Tag Archives: Obscure/Out of Print

Canonically Weird (The List)

226. CONSPIRATORS OF PLEASURE (1996)

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Spiklenci Slasti

“Conspirators is actually a film about liberation, and about gaining a freedom.”–Jan Svankmajer explaining why he considered Conspirators his most Surrealistic film up to that point

Recommended

DIRECTED BY: Jan Svankmajer

FEATURING: Petr Meissel, Gabriela Wilhelmová, Barbora Hrzánová, Anna Wetlinská, Jirí Lábus, Pavel Nový

PLOT: A man enters a newsstand and furtively buys a pornographic magazine as the owner nods conspiratorially at him. At home, he leafs through the pages but is interrupted by the postwoman, who has him sign for a letter that simply reads “on Sunday.” Over the next several days the man constructs an elaborate chicken costume; meanwhile, the postwoman, his next door neighbor, the newsstand owner, and another couple are all involved in their own strange, surreptitious projects.

Still from Conspirators of Pleasure (1996)

BACKGROUND:

  • Conspirators of Pleasure began life as a screenplay for a short written in 1970 but never filmed. That short would have told the parallel stories of the “chicken man” and his neighbor across the hall. Svankmajer resumed work on the project in 1996, thought of four more characters to include, and expanded the film to feature length.
  • In 1975 Svankmajer wrote a (satirical?) essay entitled “The Future Belongs to Masturbation Machines.”
  • Originally known for his stop-motion animated shorts, Conspirators was Svankmajer’s third feature film, and it continued a trend of having less and less animation in each successive film (there are only a few accent scenes here, which amount to about one minute of animation).
  • The end credits list Sacher-Masoch, the , Freud, , and Bohuslav Brouk (a Czech psychoanalyst who wrote up a series of case studies about masturbatory practices) as having provided “professional expertise.”
  • The , animators who paid tribute to the Czech director with the 1984 film “The Cabinet of Jan Svankmajer,” are listed in the credits as “musical collaborators” (although the soundtrack is prerecorded classical music).

INDELIBLE IMAGE: The man in a chicken suit doing a ritualistic (and sometimes literally animated) dance in front of a doll-like effigy tied to a chair.

THREE WEIRD THINGS: Stop-motion submissive; dough-snorting; carp shrimping

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: We follow six people engaged in complicated, intensely personal fetishistic rituals; adding to the odd, voyeuristic atmosphere, there is no dialogue, other than what’s overheard in the background on television. Each of the conspirators crosses the others’ paths, but continue to work on their own private obsessions, until all of them appear to receive their ultimate gratification. Then, Jan Svankmajer launches us into a new stratosphere of strangeness at the finale, when the chickens come home to roost (so to speak).


Short clip from Conspirators of Pleasure

COMMENTS: Case study: a man, Eastern European, balding but fit Continue reading 226. CONSPIRATORS OF PLEASURE (1996) →

Reader Recommendations

READER RECOMMENDATION: PHILOSOPHY OF A KNIFE (2008)

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Reader recommendation by Simon Hyslop

DIRECTED BY: Andrey Iskanov

FEATURING: Tetsuro Sakagami, Yukari Fujimoto, Manoush, Elena Probatova

PLOT: War prisoners are subjected to various horrifying experiments in the Japanese Imperial Army’s infamous Unit 731 facility.

Still from Philosophy of a Knife (2008)

WHY IT SHOULD MAKE THE LIST: Between the dreamlike cinematography, the unconventional, fractious narrative, and the bizarre attempts to blend a documentary with an arthouse film, this is definitely among the least conventional works of World War II cinema.

