Directed by Michael Langan, “Doxology” is an experimental head trip beginning and ending with verses from “Praise God, from Whom All Blessings Flow” or “The Common Doxology”. This short contains floating carrots, dancing cars, and a tennis ball crashing into the moon. What more could you ask for?
Tag Archives: Surrealism
SATURDAY SHORT: LIFE AND THE MIRROR (2007)
Today’s short was written and directed by Julio Pereira. Pereira has released a handful of shorts the past two years that deserve much more attention than they have received. His style is quite dark, and often has a sort of drained feel to it. “Life and the Mirror” will leave you lost in thought.
39. COWARDS BEND THE KNEE, OR, THE BLUE HANDS (2003)
“I only include things that are psychologically true in my stories, no matter how bizarre, stupid, silly or gratuitous the episodes in them may seem… I can only hope that the spectacle of me trying to inflict pain on hard-to-reach places on my own body is amusing to some people.”–Guy Maddin
DIRECTED BY: Guy Maddin
FEATURING: Darcy Fehr, Melissa Dionisio, Amy Stewart
PLOT: Amateur hockey player Guy Maddin falls in love with the proprietor’s daughter when he takes his current girlfriend to a hair salon/brothel for an abortion. The daughter, Meta, will not give herself to a man until her father’s death at the hands of her mother is avenged. To accomplish this, she wants to transplant her dead father’s hands onto Guy, so that it will be her father’s hands that strangle her mother.
BACKGROUND:
- Commissioned by the Power Plant Art Gallery of Toronto.
- On its debut at the International Film Festival in Rotterdam, viewers watched the ten chapters of Cowards Bend the Knee through ten peepholes in a wall. Spectators had to kneel to put the peepholes at eye level.
- Maddin issued a companion book to Cowards Bend the Knee (now a collector’s item) containing an expanded screenplay of the film and an interview with Maddin where he discusses Coward‘s autobiographical elements and gives his personal interpretations of the film.
- Autobiographical elements abound in Cowards Bend the Knee. Maddin’s real life Aunt Lil owned a beauty parlor similar to the one that appears in the film. Maddin’s father coached the Winnipeg Maroons, a pre-NHL professional hockey team; the actual Allan Cup championship ring his father won appears in the film.
- Maddin’s mother, Herdis, a non-actress, played Meta’s grandmother in the film.
INDELIBLE IMAGE: As Veronica lies on the operating table undergoing a clandestine abortion, the blood streaming between her legs forms itself into a Canadian maple leaf.
WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Cowards features Maddin’s trademark in-your-face style (a mix of silent film artifacts and glitchy hypermodern editing); crazed, dreamlike narrative (incorporating hockey matches, beauty salons, murder, infidelity, ghosts, and a hand transplant); and a wildly veering, yet somehow coherent tone that moves from melodrama to slapstick to absurdist vintage pornography to Greek tragedy in the space of a few frames. If that’s not enough, there’s the fact that the entire story is observed by a scientist, who witnesses it being played out while looking through a microscope at a dab of semen on a slide. Weird enough for you?
[wposflv src=http://366weirdmovies.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/Cowards-Bend-the-Knee.flv width=480 height=360 previewimage=http://366weirdmovies.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/cowards-bend-the-knee-still.jpg title=”Cowards Bend the Knee clip”]
Clip from Cowards Bend the Knee
COMMENTS: Maddin’s Cowards Bend the Knee is a dream, and like all dreams it is at the Continue reading 39. COWARDS BEND THE KNEE, OR, THE BLUE HANDS (2003)
SATURDAY SHORT: GORDON’S SURREAL SENIOR PROJECT FILM #2 (2008)
This week’s short was created by Gordon Inman eighteen months ago as his senior project film. As you will see, Gordon’s artistic interests don’t stop at film. He is also a very talented musician.
There are some captivating images in this short, including a Popsicle melting in reverse and a rotting watermelon. Although this may not be the most remarkable short I’ve seen, it shows great promise for the future. Our best wishes to Gordon as he continues to explore and express himself through art.
