We’ve only just got Easter out of the way, and here comes the most immersive Christmas movie of the year, an abstract but very much controlled study based in and around a festive party thrown by a very large family from Long Island, New York. Despite the specificity of the setting, however, Tyler Taormina’s third feature film is a surprisingly relatable experience, part anthropological study, part nostalgia kick, lit up (literally) like a Christmas tree in a yuletide riot of red, white and green.
It begins in a car ferrying members of the Balsano family — mother and father, brother and sister — to the home of the family’s matriarch, where four generations of Balsanos have gathered for their annual get-together. This is about as much of a set-up as you’re going to get,...
It begins in a car ferrying members of the Balsano family — mother and father, brother and sister — to the home of the family’s matriarch, where four generations of Balsanos have gathered for their annual get-together. This is about as much of a set-up as you’re going to get,...
- 5/17/2024
- by Damon Wise
- Deadline Film + TV
Omnes Films has a goal. “Our mission is to fill a void in modern cinema,” says its website. “Our films are passionate, ambitious works made by friends that favor atmosphere over plot and study the many forms of cultural decay in the 21st Century. Whatever the subject or genre, we seek projects that are original in conception and feel like they’ve never been made before.” It sounds wildly ambitious, and maybe it is, but Cannes audiences will be the judge of that when two of its films — Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point by Tyler Taormina and Eephus by Carson Lund — premiere in Directors’ Fortnight.
Taormina and Lund met at college in Boston, where the former was studying screenwriting and the latter film production. Lund, says Taormina, “was always like the crazily prodigious cinematographer. Everyone was very intimidated by this man.” Taormina, meanwhile, wanted to make kids TV. While waiting for a script to sell, Taormina had the idea for a loose indie called Ham on Rye (2019). Lund signed on as DoP, and Omnes was born.
Says Lund, “Omnes is a loose collective that’s becoming tighter. In college I made a short film called Omnes. It’s a sort of a Latin term that’s used often in theater by a director when he needs to get the attention of the cast and crew. And so, we started to tag our films as Omnes Productions. And then we said, ‘You know what? We should make this a real thing.’ So, we rebranded from Omnes Productions to Omnes Films. We wanted to really make it a cinema collective. We’re not an official company, in the sense that we don’t have an LLC or anything. To us, just a symbol of our friendship, our collaboration.”
Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point
First out of the gate was Taormina’s Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point, based on the director’s experience of family gatherings in the early 2000s. “This movie came from many things,” he says, “but I think the genesis was watching my parents’ wedding video on their 30th anniversary. This was some years ago now, and it deeply moved me.”
“I started to revisit some home videos at that time,” he continues, “and I realized pretty quickly that I actually have a total incapability of watching them. I’m too sentimental. It’s too heavy for me to watch my family when we were all so much younger.” That was when the idea of making a Christmas movie came to him. “Once I had that, I knew it would be the way to go. Or, maybe I didn’t know, but I figured that it would be the way that I could reanimate and dwell in the sentimentality that means so much to me.”
Taormina’s film is notable for its striking barrage of kitsch pop classics, which cineastes will recognize from Kenneth Anger’s experimental 1963 film Scorpio Rising. “The option of using Christmas music was just an absolute no. That would’ve been a real cringe-worthy move. But I’m very inspired by Kenneth Anger, very much so, to the point where there’s a central scene in my previous film, Ham on Rye, which was originally conceived and shot to the song he uses in Kustom Kar Kommandos [1965].
“Anger has remained an inciting inspiration for all the work I’ve done so far,” he continues, “and, for this one, Scorpio Rising was there at the beginning. I think we subconsciously realized that this music from the ’60s would make perfect Christmas music, because groups like The Ronettes and so on and so forth went on to make all these famous Christmas songs, so you hear that sound and it immediately feels festive. So, it was kind of a cheat. And on top of that, which ones to choose was very fun for me, because I was actually really interested in how the lyrics of these songs speak so much to the themes of the movie, because the context for a lot of these songs is love and love lost, you know?”
Eephus
Lund, meanwhile, had been cooking up Eephus, a personal story of his own, about a baseball field that is being demolished to build an elementary school. “We shot Eephus five months before Miller’s Point,” he recalls. “Tyler, I believe, had conceived of Miller’s Point maybe a little bit before I started writing Eephus, though I know we were kind of discussing the ideas at a similar time. I wrote Eephus largely during the pandemic, over Zoom, with my two co-writers, Mike Bassa and Nate Fisher. And then eventually when we finally got to work together in a room, we felt like things moved a bit quicker.”
Read the digital edition of Deadline’s Disruptors/Cannes magazine here.
Most of Lund’s career has been as a cinematographer and an editor. “I’d made short films, but I’d never written many screenplays,” he says. “I’m very attracted to location and light — that’s sort of the engine for my creative process — I had stumbled upon an idea where that was sort of the emphasis. Eephus is almost a landscape film, in that respect. I play baseball, and I play in a Sunday League, like the one depicted in the film. I was looking for material that would be personal to me but that also scratched this itch of making a film that would track the process of day turning to night over the course of one afternoon in New England and in fall, which is to me the most beautiful time for baseball.”
The directors were taken aback when both films made it into Cannes. “Honestly,” says Lund, “when one of them got in, we thought, ‘Ok, maybe they won’t program both.’ I mean, we don’t want to look like we’re trying to corner the market! But it happened, and we’re thrilled and a little surprised, for sure. But I think it’s a testament to the Fortnight that they’re keeping their eye on these kind of homegrown, handmade, independent films from America. Films that have a kind of different tone and vision.”...
Taormina and Lund met at college in Boston, where the former was studying screenwriting and the latter film production. Lund, says Taormina, “was always like the crazily prodigious cinematographer. Everyone was very intimidated by this man.” Taormina, meanwhile, wanted to make kids TV. While waiting for a script to sell, Taormina had the idea for a loose indie called Ham on Rye (2019). Lund signed on as DoP, and Omnes was born.
Says Lund, “Omnes is a loose collective that’s becoming tighter. In college I made a short film called Omnes. It’s a sort of a Latin term that’s used often in theater by a director when he needs to get the attention of the cast and crew. And so, we started to tag our films as Omnes Productions. And then we said, ‘You know what? We should make this a real thing.’ So, we rebranded from Omnes Productions to Omnes Films. We wanted to really make it a cinema collective. We’re not an official company, in the sense that we don’t have an LLC or anything. To us, just a symbol of our friendship, our collaboration.”
Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point
First out of the gate was Taormina’s Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point, based on the director’s experience of family gatherings in the early 2000s. “This movie came from many things,” he says, “but I think the genesis was watching my parents’ wedding video on their 30th anniversary. This was some years ago now, and it deeply moved me.”
“I started to revisit some home videos at that time,” he continues, “and I realized pretty quickly that I actually have a total incapability of watching them. I’m too sentimental. It’s too heavy for me to watch my family when we were all so much younger.” That was when the idea of making a Christmas movie came to him. “Once I had that, I knew it would be the way to go. Or, maybe I didn’t know, but I figured that it would be the way that I could reanimate and dwell in the sentimentality that means so much to me.”
Taormina’s film is notable for its striking barrage of kitsch pop classics, which cineastes will recognize from Kenneth Anger’s experimental 1963 film Scorpio Rising. “The option of using Christmas music was just an absolute no. That would’ve been a real cringe-worthy move. But I’m very inspired by Kenneth Anger, very much so, to the point where there’s a central scene in my previous film, Ham on Rye, which was originally conceived and shot to the song he uses in Kustom Kar Kommandos [1965].
“Anger has remained an inciting inspiration for all the work I’ve done so far,” he continues, “and, for this one, Scorpio Rising was there at the beginning. I think we subconsciously realized that this music from the ’60s would make perfect Christmas music, because groups like The Ronettes and so on and so forth went on to make all these famous Christmas songs, so you hear that sound and it immediately feels festive. So, it was kind of a cheat. And on top of that, which ones to choose was very fun for me, because I was actually really interested in how the lyrics of these songs speak so much to the themes of the movie, because the context for a lot of these songs is love and love lost, you know?”
Eephus
Lund, meanwhile, had been cooking up Eephus, a personal story of his own, about a baseball field that is being demolished to build an elementary school. “We shot Eephus five months before Miller’s Point,” he recalls. “Tyler, I believe, had conceived of Miller’s Point maybe a little bit before I started writing Eephus, though I know we were kind of discussing the ideas at a similar time. I wrote Eephus largely during the pandemic, over Zoom, with my two co-writers, Mike Bassa and Nate Fisher. And then eventually when we finally got to work together in a room, we felt like things moved a bit quicker.”
Read the digital edition of Deadline’s Disruptors/Cannes magazine here.
Most of Lund’s career has been as a cinematographer and an editor. “I’d made short films, but I’d never written many screenplays,” he says. “I’m very attracted to location and light — that’s sort of the engine for my creative process — I had stumbled upon an idea where that was sort of the emphasis. Eephus is almost a landscape film, in that respect. I play baseball, and I play in a Sunday League, like the one depicted in the film. I was looking for material that would be personal to me but that also scratched this itch of making a film that would track the process of day turning to night over the course of one afternoon in New England and in fall, which is to me the most beautiful time for baseball.”
The directors were taken aback when both films made it into Cannes. “Honestly,” says Lund, “when one of them got in, we thought, ‘Ok, maybe they won’t program both.’ I mean, we don’t want to look like we’re trying to corner the market! But it happened, and we’re thrilled and a little surprised, for sure. But I think it’s a testament to the Fortnight that they’re keeping their eye on these kind of homegrown, handmade, independent films from America. Films that have a kind of different tone and vision.”...
- 5/15/2024
- by Damon Wise
- Deadline Film + TV
“You look like Clara Bow in this light,” Taylor Swift sings on the final track of “The Tortured Poets Department,” titled after the 1920s sex symbol. She goes on to name-check two more immediately recognizable women — Stevie Nicks and one Taylor Swift — but what attracted Swift to reference a silent movie star on an album that also includes a throwaway Charlie Puth reference?
A movie star by the age of 20, Bow’s career was over at 28. Now Swift might have positioned her to win over a new generation of fans.
Known as the “It Girl” for both her starring role in the silent comedy “It” and her place as one of the pre-eminent sex symbols of ’20s Hollywood, Bow wasn’t washed up because her box office slipped. She was washed up because her scandal-plagued life made her a liability, both for the studios and for her own mental health.
A movie star by the age of 20, Bow’s career was over at 28. Now Swift might have positioned her to win over a new generation of fans.
