Here it is in all of its unadulterated glory, Russ Meyer’s riot grrrl masterpiece Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! , the film John Waters called “beyond a doubt, the best movie ever made. It is possibly better than any film that will be made in the future.”

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to violence, the word and the act. While violence cloaks itself in a plethora of disguises, its favorite mantle still remains… sex. Violence devours all it touches, its voracious appetite rarely fulfilled. Yet violence doesn’t only destroy, it creates and molds as well. Let’s examine closely then this dangerously evil creation, this new breed encased and contained within the supple skin of woman. The softness is there, the unmistakable smell of female, the surface shiny and silken, the body yielding yet wanton. But a word of caution: handle with care and don’t drop your guard. This rapacious new breed prowls both alone and in packs, operating at any level, any time, anywhere, and with anybody. Who are they? One might be your secretary, your doctor’s receptionist… or a dancer in a go-go club!

In stunning black and white.
 

 
Dreams Money Can Buy is a 1947 film made by artist/author Hans Richter and collaborators like Marcel Duchamp, John Cage, Ferdinand Leger, Man Ray, Alexander Calder, Paul Bowles, Max Ernst and others. There is a number by scandalous bisexual torch singer Libby Holman and popular African-American singer Josh White (who was later caught up in the “Red Scare” and black-listed) on the original soundtrack titled “The Girl with the Pre-Fabricated Heart” that plays during Leger’s segment.
 
Richter’s goal was to bring the avant-garde out of the museum and into the movie house and the results, predictably, are rather unique. Certainly Dreams Money Can Buy must have been a stunner at the time and it still is. The plot, such that there is one, revolves around a man who rents a room where he can peer into the mirror and see people’s dreams. He sets up shop and we meet his clients and see their surreal interior lives in the dream sequences. As you can imagine with the above list of collaborators, the film is a dizzying treat of audio-visual creation.
 

 
Marcel Duchamp’s contribution, “Discs,” is especially interesting. Here we see Duchamp’s famous Rotoreliefs in action, with a “prepared piano” soundtrack performed by John Cage. [I was once offered a box of glass and wood reproductions in miniature of Duchamp’s kinetic sculptures—at a good price, too—and like a fucking idiot I passed on it].
 

 
Below, Dreams Money Can Buy in its entirety on YouTube. If you want to watch with the original soundtrack, it’s here. The “modern” soundtrack, in the version embedded below, was recorded by The Real Tuesday Weld and is pretty faithful to the original music.
 

 
Thank you Vanessa Weinberg!

 
The first movement, “Des choses comme ça” (“Such things”) of Jean-Luc Godard’s 2010 film Socialism, was filmed on board the tragically ship-wrecked Costa Concordia, which ran aground off the coast of Isola del Giglio, on Janury 13. Godard’s film dealt with the decline of capitalism, and questioned the role of socialist ideals within civilization. As Xan Brooks notes in the Guardian, the Costa Concordia served:

‘...as a self-conscious metaphor for western capital ploughing through choppy waters. In Godard’s film, the Concordia plays the role of a decadent limbo where the tourists drift listlessly amid the ritzy interiors. The passengers include a UN official and an elderly war criminal. The onboard entertainment comes courtesy of an unsmiling Patti Smith.

Socialism divided critics and left the audience with a foreboding sense of disaster.
 

 
Via the Guardian
 

 
Fifty years ago today Ernie Kovacs died in a car accident. He was 43-years-old. A tragic end for a hugely talented artist.

Kovacs elevated television comedy to a fine art. Innovative, subversive and diabolically funny, he created a surreal style of humor employing cutting edge visual techniques and envelope pushing irreverence that influenced a wide range of TV shows from Saturday Night Live and SCTV to Sesame Street and Monty Python.

In this six minute compression of cine-semiology, Kovacs pays homage to film noir classics such as Touch Of Evil (the tracking shots), Psycho, Asphalt Jungle and Night In The City with a hint (as I see it) of Jean Genet and Godard. The soundtrack is Béla Bartók’s “Concerto for Orchestra” and it creates a beautiful sense of dread.

