kagablog

Audition
A longer 40-minute experimental short by Zwartjes with the usual people in goth makeup physically acting out as the camera jumps, zooms, rolls and turns. Women act out, flirt, sing, perform, and pose while people watch and the frantic camera interacts with their weird and melodramatic performances. In between, the actress is lewdly fondled by a man with one glove. Not as interesting as his other shorts which usually feel more focused, tight and convey an idea.

this review first appeared here

GHOST DANCE,
PART ONE:

Steven Johnson Leyba
The Last American Painter

52 min.

A film by CA CA CA & Dionysos Andronis

Dialogue Transcript

PROLOGUE

STEVEN JOHNSON LEYBA : A few days before Miran left for New York, I got a very disturbing but fantastic letter from the Church of Satan.
The letterhead was a pentagram Baphomet. The letter referred to my getting grief for my subject matter at school. I was told that I would not be able to get commercial assignments with my gruesome subject matter… and the letter from Blanche Barton the High Priestess, who said : “Maybe you just haven’t found the right audience… maybe now you have.

INTRODUCTION

SJL : “In an Ancient Land still called America
alone stood the Last American Painter
painting the times in images no-one wanted to see
in a visual dialogue defiant of the failing Celebrity Cult World.
In strokes of paint he told the true story of Flag, Country, Church and State,
of corporate bodily suppressions, mental and sexual genetic manipulations.
Subcontracted extortionists of the military-industrial complex on American streets.
Absolving all responsibility and accountability.
Above and beyond the laws he stood as the most responsible of all.
The country stretched past its limits, with nothing to hold it together,
all credibility shot and the suspension of disbelief, trivialized beyond belief.
Entertained and apathetic, the people accepted their Hollywood servitude.
The sanctioned painters reverted to childhood paintings of Batman and Scooby-Doo. Propaganda for nothing but juvenile comfort and denial far below even Warhol.
Mercenaries for nothing, Pre-selling out and silencing their own voices for some trite ideal.
The idea they couldn’t sell was that there was nothing before or after America.
His art twisted and stretched out of context.
Paranoïa of the one percent removed whatever impurity.
His only viable self-expression labelled obscene.
Outlawed and outcast, labelled new-world deviant, trouble-maker, criminal,
denied as a Satanist, as a Native-American Activist,
they tried to make him a caricature of non-conformity.
Apparently he had something to say that posed a threat.”

“Shit. It smells like shit, it tastes like shit. I smell shit all the time here. No, it’s not because of my bad hygiene. It’s because of the shit liquefication machines that drive all over the fields. The black and white cow shit is gathered and liquefied by trucks with strange equipment on them. All sorts of wonderful hoses are attached to these machines, all extending out, like an octopus’ tentacle. It is very erotic, perhaps more erotic then a mere tractor. Americans may very well be outraged at the fact that these cows are consuming their own excrements. I assure you, that eating your own shit with that of another is a natural and wonderful practice that is superior to eating brains.”

“The world is divided into two kinds of people : shit-eaters and non shit-eaters. There is nothing in between and no room for pretenders. And once in awhile shit-eaters are doomed to fail. The shit-eaters ruled the world. Every great man or woman was a shit-eater. Da Vinci was a shit-eater, Picasso was a shit-eater, Van Gogh… And I would bet you anything, that Einstein himself was a shit-eater. Sometimes non shit-eaters can fool us, for awhile like Napoleon or Stalin, but they eventually fail. Hitler failed because he refused to eat any sort of excretia. If the world only knew the simply fact that there would be wars waged between the consumers of shit and the haters of crap. Am I still the source of the world’s contagion? Am I an incubating soft-bomb, bacterial host sent to infect the Fortress of Europe? Am I a failed Alchemist who will never again be able to turn shit into gold?”

Musée Gustave Moreau Museum, Paris.

SJL : Gustave Moreau is quite fascinating to me because I have a background in Academic illustration, commercial illustration as well as fine art, so I can appreciate figurative art, really well done figurative art and … him doing paintings of mythological stories and also bringing in new philosophical symbolists and fine art in a progressive, innovative way. So he’s kind of merging for me both illustrational figurative, realistic and more of the philosophy of contemporary twentieth-century art. He was XIXth (Century) so he bridged the gap, made the way for Modern Art.

(Looking at Moreau paintings in the Museum)

SJL : Tasty… there’s this physicality, I just want to (makes gesture of grabbing the images into his arms and squeezing them)

SJL : Jesus… What’s interesting is that the Christian imagery doesn’t seem too Christian to me. It seems very pagan or very East, Eastern, very Asian…

SJL : I’m very much influenced by the Symbolists, Modern Art also, but more so the Symbolists now…because they kind of went they’re own way and it seems that artists now are relunctant… and part of the reason I made my film What is Art? is because artists need to take back the language and dialogue of art. We’ve given it to the Institutions, the Museums, you know, the Art Schools, the Art Critics, the Galleries. They don’t own it. We create the Art, we should take it back for artists. It seems like people are just creating art for institutions or markets. There’s hardly any innovation, anywhere, in the world…And people go, it’s happening in China or it’s happening in Eastern Europe… no, that’s just fashion. Until some artist comes and he’s speaking… in an innovative way that can make us look at the world in a different way because that’s what Art is supposed to do. People have forgotten that.

SJL : You know it’s interesting because when I got into Art, I was very much interested in Dada and the Surrealists and hearing about movements and artists leaving Europe and going to the United States because of the War… Well now I feel like there is a lot going on in the United States where, in the next ten years, artists will be leaving America because it’s getting very controlling. Not that it’s not getting controlling in Europe, but there’s more funding and more respect for the artists.

For an American artist… because, in my lifetime, New York was the center of the Art World, at least for Visual Art. Now, there is a lot of information that’s come out from the United States Government that the Government promoted Abstract Expressionism and Abstract Art to help take the Art World away from Paris… to New York. And they had all these radicals fleeing Europe, all these communists, that were doing Abstract Art so they promoted Abstract Art because it was apolitical and also like with Action Painting, De Kooning an Pollock, it was the rugged individual, which was the opposite of the Soviet, Social Realism.
So it’s very important for a painter to visit Paris…for an American Painter to go back because that is the root of Visual Art. You can’t go forward unless you go back, so going to Paris is very important. Paris may not be the Art capital of the World but neither is New York now.

Whereas, um, I call New York City the first dead city in the United States. When Paris stopped being the Art Capital of the World and then New York, Paris was always alive…
The architecture there, there were still artists who carried on…the post-modernists…being part of movements. Man Ray, the American surrealist, stayed in Paris. But now as New York is dead, there’s nothing, there’s some architecture, there’s some history, but it’s being commercialised and it’s a Theme Park.

Gare du Nord Train Station, Paris.

LOUDSPEAKER : Your attention please, for safety reasons, please do not leave baggage or other items unattended. Any suspect items will be removed. We remind you that it is compulsory to label your luggage.

Ladies and gentlemen, your attention please, because of a Social Movement…

The Illuseum, Amsterdam

(Sound of Leyba spoken-work performance)

SJL : “I concentrated on the transsexual porno. As I stroked by erect penis. All of a sudden the colors were outlined by neon hot pussy pink and lavender lines and polka-dots. I could smell my sweaty scrotum and stinking ass, the brazilian she-male glistened from the yellow sun and created Hindu patterns in the trees. Then the bodies became closer, as the bright yellow turned to orange and pink patterns. They were patterns and shapes that I am used to seeing painted in Hena on the bodies of Hindus, only they were bright pink, lavender and shades of blue. His hairy ass was orange and sepia. Then the hair turned to perfect repeating patterns. His scrotum was pink doted balls and his cock was deep inside her anus. Her ass was bluish and beautiful and seemed magical somehow…The line from her asshole to her scrotum was lavender and her scrotum had perfect parallel lines on them that vibrated and moved. Both their bodies seemed to be killing each other, but neither would die. They seemed as two red and blue and intertwined. They were being engulfed by each other and destroying each other and recreating each other. It was some sort of death and rebirth ritual. I looked into the TV table legs… as they now had a light purple outline with moving pink dots. Then the legs trailed like worms to the carpet and it was a light shocking green that moved in circular patterns.

As I thought about my life and I felt the world and I realised that all humanity was a slithering and flopping, tumbling worm. A worm system of control. I felt connected to everything and everyone. It was very animistic but it seemed that all things were enslaved by the mass of society and economies and governments. While every slug worm seemed beautiful and wonderful in its own colourful shit and the slugs in perpetual fucking. They seemed to be trying to remember something that was Ancient yet forgotten. I was seeing and feeling whatever it was that existed before the consciousness of social control. It was an instinctual feeling I have never felt before. I was sludge and filth and shit, remembering what it was like before…

…Before our self-enslavement by ideas, ideals and governments. It was disgusting yet elegant. I was telepathically communicating with sludge, and I was all things including myself. I was feeling this natural defiance and harmony and fucking. I was seeing our own brainwashing through all time…This worm fucking itself… in its organs and anarchy and absolute chaos.
It was out of complete control. It was control yet beyond all control. It was sublime and vile. And into the struggle and the fight to stay awake and alive…with the lifeforce, the human spirit, and the black laying within. It was spiritual. It reminded me that the compliance and acceptance of the mass mind meant spiritual and literal death. Freedom is only freedom when the mass mind fights and remembers to keep itself alive. It is a constant fight and fuck to keep remembering than to go back to sleep. It is still nourishing for the fighting and fucking to save one’s voice. It is a victory and a triumph. Triumph of Will to live in accordance to our natural, animal ways than to give ourselves to mass compliance and social control and turn into these various patterns in our recording of our living and remembering. They are an echo and a history of repeating patterns just as History repeats itself. This record and echo is our History. That the worm is fucking itself to move forward and to not be enslaved by patterns of our past. Our living and loving and fucking and fighting are the only things helping us move forward and keeping us from forgetting and being contained and controlled by the patterns of repetition. It is in this constant fight and struggle that we remember to be free and not to enslave ourselves by patterns of control.”

SJL : Using sexuality in Art was the carnal satanic choice of subject matter. I felt that sex was suppressed in the Arts. To me using in Art was socio-political just as Satanism is a socio-political religion and philosophy. It was Christianity and its manifestations in our culture that still tried to control the sexual image. It was ok to use sex in advertising but when an artist uses sexuality they get arrested or fined.

