My girlfriend recommended this one to me. Its director, Alain Resnais is known for Hiroshima, Mon Amour, and equally surreal and lyrical film. As soon as I began watching Last Year at Marienbad I was surprised I had never explored Resnais' filmography any further. It immediately reminded me of the experimental cinema of Maya Deren and early Luis Buñuel.
The disembodied narrator's constant voice-over is consistent with Resnais' style in Hiroshima, Mon Amour. Additionally the disjointed love story and dark themes the film plays on are also similar to Hiroshima, Mon Amour. Still, Last Year at Marienbad betrays some delightful eccentricities that make it equally as brilliant.
The motion of the camera gives the film a hallucinatory, dream-like appearance. One shot is filmed through a mirror with an ornate frame, further disorienting the viewer and separating the film from realism. The whirling organ soundtrack contributes a creepiness that makes it all the more unsettling.Perhaps not intentional, but the version that I saw had an illusion of the camera moving slightly side to side during the more stationary shots. It was probably a glitch in the transfer, but still, it added to the hallucinatory feel of the whole experience.
Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde was one of the first films to break the production code era's taboo on gore and graphic violence. Of course, Bonnie and Clyde is more than just bloody bullet holes. It is actually a somewhat subversive film that follows a dust bowl Robin Hood and Maid Marian while they recruit disciples and stuff their pockets all while taking care not to exploit the impoverished.
The film takes place during the depression and FDR campaign posters are prominently displayed throughout the film. Beatty's Clyde Barrow is morally opposed to taking money from the poor, but morally inclined to take money from the banks. From the scene where he allows the sharecroppers' whose home was foreclosed by the bank to shoot up the place, Beatty's Clyde proves himself a 20th century Robin Hood. Of course, historical proof probably is inclined otherwise.
Penn's Bonnie and Clyde are not meant to be historically accurate portrayals, though. The film was released in 1967 at the heart of the so-called "Summer of Love," when the American counter-culture was possibly at its most strong. Additionally, Hollywood was suffering a lull. The supposedly depression-proof industry was suffering because they had failed to produce many memorable films during the production era (other than a handful of film Noir classics).
The ending scene of Bonnie and Clyde is considered a classic and I will spoil it for you: they get filled with bright red bullet holes. Even after reading these spoilers, the film is worth watching. It was the harbinger of a renaissance in cinema. Soon after Roger Corman, Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper as well as Robert Downey's crew had shot some brilliant films inspired by the indulgences explored by Beatty's Bonnie and Clyde. Bless Beatty and Penn!
To avoid censorship problems, Warren Beatty held off sending a script to the Production Code Administration (PCA), the industry's self-censorship organization, until just before shooting began. Even so, PCA head Geoffrey Shurlock fought, unsuccessfully, to remove the intimation that Bonnie was nude in the first scene, the suggestion of oral sex in one bedroom scene and the scene in which a bank teller is shot in the face when he jumps on the getaway car's running board. Later Beatty had another fight to convince the head of the National Catholic Office of Motion Pictures (the successor to the Legion of Decency) that Faye Dunaway was properly covered when she runs downstairs to meet Beatty in the film's first scene. The official kept insisting that he could see her breasts.
Secrets of the Living Dolls is a BBC documentary about straight men who dress and wear plastic, prosthetic skin the makes them look like women, or at least facsimiles of women. Often they are interested in the phenomenon known as "female masking" because they are unsuccessful with women and they enjoy becoming the kinds of women they would like to meet or be with. To many they look strange and even scary, but to them they look great. There is a whole community around this sub-culture and a part of the film focuses on a meetup of female maskers in Minneapolis, MN.
Of course, if you think that's weird, imagine female masking on acid, and crystal meth... and PCP. Shaye Saint John was the character invented by artist Eric Fournier.
Here is a documentary about the Shaye Saint John story:
The back story was that Shaye was a model that was in a terrible accident and got reconstructive surgery, but got maybe a little too much. Ever the diva, Shaye continued her public life by making hallucinatory videos known as triggers. Basically, Shaye's triggers are living doll bad trips.
A playlist of Shaye's best films are included below:
Shaye's official, posthumous channel can be subscribed to here.
Why is this all so freaky though? It's noting you can necessarily put your finger on that ostensibly scares the viewer. There is no violence or rape or torture. It's actually pretty harmless on the surface.
It has something to do with the Uncanny Valley. The uncanny valley is a hypothesis developed by robotics scientist Masahiro Mori in 1970. According to Wikipedia:
Mori's original hypothesis states that as the appearance of a robot is made more human, some observers' emotional response to the robot will become increasingly positive and empathic, until a point is reached beyond which the response quickly becomes that of strong revulsion. However, as the robot's appearance continues to become less distinguishable from that of a human being, the emotional response becomes positive once again and approaches human-to-human empathy levels.[9]
This area of repulsive response aroused by a robot with appearance and motion between a "barely human" and "fully human" entity is called the uncanny valley. The name captures the idea that an almost human-looking robot will seem overly "strange" to some human beings, will produce a feeling of uncanniness, and will thus fail to evoke the empathic response required for productive human-robot interaction.[9]
That is also probably why I Feel Fantastic fascinates so many viewers.
