Re: Erotic French Postcards Download.zip
Landers Hoang
A French postcard is a small, postcard-sized piece of cardstock featuring a photograph of a nude or semi-nude woman. Such erotic cards were produced in great volume, primarily in France, in the late 19th and early 20th century. The term was adopted in the United States, where such cards were not legally made.[1] The cards were sold as postcards, but the primary purpose was not for sending by mail, as they would have been banned from delivery. The cards sometimes even depicted naked lesbians.[2] French street vendors, tobacco shops and a variety of other vendors bought the photographs for resale to tourists.
Chris Philpott's French Postcards is a wildly entertaining version of Paul Curry's Out of this World.
"A brilliant Out of this World experience! When Chris did this for me I had one of those "*^%$@ why didn't I think of that?" moments. Presentational gold!" -Steve Valentine
A study out of Cornell University recently made headlines: subjects could predict if a picture was going to appear on the left or right side of a computer screen but only when they used erotic pictures!
To test the theory, you show 12 postcards from various destinations and 12 French postcards (these are vintage nudes -- elegant, sepia-toned, upper-body nudity). The cards are mixed; then, without looking, a spectator sorts them by sensing if a card has sexual energy or not. The results are perfect!
The effect includes 24 custom-made postcards, written instructions and links to video instructions, updates, extra effects and a bonus comedy script by professional comic and magician, Bruce Gold. Also includes Jon Armstrong's "Out of this Blah Blah Blah," the cleanest OOTW handling ever!
"Finally, a reason to do Out of this World, that holds attention from start to finish. With French Postcards, they'll never forget you!"
-Steve Valentine
French Postcards Key Selling Points:
Paul Curry's Out of this World (released in 1942) is justly revered as one of the greatest of all card tricks. The plot is clear and seems utterly impossible: a spectator uses intuition to separate the red cards from the black cards. It's powerful, empowering and easy-to-do...
And yet, it is far from a perfect trick. What exactly does the audience see in performance? They see someone sort 52 pieces of paper into two piles. That's not magic, it's filing!
While there have been hundreds of methodological variations on OOTW, most don't address the core problem of making it entertaining: how do you add emotional stakes to someone dealing out cards, trying to separate red from black?
By moving from playing cards, French Postcards accomplishes several important things:
- More entertaining. In "French Postcards", the volunteer is not sensing if the card is red or black - he or she is sensing if it feels sexy or not. Instantly, this becomes more interesting, engaging and funnier. You don't have to tell a single joke - the situation itself is funny (but if you want to tell jokes, the script by Bruce Gold is excellent).
- More real. Because the premise is based on a real study, it makes the effect more believable and relevant - this is an effect that can make spectator's cry as well as laugh (you can see both in the trailer).
- Better visibility: the postcards are larger and can be seen better by your audience. The two types of cards are oriented two different ways (vertically and horizontally) and veer toward two different color-palettes (reddish versus blue-ish) to further increase visibility. The cards are visually more interesting than playing cards.
- More fooling. The size of the postcards seems to preclude sleight of hand, cutting off one possible explanation for how the trick is done.
And yet with all these advantages, French Postcards is no more difficult than the original effect.
QUOTES:
"Love these! What a fun, creative spin on a classic!"
- Charlie Frye
"Chris Philpott's French Postcards is the best presentation of Out of this World I have ever seen, and the most "magic for the buck" I have ever purchased!"
- Bob Meigs
(Five Stars) "This is a wonderful update to the classic Paul Curry plot, Out of This World. I very highly recommend this product!"
- Dr. J. M. Ayala de Cedoz, My Lovely Assistant
"Great, great, great reimagining of Out of This World! I love this routine!"
- Andy Hofer
"With French Postcards, Chris tells a compelling story in just a few sentences. Once interest has been generated, he then puts the participant INTO the tale. This is a brilliant combination and, along with being a retelling of a classic, is why the effect garners such strong reactions."
- Bill Cushman
"French Postcards has a great hook, a justification, a clever prop, and an intriguing involvement of the spectator."
- Simon Aronson
"It looked to me just how the real thing it might look and that's not something I see that often."