Known as the “It Girl” for both her starring role in the silent comedy “It” and her place as one of the pre-eminent sex symbols of ’20s Hollywood, Bow wasn’t washed up because her box office slipped. She was washed up because her scandal-plagued life made her a liability, both for the studios and for her own mental health.
- 4/19/2024
- by Mark Peikert
- Indiewire
The 1970s– an era of “unrest and mistrust, fear and violence,” says the opening minutes of Colin and Cameron Cairnes’ Late Night with the Devil, accurately reflecting the viewpoint of the burgeoning moral panic of the time. Fear mongering-ish as that sounds, after a decade of Christianity in crisis mode– including a 1966 Times cover asking, “Is God Dead?”– and the “Satanic” cult murders by the Manson Family in 1969, the ’70s were a time of peak (at least until then) obsession with all things occult, planting the seeds and ultimately leading to what would be known as the full-blown Satanic Panic in the decade to follow. The devil was believed to be real, and he was to be feared, expelled, and/or worshiped– in real life and reflected in dozens and dozens of horror films and countless categories of other media within that era.
Late Night with the Devil toys with all this,...
Late Night with the Devil toys with all this,...
- 4/17/2024
- by Julieann Stipidis
- bloody-disgusting.com
Andrea Bocelli performed a rendition of the song “Time to Say Goodbye” with his son Matteo Bocelli to accompany the Academy’s annual obituary section. Perhaps mindful of previous years, in which eagle-eyed viewers have jumped on omissions, this year’s “In Memoriam” — which began with footage of the recently deceased Russian opposition leader and subject of last year’s winning documentary Navalny — seemed comprehensive but at the same time not enough.
Related: ‘Oppenheimer’ Wins Best Picture Oscar & Six Others; Emma Stone & Cillian Murphy Take Lead Acting Prizes – Full List
Beloved actors Lance Reddick, Treat Williams, Apocalypse Now’s Frederic Forrest, Rocky’s Burt Young all relegated to a fine print reference at the end, along with such writers as Norman Lear and No Country for Old Men’s Cormac McCarthy. Also given afterthought treatment were Kenneth Anger, Terence Davies, Carl Davis, David McCallum, Sinead O’Connor and Paolo Taviani in...
Related: ‘Oppenheimer’ Wins Best Picture Oscar & Six Others; Emma Stone & Cillian Murphy Take Lead Acting Prizes – Full List
Beloved actors Lance Reddick, Treat Williams, Apocalypse Now’s Frederic Forrest, Rocky’s Burt Young all relegated to a fine print reference at the end, along with such writers as Norman Lear and No Country for Old Men’s Cormac McCarthy. Also given afterthought treatment were Kenneth Anger, Terence Davies, Carl Davis, David McCallum, Sinead O’Connor and Paolo Taviani in...
- 3/11/2024
- by Damon Wise
- Deadline Film + TV
The recent passing of Terence Davies and the tributes that followed — tales of a steel will, impassioned budgetary battles and a host of dream projects that never materialized — give this highly personal tribute to Scottish filmmaker Bill Douglas an extra and very poignant relevance as a similar story, now depressingly familiar to the British film industry, of an uncompromising talent who left us with a tantalizing promise of what might have been. Now largely unknown to the wider world but very dear to the heart of Scotland (despite the fact that he left his homeland at the earliest opportunity), Douglas is the closest thing to a Rosetta Stone in recent British independent and social-realist cinema. From his early home movies through to his last three-hour masterwork Comrades (1986), the director left an indelible imprint that still seems shockingly modern today, leaving traces in everything from Derek Jarman’s early Super-8 works...
- 11/2/2023
- by Damon Wise
- Deadline Film + TV
Documentary festival IDFA, which runs Nov. 8 to 19 in Amsterdam, has revealed its first 50 titles, including the top 10 Chinese films selected by Chinese filmmaker Wang Bing, IDFA’s Guest of Honor.
The festival has also revealed the films playing in two of the three Focus programs: Fabrications, which probes the difference between reality and realism, and 16 Worlds on 16, an homage to 16mm film.
Wang’s selection will take the viewer “on a contemplative journey into contemporary Chinese cinema,” according to the festival. “The films and their politics are subtle in their film language, representing a wave of filmmaking rarely shown internationally.”
The selection (see below), which covers films produced since 1999, includes Lixin Fan’s 2009 film “Last Train Home,” which was supported by IDFA’s Bertha Fund. The film documents the millions of migrant factory workers that travel home for Spring Festival each year.
Fabrications explores the relationship of trust between documentary film and audiences,...
The festival has also revealed the films playing in two of the three Focus programs: Fabrications, which probes the difference between reality and realism, and 16 Worlds on 16, an homage to 16mm film.
Wang’s selection will take the viewer “on a contemplative journey into contemporary Chinese cinema,” according to the festival. “The films and their politics are subtle in their film language, representing a wave of filmmaking rarely shown internationally.”
The selection (see below), which covers films produced since 1999, includes Lixin Fan’s 2009 film “Last Train Home,” which was supported by IDFA’s Bertha Fund. The film documents the millions of migrant factory workers that travel home for Spring Festival each year.
Fabrications explores the relationship of trust between documentary film and audiences,...
- 9/19/2023
- by Leo Barraclough
- Variety Film + TV
Tl;Dr:
John Lennon felt fans were playing games when they psychoanalyzed him. He said “People will do anything rather than be here now.” He discussed a rumor that a famous musician was killed by the CIA.
Some of John Lennon‘s fans liked to psychoanalyze him. The former Beatle rejected “fantasies” about himself and Elvis Presley. Despite this, he had a different attitude toward fans who believed gossip that The Beatles would reform.
John Lennon felt fans who psychoanalyzed were doing something ‘irrelevant’
The book All We Are Saying: The Last Major Interview with John Lennon and Yoko Ono features a 1980 interview. In it, John was asked about fans who wanted to psychoanalyze him. “It’s only games for people to play,” he said. “Some people like ping-pong, other people like digging over graves. They are all escapes from now. People will do anything rather than be here now.
John Lennon felt fans were playing games when they psychoanalyzed him. He said “People will do anything rather than be here now.” He discussed a rumor that a famous musician was killed by the CIA.
Some of John Lennon‘s fans liked to psychoanalyze him. The former Beatle rejected “fantasies” about himself and Elvis Presley. Despite this, he had a different attitude toward fans who believed gossip that The Beatles would reform.
John Lennon felt fans who psychoanalyzed were doing something ‘irrelevant’
The book All We Are Saying: The Last Major Interview with John Lennon and Yoko Ono features a 1980 interview. In it, John was asked about fans who wanted to psychoanalyze him. “It’s only games for people to play,” he said. “Some people like ping-pong, other people like digging over graves. They are all escapes from now. People will do anything rather than be here now.
- 8/3/2023
- by Matthew Trzcinski
- Showbiz Cheat Sheet
In just a matter of weeks, Popcorn Frights Film Festival will return for its ninth edition of sun-soaked, blood-splattered cinematic scares this August in South Florida, and following the reveals of their first two waves of programming, the third wave of must-see screenings and essential events for the festival has been announced, including the Bloomquist Brothers’ new slasher Founders Day, Olivia West Lloyd’s Somewhere Quiet, a 4K restoration of Nightmare (1981), horror movie trivia presented by Fangoria, and much more!
As previously announced, this year's Popcorn Frights Film Festival will run August 10th–20th, with screenings taking place at Fort Lauderdale's historic Savor Cinema and “The Horror Collective Screening Room” at Miami Beach's O Cinema South Beach (as part of a special partnership between Popcorn Frights and Entertainment Squad's The Horror Collective).
You can purchase In-Theater All-Access Badges here and Virtual Passes here.
Below, we have a look at...
As previously announced, this year's Popcorn Frights Film Festival will run August 10th–20th, with screenings taking place at Fort Lauderdale's historic Savor Cinema and “The Horror Collective Screening Room” at Miami Beach's O Cinema South Beach (as part of a special partnership between Popcorn Frights and Entertainment Squad's The Horror Collective).
You can purchase In-Theater All-Access Badges here and Virtual Passes here.
Below, we have a look at...
- 7/27/2023
- by Derek Anderson
- DailyDead
The 26th San Francisco Silent Film Festival was another joyous gathering of silent cinema fans, historians, scholars, and all stripes of movie buffs. Launched in 1995, the festival has grown from a single-day event to—excluding two years of Covid shutdowns—an annual, five-day celebration. It’s about the movies, of course, and this year Sfsff presented 20 features and seven shorts. But it’s also about the silent movie experience. All shows were accompanied by live music, from solo piano to small combos to a 10-piece mini-orchestra for the closing-night event, playing both archival music and original scores, many composed for the screenings.
Allan Dwan’s The Iron Mask, from 1929, opened the festival with a bittersweet farewell to the silents. The film, the swashbuckling final silent feature to star Douglas Fairbanks, has added resonance for Sfsff audiences because of the legacy of the Castro Theatre, the festival’s home for its entire 26 years.
Allan Dwan’s The Iron Mask, from 1929, opened the festival with a bittersweet farewell to the silents. The film, the swashbuckling final silent feature to star Douglas Fairbanks, has added resonance for Sfsff audiences because of the legacy of the Castro Theatre, the festival’s home for its entire 26 years.
- 7/24/2023
- by Sean Axmaker
- Slant Magazine
Invocation of My Demon Brother. “The key of joy is disobedience.”—Aleister CrowleyLucifer has risen. Kenneth Anger is, terrestrially at least, no more. Of the Hollywood that once was, Kenneth Anger was one of the few unsentimental remnants—never nostalgic and always captivated by the present. He leaves behind an aura of gothic glam and a string of sacrilegious, unselfconscious films. In the Bible, Lucifer—etymologically, “the light bearer”—was cast out of heaven for plotting against the supreme creator, that divine auteur. In Hollywood, Anger shed light on the ambrosial decadence that accompanied the rise of the film industry, whose mythological dimension he both captured and incarnated. To Anger, Hollywood was a sort of maternal womb, the amniotic element whose sinister luminescence he chiseled like a baroque sculptor. In his cinema, there is a visible adherence to the superficial gloss that made commercial films so profound. He was able...
