Tag Archives: Experimental

READER RECOMMENDATION: CRIMES OF THE FUTURE (1970)

August 8, 2016 Rafael Moreira 2 Comments

Reader review by Rafael Moreira

CAST: Ronald Mlodzik, Jon Lidolt, Tania Zolty

PLOT: Adrian Tripod, director of a dermatological clinic called House of Skin, wanders in search of his mentor, Antoine Rouge, who has mysteriously disappeared after a catastrophic plague related to cosmetic products kills the entire population of sexually mature women.

Still from Crimes of the Future (1970)

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: Crimes of the Future is chock full of Cronenberg’s characteristic, and characteristically weird, themes of the relationship between the mind and body and their fragilities and possible degradations. What makes it different from his future efforts is that the film’s null budget renders it underproduced, alienated and experimental in ways that both augment its weirdness and undermines its cinematicness. The fact that it is shot silent with a commentary added later only feeds the dreamy, disassociated atmosphere.

COMMENTS: Crimes of the Future was the venerated and singular David Cronenberg‘s second film, made, like his first (Stereo), with minimal resources. Despite being his most inaccessible works, the main surprise is how these early films reflect Cronenberg’s unique, consistent persona and the preoccupations on which he has meditated in his whole oeuvre.

Crimes‘s practically nonexistent budget both limits and enhances its weirdness. On one hand, Cronenberg’s signature ideas are denied full realization, but his way of working around the lack of resources lends the film an utterly abstract presentation. One could describe the movie as a seemingly disconnected succession of scenes of people interacting and behaving strangely in clinical spaces and shadowy corridors, only made meaningful by the somnambulant commentary of Ronald Mlodzik. Another key agent of weirdness is the truly bizarre soundscape that Cronenberg crafted, which, when not silent, consists mostly of indistinct atmospheric sounds and white noise. There are very few moments where the music seems to be in tune with what’s happening on screen, rather than serving as an obscure, sometimes disturbing background ambiance.

The film’s glacial tone and sense of detachment is reminiscent of THX 1138 at times. The audience’s reliance on the commentary by protagonist Adrian Tripod to make sense of the movie’s distant, cryptic images further increases its dreamlike quality. Sometimes, the narration is itself bizarre, as it has to communicate the insular world where Crimes takes places—a world that, while visually familiar, is otherworldly in its character’s strange behaviors, its enigmatic corporations and, of course, the central premise of its sudden defeminization.

The most curious aspect of the experience of watching Crimes is noting how, even under the restrictive budget and obscuring experimental approach, Cronenberg’s defining obsessions of the flesh, body, sexuality, disease, and mutation are all present in full force. If one can get past the film’s impenetrable nature, Tripod’s regular voice-over actually reveals a typically surreal, purely Cronenbergian narrative rich in visceral details. As he journeys through a succession of organizations, the odd individuals he meets all present a form of derangement or peculiarity reflective of Cronenberg’s themes, as each of them adapts to the great change in their own way. For instance, a former colleague of Tripod from the “Institute of Neo-Venereal Disease” has contracted a “creative cancer” from one of his patients, causing his body to continually form a series of organs that are removed in what many have interpreted as a parody of childbirth, while a concierge believes he is developing a root-like antenna from his nostrils as an evolutionary step.

Crimes feels like a sketch of the director’s imagination, fully revealing the sensibility behind his more mellow and professional works, but shadowed by its foggy experimentality and lack of resources. If patient weirdophiles can go with Cronenberg’s pretense of crafting more of a film experiment than a film, they will find it an undeniably interesting, if hard to watch, experience.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“… where Stereo was both creepy and austere, Crimes of the Future gives its remarkable characters more room to breathe and, in their own weird way, to play, picking their way around a modernist compound and narrated retroactively by the main character. It is fascinating viewing, and it’s always interesting to note what an acclaimed, spiky filmmaker was doing in his early career.”–Juliette Jones, PopOptiq (DVD)

[Crimes of the Future is included, along with Stereo, as bonus features on Blue Underground’s release of Cronenberg’s Fast Company–ed.]