38. MALPERTUIS (1972)
AKA The Legend of Doom House; Malpertuis: The Legend of Doom House
“For sure, one of the weirdest films you’ll ever see, a cult film above and beyond anything else; a film for those initiated into midnight screenings. Where else do such dreams take place?”—Ernest Mathjis, DVD liner notes for the Barrel Entertainment edition of Malpertuis
DIRECTED BY: Harry Kümel
FEATURING: Mathieu Carrière, Susan Hampshire, Orson Welles, Michel Bouquet, Jean-Pierre Cassel
PLOT: When his ship sets anchor in a Flemish town, Jan, a sailor, goes looking for his childhood home, only to find that it burned down years ago. Seeing a fleeing woman he believes to be his sister, he chases her into a brothel where he is knocked unconscious in a brawl. He awakens in Malpertuis, a massive estate ruled by his Uncle Cassavius (Orson Welles) from his sickbed. Cassavius reads his will to his very strange extended family, and its provisions set them at deadly odds with one another.
BACKGROUND:
- Malpertuis was an adpation of the only novel written by the Belgian fantasist Jean Ray, who was famous for his macabre short stories (and is sometimes compared to Edgar Allen Poe or H.P. Lovecraft). The novel was complex, composed of four separate narratives told by four characters, and therefore presented a challenge to adapt.
- Kümel’s previous film was the dreamlike, erotic vampire tale Daughters of Darkness [Les lèvres rouges] (1971). Hired to make a sexy commercial horror movie, Kümel delivered a memorably bizarre film that pleased exploitation audiences looking for blood and breasts, but was also a crossover hit in the arthouse circuit. The success of Daughters convinced United Artists to back the Malpertuis project, which was the film Kümel personally wanted to make. UA’s financial backing enabled Kümel to hire Orson Welles for the key role of Cassavius.
- Orson Welles was hired for three days of shooting. An irascible, elderly eccentric by this time in his career, Welles asked for his fee to be delivered in cash in a suitcase. Welles was drunk and rude on the set, interfering with Kümel’s attempts to direct and, in one case, repeatedly ruining one of Michel Bouquet’s takes until the director agreed to give Welles a closeup he had requested. At the end of Welles’ three-day contract, the project was well behind schedule due to the legendary actor’s drunkenness, extended lunch breaks and general peevishness. Apologizing for his behavior, Welles volunteered to work for a fourth day free, and performed all his remaining scenes perfectly in a single morning, putting the production back on schedule.
- Malpertuis was selected to compete for the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1972, but United Artists did not like Kümel’s two-hour cut and submitted a dubbed, re-edited 100 minute version of the film rather than the director’s preferred version. The film was not popular with the jury, then bombed in both the United States and Europe when UA released its preferred version (misleadingly marketed as a horror pic) as The Legend of Doom House. Not only did the film tank, but Kümel’s promising young career was cut short. Disgusted with studio interference, he began directing in television and teaching, and has directed only a few unremarkable feature films (including some arty softcore pornography) in the last twenty-eight years.
- The director’s cut of the film was unavailable on video for many years, and was not seen until the film was re-released in 2002. This cut was not available on home video until 2005, and not available on Region 1 until 2007.
INDELIBLE IMAGE: The weary face of the legendary Orson Welles, grumpy and gray but still regal, as he reclines in tuxedo-like pajamas against scarlet bedsheets. The bed-ridden Welles embodies the decaying secret center of the wickedness of Malpertuis.
WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Even before we get to the psychedelic-era Chinese puzzle-box of an ending(s), Malpertuis has created a disorienting sense of oddness. Both the film and the titular estate are labyrinthine mazes filled with enchanting and mysteriously decorated rooms, with little explanation of how these dazzling individual pieces fit together into the grand layout.
Original French trailer for Malpertuis
COMMENTS: “It’s pretty, but it’s a bit difficult to understand… Somehow, it makes me Continue reading 38. MALPERTUIS (1972)