- 7/19/2023
- MUBI
Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI, and sign up for our weekly email newsletter by clicking here.NEWSLeos Carax in Holy Motors (2012).On Monday, SAG-AFTRA members voted 97.9 percent in favor of a strike if their contract negotiations stall. This sets the stage for an industry-wide work stoppage in solidarity with the Writers Guild, even after the weekend’s news that the Directors Guild had reached a tentative agreement with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers.Away from Hollywood, CG Cinema have confirmed that Leos Carax has wrapped production on a new film, C’est pas moi, set to release in 2024. This is a "free format" self-portrait, spanning the "major stations" of Carax's four-decade career amid "the political tremors of the time." The images shared by CG Cinema feature Denis Lavant in character as Monsieur Merde, made infamous in...
- 6/7/2023
- MUBI
Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI, and sign up for our weekly email newsletter by clicking here.NEWSWe’re excited to share the cover for Issue 3 of Notebook, which features a photograph of pioneering Indian actor-producer Devika Rani. Last week we sneak-previewed what will be the subscribers-only gift: a weatherproof sleeve. Subscriptions for the magazine are always open, but in order to receive Issue 3, you’ll need to subscribe by June 1. So if you haven’t yet, don’t hesitate! Some news from the Golden Apricot International Film Festival in Yerevan, Armenia. Notebook contributor Leonardo Goi will be organizing their Critics Campus, a four-day workshop for emerging film critics, in early July. Applications are now open: submit yours today. Recommended VIEWINGHow To With John Wilson is returning for its third, and final, season, which will premiere July 28 on "Max," the...
- 5/31/2023
- MUBI
Most artists, if they’re lucky, invent one thing. But Kenneth Anger, who was a filmmaker, an author, a debauched aristocratic scenester and, to the day of his death at 96, a figure of puckish mystery, invented several things, each one of them epic.
In “Fireworks,” his transcendent 14-minute avant-garde film of 1947, Anger invented the very consciousness and imagery of gay liberation — not the desire to be liberated (which was buried in the hearts of gay people everywhere), but the rapturous visual reverie of what that liberation might look like, what it would feel like, why it seemed so forbidden, and why it needed to be. In “Scorpio Rising,” his homoerotic demon-biker/Top-40-orgy blast from the underground, Anger invented MTV, invented what Martin Scorsese did in “Mean Streets” and David Lynch did in “Blue Velvet,” invented a way to express how music and reality talk to each other.
In “Hollywood Babylon,...
In “Fireworks,” his transcendent 14-minute avant-garde film of 1947, Anger invented the very consciousness and imagery of gay liberation — not the desire to be liberated (which was buried in the hearts of gay people everywhere), but the rapturous visual reverie of what that liberation might look like, what it would feel like, why it seemed so forbidden, and why it needed to be. In “Scorpio Rising,” his homoerotic demon-biker/Top-40-orgy blast from the underground, Anger invented MTV, invented what Martin Scorsese did in “Mean Streets” and David Lynch did in “Blue Velvet,” invented a way to express how music and reality talk to each other.
In “Hollywood Babylon,...
- 5/27/2023
- by Owen Gleiberman
- Variety Film + TV
Experimental filmmaker Kenneth Anger, who also wrote the novel Hollywood Babylon (which was banned in the U.S. when it was first released in 1965) and was considered to be a pioneer of underground cinema, has passed away at the age of 96. According to The Hollywood Reporter, his death was announced by Sprüeth Magers art gallery, which has presented exhibitions of his work.
Anger made more than thirty dialogue-free short films over a career that spanned from 1941 to 2013, but The Hollywood Reporter estimates that the work he did in those 72 years would take a viewer just 8 hours to watch in its entirety. His shorts have been described as “a kaleidoscope of symbolism, homoeroticism and the occult”. Some of his most popular shorts include the 1963 collage Scorpio Rising, described as “a pastiche of pop songs plastered over homoerotic biker imagery, pulp cartoons, Nazism, and paraphernalia”; the 13-minute 1953 short Eaux d’Artifice, which...
Anger made more than thirty dialogue-free short films over a career that spanned from 1941 to 2013, but The Hollywood Reporter estimates that the work he did in those 72 years would take a viewer just 8 hours to watch in its entirety. His shorts have been described as “a kaleidoscope of symbolism, homoeroticism and the occult”. Some of his most popular shorts include the 1963 collage Scorpio Rising, described as “a pastiche of pop songs plastered over homoerotic biker imagery, pulp cartoons, Nazism, and paraphernalia”; the 13-minute 1953 short Eaux d’Artifice, which...
- 5/24/2023
- by Cody Hamman
- JoBlo.com
According to a report in Variety, pioneering experimental queer filmmaker Kenneth Anger, the director of seminal shorts like "Fireworks," "Rabbit's Moon," "Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome," and "Scorpio Rising," has died at the age of 96.
The news was announced on Anger's website by Monika Sprüth and Philomene Magers, the managers of Anger's art galleries. He had passed away on May 11, 2023, and the news was only just announced today.
Anger was a firebrand, an artistic rebel who aggressively and provocatively eschewed convention to present the world a new, cohesive type of underground, ultra-queer aesthetic that informs media and culture to this day. His shorts "Fireworks" and "Scorpio Rising" in particular blended traditionally ultra-masculine imagery -- Naval officers, leather-clad bikers -- with unapologetic gay lust, revealing the desire that exists so naturally in those worlds. Anger also blended images of queerness with religious iconography, tearing down conventional Christian morality, and introducing...
The news was announced on Anger's website by Monika Sprüth and Philomene Magers, the managers of Anger's art galleries. He had passed away on May 11, 2023, and the news was only just announced today.
Anger was a firebrand, an artistic rebel who aggressively and provocatively eschewed convention to present the world a new, cohesive type of underground, ultra-queer aesthetic that informs media and culture to this day. His shorts "Fireworks" and "Scorpio Rising" in particular blended traditionally ultra-masculine imagery -- Naval officers, leather-clad bikers -- with unapologetic gay lust, revealing the desire that exists so naturally in those worlds. Anger also blended images of queerness with religious iconography, tearing down conventional Christian morality, and introducing...
- 5/24/2023
- by Witney Seibold
- Slash Film
Anger was a gay cinema pioneer, known for avant-garde films including Lucifer Rising.
Kenneth Anger, the American experimental filmmaker, author and artist who was a pioneer in gay cinema, has died aged 96.
A statement confirming Anger’s death from the Sprueth Magers art gallery that exhibited his work around the world described him as “a trailblazer. His cinematic genius and influence will live on and continue to transform all those who encounter his films, words and vision.”
“Through his kaleidoscopic films,” the statement added, “which combine sumptuous visuals, popular music soundtracks and a focus on queer themes and narratives, Anger...
Kenneth Anger, the American experimental filmmaker, author and artist who was a pioneer in gay cinema, has died aged 96.
A statement confirming Anger’s death from the Sprueth Magers art gallery that exhibited his work around the world described him as “a trailblazer. His cinematic genius and influence will live on and continue to transform all those who encounter his films, words and vision.”
“Through his kaleidoscopic films,” the statement added, “which combine sumptuous visuals, popular music soundtracks and a focus on queer themes and narratives, Anger...
- 5/24/2023
- by John Hazelton
- ScreenDaily
Anger ignited the gossip industry with the squalid tales in his book Hollywood Babylon, while his daringly erotic films fuelled the counterculture
• Kenneth Anger dies aged 96 – news
Kenneth Anger was the dark and brilliant magus of Hollywood lore; a reclusive figure who had in his own lifetime assumed the status of myth or pop-culture rumour. He was virtually the Aleister Crowley of movie legend. He was the master of underground cinema and creator of avant-gardist short films treasured by connoisseurs as equivalent in importance to those of Maya Deren and Jonas Mekas.
But unusually for a film-maker, his masterpiece was in the medium of the written word: his outrageous, scabrous and scurrilous supposed history of Tinseltown scandals: Hollywood Babylon, first published in French in 1959 as Hollywood Babylone, banned for years and only fully available in English in 1975. The book was virtually radioactive in its sheer lack of respectability: a livre...
• Kenneth Anger dies aged 96 – news
Kenneth Anger was the dark and brilliant magus of Hollywood lore; a reclusive figure who had in his own lifetime assumed the status of myth or pop-culture rumour. He was virtually the Aleister Crowley of movie legend. He was the master of underground cinema and creator of avant-gardist short films treasured by connoisseurs as equivalent in importance to those of Maya Deren and Jonas Mekas.
But unusually for a film-maker, his masterpiece was in the medium of the written word: his outrageous, scabrous and scurrilous supposed history of Tinseltown scandals: Hollywood Babylon, first published in French in 1959 as Hollywood Babylone, banned for years and only fully available in English in 1975. The book was virtually radioactive in its sheer lack of respectability: a livre...
- 5/24/2023
- by Peter Bradshaw
- The Guardian - Film News
The pioneering movie-maker had a major influence on queer culture and the 60s counterculture, and is also remembered for authoring the cult film history book
Kenneth Anger, the artist and film-maker whose work offered a distinctively radical mix of paganism and homoeroticism, has died aged 96. Art gallery Sprüth Magers confirmed his death, saying: “Through his kaleidoscopic films, which combine sumptuous visuals, popular music soundtracks, and a focus on queer themes and narratives, Anger laid the groundwork for the avant garde art scenes of the later 20th century, as well as for the visual languages of contemporary queer and youth culture.”
Anger’s films, which included Fireworks (1947), Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954), Scorpio Rising (1963) and Lucifer Rising (1972), made him a key figure in the counterculture over four decades, and later a hero to subsequent generations of film-makers grappling with similar themes. While he never found commercial success through his films, his...
Kenneth Anger, the artist and film-maker whose work offered a distinctively radical mix of paganism and homoeroticism, has died aged 96. Art gallery Sprüth Magers confirmed his death, saying: “Through his kaleidoscopic films, which combine sumptuous visuals, popular music soundtracks, and a focus on queer themes and narratives, Anger laid the groundwork for the avant garde art scenes of the later 20th century, as well as for the visual languages of contemporary queer and youth culture.”
Anger’s films, which included Fireworks (1947), Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954), Scorpio Rising (1963) and Lucifer Rising (1972), made him a key figure in the counterculture over four decades, and later a hero to subsequent generations of film-makers grappling with similar themes. While he never found commercial success through his films, his...
- 5/24/2023
- by Andrew Pulver
- The Guardian - Film News
Kenneth Anger, the experimental filmmaker, actor and author who directed nearly 40 short films including the homoerotic “Fireworks” and “Scorpio Rising,” has died, according to the Sprüeth Magers art gallery. He was 96.