HELENA REMEYERS: I find it very amazing, very… genius to make a portrait of a person and leave out his eyes and put instead the genitals of the person, which tells indeed in my perception, a lot about somebody’s being, character, soul, and in fact it’s very censured in the lives of human beings I guess… mostly in our culture, I talk about Western culture.
I believe that the genitals are a big taboo. Sexual organs are hidden but the mystery around them is being used as a tool to sell consumer products. And when I read about the work… started reading about the work of Steven and when I saw more of his performances and sex goblins, I felt very related to the way he talks about how society took away sexuality from the people and used it to sell them other things instead. So we are not anymore the owners of our own sexuality and especially not the owners of the perception of our sexuality. And I think our sexuality is very discriminated and used, and mutilated… it has been raped.

Yeah, it will inspire, maybe also, bit by bit, this society to stop selling us our sexuality and just give it back for free and let people enjoy their whole natural ecstatic being.

SJL : Well, if I create something and I do paintings and I think they reach certain people and they learn something from it… but then, on the other hand, law-enforcement organizations like the FBI go and question my friends or potential patrons to my paintings then… That’s kind of a warfare, that’s kind of a censorship. So it tells me that I’m kind of on the right road if they think that I’m a potential problem that they need to suppress or intimidate people around me. For me that means I need to carry on.

HELENA REMEYERS : That motivated you…

SJL : Yeah… I think… people get caught up in the fame-game and they like… why bother speaking from your heart since you’ll be ignored or whatever. I think a lot of people are satisfied leaving a sentence or two on Facebook and that’s the modern like ‘freedom of speech’ and they end up trivializing their own messages or the messages of their friends.

HR : I find it interesting that you say that many people nowadays…that it even got so far that people even censure themselves and trivialize themselves. Do you believe that it’s an action from society?

SJL : Yeah, I think that the censor is within… like Burroughs, the whole… sabotaging systems of control but he was very much interested in how control is internalized… so our culture… we are the censor, we are our own censor.

HR : And how do you believe we can solve that?

SJL : By putting ourselves in uncomfortable situations.

HR : Uncomfortable…

SJL : …and Art should do that.

HR : …sounds like terrorists.

Gare de Lyon Train Station, Paris

DIONYSOS ANDRONIS : So can you tell us quickly a few words about how you met Genesis P-Orridge ?

SJL : Um… well I’d rather talk about WHY I met Genesis P-Orridge. I had seen Genesis P-Orridge since the Eighties in the Art scene in San Francisco and New York but I had no real interest other than Research, Modern Primitives, the body modification. It wasn’t until Genesis started working with Lady Jaye and altering her body and Lady Jaye altering her body so they became the third entity, the Pandrogyne. The reason that concept of the Pandrogyne interests me is because of the total physicality… You know they are artworks moving more, back to figurative… but, rather then nostalgia, Genesis and I use the body… I use it in my performances but also in my painting… and use the TOTAL physicality, not male, female… it’s all of life. Like I’ll use even organic and animal and I’ll combine it. It’s the physicality, the totality of the human experience. That’s why I was interested in Genesis and that’s why Genesis was interested in my Art and wrote the introduction for The Last American Painter. It’s because… rather then just be Figurative Artists, because I have a classical background of figure painting and drawing… I want to bring it to the Twenty-First Century. The TOTALITY, the ALL of physical life, the biology… And Genesis understood that and that’s why we became friends because we were interested in the life and the biology of the human form combined in all of sexuality, the totality of sexuality…

The Illuseum, Amsterdam

(Sound of spoken-word performance)

SJL : “Fuck You, Fuck your Freedom. America if I was free, I wouldn’t need you to tell me. America if I was free, I wouldn’t need you to tell me over and over and over…
I’m free… I’m free… I’m free…
America…fuck you. Fuck your Freedom.

HELENA REMEIJERS : …And there was involved duty, feeling the duty to speak out because what you believe you think is important for others and for yourself to help somebody or society or yourself to grow.
The first one DANGER in it’s most extreme, is a game of life or death, so you speak out your truth no matter what.

I was thinking when I was reading your book The Last American Painter and I read that you were censored so much and, how do you say, put in a corner or oppressed… I was wondering until what point would you continue… You even declared war on America. I thought that was quite brave and pretty dangerous.

SJL : Yeah, right after 9/11…

HR : And I was wondering until what point would you go… with your actions?

SJL : Well I’d die for my Art… if I couldn’t create I couldn’t live. The more problematic my art is in putting me in dangerous situations… I’ve had like three investigation by the FBI, but that just makes me want to push more so… so I will take it as far as I possibly can. And if its causing a problem. I’m poking and it’s coming back, I think I’m doing something right. In a way, I love being censored and oppressed because then I can go well ‘there’s a problem with the culture not with my art’. It’s a marriage showing that there’s a thing that needs to be dealt with. And other people should continue the dialogue. It’s a dialogue… I’m trying to create. So I’ll go as far as possible…

MARCO PASI : So… now you have taken a distance from the Church of Satan?

SJL : Yeah.

MP: I suppose it’s a big mess…

SJL : Total mess.

MP : … I’m not so familiar with what’s happened, what’s happened recently so…

SJL : All you need is to go to the website, in the News, and go back, and you can just go back, like three years, or four years, to now and there’s a lowering quality of things going on with Satanists because the more progressive people left because it just became completely ridiculous and then you see the links on the Church of Satan and there’s like.. you know, Vampire drawings and Werewolf drawings and other ridiculous things…

MP : So have you ever been in contact with the Temple of Seth?

SJL : Um… a little bit, but just indirectly. I… wrote Aquino a couple of times and then I was friends with two people that were in the Temple of Set and they had just met him recently for coffee and they got a really good quote out of Aquino who said ‘Leyba is the only one in the Church of Satan doing anything original’…

(laughter)

SJL : But when I did my performance with the Whiskey Rite, you’ll see in The Guy who saved America… He (Aquino) was quoted on the internet as saying that the Satanists and the Football team… cause I did this ritual and there were people from the 49ers… and (Aquino said) the politicians should have a class-action lawsuit against me because the pentagram cut in my back was not phi ratio. It was peed on, it was pissed on so it was defiled…

MP : So what was it originally that attracted you? (To the Church of Satan)

SJL : Being Native American, I liked the fact that he (Anton LaVey) was attacking Christianity head-on. And I saw a lot of his public rituals as political performance art. So it was very influential on my performance art and my philosophy.

MP : I never got the impression that you were so interested in Native American Traditions.

SJL : Well when I met him (Anton LaVey) it was the height of the politically correct speech, especially coming out of California. And you’re not supposed to criticize ethnic groups or other cultures so he loved the fact that I was Native American and that I could directly criticize Christianity.

MP : How do you think the Church of Satan compares with the Temple of Set?

SJL : I’m a bit apprehensive just because of his (Aquino’s) background in military and psychological warfare cause I wondered what percentage, you know, what the relationship with Aquino and LaVey and…

MP : Was there the danger of manipulation…

SJL : … government manipulation, yeah…but then now I think with the Church of Satan is a lot of members that try to bait people online about laws with drugs and then they turn them in… so it’s turned into this law-enforcement organization. Before the last three years…like uh… five years talking with Peter Gilmour who is the High Priest now of the Church of Satan and he would always tell me about all these police officers and government people that were in the Church of Satan… and I’m like, why is he telling me this… why is that a good thing?

MP : Well that’s precisely the kind of ambiguity I was talking about. And I think it has been there from the very beginning…from the sixties really.

SJL : Yeah cause it was kind of a reaction against a lot of the hippy culture.

MP : Yeah, precisely.

SJL : Some people say that LaVey was involved with Interpol and some of the U.S. government…

(laughter)

MP: It might be, you know, he was such a complex figure that everything is possible.

SJL : Yeah, that’s why I liked him. He was a contradiction.

MP : Yeah… but uh… I am a historian of esotericism and occultism so that’s what I do…

SJL : Wow, yeah.

MP : And I’m sort of a specialist more for the late Modern Contemporary period so from the Nineteenth Century up to our days and I think that you know LaVey is the case of someone who is often underestimated…

SJL : Yeah, I agree.

MP : … but actually his ideas have had a very very significant influence on society and culture. Much more than people would like to think. Obviously his books have been a massive success… commercially.

SJL : Yeah, and he’s still, kind of… pushed down.

MP : Yeah, but that’s for obvious reasons. There’s an evident political and religious, cultural reason for keeping it down, you know… Nevertheless, I mean, figures are figures, so it’s clear that his ideas have had a significant, I’m not saying a massive influence but still it’s significant I think.

SJL : Yeah, like even culturally like with the term ‘psychic vampire’, I hear that all the time.

MP : Yeah, absolutely. And uh… I think he’s also underestimated in the sense that people think he is more superficial then he really was and in fact there is a complexity in his ideas that one should investigate closely, I mean, from my point of view as an Historian… so not necessarily as a practitioner or…

SJL : That’s why we were friends.

MP : Yeah, absolutely. So, one of the interesting aspects of LaVey for me because I’m also a specialist of Aleister Crowley, I’ve studied a lot Aleister Crowley and so on…so one of the interesting aspects of LaVey for instance is how much or to what extent he was influenced from his ideas.

SJL : Yeah, at one point he’s like, uh, critical of Crowley and saying he’s a fraud, but you see a lot of Crowleian influence, let’s say in his writings…

MP : So have you ever talked with him about Crowley? Was it a topic that came up in discussion?

SJL : Not really, no.

MP : Are you interested in Crowley?

SJL : Yes, very much, more and more…A lot of the stuff that I’ve read of Crowley, it seems like he, kind of, you know, wrote in little side roads, you know, like you have to know how to navigate through his writings to get something out of it because it seems like he’s a bit of a trickster.

MP : Oh, he… he really is… but LaVey was also.

(laughter)

SJL : You know I’m not gonna spoon feed you, you’re gonna have to…

MP : Which in fact is sort of a shamanic concept anyway because the Trickster is a figure that belongs also to many Native cultures, you know, it’s not something that is invented by Crowley, you know… You find it in many different religious cultures, you find it in Tantra, also, so it’s uh… in Zen…

SJL : And in Native American Coyote stories.

Marco Pasi : Yeah, absolutely…

(spoken-word performance)

SJL : Name : My American Indian Movement.

