Mache-merde

For the last couple of years I have been working on the idea of organising a regular Decadent Literary event, the idea being to get a variety of people to give talks and readings, and create some kind of space for developing ideas. The first event took place yesterday at Moon Age in Surrey Hills with the assistance of Holiday and Claire, and was a success, with the scholarly Ian Drummond presenting a talk that covered such topics as coprophagia, magick, religion, transgression and sexuality all based upon the poem Leah Sublime by Aleister Crowley. The lecture was followed by a spirited reading of the poem and a discussion on topics ranging from poetry to scatology, ritual bestiality and the nature of sex magic. 

State of Things 6

Arriving in the post today De Matute, edited by Domingo Sanchez Blanco and Fernando Castro Florez, this 400+ page  hardback book features essays and images focusing on the work of a number of artists. My contribution to this volume is an essay Primal Drives and Feral States, which focuses on the work of the artist Samantha Sweeting whose work explores - among other areas - her interests in becoming animal, lactation, sexuality, confession and ritual. I will post the first draft of the essay here shortly.


Also of interest, the latest issue of the journal Lumina includes a reprint of my writing on the film Vanishing Point first published in the now long out of print book Lost Highways: An Illustrated History of the Road Movie. 

Caninus

(Perhaps one of my favourite genres of film is the mondo movie, and for many years I would screen Mondo Cane to my postgraduate documentary students. A wonderfully realised travelogue that promises to take the viewer not just on a geographical journey but also a trip into the heterogeneous. Such is my fascination with the genre I even own a copy of the book of the film Africa Addio, a later mondo feature also directed by Jacopetti and Franco Properi. 

The piece below was written for FilmInk as an introduction to the genre for those unfamiliar with it. I still, at some point, would like to write an entire book on the film)


There are a lot of strange and wonderful genres of cinema, but in documentary film few stand out like the mondo movie. Taking its name from the Italian feature Mondo Cane (aka Dog World,  Gualtiero Jacopetti and Franco Prosperi, 1962) the genre consists of films that focus on the weirder side of life, offering a travelogue to unknown cultures and hidden subcultures. As Mondo Cane’s narrator states, “All the scenes you will see in this film are real, they were shot as they were taking place. If sometimes they seem cruel it is because cruelty abounds on this planet. And anyway, the duty of a reporter is not to make the truth seem sweeter but to show things as they really are.”


Mondo Cane shifts through newsreel and anthropological footage, and covers such unusual topics as cargo cults, Californian pet cemeteries, fishermen torturing sharks, Germans brawling, a topless woman suckling a pig, female Australian surf lifesavers and Easter rituals. Along the way a radioactive turtle dies in a nuclear testing ground, a herd of pigs is clubbed to death by tribes people in Papua and nude women are painted blue by artist Yves Klein.

The sensationalist themes that were introduced in  Mondo Cane can be seen across the genre: ‘weird’ rituals, ‘strange’ modern art, ‘weird’ food, nudity, hints of sex, and violence toward both animals and people. These are edited together with a dream like flow of quasi-logic, dictated by free association rather than any narrative trajectory.  What links all of these images together is the narration which moves from the misanthropic to the salacious, often in one line, as the film’s guide takes the audience on a detour through humanity and human folly in all of its glory.

Banned in England the film was nominated for the Oscar for best soundtrack, and its success inspired exploitation filmmakers the world over who realized that documentary footage of naked women, shocks and the promise of violence would guarantee audiences anxious for thrills.  Mondo Cane was quickly followed by Mondo Cane 2 (aka Mondo Pazzo, Jacopetti and Properi, 1963), Mondo Nudo (Francesco De Feo, 1963), Mondo Bizarro (Lee Frost, 1966), Mondo Freudo (Lee Frost, 1966), Mondo Mod (Peter Perry, Jr, 1967) and  Africa Addio (1966). In the world of sixties cinema, the genre offered audiences the chance to see naked flesh and watch blood flow, but justified it all as documentary. Of course if the footage didn’t exist, or couldn’t be shot, some filmmakers were happy to fake suitably outrageous footage if the script demanded it, but that is half the fun of the genre.

