It’s a tapsaff special for this month’s Low Culture Podcast, and (quite obviously) that’s got nothing to do with the weather at the moment. Instead, it’s all about John’s forthcoming chest tattoo of Hull’s Three Ships mural, and Claire Denis’ 1999 masterpiece Beau Travail, which features a unit of the French Foreign Legion sweating, shirtless in the sun. John and Luke praise the acting and physical theatre skills of Denis Lavant, who plays former French Foreign Legion Adjudant-Chef Galoup, the character who narrates the film’s plot from his new civilian life in Marseille. Beau Travail is one of the most beautiful portrayals of masculinity, and especially military masculinity, we’ve ever seen, with scenes on an assault course, army exercises and fighting approaching the balletic. In the French Foreign Legion, the act of ironing is as core a part of being a man as getting sweaty and bumping into one another grunting, and tQ’s editors talk about how the best ‘war’ films are those which explore the strange routine and boredom of being part of the military machine. They discuss Beau Travail as a post-colonial artwork and ask whether the homoeroticism makes it a queer film, or if this is in fact a misreading of the intensity and intimacy of relationships within an isolated all-male environment? Claire Denis was in part inspired in the aesthetics of the film by a “specialist” male nightclub in Paris that had a Foreign Legion fetish – could a straight man have made the film, and where does it sit in terms of objectifying and fetishizing the male body? Finally, they discuss Beau Travail’s final scene, arguably one of the most beautiful and moving in contemporary cinema history. Will John and Luke be back next month or will the prospect of hanging around nearly nude with a load of fit lads have inspired them to take their oaths to France with the Foreign Legion? Liberté! Égalité! Fraternité! Thanks to all our subscribers for funding our podcasts and wider editorial, and to our editor Alannah Chance for putting this together. If you’re not yet a subscriber you can sign up now with a whopping great discount on our top Subscriber Plus tier via the link on the paywall below. Subscribers can now listen to this podcast on the site past the paywall, as well as through their podcast feeds.
Podcast:
In this month’s podcast, Luke Turner and John Doran sing the praises of this collection of songs both original and covers, from Grace Jones’ artistic imperial phase, recorded at Nassau's Compass Point Studios in the early 1980s We love it when our subscribers send in suggestions of things for us to talk about – but do we love what they’re suggesting? Is Eurythmics’ soundtrack to the 1984 film 1984 doubleplusgood or does it send John Doran into his own personal Room 101? Find out here. Troubled by facts that felt like fiction, Anna Doble feared Patrick Keiller's 1994 film might all be an in-joke. But, as she writes in this month's Low Culture Essay, it created a magic-real place that she would later explore through song. Ray Aggs speaks to Zara Hedderman about the music created during their Samarbeta residency earlier this year, exploring their relationship with folk music as a person of colour, and released exclusively to tQ subscribers today. Plus, exclusive footage documenting its process, courtesy of Low Four In this month’s essay, Stephanie Phillips reflects on the 1998 lo-fi, art pop album Julie Ruin, in which riot grrrl veteran Kathleen Hanna reaffirms her position in feminist art, while creating the building blocks for a dance punk future It's back nearly a quarter century in this month's antidote to the algorithm as Luke Turner revisits the heady Monday nights at Trash, where the arch and exotic rhythms and deadpan chat of electroclash soundtracked cheap booze and rent of early 21st century London In this month’s podcast, Luke Turner and John Doran sing the praises of this collection of songs both original and covers, from Grace Jones’ artistic imperial phase, recorded at Nassau's Compass Point Studios in the early 1980s In this month's essay, Skye Butchard remembers their dad's collection of cassettes on which he recorded the 1981 radio version of Tolkien's classic to reflect on memory, archiving, and how familial relationships and loss are intrinsically bound up with the culture we share. In this month’s antidote to the algorithm, Mat Colegate goes deep into the bloody realm of Italian schlock scores – Goblin! Libra! Daniele Pattuchi! The soundtrack to that film about PCP maddened animals attacking Frankfurt! Half a century after the release of one of the all-time great live albums, John Doran argues that the Velvet Underground only really hit their true peak after they lost Nico, Warhol and Cale. This feature was first published on 2 April 2020From the Archive
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