This, is my declaration of War.

Name : My American Indian Movement is my War.

Personal, symbolic, literal, metaphorical, theoretical, ideological, socio-political, spiritual, physical, and artistically satanical.

Make up your mind!

But it is a War…

All of Humanity is at War. Fighting the described realities of mass media and their containments and entertainments…

I am a Warrior. My life and creation by my ritual atonements in its all historical content, personal creation and application, assertion.

MARCO PASI : But at the same time, I think there is a strong trend of Native American revivalism which does not necessarily combine with Satanism… so in your case it was…

SJL : I was the first to do it… because being Apache, which means the Enemy… my people didn’t call themselves ‘enemy’, that was a Zuni word that the Whites used and it stuck on the tribe and that’s the legal name now…

MS : …Satan is the Adversary in Native American traditions.

STJ : So that’s what I did, I adopted… ‘Ok, I’m Apache, I’m the Enemy, I’m the Adversary, Satan is the Adversary so I am adopting your Enemy…
And the traditional Crown Dancer of the Apache, they were called Devil Dancers, so I’m like…I was reclaiming it, you know, like the word nigger, or faggot, I was reclaiming it. We’re devil-worshippers, we’re Satanists, you know…

MP : And how do you find LaVey from a political point of view. That’s an interesting aspect because I always found that his philosophy can be interpreted in different ways from a political point of view, so there is a kind of ambiguity there. So, some people might interpret it more in anarchistic terms…

STJ : A lot of people have…even atheistic.

MP : Yeah… but others, I think, have a more right-wing kind of…

STJ : That’s partly why I had a falling out because I’m very against a lot of that right wing philosophy.

MP : Which is, I think, or at least part of it implicit a bit in his writings, I mean it’s not something that is necessarily projected onto it, but is part of the package…

STJ : Yeah, some of his writings…

MP : I read some of his interviews and, you know, in some places, well, he says, well I want a state of order and police…

STJ : … Cop on every corner…

MP : Yeah, this kind of stuff… So how do you… Did you talk a bit with him about this?

STJ : And he was…He believed that Satanism could encompass a total spectrum of views, you know, like a democracy. But in reality when he died it was not the case, it wasn’t as open.

MP : Well it’s clear to me that, you know, the Church of Satan was based on the charismatic presence of LaVey, and so… and this is the kind of pattern that you find again and again in religious movements, that there is this kind of leader… figure…

SJL : Always…

MP :… and then the leader disappears for one reason or another…

SJL :… and you even have a second one that’s stronger then the first…

MP : It’s very hard, it’s very hard… of course, when it happens, then you may have a movement that’s going to stay for quite a while… for instance you have Christianity, you have Jesus-Christ but then you have Saint-Paul and Saint-Paul really, you know, put the thing together and turned the whole thing into a Church, a real Church…and that would stay for centuries. So you have a string of persons this charisma, this… When you have only the founder at the beginning, the person who, just created the thing, but nobody after him then, you know, it’s very easy that the whole thing collapses at one point…

SJL : Yeah…

MP : And in fact, there is also another aspect I think which is theorized into the philosophy of the Church of Satan and many satanic movements and it’s the fact that there is a strong emphasis on individuality, you know, individuality… so it’s clear that it’s difficult to build up an institution that is really, that has a viable function, that really works as an institution… and also it must have a hierarchy also…there must be a sort of discipline, you know…

SJL : I found out the hard way… with Coyotel. If you get a chance, there is the Church’s Bible and I started the Coyotel Church, and already with some close friends and already there was the struggle with the hierarchy and we had started a publishing house… we had a falling out and then we had to end the company…but so just with three close friends it was difficult.

MP : Yeah but that’s the problem, I mean how do you combine precisely this tendancy to underscore, to give importance to individuality, to your own personal development as a human person with your own needs and your own interests with the fact that you have to compromise and negotiate all the time when you find yourself with somebody else… and you want to create a movement and you want to … so, it’s clear that if you want to go far you can do it more easily when you are with other people… so you get together, you join, you know, with friends…

SJL : Other people will create a movement…

MP : Of course you will have more attention from the outside if you, you’re going to get more power in terms of means to, you know, make your message come across, but then there comes a moment when wheels collide and then it’s a problem.

SJL : Yeah… did I show you the Church’s Bible? Let me go grab it…

MP : Yeah.

SJL : …absolving all responsibility and accountability,
above and beyond the laws he stood as the most responsible of all.
The country stretched past its limits with nothing to hold it together.
All credibility shot and the suspension of disbelief, trivialised beyond belief.
Entertained and apathetic, the people accepted their Hollywood servitude.
The sanctioned painters reverted to childhood paintings of Batman and Scooby-Doo. Propaganda for nothing, but juvenile comfort and denial, far below even Warhol. Mercenaries for nothing pre-selling out, and silencing their own voices for some trite ideal. The idea, they couldn’t sell, was that there was nothing before of after America.
His Art twisted and stretched out of context.
Paranoïa of the one percent removed whatever impurity.
His only viable self-expression labelled obscene.
Outlawed, and an outcast labelled New World deviant, trouble-maker, criminal,
denied as a Satanist, as a Native American Activist,
they tried to make him a caricature of non-conformity.
Apparently he had something to say that posed a threat.
Indoctrination, institutions and museums became obsolete.
He painted in spite and out of spite and love…
In an Ancient land still called America,
alone stood the Last American Painter…

Thank you.

(applause)

Forbidden Files
Many moons ago, here in Australia, SBS played a most unusual series: The Forbidden Files, a collection of short films from which The Blair Witch Project may have gain its inspiration.

It was subtitled from the original French. The series was actually called les Documents Interdits, and it was compiled by Jean-Teddy Filippe.

There were 14 episodes in total, but 2 have been lost. Here’s a run-down.

1. The Divers
Rare and unexplained footage from naval commando archives reveals the distinct presence of a powerful figure in the ocean. As the commandoes’ boats approach, a diver enters the water and is immediately taken under by the “creature”. Diver and creature break the surface some 500 meters from the initial attack in a matter of seconds. Captured on film, it remains an unfathomable mystery to this day.
2. The Child
Only six weeks old, baby Peter is filmed levitating his teddy bear. at six months he’s flinging cups off his high chair with a stare, and at six years old Peter has drowned the dog in the family’s pool. Video tape highlights of Peter’s telekinesis are sure to shame the most unruly poltergeists.
3. The Ghosts
Documented by an amateur camera operator, Miguel takes us and another passenger on a journey to the Nameless Ones. They are ghosts from the unknown who bring to us messages that sometimes we do not understand.
4. Shipwreck
The lone survivor of the wreck of the Véga that mysteriously went down on August 7 1950, has filmed his daily rituals. He goes for eighteen days without touching his provisions of food or drink and when the opportunity arises for him to be rescued he chooses not to shoot his flame thrower. As his camera documents for us, he is the witness to a supernatural phenomenon. When the boat becomes beached, the camera and this film, plus the words ‘those who have seen it can never come back’ which were scrawled on the tarpaulin, are his only remains.
5. The Picnic
In-camera edited film shot by Kevin Riley on July 11 1970. Cindy, Stephen, Karen and Kevin head off in a Kombi van for a night under the stars in the Roaxaca Zone. The native Indians call it ‘The river of stones that runs over the sleeping forest’. One of the party, Stephen hears music in the distance. It is inaudible to the rest of the group. What Kevin accidentally documents is the disappearance of Stephen who is inexplicably drawn to the music he hears.
6. The E.T.
An encounter between earthlings and their guest from outer space took place and was documented in Takohamo. On July 19 1969 Olsen II (the guest) died in mysterious circumstances. But perhaps his fate was decided a long time ago. On the next day, July 20 1969 Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon. The Takohamo mystery deepens a little more.
7. The Ferguson Case
This episode looks at THE AT ONCE SHOW which goes to air live on the WACN channel in the USA. Its anchor tells of how Mrs Ferguson had rung the station to get help checking out some mysterious sounds in the manor house. THE AT ONCE team send a reporter to investigate, and what we see is the live to air footage that was captured but which in itself heightens the mystery of THE FERGUSON CASE.
8. The Crowns film the Youngs
An amateur filmmaker carefully documented the growing relationship between them as neighbours; the Crown and the Young families. Both wives had babies born within days of each other. They grew into children and then adults that fell in love with each other and left home. This picture of domestic / neighbourhood tranquility is disrupted by the divorce and remarrying of one of the partners. Time passes and the filmmaker obsessively documents the daily ritual of the neighbours next door. In that process he films the family’s puppy’s unearthing of a bloodied glove which belonged to Maria Mendoza. The Mendoza Case was still a mystery until this footage was handed over to the authorities on the death of the husband.
9. The Soldier
In Sicily in 1943, an unknown soldier films two strange figures as they walk into the ocean and disappear. Leaving his camera on the beach, the soldier films himself as he walks into the water – crossing the unknown frontier.
10. The Madman of the Crossroads
The incredible story of Tibor Nagy who claims to have filmed his excursion to the moon when he and his family were abducted by aliens. Tibor shows his moon movie to fellow believers at a spot near where he was taken. He also pines for his aliens to take him back to the moon.
11. The Witch
A phantom terrorises the inhabitants of a Spanish village, that eventually is displaced. As this amateur film reveals, there is never any end to an exodus. A journey to the land of those ‘one does not mention’.
12. Siberia
SCAR is the code name of a programme of bio-mechanics to improve human performance which could turn people into semi-robots. Piotr is one of the 12,500 who people this security camp. He lets the camera document how ‘they’ reconstructed his arm after it had been virtually crushed in a work accident. That footage was marked: STRATEGIC MATERIAL – TOP SECRET, and plainly reveals the harsh reality of the forgotten people of the Cold War.
13. The Boat: (no information)
14. The Lost People (Le point de vue des égarés): (no information)

So: how’s your French? Because here they are… sans subtitles. (Bandwidth warning!!!) this article first appeared here

watch the forbidden files here

Still playing in the key of Bruno S.
By Michael Kimmelman

BERLIN — The other evening, Bruno S. sang at an old bar here called the Stadtklause, a wood-paneled dive near the remains of the Anhalter Bahnhof, the old railway station torn down after the war. Franz-Josef Göbel, who runs the place, invited Bruno a couple of years ago to come sing whenever he felt up to it, not for money, just to have a place to go, and since then Bruno has stopped by on the odd night.