Alfred Eaker's Fringe Cinema, Director Retrospective

DIRECTOR RETROSPECTIVE: THE ANIMATED FILMS OF SUZAN PITT

August 4, 2016 Alfred Eaker 1 Comment

A promenade through the oeuvre of animator Suzan Pitt is like taking part in a bohemian cavalcade disguised as a dollhouse, awash with luminous colors and energetic imagery, while grinding atonal music from a Holly Hobbie record player. She’s a balls-to-the-wall art school darling; unassuming, yet filled to the brim with edifying duplicity. Pitt inspires one to glean from life what one gleans from her art.

Her background is in painting and, as she explains in the aptly titled documentary Suzan Pitt: Persistence of Vision (2006), Pitt explains that she realized that the figures of her canvases had an implied history and future and began processing the idea of “what would happen if this moved over here? And that moved up there? Then that would be a different thing. There would be a passage of time.” The end result of that process was a painter interning in animation. Pitt’s first credited short is Jefferson Circus Songs (1975). Already in this first effort, she emanates an idiosyncratic abjection that spikes into mystical farce. Inundating us with a smorgasbord of imagery (live action, stop motion, and willfully rudimentary animation that includes harlequins, Siamese twins, geishas, an adolescent nurse with mop hair, Christmas lights, Easter eggs, and mythological creatures), Pitt introduces us to a vision which repudiates rationality and judgment. The threat of an overwhelming seriousness is dissipated as the filmmaker unveils her sense of self-depreciating humor. Yale Marshall’s tinkly score compliments the chaos.

In her second film, Asparagus (1979, available on DVD and on Fandor.com), Pitt again displays a shrewd awareness in juxtaposing music with imagery. Her composer of choice here is Richard Teitelbaum, who studied under one of the 20th century’s most vital composers: Luigi Nono. Asparagus also features the music of prolific and prominent free jazz artist Steve Lacy (who has worked with too many artists of note to name, including Carla Bley). Together, the aural language of Teitelbaum and Lacy create an ideal dialogue with Pitt’s imaged world of a phallic asparagus. Pitt describes her work as “a rich pastiche of imagery that folds together and becomes a running image.” The imagery, once internalized (from the way we manipulate and arrange images from childhood) is put together and connected to a “world of sense-making.” It follows Jung’s idea of pregnant imagery and she describes it as a “daydream that you can come into at any point,” being a “complex circle.” Pitt, leading an exquisite assemblage of artists, produces a provocative, erotically charged short that beams and steams absurdity with septic glitter in the most edifying way. Although as personal as a poem, Asparagus rightly resonated strongly with both critics and audiences, winning festivals the world over. Of all Pitt’s films, it is Asparagus that invites the most commentary, a rare example of a wholly successful independent film, which is covered in detail here already as a List Candidate.

In addition to her animated film work, Pitt is a professor who has done work in murals and theater design, along with actively showing her paintings and wood constructions in gallery showings, which explains the almost twenty year gap between films. Compared to the first two films, Joy Street (1995, on DVD and Fandor) is almost rhapsodic and narrative. Opening with imagery which conjures up visions from silent film, Joy Street wistfully flows into ecstatic, bonbon-hued colors, burning with ravenous anecdotes and music by Roy Nathanson from the Jazz Passengers. Although Pitt is often referred to as a woman animator, one would be hard-pressed to locate a male counterpart, which nullifies such categories. Her acerbic candor is probably never more accessible than here.

El Doctor (2006, on DVD and Fandor), written by Blue Kraning, is the first Pitt film with dialogue. It is the story of an alcoholic doctor, along with a gargoyle and south of the border art, inspired by Pitt’s own trip to the doctor. In her fourth film, Pitt captures the flavor of (what is to us) an eroticized, dissonant Catholicism, the Hispanic culture it influences, and outsider artist Jose Guadalupe Posada. Commendably, Pitt doesn’t subscribe to the usual bathos associated with naive art.

