Weird Films of the 1970s Presents House (1977)

THE LAST IN OUR SERIES THIS WINTER.  TOMORROW NIGHT.

At that level, a hit movie about shark attacks

leads to a movie about bear attacks. 

That’s the best they can do.

This is not a film you have to “see to believe.”  You will see this film, and still you will not believe it.  We’ve watched some odd films this quarter.  This one, our last in this winter run, cannot be called “odd” or “weird.”  It has no adequate adjectives, and it exists in a realm where natural light does not shine, where everything glitters soft, where pianos eat girls, where a theme song gets stuck on repeat, where landscapes open inward like double doors, where faces break like mirrors and there is fire beneath.
 

Criterion, responsible for its recent DVD release, states that it is a “psychedelic ghost tale” that “might have been beamed to Earth from some other planet.” That’s about right.  But more accurately, it is an strangely pure cinema of effects and techniques, craft gone wild.  It’s a joyous hijacking of all the tricks of the advertising trade, given a big enough budget to fully let loose not what comes from outside but from inside, the deep madness barely restrained by the conventions of profit-making.  What results is a manic goofiness so profound it becomes sinister, and a shuddering collapse of the gap between the sublime and the moronic.  We see, at the same moment, one of the better sunsets committed to film and a severed head flying through the air to bite the ass of her friend.  It is gorgeous and cheap, a profound gag, and the anarchic giggling of an unhinged ludic impulse which asks, in deadly seriousness: actually, what can  film do that other media cannot?
 

Also, you will see a painting of a fluffy white cat named Blanche vomit enough blood to flood a house.

Tuesday, March 8

Stevenson 150, 8 PM

Weird Films of the 1970s Presents: Gold Told Me To (1976)

Who were Moses and Jesus, really?

It’s no stretch to see Larry Cohen as the American director of the long 70s.  Not the “best” director and certainly not the most serious.  But when it comes to the hot fusion of total social dread, tectonic economic shifts, the hangover of the late 60s, and the inveterate, almost unwilled weirdness that marks the decade, no one nails it like Cohen.  I mean, name another director whose insane range included Quetzalcoatl residing in the Chrysler building (Q, 1982), one of the least marketable films ever made (Bone, 1970), the tender love of murderous mutant babies (It’s Alive, 1974), a fierce blaxploitation film (Black Ceasar, 1973), a location-shot biopic of the most famous of pervy FBI chiefs (The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover, 1977), and the deep and unabiding evil of mind-controlling no-calorie health food (The Stuff, 1985).  And then there’s this one, the most explicitly “70s” of his film, haunted by the violent incoherence of the metropolis, often filmed guerilla style (for instance, inserting Andy Kaufman into a real police parade), and in which New Yorkers begin arbitrarily murdering strangers, family members, and themselves because “God told me to.”  And by “God,” yes, we may very well mean a gender-bent alien creature straight out of a Satanic glam version of Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures.  This is some seriously wild stuff, whose chaotic goofiness only makes the unmistakable anxiety of an era reek that much more.

Tuesday, March 1

Stevenson 150, 8 PM

Weird Films of the 1970s Presents: In Danger and Dire Distress the Middle of the Road Leads to Death (1974)

Inge Maier, who watched, kept getting the feeling that she was in the wrong film.

(see above and below)

Tuesday, February 22^nd

Stevenson 150, 8 PM

Weird Films of the 1970s Presents: The Castle of Purity (1973)

You are a creator of utopias, of places that do not exist.

An extraordinary synthesis of Golden Age Mexican melodrama with the more freewheeling films of the middle period of Luis Buñuel's career (note that lead actor, Claudio Brook, was Simón in Simón del desierto [1969] and that lead actress, Rita Macedo, has prominent roles in two other indispensable Buñuel films, Ensayo de un crimen [1955] and Nazarín [1959]), Arturo Ripstein's The Castle of Purity offers an allegorical telling of the true story of a man's attempt to keep his family free from sin by locking them away inside their hefty ramshackle house in downtown Mexico City.  Beginning eighteen years into this enforced seclusion, the film depicts the falling apart of this impossible project and details with especial nastiness the misogyny of the family's rat-poison-perfecting totalitarian patriarch, Gabriel Lima, whose marvel and disgust at the prospect of female sexuality seemingly knows no bounds.  As one critic has trenchantly put it, The Castle of Purity presents us with "machismo's last bunker."  One of the most consequential Mexican films of the decade, Ripstein's depiction of an infernal utopia is not to be missed.

