Standish Lauder
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Thomas WhiteWho’s Crazy (1966)
'Accompanied by a frenetic original soundtrack by the great Ornette Coleman, insane asylum inmates escape their confinement and hole up in a deserted Belgian farmhouse, where they cook large quantities of eggs and condemn one of their own in an impromptu court. The actors don’t have much need for words when they can dance around, light things on fire, and drip hot wax on each other instead. Ornette Coleman and the other members of his trio – David Izenzon and Charles Moffett – recorded their score for WHO’S CRAZY? in one go while the film was projected for them, and the result feels like a bizarre silent film with the greatest possible accompaniment. The soundtrack also features a young Marianne Faithfull singing what are probably her most experimental riffs – written for her especially by Ornette – as she asks, “Is God man? Is man God?” in an original track titled “Sadness.” WHO’S CRAZY? was long thought to be lost by jazz-on-film scholars and the Library of Congress. In early 2015, the only surviving copy of the film, a 35mm print struck for the film’s debut at Cannes in 1966, was salvaged from director Thomas White’s garage after sitting on a shelf there for decades. Ornette’s soundtrack exists as a hard-to-find LP, but audiences have never before had the opportunity to see what Ornette saw when he composed it. The cast consists of actors from New York’s experimental theater troupe, the Living Theatre, who also performed in Shirley Clarke’s THE CONNECTION.'-- Grand Motel
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Teinosuke KinugasaA Page of Madness (1926)
'Though the synopsis of the plot doesn’t really do justice to the movie — a retired sailor who works at an insane asylum to care after his wife who tried to kill their child — the visual audacity of Page is still startling today. The opening sequence rhythmically cuts between shots of a torrential downpour and gushing water before dissolving into a hallucinatorily odd scene of a young woman in a rhomboid headdress dancing in front of a massive spinning ball. The woman is, of course, an inmate at the asylum dressed in rags. As her dance becomes more and more frenzied, the film cuts faster and faster, using superimpositions, spinning cameras and just about every other trick in the book. While Kinugasa was clearly influenced by The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, which also visualizes the inner world of the insane, the movie is also reminiscent of the works of French avant-garde filmmakers like Abel Gance, Russian montage masters like Sergei Eisenstein and, in particular, the subjective camerawork of F. W. Murnau in Der Letzte Mann. Kinugasa incorporated all of these influences seamlessly, creating an exhilarating, disturbing and ultimately sad tour de force of filmmaking. The great Japanese film critic Akira Iwasaki called the movie “the first film-like film born in Japan.”'-- Open Culture
the entire film
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George BarryDeath Bed: The Bed That Eats (1977)
'In 1972, some guy named George Barry got a camera and some film. What happened was Death Bed: The Bed That Eats. An incredibly bizarre mix of horror, sexploitation, avant-garde technique and arthouse, Death Bed was shot in 1972 but a print wasn't struck until 1977. It then disappeared. before being rediscovered in 2003 and released on DVD, it gained a cult following when bootlegs made from a rare UK VHS/Betamax copy of the film began circulating. Director George Barry reportedly forgot about the film before he came across said bootleg found on a horror movie forum.'-- collaged
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Standish LauderNecrology (1969)
'Lauder’s film is a continuous shot of the anonymous faces of evening commuters in New York’s Grand Central Station. The film was made with a stationary camera pointed at a down escalator, and then the film was run backward, creating an effect of expressionless faces rising towards the heavens. Legendary filmmaker Jonas Mekas remarked of Necrology, “It is one of the strongest and grimmest comments upon the contemporary society that cinema has produced.”'-- Andris Damburs
the entire film
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Helge Schneider00 Schneider - Jagd auf Nihil Baxter (1994)
'The funny clown Bratislav Metulskie is found dead in circus "Apollo". The retired commissioner 00 Schneider is asked to assume control of the case. Schneider and his aged sidekick Korschgen investigate to find the murderer. Nihil Baxter, a passionate art collector who is a little nuts and does not cultivate social contacts at all. Commissioner Schneider investigates at the circus and pays Baxter a visit. Baxter makes up an alibi and claims that he was working on a painting when the murder took place. The Sidekick Korschgen finds out that the picture is an imitation. When Baxter tries to escape to Rio by plane after he stole a sculpture from the practice of Dr. Hasenbein 00 Schneider and his sidekick are also on board. As they are incognito they are able to arrest the criminal with the help of the world famous "sniffer dog nose" pilot.'-- collaged