As usual, he set himself up in the entryway, on a low green stool, cradling his accordion, his bells on a little table beside him. A plastic bag turned out to be for his bronchitis pills. He sang the usual songs, about prison and despair, bloodshed and lost love, the ones Berlin street singers have sung for hundreds of years. Customers mostly squeezed past him, oblivious. A few stopped to listen. One woman wept.

“Do you know who that is?” my friend Ingrid had asked me when she came by my family’s apartment one day late last spring. An old musician seated before a rickety cardboard box was below the window. He sang in a croaking voice on the empty sidewalk in the afternoon sunshine, his back toward the brick church across the street.

“That’s Bruno S.,” Ingrid said, excitedly. She looked as if she had come across Marlene Dietrich, back from the dead.

His real name is Bruno Schleinstein. Everybody has always called him Bruno S. Years ago, he was famous, a kind of movie star, although that’s not quite the right term. It summons to mind George Clooney.

During the 1970s Bruno was the star of two remarkable Werner Herzog films, “Jeder für sich und Gott gegen alle” (the English title is “The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser”) and “Stroszek,” in which he occupied the roles of damaged characters so completely and genuinely, so uncannily, that it was never quite clear how much he actually understood what use was being made of him by the director. His performances were riveting but he was obviously not well mentally, and even as he came across in his own way as knowing, he was at the same time simply being himself, and the question hovered: How much was fiction, how much reality?

Then he dropped down the memory chute.

When we introduced ourselves, he kept his eyes firmly cast downward. He was toothless and shaggy and he spoke haltingly, forcing out his words, but there was something gentle about him. He agreed we could come over.

And so we began to visit him in the cluttered apartment where he lives alone on a street full of prostitutes. During the summer, he sang for us. During the fall, he showed us a painting he was working on. A gallery in town, Endart, sells his work. It supplements his small pension. He is an outsider artist, a good one.

Recently, with Christmas coming, we asked what he was doing. This is not a good season for people who are alone. He said he hates the Christmas markets around town where “the gentlemen who go in come out like plucked chickens with all their feathers flying, and such beautiful colored feathers!” That’s how Bruno tends to talk. He makes up words and phrases or borrows them from old songs and gives them a twist. “Lieder-bann”: a spell of songs. “Das Loch der Vergessenheit”: the hole of forgottenness. He says he transmits (durchgeben) his songs, he doesn’t sing them.

When the conversation turns to Herzog or to his mother or brother and sister, he becomes instantly distraught, although it’s never clear exactly what happened. He’s mostly mischievous, puckish.

He was born in 1932, abandoned as a baby to an orphanage, a “Reichsausschusskind”; in psychiatric clinics, Nazis performed experiments on mentally disabled children whom they called Ausschusskinder, the discarded children, a word no German would ever use today. Nobody visited him. He knew who his relatives were, but they declined to know him. After the war he learned songs and to play the accordion in the institutions through which he was shuffled. Music gave him a measure of solace and a way to escape his loneliness.

On his own as an adult, he got a job as a laborer and began to sing in courtyards around the city, as musicians had done for ages. Herzog came across him in a 1970 documentary, “Bruno the Black,” about Berlin’s street musicians. It’s hard to imagine today what an international celebrity and figure of fascination to German intellectuals Bruno became, but then, in the way of such things, he drifted into obscurity, resentful and confused.

“Everybody threw him away,” Bruno likes to say, often using the third person to refer to himself.

At Stadtklause he sang “Mamatschi,” in which a poor boy grows up wishing for a little horse. The horse arrives only years later with the hearse that bears his dead mother away.

Between stanzas Bruno mixed in a German Christmas tune and “Holy Night,” playing the melodies on the bells. They had been arranged on the table in no obvious order so that he fished around like someone searching frantically through a messy drawer for a lost key.

He sang other Moritaten, black humored ballads out of which eventually came Brecht’s “Threepenny Opera” – the music plied by roving hurdy-gurdy musicians with whiny voices whose partners displayed hand-painted pictures, multimedia entertainment for the masses until the Nazis banned it.

“Once upon a time there was a beautiful town,” Bruno sang in the bar the other night. “You could go everywhere, in all the courtyards and on all the streets. After the wall fell, everything changed.”

Ingrid collected coins from people who had gathered at the bar for a holiday party. Bruno won’t ever ask for money.

We stopped by to see him again a couple of days ago. In what is not a large apartment, he swims in an ocean of papers, magazines, records, biscuit tins, fans, lamps, old phonograph equipment, old tape players and radios, antique sewing machines and coffee grinders, two pianos, a large wooden model of a castle on which is painted “Brunos Burg,” (Bruno’s Fortress), a machine for sewing shoes, a dental chair and an operating table (from Herzog, he said).

There is too much, in too much seeming disarray, to take in. In the kitchen, next to the stove and amid the muddle of pots and blenders, Bruno has wedged a low glass tabletop on which to paint. He has been working on the same painting at least since the summer, protecting it under layers of newspapers, towels, pens and paint, all of which he lifts and peels away, as one doffs heavy clothing.

The picture shows a vast conflagration. A vase falls from a tottering column, which Bruno explains is the incident that started the fire, a recurring dream about Berlin. A man flees; another screams. Above it all the symbol of the city, the Berlin bear, wears a golden crown, surrounded by a rain of black crosses.

“I gave the Berlin bear a solemn crown but when your mother town is estranged from you, death can’t be far away,” Bruno said, cryptically as usual.

“I wish she could see it,” he said, now talking about his mother. “If she did, she would die straightaway of a heart attack because she would see her son’s death.”

He calls her Mrs. Bremse, which translates both as “brake” and “horse fly.” It turns out that he had been playing all those months ago near the church up the street from us because his brother, now long dead, used to live in the neighborhood.

Then Bruno sang again. He sang “Mamatschi” and “Die Gedanken sind Frei” (Thoughts Are Free). For Bruno, who often says he’s imprisoned, it’s a song about vain hope, about the impossibility of finding refuge even in one’s thoughts.

“Ah!” he exclaimed when we asked what he was doing on Christmas Day. “He will transmit,” he said about himself. He’ll be at the spot where we met him on that spring day months ago.

“He will take his accordion and his bells and go around the houses and one of the songs for sure will be ‘Mamatschi,”‘ Bruno announced. “Because this will touch people.”

this article first published by newyorktimes

Interview with Ulrike Ottinger
Surreal images

by Marc Silberman

from Jump Cut, no. 29, February 1984, p. 56
copyright Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, 1984, 2005

Filmography

Ottinger was born in 1942. She studied art in Munich 1960-61 but had no formal training as a filmmaker. She has worked as a photographic, collage and graphic artist in Paris, 1962-1968. She directed a film club and alternative art center in Constance, 1969-1972. Since 1972 she has lived in Berlin.

1977: MADAME X — EINE ABSOLUTE HERRSCHERIN (MADAME X — AN ABSOLUTE RULER) 141 min., l6mm, color, dist: Filmwelt (Munich). Using the pirate film genre as an ironic framework, the film examines role behavior and the difficulties of breaking with traditional models. A group of women sail off on the Chinese junk Orlando, only to find that they reproduce the same behavior among themselves to which they were subjected in a male-dominated society.

1979: BILDNIS EINER TRINKERIN — ALLER JAMAIS RETOUR (PORTRAIT OF AN ALCOHOLIC — TICKET OF NO RETURN) 108 min., 35 mm, color, dist: Basis Film (Berlin). Conceived as a melodrama, this portrait undermines the audience’s desire for a utopian resolution by showing alcoholics driven to isolation and self-destruction. Two women — one wealthy and intent on inducing alcohol poisoning, the other poor and drinking herself to death — together make a tour of the Berlin “scene.”

1981: FREAK ORLANDO: KLEINES WELTTHEATER IN FÜNF EPISODEN (FREAK ORLANDO: SMALL THEATER OF THE WORLD IN FIVE EPISODES) 126 min., 35mm, color, dist: Basis Film (Berlin). Orlando, a symbolic figure who changes sex and lives through centuries, journeys through the human and social labyrinths of Western culture. She encounters freaks and outsiders on her way. Those who control power structures and defend normalcy are males. The film is filtered through the satirical vision of a woman who sees history as that of the patriarchy.

I find myself rather isolated in the German film scene, particularly among my women colleagues, because my films come out of the tradition of fantasy and surrealist filmmaking. Besides that, my experience as an artist, especially in Paris during the sixties, is rather unusual for a filmmaker. My eyes have become extremely sensitized to visual images. My film BILDNIS EINER TRINKERIN, for example, on one level offers a sightseeing tour through Berlin. I construct my films with images. I use a syntax of images, whereas most German women filmmakers seem conventionally tied to dialogue. I seek new images for the new content which is proposed by a woman’s experience. This may be why spectators often complain about my films’ length and dense imagery. They are not accustomed to an associative style, beyond psychological motivation.

I don’t think it is adequate to show things “as they are” in a film. I don’t think you can do that today. There was a counter-movement ten years ago against formalist films. Even fiction films then presented things “as they were,” certainly an unpretentious goal. In my film BILDNIS EINER TRINKERIN, quasi-documentary scenes alternate with extremely stylized ones. I introduced this technique because I realized that Berlin filmmakers often made the quasi-documentary with tremendously precise film content, but formally lifeless. The public for these films has already developed a critical consciousness and watches a familiar reality on film — so familiar that the public doesn’t see, or doesn’t want to see, what goes on around them.

I work self-consciously with fragments of reality in a collage process. For example, in BILDNIS EINER TRINKERIN, I have integrated many other noises — both artificial and real — into the original sound track to broaden associative possibilities. Earlier I never had the money to record on-the-spot sound. Here I could afford a sound crew, but still used the old process. Basically, I attach little value to traditional narrative film. I work in a completely different way. In my films I introduce ironic “quotes” of films or images. In other words, I use traditional cinema’s clichés for my own purposes.