After some deliberation I have decided that this film is not actually worth watching. Begotten is an early film by E. Elias Merhigne, who would later become known for the Shadow of the Vampire. Shadow of the Vampire is actually a brilliant film, not only thanks to Willem Dafoe's intense portrayal of Nosfereatu and John Malkovich's iconic portrayal of Murnau, but also thanks to Merhigne's artistry in pacing, editing and ambiance. I discovered this film on some sort of social media related to artistic horror cinema. Of course, artistic doesn't often mean good and the number of times artistic actually means pretentious is enough to make any cinephile uncomfortable. The Begotten is a film that has taken what the early David Lynch shorts had in terms of creepiness and stripped it of any sense of narrative or even cohesive form. Begotten instead replaces these essential elements of film with some vague, religious symbolism. However, unlike the films of Lynch and Jodorowsky, the religious imagery comes off as completely disingenuous. The shear length of the shots wreaks of pretension and an overly ambitious attempt at being "strange." All in all, this film tries way too hard and in so doing fails at either being disturbing or profound, when it sets out to be both. One can identify elements of Maya Deren, especially Meshes of the Afternoon, but still, the film fails to live up to its ambitions as a work of creepy art. Another film make that comes to mind who has done similar things is Crispin Glover with this What Is It? trilogy. However, even Glover's purposely shocking, pretentious NaziShirley Temple and Down syndrome sex imagery is superior to the half-assed attempt that Merhige made in Begotten. The sparseness of the soundtrack and the juxtaposition of nature sounds with a repetitive beating heart does invoke a creepy and even spiritual element. Still, I can't help but feeling that this is some charlatan ploy to evoke some primal fear in me and it doesn't quite work out for a hardcore genre fan. I must admit, I enjoyed moments of this film, but all in all I must say, this is a pretentious work that gives art cinema a bad name. Cinephiles must live not on convulsions alone. Begotten is a student film that doesn't nearly live up to the legacy of student films like Lynch's the Grandmother or Cronenberg's From the Drain.
Not much theme to this one, but highlighting two Asian horror films I've seen recently. They're both from 2004. One is Japanese, the other is South Korean.
Infection is a film by prolific Japanese horror director Masauki Ochiai (also known for 2008's Shutter). It takes place in an understaffed and underfunded hospital. A patient is brought in by an ambulance, but the hospital clearly cannot handle someone with an infection of this type. The hospital director, however, is convinced this will be the doctors' break-through discovery and bring them all fat grant checks. As with all horror movies, there are, of course, disastrous consequences.
What I liked about this film is the pervasive feeling of loneliness and anxiety throughout the film. It's the kind of feeling you might get when you wake up in the middle of the night from a nightmare, but have no recollection of the specifics of the dream. The viewer is thus thrust from the garrison of comfortability, down into the eerie nether regions that lie beneath the rabbit hole.
I would also say that one might pick up thematic hints of Kōbō Abe's 1997 novel Secret Rendezvous. Infection is not nearly as openly sexual as Secret Rendezvous, but anxieties about medical science and hospital settings, sexual tension between males and females and questionable medical practices are themes present in both works.
The Doll Master is the directorial debut of South Korean director Yong-ki Jeong. It is a story in the House on Haunted Hill (1959) format whereby a wealthy eccentric invites a group of unwitting outsides to their manor for twisted reasons that they're less than upfront about.
In this case the eccentric rich person is some sort of doll maker who adorns her house with creepy, life-sized dolls. Every room has some sort of doll in an unsettling pose. Of course, it isn't long before people start dying and you can guess the rest.
This film was not entirely thrilling as it was a hackneyed, cliche premise and the acting and filming weren't entirely impressive either. Worth a watch if you're in for some light entertainment a la Steve Beck's remake Thir13en Ghosts (2001), but hardly an earth-shattering experience.
It used to be that Americans were obsessed with slasher films and the Japanese were obsessed with ghost films. With recent developments in the American cinema and the arrival of the Blair Witch Project style "shaky cam" films all that has changed. Ghost hunting too has become more scientific with the invention of high-tech ghost hunting devices such as Electromagnetic field readers et al. Recent films such as the Haunting of Whaley Place and Paranormal Activity have taken the reality television scenarios of shows like the SyFy Channel's Ghost Hunters and fictionalized them.