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Dušan MakavejevInnocence Unprotected (1968)
'“Narrative structure is prison; it is tradition; it is a lie; it is a formula that is imposed,” Dušan Makavejev once said. The Serbian filmmaker, who rose to cinematic fame or infamy (depending on who you ask) in Communist Yugoslavia in the sixties and early seventies, believed in breaking all the rules. Through collage and juxtaposition, Buñuelian absurdity and sexual confrontation, Makavejev freed narrative cinema from all oppressive norms. This utterly unclassifiable film is one of Makavejev’s most freewheeling farces, assembled from the “lost” footage of the first Serbian talkie, a silly melodrama titled Innocence Unprotected, made during the Nazi occupation; contemporary interviews with the megaman who made it and other crew members; and images of the World War II destruction, and subsequent rebuilding, of Belgrade. And at its center is a (real-life) character you won’t soon forget: Dragoljub Aleksic, an acrobat, locksmith, and Houdini-style escape artist whom Makavejev uses as the absurd and wondrous basis for a look back at his country’s tumultuous recent history.'-- The Criterion Collection
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Oliver HerrmannOne Night, One Life (1999)
'Oliver Herrmann was quickly proving to be an artist of provocative potential after creating the innovative short films Dichterlieb (2000), One Night, One Life (2002), and Le Sacre du Printemps (released 2004). Tragically, Herrmann’s life and career were cut short when he died of a diabetic stroke at the age of 40 in 2003. Herrman’s film of Arnold Shoenberg’s “Pierrot Lunaire,” is conducted by modern music specialist Pierre Boulez and starring Schäfer. A bit of history may be needed for Schoenberg’s atonal, expressionist melodrama. Set to Albert Giraud’s text, the poems, usually spoken by a soprano, are delivered in “Sprechgesang” (spoken singing). Upon its 1912 premiere, “Pierrot Lunaire” predictably offended the traditionalists. Much publicity was made about it, mostly bad, but at least this was a period when new music and new composers actually grabbed headlines. As late as the 1970s, conservative NY Times music critic Harold C. Schonberg claimed that “Pierrot Lunaire”‘s’ failure to enter the standard repertoire was an indictment of contemporary music. Yet, the 21st century has (somewhat) rendered Schonberg’s assessment as premature. If not quite part of the daily repertoire diet, “Lunaire” is extensively recorded and performed. One might envision it someday becoming as commonplace as Beethoven. However, together, Herrmann, Boulez, and Schäfer produce a commendable effort to rectify its potentially harmful respectability. The proof is in the pudding as far as music forum reviews go, with the hopelessly puritan music fans expressing outrage towards Herrmann’s blasphemous filming of music that was labeled blasphemous in 1912.'-- 366 Weird Movies
the entire film
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Marco FerreriDillinger Is Dead (1969)
'In this magnificently inscrutable late-sixties masterpiece, Marco Ferreri, one of European cinema’s most idiosyncratic auteurs, takes us through the looking glass to one seemingly routine night in the life of an Italian gas mask designer, played, in a tour de force performance, by New Wave icon Michel Piccoli. In his claustrophobic mod home, he pampers his pill-popping wife, seduces his maid, and uncovers a gun that may have once been owned by John Dillinger—and then things get even stranger. A surreal political missive about social malaise, Dillinger Is Dead (Dillinger è morto) finds absurdity in the mundane. It is a singular experience, both illogical and grandly existential.'-- The Criterion Collection
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Mamoru OshiiAngel's Egg (1985)
'When people talk about something as having multiple interpretations, there's almost always one "master" interpretation of the material that bubbles to the top and gets stuck there. The more movies and shows I watch, even those not designed to be an open-ended viewing experience, the more I feel it's best to leave all such theories out of the picture until you've formed an outlook of your own. A movie should be a viewing experience first and a theory-forming exercise second, doubly so if the first viewing yields up not a storyline or even a theory, but a mood. Mamoru Oshii's Angel's Egg is so heavily charged with meaning and symbolism, it practically dares you to make something of it. It seems foolish to write about the film without producing something akin to the I-think-this-means-that essays that swirled in the wake of Stanley Kubrick's equally enigmatic 2001: a space odyssey. Surely the whole point of talking about a movie this heavily symbolic is to talk symbolism, right?'-- Ganriki
