PLOT: The disc includes six short, experimental, largely non-narrative films by Kenneth Anger completed between 1964 and 1972.
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Compilations are ineligible for inclusion on the List of the 366 Best Weird Movies ever made. Short films have an uphill battle to take a spot on the List that could be occupied by a feature, but either or both of Scorpio Rising and Lucifer Rising (each clocks in at just under 30 minutes long) are meaty and weird enough that they could hear their names called on the final roll.
COMMENTS: Kenneth Anger is one strange dude. Author of the tabloid-style scandal tome Hollywood Babylon, devotee of Aleister Crowley, pal of rock stars Mick Jagger and Jimmy Page, notoriously unreliable self-mythologizer, and winner of a lifetime achievement award from the American Film Institute, Anger spends years working on films that only play for a few minutes (his most extensive work is only 35 minutes long). He sometimes returns and reworks older movies a decade or more after they are released. Even if you’ve never seen an Anger film, you’ve seen dozens of movies that have been influenced by his work; due to his innovation of scoring parades of surrealistic images to pop music, he’s sometimes considered the father of the music video (though he hates the form and has turned down offers to make videos). The refracted images of films like Invocation of My Demon Brother also helped define the film style we now think of as “psychedelic.” This collection contains Anger’s most important and influential works, from the 1960s and early 1970s—the era of sex, drugs, and rock and roll, when the formerly struggling underground academic filmmaker found himself embraced by the upcoming generation of hipsters. In order of presentation, the films covered in this collection are:
Scorpio Rising (1964): A young motorcyclist named Scorpio polishes his bike, gets dressed in leather, goes to a wild biker Halloween party, then participates in a race. Scenes of James Dean, Marlon Brando in The Wild One, and a “life of Jesus” movie are intercut into the Continue reading CAPSULE: THE FILMS OF KENNETH ANGER, VOL. 2→
“Why castigate these creatures
Whose angelic features
Are bumping and grinding on trash?
Are they not spawned by our greed?
Are they not our true seed?
Are they not what we’ve bought for our cash?”–poem from Trash Humpers
PLOT: Four rednecks in wrinkled geriatric masks wander around nearly deserted streets drinking wine, demolishing abandoned television sets, tormenting the bizarre outcasts they come across in their wanderings, and humping trash. One of the humpers explains to the camera that, unlike the suburbanites sleeping in their homes, they “choose to live like free people.” By the end of the video the focus shifts to a single humper who may be having doubts about the trashy lifestyle.
BACKGROUND:
Trash Humpers was basically unscripted, although the characters and aesthetic had been thought out beforehand. According to Korine, the cast wandered through Nashville for a few weeks, sleeping outdoors, and filmed their in-character improvisations; the most interesting bits were edited into the final product.
Korine assembled this film quickly in reaction to his negative experiences making his third feature film, the relatively big-budget Mr. Lonely; he found the bureaucracy surrounding that production creatively stifling.
Trash Humpers is distributed by Drag City, an independent music label that has only recently branched out into underground film. Their other 2009 release, Vernon Chatman’s absurdist Final Flesh, was previously inducted onto the List of the 366 Best Weird Movies Ever Made.
American DVD-by-mail rental giant Netflix originally declined to stock copies of Trash Humpers. Drag City circulated a press release suggesting that the movie was refused because of its provocative content, and pointing out other controversial movies the company stocked. Trash Humpers was accepted into the rental program soon after the press release.
INDELIBLE IMAGE: It seems impossible to think of the title without immediately calling up the mental picture of actors in creepy geriatric masks in an alley grinding their groins against garbage bags.
WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Any film in which four rednecks in latex masks that make them look like escapees from a nursing home for the criminally insane force a pair of Siamese twins connected at the head by what looks like a giant tube sock to eat pancakes doused in Palmolive has weirdness in its corner.
