Network Awesome
2012 -2014
ANDY WARHOL'S SCREEN TESTS: I'LL BE YOUR MIRROR (also at the Huffington Post and WFMU)
Warhol’s Screen Tests show the artist’s gaze at its blankest. Auditioning factory stars and starlets (and whoever might happen to drop by his notorious studio) in front of a locked or unlocked frame, these harshly lit studies function as portraits of the sitters. In the artist’s strategically vague or absent instruction of “no action”, the subjects squirm or pout, fidget or stare blankly. >>>
FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE: THE STRANGE TALE OF CLARA ROCKMORE AND LÉON
THEREMIN (also at the Huffington Post)
There is something about the Theremin, both its sound and the manner of its playing, that is almost comedic. An all-electric musical saw, its over-familiar, spooked warble has become a staple of B-movie sound effects. A "good vibration" quickly reached for as shorthand for the uncanny, curdling quickly into cliché or cute eccentricity. >>>
ANDRZEJ ŻUŁAWSKI: A MAN POSSESSED (also at WFMU)
Andrzej Żuławski’s “intellectual horror film”, Possession begins with the protagonist’s return from an unspecified but apparently dangerous assignment. In an empty room at Tempelhof Airport in Berlin, Mark’s employers plead with him to stay but he is adamant. His “subject” (and his pink socks) will elude them for now. Returning to his bland apartment in a 70’s housing complex, Mark (played somewhat woodenly by Sam Neil), finds his wife is leaving him for Heinrich, an intellectual martial arts expert with a wardrobe of silk shirts. >>>
DREAMS THAT MONEY CAN BUY: HANS RICHTER (also at WFMU)
Shot in colour on 16mm with the sound post-synchronized, Hans Richter’s extraordinary portmanteau film, Dreams That Money Can Buy is a real curate’s egg. Completed in 1947 for a budget of $25000 ($15000 of which had come from Peggy Guggenheim), the feature length film took three years to complete. >>>
THE SCREAMERS: 122 HOURS OF FEAR (also at WFMU)
History, even punk history, is written by the winners. In the late 70’s, just before the straight edge aggro of hardcore swept the board, there bloomed in L.A a punk scene that was as musically adventurous as its suburban SoCal counterpart was orthodox. The light that burns the brightest often burns only briefly and for three or four years L.A was in flames. Among those fueling the fire were Tomata du Plenty and The Screamers. >>>
ATTITUDE AS IDEOLOGY: LINDSAY ANDERSON’S IF…
Lindsay Anderson (1923 - 1994), the director of If… , was held by his contemporaries as amongst the greatest of British post-war film makers. Although he only completed eight features for the cinema, between 1957 and 1992 Anderson directed 33 plays for the British stage, from Shakespeare, Gogol and Checkov to contemporaries like Christopher Logue and David Storey. With the latter he would collaborate repeatedly and make his feature film debut, This Sporting Life (1963), which would win its star, Richard Harris, an Oscar nomination. >>>
ERICH VON DÄNIKEN: CHARLATAN OR CHARIOTEER?
In 1967 Econ-Verlag published Erich von Däniken’s, Erinnerungen a die Zukunft (Memories of the Future), later to be translated as Chariots of the Gods. The title would go on to sell over 20 million copies worldwide. In this book and the 26 that followed, Däniken would expound upon his theory of “paleo-contact”, that human civilization was a consequence of our ancestors being visited by extraterrestrials. In the course of his literary career he would become a very wealthy man, posing the provocative question, “Was God an Astronaut?” >>>
FANTASTIC VOYAGE: HAL SUTHERLAND MAKES IT WORK
“Headquarters: CMDF, Combined Miniature Defense Force. Project: Fantastic Voyage. Process: Miniaturization. Authority: Top Secret, highest clearance. Team: Jonathan Kidd, Commander. Guru, master of mysterious powers. Erica Lane, doctor/biologist. Busby Birdwell, scientist/inventor, builder of the Voyager. Mission: In their miniaturized form, to combat the unseen, unsuspected enemies of freedom. Time Limit: 12 hours.” >>>
HERZ ISN'T JUST THE CREMATOR: MORGIANA
When Soviet tanks arrived in Prague on the 21st of August 1968, Alexander Dubček’s short lived experiment in the liberalization of the then staunchly communist Czechoslovakia came to an abrupt end. Reforms had begun with Dubček’s election to the role of First Secretary of the Communist Party in January of that year and had been achieved, in part, with the support of progressive factions within the country’s intelligentsia that included writers such as Vaclav Havel and Milan Kundera and students of the Film and TV School of the Academy of The Performing Arts in Prague (FAMU), where Kundera lectured on world literature. >>>