The half hour, self-coiling documentary Suzan Pitt: Persistence Of Vision is directed by Blue Kraning and Laura Kraning. I’m glad it exists as a proclamation reflecting on Pitt’s past, film techniques, and artistic worldview. Loving someone like Pitt goes beyond perception. The world needs her, and this primer is highly recommended viewing.

Pitt can also be seen as one of the smokers in James Benning’s 20 Cigarettes (2010) (sadly, they never called me).

Inspired by an ashtray and H.P. Lovecraft, Visitation (2012, also on Fandor) is cartoonish erudition, gestural and unforgettably hand painted. Juxtaposed to the music of Jules Massenet, Visitation is a monochromatic vision. Christ have mercy! It crosses every border and makes you fall in love with Pitt’s artistic voice all over again: configuring , transforming, reminding us that her first ventures into film were in 8mm. Archaic, postmodern, jazzy, operatic, with images ranging from the Spanish inquisition to the witch of the forest, it’s the kind of film one imagines film should be like.

At seven minutes, Pinball (2013) is the briefest Pitt film to date and one of the most startling. Juxtaposed to the preexisting 1952 revision of “Ballet Mecanique” by the bad boy of music, George Antheil (a beloved Surrealist), Pinball is a art film connoisseur’s orgasm. I was immediately reminded of John Zorn, Roy Lichtenstein, and Phillip Guston (he of the Morton Feldman tribute). Upon seeing it, my wife said, “I see you found another soul companion” (the other being Todd M. Coe). Pinball shows exactly the mental images I conjured up on first reading of Antheil’s premiere of “Ballet Mecanique,” with Andre Breton, Salvador Dalí, and Luis Buñuel on the stage pistol-whipping protestors.

This is the world of Suzan Pitt, and we are the better for her.

Alfred Eaker's Fringe Cinema

SYMPATHY, SAID THE SHARK (2015, DEVIN LAWRENCE)

July 28, 2016 Alfred Eaker Leave a comment

Sympathy, Said the Shark (2015) is the second feature film by fellow Portalandian Devin Lawrence, which has attracted some attention due to its innovative multiple points of view.

Of course, the use of various POVs isn’t completely original. It has been done before, albeit usually poorly. Lawrence, executive producer Zak Bagans, and their crew were aided by use of the cutting-edge Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera. However, if Sympathy, Said the Shark was merely an excuse to show off 21st century filmmaking technology, then it would only warrant coverage on software sites. Fortunately, Shark is of more value than that alone.

Lawrence and Bagans previously worked together in the paranormal “reality” series, “Ghost Adventures,” which began life as a documentary feature in 2004. Its popularity has keep it syndicated for twelve seasons. Seeing paranormal investigators on the duo’s film résumé hardly inspires enthusiasm for Sympathy, Said the Shark, but, not having seen the series, that could be a case of unjustified skepticism on my part, since the team’s first venture into narrative feature is surprisingly exploratory in a slick, kinetically-paced way. Some complaints have been lodged over its ambiguous title, with predictable charges of “pretension” leveled. I’ll digress here. The title is curious enough to inspire investigation, which is as it should be. It indicates that the filmmakers have learned a few things, in looking for dead people, about what makes for a compelling entry point. If Lawrence’ script writing and resulting film is not quite as risky or gutsy as its title, it goes a considerable distance in effort.

After some hardcore engagement, Lara (Melinda Cohen) and Justin (Lea Coco) are settling in for a rainy night when interrupted by a text message and knock at the door. Familiarity with Hitchcock, or any number of American filmmakers, tells us that answering the door is a precursor to mayhem—but what fun is common sense?

Still from Sympathy Said the Shark (2015)

Within moments, we are subjected to the perspectives of both Lara and Justin, along with that of the bloodied, intrusive Church (Dominic Bogart). Time overlaps coincide with perspective shifts, giving the viewer alternative psychological assessments. Lawrence clearly likes these characters and, in that, he’s really more securely in De Palma terrain, as opposed to Hitchcock, which is a good thing. With his postmodern sensibilities, De Palma has always been a warmer, more experimental, and more three-dimensional director than Hitchcock, to whom he is often compared (sometimes erroneously). As with De Palma, Lawrence does not allow his bag of tricks to overwhelm the narrative or characters (as Hitchcock often did). With conflicting perspectives come raging, emotional torrents, revelations, skeletons hurled out of closest, viable conspiracies, and additional threats to harmony.