“One of the most memorable screenings in the early years of Midnight Madness, Tetsuo so stunned the attending crowd that few noticed the print had no subtitles.”–Toronto International Film Festival
PLOT: A man who collects scrap metal (identified as “fetishist” in the credits) slices his leg open with a knife and inserts a metal pipe beside his thigh bone, then runs into the street when he notices maggots in the wound, where he is struck by a car driven by a salaryman and his girlfriend. The salaryman leaves the scene of the accident, and later finds a piece of sharp metal growing out of his cheek; as the days go by, his entire body begins to transform into a machine. Many hallucinations later, the fetishist, still-alive and also half made of metal, returns to do battle with the now almost completely mechanized salaryman.
BACKGROUND:
Director Shinya Tsukamoto honed his craft working in an experimental underground theater group, and Tetsuo originated as a play.
Tsukamoto is also an actor. Besides playing the fetishist in Tetsuo, the IMDB lists thirty-six acting credits for him, including a major role in Takashi Miike‘s Ichi the Killer (2001).
The Iron Man was followed by two sequels: the less surreal, more action-oriented reworking Tetsuo II: Body Hammer (1992) and the just-released-on-DVD as of this writing Tetsuo: The Bullet Man (2009).
While Tetsuo has become a cult favorite over the years, it was not well-received on release, perhaps simply because it was too strange and underfunded to find its way onto many screens. It won only one major award, “Best Film” at the Fantafestival in Rome (an event that has since disappeared).
INDELIBLE IMAGE: Shinya Tsukamoto must have spent hours creating elaborate landscapes full of battered scrap metal and wire, and painstakingly animating sequences where the fetishist zooms through urban streets at the speed of amphetamine-enhanced thought; but no matter how much work the director put in to any effect, it’s the simple picture of the salaryman sporting an unbalanced, rotating drill bit penis that no one can forget.
WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Tetsuo is a carefully patterned, but effectively nonsensical, barrage
Short clip from Tetsuo: The Iron Man
of images of industrial dehumanization. Men and women extrude cables, wires, gears, drills, threaded pipes, and miscellaneous machine parts from their skin, in glorious showers of blood. Nightmare visions in grainy black and white flow at a breakneck pace to the pulsing beat of an industrial soundtrack. It’s a square plug of a movie forced into the round connector of our cinematic expectations, and it emits dangerous sparks.
“I don’t know if I really like this movie, it’s just kind of weird. It’s worth checking out; it’s weird. Something to talk about. So, if you like really, really weird stuff, check out Final Flesh, it’s really weird.”–YouTube reviewer
DIRECTED BY: Written by Vernon Chatman, directed by “Ike Sanders” and three other uncredited directors
FEATURING: Twelve amateur porn stars
PLOT: After a prologue explains that the atom bomb is about to drop, we’re shown a family of three (mother, father and adult daughter) sitting around a kitchen table, deciding that they will stay and “die with dignity.” The mother and daughter give birth to various food items and the father tires to climb back into the womb, and then daughter relates a dream. We see a mushroom cloud, then another trio of actors in a different apartment who believe they are in the afterlife: they recite more humorous nonsense about God, death and the apocalypse and enact more bizarre skits before the action shifts to another trio in a different room, then another…
BACKGROUND:
Vernon Chatman made Final Flesh by submitting scripts to four different amateur porn production companies that specialize in acting out their client’s fantasies. The scripts were submitted between 2002 and 2009, so the film was actually 7 years in the making.
Chatman is a stand-up comic and Emmy-winning television writer. He wrote for “Late Night with Conan O’Brien,” and “The Chris Rock Show” before co-creating the short-lived, weird cult TV series “Wonder Showzen” and “Xavier: Renegade Angel.” He’s most famous for his work with “South Park,” where he provides the voice of “Towelie,” the pot-smoking towel.
Chatman is a member of the Brooklyn-based art collective PFFR, who produce music, art, and short films. The first segment of Final Flesh was made as a short film for a PFFR art show, and although the final project was Chatman’s work alone, it was still released under the PFFR umbrella.