the entire film
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Gian Carlo Menotti Help, Help, the Globolinks! (1969)
'In this children’s opera, the world has been invaded by bizarre alien creatures named Globolinks, who are allergic to music. A bus full of children returning to boarding school breaks down in the middle of a lonely forest, and the students are surrounded by the alien creatures. Meanwhile, back at the school, the headmaster is infected by one of the aliens, meaning that he will soon turn into a Globolink himself. A children’s opera about music-loathing aliens is lready presumptively pretty weird. But when the opera is made in 1968, at the height of the psychedelic sixties, and utilizes all the camera tricks, distorted electronic noises, and bizarre set designs Summer of Love filmmakers developed in an attempt to mimic the disorienting effects of LSD, there’s no more need for the presumption–we’re definitely caught in a very weird nook of film.'-- collaged
the entire film
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Pat O'NeillWater and Power (1989)
'Water and Power is one of the most significant experimental films to come out of the 1980s, winning a Sundance Grand Jury Prize in1990 and being selected to the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress in 2008. Requiring almost a decade of work, the film is a true city symphony to the Los Angeles Basin. Like Roman Polanski's Chinatown, the core focus of the film is the relationship of water, in all its forms, to the duplicitous undercurrents of this desert town. O'Neill implies a history of a frontier town, superimposing text and surrealist vignettes over wide vistas of the urban streets of LA and the landscape of Owens Valley, a main water source for the downtown area that is becoming increasingly sucked dry. The size and resolution of the 35mm film image provides a massive canvas for O'Neill's incredibly precise optical printing work. The baselines for many of his compositions are time-lapsed landscapes, shot on a motion-control camera that allows precise movements to be duplicated in other locales. On top of these, O'Neill layers hi-contrast, ghostly figures performing surrealistic repetitive actions in a derelict downtown office, drawing historical and metaphoric parallels to the landscape being shown. The images are sutured together under the spell of George Lockwood's beautiful sound design, layering snippets from B-movies, sound effects and a plethora of musical genres over the visual field.'-- aafimfest.org
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Věra ChytilováLes Petites Marguerites (1966)
'The unconventional Les Petites Marguerites (aka "Daisies") was the product of an unconventional filmmaker. A former philosophy and architecture student, Chytilová enrolled at FAMU in 1957, the only female in her class. There she discovered a love for improvisation, nonprofessional actors, and cinema verité—anything that rejected the idea of film as an exact science. Daisies incorporates all this and more in a wildly experimental narrative that is considered the movement’s singular feminist statement. Although Chytilová has denied that it was her intention to make a feminist film per se, it’s easy to see why decades of scholarship has made this assertion. The two teenage protagonists, Marie I and Marie II (Jitka Cerhová and Ivana Karbanová, neither of whom had any acting experience), refuse to play by the rules of the patriarchal culture around them, spending the film’s seventy-odd (very odd) minutes tearing up the world: exploiting weak-willed older men, consuming enormous amounts of food and drink, wreaking inebriated havoc, and finally descending into pure annihilation. In one of the film’s most famous sequences, they gleefully cut up a succession of phallic objects (bananas, sausages, bread rolls) with scissors. Chytilová ensures that something unexpected occurs in virtually every shot and edit, juxtaposing images with dissonant sounds, abruptly changing color filters within scenes, and fragmenting many sequences through unmotivated montage.'-- Michael Koresky
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Shozin Fukui964 Pinocchio (1991)
'Pinocchio 964 is a memory-wiped sex slave who is thrown out by his owners for failure to maintain an erection. It is unclear in what ways he has been modified beyond having no memory and being unable to communicate. He is discovered by Himiko while wandering aimlessly through the city. Himiko has also been memory-wiped, possibly by the same company that produced Pinocchio, but she is fully functional. Himiko spends her days drawing maps of the city, to aid other memory-wiped people. Himiko takes Pinocchio home and tries to teach him to speak. After much effort he has a breakthrough and finally becomes aware of his situation. At this point his body erupts in an inexplicable metamorphosis and it becomes clear that his modifications were much more involved and esoteric than simple memory loss. Himiko also begins to transform, though in a much more subtle manner.'-- letterboxd.com