How does a dialectical materialist examine this phenomenon? The telephone psychic phenomenon is not new, but it indicates our obsession of the idea that death is not the end. Most hauntings are explained by the idea that once one has crossed over into death they remain in limbo due to the traumatic natures of their death or else because they had unfinished business in the world of the living. The paranormal-capitalists opportunize these paranoid delusions by claiming that some (psychics) have access to the supernatural world that others don't and for a price their special skill can be shared with those who can afford to pay for them. This is supernatural class antagonism and it stinks very much of the old orthodoxy of the clergy vs. laity dialectic which reached their most obvious epitome in the middle ages when all the bibles were written in Latin; a dead language other than the vernacular. This conspiracy is made even more transparent when the fact that Jesus spoke Aramaic, not even Latin (the language of Constantine and the Roman oppressors), is examined. It is also not surprising that during this time hallucinogen-fueled witch hunts were prevalent. The misogyny of this practice is also apparent. Any woman was suspect for dealing with the devil, also a male. I will return to this concept in chapter six. For now I would like to examine some of the common tropes of paranormal horror films and their ideological significance.
First, there is a paradox of power involved with the ghost concept. Ghosts are both powerless and powerful. The apparition has the power to kill someone, but not the power to effectively communicate with someone. Marx calls this alienation. Marx is also full of ghost analogies. He talks about 'the specter of communism' in the introduction to the Communist Manifesto. He also appears to offer the commodity a spiritual character when he talks about commodity fetishism. It's as though the value we place upon an item, within which the history and provenance of a commodity is encoded, has an apparition-like quality.
Today is NY state's primary election and I already voted for Bernie. In celebration of the occasion (and a possible blow to the Democratic Party establishment) I decided today's blog would be about election films. Here is the list:
1. Bulworth (1998) Directed, written and starring the brilliant Warren Beatty, Bulworth is about a politician who gets so depressed and goes so insane that he starts telling the truth (what an idea!!). Of course, I'm not trying to spoil it, but you can imagine what happens when a politician starts telling the truth. Trailer: Full film:
2. The Manchurian Candidate (1962)
This film played on so many cold-war phobias that it could indeed be a recipient of the Paranoid Cinephile Paranoid Cinema award. One of the only films staring Ol' Blue Eyes that I can sit through, this film is an settling combination of science fiction, espionage and action that cold war audience ate right up. The 2004 remake with Denzel Washington was about David Ickeian aliens, which is hopefully less believable than a Maoist plot to brainwash our elected officials (I'm rooting for the Maoists btw).
Trailer: Full film:
3. Farenheit 9/11 (2004) This is one of those documentaries where truth is stranger than fiction. The film starts with a fraudulent election and ends with a really big pile of dead bodies. Anyone with left-sympathies who grew up or was around during the Bush II years will understand the outrage and grief that this film evokes. A scathing expose of the war criminals in the Bush administration.
Trailer: Full film:
4. The Times of Harvey Milk (1984) Although I have enjoyed a number of Gus Van Sant films (I thought Elephant was a brilliant take on the school shooting phenomenon, for example) , I do think he and Sean Penn butchered the Harvey Milk story with the formulaic biopic Milk (I'm sure I'll rant more about the biopic formula in a future post). This documentary from 1984, however, tell the story of America's first gay city councilperson and activist for gay rights, Harvey Milk, brilliantly using primary source footage and interviews with people who were there (and no James Franco!). Trailer: Full film (must purchase):
Ones I haven't seen: The coup against Salvador Allende by fascist general Augosto Pinochet in Chile on 9/11/1973 has always interested me as an example of capitalism undermining the democracy it claims to uphold. In 1908 socialist author Jack London wrote a book entitled the Iron Heel that seemed to predict the Allende coup 64 years earlier. There was a film, the Golden God (1914) made by Romaine Fielding loosely based on the book, but the IMDb site for this only contains this synopsis:
Although an advertisement for this film appears in Moving Picture World on 17 January 1914, no film bearing this title was ever distributed at this time. The film was condemned by the National Board of Censorship as "inflammable" because of the battle scenes and the subversive tone of Capitol versus Labor. In June 1914 the negative and all release prints were destroyed in a catastrophic explosion and fire in the film vaults at the Lubin plant in Philadelphia.
Secondly, Pablo Larraín made a film called No (2012) which deals with issues over the 1988 referendum in Chile over whether Pinochet should stay in power for another 8 years or not. It stars Gael García Bernal who I am usually a fan of, so I am adding this one to my watchlist as well.
a little more), I'm glad John Lennon and Yoko Ono went to see it at a midnight showing. They convinced the Beatles' manager, Alen Klein, to bankroll Jodorowsky's next film, what some would call his most self-indulgent (and consequently most brilliant) the Holy Mountain.
Does the film live up to the budget? Let's put it this way, Jodorowsky never made a better film since, even though his concept for Dune would have been brilliant. The Dance of Reality was a pretentious jab at communist discipline and any non-religious approach
However, the Holy Mountain has always stuck with me as one of the most brilliant films of all of cinema history. I can't help, even as an atheist, feeling shame a being mocked by Jodorowsky's psycho-magic in the documentary about him, Consellation.