“It is with deep sadness that we mourn the passing of visionary filmmaker, artist and author Kenneth Anger (1927–2023),” the gallery, which exhibited Anger’s work, wrote. “Kenneth was a trailblazer. His cinematic genius and influence will live on and continue to transform all those who encounter his films, words and vision.”
It is with deep sadness that we mourn the passing of visionary filmmaker, artist and author Kenneth Anger (1927–2023).
Kenneth was a trailblazer. His cinematic genius and influence will live on and continue to transform all those who encounter his films, words and vision. pic.twitter.com/xIfxWNmGUK
— Sprueth Magers (@SpruethMagers) May 24, 2023
From his first homemade film in 1937 as a boy to his final effort, a two-and-a-half-minute film “Missoni...
“It is with deep sadness that we mourn the passing of visionary filmmaker, artist and author Kenneth Anger (1927–2023),” the gallery, which exhibited Anger’s work, wrote. “Kenneth was a trailblazer. His cinematic genius and influence will live on and continue to transform all those who encounter his films, words and vision.”
It is with deep sadness that we mourn the passing of visionary filmmaker, artist and author Kenneth Anger (1927–2023).
Kenneth was a trailblazer. His cinematic genius and influence will live on and continue to transform all those who encounter his films, words and vision. pic.twitter.com/xIfxWNmGUK
— Sprueth Magers (@SpruethMagers) May 24, 2023
From his first homemade film in 1937 as a boy to his final effort, a two-and-a-half-minute film “Missoni...
- 5/24/2023
- by Josh Dickey
- The Wrap
Kenneth Anger, the experimental filmmaker and author whose work was groundbreaking in its exploration of gay themes and erotica, has died. He was 96.
His death was announced by his gallery, Sprueth Magers.
“It is with deep sadness that we mourn the passing of visionary filmmaker, artist and author Kenneth Anger (1927–2023),” the gallery posted on social media. “Kenneth was a trailblazer. His cinematic genius and influence will live on and continue to transform all those who encounter his films, words and vision.”
Anger’s films include the 1947 Fireworks, a legendary cinematic achievement in the history of American gay culture and film. He also wrote and published Hollywood Babylon in 1959, a book that popularized scandals and pieces of film-land gossip that, while largely discredited over the years, have remained part of Hollywood lore.
“Anger considered cinematographic projection a psychosocial ritual capable of unleashing physical and emotional energies,” said his gallery owners Monika...
His death was announced by his gallery, Sprueth Magers.
“It is with deep sadness that we mourn the passing of visionary filmmaker, artist and author Kenneth Anger (1927–2023),” the gallery posted on social media. “Kenneth was a trailblazer. His cinematic genius and influence will live on and continue to transform all those who encounter his films, words and vision.”
Anger’s films include the 1947 Fireworks, a legendary cinematic achievement in the history of American gay culture and film. He also wrote and published Hollywood Babylon in 1959, a book that popularized scandals and pieces of film-land gossip that, while largely discredited over the years, have remained part of Hollywood lore.
“Anger considered cinematographic projection a psychosocial ritual capable of unleashing physical and emotional energies,” said his gallery owners Monika...
- 5/24/2023
- by Greg Evans
- Deadline Film + TV
Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI, and sign up for our weekly email newsletter by clicking here.REMEMBERINGInauguration of the Pleasure Dome.Kenneth Anger has died at the age of 96, as reported this morning by his gallery. "Anger forged a body of work as dazzlingly poetic in its unique visual intensity as it is narratively innovative," wrote Maximilian Le Cain of the pioneering avant-gardist (and devoted occultist) for Senses of Cinema. "Anger’s films are cinematic manifestations of his occult practices. As such, they are highly symbolical, either featuring characters directly portraying gods, forces and demons or else finding an appropriate embodiment for them in the iconography of contemporary pop culture."The Austrian actor Helmut Berger died last week aged 78. He was best known as Luchino Visconti’s muse, unforgettable in The Damned (1969), Ludwig (1973), and Conversation Piece (1974). Among his additional...
- 5/24/2023
- MUBI
Kenneth Anger, the avant-garde filmmaker whose surrealistic queer compositions Fireworks and Scorpio Rising made him a pioneer of underground cinema and a target for censorship, has died. He was 96.
Anger’s death was announced Wednesday by the Sprüeth Magers art gallery. “Kenneth was a trailblazer,” it said in a statement. “His cinematic genius and influence will live on and continue to transform all those who encounter his films, words and vision.”
No details of his death were immediately available.
In 1959, Anger authored the smutty exploitative book Hollywood Babylon — banned after its U.S release in 1965 — and followed it up with a sequel in 1984.
Anger’s work spanned the years 1941 to 2013 yet totaled just eight hours, a kaleidoscope of symbolism, homoeroticism and the occult found in his 36 dialogue-free short films (some complete, others fragmented) by THR‘s count.
His collage Scorpio Rising (1963), a pastiche of pop songs plastered over homoerotic biker imagery,...
Anger’s death was announced Wednesday by the Sprüeth Magers art gallery. “Kenneth was a trailblazer,” it said in a statement. “His cinematic genius and influence will live on and continue to transform all those who encounter his films, words and vision.”
No details of his death were immediately available.
In 1959, Anger authored the smutty exploitative book Hollywood Babylon — banned after its U.S release in 1965 — and followed it up with a sequel in 1984.
Anger’s work spanned the years 1941 to 2013 yet totaled just eight hours, a kaleidoscope of symbolism, homoeroticism and the occult found in his 36 dialogue-free short films (some complete, others fragmented) by THR‘s count.
His collage Scorpio Rising (1963), a pastiche of pop songs plastered over homoerotic biker imagery,...
- 5/24/2023
- by Rhett Bartlett
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
Experimental filmmaker, artist and author Kenneth Anger has died. He was 96.
His gallery, operated by Monika Sprüth and Philomene Magers, confirmed the news on their website, writing, “Kenneth was a trailblazer. His cinematic genius and influence will live on and continue to transform all those who encounter his films, words and vision.”
Born in 1927 in Santa Monica, Calif., Anger produced over 30 short films from 1937 to 2013, having made his first movie at 10 years old. Known as “one of America’s first openly gay filmmakers,” he gained a reputation for exploring themes of erotica and homosexuality decades before gay sex was legalized in America. Anger received recognition for his homoerotic 1947 film “Fireworks,” which landed him in court on obscenity charges. Filmed in his childhood home in Beverly Hills while his parents were away for the weekend, “Fireworks” is known as the first gay narrative film produced in the U.S.
Afterward, Anger...
His gallery, operated by Monika Sprüth and Philomene Magers, confirmed the news on their website, writing, “Kenneth was a trailblazer. His cinematic genius and influence will live on and continue to transform all those who encounter his films, words and vision.”
Born in 1927 in Santa Monica, Calif., Anger produced over 30 short films from 1937 to 2013, having made his first movie at 10 years old. Known as “one of America’s first openly gay filmmakers,” he gained a reputation for exploring themes of erotica and homosexuality decades before gay sex was legalized in America. Anger received recognition for his homoerotic 1947 film “Fireworks,” which landed him in court on obscenity charges. Filmed in his childhood home in Beverly Hills while his parents were away for the weekend, “Fireworks” is known as the first gay narrative film produced in the U.S.
Afterward, Anger...
- 5/24/2023
- by Ethan Shanfeld
- Variety Film + TV
“Time is all we have and every second that ticks away is one less second we’re alive,” Kenneth Anger told an interviewer from The Guardian 16 and a half years before his death this May at the age of 96. “The sands of time are going through the hourglass but it doesn’t frighten me.”
If Woody Allen’s Zelig was found rubbing elbows with the storied and famous of the ’20s and ’30s, starting in the 1950s Anger was for some decades more than a match for him. His legacy is poised between the pathbreaking cinematic auteur who made such avant-garde shorts as “Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome” (1954) and “Scorpio Rising” (1963) and the purveyor of at times fictionalized Hollywood scandal in the sensational and frequently updated “Hollywood Babylon” (1959).
He was not immune from his own brushes with dark history — the very bikers he incorporated in some of his middle-period work...
If Woody Allen’s Zelig was found rubbing elbows with the storied and famous of the ’20s and ’30s, starting in the 1950s Anger was for some decades more than a match for him. His legacy is poised between the pathbreaking cinematic auteur who made such avant-garde shorts as “Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome” (1954) and “Scorpio Rising” (1963) and the purveyor of at times fictionalized Hollywood scandal in the sensational and frequently updated “Hollywood Babylon” (1959).
He was not immune from his own brushes with dark history — the very bikers he incorporated in some of his middle-period work...
- 5/24/2023
- by Fred Schruers
- Indiewire
Recently split from his co-worker girlfriend, Vincent (Karim Leklou) is having a bad day at the office. First, a young intern batters him over the head with a laptop, and then Yves from accounting stabs him savagely with a pen. And after a meeting with human resources, the poor guy is left with the curious feeling that, somehow, he deserved it. Even his shrink, who has a print of J.M.W. Turner’s ironic masterpiece “The Fighting Temeraire” on his wall, thinks so, planting further seeds of doubt in Vincent’s mind. “I think you’re looking for attention from those who attack you,” he decides.
Vincent’s “crime” is to make eye contact, and after a further series of interactions — notably with a middle-aged female motorist, who tries to run him down, and, crucially, his upstairs neighbor’s young children — Vincent drops everything and heads to his family’s country home.
Vincent’s “crime” is to make eye contact, and after a further series of interactions — notably with a middle-aged female motorist, who tries to run him down, and, crucially, his upstairs neighbor’s young children — Vincent drops everything and heads to his family’s country home.
- 5/19/2023
- by Damon Wise
- Deadline Film + TV
Jimmy Page didn’t need long to become a standout guitarist. He was an ace session player long before joining the Yardbirds or forming Led Zeppelin. He said his guitar playing improved even more thanks to Led Zeppelin. Yet when he began working on the Lucifer Rising soundtrack, Page gave up playing his guitar altogether, and it made sense.
Jimmy Page | Michael Putland/Getty Images Jimmy Page gave up playing guitar in favor of Eastern instruments on his long-lost album
Filmmaker Kenneth Anger started working on his film Lucifer Rising long before he met Page. Yet the guitarist agreed to compose music for the movie soon after their first encounter in 1972. Both artists had a shared interest in the occult and author Aleister Crowley.
However, Page expressly avoided using guitars in his soundtrack for the movie, Page told Light & Shade: Conversations With Jimmy Page author Brad Tolinski:
“I employed...
