Tag Archives: Public domain

Apocryphally Weird

68*. DREAMS THAT MONEY CAN BUY (1947)

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“Ernst was obviously an astute observer of what qualities go into making an experience oneiric.”—Deirdre Barrett, IASD president

RecommendedWeirdest!

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Jack Bittner

PLOT: Fresh from the bank and owing cash, Joe needs to get some money—fast. A solution hits him for quick green, and soon he’s selling people dreams. Most come to buy (one comes to sell), but the ephemeral business ain’t all swell.

Still from "dreams that money can buy" (1949)

BACKGROUND:

  • One loft apartment, $25,000 (partly supplied by Peggy Guggenheim), three years of filming, and the involvement of some of the contemporary art-world’s heaviest hitters is all it took to create Dreams That Money Can Buy.
  • The film won of the Venice Film Festival’s special award for “Best Original Contribution to the Progress of Cinematography”.
  • At its New York City premiere, Dreams was projected on wall and ceiling of the venue, instead of the screen.
  • , aged 19 at the time, shows up as an extra, securing his place amongst the cool kids of cinema five years before his directorial debut.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: In a feature-length showcase from the avant-garde’s best, choosing just one is an odd request. G. Smalley suggests the scene from Max Ernst’s “Desire” where an elderly butler (Ernst himself) pulls first a shirtless man, then a pallid, corpselike woman in a nightgown out from under the sleeper’s red-velvet curtained canopy bed. It helps that the room is filled with smoke (possibly from an incinerated telephone) and that the sound accompaniment is a trancelike looped recording of men and women chanting backwards.

TWO WEIRD THINGS: Bouncy beatnik narrator; escaping out the window with Zeus-bust luggage into death color-drop explosion

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: This dream anthology has pep, humor, surrealism, and cool to spare, all presented in the confines of a brownstone apartment.

Promo trailer for a London screening of Dreams that Money Can Buy (1947)

COMMENTS: It is the intersection of Capitalism and Surrealism. It is Continue reading 68*. DREAMS THAT MONEY CAN BUY (1947) →

It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue, List Candidates

APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: FUN IN BALLOON LAND (1965)

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Beware

DIRECTED BY: Joseph M. Sonneborn, Jr.

FEATURING: Balloons, marching bands, parade floats, clowns, and more balloons

PLOT: During an especially drowsy storytime, a boy has dreams about large parade balloons that cavort and loom over him; we then see the balloons in their natural habitat, the 1964 Thanksgiving Day Parade in Philadelphia, with play-by-play from a possibly inebriated narrator.

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: Exhibit A in the case for advertising’s malign influence, this hour-long promo for parade balloons is both horror show and monument to boredom. Viewed through the ironic shades of nostalgia, it’s gleefully ignorant, but as a relic of its era, it’s a searing indictment of the utterly misguided definition of “fun” among the City of Brotherly Love’s cultural elite.

Still from Fun in Balloonland (1965)

COMMENTS: Perhaps you started your day today with a viewing of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, a hours-long march of giant helium balloons, high school bands, and uncomfortably cold Broadway performers hiking through the streets of Manhattan. They (and you) are partaking in a tradition that goes back to 1924, but that’s not even the oldest Thanksgiving street party there is. That crown is held by Philadelphia’s parade, created by Macy’s rival Gimbel’s back in 1920. So it’s more than appropriate to turn our gaze toward that venerable Turkey Day bastion, and see how it inadvertently spawned a turkey of a very different kind.

Fun in Balloon Land wastes no time in delivering off-putting weirdness with the shockingly atonal theme song, sung by a man backed by a group of faux-enthusiastic children and the world’s saddest roller-rink organ. Through slant rhymes and methodical destruction of meter, the “tune” previews attractions to come like the Marrying Turkey, suggests that a teddy bear has fallen arches, and just generally shreds the auditory nerve. Already, we’re off balance before we’ve even seen the opening credit for “Giant Balloon Parades Inc. Presents,” a declaration that doesn’t augur well for artistic achievement.

The film kicks off in earnest with the sleepytime dream of Sonny (whose name we won’t learn until the last 10 minutes of the film), who rises from bed to stand in the corner of a book of fairy tales like a punished child and starts imaging a series of locales that correspond perfectly with Giant Balloon Parades, Inc.’s product line, including an undersea kingdom, a farm, and a culturally insensitive Old West. Sometimes these scenes are accompanied by amateur dances, but occasionally the film gets ambitious and tries to tell a story, as when the boy dons a gold lamé diaper and blows off a couple of Philly-accented mermaids. The “magic” of the balloons is meant to be self-evident, so there’s no attempt to reference any actual fairy tales or stories of adventure; they’re just generic milieus. All of this Continue reading APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: FUN IN BALLOON LAND (1965) →

Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

THEY CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: THE GOLEM (1920) / GOLEM (1979)

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When Dracula, Frankenstein’s monster, the Mummy, and a host of other horror icons were lining up at the doors of Universal Studios in search of eternal fame, somehow the humble golem failed to get the invite. An immensely powerful beast molded out of clay, brought to life by a mystic Hebrew incantation, it may have had too much in common with Mary Shelley’s invention; or more likely, Hollywood’s Jewish studio chiefs prudently sidestepped anything that would offend sensitive and vociferous gentile audiences. Still, even without the spotlight, the legend of the golem has quietly endured, so much so that Golems appear in the vaunted Reader Suggestion Queue twice. Today we examine these two tales, one a literal origin story, the other something more abstract.

