“It’s a terrifying sensation that will rip apart your soul.”
I’m not so sure about that, but Things, a pathetically inept, blood-splashed straight-to-video “shocker” will probably do something for you…
Is there anything better than a no-budget gore flick that makes you laugh out loud? Think Bloodsucking Freaks. Extreme gore and humor (especially when it’s unintentional) are two great tastes that taste great together—at least if you are in the right frame of mind, I suppose—but when you add in a hefty dollop of ineptitude, it gets even tastier. The newest “outsider cinema” release from The Intervision Picture Corp. and Severin FIlms, Things looks like it’s a stand-out of the “wow this sucks, but it’s GREAT” genre. They’re the experts!
In 1989, it became the first Canadian shot-on-Super 8 gore shocker commercially released on VHS. Today, it remains perhaps the most bizarre, depraved and mind-boggling chunk of Canuxploitaion ever unleashed upon humanity. Adult film superstar Amber Lynn and co-writer/producer Barry J. Gillis star in this surreal saga about two friends who visit a remote cabin, only to discover a womb of monstrous horror that demands graphic dismemberment. It’s an inexplicable orgy of eye ripping, beer guzzling, boob baring, skull drilling, sandwich making, chain sawing, bad acting and post-sync dubbing from co-writer/producer/director Andrew Jordan that has spawned its own disturbing cult of fans. Some will be repulsed. Others may be transformed forever. But you have never seen anything like THINGS.
Now there’s a factual statement if ever there was one… Order a copy of Things if you dare…
The great Swedish film director Ingmar Bergman made a rare appearance on American television when he visited The Dick Cavett Show in 1971, with actress Bibi Andersson, for a lengthy, in-depth interview.
Ostensibly about his then current film The Touch (with Andersson, Max Von Sydow and Elliot Gould), Cavett leads the conversation in unexpected places (fascism, drugs, his estrangement from his parents, working with women, his temper on set, artistic freedom). Bergman often turns the conversation around and poses the questions back to Cavett before he eventually answers. The whole thing is fascinating. Cavett is his usual knowledgeable self. Bergman tells a great story about getting one of his favorite shots ever in Wild Strawberries.
It’s difficult to imagine a conversation like this taking place on American TV forty-years later, isn’t it? It’s also weird from the vantage point of 2011 to consider that a mainstream audience might have actually known who the guy was back then! How times have changed and not necessarily for the better…
The Pink Floyd performing in the ancient (and empty) Roman amphitheatre in Pompeii, Italy in October of 1971, right before Meddle came out. There are three different versions of Live at Pompeii: the one embedded here, which is the original; a 1974 version that inserted “fake” studio sessions for the by-then already completed Dark Side of the Moon; and the expanded “director’s cut” of Live at Pompeii that came out on DVD in 2003. It’s a pretty spectacular performance, I think you’ll agree. Listen LOUD.
1. “Intro Song”
2. “Echoes, Part 1”
3. “Careful with That Axe, Eugene”
4. “A Saucerful of Secrets”
5. “One of These Days”
6. “Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun”
7. “Mademoiselle Nobs”
8. “Echoes, Part 2”
If you are a fan of either Woody Allen or Jean-Luc Godard, then Godard’s 1986 short Meeting WA should tickle your fancy. Featuring Allen’s trademarked neuroses and some standard Godardian cinematic tropes, it’s a 26-minute gem. Filmed when Allen was participating in Godard’s nearly universally-panned King Lear adaptation.
Destroyer is a Canadian band, but it’s also principally the work of singer/songrwiter Dan Bejar. Earlier this year Destroyer released their 11th album, called Kaputt, to a mixed reception. I kind of get why - this is an album that smells of sun tan lotion, so a mid-January release date seems a bit odd.
Ok, first off I have to admit that I am new to this band. This is worth mentioning at the start because Destroyer have been around for over a decade, have released ten albums already, and Bejar has worked with the acts Swan Lake and New Pronographers. The response to this album from the Destroyer fanbase has been mixed, as it is quite a departure from their better known sound. Some have been turned clean off it by the musical reference points (Avalon-era Roxy Music, Don Henley, Prefab Sprout, mainstream 80s soft rock, I even detect a smidgen of Enya in there). But this hasn’t put me off at all - not just because I admit to having a soft spot for that kind of thing, but because Bejar infuses the album with such a strong personality and sense of musicality that he makes it work, especially over the two final tracks that combined last more than half an hour.
If there was one word I would use to describe this record, it’s “Balearic”. The longest-running myth about the British dance scene is that in 1987 a group of DJs went on holiday to Ibiza, discovered ecstasy, and returned to London to start the acid house revolution. The problem with that is that the renowned DJs in Ibiza at the time were not really playing acid house - they played a mixture of different genres that all tended to fall under the British umbrella term “Balearic” (after the group of islands of which Ibiza is a part). In essence “Balearic” was anything that sounded good on a beach, and in practise this could include some music that dance snobs and music purists would find reprehensible (Chris Rea, The Blow Monkeys, etc).
To me Kaputt captures the essence of those musics perfectly. It’s music for lazing around on sunny summer holidays, for playing on the drive to the beach, or after the barbecue. It’s a perfect post-club record too, as the tracks blend seamlessly into one another bringing to mind a more 80s sounding Air, all held together by Bejar’s unique songwriting and delivery. If there is any justice, this will get picked up by dance fans as their new classic comedown soundtrack.
If you’ve seen the legendary 1940 screwball comedy His Girl Friday, you’ll know why this edit clocks in at only 8 minutes. If you haven’t seen it, just know that it’s one of the fastest paced and dialogue-heavy films ever made. Director Howard Hawks made sure that Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell spoke their lines over each other as much as they possibly could because, well, that’s what people do in reality.