As censorship battles were fought and won, and with the growth of porno and gore movies, the genre began to fade from view. Shocks could be found elsewhere in cinema and television was able to show 'the world'. Similarly as more people travelled abroad so the exoticism offered by the movies became less fascinating. But, for a while, the whole world was mondo. 
 

Symphorophilia

(in keeping with the Sunday's post regarding educational movies, my column about Harley Cokliss and J G Ballard from FilmInk).


Although associated with the New Wave of British Science Fiction, J G Ballard’s novels defy ready characterisation. While some of his earlier books are broadly recognisable as science fiction genre pieces most are slipstream novels firmly located in the phobias, paranoia and dystopias of the present rather than the spectacle of space opera. Ballard’s broadly autobiographical 1984 work Empire of the Sun formed the basis for Steven Spielberg’s 1987 movie of the same name, while his cult novel of car crash fetishism Crash (1973) was filmed by Canadian auteur David Cronenberg in 1996. But there is more to Ballard than these two well-known adaptations.

A YouTube search for Ballard brings up a short film from 1971, directed by Harley Cokliss (aka Harley Cokeliss). Largely unknown outside of a handful of Ballard’s most ardent fans, Cokliss’s film, Crash! is based on themes drawn from Ballard’s 1969 experimental book The Atrocity Exhibition. Ideas that would later fully manifest in the 1973 novel Crash.

This short film features Ballard and actress Gabrielle Drake (familiar from cult TV shows such as UFO and appearances in The Avengers and The Champions) alongside footage of cars and roads. The narration - delivered by the author - details the cultural obsession with cars, deadpanning: “If the man in the motor car is the key image of the 20th century, then the automobile crash is the most significant trauma. The car crash is the most dramatic event in most people’s lives, apart from their own deaths, and in many cases the two will coincide”. 

Images of Ballard driving are cut with footage of Drake who appears as both seductress and symbol of eroticised autogeddon. Ballard, in light suit, walks through car showrooms and stalks the ruined landscape of car wrecking yards; his voice accompanies the stark images of roads, and lascivious low angled close-up shots of cars, women’s legs and female hands caressing vehicles. The soundtrack - created from what sounds like experimental electronic music, buzzing and electronic tones – creates the strange sounds of some near-future sonic exoticism.

This film is remarkable not just for its thematic interest but also for its experimental nature, it flows with the logic of a dream between images of cars and women, roads and crashes. Produced by the BBC it was broadcast two-days before Valentine’s Day, 1971, it is a powerful evocation of Ballard’s most experimental literary work and most notorious engagement with the febrile eroticism of the car crash. While the Cronenberg adaptation of Crash was a genuine celebration of the sexuality of Ballard’s novel, this short film presents Ballard at the moment at which he was developing the ideas for the novel and almost seems like a video sketch book.

Cokliss went on to direct cult films Battletruck (1981) and Dream Demon (1988), but it appears that Crash!  was his most experimental work. An unusual addition to a resume, it appears to be absent from the Internet Movie Database. 

Coreopsideae Rising

I met Nicolas Grey when we were both teenagers, along with others we spent time watching late night films at the cinema he worked in and listening to music. He was an incredible artist and co-produced Watermelon comic which drew on a combination of the psychedelic underground comics of the '60s and Nic's deep empathy for those individuals too raw and honest to fit in (think of the protagonists in the work of Fante or Bukowski). Through much of the subsequent two decades he has continued to work, and now has a website that showcases his talent. The attention to detail in is almost painful in its meticulous execution, while his subject matter is uniquely his own, drifting from images of saints and folk narratives through to crowded street scenes and portraits.

The above picture - A Portrait of Elizabeth Short - finds in brutal murder the beatification of the dead woman whose slaughter represents one of the most infamous of LA history. The crime is a cornerstone of LA gothic and most reading this should be familiar with both John Gilmore's account of the case and James Ellroy's novel which draws upon it.

Education!

(For the last couple of years I have had a regular column in FilmInk focusing on the 'outer limits' of cinema, cult movies, underground film and so on. I've decided to start posting these here.)