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Willard MaasGeography Of The Body (1943)
'Extreme close-ups of nude male and female bodies, taken through a magnifying glass bought at a dime store, are combined with a surrealist text written and read by poet George Barker. The poem, in Barker's deadpan reading, comments humorously on the body parts, which are photographed in such tiny detail that they appear as landscapes. Geography of the Body was the first widely distributed underground art film, and was a regular fixture of the campus art film circuit for years. Although by the year 2000 it appears as a relatively quaint antique (and is in serious need of preservation assistance), Geography of the Body was easily as influential in its day as Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid's Meshes of the Afternoon, made the same year.'-- Ubu
the entire film
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Robert Downey Sr.Greaser's Palace (1972)
'Nearly every event in Greaser’s Palace arrives unexpectedly and unannounced; there are few movies as totally unpredictable as this one. Jesus appears as a song-and-dance man, and has an agent. Characters get shot unexpectedly and repeatedly, and return from the dead with psychedelic stories about the afterlife. A midget and a transvestite live together in a prairie homestead as man and wife. A man tries to rape a wooden Indian. Mariachi music is used as an instrument of torture. The weirdness of this world is underplayed; none of the characters, with an important exception, acknowledge or even notice that anything is even the slightest bit off. This attitude makes some of the events come off even funnier, but it also makes the proposed comedy impure and tainted. Downey never signals to us whether he’s making a joke or not, and so we’re never sure whether we’re supposed to laugh or not. A town is assembled, quietly listening to a woman sing a song about the virtue of chastity. Suddenly, a man starts screaming in pain because a man dressed as a Halloween ghost burns him with a lit cigar. He is dragged by a gang of cowboys out into a dirt road and shot by his father for interrupting the festivities. Is this funny, or disturbing? Who can say? We don’t have a stock emotional response to that kind of scene; we have to make up our reaction on the fly.'-- 366 Weird Movies
the entire film
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Juraj HerzThe Cremator (1969)
'In this mesmerizing, avant-garde Gothic horror film, a funerary specialist becomes obsessed with what he believes to be the nobility of his calling, with terrifyingly tragic and bizarre results. The production design is crisp and symmetrical. Stanislav Milota’s stunning black and white cinematography is haunting and beautiful. It features successions of extreme closeups that emphasize the slightly grotesque and disturbing features of the biological condition. Milota’s use of black and white film stock’s enhanced tonal range is artfully employed to focus attention on rich textures and multitudes of shades. This gives The Cremator a uniquely unsettling dreamlike quality. The musical score by Zdenek Liska is alluring, phantasmic, and aesthetically intriguing. Viewing The Cremator is akin to experiencing a nightmare that one is reluctant to wake from.'-- collaged
the entire film
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Jean RollinThe Iron Rose (1973)
'THE IRON ROSE is a haunting experience - a macabre tone poem about youth and age, love and nihilism, nostalgia and superstition, and, above all, life and death. Francoise Pascal (There's a Girl in My Soup) and Hugues Quester (Three Colors: Blue) go on a metaphysical, Orpheus-like journey inside an ancient, all-but-abandoned graveyard but, as night falls, they cannot find their way out. As Quester's nihilism crumbles to impatience and terror, Pascal transfers her disappointed passion for him to the cemetery itself and becomes jubilantly (and dangerously) attuned to its dead. Pascal gives a remarkably intuitive performance, at times so spontaneous in spirit, one cannot imagine how parts of it were ever scripted. The cemetery itself is analogous to Rollin's love for all things antiquarian, including the old train station and the nearly moribund city of Amiens. If Orson Welles was correct when he estimated that a film could only be considered good to the extent it represented the artist who made it, THE IRON ROSE is Jean Rollin's first authentic masterpiece.'-- Tim Lucas
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Jay Schlossberg-CohenNight Train to Terror (1985)