But all that disappears in this cut by video pro Valentin Spirik. The dialogue is completely cut out, leaving an almost hypnotic quick-cut body of jerky scene sequences layered with incidental verbal and atmospheric noise. Check it out.
I have to say, this trailer looks good. I have been a big fan of Spike Jonze in the past (Being John Malkovich is a classic IMO) and an admirer of the Arcade Fire but have gone a bit, well, cold on them both more recently. This looks intriguing though, with its homeland war/terrorism and teenage love themes. I just hope the film (a short, clocking in at 30 minutes, and co-written by Win & Will Butler based on last year’s album The Suburbs) delivers:
**EDIT**
You can watch Scenes From The Suburbs in full HERE for the next 24 hours only.
I find it difficult to watch Adam Curtis‘s various acclaimed documentaries without thinking: how much has he taken from Bruce Conner?
Indeed without Conner, would Curtis have developed his magpie, collagist-style of documentary making?
I doubt it, but you (and Curtis) may disagree.
The late Bruce Conner is the real talent here - an artist and film-maker whose work devised new ways of working and presciently anticipated techniques which are now ubiquitously found on the web, television and film-making.
Conner was “a heroic oppositional artist, whose career went against the staid and artificially created stasis of the art world”. Which is academic poohbah for saying Conner kept to his own vision: a Beat life, which channeled his energies into art - with a hint of Dada, Surrealism and Duchamp.
Conner was cantankerous and one-of-a-kind. He would wear an American flag pin. When asked why, he said, “I’m not going to let those bastards take it away from me.”
He kicked against fame and celebrity, seeing art as something separate from individual who created it.
“I’ve always been uneasy about being identified with the art I’ve made. Art takes on a power all its own and it’s frightening to have things floating around the world with my name on them that people are free to interpret and use however they choose.”
Born in McPherson, Kansas, Conner attended Witchita University, before receiving his degree in Fine Art from Nebraska University. At university he met and married Jean Sandstedt in 1957. He won a scholarship to art school in Brooklyn, but quickly moved to University of Colorado, where he spent one semester studying art. The couple then moved to San Francisco and became part of the Beat scene. Here Conner began to produce sculptures and ready-mades that critiqued the consumerist society of late 1950’s. His work anticipated Pop Art, but Conner never focussed solely on one discipline, refusing to be pigeon-holed, and quickly moved on to to film-making.
Having been advised to make films by Stan Brakhage, Conner made A MOVIE in 1958, by editing together found footage from newsreels- B-movies, porn reels and short films. This single film changed the whole language of cinema and underground film-making with its collagist technique and editing.
The Conners moved to Mexico (“it was cheap”), where he discovered magic mushrooms and formed a life-long friendship with a still to be turned-on, Timothy Leary. When the money ran out, they returned to San Francisco and the life of film-maker and artist.
In 1961, Conner made COSMIC RAY, a 4-minute film of 2,000 images (A-bombs, Mickey Mouse, nudes, fireworks) to Ray Charles’ song “What I Say”. With a grant from the Ford Foundation, Conner produced a series of films that were “precursors, for better or worse, of the pop video and MTV,” as his obituary reported:
EASTER MORNING RAGA (1966) was designed to be run forward or backward at any speed, or even in a loop to a background of sitar music. Breakaway (1966) showed a dancer, Antonia Christina Basilotta, in rapid rhythmic montage. REPORT (1967) dwells on the assassination of John F Kennedy. The found footage exists of repetitions, jump cuts and broken images of the motorcade, and disintegrates at the crucial moment while we hear a frenzied television commentator saying that “something has happened”. The fatal gun shots are intercut with other shots: TV commercials, clips from James Whale’s Frankenstein and Lewis Milestone’s All Quiet on the Western Front. The film has both a kinetic and emotional effect.
REPORT “perfectly captures Conner’s anger over the commercialization of Kennedy’s death” while also examining the media’s mythic construction of JFK and Jackie — a hunger for images that “guaranteed that they would be transformed into idols, myths, Gods.”
Conner’s work is almost a visual counterpart to J G Ballard’s writing, using the same cultural references that inspired Ballard’s books - Kennedy, Monroe, the atom bomb. His film CROSSROADS presented the 1952 atomic bomb test at Bikini Atoll in extreme slow motion from twenty-seven different angles.
His editing techniques influenced Dennis Hopper in making Easy Rider, and said:
“much of the editing of Easy Rider came directly from watching Bruce’s films”
The pair became friends and Hopper famously photographed Conner alongside Toni Basil, Teri Garr and Ann Mitchell.
Always moving, always progressing, having “no half way house in which to rest”, Conner became part of the San Francisco Punk scene, after Toni Basil told Conner to go check out the band Devo in 1977. He became so inspired when he saw the band at the Mabuhay Gardens that he started going there four night a week, taking photographs of Punk bands, which eventually led to his job as staff photographer with Search ‘n’ Destroy magazine. It was a career change that came at some personal cost.
“I lost a lot of brain cells at the Mabuhay. What are you gonna do listening to hours of incomprehensible rock’n’roll but drink? I became an alcoholic, and it took me a few years to deal with that.”
Conner continued with his art work and films, even making short films for Devo, David Byrne and Brian Eno. In his later years, Conner returned to the many themes of his early life and work, but still kept himself once removed from greater success and fame. He died in 2008.
Towards the end of his life he withdrew his films from circulation, as he was “disgusted” when he saw badly pixelated films bootlegged and uploaded on YouTube. Conner was prescriptive in how his work should be displayed and screened. All of which is frustrating for those who want to see Conner’s films outside of the gallery, museum or film festival, and especially now, when so much of his originality and vision as a film-maker and artist has been copied by others.
‘Mea Culpa’ - David Byrne and Brian Eno. Directed by Bruce Conner