Both the narrative and aesthetic of Sympathy, Said the Shark are guided by its emotional roller coaster. That requires solid actors, which the film provides. If Lawrence had distanced himself or taken a more objective approach, the minimally-plotted film would not have worked. Rather, he utilizes psychology to manipulate us, as any good filmmaker will, and we subscribe to his enthusiasm. All too often, experimental films can be vapid exercises. Lawrence, his crew, and cast succeed to a degree that his should be a name to watch. Sympathy, Said the Shark is a refreshing, promising start.

Canonically Weird (The List)

242. L’AGE D’OR (1930)

June 29, 2016 Gregory J. Smalley (366weirdmovies) 2 Comments

“It is LOVE that brings about the transition from pessimism to action: Love, denounced in the bourgeois demonology as the root of all evil. For love demands the sacrifice of every other value: status, family, and honor.”–from the program to L’Age D’Or

Recommended

DIRECTED BY: Luis Buñuel

FEATURING: Gaston Madot, Lya Lys, Max Ernst

PLOT: It begins as a documentary on scorpions. “Some hours later,” reads an intertitle, and suddenly we are on a rocky beach where a peasant spies four chanting bishops perched on a rocky outcropping. Later, on the same beach, a man and a woman are discovered locked in an embrace; they spend the rest of the movie attempting to consummate their love, as the action shifts to “Imperial Rome” and a private concert at a wealthy bourgeois garden party.

Still from L'age D'or (1930)

<br /> BACKGROUND:

The bohemian aristocrat Vicomte Charles de Noailles commissioned this film as a birthday present for his wife (a poet and a descendant of the Marquis de Sade). Because of the scandalized reaction to the film’s blasphemous content, the Vicomte was threatened with excommunication by the Catholic Church, and quickly withdrew the film from circulation.
The film’s original title was to be Un Bête Andalou.
As with Un Chien Andalou, Buñuel originally planned to co-write and co-direct with Salvador Dalí, but the two had a falling out before the film was completed. Dalí is credited as co-writer, but disowned the film later, and what remains of his contributions is a matter of conjecture.
Painter Max Ernst had a large role in the film; other less-famous members of the Surrealist circle appear in smaller parts.
The opening is footage from a 1912 documentary. The ending is a reference to Marquis de Sade’s “120 Days of Sodom.”
Along with official members of the Surrealist movement, Pablo Picasso, Jean Cocteau, Vladimir Nabokov, and Gertrude Stein were among those in attendance at a private screening hosted by the Vicomte.
Buñuel had hoped that Un Chien Andalou would incite riots and was disappointed when it was a huge popular success. L’Age D’Or did inspire violence. Members of the Fascist-leaning “League of Patriots” threw ink on the screen and destroyed paintings by Dalí and other Surrealists that were being exhibited in conjunction with one screening. The French authorities banned the film within a year of its release “to preserve public order.”
Because the de Noailles family removed L’Age D’Or from distribution, the film was not legally screened in the United States until 1979.
At the urging of the Spanish Communists, who considered Surrealism bourgeois, Buñuel later re-cut L’Age D’Or into a 20-minute short to make it less difficult and more accessible to proletariat viewers. This version of the film did not survive.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: For its poster image, distributor Kino Lorber takes the scene where Lya Lys, frustrated that her finger-sucking foreplay with Gaston Madot has been temporarily interrupted, satisfies her desires by fellating the toe of a nearby statue. But we find the moment where she walks into her boudoir to see a cow lounging on her bed to be funnier, and less expected. (Footnote one: one source reports that this scene is a pun, since the word for “cow” [“vache”] was then-current French slang for “cop.” If so, the fact that this meaning is lost on contemporary audiences makes the image even more surreal. Footnote two: a still that frequently accompanies reviews of the movie shows a man crouched down next to the cattle-infested bed; this shot does not appear in Kino’s cut of the film, and may be from a promotional still).