'God and Satan are riding on a train at midnight. Looking out the window, they watch three stories, and debate the eternal fate of the protagonists. All the while, a teen pop/rock band is acting out a music video in a nearby compartment. Inspired by the box-office success of horror anthology movies like Creepshow (1982) and Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983), Night Train to Terror tries to hop a ride on the omnibus gravy train. Rather than shoot new stories specifically for this movie, however, the producers decided to save time and money by cutting unreleased full-length features they already owned the rights to into twenty-five minute segments. Needless to say, the results of this hacksaw editing, which consistently sacrifices narrative for nudity and gore scenes, are incoherent. The expository sequences with a hammy God (“I shed my mercy on them, as I do the gentle rain”) and hammier Satan (“there is no evil so vile which man will plunge himself into”) on a cosmic train judging the characters adds an additional layer of bizarreness. But, it’s the upbeat teen New Wave band shooting a music video in the next train compartment that sends the movie off the tracks and plunging into a void of pure weirdness.'-- collaged
the entire film
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p.s. Hey. A friend of mine in the real world noticed that I had let another real world friend -- 'John B. Fitzroy', who curated a music gig here recently, as you my remember -- host a post, and he asked if he could mastermind one too featuring some overlooked avant-garde films of which he is especially fond. Naturally, I said yes, and he picked the films, and I laid them out in my usual style, and there are the results right up there. He, Terry Ratchett, is a young film buff, filmmaker and sometime film programmer, just so you know. He and I hope you enjoy the show. And Terry, thanks a whole bunch, man. ** Jamie McMorrow, A fine one to you too, Jamie! It is a really beautiful book. Complicated and obsessive but kind of weightless. It's interesting. He's pretty much great always. Ah, I see. I've never tried to create great pop songs, obviously, so I'm just a fantasizer about the form. See, when you say you're incompetent with your instruments, which I'm sure is modesty and not completely true, I imagine an amazing kind of broken machine kind of magical, unexpected wondrous thing happening, but I can get pretty romantic about art making, and when I think about writing, I know inability doesn't lead to wow moments very easily either. But I'm a big fan of the kind of lo-fi one-man-band pop songsters like Pollard/GbV, obviously, and newer guys like Alex G. I have this thing for pop when you hear both the chiseled pop and the aspiration for perfection and the inabilities/ limitations at the same time, if that makes any sense. Did your song lose any of its elusiveness yesterday? I like archives too, definitely. It's weird that Trocchi's and Kavan's archives are in US. Huh. I wonder why that happened? My day was all right. I did roam around a little, but I didn't see any art that knocked me out or anything, so it was mostly about the Parisian surroundings. What did Wednesday drop in your lap? Love, me. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi, David. I'm glad, obviously, that that scary experience just ended up feeding your work. I only realized/read yesterday that Doris Roberts was in films way back too. I just thought of her as being this older character actress specializing in ironic brusqueness. Interesting. ** Steevee, Hi. Oh, yeah, Xanax is a dangerous clinger. I just meant that if the anti-depressants won't kick in in time, there was that imperfect other short-term option maybe. You hadn't mentioned that before, no. Wow, how did that go? I wish I could have been there. Do you do panels and things like that often or occasionally? ** Tosh Berman, Hi, Tosh. Yeah, it's so great. I have this awfully nerdy longtime plan to read the book on a bench in St. Sulpice, but I haven't yet. Thanks! ** Dóra Grőber, Hi! Yeah, those blocks, grr. For me, they only seem to end when I just give up on trying for a while, which makes me hungry to write after a few days or a week or something, and the hunger seems to knock the block down or something. It's very mysterious, that stuff. Ha ha, I wasn't peeking, I swear. I suppose if that was technically possible, I might have. But very respectfully, I promise. Because I'm just a writer and Zac, although a very good writer himself, is primarily a visual artist, we've ended up using this process where we talk about what we want in great detail, and I take elaborate notes, and then I go rough-out what we both wanted as best I can. I send that to him, and goes through it, revising and rewriting what I've written, and then we meet and go over the draft very thoroughly and make corrections together until we're both satisfied. Then we send it to Gisele, and she goes over it and tells us what she wants changed