COMMENTS: A few short years before the outbreak of World War II, one General Shiro Ishii of the Japanese Imperial Army—a man who possessed a fatal combination of power, patriotism, intelligence and absolutely no regard for human life—oversaw the construction of a military facility in the Chinese province of Manchuria. Officially registered as a water purification plant, this facility—Unit 731, as it would come to be known—housed not only military personnel, but several thousand Chinese and Soviet prisoners, and a team of some of Japan’s top scientists. Over the next few years, these prisoners would be subjected to a series of horrifying, inhumane experiments in the name of helping the Japanese war effort. Prisoners were infected with deadly diseases, exposed to bomb blasts, and amputated and dissected without anesthetic.

And thanks to vested Cold War interests on the part of the USA, most of the perpetrators of these atrocities would walk away unpunished, and go on to enjoy prosperous careers.

This is the story that 2008’s Philosophy of a Knife—from one of modern Russia’s resident oddball directors, Andrey Iskanov—tells. Or, at least, purports to tell.

There’s a lot that needs to be said about Philosophy of a Knife, mostly because there’s so much of it. The film clocks in at over four hours; and while, admittedly, there are instances when it’s acceptable for a film to do that, I’m not convinced that Knife is one of them.

If there’s a key mistake this film makes, it’s in its genre. The film, it seems, is making a bold attempt to blend an art film with a documentary, combining stock footage, interviews and voiceover with heavily stylized reenactments of the experiments conducted at Unit 731. And while this is a debatable issue, I can’t see that blend as other than doomed to failure, since those genres are, in my opinion, irrevocably opposed. After all, any documentary worth its salt is going to try and be objective; while art, in any form—in my opinion— is inherently subjective. At least, until we’ve invented painting robots.

But even a viewer who disagrees with that particular perspective will probably agree that, as a documentary, Philosophy of a Knife‘s efforts are half-hearted at best. The voiceover segments—narrated by what sounds like a castrated Robbie Williams—cover only the most Continue reading READER RECOMMENDATION: PHILOSOPHY OF A KNIFE (2008) →

Canonically Weird (The List)

212. AFTER LAST SEASON (2009)

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“This movie makes no sense. I don’t mean the story doesn’t make sense, it almost does. I mean the movie as a thing that exists doesn’t make sense.”–Rob Steele

Beware

DIRECTED BY: Mark Region

FEATURING: , Peggy McClellan

PLOT: Matthew and Sarah are med students with an interest in neurology. A fellow student is knifed to death by a serial killer. Matthew runs a telepathy experiment with Sarah, who sees visions of the killer, and together they try to visualize the murderer.

Still from After Last Season (2009)

BACKGROUND:

  • After Last Season made a minor stir on the Internet in 2009 when its nonsensical (but, as it turns out, completely representative) trailer was released on YouTube and other video sites.  The piece was so thoroughly anti-cinematic, with its laughable props and the meaningless minutiae of its dialogue, that many people assumed it was a parody of a low-budget indie film created by an established director. The frenzy reached it’s peak when “Entertainment Weekly” published an article repeating rumors that the trailer was a hoax by notorious prankster Spike Jonze intended (somehow) to draw attention to his upcoming film Where the Wild Things Are.
  • After Last Season got a one week release in four U.S. theaters.
  • Director Mark Region claimed the film cost $5 million to make. Few believed him.
  • After the original run, producer/distributor Index Square stopped offering new DVDs for sale, and actor Jason Kulas said Region has told him there are no plans to produce more.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: The astoundingly crude computer-generated animation, which often looks like it could have been drawn in MS Paint. The best moment is when a killer’s knife (which looks like an ice cream cone held upside down) emerges from out of a blank wall.

THREE WEIRD THINGS: Cardboard MRI; Photoshopped telepathy; invisible ghost

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: “Huh?,” “um…,” and “whah?” are all equally valid responses to After Last Season.  This movie may go down as this generation’s Beast of Yucca Flats: stultifyingly dull at times, but so full of misguided directorial choices and  failed attempts at cinematic poetry that it takes on a dreamlike character. Watching After Last Season is like trying to follow a old-timey radio serial on an AM station with fading reception: you can tell there’s a voice trying to make itself heard, but the transmission is so garbled that the basics of the story become lost in static and long stretches of dead air. It’s difficult watching, for sure—thus the “beware” rating—but for intrepid curiosity seekers looking to experience the weirdest of the worst, it’s a must see.