Jimmy Page | Michael Putland/Getty Images Jimmy Page gave up playing guitar in favor of Eastern instruments on his long-lost album
Filmmaker Kenneth Anger started working on his film Lucifer Rising long before he met Page. Yet the guitarist agreed to compose music for the movie soon after their first encounter in 1972. Both artists had a shared interest in the occult and author Aleister Crowley.
However, Page expressly avoided using guitars in his soundtrack for the movie, Page told Light & Shade: Conversations With Jimmy Page author Brad Tolinski:
“I employed...
- 5/5/2023
- by Jason Rossi
- Showbiz Cheat Sheet
Close-Up is a feature that spotlights films now playing on Mubi. Amanda Kramer's Please Baby Please is showing exclusively on Mubi starting March 3, 2023, in the United States, and March 31, 2023, in most countries in the series The New Auteurs.It says a lot that Amanda Kramer’s new film frequently features the tinkly strains of the Skyliners’ 1958 song “Since I Don’t Have You”: it has a woozily helpless romantic masochism that’s long since been discouraged by contemporary thinking about partnership. Although it may not actually take romantic suffering as its thesis, Please Baby Please—another title reminiscent of a yearning-filled doo-wop track—does embody that song’s aura of lyrical self-flagellation in a host of surprising and bold ways. Kramer’s film retools the gendered conventions around sacrifice and control in a partnership, allowing that audio cue to exemplify the paradox of power and sex in romantic love.
- 3/31/2023
- MUBI
Tom Luddy, the understated co-founder and artistic director of the Telluride Film Festival who championed world cinema, spotlighted overlooked gems and saluted legends during his near half-century run with the event, has died. He was 79.
Luddy died peacefully Monday in Berkeley, California, after a long illness, Telluride senior vp public relations Shannon Mitchell told The Hollywood Reporter.
“The world has lost a rare ingredient that we’ll all be searching for, for some time,” Telluride executive director Julie Huntsinger said in a statement. “I would sometimes find myself feeling sad for those who didn’t get to know Tom Luddy properly. He had a sphinx-like quality that took a little time to get around, for some.
“But once you knew him, you were welcomed into a kingdom of art, history, intelligence, humor and joie de vivre that you knew you couldn’t be without. He made life richer. Magical. He...
Luddy died peacefully Monday in Berkeley, California, after a long illness, Telluride senior vp public relations Shannon Mitchell told The Hollywood Reporter.
“The world has lost a rare ingredient that we’ll all be searching for, for some time,” Telluride executive director Julie Huntsinger said in a statement. “I would sometimes find myself feeling sad for those who didn’t get to know Tom Luddy properly. He had a sphinx-like quality that took a little time to get around, for some.
“But once you knew him, you were welcomed into a kingdom of art, history, intelligence, humor and joie de vivre that you knew you couldn’t be without. He made life richer. Magical. He...
- 2/14/2023
- by Mike Barnes
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
The Great Italian Films of the 1970sThere was a certain type of great art film which was being made from 1968 through the 1970s which can never be approximated. Active and engaged filmmakers were consciously wakening out of the post-war amnesia and taking a perversely erotically charged political stand against the hypocrisy of the previous generation.
Italy was the hotbed of this examination of fascism coming out of World War II. Luchino Visconti’s The Damned (1969), Bertolucci’s The Conformist (1970), Pier Paolo Pasolini’s infamous Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975). Even the American musical, via Bob Fosse’s adaptation of Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin Stories, Cabaret (1972) hinted at what the Italians went after with their full force of creative muscle.
Take Liliana Cavani’s The Night Porter (1974), set in Vienna in 1957, the film centers on the sadomasochistic relationship between a former Nazi concentration camp officer (Dirk Bogarde) and one of his inmates (Charlotte Rampling). Their sadomasochistic love is their only happiness and it paralyzes the former Nazis who have been reintegrated into polite society.
Universally reviled by U.S.’s top critics, Roger Ebert of The Chicago Sun-Times called it “as nasty as it is lubricious, a despicable attempt to titillate us by exploiting memories of persecution and suffering”. Vincent Canby, prominent critic for The New York Times, called it “romantic pornography” and “a piece of junk”. Pauline Kael wrote in The New Yorker, “Many of us can’t take more than a few hard-core porno movies, because the absence of any human esteem makes them depressing rather than sexy; The Night Porteroffers the same dehumanized view and is brazen enough to use the Second World War as an excuse.”
Susan Sontag’s essay Fascinating Facism for New York Review of Books (February 6, 1975) stated, “If the message of fascism has been neutralized by an aesthetic view of life, its trappings have been sexualized. This eroticization of fascism can be remarked in such enthralling and devout manifestations as Mishima’s Confessions of a Mask and Sun and Steel, and in films like Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising and, more recently and far less interestingly, in Visconti’s The Damned and Cavani’s The Night Porter.”
However, its value was recognized by the executive producer Joseph E. Levine who quoted them on the posters of the U.S. theatrical release through his company Avco Embassy.
In a brilliant essay of the film by Kat Ellinger I quote:
Filmmakers were suddenly touching the untouchable, and it made certain people incredibly uncomfortable.”
Unlike Naziploitation, The Night Porter does nothing to cartoonise the Nazi officers that dominate the narrative. It isn’t a case of good versus evil, or that sadism is presented as a form of lasivious softcore pornography. Neither is the film a deliberate political treatise like the art films of Bertolucci, Visconti, or Pasolini. Its biggest transgression is that it humanises one of its main characters, Max (Dirk Bogarde), a former Nazi officer with a penchant for sadism, when he finds his ‘little girl’ again in the postwar period; a former concentration camp inmate Lucia (Charlotte Rampling) with whom he undertook a sadistic affair while she was incarcerated. On reuniting it is clear that their loved never died, so they continue, even though they know it will eventually contribute to their downfall and consequent death. Love in this realm is desperately profane, disgusting, something that should never be. And because of this it remains infinitely fascinating and uniquely humanistic.
Related in spirit was Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris (1972), using sex to express the death of love and male causality, its own furor when it hit American cinemas still continues to court controversy; and Luchino Visconti’s The Innocent (1976), based upon the novel by the decadent writer Gabriele D’Annunzio, expressing the same but in a totally antithetical environment of the aristocracy. Bertolluci’s The Conformist(1970) twisted the repressed homosexual of its title into a sadomasochistic fascist.
One could say, as did Gabriel Jenkinson, “the dynamics of conformity present in the modern consumerist capitalist system result in repression, which in turn manifests as violent sadomasochism — and …if one does not actively rebel against this system, one is complicit in its proliferation.”
Parenthetically on the other side of the earth, in Japan, In the Realm of the Senses (1976) by Nagisa Ôshima about a woman whose affair with her master leads to an obsessive and ultimately destructive sexual relationship also came out of Oshima’s early involvement with the student protest movement in Kyoto in ‘68 and out of his concern with the contradictions and tensions of postwar Japanese society in which he exposed contemporary Japanese materialism, while also examining what it means to be Japanese in the face of rapid industrialization and Westernization.
In 2020 Vincent Canby might have revisited The Night Porter and seen it in a different light. His 2020 review of Visconti’s last film, L’innocente (The Innocent), completed in 1976 shortly before his death was “among the most beautiful and severely disciplined films he has ever made.” It was also brazenly sadistic and sexy to a point that today would be labeled pornographic, and today could not be conceived of, much less made, diving, as it does, into sex, abortion, male domination and violence.
According to The World, public radio’s longest-running daily global news program, a co-production of Prx and Wgbh, in 2012:
British scientists have finally confirmed what women worldwide have been suspecting for centuries. It’s not religious principles that start wars. It’s not even civilization’s thirst for oil. Ladies and gentlemen, it’s the penis.
According to a study published this week in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society publication, the male sex drive is the cause of most conflicts in the world, from soccer hooliganism to religious wars, not to mention family disputes over the toilet seat being left up.
According to this story in The Telegraph, the scientists call it the “male warrior instinct” and claim men are programmed to be aggressive toward outsiders. It apparently used to be a handy instinct, back when you had to kill other suitors in order to gain more access to mates, but nowadays, this only works in some countries and a few US cities. For the rest of us, this unreformed sex drive only means ever-increasing defense budgets.
The magnitude of this discovery is so great, it’s difficult to estimate the potential ramifications.
At only eight inches on average (or that’s what we have been told), it’s smaller in size than most other controversial discoveries, yet — just like the atom — it has catastrophic consequences if in the hands of the wrong people.
And so these filmmakers show us the pathological drive of the unleashed male libido.
But times are different in the 21st century. These films could never be approximated by our Tik Tok generation where porn has created a quick witty and essentially violent vibrato of sexuality. These films of the late ‘60s and ‘70s took the libido at its rawest and showed its drive as an expression of political evil in very different types of stories.
And it might be worth noting that of all these films, the most reviled was written and directed by a woman and in most of the films, it is, in fact, a woman who proves the stronger of the two sexes and disarms the man. What remains viscerally true to this day is that that missile shaped 8 inch organ needs to be beaten into a plowshare.
SexFascismMoviesItalyInternational Film...
Italy was the hotbed of this examination of fascism coming out of World War II. Luchino Visconti’s The Damned (1969), Bertolucci’s The Conformist (1970), Pier Paolo Pasolini’s infamous Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975). Even the American musical, via Bob Fosse’s adaptation of Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin Stories, Cabaret (1972) hinted at what the Italians went after with their full force of creative muscle.
Take Liliana Cavani’s The Night Porter (1974), set in Vienna in 1957, the film centers on the sadomasochistic relationship between a former Nazi concentration camp officer (Dirk Bogarde) and one of his inmates (Charlotte Rampling). Their sadomasochistic love is their only happiness and it paralyzes the former Nazis who have been reintegrated into polite society.
Universally reviled by U.S.’s top critics, Roger Ebert of The Chicago Sun-Times called it “as nasty as it is lubricious, a despicable attempt to titillate us by exploiting memories of persecution and suffering”. Vincent Canby, prominent critic for The New York Times, called it “romantic pornography” and “a piece of junk”. Pauline Kael wrote in The New Yorker, “Many of us can’t take more than a few hard-core porno movies, because the absence of any human esteem makes them depressing rather than sexy; The Night Porteroffers the same dehumanized view and is brazen enough to use the Second World War as an excuse.”
Susan Sontag’s essay Fascinating Facism for New York Review of Books (February 6, 1975) stated, “If the message of fascism has been neutralized by an aesthetic view of life, its trappings have been sexualized. This eroticization of fascism can be remarked in such enthralling and devout manifestations as Mishima’s Confessions of a Mask and Sun and Steel, and in films like Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising and, more recently and far less interestingly, in Visconti’s The Damned and Cavani’s The Night Porter.”