I had so little money for MADAME X that I was forced to work collectively from the start. I wrote the script and did the camera work. I had the notion of a pirate film. The ship was a metaphor for awakening, basically into the adventure of reality. Then I began to consider which women I could possibly work with, according to the roles. An artist on roller skates justifies her escape to Madame X because of her dissatisfaction with the academic culture industry; she speaks directly into a microphone. A beautiful prostitute with wonderfully developed body language had to find another way to articulate herself, and I just let her move. Nor does the third-world woman speak; she expresses herself by means of gestures and dance. Yvonne Rainer plays the artist (I had intended to play the role myself originally) and obviously could write her own text. I dissolved the shots of her into details — the roller skates, her hands, her mouth. Another woman spoke a curious mixture of several languages. With her, I’d write something and then ask her how she would say it. In this way the film incorporates many expressions typical of the women.

Although the film focuses primarily on the moment of awakening, I try to make clear that the enthusiasm of waking up cannot last because reality itself offers a mixed bag of pleasant and unpleasant experiences. Nonetheless, desires for escape and change should remain. All the characters die. All their traditional, socialized patterns of behavior must die or at least be disrupted to create new possibilities. In addition, the film investigates role-playing, the impossibility of rationally determined female or male role-playing.

I consciously formulated the contradiction between Madame X as a master and her promise of freedom. Madame X does not represent a person at all but rather a kind of power machine. She moves mechanically, just like her image, the ship’s figurehead. She represents me, power, and traditional hierarchical structures of behavior. I find it remarkable that awakening, which has become a mass gesture in the women’s movement, runs its course within the same hierarchical, patriarchal patterns. I wanted to show this contradiction as our reality, one that stuns and disturbs, and to emphasize that we have to take seriously the residue of behavioral structures which have been chiseled into us for centuries.

Amazingly, I find that there is always a figurehead which the women’s movement follows — and above all, within these traditional patterns. I find the movement itself very important, but I still need to gently critique it. We have given too little thought to the power of traditional structures. Surely, they must be broken down, but each of us falls back into the old patterns. Therefore, women in the film find a new identity that is only slightly different, not an ideal one. Yet changes only come step by step. I find it unrealistic to make a film in which women revolt and triumph gloriously.

this review first published by jump cut

01
Meshes of the Afternoon
Maya Deren
*
02
Un chien andalou
Luis Buñuel
*
03
Wavelength
Michael Snow
*
04
Outer Space
Peter Tscherkassky
*
05
Notes Towards an African Orestes
Pier Paolo Pasolini
*
06
The Unprecedented Defence of the Fortress Deutschkreuz
Werner Herzog
*
07
My Name Is Oona
Gunvor Nelson
*
08
by Brakhage: An Anthology, Volume One
Stan Brakhage
*
09
Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son
Ken Jacobs
*
10
India Song
Marguerite Duras
*
11
Of Freaks and Men
Aleksey Balabanov
*
12
At Land
Maya Deren
*
13
Titicut Follies
Frederick Wiseman
*
14
Fuck
Andy Warhol
*
15
Ticket of No Return
Ulrike Ottinger
*
16
Dog’s Dialogue
Raúl Ruiz
*
17
The Blood of a Poet
Jean Cocteau
*
18
The Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting
Raúl Ruiz
*
19
Brutality in Stone
Alexander Kluge
*
20
Even Dwarfs Started Small
Werner Herzog
*
21
Land Without Bread
Luis Buñuel
*
22
Three Ages
Buster Keaton
*
23
Zero for Conduct
Jean Vigo
*
24
L’Atalante
Jean Vigo
*
25
A Study in Choreography for Camera
Maya Deren
*
26
Hour of the Wolf
Ingmar Bergman
*
27
Patriotism
Yukio Mishima
*
28
Orpheus
Jean Cocteau
*
29
Tetsuo, the Iron Man
Shinya Tsukamoto
*
30
Daisies
Vera Chytilová
*
31
Sweet Movie
Dušan Makavejev
*
32
Black God, White Devil
Glauber Rocha
*
33
Les hautes solitudes
Philippe Garrel
*
34
The Heart of the World
Guy Maddin
*
35
Death in the Seine
Peter Greenaway
*
36
The Grandmother
David Lynch
*
37
Testament of Orpheus
Jean Cocteau
*
38
Mysterious Object at Noon
Apichatpong Weerasethakul
*
39
WR: Mysteries of the Organism
Dušan Makavejev
*
40
Les maîtres fous
Jean Rouch
*
41
Chronicle of a Summer
Edgar Morin
*
42
Death by Hanging
Nagisa Oshima
*
43
Blood of the Beasts
Georges Franju
*
44
Enthusiasm
Dziga Vertov
*
45
Prospero’s Books
Peter Greenaway
*
46
Fata Morgana
Werner Herzog
*
47
Far From Vietnam
Agnès Varda
*
48
Weekend
Jean-Luc Godard
*
49
Eraserhead
David Lynch
*
50
Celine and Julie Go Boating
Jacques Rivette
*
51
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
Robert Wiene
*
52
Killer of Sheep
Charles Burnett
*
53
Teorema
Pier Paolo Pasolini
*
54
L’âge d’or
Luis Buñuel
*
55
The Wrong Movement
Wim Wenders
*
56
Symbiopsychotaxiplasm
William Greaves
*
57
The Man with the Movie Camera
Dziga Vertov
*
58
Je tu il elle
Chantal Akerman
*
59
Limite
Mário Peixoto
*
60
Woman in Chains
Henri-Georges Clouzot
*
61
Motion Painting No. 1
Oskar Fischinger
*
62
Valerie and Her Week of Wonders
Jaromil Jires
*
63
Jubilee
Derek Jarman
*
64
The Man Who Sleeps
Bernard Queysanne
*
65
Blind Beast
Yasuzo Masumura
*
66
Vampyr
Carl Th. Dreyer
*
67
Train of Shadows
José Luis Guerín
*
68
El Topo
Alejandro Jodorowsky
*
69
Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach
Danièle Huillet
*
70
Punishment Park
Peter Watkins
*
71
The Party and the Guests
Jan Nemec
*
72
The Round-Up
Miklós Jancsó
*
73
Ceddo
Ousmane Sembene
*
74
A Page of Madness
Teinosuke Kinugasa
*
75
In the Realm of the Senses
Nagisa Oshima
*
76
Brightness
Souleymane Cissé
*
77
The House Is Black
Forugh Farrokhzad
*
78
Un chant d’amour
Jean Genet
*
79
House
Nobuhiko Obayashi
*
80
Seduction
Gustav Machatý
*
81
Pola X
Leos Carax
*
82
Darkness/Light/Darkness
Jań Švankmajer
*
83
Fireworks
Kenneth Anger
*
84
The Corridor
Sharunas Bartas
*
85
Possession
Andrzej Żuławski
*
86
A New Life
Philippe Grandrieux
*
87
Valse Triste
Bruce Conner
*
88
…Remote… Remote…
Valie Export
*
89
Pull My Daisy
Robert Frank
*
90
L’eclisse
Michelangelo Antonioni
*
91
All the World’s Memory
Alain Resnais
*
92
It Wasn’t Love
Sadie Benning
*
93
La jetée
Chris Marker
*
94
FILM IST. a girl & a gun
Gustav Deutsch
*
95
Ballet mécanique
Fernand Léger
*
96
Not Reconciled
Jean-Marie Straub
*
97
Begone Dull Care
Evelyn Lambart
*
98
Freaks
Tod Browning
*
99
Triumph of the Will
Leni Riefenstahl
*
100
Flaming Creatures
Jack Smith
*
101
Lost, Lost, Lost
Jonas Mekas
*
102
Unsere Afrikareise
Peter Kubelka
*
103
Outer and Inner Space
Andy Warhol
*
104
Christmas on Earth
Barbara Rubin
*
105
Two Men and a Wardrobe
Roman Polanski
*
106
Dandy Dust
A. Hans Scheirl
*
107
The World’s Greatest Sinner
Timothy Carey
*
108
Funeral Parade of Roses
Toshio Matsumoto
*
109
Living
Frans Zwartjes
*
110
L’ange
Patrick Bokanowski
*
111
Heroic Purgatory
Yoshishige Yoshida
*
112
Stations of the Elevated
Manny Kirchheimer
*
113
Blue
Derek Jarman
*
114
Fear
Gerald Kargl
*
115
The Death King
Jörg Buttgereit
*
116
Unas fotos en la ciudad de Sylvia
José Luis Guerín
*
117
Kitchen Sink
Alison Maclean
*
118
The Devils
Ken Russell
*
119
Fantastic Planet
René Laloux
*
120
The Silver Globe
Andrzej Żuławski
*
121
Nuit et brouillard
Alain Resnais
*
122
Letter from Siberia
Chris Marker
*
123
11 x 14
James Benning
*
124
The Hart Of London
Jack Chambers
*
125
The Days of Eclipse
Aleksandr Sokurov
*
126
Je Vous Salue Sarajevo
Jean-Luc Godard
*
127
Images of the World and the Inscription of War
*
128
Ecstasy
Gustav Machatý
*
129
Pentimento
Frans Zwartjes
*
130
Begotten
E. Elias Merhige
*
131
Tales of Ordinary Madness
Marco Ferreri
*
132
Awakening of the Beast
José Mojica Marins
*
133
Ménilmontant
Dimitri Kirsanoff
*
134
Dementia
John Parker
*
135
Eden and After
Alain Robbe-Grillet
*
136
Embassy
Chris Marker
*
137
Female Prisoner #701: Scorpion
Shunya Ito
*
138
Sissy Boy Slap Party
Guy Maddin
*
139
The Phantom Carriage
Victor Sjostrom
*
140
The House
Sharunas Bartas
*
141
Liquid Sky
Slava Tsukerman
*
142
Singapore Sling
Nikos Nikolaidis
*
143
Impressions of Upper Mongolia
Salvador Dalí
*
144
Africa Addio
Gualtiero Jacopetti
*
145
Film About a Woman Who…
Yvonne Rainer
*
146
Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y
Johan Grimonprez
*
147
Demolition of a Wall
Louis Lumière
*
148
Blow Up My Town
Chantal Akerman
*
149
Nocturne
Lars von Trier
*
150
Rabbit’s Moon
Kenneth Anger
*
151
It Is Not the Homosexual Who Is Perverse, But the Society in Which He Lives
Rosa von Praunheim
*
152
In Order Not to Be Here
Deborah Stratman
*
153
The Last of England
Derek Jarman
*
154
Return to Sarajevo
Philippe Grandrieux
*
155
Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!
Russ Meyer
*
156
Fando and Lis
Alejandro Jodorowsky
*
157
Reading Book of Blockade
Aleksandr Sokurov
*
158
The Brig
Jonas Mekas
*
159
Paradise
Michael Almereyda
*
160
Satan’s Brew
Rainer Werner Fassbinder
*
161
Le berceau de cristal
Philippe Garrel
*
162
The Raspberry Reich
Bruce LaBruce
*
163
The Last Revenge
Rainer Kirberg
*
164
Decoder
Muscha
*
165
Near Death
Frederick Wiseman
*
166
Secrets of a Soul
Georg Wilhelm Pabst
*
167
Flesh
Paul Morrissey
*
168
Pripyat
Nikolaus Geyrhalter
*
169
North on Evers
James Benning
*
170
World of Glory
Roy Andersson
*
171
Egomania – Insel ohne Hoffnung
Christoph Schlingensief
*
172
It Is Fine. Everything Is Fine!
David Brothers
*
173
What Is It?
Crispin Glover
*
174
The Last Battle
Luc Besson
*
175
Gambling, Gods and LSD
Peter Mettler
*
176
The Manhattan Love Suicides
Richard Kern
*
177
Barren Lives
Nelson Pereira dos Santos
*
178
Sobibor, Oct. 14, 1943, 4 p.m.
Claude Lanzmann
*
179
The Eighteen Who Stirred up a Storm
Yoshishige Yoshida
*
180
The Asthenic Syndrome
Kira Muratova
*
181
Alicia
Jaume Balagueró
*
182
Cindy: The Doll Is Mine
Bertrand Bonello
*
183
The Inner Scar
Philippe Garrel
*
184
Blow Job
Andy Warhol
*
185
Evening’s Civil Twilight in Empires of Tin
Jem Cohen
*
186
Viva la muerte
Fernando Arrabal
*
187
Rubber Johnny
Chris Cunningham
*
188
Housing Problems
*
189
Film
Alan Schneider
*
190
Cowards Bend the Knee or The Blue Hands
Guy Maddin
*
191
Mirindas asesinas
Álex de la Iglesia
*
192
Nocturno 29
Pere Portabella
*
193
The Angelic Conversation
Derek Jarman
*
194
Salome’s Last Dance
Ken Russell
*
195
The Phone Box
Antonio Mercero
*
196
Third Known Nest
Tom Kalin
*
197
The Skeleton Dance
Walt Disney
*
198
Dangerous Encounters: 1st Kind
Tsui Hark
*
199
The Hearts of Age
Orson Welles
*
200
Taking Off
Milos Forman
*
201
Ten Minutes Older
Herz Frank
*
202
Crime and Punishment
Piotr Dumala
*
203
Black Test Car
Yasuzo Masumura
*
204
Undressing My Mother
Ken Wardrop
*
205
Human Remains
Jay Rosenblatt
*
206
Life
Artavazd Peleshian
*
207
Lodela
Philippe Baylaucq
*
208
Méditerranée
Jean-Daniel Pollet
*
209
Eadweard Muybridge, Zoopraxographer
Thom Andersen
*
210
Epileptic Seizure Comparison
Paul Sharits
*
211
For My Crushed Right Eye
Toshio Matsumoto
*
212
Disorder
Huang Weikai
*
213
Neon Vampires
Carmelo Bene
*
214
The 70’s People
Peter Watkins
*
215
The Milky Scab
Velasco Broca
*
216
Avant pétalos grillados
Velasco Broca
*
217
Kinky Hoodoo Voodoo
Velasco Broca
*
218
Dante Isn’t Just Severe
Joaquín Jordá
*
219
Manopsychotisches Ballett
Jörg Siegert
*
220
Mondo Trasho
John Waters
*
221
The Inextinguishable Fire
Harun Farocki
*
222
Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis
Mary Jordan
*
223
Society of the Spectacle
Guy Debord
*
224
Grotesque
Zoltán Huszárik
*
225
Asparagus
Suzan Pitt
*
226
A Short Film About the Indio Nacional (or the Prolonged Sorrow of the Filipinos)
Raya Martin
*
227
The House of Life
David Byrne
*
228
Junkopia
Chris Marker
*
229
Experiments in the Revival of Organisms
D.I. Yashin
*
230
Fly
Yoko Ono
*
231
House
Walerian Borowczyk
*
232
Vixen!
Russ Meyer
*
233
Wolff von Amerongen – Did he committ bancruptcy offences?
Gerhard Friedl
*
234
Cinema and Death
Hartmut Bitomsky
*
235
The Flat
Jań Švankmajer
*
236
Last Words
Werner Herzog
*
237
Precautions Against Fanatics
Werner Herzog
*
238
Killed the Family and Went to the Movies
Júlio Bressane
*
239
Reminiscences
Diana Matuzevičienė
*
240
Young Aphrodites
Nikos Koundouros
*
241
Topos
Antouanetta Angelidi
*
242
Allegory
Kostas Sfikas
*
243
Faithful Heart
Jean Epstein
*
244
Towers Open Fire
William S. Burroughs
*
245
Multiple Orgasm
Barbara Hammer
*
246
Ice Cream for Crow
Don Van Vliet
*
247
Stridura
Ange Leccia
*
248
Fingered
Richard Kern
*
249
Dandy
Peter Sempel
*
250
Emperor Tomato Ketchup
Shuji Terayama
*
251
Kin-Dza-Dza
Georgi Daneliya
*
252
Audition
Frans Zwartjes
*
253
The Forbidden Files
Jean-Teddy Filippe
*
254
Flaming Ears
Ursula Puerrer
*

