Tag Archives: Experimental

Capsules

CAPSULE: AN EVENING SONG (FOR THREE VOICES) (2023)

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DIRECTED BY: Graham Swon

FEATURING: , , Peter Vack

PLOT: Barbara and Richard, married writers from the East Coast, move to the Midwest and hire Martha, a quietly pious local, as their maid.

COMMENTS: One narrator evokes simple matter-of-factness; the second narrator segues into a reminiscence of another world; and the final narrator readily apologizes for what he’s about to do. These three voices in Graham Swon’s feature, An Evening Song, are its body, spirit, and mind; with the three characters—an innocent country local named Martha, the disillusioned writer-prodigy Barbara, and her mentally restless husband, Richard—conveying the film’s philosophical pull and tug. Events do literally happen in An Evening Song (indeed, it is loosely based on real events and individuals), but Swon has crafted more of a meditation oscillating around a narrative through-line than a traditional drama.

Over the course of eighty-odd minutes, Swon’s players perform the strange and gentle decline of a marriage on the rocks. Relocating to the Middle of Nowhere, Iowa, two different writerly types observe their hired help from their own perspectives. Barbara, having begun to give up on life more than a decade prior, has reached a critical stage of ennui that is only slightly alleviated by the discovery of this mysterious, scarred country girl, who seems to embody a delightfully unsolvable riddle. Richard, devoid of any bent towards mysticism, is commendably observant and empathetic, and entranced by Martha as well—but as a riddle to attempt solving. Under the couple’s gaze, Martha gazes back: she perceives Barbara’s ethereality with admiration, but also perceives Richard’s constantly ticking pragmatism with appreciation. We have here a love triangle, of sorts.

But in what way? Swon raises many questions in this film—and wanders (with purpose) down many avenues. Richard, bless his heart, accommodates to his utmost, and for all we can observe is impossible to offend, disappoint, or anger. (This is for the best, no doubt, as he has found himself dropped right in the middle of two particularly conundrous individuals.) Barbara does love Richard (maybe, probably), but longs for a life in the mystical “nowhere” reminisced throughout her narrations—which Richard cannot provide. Martha, on the other hand, does: her piety and humility raise her to ineffable heights in a dream she conveys to Barbara during a climactic, quiet encounter in a placid field, after which the story pivots and moves irrevocably toward the dissolution of Barbara’s will to remain on this plane of existence.

The song continues, narrations bump up against one another and fuse, with all three becoming harmoniously concurrent during a contemplative, sleepless night-and-day meshing of perspectives. This film is no Eraserhead, to be certain; but it is a curious experience. With full marks for dreamy ethereality, Swon’s pocket-sized meditation manages a tension from its competing and complementary voices, creating something nearly imperceptible, maybe close to a nothing, but which lingers in the mind like a mystifying apparition.

An Evening Song (for Three Voices) completed a short run in New York last week and will play at the Acropolis in Los Angeles for one night only, May 29. We’ll let you know when it’s available online.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Stylistically, Swon’s film shares an aesthetic kinship with some of Guy Maddin’s films, but it is far less accessible… The ambition and craftsmanship are laudable, but the hallucinatory haze too often produces a sensation of narrative drift. Recommended with the above caveats for experienced patrons of unconventional cinema” — Joe Bendel, J.B. Spins (contemporaneous)

It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

CAPSULE: INVENTION (2024)

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DIRECTED BY: Courtney Stephens

FEATURING: , Sahm McGlynn, James N. Kienitz Wilkins

PLOT: Actress Callie Hernandez comes to terms with her eccentric father’s death, while portraying the character Carrie Fernandez who inherits her father’s patent for an “electromagnetic healing device.”

COMMENTS: Brought to our attention by a reader who noticed some uncanny similarities to Certified Weird curiosity  After Last Season, Invention tells a story of death and medical experimentation. Both films are low-budget explorations of weird science, but the comparison ends there—in Invention‘s favor, as the more coherent and watchable film (although After Last Season earns the award for weirdness).