He, the director who forced his actors to take psilocybin mushrooms during the "hump the mountain" scene. He who, at the end of the film assures that all we have just seen was a film and not actual reality. He who can read your fortune in the tarot deck.
I understand why some might be taken in by cults and cult films are called that for a reason. They offer the perfect escape from just the wrong situation. The Holy Mountain is one of those films. And it was geuinely, Babylonianally hedonistic and subversive. You can enter a world where it doesn't matter if you mutilate animals or make bombs into toys. The journey is the same. You might be Jesus of Muhammad, but you're still just in Olympic competition with Zeus and Aphrodite at the Pantheon Bar and it's Kareoke night. A drunk guy can go across the mountain, but he can't ascend because he can only travel horizontally.
I love you and I'd like you to know, this film has not always or even often done right by me. As a matter of fact, strict, fundamental adherence to this film could result in some dangerous fundamentalism. Of course Jodorowsky free's you from all that at the end when he declares the whole previous hour and a half simulacrum of reality a film. Just watch it already.
Frank Hennenlotter's films are trash. They appeal to the basest of human desires: violence and sex. His films are also funny, not unlike John Waters or Lloyd Kaufman's Troma actually. However, like Waters, and unlike Kaufman, there is a degree of sophistication to Hennenlotter's films. In his heyday he rode the wave of surreal horror-comedies made popular in the home video scene by films like Stuart Gordon's Re-Animator. Here are some quick reviews of Hennenlotter's most important films.
1. Basket Case (1982)
As much a story of the bond and love between siblings as much as it is a story of revenge and violence, Basket Case is the heartwarming tale of Duane and Belial, separated Siamese twins set out to kill the doctors who separated them. At the same time, they are finding that they are very different in more ways than they'd like to admit. A schlocky grindhouse flick with some actually poignant dramatic moments.
Here's the trailer.
(1962), Frankenhooker is the story of love that never dies. A med student tries to find a prostitute's body on which to put his dead lover's head.
The Brain that Wouldn't Die can be seen in its entirety here:
The trailer for Frankenhooker is below:
3. Bad Biology (2008)
Although released in the 2000s, Bad Biology is very much in keeping with Hennenlotter's films from the 80s and 90s stylistically. It is a Shakesperian tragedy about star-crossed lover cursed with overactive, mutant genitals. This film also has a great hip hop soundtrack thanks to co-producer R.A. the Rugged Man.
Here's the trailer:
I just watched Karyn Kusama's the Invitation (2015) and was both entertained and stressed. The film is best viewed if one knows very little about the plot so let's just say it's about some people that get invited to a dinner party in LA. Of course, it is a thriller, so there is obviously more to it than that.
This film is of course completely original, but definitely fits into the dinner-party-psychodrama category with the above mentioned. What impressed me about the Invitation was also the balance between intense interpersonal drama and tense psychological mind games. I give it 8/10.
I would put the trailer, but I actually recommend you don't watch it before you see the movie.
In the late 1960s America's innocence had been lost. The television news was its own horror show: a real life one. From the bloody, burned bodies in Vietnam to political assassinations at home, everyone was going a little bit psychotic. Of course, everyone knows this now looking back. Hindsight is 20/20. But back then they couldn't see the cloud because they were in it. All this was new. There was no such thing as post-modern cynicism. They still were doing it although they did not know what they were doing, to paraphrase Marx.
As powerful as the 'mainstream' had become there was a counter-current that set out to be as subversively strange as they could. Enter Charles Manson. Charles Manson had spent a third of his life incarcerated by the time he got out in 1967. He made friends with Bobby Beausoleil, another musician and later an actor and score composer for the epic Kenneth Anger avant-horror film Lucifer Rising. According to Anger, Beausoleil was 'a little too close to the devil.' Manson and Beauseoleil were a match made in hell. Charlie would send Beausoleil and a veritable harem of women to the Beach BoyDennis Wilson's house (the Beach Boys had covered a song written by Manson on their ironically named 20/20 album). There they met Terry Melcher, a record producer. Melcher was friends with Sharon Tate and Roman Polanski, who were married at the time. Tate had just made The Fearless Vampire Killers, a vampire film with Polanski, and rumor has it that the pair were into the occult. As the game six degrees of Kevin Bacon tells us, everyone in Hollywood is connected one way or another. The point of this narrative is that life imitates art. The artists got knives and started feeding on other artists in a drug frenzy. Beausoliel was already in jail in 1969, but another group of Manson's friends, lead by Tex Watson, went to the Tate mansion in order to 'do something witchy' to Melcher in revenge for not getting the family a record contract. They wrote 'political piggy' on the wall in blood to make it look like it was Black Panthers that did it. Manson was afraid of black people, especially the Black Panther Party.
