Oh, baby!


Back to my growing-up home in Maine for a week and a half. This was the view onto the world that greeted me here. Grim cold beauty...

And a week of esoteric watching. Along with reading Caroline Finkel's Osman's Dream: The History of the Ottoman Empire and Carlo Lucarelli's De Luca trilogy, I'm going to be watching/rewatching the following films that I hurriedly ripped onto my computer before I left:

It's Alive 2: It Lives Again

Phantasm

This Sporting Life

Hatchet for a Honeymoon

His Kind of Woman

Burn!

The Devil

Pierrot Le Fou

Distant

Witchfinder General


No reason whatsoever for this grouping, simply what I grabbed. Having watched the first two (It's Alive 2: It Lives Again and Phantasm) on planes and buses, I have the illusion of some deep running common thread through these films for me to chase down. Mostly, though, I'll share my thoughts on these as I go (and invite any of the collective yours on the films of this awkward personal viewing series).

And I start with just an image-thought, the transition from the ontological horror and anxiety that comes from confronting your own monstrous off-spring/mutant baby who happens to be a killing machine...


... to the moment of shattering jouissance when you finally take the little fanged bastard into your arms and accept him as your own.

2 comments:

Benjamin said...

Burn! is brilliant - I think the companion to Black Skin White Masks (as The Battle of Algiers is to The Wretched of the Earth). Also Witchfinder General has often been analysed as an English Western, and happens to be a great film as well.
I have Satantango to watch - seven and a half hours b/w reflection on the end of communism - I really like to live the cliche of the intellectual...

ECW said...

I love Witchfinder General (originally titled Conqueror Worm as a way to cash in on the earlier Vincent Price "adaptations" of Poe stories and poems). I'm saving that for the flight back...

Satantango is also awaiting me, though I might need to intersperse it with something less like a reflection on the end of communism. And something more like whiskey and tears.