In real life, actor-writer Hernandez is the daughter of Dr. John Hernandez, an alternative medical guru who hosted a program on local television. Six months after his death, Hernandez began collaborating with director Stephens on a script inspired by her mourning experiences. Actual footage from her father’s VHS archives made its way into the film. The story becomes a dual narrative about Hernandez and her fictional counterpart, “Carrie Fernandez,” the daughter of elusive “Dr. J.” When she unexpectedly inherits a patent discovers upon his death, she discovers her father secretly invented a “vibronic” machine.

Dr. J’s story is reminiscent of Wilhelm Reich, another traditionally educated medical professional whose career took a strange turn when he began developing outré theories (whom readers may recall from the Certified Weird film WR: Mysteries of the Organism). Dr. J’s device isn’t sexual, but Carrie finds out the FDA recalled it for its dubious medical value.

People of a certain age will remember seeing television personalities like Dr. J on public access, programs that were a bewildering mix of actual facts, bizarre theories, and advertising for various New Age products and therapies. I distinctly remember flipping past these types of shows on PBS back in the 1980s and ’90s (to a kid, they were incredibly boring). I can only imagine what it must have been like growing up with someone like Dr J for a father. Invention gives the viewer a pretty good idea, though the film mostly focuses on the absurdities of dealing with the loss of a parent in a death-phobic country like the United States.

Invention excels at black humor, maintaining a consistent tone of deadpan awkwardness as Callie/Carrie endures stilted conversations with funeral parlor staff and estate executors, while navigating the Kafkaesque bureaucracy of corporate bereavement policies. As Callie encounters the various people connected to her father’s mysterious machine, she tries to learn more about it, but conflicting stories emerge. Some of Dr J’s friends and patients remain convinced of his misunderstood genius; others politely refrain from calling him a crackpot to his grieving daughter.

Brief scenes of intensely colored video and animation emphasize Carrie’s descent into this psychedelically-tinged world of alternative medicine, as does a tea party in an “Alice in Wonderland”-themed corn maze. The intertwined narratives of Callie and Carrie, united by archival television footage, blur the boundaries between fiction and reality, as Dr. Hernandez essentially plays himself in both. But aside from the animated sequences, the film’s style remains realist. It hovers at the edge of the rabbit hole without ever tumbling in.

Many viewers will probably leave this film wanting to know more about the mysterious machine, but it remains cryptic. A series of cathode-ray tubes connected by a ring of coiled wire and staged in a red-walled room, it looks suitably science-fictional, and its main champions are a little too “woo” to be believed. Callie references Nikola Tesla’s theories when trying to defend to father’s vision, but she doesn’t seem entirely convinced. Even after she begins using the machine, she never reveals whatever effect it may or may not be having on her.

Hernandez looked familiar to me, but I couldn’t remember what else I had seen her in—probably because she was buried under layers of mascara in Under the Silver Lake (as Millicent Sevence, another daughter in mourning for her eccentric father). She also co-starred in Benson and Moorhead’s The Endless. Which is  to say, Hernandez has some fledgling weird credentials. Courtney Stephens has been assistant director on a number of pictures. I’ll be curious to see how both their careers develop. Invention has weird potential; perhaps someday we’ll see something full blown weird from its creators.

Invention is currently playing in limited cities across North America, with a wider release planned for Summer 2025.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“This strange, personal movie is a mind meld between the experimental filmmaker Courtney Stephens (‘Terra Femme’) and the actress Callie Hernandez (‘Alien: Covenant’)… ‘Invention’ is committed to finding its own wavelength.”–Ben Kenigsberg, The New York Times (contemporaneous)

(This movie was nominated for review by Morgan, who suggested “If After Last Season left an impact on anyone, it would probably have to be Courtney Stephens and her film Invention from 2024. The trailer is a pretty strong homage: minimalist keyboard music, cardboard in the background, CGI dreams, questions that go nowhere, and shot on film.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

 

 

List Candidates

APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: PINK NARCISSUS (1971)

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“Narcissus now had reached his sixteenth year
And seemed both man and boy; and many a youth
And many a girl desired him, but hard pride
Ruled in that delicate frame, and never a youth
And never a girl could touch his haughty heart.”