I can imagine the Manson family watching Dracula or the Wolfman on an old projector at Spahn Ranch, stoned out of their minds on LSD and MDA and fucking like rabbits in the straw [like the film Manson Family Home Movies]. When their minds were in this vulnerable state Manson would sing to them. He would sing, "People say I'm no good, Because I don't do like they think I should, Do they really expect you to act like them?" Counter-culture meant subverting the norm, whether it be religious norms, sexual norms or norms of dress and grooming.
Rabies physically changes the composition of the brain. LSD and other psychedelics are said to do something similar, even though there's no evidence for it. It was as though someone had poisoned America's water supply. When soldiers started coming home from the jungles of Vietnam they were all messed up. A spirit of evil had gotten into them. Fear is a dangerous thing. The peace and love generation was no longer peaceful and lovey. On Manson's heels were the Weather Underground, the Symbionese Liberation Army, the Black Liberation Army and The People's Temple. They were proof that the hippy experiment had somehow become more violent that anyone had expected.
There were a whole lot of films based on the Manson myth at this time, but my favorite is I Drink Your Blood. Horace opens the film with the line, "Let it be known that Satan was an acidhead." If Charles Manson was Satan then this was true. The cult in I Drink Your Blood bears striking resemblance to the Manson cult. But not only that, it points to a greater phenomenon that was going on at that time in America. It was two worlds colliding... Helter Skelter. The Freedom Riders had seen what the deep South thought of integration of their two worlds. Their bus was burnt and their leaders were beaten and left for dead. Yes, small town America didn't want to change even though the times there were a-changing.
In I Drink Your Blood a cult of Satanic hippies from various racial backgrounds invade a small town that is about to be destroyed by a dam. They aren't very nice to the locals, they rape a young girl and beat up an old man, so the young boy poisons their food with rabies infected blood and zombie chaos ensues.
Who really is the monster here? Is it the young boy who infects the whole town with rabies? Is it the rabid zombies themselves? Or is the monster not even present here? Isn't the monster in I Drink Your Blood really evil itself? The followers of Satan (i.e.: Manson - or worse - Marx) are the perpetrators of the initial evil, but really aren't they in fact the victims of evil? The rabid dog that the boy takes the blood from is the patient zero here, but it is the act (in the Žižekian sense) of tainting the meat pies with the rabid dog's blood that breaks the master signifier and opens the door for the ensuing chaos. The boy thus is the actor, driving a wedge in reality and opening the door for the negation of all previous master signifiers. I would argue that it is the boy, the agent/actor, that fits the monster archetype. Juxtapose that with the good he thinks he is doing and his youthful innocence.
This is not the only film to make the child into a monster. The J-horror instant classic Ringu also does this. In Ringu it is the child's innocence that leads to her evil. Again, it is a Žižekian act, the watching of the enchanted video tape, that breaks the master signifier and results in death and chaos.
This clash of worlds, the dialectic between country and city, white and minority, conservative and progressive is also seen in another Zombie film made around the same time, the George A. Romero classic Night of the Living Dead. The protagonist of the film is a Mandingo-archetype African-American man. He is strong, well spoken, tall, handsome. He is helping a helpless white woman. The dialectic comes when a family is discovered in the basement. The patriarch of the family is a racist redneck. He tries to subvert the protagonist's power. He doubts an African-American's ability to lead by insisting that he himself determine the line of defense the group takes (staying in the basement versus boarding up the windows and defending themselves from upstairs where there is an escape route), and thus reveals himself a racist. Issues of affirmative action and meritocracy arise here. The African-American man is obviously the best man for the job. However, by virtue of the color of his skin his legitimacy as the leader is put into doubt.
Zombie films in general reflect this dialectic. The monster here reveals itself to be the ultimate master signifier, defined by its negation. The zombies are undead, neither dead nor alive. However, they are not quite human. They are humans stripped of their humanity. Their only drive is the thirst for blood, much like the rabies victim. Often zombie scenarios are the endgame of a post-apocalyptic world. The 99% from whatever other backgrounds tend to share and get along when faced with difficult situations. Thus, the remaining uninfected individuals in the apocalyptic zombie world tend to work together no matter their petty differences. The zombie apocalypse is the great equalizer. Kropotkin calls mutual aid a factor of fitness in a world where the fit survive. That is to say that those communities that tend to work together tend to survive whereas those that do not perish. I'm reminded here of the scene in Jurassic Park when one of the characters runs to the bathroom and is eaten by a T-Rex. Jeff Goldblum's character, the Chaos theorist, explains, "When you've gotta go, you've gotta go." The point is that in these crisis situations any sign of individualism is punished in the most extreme of way. In order to survive we must work together. No one is an island.
There are two projects in the works written and directed by musicians that I am extremely excited about.
First, Boots Riley (of the communist hip hop group the Coup) has received a Sundance grant to make his film Sorry to Bother You. The film is based on the Coup's concept album of the same name. Riley has already released the screenplay as a book. Luckily, thanks to Robert Redford and the Sundance foundation, Sorry to Bother You will finally be in the format it was meant to be in: film.
