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Trip out with Salvador Dalí and Amanda Lear at a 1968 art opening


Olivier Mosset, ‘Untitled,’ 1968 (via Contemporary Art Daily)

Fun and Games for Everyone is the second of three films the French director Serge Bard made before changing his name to Abdullah Siradj and abandoning le cinéma. This one immortalizes a 1968 opening at the Rive Droite gallery, dedicated to Olivier Mosset’s series of identical white canvases with black circles in the center.

The film was shot in ultra-high-contrast black and white, an effect achieved by cinematographer Henri Alekan:

Alekan asked LTC film labs to flash the negative before processing it, giving the film a semi-negative look.

Bard was a member of the “Zanzibar group” of filmmakers, which also included Mosset, Jackie Raynal, and Philippe Garrel, later the director of a number of really miserable movies starring Nico. On the soundtrack of Fun and Games is French jazzer Barney Wilen, whose big move in ‘68 was a “free rock” album dedicated to Timothy Leary.

The trailer is below, and the full movie is available for rent on Vimeo. Patient and attentive viewers will spot Salvador Dalí, Amanda Lear, and Barbet Schroeder; there is, for instance, a glimpse of Dalí at 36:45. Caveat spectator: the full movie is a non-narrative deal. There is much gorgeous footage of slightly dazed French people, and the movie opens with a long period of silence; such dialogue as occurs is almost entirely in French, and there are no subtitles.
 

Posted by Oliver Hall
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01.05.2018
09:58 am
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Listen to some lesser-known Pink Floyd gems from their soundtrack to ‘More’
06.05.2014
10:52 am
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For one of the top-selling rock groups of all time, there are several albums by Pink Floyd that are virtually unknown to the vast majority of people who would call themselves “big” Pink Floyd fans (but who only actually own The Wall and The Dark Side Of The Moon).

One such album is their 1969 soundtrack album for French/Swiss director Barbet Schroeder’s More, an English language film about heroin addicts in Ibiza modeled on the Icarus myth. I think it’s one of the very best Pink Floyd albums, or at least it has a handful of some of their very best songs.

As Roger Waters said of the working on More:

“His [Barbet Schroeder’s] feeling about music for movies was, in those days, that he didn’t want a soundtrack to go behind the movie. All he wanted was, literally, if the radio was switched on in the car, for example, he wanted something to come out of the car. Or someone goes and switches the TV on, or whatever it is. He wanted the soundtrack to relate exactly to what was happening in the movie, rather than a film score backing the visuals.”

Speaking of visuals, More was shot by Academy Award-winning cinematographer Nestor Almendros (Days of Heaven).

It might be hard to imagine “The Nile Song,” which is undoubtedly the heaviest song in the entire Pink Floyd discography, taking a backseat to what’s going on onscreen (see last clip):
 

 
The gorgeous “Cymbaline,” sung by David Gilmour, is only heard in the film on someone’s record player as a couple roll and smoke a joint and predict it will be legal in five years. This slower live performance was filmed in the Abbaye De Royaumont, 18 miles north of Paris, in 1971. This would have been one of the final live performances of this song, as they would soon drop it from their concert repertoire in favor of the material that would become The Dark Side of the Moon.
 

 
A performance of “Green is the Colour” from Belgian television:
 

 
More from ‘More’ after the jump…

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Posted by Richard Metzger
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06.05.2014
10:52 am
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Charles Bukowski: ‘I drink, I gamble, I write…’ the making of ‘Barfly’

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A behind-the-scenes look at the making of Charles Bukowski’s semi-autobiographical movie Barfly, with Mickey Rourke, Faye Dunaway, director Barbet Schroeder and the great, Bukowski, who explained the film’s title:

‘I was the barfly. I would open the bar and I would close the bar and I had no money. It was a place to be. It was my home.’

Bukowski wrote the script for Schroeder, who was so passionate about making a film with the poet, that when backers Canon planned to exclude the project form its production schedule, the director threatened to cut-off his own finger with a battery-powered saw if he didn’t get the finance to make it.
 

 

Posted by Paul Gallagher
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11.22.2011
05:22 pm
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