#The Pleasure Garden

[letterboxd-loggd]

The Pleasure Garden (1925) Alfred Hitchcock

August 17th 2022

[lgbtqsilentfilmproject]

The Pleasure Garden (1925)

Directed by Alfred Hitchcock

Starring: Virginia Valli, Carmelita Geraghty, Miles Mander.

Alfred Hitchcock’s directorial debut is a study in how to subvert expectations and use narrative to your advantage. The Pleasure Garden uses its glamorous, yet morally ambiguous characters to push boundaries that would alter be further explored by queer filmmakers in the decades to come.

As many of the films before this one, The Pleasure Garden is a pre-Hays code production, balancing on the edge of socially acceptable and morally unacceptable. While not explicitly about gay or queer characters, this film explores women outside of their normal social sphere and instead focuses on dance hall girls. Critiquing mainstream societies attitudes towards women and the “others” often pushes to the bottom of the social bracket.

Garden offered a lens through which to view non-traditional relationships and identities. Alongside Mikaël, this films nuance and subtlety attracted filmmakers to copy the same style of narrative in their own films.

By the mid-20th century, the Hays code was no more and filmmakers could more freely explore topics such as gender, sexuality, and race. Drawing on inspiration from earlier works of Hitchcock and contemporaries, new filmmakers saw themselves on screen for the first time. Subtle defiance defines these films and aids in their continued historical value. Once again, while not an explicitly LGBTQ+ film, The Pleasure Garden still exemplifies how early cinemas explorations of the human condition and societal boundaries laid the foundational groundwork for which future queer filmmakers could bravely emerge victorious.

Notes and References:

Hitchcock, Alfred, Hitchcock on Hitchcock: My Screen Memories. University of California Press, 1936).

Klein, Amanda Ann, American Film Cycles Reframing Genres, Screening Social Problems, and Defining Subcultures, (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011)

[principiumindividuationis777]

[epistula-nonerubescit]

reading and studying freud's essays is not so relaxing, it takes me an hour to partially decipher two pages 💚

[suburbanbeatnik]

Happy Bridgerton day! The Vauxhall final for DANDIES & DANDYZETTES is at last complete! In the famous Vauxhall pleasure gardens, as musicians play and the whale oil lamps shine, people flirt and dance and fight in a whirl of activity. Many of the people here are also from the class portraits as well.

[eternal-gardens]

O Allāh we ask You to be pleased with us and reward us with Jannah.

[ofallingstar]

Private Vices, Public Pleasures (1986)

[pulpsandcomics2]

Pleasure Garden

[graemegardenappreciationsociety]

[revasserium]

scorpio rising

elbert; 1,087 words; elbert takes you dancing. i blame @aquagirl1978 for showing me his teaser pv. this one's for u.

he has always been hungry.

from the first day he meets you, he has hungered for your touch, for your smile, for a sliver of your forever — it is not promised. but he does not care. and there’s beauty in this madness — he has always known it — beauty in the mortified longing threatening to grind his bones to dust.

i want…

it’s a selfish thing, he knows, to want like this, to want so hard that it threatens to consume his very soul. he wants — he wants.

“stay close,” he says, because the night is dark and full of terrors but to him the darkness has always been kind.

he feels your presence at his back, emanating warmth like a hearthstone pulled from the dancing flames. he wants.

“el…bert? where are you taking me?”

your curiosity is cool and crisp, slicing through the heat of his own internal frenzy. he wills the tension from his shoulders as he tries to cast you a small, reassuring smile.

“you’ll see.”

at this hour, vauxhall is a cynosure of bacchic revelry, with fireworks and masked dancers, jugglers and magicians and drunken vendors hawking their wares to laughing, unwitting attendees. a hundred thousand tiny lamps glitter among the branches of trees like so many fallen stars, and the raucous sound of street musicians plays backdrop to it all — the air itself thrums with life and vitality, the earth beneath your feet soaked with the remnants.

“wh-what is going on?”

elbert almost laughs at your clear confusion, but he tugs a pair of masks from the inside of his jacket and offers it to you.