Tuesday, February 15th

Stevenson 150, 8 PM

Weird Films of the 1970s Presents W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism (1971)

[a conveniently cross-ocean echo of a screening of this in London.  If you've never seen this and are in our area, it really is not to be missed - Erik's description below ain't kidding.] 

I’m a romantic. I claim there’s no real revolution without free love.

A supremely bizarre movie that intercuts experimental documentary footage shot in the U.S. with a fictional narrative (filmed in Belgrade) and archival recordings (of, among other things, a Stalinist propaganda film and Nazi electroshock treatments), W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism is a free-for-all pick-and-mix collage work that seeks to fragmentarily embody the beliefs, concerns, and methods of Wilhelm Reich, a rogue Austrian psychoanalyst, former Communist Party member, inventor of the orgone accumulator, and author of (among many, many other things) The Function of the Orgasm, The Mass Psychology of Fascism, and Sexpol.  In a nutshell, Dušan Makavejev’s film is an invaluable document of and from the free love era.  Come for the fucking, but stay for the decapitated head that won’t stop proselytizing about the revolutionary potentials of fucking.  Not to be missed in any case.

Tuesday, February 8^th

Stevenson 150, 8 PM

For the remainder of the quarter, we will be showing 1970s films from different countries each week.  Same time, same place.  All are welcome.  Tell your family, tell your friends.

1970s Film Series Presents The Working Class Goes to Heaven (1971)

 

 

“Man works in order to eat.” 

“What a discovery!”

“The food goes down, here is the machine that crunches it, and it’s ready for exit. 

The same as in a factory.

“Yeah, so what?”

“Shit factory!”

This is arguably one of the greatest political films ever made.  And amongst those, Petri’s is inarguably one of the funniest, most savage, and nearly unhinged: a film that condemns the entire order of value, labor, and politics under capital, yet isn’t quite sure what can be done against it other than a increasing slide toward insanity and attacks on inflatable animals.  Disowned by the Left of all stripes (for alternately managing to make the “anti-union” left look like halitosis-ridden bearded shouters and the unionists look like those who can’t think beyond the given social forms of the factory), it perfectly nails the messiness of the situation without ever suggesting that there is no alternative.  Add to this Gian Maria Volonté’s straight-up bestial rage, one of the more awkward sex scenes I’ve ever laid eyes on, the fear that your child may be a “moody Martian,” burning the car of the boss, machines to be cared for and machines that mutilate your hands, and a startling anti-work elaboration, via absurdist humor, of the most pressing theoretical and practical questions of that decade.

Tuesday, February 1^st 

Stevenson 150, 8 PM

For the remainder of the quarter, we will be showing 1970s films from different countries each week.  Same time, same place.  All are welcome.  Tell your family, tell your friends.

 

Films of the Seventies: The Bed Sitting Room (1969)

For our screening series this quarter, Erik and I are moving on from the run-down sadism that is British horror film to - god forbid - films that are not necessarily horror films.  (Many, however, will be.) Instead, we're doing the global 70s, ranging from Italy to Senegal, Mexico to Yugoslavia, West Germany to Japan. We're starting at the end of the British 60s, with a film that those who read this blog likely know by now, one of my all-time favorites, that really does not get old. 

“Oh, we’ll just have to keep going?”
“What for?”
“Because we’re British.”
“British! What a lot of use that is.”

As an apocryphal critic pithily put it at the time of its release, Richard Lester’s post-apocalyptic film, The Bed Sitting Room, really is “like Samuel Beckett, but with better jokes.”  Carrying on and muddling through after the unfortunate “nuclear misunderstanding that led to the Third World War,” the twenty or so survivors in Great Britain live a salvage-filled existence as they heed well the (constantly repeated) imperative to keep moving and obliviously confront the possibility that they will suddenly mutate into animals, bed sitting rooms, and God knows what else.  Nominally based on the Spike Milligan and John Antrobus play from 1963, Lester's cinematic version is a staggering vision of waste and remnant, of frozen, necrotic social relations, and of what we keep doing to keep ourselves busy after the end of the world.  It is very dark, it is very uncomfortable, it is very funny, and it is very, very British.  As the characters all croakingly sing apropos the closest living blood relative to the now long deceased queen, "God Save Mrs. Etheyl Shroake, Long Live Mrs. Etheyl Shroake"  Not to be missed.

Tuesday, January 25^th

Stevenson 150, 8 PM

For the remainder of the quarter, we will be showing 1970s films from different countries each week.  Same time, same place.  All are welcome.  Tell your family, tell your friends.