This first aired in 1961 and it still seems fresh today. The highly-stylized sets, feral cat, dead-eyed baby dolls and hallucinatory effects have the eerie dreaminess and sense of camp that David Lynch, the Kuchar brothers and Kenneth Anger would explore years later.

No telling where Kovacs would have taken his art had he lived. Sadly, it came to an end on a dark street in Los Angeles on January 13, 1962 when Kovacs lost control of his car while allegedly attempting to light one of his ubiquitous cigars.
 

 
Apparently, in order to get into character for the film Taxi Driver, Robert De Niro obtained his own hack license and would pick-up/drive customers around in New York City.
 
(via Retronaut)

 
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 own The Wall and The Dark Side Of The Moon).

One album is their 1969 soundtrack recording for German director Barbet Schroeder’s More, an English language film about heroin addicts in Ibiza modeled on the Icarus myth.

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 canon, taking a backseat to what’s going on onscreen:
 

 
The gorgeous “Cymbaline,” sung by David Gilmour, is only heard in the film on someone’s record player. This slower live performance was filmed in the Abbaye De Royaumont, 30 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 Dark Side of the Moon.
 

 
After the jump, much more ‘More’!

 
Carl Theodor Dreyer preferred to work with non-actors, as he believed they offered a more reactive performance. In truth, it was because non-professionals did as he said without question or interpretation, which gave Dreyer greater control over the film. Jacques Tati and Pier Paolo Pasolini similarly used non-actors. With Tati it often blighted his films (see Traffic), while for Pasolini it brought something sublime (see The Gospel According to Saint Matthew).

For Dreyer, the use of non-actors in Vampyr (1932), added to the disorienting, dream-like quality, drawing the spectator into a strange and compelling, nightmare world.

Following on from his success with Music for Silents, composer and former Banshee, Steven Severin, has written a fantastic new soundtrack for Vampyr, which he will be performing at special screenings of the film across the UK during January and February. Dates include, Edinburgh, Inverness, Aberdeen, Dundee, Bradford, York, Hackney, Brixton, Brighton, Stratford Upon Avon, Ambleside, Oswestry, Cardiff, Bristol, Exeter, Hebden Bridge, Nottingham, Birmingham, Lancaster & Salford. Details here.

Steven will also be releasing a CD of the soundtrack, which you can order directly form his website.
 

 
In this footage shot by the Maysles brothers on December 6, 1969 for the film Gimme Shelter, The Rolling Stones and The Grateful Dead wait for a helicopter on a pier in San Francisco to take them to the Altamont Speedway.

Jagger, in not so sympathetic devil-mode, foppishly preens and sashays like rock royalty, much to Jerry Garcia’s amusement, while attempting to force an unyielding Charlie Watts to bestow a kiss upon a groupie’s forehead. As Jagger continues to egg Watts on, Charlie responds with the classy retort “Love is much more of a deeper thing than that.. it is not flippant, to be thrown away on celluloid.”

Later that day, the whip would come down.

This footage never appeared in the final cut of Gimme Shelter. It did eventually turn up on DVD as part of the Get Yer Ya Ya Yas Out boxset.

Michael Azerrad has written an insightful piece on The Gimme Shelter outtakes on his blog.
 

 
An autobiographical narrative, a list of words beginning with the letter “f” and 11,592 photos collected over the course of several years are the components in Frank Film, a hypnotic visual and sonic film experiment directed by Frank Mouris in 1973.

In less than nine minutes an amazing amount of information is communicated opening a door into the life of the film maker and modern culture’s mind at large.  
 

 
Director Fred Neuen nails the girls with guns grindhouse vibe with this trailer for Bikini Blitzkrieg.

A lot of care went into the production of this preview for a film that doesn’t exist…yet.

In hidden labs, scattered across Europe, the Nazis have been building secret weapons, to tip the scale in World War 2…. they failed… until a group of bikini-models, shooting a gun-nut video in the middle of nowhere reactivate dormant Doomsday-devices… Hot Girls & Guns, Nazi-Zombies, Robots, Drones and Super Powers! It’s… “BIKINI BLITZKRIEG”!

Neuen shot the short film in two days. Post-production took a year with Neuen footing the bill and working on the project in his spare time.

Neuen is using this video as a lure for investors. Looks like a good fit with Troma.