NAKED BEHIND BARS: WOMEN IN PRISON
“Here women without men live only for the moment of freedom,” promises the trailer forJohn Cromwell’s, Caged (1950) summing up the kinky appeal of the women in prison film. For separatist lesbians, crazed nihilist drag queens, lecherous voyeurs (and even the morally minded), here were to be found, in vicarious microcosm, in noir shadow and occasionally in lurid Technicolor, the whispered secrets of the cellblock. >>>
PETER FOLDES: HUNGER
The German artist Paul Klee famously described the act of drawing as “taking a line for a walk” and for Peter Foldes, who had studied painting at the Slade School Of Art and the Courtald Institute, this definition seems particularly apt. In his wordless 11-minute animation Hunger, the line vibrates and wiggles, looping back on itself in a constant state of mutation. It transforms itself from person to object and back again as it describes the process by which its protagonist ultimately becomes the victim of his own gluttony. >>>
THE EXPERIMENTAL CINEMA OF FRANS ZWARTJES
In Zwartjes’, Living (1971) the camera swoops and pursues the bourgeois male and female protagonists (the filmmaker and his wife, Trix) who seem haunted by it - rarely meeting its gaze or each others. The camera floats, rising and falling in a queasy dance as the women’s heel descends on a floor plan. This scene, in a minimal, perhaps unfamiliar apartment, is strangely reminiscent of Herk Harvey’s, Carnival of Souls or Lynch’s White and Black Lodges. The phased organ score and the deathly makeup, the carefully colour coded set, contributing to a deep sense of unease. >>>
THE FIRESIGN THEATRE: THE MEN BEHIND THE CURTAIN
In Nick Danger:The Case of the Missing Yolk, The Firesign Theatre construct a Chinese box puzzle of parallel universes. Hillbillies, mortgaged to the hilt in order to acquire their home of the future, sit stupefied in front of the TV while neo-noir detective, Nick Danger, uses his third eye to investigate the kidnapping of their adult children. Beneath a machine gun patter of bad puns, those yolks will inevitably be cracked and cracked again, The Firesign Theatre’s TV satire feels like what would happen if Marshall McLuhan had got his hands on the Marx Brothers. >>>
THE PERFECT NOIR: BILLY WILDER’S DOUBLE INDEMNITY
In the opening frames of Billy Wilder’s archetypal film noir it is evident, even before the confession he is about to recount, that Walter Neff is a doomed man. With his back to the camera Neff slumps in abject defeat. In his colleague’s office he narrates the story of an intricately plotted murder unraveling. >>>
GOODBYE SUZIE Q: BOB HOPE’S VIETNAM CHRISTMAS SPECIALS
In Francis Ford Coppolla’s, Apocalpyse Now, there is an iconic scene in which Playmate of the year, Miss Terri Foster (played by Cynthia Wood) descends from a Playboy helicopter to entertain the gathered troops. In a sexy cowgirl outfit, she struts her stuff in the spotlight to a soundtrack of Dale Hawkins’, Susie Q. The local “Vietnamese” watch from behind a chicken wire fence as the soldiers grow more agitated. >>>
THE SURREAL RINGING OF THE CASH TILL: DAVID LYNCH'S COMMERCIALS
It’s one of Hollywood’s worst kept secrets that A (and B) -list celebrities in search of another payday could always sneak off to Japan or Europe to shill products they wouldn’t be seen dead endorsing in America. Arnie’s enthusiastic efforts on behalf of the energy drink, "Vfuyy" and Sly’s insatiable appetite for Ito Ham are internet memes well past their respective sell by dates but they are but two examples in a roll call of unlikely but highly lucrative commercial partnerships. >>>
URBAN DECAY AND THE MONOMYTH: CASTELLARI’S BRONX
Enzo G. Castellari’s, 1990: The Bronx Warriors was released in 1982, a year after John Carpenter’s, Escape from New York, and the two films bear more than a passing resemblance. Indeed a number of major Hollywood films released on the cusp of the 80’s (Fort Apache the Bronx and Blade Runner amongst the most notable) return to cinema’s enduring fascination, and horror, of the city. In these films the city is often divided, hostile and under siege, its inhabitants beyond the rule of law. >>>
WHAT THE MICROSCOPE DOES NOT REVEAL: WATCHING NABOKOV
On Nov 19, 1958 CBS’s rather stodgy and conservative culture strand, Close Up was interrupted at short notice to accommodate Vladimir Nabokov’s defence of his incendiary novel, Lolita. Nabokov confronts (or evades) Lionel Trilling, every inch the debonair literary butterfly, poised with cigarette. >>>