THE GOLEM: HOW HE CAME INTO THE WORLD (1920)

Der Golem, wie er in die Welt kam

DIRECTED BY: Paul Wegener,

FEATURING: Paul Wegener, Albert Steinrück, Lothar Müthel, Lyda Salmonova,

PLOT: When the Emperor decrees that all Jews must leave the city of Prague, Rabbi Loew invokes the help of the demon Astaroth to construct a defender for his people out of clay.

COMMENTS: An early classic of German expressionist cinema, you will find quite a few reviews of this silent rendering of the original folk tale about the avenger of clay. They tend to focus on three main topics: the source material that came to inform the film, the peculiar history of how it came to be made, and a detailed recap of the plot. It feels like someone’s got my number, because that’s where my instincts would normally lead me, as well. So let’s try and cover those basesin one fell swoop, and then we can turn in a different direction: the ancient folktale was codified in a 1915 novel, which writer/director/star Wegener spun into a trilogy. The first two, set in contemporary times, are now lost to history, but the third, a prequel delivering the backstory in which a rabbi summons the warrior to defend the Jewish people but soon loses control of his creation, has survived the years, and that leads us here.

That background established, it’s important to note how neatly The Golem serves to meet the moment while paving the way for the horror legends of the future. While the story is set in medieval Prague, the fanciful decoration owes more to Méliès than the Middle Ages: impossible peaks tower over the city, while buildings are adorned with twisty staircases and walls never Continue reading THEY CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: THE GOLEM (1920) / GOLEM (1979) →

Reader Recommendations

READER RECOMMENDATION: THE MANIPULATOR (1971)

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Reader Recommendation from James Auburn

AKA BJ Presents; B.J. Lang Presents 

Beware

“…a motion picture so haunted… it will never be shown!” – B.J. Lang Presents trailer

DIRECTED BY: Yabo Yablonsky

FEATURING: , ,

PLOT: The film takes place almost entirely on a dusty soundstage. B.J. Lang (Rooney) has kidnapped a woman he refers to as Carlotta (Luana Anders of “Easy Rider”) and has tied her to a wheelchair. Lang spends nearly 90 minutes tormenting Carlotta, screaming at her, forcing her to recite lines to an imaginary movie, and spooning baby food into her mouth, among other indignities. 

Still from the manipulator (1971)

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: This acid-damaged wannabe-arthouse film has stupefied even jaded psychotronic film freaks. Every “hip” avant-garde editing gimmick in the psychedelic-era toolbox is utilized: strobe lights, fish-eye lens, solarization, freeze-frames, quick-cut frames of random images, flashbacks/flash-forwards, slow-motion/fast-motion, etc. The viewing experience feels like a 90-minute long, 104-degree-fever hallucination that makes you question your own sanity. The uncomfortably cathartic performances from its two leads seem like a blend of acting-workshop exercises and heavy existential therapy put on film. Through extended monologues, the central character explores his own inner turmoil and waxes philosophical about life and show business, and as he wallows in his own insanity, the movie itself follows suit.

 

COMMENTS: Yes, one of the most demented movies you’ve ever seen starred Mickey Rooney—and he gives a psychotic tour-de-force performance that must be seen to be disbelieved.

In the opening scene, B.J. Lang enters the soundstage, as if to begin a routine day of work, passing cobwebbed props and backdrops; he sits down, and starts talking excitedly to thin air. Lang establishes himself as either a movie director who has gone insane, or an insane man who fancies himself a movie director; it’s never quite clear which. He runs a take of an imaginary movie scene while barking orders at mannequins and a film crew that exists only in his addled head. This opening segment culminates in a nightmarish two-minute freakout sequence with Lang screaming at two nude white-bodypainted figures (his parents? sure, why not) who cruelly laugh at him, over a screeching electronic racket. Suddenly: silence. Closeup: Lang is drenched in sweat, exhausted, as are our eardrums and sensibilities. What’s your threshold for cinematic insanity? You’ll know in the first ten minutes of The Manipulator.

We then discover Carlotta, tied to the wheelchair. Evidently she’s been there against her will for some time. For a long stretch, her only line is “I’m hungry, Mr. Lang!” She repeats it, again and again, with every different inflection she can muster (Lang spoon-feeds her a few Continue reading READER RECOMMENDATION: THE MANIPULATOR (1971) →