— Ovid, Metamorphoses

DIRECTED BY: James Bidgood

FEATURING: Bobby Kendall

PLOT: A modern-day Narcissus, alone in a New York City apartment, imagines himself as characters in a series of homoerotic fantasies while gazing upon his own reflection in a mirror.

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE APOCRYPHA: There’s nothing particularly weird about a teenage boy imagining himself as a matador bedecked in gold embroidery with red silk cape, but when the camera pulls back to reveal the “bull” in this corrida—a biker who looks like he rode right out of an illustration by Tom of Finland—we enter another level of surreal and sensual fantasy.

COMMENTS: In this silent modern-day retelling of the myth of Narcissus, first-time director and cinematographer James Bidgood creates an otherworldly dreamscape with a nightmarish edge. A young hustler falls into a series of sexual reveries in his bedroom while the lewd antics of a darkly Expressionist city parade outside his window. Mirrors take the place of the original’s pond, and as his dreams become increasingly self-obsessed, the lines between the worlds on either side of the glass blur, leading to a phantasmagoric conclusion.

Upon entering the apartment, awash in a warm pink glow, and decorated with multiple photographs of himself, Narcissus (Kendall) gradually strips off his tight white clothes. As he ripples his shirt before a wall of mirrors, it transforms into a red cape and a motorcycle engine revs, its handlebars cleverly framed as the bull’s two horns (aimed at the bull-fighter’s shapely rear end). A bathhouse hook-up intercuts this vision where Narcissus and the biker end up in a tub frothing with soap bubbles, the action occasionally interrupted by blank white frames.

For a first film by an amateur film maker, Pink Narcissus displays an impressive command of cinematic techniques. The inner life of the protagonist, in which he travels through time and around the world, when juxtaposed with extreme close-ups of his body—slow shots of fingers being licked, swelling nipples, belly button tickled with a blade of grass—underscore his absorption into solipsistic desires. When he gazes into the mirror, the camera flips to the perspective of his own reflection gazing back at him. Often shot from below, Kendall strides through the film with the camera staring up at his monumental form. Sometimes half-dressed, sometimes nude, the angle emphasizes his youthful and muscular physique but also the character’s revelry in his own power as he wields his physical attractions like a lure and a weapon.

In Classical Rome, he takes on the roles of both a cruel emperor and a powerless prisoner whom the emperor condemns. In an Orientalist tableau, he’s both a harem boy and a stern bearded sultan. A dancer draped with semi-sheer silk and strands of pearls performs for them in an extended sequence of images variously distorted, stretched and abstracted. The choreography, in which the movements of male anatomy form flowing patterns in the gauzy silk, recalls the Serpentine dances of Loie Fuller. The frames dissolve between the dancer’s body, close-ups of the pearls and Narcissus grasping the beaded strands in his hand. As the harem boy Narcissus enjoys the performance, but the sultan demands the dancer’s execution. Carried out with shocking rapidity, this death sentence marks the film’s most potently violent and sexual moment.

Unabashedly gay and erotic, daringly so for having been made in the pre-Stonewall era, Pink Narcissus take its stylistic cues from ’60s pinup art. Bidgood was a photographer for the men’s health and fitness magazines which featured coded gay imagery at the time. He once explained in an interview that when he grew bored with the typical images of beefcake models wearing g-strings, “I thought there should be something more.”

