The Strange Commercial

[imomus]

My new piece for Design Observer is about some strange and beautiful old commercials you can watch on the web. It focuses on films by Charles Wilp and Serge Lutens for Afri-Cola and Shiseido.

Oh, and check out today's Art Harbour sound. It's a tiny morsel of buzz taken from one of the Shiseido commercials and run through some pitch and tempo effects so that it becomes an entire symphony. It's one I'm quite proud of.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

I don't know whether it is necessarily racist, or ironic, though both thoughts occured to me, but mainly it just seems strange. Indeed that is the strangest element of that film for me.
So from my point of view this has only a superficial resemblance to the incident you mention above.

Buschbaby has quite a precise meaning in German. I don't understand what that meaning has to do with the contents of the film. Do you?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I'd imagine the line of mental association went something like this:

black woman Africa bush sex make babies call you baby jungle my inner panther hump hump primal expressive Matisse Picasso porn sex money exoticism John The Baptist the Other projection pleasure centres escape dull grey German city streets...

Whereas people educated after about 1980 would immediately get a stream of associations more like this:

black woman guilt repression de-link from Africa de-link from sex throttle inner panther treat with respect just one of many roles in control reparations stop stereotyping anyone can be anything reductive can't believe how sexily she's dancing exploitation blaxploitation PhD thesis orientalism dull grey campus outside can I masturbate now...