Final Flesh is distributed by Drag City, an independent music label that has only recently branched out into underground film (and may have given up that side-business already). Drag City’s other 2009 movie release, Trash Humpers, hogged the company’s headlines when it became a minor cause célèbre after Netflix refused to stock it. Final Flesh received relatively little promotion, despite the fact that Netflix declined to carry it, as well.
INDELIBLE IMAGE: For Final Flesh, we’re going to break with tradition and provide four different “indelible images,” one from each segment of the film. A girl breastfeeds a porterhouse steak; a woman in a jeans, a tank-top and a skull mask threatens a man on his deathbed; a couple make out by mashing the skulls drawn on their backs together; a young lady in black lingerie performs a wedding ceremony on two corpses lying side by side.
WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: The conceptual art premise of sending a non-erotic script to be acted out by pornstars-for-hire might be weird enough, but when that apocalyptic screenplay requires the bemused amateur actors to bathe in the tears of neglected children and recite lines like “I just creamed my demon” after being slapped, we’ve traveled beyond the snarkily experimental into the realm of the existentially deranged. All the world’s a stage and these men and women play many parts; if some of those roles require them to pour ketchup in a conch shell and poke at it with a turkey baster while moaning orgasmically, then maybe that’s just how this universe rolls.
In the 1980s art scene, the fine arts were divided into camps. In one camp there was the dominating, self-proclaimed avant-garde, and in the other, smaller camps were the Surrealists, the expressionists, the pop artists, the hyper-realists, and the traditionalists. I tended to pitch my tent with the expressionists and, with some reservations, the Surrealists and the pop artists as well. While I never gave much credence at all to the hyper-realists or the traditionalists who bored me to tears then (now I simply have succumbed to impatient avoidance and dismissal of that unimaginative, fundamentalist lot), I also have kept the self-proclaimed avant-garde at bay, possibly because I suspect, like the Dadaists and Surrealists suspected, that the avant-garde tends towards overt, dull academia and/or superficiality.
A few years ago I read a review of a Ken Russell film (unfortunately, I did not have the foresight to document the source); the critic essentially took Russell to task for being a failed avant-gardist who straddled the road between populist art and the avant-garde. While the critic had some validity in his assessments of Russell’s work, I felt he missed the mark. Russell was never a member of the avant-garde. Rather, he was a hard school Surrealist whose work has been passionately uneven. Surrealism, of course, has as its vital focal point ordinary expressions, that are then blurred by dreams and imagination. The imaginative dream realm would not exist without the warm-blooded center of reality. Of course, bad Surrealism (or poor imitation of Surrealism) tends to look like the academia of the avante-garde when it loses that vital core, and perhaps that is why the “naïve surrealists” have been so rightly celebrated.
The avant-garde, on the other hand, has always promoted art for art sake. It is an atheistic aesthetic of pure abstraction, and while it first produced a startling movement in many mediums, its tendency towards superficiality quickly took hold. In painting, abstract expressionism became decorative works for the business office; in film, such experiments soon became tedious efforts which jettisoned any and all connections with humanity; and in music, post-Webern electronic experimentation became so disassociated that it made all-too valid Arnold Schoenberg’s question, “but, are they making music with it?” ((Schoenberg was the father of the twelve-tone method. His pupil, Anton Webern, became a favorite influence among the disciples. Towards the end of his life Schoenberg was asked if he realized young musicians were copying his twelve tone method, to which he replied with the question above)).
Of course, this is an over simplified and somewhat idiosyncratic distinction, and to do it justice is beyond the scope or goal of this review, but this description can temporarily suffice. Part of the problem in associating Ken Russell with the avant-garde is Russell’s impetuous giddiness, his desire to be the eternal bad boy, which is filtered through consummate craftsmanship and even occasional sophistication underneath that rebel persona. Russell’s work, while often deeply flawed, is seldom dull. The vitality of his Surrealist oeuvre (at least his strongest works) can be found in an idiosyncratic vision of a journey through dramatic, personal, human experience.
Recently, I came across Indiana filmmaker’s Adam Cooley’s 2010 feature, Currently Untitled,
