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‘Beyond The Black Rainbow’ will blow your mind
09.30.2011
05:25 pm
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Panos Cosmatos’ Beyond The Black Rainbow, which screened at this year’s Fantastic Fest, truly earns the description “visionary,” not in the sense of being prophetic (though it might be) but in the sense of arising out of visionary states of mind. Cosmatos is not looking forward as much as he’s looking inward to a landscape where dreams and nightmares intertwine like the snakes of Athena, illuminating the darkest corners of the psyche. Beyond The Black Rainbow is bold, uncompromising, demanding and totally mesmerizing. It is an extraordinary debut for a first-time director.

Cosmatos, who looks a bit like a young Stanley Kubrick, draws inspiration from films like 2001: A Space Odyssey, Saul Bass’s Phase 4, George Lucas’s THX1138 and countless lesser-known and lesser-quality sci-fi films from the 1960s through the 80s and concocts something that, despite its influences, is personal film making of a highly original style. Mixing the grainy, saturated look of old videotapes with ultra-mod visual design and sets, while exhuming artifacts of lo-fi sci-fi kitsch, Cosmatos, in a deft act of cinematic alchemy, transforms it all into something artful, visually coherent and mind expanding. It is unusual and gratifying to see a young director aspire to a type of film making that decades ago would have been termed “experimental,” evoking Kenneth Anger, Stan Brakhage, Alejandro Jodorowsky and William Klein. What you end up with is pop culture tropes spun through a pure cinema aesthetic. A movie that asks nothing of you other than to SEE it with eyes wide open.

I couldn’t tell you what Beyond The Black Rainbow is about. I’ve only seen it once and the narrative is more stream of consciousness mashup than a tidy tale with beginning, middle and end. In that respect, the storytelling resembles the works of William Burroughs, who Cosmatos humorously references in the film. There’s a free associative dynamic to the movie where images play off each other like musical notes in a Beefheartian jam, always on the brink of chaos while the center is holding to some still point, the Tao of now. It helps that the score by Jeremy Schmidt (from the band Black Mountain) gives Cosmatos’ trippy epic a primal gravitational pull that, in the film’s wildest moments, keeps the lysergic shards of color and shape from dissipating into the void.

The movie’s central physical location is an institution/hospital/psyche ward that melds the cold clinical feel of David Cronenberg with the Technicolor eye candy of Dario Argento. Within this de-humanized world, a drug-addled scientist is attempting to create a new form of cosmic human being. Under the spell of a mad, new agey guru (Heaven’s Gate nutjob Marshall Applewhite comes to mind) the scientist performs drug experiments on a captive young woman who has either gone insane or is the only sane person in the film. The movie for the most part takes place inside her head…I think. The plot is serviceable but mostly irrelevant, serving as a jumping off point for Cosmatos’ true mission which is creating a modern “head movie.” And he succeeds.

I imagine many viewers will complain that Beyond The Black Rainbow is boring (some critics already have), but the same has been said of many films and directors that go out on their own, without concern for commercial prospects, who audaciously create something that is pure and original, that requires of the viewer an openness and a willingness to surrender to what is on the screen. What may be boring to some, I find hypnotic and riveting. To be ravished by Tarkovsky is bliss compared to being mauled by Michael Bay.

Panos Cosmato grew up around big-budget Hollywood commercial film making. His father is George P. Cosmatos who directed Sylvester Stallone in Rambo 2 and Cobra, as well as the very fine Tombstone. He could have easily followed in his father’s footsteps (he has the skill to do so) but instead he opted to make a film that takes big chances and has done so with the delirium of an obsessed film nerd whose sense of cinema and creativity holds its own against many of his influences.

Cosmatos is a young guy and Beyond The Black Rainbow will open some doors. I hope he sticks to his guns and delivers on the promise of his mindtwisting debut. It will be released by the trailblazers at Magnet films sometime in the near future.

Here’s a trailer for Beyond The Black Rainbow followed by an interview with the director at Fantastic Fest.
 

 
Interview after the jump…

READ ON
Posted by Marc Campbell
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09.30.2011
05:25 pm
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