poster by guillaume le roi

This futuristic science fiction comedy features an atomic bomb blast that causes women to grow beards and lose the ability to have children. A summit meeting is held at the United Nations, with the proposed solution of building a time machine. The decision is made to travel back in time and murder Einstein, with the hopeful result being that without the noted mathematician’s research there will be no atomic bombs.

After earning a name for himself with a number of acclaimed short films and a striking animated feautre (The Theater of Mr. and Mrs. Kabal), director Walerian Borowczyk embarked on his first live-action film with the peculiar and fascinating Goto, Island of Love in 1968. Though anyone acquainted with his later work might expect a combination of antiquity and erotica, the film is quite a bit stranger than that, mixing political commentary with whimsical fantasy and poetic visuals into a truly unique and surprising experience.

On an isolated island unclaimed by any larger principalities, Goto (Brasseur) rules with a “generous” but firm patriarchal fist, with his wife, Glossia (Brancie), steady at his side. Essentially a dictatorship, the island is filled with a colorful assortment of characters who all fulfill their roles according to their social caste; however, enterprising Gono (Andréani) has other ideas, particularly when a reprieve from execution brings him into close contact with the rulers. At first assigned with odd but rewarding tasks like walking the royal dogs and catching insects, he begins a flirtation with the queen and orchestrates a political shift in power that may change the power structure of the island forever.

Filled with odd little grace notes and narrative tangents, Goto is fairly low on overt eroticism (mainly a few brief bare backsides and some corset-handling) but high on visual eccentricity that’s unmistakably Borowczyk. The black and white cinematography (with a quick splash of color) reveals one formal composition after another designed to evoke the mood of a lost painting, with characters precisely placed in unusual compostions similar to his later framing in films like Immoral Tales and The Beast. One particularly striking scene features the releasing of the monarch’s German Shepherds, a sequence possibly designed to pay homage to Brasseur’s final scene in Eyes without a Face. The director’s trademark oddball sense of humor is here as well, particularly in Gono’s outrageous Machiavellian tactics which take several unusual twists and turns.

In keeping with Cult Epics’ other fine Borowczyk releases, Goto sports a nice anamorphic transfer from a rare film element. The print features some flutterig black levels here and there, but the quality is sharp enough with good contrast. As with many titles supplied from Argos, the English subtitles are burned-in but at least remain clear and readable throughout. Extras include Borowczyk’s quirky 1959 short film, “Les Astronautes” (14 minutes), the theatrical trailer, and thorough liner notes by Rayo Casablanca which lay out the film’s placement in the director’s filmography while sketching out some of its major themes.

this review first appeared here

We see two queers in faecal dirty grainy black and white, one giving the other a blow job. Their clothes are covered with an indescrible substance; it’s probably good that we don’t have TV you can smell. While jerking a certain body part back and forth with his right arm, one repeatedly begs the other: ‘Give me your fucking puke, man!”, and the other immediately sticks his finger down his throat. Apparently the one who’s asking is very thirsty, and he is indeed satisfied….If, upon seeing this scene, the proverbial morsel does not drop out of your mouth back onto your plate, I suppose nothing in the world can shock you anymore. Everyone else clasps his remote control with glassy eyes and prays the rest of the film will be different. And it is. Not like you might expect from a short film, for The Dead Man 2: Return of the Dead Man shatters every conventional film framework.

After the opening scene we find ourselves in a strange bar: an old man who, judging by his hands, should have been in his grave a long time ago, walks in slowly with a totally blank, unseeing expression on his face. This man is looking for something. And he finally finds it, in the form of a fat lady who, at the end of the film, treats him to a forceful ‘golden shower’ he seems to enjoy intensely. In between is a long sequence which is almost entirely gray black, showing only outlines and shapes. The soundtrack is the industrial music of the Japanese composer Merzbow, sounding as if you were standing in the middle of a swarm of one million locusts. The endurance of our vision and hearing are tested ad absurdum; this is either the work of genius or of a madman, in the case of this film there’s nothing in between.

So what is the director trying to tell us here? I don’t know, there has been no international film critic who has been able to reveal the meaning of this film, it remains inaccessible, closed, bizarre, shocking, towering monolithically out of what we normally call film. Is it the poetry of death that we should not wish to return? Or is this an after death bar, where drinks are served wordlessly, soundlessly, while the images of the burning Waco stronghold are still glowing on the viewer’s retina? Is there sex after death?

You really have to see this piece of experimental cinema to believe it! By the way, this is the film with which Ian Kerkhof graduated from the Netherlands Film Academy! Enter at your own risk – here there be tygers.