However, its value was recognized by the executive producer Joseph E. Levine who quoted them on the posters of the U.S. theatrical release through his company Avco Embassy.
In a brilliant essay of the film by Kat Ellinger I quote:
Filmmakers were suddenly touching the untouchable, and it made certain people incredibly uncomfortable.”
Unlike Naziploitation, The Night Porter does nothing to cartoonise the Nazi officers that dominate the narrative. It isn’t a case of good versus evil, or that sadism is presented as a form of lasivious softcore pornography. Neither is the film a deliberate political treatise like the art films of Bertolucci, Visconti, or Pasolini. Its biggest transgression is that it humanises one of its main characters, Max (Dirk Bogarde), a former Nazi officer with a penchant for sadism, when he finds his ‘little girl’ again in the postwar period; a former concentration camp inmate Lucia (Charlotte Rampling) with whom he undertook a sadistic affair while she was incarcerated. On reuniting it is clear that their loved never died, so they continue, even though they know it will eventually contribute to their downfall and consequent death. Love in this realm is desperately profane, disgusting, something that should never be. And because of this it remains infinitely fascinating and uniquely humanistic.
Related in spirit was Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris (1972), using sex to express the death of love and male causality, its own furor when it hit American cinemas still continues to court controversy; and Luchino Visconti’s The Innocent (1976), based upon the novel by the decadent writer Gabriele D’Annunzio, expressing the same but in a totally antithetical environment of the aristocracy. Bertolluci’s The Conformist(1970) twisted the repressed homosexual of its title into a sadomasochistic fascist.
One could say, as did Gabriel Jenkinson, “the dynamics of conformity present in the modern consumerist capitalist system result in repression, which in turn manifests as violent sadomasochism — and …if one does not actively rebel against this system, one is complicit in its proliferation.”
Parenthetically on the other side of the earth, in Japan, In the Realm of the Senses (1976) by Nagisa Ôshima about a woman whose affair with her master leads to an obsessive and ultimately destructive sexual relationship also came out of Oshima’s early involvement with the student protest movement in Kyoto in ‘68 and out of his concern with the contradictions and tensions of postwar Japanese society in which he exposed contemporary Japanese materialism, while also examining what it means to be Japanese in the face of rapid industrialization and Westernization.
In 2020 Vincent Canby might have revisited The Night Porter and seen it in a different light. His 2020 review of Visconti’s last film, L’innocente (The Innocent), completed in 1976 shortly before his death was “among the most beautiful and severely disciplined films he has ever made.” It was also brazenly sadistic and sexy to a point that today would be labeled pornographic, and today could not be conceived of, much less made, diving, as it does, into sex, abortion, male domination and violence.
According to The World, public radio’s longest-running daily global news program, a co-production of Prx and Wgbh, in 2012:
British scientists have finally confirmed what women worldwide have been suspecting for centuries. It’s not religious principles that start wars. It’s not even civilization’s thirst for oil. Ladies and gentlemen, it’s the penis.
According to a study published this week in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society publication, the male sex drive is the cause of most conflicts in the world, from soccer hooliganism to religious wars, not to mention family disputes over the toilet seat being left up.
According to this story in The Telegraph, the scientists call it the “male warrior instinct” and claim men are programmed to be aggressive toward outsiders. It apparently used to be a handy instinct, back when you had to kill other suitors in order to gain more access to mates, but nowadays, this only works in some countries and a few US cities. For the rest of us, this unreformed sex drive only means ever-increasing defense budgets.
The magnitude of this discovery is so great, it’s difficult to estimate the potential ramifications.
At only eight inches on average (or that’s what we have been told), it’s smaller in size than most other controversial discoveries, yet — just like the atom — it has catastrophic consequences if in the hands of the wrong people.
And so these filmmakers show us the pathological drive of the unleashed male libido.
But times are different in the 21st century. These films could never be approximated by our Tik Tok generation where porn has created a quick witty and essentially violent vibrato of sexuality. These films of the late ‘60s and ‘70s took the libido at its rawest and showed its drive as an expression of political evil in very different types of stories.
And it might be worth noting that of all these films, the most reviled was written and directed by a woman and in most of the films, it is, in fact, a woman who proves the stronger of the two sexes and disarms the man. What remains viscerally true to this day is that that missile shaped 8 inch organ needs to be beaten into a plowshare.
SexFascismMoviesItalyInternational Film...
- 2/11/2023
- by Sydney
- Sydney's Buzz
Queer history cannot escape its own evanescence. Neither can queer spaces, really. To judge by the conceit behind Georden West’s fabulous, if oblique, “Playland,” such ephemerality is precisely what makes such a history and such spaces so ripe for memorializing. In this case, West has turned his attention to the Playland Café which, over its storied tenure from 1937 to 1998, became a fixture of the Boston gay scene. Rather than narrativize the bar’s own story, West opts for a collage-like approach, conjuring up figures from the bar’s many pasts in intersecting vignettes that together capture the spirit of the Playland Café, both at its glory and now following its demise.
At the center of “Playland” is an interdisciplinary sensibility. West’s film builds itself out with the use of archival images, historical audio clips, choreographed numbers and glittering tableaux vivants. This is an excavated history that requires collapsing and colliding worlds and words.
At the center of “Playland” is an interdisciplinary sensibility. West’s film builds itself out with the use of archival images, historical audio clips, choreographed numbers and glittering tableaux vivants. This is an excavated history that requires collapsing and colliding worlds and words.
- 2/2/2023
- by Manuel Betancourt
- Variety Film + TV
Since the creation of the camera and the dawn of cinema, film has been one long experiment. Experimental film has often been defined through its rejection of traditional storytelling and structure, its defiance of logic or reason while creating mesmerizing scenes through dreamlike abstraction and subjective narrative.
A key figure in the early history of experimental film was the French filmmaker Georges Méliès. In the late 1890s and early 1900s, Méliès was one of the first filmmakers to use special effects and trick photography to create fantastical and surreal images on the screen. His films, such as A Trip to the Moon and The Impossible Voyage, were some of the first examples of what would later be called experimental film. Another important trailblazer during the silent era was female director Lois Weber who is credited in creating an estimated 200 to 400 films. She was credited with pioneering the use of the...
A key figure in the early history of experimental film was the French filmmaker Georges Méliès. In the late 1890s and early 1900s, Méliès was one of the first filmmakers to use special effects and trick photography to create fantastical and surreal images on the screen. His films, such as A Trip to the Moon and The Impossible Voyage, were some of the first examples of what would later be called experimental film. Another important trailblazer during the silent era was female director Lois Weber who is credited in creating an estimated 200 to 400 films. She was credited with pioneering the use of the...
- 1/19/2023
- by Robert Lang
- Deadline Film + TV
Watching Damien Chazelle’s “Babylon,” in all its superficially titillating, occasionally exciting and mostly exhausting wretched excess, I thought to myself: We’ve been here before, so many times.
You sit down to watch a movie by a director whose work you love. He’s swinging for the fences. His ambition is on full display and so, in fits and spurts, is his talent. Yet something else is on display too: a lack of judgment that starts out like a worm, wriggling through the proceedings, before growing and metastasizing until it’s eating everything in its path.
I’ll leave the D-word out of this, since “Babylon,” a watchable if weirdly joyless movie, never turns into a disaster of incoherence like, say, “Amsterdam.” Yet the movie reminded me of how many great directors have had a compulsive epic misfire in them. Probably most of them; it may be inherent in the imagination of moviemaking.
You sit down to watch a movie by a director whose work you love. He’s swinging for the fences. His ambition is on full display and so, in fits and spurts, is his talent. Yet something else is on display too: a lack of judgment that starts out like a worm, wriggling through the proceedings, before growing and metastasizing until it’s eating everything in its path.
I’ll leave the D-word out of this, since “Babylon,” a watchable if weirdly joyless movie, never turns into a disaster of incoherence like, say, “Amsterdam.” Yet the movie reminded me of how many great directors have had a compulsive epic misfire in them. Probably most of them; it may be inherent in the imagination of moviemaking.
- 1/15/2023
- by Owen Gleiberman
- Variety Film + TV
It's unsurprising how many have compared "Babylon," director Damien Chazzelle's super-charged elegy for early Hollywood, to "Boogie Nights" and "Singin' in the Rain." In its tensions -- talent and luck, apocryphal myth-making and the lesser-known truths, moral incongruity and creative spunk, and the critique of an apathetic business that nonetheless creates empathetic works -- Chazelle's "Babylon" bears some lineage to both films.
If you only focus on those influences, however, you will miss the primary tension: The fight between identity and assimilation. These politics, as viewed through the film's protagonist, Manuel Torres (Diego Calva), position Chazelle's behemoth vision closer to "The Last Black Man in San Francisco," "Medicine for Melancholy," and "Bamboozled" as an assimilation narrative affixed to a fable.
In Joe Talbot's "The Last Black Man in San Francisco," amid a gentrifying city selling the remnants of its Black heritage to the highest bidder, Jimmie Fails (played by...
If you only focus on those influences, however, you will miss the primary tension: The fight between identity and assimilation. These politics, as viewed through the film's protagonist, Manuel Torres (Diego Calva), position Chazelle's behemoth vision closer to "The Last Black Man in San Francisco," "Medicine for Melancholy," and "Bamboozled" as an assimilation narrative affixed to a fable.
In Joe Talbot's "The Last Black Man in San Francisco," amid a gentrifying city selling the remnants of its Black heritage to the highest bidder, Jimmie Fails (played by...
- 12/29/2022
- by Robert Daniels
- Slash Film
In the late 1920s, silent era filmmaking was at the height of its artistry, and Hollywood was one big, debaucherous party. This was the roaring twenties, after all. In fact, it was the depravity — on screen and off — of this era that led to the creation of the Production Code that would handicap studio films for decades to come.
Although many films have paid tribute to these wild, early days like James Ivory’s “The Wild Party” or Michel Hazanavicius’ “The Artist,” few have boasted as impressive a grasp the magic and darkness of its history and mythology as Damien Chazelle’s “Babylon.” This era is a perfect collision of all the Oscar winner’s interests.
In his three-hour epic “Babylon,” the romantic cinephilia of “La La Land” meets the obsessive jazz rhythms of “Whiplash” meets the detailed history of “First Man.” Inspired in part by the racier (though often...