“come… dance with me.”

you slip on the mask, still too bewildered to refuse, and feel elbert slip his fingers between yours, tugging you gently towards him and into a pool of flickering lamplight. the music swells and the world spins around you.

there is beauty in this madness — elbert has always known it — beauty in the way a body might tremble and shake when faced with something it cannot control, but this at least, elbert knows. this at least, he can take into the palms of his own hands and hold it close.

this dance — you.

he watches as a brilliant smile blossoms across your lips, your cheeks flushing high with color. it is beautiful, watching you as you fall into a peel of unexpected laughter as he spins you out and pulls you back in, you chest heaving with the exertion of the song.

he wonders if he’s holding onto your hands too tight and then he knows that he is.

but you’re clutching back at him just as tightly as the music ends and everyone around you cheers. he feels the weight of a million pairs of eyes on him and yet still, he only has eyes for you. when you pull up from your curtsey and meet his eyes, he finds himself transfixed by your gaze so warm and soft and full of an unbridled happiness the likes of which he has never tasted himself.

but with you — he thinks he just might.

the mask affords him the brief veil of anonymity, but even with it, he can feel people’s eyes lingering, their heads turning for a second look, a third. he doesn’t have much time.

“elbert, that was so much fun!”

he allows himself a soft laugh as he pulls you into one of the many shaded promenades, pressing himself back into the thickly cut foliage. you stumble into his chest, letting out a squeak as you pull back but he lifts up a hand to stop you.

“please… let me have one more minute…” he says, and he feels you go still in his arms.

he threads his fingers through your spidersilk hair, letting the tangle carelessly against his skin. like this, he smells the soft, fresh fragrance of your bathing soap, and he leans in ever so slightly to take in another breath. your skin is warm and soft, your lashes a darkened frame to the night sky of your eyes.

“elbert…?”

he purses his lips. he lets you go.

“sorry… i just… wanted a moment…”

you smile, shaking your head. several strands of your hair get caught in his fingers and he has to force himself to let them go.

“i had… a really good time tonight, elbert… thanks for taking me here.”

you walk next to him as the pair of you exit the gardens, you tugging off your mask but he hesitates in taking off his own. he traces the edge with a delicate finger as you watch.

“if… it makes you feel better, you can keep it on while we walk back,” you say, letting your fingers lace behind your back.

elbert smiles as he nods, letting the silence stretch thin and smooth between you. in the distance, big ben tolls in midnight, and the pair of you make your leisurely way back to the castle beneath the full blood-moon. you exchange few words and even fewer glances, but elbert find himself willfully lingering half a step behind you just to watch the way your hair sways, to see the glint of moonlight in your eyes as you turn to grace him with a smile.

“thanks again for taking me out…”

elbert slips off his mask as the castle doors close behind you.

“i thought you might’ve wanted… a chance of pace…”

“yeah, it was really fun!”

you smile up at him, radiant and flushed with joy and he briefly wonders if this might be what ellis is always going on about — the happiest moment in a person’s life. seeing you smile like that, he wonders then if this is his.

at least, it would be a worthy candidate.

“good… we should… do it again sometime.”

you nod, enthusiasm pouring from you like milk from a spilling jug.

elbert licks his lips.

“yes! it’ll be a date!” you say.

he can only nod, letting the sound of your voice ring in his mind like the tolling of bells.

a date.

he wants, he wants, he wants.

“a date… yes, certainly, it will be… if that’s what you wish.”

he feels his heart stuttering his chest as you bob your head once more.

“yep, it’s a date then.”

he feels his lips tug into smile, tastes the familiar greed on this tongue.

he wants. he wants. he wants.

“it’s a date.”

[thismorningscoffee]

[martyr-eater]

I was going through an old grave disorder era interview and found this charming bit about dave's garden 🌿

[theblackestofsuns]

Emily Mason's "Pleasure Garden" (1970) from Jackson Arn's article in this week's New Yorker magazine.

[antaripirate]

EVERYONE SHUT UP WE HAVE ALUCARD CONTENT

[suburbanbeatnik]

My next long-awaited update for @mimicofmodes's Dandies & Dandyzettes! Drinking, debauchery and revelry was a way of life at Vauxhall pleasure gardens (brawling too). You may recognize some faces from the class portraits.

[real-odark]

alexa please play Whizzvin Yuri Lemon Montage to Symphony by Clean Bandit

i just wanna be part of yuor Symphoooonnyyyyyuh.l...,.,........ ., Will u hold me tigth and not let go..... symphonyyyhhh