and so on, because she has the final word. I'm really you liked the post. And, best of all, I'm glad it inspired you to want to write something. That's a post's ultimate success. My day was nice, not too, too work-filled. How did Wednesday treat you? ** Bear, Hi. Definitely great that you're able to have free rehearsal space. I know from my theater work with Gisele Vienne how tough and expensive that can be. And it's exciting that you're going to direct the play! I hope somehow I'll get to see the play. Oh, yes, because I hadn't fully dipped into your suggestion, I stupidly didn't realize that Genesis is Genesis P-orridge! Yes, I know GP-o's work, but more the music with Psychic TV and Throbbing Gristle than the visual art, which I've only seen in kind of random online images. So, it was great to actually concentrate on her/is visual work. Are you into Psychic TV and so on? I'm glad you liked the theme park post. Yes, the Santa Fe one made me wish I could visit it too. The TV project is a proposed mini-series, three episodes, each about 50 minutes long. It's the project of Gisele Vienne, a French theater director and choreographer. I've been collaborating with her and writing her works for about twelve years or so now. I'm co-writing the script for the series with my friend Zac, with whom I made a film, 'Like Cattle Towards Glow', and a forthcoming film in the early stages. We have a producer who's handling the project and trying to sell it to TV networks. The French/German channel ARTE is tentatively interested in producing it. and right now we're trying to get a full-sized script together to give to them, and hopefully they'll like it and want to produce and show the series. Real pleasure talking with you. How was your day? ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, Ben. Yeah, the Wakefield Press edition is the only one in English, I think. Oh, I got your correction this morning, thank you. Your glorious post will launch here next Thursday -- a week from tomorrow -- if that's good. And I'm going to give it a thorough listen, yay, today or tomorrow. Thank you so much, Ben! It's a total boon! ** Tender prey, Hi, Marc! You haven't read Perec or Queneau? Oh, man, you have such a treat in store when you do. There's this quality to the prose of the Oulipo writers, Perec especially, that has this really beautiful weight, kind of a bantam weight, and and this continuous playfulness that's busy but somehow also serene. Reading Perec is just like giving yourself bliss as a gift. Queneau too, although he's more thoroughly narrative, except for the sublime 'Exercises in Style', so his prose is a little thicker. But, yeah, I think you'll find Perec and the others really lustrous when you read them. Well, that's how those times when circumstances are preventative re: making art are for me when I'm not being mopey, so I hoped that might be the same-ish for you. I love 'Peggy and Fred in Hell'. I haven't seen the newest incarnation. I did end up putting together a Leslie Thornton Day yesterday, and I got to see bits of works I hadn't seen. Have you seen the gallery work she's been doing? Here are some samples, if you haven't. I was really taken with that work while looking at it yesterday. I hope you get to see 'TVC'. It's quite different from our other works, and I'm pretty happy with it. Yes, the TV series is kind of a spin-off from 'TVC'. Its stars are one woman/character and her ventriloquist dummy from the play. We were so excited by her, her character, her dummy, that we really wanted to do something where we could concentrate on them. The deadline to turn in our proposal -- two finished episodes in script form, a synopsis for the third episode, and surrounding texts to explain the project -- are due to ARTE at the end of this month. Then they'll take six weeks or so to decide if they're interested enough to give us development money to finish the script, etc. I don't know when it would actually go into production, if it does. Next year sometime? It's a super joy for me to be in touch again too, big time! Oh, Wolf! Please pretend you're me for a moment and return her wolf-hugs in kind. Love, me. ** Misanthrope, Yeah, sorry for fucking up the perfect future you had planned with Noah. My fondness for practicalities has its dark and light sides, I know. Head bowed. Sheepish look on my face. Oh, sometimes stuffed bears have their dates of birth stamped on them. Wait, no, sorry. Mine did, but they were handmade for me by my grandmother. Never mind. Well, uniqueness is a quality you have in spades, and there ain't nothing you or anyone else can do to change that. So, Charlie is not familiar with your mom's ribald and off-center sense of humor? I bet he is. I bet he chuckled. ** H, Hi. Cool. I'm glad the blog had its pleasing face on yesterday. Bon Wednesday! ** Okay. Please scour Terry Ratchett's film program today and watch as much of it as your little hearts desire. Thank you. See you tomorrow.