Boots Riley (writer/director) / Sorry to Bother You (U.S.A.): A black telemarketer with self-esteem issues discovers a magical key to business success, propelling him to the upper echelons of the hierarchy just as his activist comrades are rising up against unjust labor practices. When he uncovers the macabre secret of his corporate overlords, he must decide whether to stand up or sell out. [the idea seems like something of an homage to Robert Downey's Putney Swope]
Boots Riley studied film at San Francisco State University before ending his studies in favor of a major label recording deal for his band, The Coup. He directed a music video for The Coup's “Me And Jesus The Pimp In A '79 Granada Last Night,”
upon which the novel Too Beautiful For Words was based. He has never won an award for artistic achievement, but has decided that being the only musical artist whose surveillance was uncovered via Wikileaks is just as good as an Oscar or a Grammy.
Here is the video for the Coup's song "The Guillotine," from the album "Sorry to Bother You"
Second, art-pop rockstar St. Vincent has written and is directing a horror film set to be released soon. She has released a promotional image on her Instagram account. It will be part of an anthology film made by female directors entitled XX.
Here is the official video for her song "Marrow"
Here is the promotional poster for the film:
Tuesday, April 12, 2016
Upcoming event:
Saturday, April 16th, 8pm Experimental Films from the 1950s and '60s
VSW Auditorium
Films by: Maya Deren, Marie Menken, Stan Brakhage, Sidney Peterson, Chick Strand, Christopher MacLaine, James Broughton, Gunvor Nelson, Kenneth Anger.
Projected in 16mm. $5 suggested donation. This event is part of the Spring 2016 VSW Film Series. View this event on facebook.
Lee Hardcastle is a stop motion animator working with clay whose short films usually have creepy and violent themes. He is probably best known for the "T is for Toilet" segment on the anthology film ABC's of Death. Ghost Burger is a 20 minute sequel to "T is for Toilet." It is a fairly brilliant horror/action film in claymation. You can watch it below.
He has also done work for Adult Swim, which can be seen below.
The use of claymation makes Hardcastle's films especially creepy. Animation in general was traditionally known as a children's medium. Since the popularity of anime and the Simpsons in the 1990s it has become accepted as a medium for adults as well. However, claymation has not necessarily breached the adult market.
Still, the short films of Lee Hardcastle are unique in their narrative style (an homage, perhaps, to 1970s grindhouse action/horror films) and colorful mise en scène.
Here are a few more of his shorts for you to enjoy.
Squirm is about worms. Not just any worms, though. Freaky Georgia worms with tons of legs and, yes, fangs. They bite, but normally they're ok. You can even use them to fish with. However, if they come in contact with electricity they go crazy, and there's so many of them in the ground that once they come up the humans don't have a chance.
Squirm, although a major studio release (Universal), has the feel of an indie grindhouse/exploitation film. You also get the sense that the actors in this film are real country people. These yokels don't come from Los Angeles. If they're not GA natives they're from somewhere in the deep south. Of course, the city slicker is the protagonist, but that doesn't stop the locals from treating him like dirt (ironically, the thing worms live in).
This film is fun and will at times make your skin crawl. I thoroughly enjoyed it.
Tony Conrad, minimalist musician/composer, experimental film maker and University of Buffalo faculty member has died April 9, 2016. He was 76. Conrad was influential on film makers like John Waters and to many of my friends who have taken his classes at UB he was beloved. It is also said that Conrad was indirectly responsible for naming The Velvet Underground. Conrad participated in the making of Jack Smith's Flaming Creatures, an experimental film that legendarily was partially screened as evidence before the Senate to prove that supreme court nominee Abe Fortas was soft on obscenity. The police had raided and broken up an underground screening of the film citing obscenity law. Here are a few portions of the film:
The Acid Western is a sub-genre of films that emerged after the heyday of the Western genre when films by directors like John Ford and Howard Hawks saw their greatest popularity. In the 1960s and 70s the culture in America was changing and so was the culture in Hollywood. Directors began to take on issues of autonomy, consciousness, equality, freedom and violence from a counter-cultural angle. The Acid Western emerged from this cinema climate.
In more ways than one Dead Man can be seen as the fulfillment of a cherished counterculture dream, the acid western. This ideal has haunted such films as Jim McBride's Glen and Randa, Dennis Hopper's The Last Movie, Monte Hellman's The Shooting and Two-Lane Blacktop, Robert Downey's Greaser's Palace, and Alex Cox's Walker, not to mention such novels as Rudolph Wurlitzer's Nog and Flats. (Rosenbaum - Acid Western)
I have compiled a list of my favorite Acid Westerns with a short description. This list originally appeared on IMDb.
"A parable based on the life of Christ. This ain't your father's Bible story, full of references about... (91 mins.)"
Perhaps the seminal Acid Western and Robert Downey Sr.'s greatest work (Although Putney Swope is nothing short of genius) Watch the full film...