Although many films have paid tribute to these wild, early days like James Ivory’s “The Wild Party” or Michel Hazanavicius’ “The Artist,” few have boasted as impressive a grasp the magic and darkness of its history and mythology as Damien Chazelle’s “Babylon.” This era is a perfect collision of all the Oscar winner’s interests.
In his three-hour epic “Babylon,” the romantic cinephilia of “La La Land” meets the obsessive jazz rhythms of “Whiplash” meets the detailed history of “First Man.” Inspired in part by the racier (though often...
- 12/21/2022
- by Marya E. Gates
- Indiewire
Click here to read the full article.
When the dizzying trailer for Babylon dropped, its coke-fueled bacchanal of sex, partying, moviemaking and sleaze sold it as The Day of the Locust meets The Wolf of Wall Street. Marketing can be deceptive, but in this case, turns out that’s an accurate taste of what the whopping three hours and change of Damien Chazelle’s poison-pen letter to 1920s and ‘30s Hollywood delivers, with the freewheeling storytelling of Boogie Nights and a sticky dollop of Lynchian creepiness. No doubt plenty of cool kids will eagerly sign up to be pummeled by the film’s crazed excesses, though just as many will find it exhausting and sour. Even its technical virtuosity feels assaultive.
To all the folks who stomped out any chance of Chazelle’s soulful space-travel drama, First Man, finding an audience by whipping up a fake controversy charging that it was unpatriotic,...
When the dizzying trailer for Babylon dropped, its coke-fueled bacchanal of sex, partying, moviemaking and sleaze sold it as The Day of the Locust meets The Wolf of Wall Street. Marketing can be deceptive, but in this case, turns out that’s an accurate taste of what the whopping three hours and change of Damien Chazelle’s poison-pen letter to 1920s and ‘30s Hollywood delivers, with the freewheeling storytelling of Boogie Nights and a sticky dollop of Lynchian creepiness. No doubt plenty of cool kids will eagerly sign up to be pummeled by the film’s crazed excesses, though just as many will find it exhausting and sour. Even its technical virtuosity feels assaultive.
To all the folks who stomped out any chance of Chazelle’s soulful space-travel drama, First Man, finding an audience by whipping up a fake controversy charging that it was unpatriotic,...
- 12/16/2022
- by David Rooney
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
Pitt and Margot Robbie, and many razzle dazzle setpieces, help lift a story in no hurry to engage with the true-life nastiness of its era
Damien Chazelle returns to that la la land in which he made his big breakthrough, with a turbocharged but heavy-handed epic about the secret chaos and excess of 1920s silent-era Hollywood on the verge of talkie extinction, inspired by some well-known anecdotes and further embellishing the apocryphal rumours and tales. It’s a love letter to the movies, inevitably, though I remember Chazelle’s previous films being love letters to actual human beings. There are preemptive references to Singin’ in the Rain and it climaxes with a swoony-solemn Oscar-telecast-type montage including clips from Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon and James Cameron’s Terminator 2. Funny though Babylon often is, in all its frantic melodrama it is weirdly without the gentle romantic sweetness and...
Damien Chazelle returns to that la la land in which he made his big breakthrough, with a turbocharged but heavy-handed epic about the secret chaos and excess of 1920s silent-era Hollywood on the verge of talkie extinction, inspired by some well-known anecdotes and further embellishing the apocryphal rumours and tales. It’s a love letter to the movies, inevitably, though I remember Chazelle’s previous films being love letters to actual human beings. There are preemptive references to Singin’ in the Rain and it climaxes with a swoony-solemn Oscar-telecast-type montage including clips from Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon and James Cameron’s Terminator 2. Funny though Babylon often is, in all its frantic melodrama it is weirdly without the gentle romantic sweetness and...
- 12/16/2022
- by Peter Bradshaw
- The Guardian - Film News
Celebrated cartoonist and screenwriter Daniel Clowes discusses his favorite formative films with hosts Josh Olson and Joe Dante.
Show Notes: Movies Referenced In This Episode
Baxter (1989)
Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1966) – Josh Olson’s trailer commentary
Ghost World (2001) – Josh Olson’s trailer commentary, Glenn Erickson’s Blu-ray review
Art School Confidential (2006)
Help! (1965) – Allan Arkush’s trailer commentary, Charlie Largent’s review
The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming! (1966) – John Landis’s trailer commentary,
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1938) – Charlie Largent’s Blu-ray review
Gone With The Wind (1939)
Mudhoney (1965) – John Badham’s trailer commentary
Finders Keepers, Lovers Weepers! (1968)
Common Law Cabin (1967)
Beyond The Valley Of The Dolls (1970) – Michael Lehmann’s trailer commentary, Glenn Erickson’s Blu-ray review
The Seven Minutes (1971)
Black Snake (1973)
An American Werewolf In London (1981) – Glenn Erickson’s Blu-ray and 4K Blu-ray reviews
Lady In A Cage (1964) – Darren Bousman’s trailer commentary, Charlie Largent’s Blu-ray review
The Wild One (1953)
Hush…...
Show Notes: Movies Referenced In This Episode
Baxter (1989)
Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1966) – Josh Olson’s trailer commentary
Ghost World (2001) – Josh Olson’s trailer commentary, Glenn Erickson’s Blu-ray review
Art School Confidential (2006)
Help! (1965) – Allan Arkush’s trailer commentary, Charlie Largent’s review
The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming! (1966) – John Landis’s trailer commentary,
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1938) – Charlie Largent’s Blu-ray review
Gone With The Wind (1939)
Mudhoney (1965) – John Badham’s trailer commentary
Finders Keepers, Lovers Weepers! (1968)
Common Law Cabin (1967)
Beyond The Valley Of The Dolls (1970) – Michael Lehmann’s trailer commentary, Glenn Erickson’s Blu-ray review
The Seven Minutes (1971)
Black Snake (1973)
An American Werewolf In London (1981) – Glenn Erickson’s Blu-ray and 4K Blu-ray reviews
Lady In A Cage (1964) – Darren Bousman’s trailer commentary, Charlie Largent’s Blu-ray review
The Wild One (1953)
Hush…...
- 11/15/2022
- by Kris Millsap
- Trailers from Hell
If the new Belvedere Vodka commercial, starring Daniel Craig and directed by Taika Waititi, were a scene out of Craig’s latest film, it would be the best scene in the movie, or at least the one that everyone’s talking about. Then again, no one would mistake it for a movie scene. The commercial has a postmodern strike-a-pose viral aesthetic — it‘s two minutes of bliss frozen in time. As Craig saunters and dances through a swank hotel in Paris, it becomes the rare commercial in which a movie star isn’t being used to sell a product so much as he’s using the commercial to sell a shift in his own image. Yes, the extended spot is hawking vodka, and Craig probably got a paycheck that leaves most movie-star paychecks in the dust. Yet that’s all kind of beside the point. The commercial is Craig’s...
- 11/13/2022
- by Owen Gleiberman
- Variety Film + TV
What’s the matter with Pearl? Plenty, as it turns out in Ti West’s terrifically enjoyable postscript to his spring release X, which saw a 1970s film crew fall brutally afoul of an elderly farmer and his wife while shooting a porno in their barn. Unusually for a horror film, X had the same actress — Mia Goth — as both the final kill (the farmer’s psychotic wife Pearl) and the final girl (sex-film starlet Maxine), and this intelligent, not to mention almost indecently hasty prequel explains the reasons.
Pearl, screening out of competition at the Venice Film Festival, is that rare horror franchise follow-up that, while mindful of expectations from its predecessor’s core gore audience, has considered artful new ways to drill down into the essence of the original.
First, a quick digression into the appeal of X and Ti West’s films in general: West has an...
Pearl, screening out of competition at the Venice Film Festival, is that rare horror franchise follow-up that, while mindful of expectations from its predecessor’s core gore audience, has considered artful new ways to drill down into the essence of the original.
First, a quick digression into the appeal of X and Ti West’s films in general: West has an...
- 9/4/2022
- by Damon Wise
- Deadline Film + TV
For a certain type of cinephile versed in the avant-garde, the name Jonas Mekas brings to mind a particular type of autobiographical filmmaking — one that prioritized the immediacy of a given moment over context or sometimes even narrative coherence. He was an Immensely prolific filmmaker, critic, archivist, and poet who, in his own words, immigrated to the US in the late ’40s “hungry, thirsty for art,” taking in everything he could.
While not exactly forgotten, Mekas’ work as the “Film Culture” founder, Village Voice critic, historian, and champion of such directors as Kenneth Anger and Ken Jacobs, has often overshadowed his prolific film work.
Continue reading ‘Fragments Of Paradise’ Review: An Conventional, But Captivating Documentary About Unconventional Filmmaker Jonas Mekas [Venice] at The Playlist.
While not exactly forgotten, Mekas’ work as the “Film Culture” founder, Village Voice critic, historian, and champion of such directors as Kenneth Anger and Ken Jacobs, has often overshadowed his prolific film work.
Continue reading ‘Fragments Of Paradise’ Review: An Conventional, But Captivating Documentary About Unconventional Filmmaker Jonas Mekas [Venice] at The Playlist.
- 9/2/2022
- by Christian Gallichio
- The Playlist
By the time she was 21, actress Lupe Velez had worked with nearly all the top directors of the silent era, including D.W. Griffith (“Lady of the Pavements”), Lon Chaney (“Where East Is East”), and Cecil B. DeMille (“The Squaw Man”). Her first big break came from the King of Hollywood himself, Douglas Fairbanks, in 1927’s “The Gaucho.” She was star of an eight-film series at Rko Studios.
And yet, for most, the image they have of the classic screen star is a fake one, one not at all in line with her prodigious talents and incredible filmography.
In 1965, when “Hollywood Babylon” was published, author Kenneth Anger claimed that his tell-all would unpack the sleazy and sordid lives of numerous stars of the silent and early sound film era, with many of his tawdry tales involving sex, drugs, and death. In several instances, Anger included photos of dead celebrities, like infamous...
And yet, for most, the image they have of the classic screen star is a fake one, one not at all in line with her prodigious talents and incredible filmography.
In 1965, when “Hollywood Babylon” was published, author Kenneth Anger claimed that his tell-all would unpack the sleazy and sordid lives of numerous stars of the silent and early sound film era, with many of his tawdry tales involving sex, drugs, and death. In several instances, Anger included photos of dead celebrities, like infamous...
- 7/18/2022
- by Kristen Lopez
- Indiewire
With the death this week of Ralph “Sonny” Barger, national president of famed motorcycle club the Hells Angels, a piece of vibrant American pop culture history recedes farther into the past.
