Given that the author's arrangement of the three woodcuts from 1534 is unknown, Horses in battle, The stallion approaches the mare. i Stallion ejaculating, accurately create the narrative, what is their appropriate narrative (flow) and what would be the melodramatic meaning in the unfolding of this plot, Baldungova the scandalous allegory remains ambivalent, but nevertheless powerful and poignant (although it is debatable that it is the 'climax' of the plot). If we reject the possibility of arbitrarily combining the three frames in any direction, only two options are actually available to transform the images into a legible narrative sequence. Our suggestion is that the two editing options coincide with - since we are already talking about obscene iconography - the difference between stag film and narratively determined pornography that emerged when the format of such films changed after they began to be shown in cinemas, with the easing of censorship, and consequently had to take on the length and dramaturgy of classical cinema. Stag belongs to the primitive period of film development, the so-called cinema of attraction where the original intention is to make attractive and enticing material simply visible and accessible, which takes on a special intensity when a pornographic scene centered on female and male genitalia in action is shown on the big screen. The story, if there is one, is never fully told, since it is not the center of interest, but all the focus is placed on the iconographic fascination with the proscribed. On the other hand, when, due to the mode of reception and the newly acquired legality, pornography wanted to gain representational legitimacy, this implied not only that the format had to become feature-length, whereby the story, no matter how functional, became an inevitable ingredient of such a process, but also - what is more important - the presented sexual act was organized according to the narrative rules of exposition, elaboration and conclusion, that is, the intercourse itself was visually narrativized by being shaped with the help of fundamental, 'transparent' and undeniable phallic benchmarks of erection and ejaculation which constitute, in fact, the range of meaning in the pornographic universe focused on pleasure: things should finishedIn short, the disproportion in the internal genre mechanism consisted in scale textual interpellations: while the function stag the movie was yes excite, the point of narrative pornography was to satisfy.
If we apply this fundamental distinction to Baldung's atypical cycle, then the difference consists not only in accents and genre economy, but also in the quality of the resulting atmosphere and the author's irony. Stag version would, therefore, favor this sequence: The stallion approaches the mare., Stallion ejaculating i Horses in battleSince stag the film is not 'burdened' with a dramatic climax, the editing would only establish the iconographic specificity of a scene that has no developmental line, but rather concentrates on the basic elements of fascination directed at what is not decent to see, especially when reduced to a bestial level. That this is a 'descending', that is - to remain in the 'genre' vocabulary - a sluggish progression can best be seen in the panel with the author's monogram which, in each subsequent instance, is 'castrated' for one essential part, so that in the end all that remains is mere information when it comes to the 'making' of the work: The. (John) balding He did 1534, Baldung Made 1534 and truncated, reduced and 'colorless' Baldung 1534After the first two shots that provide sexual content through the staging of strong animal instincts, the final shot ends the sequence polemically in such a way that the energy, after the supposed intercourse, is not only not reduced and dispersed, but has turned into aggression and chaos between the obviously dissatisfied horses.
A 'rounded' narrative, on the other hand, always implies that the libidinal reservoir is organized and structured, and thus pacified: storytelling is the 'zero' form of sublimation. Pornography wants to maintain the gravity of pleasure at all costs, and in this case, regardless of certain difficulties, the sequence would be established in such a way that pleasure would still be achieved: Horses in battle, The stallion approaches the mare. i Stallion ejaculating. In this formation, Baldung's enigmatic cycle takes on clearer genre contours, since pleasure is narratively explicit, i.e. the montage 'stitching' is purposeful: the small plot develops 'logically', because the narrative ending is identical with the sexual ending: ejaculation is the real end of the (pornographic) story. While the opening shot of the horses 'instructively' shows what happens when sexual energy has nowhere to articulate (which, therefore, happens when the story unfolds without female presence), the second - at least for the central 'protagonist' - provides a mare who teases (visually, but also with her scent, her exposed genitals) the stallion who, thus, emerges from the crowd. The third image, although the raised hooves of the mare seem to indicate a violent confrontation, nevertheless closes the simple narrative with the desired satisfaction: intercourse interrupted is the essential 'ideogram' of pornography, because in the genre sex is never presented as a means of biological reproduction (Baldung's irony is that he attributes the key generic, cultural - and not natural - regularity to the animal world), but exclusively as a mechanism of pleasure, a textual system that rests on the satisfaction of repetition, on the pictorial or cinematic loopin which, however deficient in plot, it is nevertheless constantly repeated with the same results and consequences. The board with Baldung's name, in this narrative variant, is occasionally moved, perhaps in search of protection (because we are witnessing a sexual act that ends with the oldest method of contraception!), as if it is reacting to the events within the proscenium: in the first frame the monogram may have been discarded, but at least it is certain that it is outside the epicenter of the male frenzy, in the central scene it is located near the middle, while a small monkey - as a cynical emissary or parodic double of the author who is 'anchored' at a safe distance - holds it, and in the final scene, it is returned to the margin, in fact exactly where, according to convention, the artist's signature should be, which is further valorized here by avoiding the very polluted place where the stallion spills his semen in a stream.
Baldung's impost in the cycle is certainly perverted and rearranged through the significant dislocation of the panel with the Name-Author, but again in a pornographic context, the author's and authorial involvement lacks the intensity to branch out dizzying allegorical implications. This is because the artist's appearance in The stallion approaches the mare., regardless of whether the narrative is profiled as stag or narrative pornographic 'film', is nevertheless limited by his voyeuristic position in the upper left corner. Baldung, who hides and reveals himself behind a tree, has a beard and a cap with Self-portraits in 49 (the only thing that makes him look younger is the distance), but he is strangely passive while everything around him is agitated, chaotic, charged with animal sexual frenzy. Is it a kind of blockage or psychological paralysis, is the artist himself admitting much more than he intended? In order to understand the character of Baldung's play, we must take the entire cycle out of the pornographic, and place it again in a metapoetic perspective (which can take on a strong autobiographical resoluteness): the depth of his authorial inscription here is not even so much related to the possibility of different narrative versions, as to the further development of the general semantic texture around a single anchor symbol with crucial associative relevance. More will be said about this in the next issue of Art.
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