Original trailer for After Last Season

COMMENTS: There’s a concept in cinema theory called “film grammar;” it refers to sets of filmmaking conventions that  have been Continue reading 212. AFTER LAST SEASON (2009) →

Alfred Eaker's Fringe Cinema

JOHN WATERS’ MULTIPLE MANIACS (1970)

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Multiple Maniacs (1970) was ‘ second feature-length movie (his first was 1969’s Mondo Trasho). Shot in grainy black and white, it lives up to its “Cavalcade Of Perversions” tagline. Even for those familiar with Waters’ early work (and everyone should at least sample one of them), Multiple Maniacs may be considered an extreme challenge. Comparatively, Pink Flamingos (1972), Female Trouble (1974), Desperate Living (1977) and especially Polyester (1981) might be seen as -styled celebrations of white trash.

Shot on a two thousand dollar budget (Pink Flamingos came in at $5,000 and Polyester, $200,000), Multiple Maniacs opens with the camera panning down credits typed out on white paper.

, as a carny broker, introduces us to Lady ‘s “Cavalcade Of Perversions.” As the locals ready themselves in a canvas tent, Lochary, in best tent revival tone, assures us: “This is the show you want: the sleaziest show on earth. Not actors, not imposters, but real, actual filth. These assorted sluts, fags, dykes, and pimps know no bounds. They have committed acts against God and nature that would make any decent person recoil in disgust.”

These are not mere words, and before we can scream “,” we are privy to a woman licking a bicycle seat, a hippie eating a bra, two men licking the hairy armpits of a topless girl, a Human Ashtray, and two-cent choreography of a naked human pyramid that makes us thankful Adam invented the fig leaf.

Mere warm-up acts: “See two actual bearded queers French kissing! See a heroin addict in Fruit of the Looms, writhing among the leaves… Now I give you Lady Divine.”

After Divine robs the audience and killing one of its members (with a pop gun), Lochary, , and gang cruise and dance to Elvis (without permission to use the music, which is one of the reasons Multiple Maniacs has never been made available on DVD and only appeared briefly on VHS). All that 1950s devil music inspires even more hedonism, and soon Lochary and Pearce are doing the nasty, despite the fact that David is Divine’s lover. Enter to spill the beans to Divine in a phone call.

Hell hath no fury like an oversized drag queen scorned, but before Divine can get her hands on the cheating beau, she is accosted by rival queens. Fortunately,  she is consoled by her guardian angel, the Infant of Prague, who takes Lady Divine by the hand and gets her to the church on time.

With blasphemy rivaling L’ Age d’ Or or Viridiana, Divine gets a “rosary job” from on the sacred pews of St. Cecilia, as the narrative literally parallels St. Francis’ “Way Of The Cross.” Perhaps even more blasphemous than Stole inserting prayer beads into anal orifices is future egg-lady Massey as the virgin Mary, meeting Jesus on the way to Calvary. Like before him, Waters actually knows the orthodox dogma he satirizes, which makes the film effective guerrilla heterodoxy. Multiple Maniacs is Waters’ weightiest, most literal, penetrating, and spiritual film (yes, I said that). Divine (she is divine for a reason) delivers a voice-over narrative: a conjoined, meditative, idiosyncratic homily between actor and director, advocating for the societal outcast forever opposed by the smug, suburbanite Pharisees.

Made at the height of the Manson murders, Waters catapults Divine and Stole into the mayhem that had paralyzed American culture in a frenzy of fear. Caught in a perverse, religious fervor, our heroines are ordained as Waters’ SS Perpetua and Felicity, martyrs of the Multiple Maniacs.  Unlike his country, Waters was anything but appalled. Rather, his brand of faith remained lucid and unwavering.