Alexander Fortsch
DOOM nr 1, sep 1995

Au début du film on aperçoit deux homos se donnant une fellation. Leurs vêtements sont extrêmement sales et pleins de graisse. C’est bien que la télé olfactive n’existe pas encore. Le premier se masturbe avec sa main droite tandis que le deuxième répète sans cesse « Donne-moi ta bite, mec ! ». Le premier passe son index dans sa gorge. Le deuxième semble avoir très soif et paraît à la fin satisfait du résultat….Si vous n’avez pas envie de vomir en regardant cette scène, je pense que rien au monde ne pourra vous choquer plus. Tous les autres spectateurs seraient sortis de la salle ou ils auraient souhaité que le reste du film soit différent. Comme il est en vérité. « Le Mort 2- Le retour de l’Homme Mort » renverse toutes les conventions esthétiques du court-métrage.

Après cette scène d’ouverture, on se retrouve dans un bar étrange. Un vieillard qui, en jugeant par ses mains, serait enterré depuis longtemps, se promène lentement sans expression au visage. Il cherche quelqu’un qui est une femme grosse qui l’arrosera d’un « liquide doré » à la fin, qui lui donnera du plaisir. Au milieu, il y a une longue scène noire/grise qui montre seulement de s formes figées. La bande musicale est celle du compositeur japonais Merzbow et elle nous fait croire que nous sommes au milieu d’un groupe d’un million de locustes. L’endurance de notre vision et perception auditive est testée ad absurdum. C’est en même temps le travail d’un réalisateur génial et d’un fou. Il n’y a rien au milieu.

Qu’est-ce qu’il essaie à nous raconter le cinéaste avec ce film ? Je ne sais pas. Aucun critique mondialement n’a jamais été capable de révéler le sens de cette œuvre inaccessible, étrange, choquante, éloignée de ce qu’on appelle banalement film. Est cela la poésie de la mort qu’on ne souhaiterait pas qu’elle revienne ? Ou est cela un bar qui vient après la mort où les boissons sont servies silencieusement pendant que les images du Waco en flammes s’impriment sur notre iris. Y a-t-il du sexe après la mort ?

Vous devez visionner ce film expérimental pour y croire ! A propos, avec ce film Ian Kerkhof est sorti diplômé de la Netherlands Film Academy. Entrez dans votre responsabilité.

alexander fortsch
doom #1, september 1995
translated into french by dionysos andronis
this french translation first appeared on dionysos’ excellent site

Arturo Ripstein’s Mexican-made “The Castle of Purity,” the story of a man who locked his family within urban walls for 18 years, had been hailed as extraordinary before its showings last weekend at the Museum of Modern Art. It is indeed extraordinary and haunting.

Mr. Ripstein arranged his drama in a stately flow of lucid, exquisitely colored images that edge toward doom. The acting is so good that it is hardly noticeable as such. There is not one note of music, only the pelting rain, blending with Alex Phillips’s photography and Manuel Fontanals’s set design (a spacious but tottering house, not a chamber of horrors).

This bizarre, burrowing movie has been called an attack on Latin family tradition, a metaphor of Christian society and a suspense thriller. To one viewer, it is all three. With his small cast, headed by Claudio Brook and Rita Macedo, and his co-scenarist José Emilio Pacheco, the 34-year-old director has subtly shaped a remarkable film. Mr. Ripstein is a young man to the movie camera born.

this review first published here

Synopsis

To the question “What is a woman?” posed by a television station, a few women filmmakers have responded, including Agnès Varda. This cine-leaflet is a possible answer, and is called “Our Bodies, Our Sex.” On screen, a pregnant woman, naked, dancing, and laughing lustily, sparked complaints written to the TV station. The film is about women’s body—our body—our object-body, our taboo-body, our body with or without children. How can we live our body?

Agnès Varda

Agnès Varda has been called the “Grandmother of the New Wave,” a well-meaning if curious tribute for a woman who directed her first feature film at the age of 26. Born in Brussels, Varda studied literature and psychology at the Sorbonne, and art history at the École du Louvre. She’d originally wanted to be a museum curator, but a night-school course in photography changed her mind. Rapidly establishing herself as a top-rank still photographer, Varda became the official cameraperson for the Theatre Festival of Avignon and the Theatre National Populaire, and then pursued a career as a photojournalist.

Encouraged by filmmaker Alain Resnais, Varda made her movie directorial bow in 1955 with La Pointe Courte. She based the film on a William Faulkner short story, to which she was attracted because of its parallel plotlines (a recurring device in her later films). That same year, she accompanied another future New Wave director, Chris Marker, to China as visual advisor for his Dimanche… read more

Agnès Varda has been called the “Grandmother of the New Wave,” a well-meaning if curious tribute for a woman who directed her first feature film at the age of 26. Born in Brussels, Varda studied literature and psychology at the Sorbonne, and art history at the École du Louvre. She’d originally wanted to be a museum curator, but a night-school course in photography changed her mind. Rapidly establishing herself as a top-rank still photographer, Varda became the official cameraperson for the Theatre Festival of Avignon and the Theatre National Populaire, and then pursued a career as a photojournalist.

Encouraged by filmmaker Alain Resnais, Varda made her movie directorial bow in 1955 with La Pointe Courte. She based the film on a William Faulkner short story, to which she was attracted because of its parallel plotlines (a recurring device in her later films). That same year, she accompanied another future New Wave director, Chris Marker, to China as visual advisor for his Dimanche a Pekin. Varda’s international reputation was secured with her 1961 feature Cleo de 5 a 7, which related in “real time” the anguish of a pop singer awaiting the results of her cancer tests. Her next film, and her first in color, was Le Bonheur (1965), a pioneering feminist manifesto wherein a misguided protagonist convinces himself that he can live copacetically with both his wife and his mistress.

Many of Varda’s subsequent productions were heavily influenced by her political views. While visiting America with her director-husband Jacques Demy in 1968, she directed two tractlike short subjects, one of which, Black Panthers (1969), was a paean to activist Huey Newton. Her 1970 production Nausicaa, a TV documentary about Greeks living in France, was so politically volatile that (according to Varda) it was banned outright by Greece’s military government. Varda continued experimenting with new forms into the ‘70s; her German documentary Daguerreotypes (1974) was comprised of 4000 still photos (an extension of Varda’s fondness for “personifying” inanimate objects), while Response de Femmes (1975) was lensed in 8-millimeter. In 1977, she formed her own production company, Cine-Tamaris. Its first effort was One Sings, the Other Doesn’t, a celebration of “the happiness of being a woman” that proved to be a worldwide success. Varda would not make another theatrical film until the highly acclaimed 1985 docudrama Vagabond, a bleak, powerful portrait of an ill-fated young drifter (played by Sandrine Bonnaire, who won a César for her performance).

In addition to her own films, Varda has written dialogue for the works of others, most notably for Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris. She also served as producer for her husband’s Lady Oscar. As Demy lay dying in 1990, Varda expressed her love and appreciation for her husband in the eloquent Jacquot de Nantes (1991); though many believed that this would be her farewell film, she was back in 1995 with Les Cent et Une Nuits. Among the many awards bestowed upon Varda have been the Prix Melies for Cleo de 5 a 7 and the Prix Louis Delluc and Berlin Film Festival Special Award for Le Bonheur.

(From http://www.allmovie.com/cg/avg.dll?p=avg&sql=2:115169~T1 )

this article first published here

Filmed and edited by Brian De Palma
Written by William Arrowsmith (based on The Bacchae by Euripides)
US, 1970, black & white, DVD, 85 min.
Cast: William Finley, Joan Macintosh, and Will Shephard

When Richard Schechner’s The Performance Group put on a notoriously uninhibited update of the Euripedes play “The Bacchae” in a Greenwich Village garage, it became the talk of New York and solidified the group’s reputation at the forefront of avant garde theater. Brian De Palma was floored when he saw a performance and immediately set out to devise a way to present the fourth-wall-obliterating play in cinematic form. He presents it in split-screen, with cameras recording both the cast and the audience as they intermingle in a writhing, orgiastic expression of Dionysian abandon.

Back in January, AFS presented DIONYSUS IN ’69 as part of the Essential Cinema series “First Blood: The Early Films of Brian De Palma.” Now, to coincide with the re-staging of DIONYSUS IN ’69 from Dec. 3-20 at the Off Center by renowned Austin theater group Rude Mechanicals, we’re thrilled to present the film again, this time with the director of the original performance, Richard Schechner, in attendance.
About Richard Schechner:

Richard Schechner has directed plays with leading professional actors in the United States, Taiwan, China mainland, India, and the Republic of South Africa. Productions such as Dionysus in 69, Commune, Faust/gastronome, Oresteia, Hamlet: That Is the Question, and Yokastas Redux confirm that Schechner is one of the world’s most innovative directors. Schechner is the founding director of The Performance Group and the artistic director of East Coast Artists. In his directing, he has pioneered environmental theatre and audience participation. He has radically reinterpreted and deconstructed canonical texts of the Western repertory. Schechner is in Austin as Cline Visiting Professor of the Humanities at the University of Texas at Austin.

more info here

THE LAST LETTER (LA DERNIÈRE LETTRE) is based on a chapter of Vasily Grossman’s novel Life and Fate. It is 1941. A Ukrainian ghetto has fallen to the Nazis and all of its Jewish residents are slated to be murdered. In the midst of the impending horror, the town’s physician, a woman named Anna Semionova, dictates one final letter to her son, who is safe outside of enemy lines. The letter, with its detailed observations of daily life in a ghetto, reveals the fear, courage, frailty, compassion and dignity of this woman as she reviews her life and faces her death.

more info here

Meghan Vogel

Finally, the perfect film has been made about Robert Anton Wilson. Part mystic, part prophet, part quantum scientist and all optimist, Wilson has grown over the years from a cultish science-fiction writer into a revered, almost mythical, icon ala Timothy Leary. Throughout his fiction and non-fiction works alike, Wilson manages to weave in certain diverse topics, ones all ultimately headed in the same direction. From politics to neuroscience to occultism to Zen Buddhism, Wilson breaks down the most esoteric philosophies and models using wit, humbleness and pure charm.

The documentary, “Maybe Logic: The Lives and Ideas of Robert Anton Wilson,” chronicles the philosophy and themes of Wilson, perhaps best known for his science-fiction/fantasy work “The Illuminatus!” trilogy, first published in the mid-’70s, and a nonfiction work, “Cosmic Trigger.”

“The key was finding the core of everything he talks about,” said director Lance Bauscher, a former Humboldt State University student. “That’s where the name ‘Maybe Logic’ came from. It’s really at the heart of all he writes and talks about — this probabilistic perspective at the center of everything.”