With his astute eye for composition and color, he began to design richly decorated tableau for his photographs, beginning with underwater scenes inspired by Esther Williams films and the glamour of Old Hollywood. Pink Narcissus blossomed out of a photoshoot for a Valentine’s Day issue of The Young Physique magazine. Bidgood created the pink-hued bedroom interior with the heart-shaped swan headboard for the cover in his own tiny NYC apartment. As the shoot with model Bobby Kendall progressed, a story began to take shape and Bidgood started to film the scenes. Over the course of seven years, he painstakingly crafted this journey into a mythic realm highly charged with sensuality yet strikingly beautiful, an example of DIY film making like no other.

Note: The executor of Bidgood’s estate has said that Blu-ray and VOD releases of Pink Narcissus are planned for Summer 2025.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a fragile antique, a passive, tackily decorated surreal fantasy out of that pre‐Gay‐Activist era when homosexuals hid in closets and read novels about sensitive young men who committed suicide because they could not go on.”–Vincent Canby, The New York Times (contemporaneous)

 

Capsules

CAPSULE: BABY INVASION (2024)

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Baby Invasion is currently available on VOD for purchase or rental.

DIRECTED BY: Harmony Korine

FEATURING: Juan Bofill, Shawn Thomas, Steven Rodriguez, Antonio Jackson, Tej Limlas Ly, Anonymous

PLOT: Six baby-faced goons massacre guests at a mansion in search of stacks of cash and Internet notoriety.

COMMENTS: My only real quibble with Mr. Korine’s latest romp is that it could have been far, far more disturbing. Of course, a “romp” can really only be so disturbing before it leaves romp territory, so perhaps the director did things correctly. Regardless, Baby Invasion is, without a doubt, exactly what Harmony Korine wanted it to be, for better in a number ways—and for worse, according to the general impressions that have caught my ear.

This brings me to the primary characteristic I admire in Harmony Korine: I believe he does not care what I think, what you think, what the Academy thinks, what the French think, what anyone thinks. Like Frank Sinatra, albeit filtered through Syd Vicious, Korine can stand proudly and shout: I Did It My Way. In this case, “his way” went as follows: 1) Invasion. A home invasion, the home being an expansive and expensive mansion, with several pools both indoor and out, countless objets kind of just taking up space (whoever owns this place can afford a decorator, and should seriously consider hiring one). This home is invaded by a squad of alarmingly well-armed guys who show up in a van, eat some of the inhabitants’ fruit, take some of their drugs, and otherwise lark about as they search for the mansion’s safe.

2) Baby. Now, this “found footage” is flanked by a documentary-style (à la late ’90s camcorder, judging from the film quality) conversation with a programmer who explains how her game was hijacked halfway to completion and converted into a quasi-avatar/quasi-livestream showcase for real home invasions. The gaggle of goons have their faces obscured by baby-faces; there is a constant side-scroll of remarks and emojis from real-time ‘Net observers; pixel-splosion boosts and power-ups sparkle on the screen as our pseudonymous protagonist goes through the motions.

Baby Invasion is a novelty, and for its eighty-minute runtime is entertaining enough. Whatever commentary one gleans will not take a lot of effort. I can only recommend this—somewhat—because of my degree of disorientation by the end, as game, meta-game, meta-life, and life became increasingly difficult to differentiate. The occasional shots of the “gamers” suggest none of this is real. The security cameras suggests it is. This muddling, I suspect, is Korine’s overarching goal, and he achieves it nicely. However, I would have preferred to be either slightly more amused, or considerably more dismayed, by the goings-on.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Korine, who started the company Edglrd in recent years to package his bizarre and off-putting projects while shepherding those similar from others, seems to believe that whatever ‘Baby Invasion’ is housing is the key to the evolution of cinema. That’s upsetting if true, but in a crippled moment for the creativity of the art form from the multiplexes to the arthouse, we might as well listen in… The wall-to-wall trippy rabbit hole of a world Korine has constructed is an immersive environment that shapeshifts… I sort of prayed for oblivion while in my own seat, but I was strangely hypnotized throughout.”–Ryan Lattanzio, Indiewire (festival screening)