Still from Multiple Maniacs (1970)You can rest assure that neither the kitsch martyrdom of Dick Burton or Vic Mature included being raped and stigmatized by a lobster on a passion play couch. Perhaps that is the reason Moses forbade shellfish, which actually makes sense in a Waters’ universe. If only the hopelessly self-righteous Cecil B. would have been demented enough to know, he might have spared us those 1950s Hollywood Bible epic pornos. However, given 20/20 camp-value hindsight, perhaps it is better that constipated hypocrite wasn’t in on a Waters joke. Multiple Maniacs may just be seen as a healthy response to a sanctimonious Ten Commandments (1956).

Capsules

CAPSULE: THIS FILTHY EARTH (2001)

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DIRECTED BY: Andrew Kötting

FEATURING: Rebecca Palmer, Shane Attwooll, Demelza Randall, Xavier Tchili

PLOT: A cruel framer destroys young Francine’s humble but idyllic life when he marries her sister for her land.

Still from This Filthy Earth (2001)
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: This weirded-up anti-pastoral portrait of agrarian sin would certainly find champions among this site’s readers; but although it shows artistry, it lacks the necessary significance to be compete as one of the best weird movies of all time.

COMMENTS: The key images in This Filthy Earth occur in a postmortem montage: time-lapse photography of decaying corpses of a rabbit, fox and pigeon. Time is so compressed that their bodies seem to explode into a writhing mass of worms in an instant. Decay and rot are the movie’s reality, and the fecundity of the “filthy” earth is only implied by the massive sheaves of wheat that must be reaped in the farmers’ fields (which themselves lead to death from overwork, continuing the cycle). There are lots of time-lapse shots in this movie, along with blurry, out-of-focus shots, weaving drunken cameras, stock footage, and bits shot in Super-8 with out-of-balance color. These digressive video doodads, done in the experimental tradition of , are not always as meaningful as the rotting corpses, nor do they always fit well into the gritty naturalism of the story, any more than does the anachronistic electronica soundtrack. Combined with explicit shots of rutting cattle (and humans) along with pus, urine, and pigs rooting in filth, they do create a nightmarish pastoral, however, sort of an English countryside version of Gummo.

This Filthy Earth was loosely adapted from Emile Zola’s “La Terre” (“The Earth”), a sprawling novel about the 19th French peasantry that was deemed obscene on publication due to its depictions of casual sex, incest, blasphemy, and general degeneracy among the lower classes. This may explain some confusion in the plot; certain minor characters (like “Jesus Christ”), formally major players, serve no real function in the condensed narrative. The ending of the novel has been changed significantly, and, surprisingly, lightened; Zola’s truly horrific and disturbing rape here passes by as an almost mundane occurrence. However controversial, “La Terre” had a sociological purpose in documenting an agrarian society at a very specific place and time. This Filthy Earth is set in a nameless village in an indeterminate time period that could be anywhere from the 1960s to the present day. Unfortunately, rather than making the setting timeless, these dislocations in time and space remove context from the despair, making the movie unpleasantly nihilistic in tone.

This Filthy Earth was barely screened in Britain, and received virtually no distribution at all outside the country. Nonetheless, the film was released on Region 2 DVD by the British Film Institute with a thick pamphlet, one that unfortunately contains some of the worst examples of obscurantist academic film writing (along with one much better piece by John Roseveare and some humorous tidbits from Kötting). Americans with multi-region players may want to turn on close captioning to help with the accents, particularly when the toothless father speaks (to the untrained ear, his incoherent second-childhood babbling is often indistinguishable from the obscene insults he hurls at his children).

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“… mixes a grainy, indistinct celluloid and smudged sound with a kind of magic-lantern effect of still images, giving a faintly hallucinatory, ahistorical feel to an uproariously grim tale.”–Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian (contemporaneous)

(This movie was nominated for review by “kostman,” who described it as a “weird film based on Emil Zola’s novel La Terre with its grotesque country scenery and the sick relations between the village’s people .” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)