Bauscher, who also wrote, co-edited, co-designed and co-producer the film, met Wilson about three years ago in Capitola, near Santa Cruz, where they both live. He said Wilson was eager to do the documentary when the idea came up.

“He’s a communicator, so he jumped right at it,” Bauscher said. “It’s not an objective film. He’s the subject, and we wanted to celebrate his ideas.” Bauscher ended up with about 100 hours of film.

“He can just talk and talk, and his knowledge and memory recall is extraordinary,” Bauscher said. “There are so many aspects to him, but we really just went into the philosophy of Bob. He’s just another guy — he’s just extremely bright, and so funny and so humble. He doesn’t waste words.”

“I started rebelling in my teens, and I’m rebelling more every year,” the 71-year-old Wilson says at the beginning of the film. Although in poor health, suffering from post-polio syndrome, Wilson seems more alive now than ever. With his shining eyes, snow white beard and simple, humorous aphorisms, its easy to take him for an image of Old Testament prophet from the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel- that is, if prophets have Brooklyn accents.

Reverend Ivan Stang, of the Church of the Subgenius, perhaps best puts it when he introduces Wilson at an event as, “The Jerry Fallwell of quantum physics, the Carl Sagan of religion, the Arnold Schwarzenegger of feminism … and the Robert Anton Wilson of humanity.”

Spliced together with old footage of Wilson during interviews, speaking engagements and stand-up comedy throughout the last three decades, the film also includes interviews with Wilson’s colleagues, including author Tom Robbins and legendary ’60s figure Paul Krassner. Cleverly and tastefully assembling Wilson’s diffuse observations, the documentary does a remarkable job of touching on all of the motifs in Wilson’s work.

Some fans, however, may be disappointed the political conspiracy theories often mentioned in Wilson’s books, and which “The Illuminatus! Trilogy” is modeled after, aren’t given more screen time.

“The conspiracy theories aren’t what Bob is all about,” Bauscher said. “He just uses them as a teaching tool.”

Indeed, Wilson refutes conspiracy theories based on the logic that nothing is true, and everything is true.

“The strongest conspiracy is the conspiracy of the stupid,” he says in the film. The film begins with Wilson laying out the basic tenets of his beliefs, or rather, what he believes to be the case.

“Everybody abstracts a different reality tunnel. We don’t know what is or what isn’t,” he says. “All we know is what we tuned in or didn’t tune in.”

Beautifully intertwining the scientist Wilson with the humanitarian Wilson, the film moves in a seamless arc, managing to encompass all of Wilson’s teaching methods and philosophies.

“Every model we make tells us about how our minds work, just as much as it tells us about the universe.

These are just symbolic human games,” says Wilson, the quantum physicist, when reminding his audience that the “map is not the territory.”

As a Discordian Pope, Wilson, who is fond of quoting James Joyce and William Blake, also tells his audience, “Most people just take themselves too damn seriously, which is why they act like damn fools.”

fnord.

Speaking about his illness, a major part of his life these days, and his reliance on medical marijuana for pain control, Wilson says, “The high is part of the cure, every disease in this world is improved if you feel happy and good … I don’t know why the government wants me to be in pain.”

Calling the political climate of current society “the last dying gasp of the dinosaur age,” Wilson lays out his ideas for a more humane world: The absence of pain and enough food and clean water for everyone. “We have the capability to that now,” he says. “And if that happened, why would anyone want to become a terrorist?”

Wilson also outlines interest in occultism, paganism and Eastern philosophies, while conjoining them with modern-day neuroscience and physics through the idea that mysticism is just another branch of science.

Despite being a Buddhist, Discordian, Subgenius and Witch, Wilson remains skeptical.

“B.S. stands for belief system,” he says. “Don’t accept anyone else’s, and don’t believe totally in your own.”

Wilson’s playfulness is captured in the sleek production of the film’s quality. The soundtrack, provided in part by avant-garde hip-hop label Ninja Tunes, is another added bonus. Co-creator of the label, Matt Black, was more than eager to help with the music.

“Bob’s influence is huge,” Bauscher said. “He’s far from mainstream, but people in modern music circles are really into him.” The film is not yet in major distribution, and has been showing in select cities in the Pacific Northwest. Soon it will be shown at the Santa Fe Film Festival and the San Francisco Independent Film Festival.

“We hope to show it at a lot of film festivals,” Bauscher said. “Hopefully it will move out of outside of Bob fans into the film community. It’s really for fans today who love his stuff, but also for fans who are yet to be fans.”

Those familiar with Wilson’s life through his non-fiction books, will be glad to see major events in the author’s life extrapolated upon. Above all, however, the documentary capture’s Wilson’s seductively positive outlook.

“I believe a golden age is possible in the future,” Wilson says. “And why not try for it?”

For more information about the documentary visit www.maybelogic.com

Wednesday night, the San Francisco International Film Festival presented its annual Founder’s Directing Award to director Walter Salles, known for his films, “The Motorcycle Diaries,” 1998′s Best Foreign Language Film winner “Central Station” and “Dark Water.” The main topic of discussion, however, was Salles’ proposed and long-in-the-works production and adaptation of Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road.”

The evening was built around a work-in-progress screening of “In Search of On the Road,” which is the Salles-directed documentary about his own journey to get the “possible film” (as he repeatedly referred to it) of “On the Road” made. The cut shown was organized specifically for the SFIFF screening and was about an hour long, though Sallessuggested that the entire film will end up being a regular feature length documentary (he recently told the SF Gate it was a “very impressionistic 60-minute edit, a work in progress of an unfinished 120-minute documentary,” and that sums it up well). Acknowledging the gravity of adapting such a book, the doc is exploratory, ironically and befittingly his own travelogue of self-discovery behind the heart of the novel and characters. Most impressive was the director’s deep-seated desire to really understand the material and capture the spiritual humanity within even though he’s obviously been living with the book and film adaptation for several years.

While there has been recent movement on the feature-length adaptation; GarettHedlund (“Tron” “Friday Night Lights”) was evidently cast as Moriarty and Sam Rileywas allegedly cast as Sal Paradise (the Kerouac proxy) in 2009, the filmmaker sadly declined to go into any details or specifics of recent casting and it sounds like that’s because funding is still TBD.

So then, first and foremost on people’s mind, how close is the film to production? Unfortunately, Sallesdanced around the subject without much commitment to any facts. “You’ve heard of the Sisyphus myth?” he quipped alluding to the myriad of obstacles facing the long-gestating project. “It’s a work of passion and one cannot try to dive into this territory without knowing the difficulties that surround it.” He also admitted that the current state of independent production in the U.S. makes things “complicated.”

“We are in the hopeful phase of trying to together put it together, I hope somehow…” Salles said, not entirely sounding entirely that convincing. “What I’m trying to express here with [“In Search of On the Road”] is the doubts involved with dealing with such a mythical subject matter and trying to enrich the perception you can have of this material.”

While the documentary itself didn’t give any answers regarding a timeline, when it stated that any version of “On the Road” done correctly would need to be shot in black and white, the audience met the comment with vociferous applause.

Salles is clearly a deep and thoughtful person and perhaps this is why he’s tackled this project so deeply, carefully, methodically and with self-doubt. While it’s a very classic American novel, obviously being translated by an outsider, he sees the Kerouac book as a universal work.

“Motorcycle Diaries was about a social political revolution, but here, it’s political yes, but it was a behavioral revolution at stake. And that effected all of us. We may have lived in different parts of the world with different languages, but it is strangely part of our experience as well. This movement meant a lot and my generation was always informed by it.”

Mexican director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu conducted the Q&A with revealing and often humorous results. At one point, fishing for laughs, Inarritu asked Salles if his “On the Road” adaptation would be a 2-D or 3-D film, but instead received a characteristically serious response that had Salles looking back to the birth of cinema to support the case he’s about to make. Though not humorless, he shrugged at the third dimension issue and said flatly, “I saw incredible films last year… in 2D.”

The documentary was born out of a previous missed opportunity during the years ofpre-production leading up to “The Motorcycle Diaries.” To get a true feeling for the story,Salles repeated Guevara’s journey found in the book three times over during which he researched and interviewed first-hand witnesses. In retrospect he decided the process itself would have made for a fantastic film itself and expressed regret saying, “those two years of exploration were really unique and I wish I had filmed them.” “In Search of On the Road” is his way of avoiding making that same error again.

The film aims to cover a range of subjects but is specifically built around the very candid concept that “On the Road” may be an impossible film to properly adapt. Interviews in the film include many first-hand witnesses of Kerouac’s journeys, biographers, poets and a good number of prominent figures in the film world- many of whom have at one point or another considered being involved in other iterations of the adaptation. The cut shown last night included segments with Francis Ford Coppola, Dennis Hopper, Johnny Depp,David Byrne, Sean Penn, Dave Eggers, Philip Glass, Wim Wenders and Peter Coyote.

Shot on Super8 and miniDV, the documentary also shows off some footage of an open casting call held by Coppola over 15 years ago in anticipation of a different version of the film. In it, we see Matthew McConaughey auditioning for the role of Dean Moriarty,Russell Crowe as Old Bull Lee (the William Burroughs character), as well as Brendan Fraser, Mira Sorvino and Ashley Judd. The edit of the auditions isn’t exactly a cruel portrayal of the actors, but there probably wasn’t anyone in the theater wanting to imagine “On the Road” with the cast presented here.

In a brief session at the end of the program, Graham Leggat, Executive Director of the San Francisco Film Society, compares Salles’s quest to get the film made to the Terry Gilliamdoc “Lost In La Mancha,” a choice of words that clearly illustrates the fight that the director has before him. If we can’t get great adaptations based on deeply loved literary classics, at least we can get some great documentaries about failing to do so. – Sean Gillane

this article first appeared here

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Bonjour,

Ce soir Vendredi 13 a lieu la première projection de BUCK & BUCKY, un film expérimental de science-fiction traitant des mythes égyptiens sur trois écrans et d’une durée de trois heures réalisé par CA CA CA.

Ont participé activement à la bande sonore les projets TZII, SOLAR SKELETONS et HATHOR KYRHIARIA.

Vous êtes conviés à cette projection semi-privée à 21h00 au 43 rue des fabriques 1000 Bruxelles (sonnette Antoine MEYER).