It’s hard to appreciate today, but when Barger founded the Oakland chapter in 1957, the mythology of the outlaw biker had already been emblazoned on the national consciousness through the Hells Angels’ impact on fashion, movies and music, as a symbol of rebellion. Barger’s death on June 29 at the age of 83 made international headlines because of that reach.
Barger was the face of the Hells Angels for decades, but the origin story of the Hells Angels began nearly a decade before when the club was founded in Fontana, Calif., in 1948. The mythos of the rebel clad in black leather astride their prized “hogs,” as their often-chopped Harley-Davidson motorcycles are known, is now entrenched in the public’s imagination.
It’s hard to appreciate today, but when Barger founded the Oakland chapter in 1957, the mythology of the outlaw biker had already been emblazoned on the national consciousness through the Hells Angels’ impact on fashion, movies and music, as a symbol of rebellion. Barger’s death on June 29 at the age of 83 made international headlines because of that reach.
Barger was the face of the Hells Angels for decades, but the origin story of the Hells Angels began nearly a decade before when the club was founded in Fontana, Calif., in 1948. The mythos of the rebel clad in black leather astride their prized “hogs,” as their often-chopped Harley-Davidson motorcycles are known, is now entrenched in the public’s imagination.
- 7/1/2022
- by Steven Gaydos
- Variety Film + TV
NYC Weekend Watch is our weekly round-up of repertory offerings.
Bam
A series on recent restorations showcases what’s made rep-going worthwhile of late—Inland Empire, The Conversation, Mississippi Masala, and more.
Film at Lincoln Center
The 4K Lost Highway restoration continues; Hedwig and the Angry Inch screens at Governor’s Island on Friday.
Roxy Cinema
Wild at Heart plays on 35mm this Saturday night; Betty Blue screens Friday and Saturday.
Anthology Film Archives
Essential Cinema has Kenneth Anger and Bruce Baille.
Museum of Modern Art
One of the year’s great retrospectives looks at deep cuts of Shochiku Studios, while a slashers retrospective is underway.
Film Forum
A 35mm print of Diva and new restoration of The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie continue.
Museum of the Moving Image
George A. Romero and his progeny are subject of a series.
IFC Center
Inland Empire, Aguirre, Mulholland Dr., Perfect Blue, Paprika,...
Bam
A series on recent restorations showcases what’s made rep-going worthwhile of late—Inland Empire, The Conversation, Mississippi Masala, and more.
Film at Lincoln Center
The 4K Lost Highway restoration continues; Hedwig and the Angry Inch screens at Governor’s Island on Friday.
Roxy Cinema
Wild at Heart plays on 35mm this Saturday night; Betty Blue screens Friday and Saturday.
Anthology Film Archives
Essential Cinema has Kenneth Anger and Bruce Baille.
Museum of Modern Art
One of the year’s great retrospectives looks at deep cuts of Shochiku Studios, while a slashers retrospective is underway.
Film Forum
A 35mm print of Diva and new restoration of The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie continue.
Museum of the Moving Image
George A. Romero and his progeny are subject of a series.
IFC Center
Inland Empire, Aguirre, Mulholland Dr., Perfect Blue, Paprika,...
- 6/30/2022
- by Nick Newman
- The Film Stage
Just before the Cannes Film Festival midnight-show premiere of the David Bowie documentary “Moonage Daydream,” the film’s writer, director, and editor, Brett Morgen, didn’t simply stroll down the red carpet. As Bowie’s “Let’s Dance” blared from the promenade speakers, Morgen danced — and pranced and pogo-ed, and flashed a cheeky madman grin, and by the time he entered the theater, the crowd, taking all this in on a giant video screen, gave him an even more rapturous than usual Cannes ovation. Morgen had the right look for these antics. He started off his career as a documentary geek, but around the time of “Montage of Heck,” his 2015 film about Kurt Cobain, he began to style his hair in a fashionably disheveled wet-look mane. Tall and aggressive, he entered the Lumière like a would-be rock star.
The reason I bring this up is that I think it’s relevant...
The reason I bring this up is that I think it’s relevant...
- 5/26/2022
- by Owen Gleiberman
- Variety Film + TV
The opening moments of Amanda Kramer’s “Please Baby Please” play like an archly stylized “West Side Story” by way of Kenneth Anger. Only, instead of the Jets, we have the “Young Gents,” a group of leather-clad rascals who dance their way through the streets of a neon-tinged, foggy 1950s Manhattan before descending on an unsuspecting couple and, well, beating them to death. Looking like Marlon Brando circa “The Wild One” cosplayers, this ragtag group is interrupted by two stunned bystanders, Arthur and Suze (Harry Melling and Andrea Riseborough). The moment will change the bohemian couple forever. The lustful gazes exchanged between Arthur and Teddy, as well as the electrifying fear-turned-titillation Suze experiences, set them both on a conquest to undo the relationship they thought they wanted. In the process, Kramer sketches out a feverish queer manifesto on gender that feels both novel and familiar.
For by the time the...
For by the time the...
- 1/26/2022
- by Manuel Betancourt
- Variety Film + TV
Heroin chic crime and punishment caper feels more like an oblique marketing exercise than the classic queer cinema it nods to
Writer-director Janell Shirtcliff’s debut feature plays like a throwback to trashy queer-minded cult films of old, like the early work of John Waters (Pink Flamingos or Female Trouble) or Gregg Araki (The Doom Generation). There’s maybe even just a soupçon of Kenneth Anger in the use of what look very much like excerpts from Anger’s cutup gay bikers-meet-Jesus film Scorpio Rising. Except this shonky tale of crime and punishment in Los Angeles lacks the incisive wit or heretical instincts of those antecedents. It’s more like a Gen-z fashion magazine homage to Gen-x heroin chic, with fractionally more of a plot.
Main protagonist Mads (Bella Thorne) loves Jesus in her own special way, even though she is a heroin user and possibly a sex and love addict.
Writer-director Janell Shirtcliff’s debut feature plays like a throwback to trashy queer-minded cult films of old, like the early work of John Waters (Pink Flamingos or Female Trouble) or Gregg Araki (The Doom Generation). There’s maybe even just a soupçon of Kenneth Anger in the use of what look very much like excerpts from Anger’s cutup gay bikers-meet-Jesus film Scorpio Rising. Except this shonky tale of crime and punishment in Los Angeles lacks the incisive wit or heretical instincts of those antecedents. It’s more like a Gen-z fashion magazine homage to Gen-x heroin chic, with fractionally more of a plot.
Main protagonist Mads (Bella Thorne) loves Jesus in her own special way, even though she is a heroin user and possibly a sex and love addict.
- 11/16/2021
- by Leslie Felperin
- The Guardian - Film News
This is an excerpt from Melissa Anderson’s Inland Empire, available to order from Fireflies Press.Like the Avenging Angel – the Nikki/Susan avatar who delivers a long soliloquy teeming with tales of imperilment – I often don’t know what was before or after in Inland Empire no matter how many times I’ve watched it. Recursive episodes proliferate in the film. At least three times Nikki/Susan dissociates, looking at another version of herself from another vantage point. At one point the Avenging Angel enters an empty movie palace, here a de facto hall of mirrors: she sees herself onscreen saying, ‘Watchin’ it, like in a dark theatre.’ That nearly vacant cinema instantly recalls Mulholland Drive’s Club Silencio, the mystical cabaret that Betty and Rita, desire-drunk after having sex, cab to in the middle of the night – and where their love story, if not their very identities, begins to unravel.
- 10/31/2021
- MUBI
After a hiatus where New York’s theaters closed during the pandemic, we’re delighted to announce the return of NYC Weekend Watch, our weekly round-up of repertory offerings. While many theaters are still focused on a selection of new releases, a handful of worthwhile repertory screenings are taking place.
Paris Theater
To mark their return, a frighteningly stacked weekend: A Room with a View and Grey Gardens on Friday; Children of Paradise, Louis Malle, and Vivre Sa Vie on Saturday; then Amelie and Ed Lachman’s print of Carol on Sunday.
Roxy Cinema
Screen Slate celebrates their 10th anniversary with prints of Friday the 13th, Jackass, 24 Hour Party People and more.
Anthology Film Archives
A weekend of experimental shorts is complemented by Kenneth Anger and a Baille/Belson program.
Museum of the Moving Image
The Age of Innocence and Ran show in “See It Big,” while 2001 and Eyes Wide Shut have showings.
Paris Theater
To mark their return, a frighteningly stacked weekend: A Room with a View and Grey Gardens on Friday; Children of Paradise, Louis Malle, and Vivre Sa Vie on Saturday; then Amelie and Ed Lachman’s print of Carol on Sunday.
Roxy Cinema
Screen Slate celebrates their 10th anniversary with prints of Friday the 13th, Jackass, 24 Hour Party People and more.
Anthology Film Archives
A weekend of experimental shorts is complemented by Kenneth Anger and a Baille/Belson program.
Museum of the Moving Image
The Age of Innocence and Ran show in “See It Big,” while 2001 and Eyes Wide Shut have showings.
- 8/12/2021
- by Nick Newman
- The Film Stage
The 14th Annual QFest St. Louis — presented by Cinema St. Louis (Csl) — will take place from April 16-25. Because of the Covid-19 pandemic, Csl will offer all programs virtually, protecting the health of patrons. Programs can be streamed at any time during the festival’s dates. Recorded introductions and Q&As will be available for most film programs. For the full schedule of screenings, including trailers and descriptions of the films, visit the festival website at www.cinemastlouis.org/qfest.
One of the eclectic array of 24 films that are part of this year’s QFest St. Louis is the 1971 film Pink Narcissus, an experimental and artistic ‘erotic poem’ set in the fantasies of a young male prostitute.
This year’s Q Classic, Pink Narcissus — which is celebrating its 50th anniversary — is a breathtaking and outrageous erotic poem focusing on the daydreams of a beautiful boy prostitute who, from the seclusion of his ultra-kitsch apartment,...
One of the eclectic array of 24 films that are part of this year’s QFest St. Louis is the 1971 film Pink Narcissus, an experimental and artistic ‘erotic poem’ set in the fantasies of a young male prostitute.
This year’s Q Classic, Pink Narcissus — which is celebrating its 50th anniversary — is a breathtaking and outrageous erotic poem focusing on the daydreams of a beautiful boy prostitute who, from the seclusion of his ultra-kitsch apartment,...
- 4/13/2021
- by Tom Stockman
- WeAreMovieGeeks.com
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