- Sean Giles
"I've just used French Postcards at a gig tonight during that: "show us something different moment". WOW what great reactions! Can't thank you enough!"
- Graham Lowery
"They're friggin fantastic! It takes an amazing effect with a boring premise, flips it, makes it interesting and can engage a lot more people. An incredible effect!"
- Mystery Arts Inc.
"What a practical and brilliant idea to elevate a great effect even higher."
- Tom Jorgenson
"The best version of the best card effect ever!"
- Rob Maron
Miss Fernande was presumably a courtesan in Paris, the beginning of the 20th century. She was the favorite and almost exclusive model of French photographer Jean Aglou. Although she appears on postcards by different publishers, we didn't know any photographs of her taken by another photographer than Jean Aglou or his brother Georges Aglou. But while researching on the internet about Louis Amde Mante, we saw two coloured photos by Mante (shown on the right), which show a dressed woman, most probably being Fernande. So far we have no reliable evidence for this.
Miss Fernande is known as "the queen" of French erotic postcards. More than a hundred years after her modeling career, Miss Fernande is still the most popular model among numerous of anonymous nude vintage postcard models, and her postcards get sold for the highest prices of all at online auctions. Jean Aglou's numerous photo series show Miss Fernande modeling over several years, documenting the change of her body from a young girl to a more voluptuous woman in later years.
She must have used the postcards as signature cards for her business, and that's probably the lucky reason why her name is still known today. The story about discovering her name is told in the book "Die verbotene Venus" (The Forbidden Venus) by Ferruccio Farina. The author found a postcard of her (displayed here on the right) with imprinted name and address and a handwritten signature on the backside.
Some internet sources erroneously identified Miss Fernande as Fernande Barrey (1893-1960), but there is no real proof for this hypothesis. The article on Wikipedia cites Christian Bourdon's book about Jean Aglou, but in his book he actually says that there is not more than just coincidence in age.
Apart from Miss Fernande's first name, there is no other reliable information available about her life or other biographical details. At least her year of birth is quite reliable verified, because Jean Aglou mentions the age of his models shown in the magazine "L'tude Acadmique". In issue No.119 from February 1st 1911, Miss Fernande is shown on 4 photographs and the model's age stated is 18. If this stated age is not just "corrected" out of legal reasons, Miss Fernande was most likely born in 1893.
There is an incredible comprehensive website of Miss Fernande's postcards, created and published by Louis La Volpe, that we would like to mention for all the fans of Miss Fernande. But most of them will already know:
Towards the end of the 19th century two things happened at the same time, triggering the development of the erotic picture postcard: the social climate changed so that what had previously been considered obscene was now just naughty, and the postcard suddenly had its golden heyday.
This period lasted barely twenty years, but during that period the skill of the imagination of thousands of talented artists ensured that we were inundated with millions of miniature sandwich boards full of enticing scenes, dreams and thoughts, people, fictions and facts, greetings, jokes and beauty.
The development of the picture postcard got off to a slow start, but the time it took for this initial dawdling was well spent: when social freedom was a fact, the picture postcard was ready. If this freedom or the sudden popularity of the picture postcard had been a long time ago, this coincidence would have been much less effective and sparkling than it was now.
The dating of erotic cards - the further we get into the twentieth century, the more postmarks there are - are of particular importance, because they form a nuanced commentary on both the rapidly loosening and cheerful attitude towards sexuality and the exceptional way in which the World War I changed the fashionable image of the sexually-attractive woman.
The early Edwardian hourglass model was an anachronism well before the war, but the limitation of its strapped up waist had been replaced by the perhaps more severe limitation of the narrow hobble skirt; the war, however, freed the legs and bodies of the women, free to move in the world on the same wider scale as when they had had to do the work of the men.
A similar change in fashion had, of course, taken place during the Napoleonic Wars, although the changes then had not been illustrated nearly as amusingly by La Belle Assemble as they are now by the picture postcards. The lady with the hourglass shape could hide her ankles as much as she wanted with a frilly foam layer of long skirts, but at night she exposed her raised breasts almost to the nipples.
7fc3f7cf58