THREE WEIRD THINGS: Shoo cow; stone toe sucking; Jesus leaves the orgy

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Skeletal bishops on the beach, cows in the bedroom, and Jesus at a murder orgy: the scandalous L’Age D’Or was too hot and weird for 1930, and still carries the power to shock today. Watch it for its historical importance, but also as a profane prayer—an unapologetic hymn in praise of unfettered individual desire.

End scene from L’Age D’or

COMMENTS: In the repurposed documentary footage that opens Continue reading 242. L’AGE D’OR (1930) →

List Candidates

LIST CANDIDATE: THE ATROCITY EXHIBITION (2000)

June 20, 2016 El Rob Hubbard 3 Comments

DIRECTED BY: Jonathan Weiss

FEATURING: Victor Slezak, Anna Juvander, Michael Kirby, Rob Brink, Diane Grotke, Caroline McGee, Robert Morgan, Mariko Takai

PLOT: In a mental institution, a doctor has enticed patients and staff into staging bizarre microdramas and recording them on film. Is he recording his own mental breakdown, or the larger ills of society?

reagan_sex_s7

WHY IT SHOULD MAKE THE LIST: Inasmuch as cult author J.G. Ballard can still be called “weird” nowadays, the film perfectly captures the clinical nature of his themes and uneasy alliances. One scene is a fashion shoot in the midst of a surgical operation. Another memorable sequence has Traven emerging from a 1950s black sedan on an airport runway shouting “Marilyn Monroe” and breaking into a run with the sound of helicopters on the soundtrack; he inexplicably ends up back at the sedan, vomiting over the front hood.

COMMENTS: The Atrocity Exhibition is another one of the many “unfilmable” novels that some filmmaker, at some point, takes on as a challenge. David Cronenberg first took the plunge, being the first to adapt Ballard’s other “unfilmable” novel, Crash, in the mid-90’s, and largely succeeding. “The Atrocity Exhibition“, however, was slightly more challenging for an adapter: there’s no real plot, just linked incidents; the main character is undergoing a mental breakdown affected by mass media; each chapter represents an aspect of the protagonist’s psychosis (his name changes in each segment); and most of the action is psychological. The book is a collection of themes and ideas showing up in Ballard’s work at the time (the mid to late 1960’s), some of which would be fleshed out/explored further in works like “Crash” and “High Rise,” and is much more fragmentary than most novels.

Jonathan Weiss’s approach in adapting Ballard’s work is geared to the experimental film work in the 1960’s and 1970’s. Using stock-film sequences interspersed with new footage, the film is presented as the artifact from Dr. Traven’s project, staged mini-dramas reflecting his obsessions (assassinations, war, celebrity, plastic surgery, the Space Race) which document his—and by extension, society’s—surrender to psychosis. But is it a surrender, or merely an adaptation to the new order?

Exhibition is perhaps the purest adaption of Ballard’s work to date. The low-budget, as well as the unusual nature of the main role, excluded any casting of name stars, and the movie was shot over the period of several years. It’s not as polished or sexy as Cronenberg’s Crash, but it’s even more intellectually rewarding.

the-atrocity-exhibition

DVD INFO: The Atrocity Exhibition had limited festival screenings in the early ’00’s, but no true theatrical release. It seemed it would languish in obscurity until its release on DVD in 2006 by Reel 23, a European company—Region 0, but on the PAL system—now a pricey import, if you do some hard looking. You get a good transfer of the film in picture and sound, highlighting the score by J.G. Thirwell (“The Venture Bros.”, “Foetus”), subtitles in French, Spanish, German and Dutch, and an informative commentary track by the director. But what makes this release special is a second commentary track with the director and J.G. Ballard together. Ballard doesn’t stick around for the last 20 minutes of the film, pretty much having said whatever he needed to.

A contentious interview with Jonathan Weiss can be found on the “Ballardian” website, along with the review that touched things off.

Oswalds Mill Audio (OMA), selling high-quality and high-end audio equipment, is Jonathan Weiss’ current venture.