ABOVE: Beyond Bizarre galleries x4. Top row, left: Production stills; right: John Willie art & photos. Bottom row, left: Roberto Baldazzini photo shoot tribute to JW; right: Baldazzini creating artwork
Roberto Baldazzini’s JW tribute shoot
Outside France, the Beyond Bizarre team has just secured a fantastic contribution from Roberto Baldazzini, one of my favourite Italian fetish/erotic artists.
Roberto created a special John Willie tribute bondage shoot featuring a lingerie-clad model tied to a post in the style of the cover art of the original Sweet Gwendoline book.
The filmmakers have provide an extensive gallery of the shoot for this article (see bottom row galleries above). In it you can see Baldazzini doing the rigging, photographing his handiwork and then creating some of his black ink renderings from the reference shots — all the time being filmed and photographed by Charlotte and Guillaume.
There may well be further international contributions to the documentary in due course. The initial focus on French contributors was, the team explain, a matter of practicality — starting with the people most accessible to them to get the project off the ground.
But with the expertise and talent of those mentioned above right on your doorstep, why not start there anyway? And, they add, with a probable film length of 60 or 70 minutes, one has to be wary of trying to pack too many talking heads into the available time.
Nevertheless, you might still be wondering just why Willie/Coutts — a British artist who did his best-known work in the USA, and before that, Australia — would be so important in France that the first ever documentary about him looks to be coming from France rather than from an English-speaking nation.
Why Beyond Bizarre started in France
Charlotte and Guillaume reckon it’s not so much that John Willie is especially popular in France. It’s more that — as serious fans of comix and graphic novels will be aware — France has a very large comic culture which readily accepted JW as part of it.
They explain: “Belgian and French artists have been notably important in this area since the late ’40s, along with Italian artists as well. And US comics are very popular in France, especially since the end of WWII.
“France practically invented ‘adult comics’ — not erotic, but ‘adult’ by their thematics. There was a will to get comics outside the field of ‘young literature’, with Metal Hurlant, L’Echo des Savannes and some other titles in the late ’70s.
“There are many books about comics history; it has always been taken very seriously, like an art form.
“When the French edition of John Willie’s Sweet Gwendoline came along,” they add, “It was not like a pornographic little flick, but more like the rediscovery of a forgotten artist. Underground, yes, but an artist.
“It had Rund’s introduction translated, as well as that of the artist Allen Jones and an introduction by Les Humanoides’ Jean-Pierre Dionnet, who wrote beautiful things like:
“Time is passing. The famous work suddenly goes out of fashion. Then the strange, the bizarre, the minor, the deviant […] returns. Artists who couldn’t or did not want to join the ranks enter the light.”
“So maybe this is it,” the filmmakers continue. “Maybe Willie was presented to us in France as an artist from the beginning. It could be a part of the explanation for today’s interest in him in France.
They point out that France also has a strong tradition of erotic imagery — a taste that Willie’s work obviously appeals to.
“We know for a fact that Willie was influenced by Carlo, for example. And it’s obvious that he saw the Rouge Baiser lipstick poster from the 1930s by René Gruau. [It inspired the cover of Bizarre No 6].
“And he was British after all. He definitely had a European sensibility.”
Books that helped keep JW name alive
Of course, add the couple, they knew that John Willie had been published many times in Europe, and especially in France and Italy.
“Jean-Pierre Dionnet (Les Humanoides Associés founder, who will be in the film) did great work back in the 1970s and early ’80s about this kind of ‘counterculture’. Jeff’ Rund’s books are of course incredible and admirable, but they are difficult to find.
“You have to look for them, order them from him… you can’t just find them in a bookstore.
“Whereas you can find French editions of Gwendoline, from the ’70s and most recently from 2012 (Vincent Bernière, publisher of the latter, will also be in the film), pretty easily in any bookstore.
“In addition, in 2018 an independent French publisher did a kind of ‘digest’ of Jeff’s Possibilities, called Attachements. It’s the first book about Willie’s photography in France since Plusiers Possibilities from Futuropolis in 1985”
So perhaps the simplest answer to why this documentary is a French project is: John Willie’s work is still very much alive in France.
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