2. El Topo "A mysterious black-clad gunfighter wanders a mystical Western landscape encountering multiple bizarre characters. (125 mins.)" Jodorowsky's first commercial success. Attracted the eye of John Lennon and Yoko Ono, which helped the next film (the Holy Mountain) to be financed by Alan Klien (the Beatles' manager). A blend of old West tropes, Mexican bandito culture and ancient samurai tradition. Watch the trailer...
3. The Last Movie "A film shoot in Peru goes badly wrong when an actor is killed in a stunt, and the unit wrangler, Kansas... (108 mins.)"A self-conscious facsimile of a Western, which makes it a mindfuck through and through. Layers of reality reveal layers of meaning. Clearly a film maker's film. Filmed on location in South America as the behind the scenes of some fictitious Western film shot with a camera made from twigs: complete with drugs, sex and general slack. Legend has it film went way over budget and Dennis Hopper got in big trouble over it. Watch Dennis Hopper working on the Last Movie...
4. Dead Man "On the run after murdering a man, accountant William Blake encounters a strange North American man named Nobody who prepares him for his journey into the spiritual world. (121 mins.)"The film for which film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum coined the term. All the elements are there (and this case the whole IS equal to the sum of its parts): young Jonny Depp as lead, young Jim Jarmusch as director, old Neil Young as soundtrack, appearances by Crispin Glover, John Hurt, Iggy Pop. Probably the perfect combination of elements to create a brilliant film. Jarmusch knew what he was doing. Watch the trailer...
5. The Shooting "A mysterious woman persuades two cowboys to help her in a revenge scheme. (82 mins.)"Considered the first Acid Western. The Shooting is an arid odyssey that gets more languid as it goes along. Throughout the whole film there is a heavy smog of mystery that holds you to it. There are more questions than answers in this film and by the end little is revealed. Watch the full film...
6. Walker "An unconventional retelling of the life of William Walker, a 19th century American mercenary leader who became the president of Nicaragua. (94 mins.)" A commentary on manifest destiny, imperialism, the vagueness of the democratic promise and the contradictions of competition and capitalism. Somewhat of a negative acid-Western as it betrays individualism as a contradictory and hedonistic Xanadu. Watch the trailer...
Lately I've fallen deep into the rabbit hole that leads to Kraina Grzybow (English: Mushroom Land) and its most popular television show Poradnik Uśmiechu (English: Smile Guide). Poradnik Uśmiechu is a Polish language tutorial for how to have weird fun and often disturbing times hosted by a missing girl in a blue sweater with strange eyes and her big furry friend. All five episodes are embedded below with a poor translation of the title and description.
Smile Guide 1 - How to effectively apple Sally learns how the apple, helps her squirrel Gretel, which also. Mama Agatka although he has no idea.
Guide Smile 2 - How to Make from Paper Agatka the squirrel Gretel when they want the paper. Fortunately cow. Mom Agatka trouble in the existing situation. Sally returned to.
Smile 4 Guide - How your hair
Absences Agatka decides mail. Unfortunately, her hair. With the help of a mysterious unexpectedly.
Guide Smile 5 - How to correctly call
Agatha answers mysterious. It turns out. Along with Maggie the Squirrel flowers it's emergency. Immediately to last episode.
What does it mean when a spectator identifies more with the villain of the film than the protagonist? In this series, I examine this question in the context of horror. I use national-character studies style anthropology (a la Margaret Mead), Marxian critique of ideology, critical film theory and Freudian psychoanalysis as my lenses.
Horror is that unique genre that allows the viewer to both despise and root for the monster. Perhaps the popularity of the horror genre is because we often see something of ourselves in the monster, that figure that is both protagonist and antagonist, holder of the subjective gaze, what Žižek and Lacan would call the master signifier. The viewer of a horror film roots for the monster that he or she despises because there is an identification going on there.
Freud, in his writings on dream analysis, describes the dream as fantasy fulfillment. For him, it is the realization of repressed desires that motivate our creative subconscious to develop these nonsensical narratives. Isn't that indeed what film is? The visual and auditory manifestation of the director's dreams, fantasies and deepest desires. Yet, if a film is a dream then what is a horror film if not a nightmare? What then does Freud have to say about nightmares?
Freud hypothesizes that the reasons that these distressing dreams arise are all related to wish-fulfillment. First, there is the ego, which creeps into even our unconscious life. The stresses and anxieties of our waking life invade the dream world so that even our dreams are not without a certain amount of moral guilt attached with them. Some of these dreams are what Freud terms 'punishment dreams' whereby our wish is to be punished for a past wrong-doing: fulfilled in our subconscious, dream life.
However, this does not account for all nightmares. Some of them are related to stressful stimuli accumulated throughout the day, whether it be emotional stress or physical ailment. One thing is clear in these dreams, though The ego tends to play a much larger role in these types of dreams than in what Freud terms 'straightforward dreams of satisfaction.'
How can we extrapolate this concept into the realm of film? Horror is a much more ego-centric genre than the romance or the comedy. In romances and comedies we are offered escape. Of course, often in these films there is little choice as to whether or not to identify with the protagonist, as is even more clearly evidenced in the ideologically-charged action genre (I will return to this idea later). In horror there is not a clear good or evil. In some films evil is even celebrated as the good. This is not necessarily true with all horror films, but the ambiguity of the genre is often what separates it from others. There is also the celebration of the inner sado-masochist. Horror allows us to experience, by proxy, the atrocious fantasies of either punishing our enemies or being punished by our enemies. These are the desires Freud tells us need to be repressed in order to get along with others in society. These are also the desires that psychopaths are unable to suppress. That is why horror is often psychopathic and utilizes psychosis' cousin, surrealism. In the Nightmare on Elm Street films, for example, Freddy Kruger is the ultimate psychopath, blurring the lines between the conscious and the subconscious.
Ideology also plays a part. Mussolini is famously quoted as saying, "Every anarchist is a baffled dictator." Passolini took this concept to its extreme in his most cringe-worthy film Salo: 120 Days of Sodom. The film would prove to be his last. During one of the films many scenes of sadistic sex the monsters of the film, the dictators, say to each other, "The true anarchist is the fascist because freedom comes from power." It is this unbridled, sado-masochistic hedonism that makes horror enjoyable to watch. It is flirting with the perverse, while at the same time we are aware that it's not real. It is merely a nightmare where we are in control. We can turn it off, close our eyes or even walk out of the theater if we want to.
As I've stated earlier, horror is unlike the action film for example, because the viewer is able to choose whether or not to identify with the master signifier of the film. In the action film the hero is always the hero, the protagonist always the protagonist. We don't have a choice but to root for the protagonist. But what if we don't relate with the protagonist and even, frankly, think the protagonist is a bit of an asshole? Neil LaBute's remake of the Wicker Man exemplifies this, even more so than the original (and vastly superior) 1973 version directed by Robin Hardy. Nicholas Cage plays a male police officer who invades the matriarchal community of Summersisle. When he bursts into the schoolhouse the teacher asks the girls the question, "What is man?" to which the girls reply, "Phallic symbol, phallic symbol." (In the original it is the Maypole that is the phallic symbol). In the end Cage's character is ritualistically sacrificed and righteously so. Cage is the phallic symbol, the puritanical penis demanding the rule of patriarchal law. The Wicker Man remake was marketed as a horror film, but fits more into the action genre's mores due to LaBute's interpretation.
A similar objection holds true for Christopher Nolan's the Dark Knight Rises. Bane, a preacher of freedom, equality, autonomy and class warfare is the villain against which what Žižek terms the Dickensian 'good capitalist' (a la Tale of Two Cities), Batman, must fight.
Put quite simply, LaBute's the Wicker Man is here read as an anti-feminist film just as Nolan's the Dark Knight Rises is read by Žižek as an anti-Occupy/anti-leftist film.
These two films are in stark contrast with the complexity of the Michael Myers character in Rob Zombie's retelling of Halloween. Myers is a psychologically complex individual. Abused as a child, he has learned to harden his heart and leave the virtue of mercy behind. He is the personification of a monster. However, even this monster has elements of humanity. He saves a woman in the mental institution from being raped by the orderlies and when he goes on a killing spree he mercifully does not kill her. Instead, he poetically punishes her would-be rapists. However, Myers is still a psychopath, unable to know the difference between right and wrong. He inevitably does murder the one orderly who actually is nice to him, solidifying his status as a monster.
The monster-archetype is thus exemplified in the Jungian sense. We see that the monster is within us all, but also not like us for one reason. The monster is the actor, the perpetrator of the Žižekian/Lacanian act; that which breaks all previous notions held within the master signifier of a particular ideology.
Another indication that the monster is the prevailing archetype in horror films is the seemingly universal character of the monster. A supernatural J-horror, an American slasher film or even the newer torture sub-genre all contain elements of the monster-archetype.
Yet, where does morality fit into the horror-genre and its tropes? The cultural relativism concept contributed to anthropological theory by Franz Boas tells us that morality is culturally determined. Horror films seek to subvert the morality of the cultures from which they come. However, in so doing horror is paradoxically moralistic. By portraying what we should not do horror films thereby identify what we should not do. As much as we may identify with the sadistic monsters on screen, we realize that they aren't real and we cannot do that in real life. Suspension of disbelief is necessary in order to enjoy horror or any other type of film, but for horror this disbelief is also part of the fun. We are scared when we suspend our disbelief, but in order to comfort ourselves we must tell ourselves continually that it is not real, even if only in the back of our minds. It is this that makes the horror genre unique, brilliant, open-ended and fun.
the Brain that Wouldn't Die