Old educational films are a true pleasure for connoisseurs of oddball cinema and weird movies. Predominantly produced for the education of students, the genre also includes films made for soldiers and even training videos for employees. The movies tended to be short documentaries that sought to inform the audience on one particular facet of a topic. There’s rarely – if ever – any debate or argument in an educational film, instead simple facts (or factoids) are presented to the viewer often with a conservative moral twist. The zenith of the educational movie was the '50s and '60s, when teachers would drag a 16mm projector into the classroom and these films offer a unique insight into the educational demands and standards of a different era.

Many consider the classics of the genre to be films about drug danger, sex education and drivers-ed, films that offered moral tales frequently punctuated with graphic images of sex and violence.

The anti-drug genre stretches back to the likes of exploitation classics such as Marijuana Madness but the educational anti-drug movie reached its zenith in the late ‘60s with films like Trip To Where (1968). Following a young Navy man who drops acid with two friends and has the definitive bad trip, by the end of the movie he is driven insane by LSD. Trip To Where has everything from cheesy special effects trip sequence to a tongue clicking message. Another classic anti-psychedelic educational LSD Case Study (196?) follows a tripping girl as she buys a hot dog, but each time she bites – or tries to bite - the anthropomorphic frankfurter screams in agony.

The sex education movie took the audience where prim social science teachers may otherwise have feared to tread, presenting topics such as puberty, dating, and menstruation. The genre’s early classics - Growing Girls (1949) and The Story of Menstruation (1946) - coyly wrap these topics into neat bundles that are equally defined by chaste behaviour and rigidly observed rituals of personal hygiene, although by the late ‘60s and ‘early ‘70s the films had become more explicit with images of nudity and, somewhat notoriously, in Growing Up (1971) female masturbation.

Drivers-ed movies, designed to make teens drive safely, are a combination of Grand Guignol gore and authentic horror. Mechanized Death (1961) opens with the remarkable sound of a woman screaming, whining, groaning and sobbing in pain, we know this because the grim narration tells us that it is the sound of “excruciating agony”. The film doesn’t let up in its blood-splattered footage of car crashes and mutilated corpses. The idea that teenagers would be screened movies such as Mechanized Death and its equally gory predecessor Signal 30 (1959) in schools seems baffling now, but the genre spawned many films that would be screened to classrooms full of shocked and nauseated teens.

Young conscripts to the army were also exposed to educational movies, which were often screened to warn them of the dangers of various forms of ‘fraternization’ with local females. These films included Whatsoever A Man Soweth (1917), which cut images of soldiers worrying about syphilis with horrifying images of babies born ravaged by the disease in its congenital form. Meanwhile, 1942 movie Ship Of Shame depicted a battleship dangerously undermanned as the results of a VD riddled crew. This was made more horrifying by the inclusion of close-up footage of rotting genitals.

These long lost totems to the education of the past are worth seeking out for any archaeologist of the cinematic.

Gestured

Numerous notebooks scattered around:

Scrawled notebook entries on body horror, the depiction of that deemed as 'unshowable' and Bataille, with some sidelines on video nasties.

Detailed notes on the transcription of Naked Lunch, with a lengthy quote from Kerouac. These formed part of a forthcoming essay on Burroughs' book.

Millions of Images

I have just acquired two heavy hardback books of photographs taken from two great filmmaker's works. Lavishly produced and beautiful to look at, Andy Warhol Motion Pictures features many images from his Screen Tests series (and not necessarily the usual stills of Lou Reed et al) as well as shots from Kiss, Blow Job and Sleep. There's a sense of the films from this book because of the use of numerous stills from one film, which captures the laying bare and exposure that the subjects sitting for the camera went through.

In a similar style Fassbinder: Berlin Alexanderplatz collects together hundreds of images from Fassbinder's production. Again produced to an exceptional standard and an absorbing book to get lost in.

Millions of images, indeed.

State of Things 5

This Saturday, from 10:30am at Sydney College of the Arts, Balmain Road, Rozelle, I will be screening underground movies as part of the Sydney Underground Film Festival post-fest events. Screenings will include the Australian premiere of transgressive movie The Amateurs (Usama Alshaibi) and unsettling true crime / urban mythology documentary Cropsey (Joshua Zeman and Barbara Brancaccio).

Also, on September 28th I will be on a panel discussing zombies following the performance of the play Quack at SBW Stables Theatre, Nimrod Street, Sydney. More details as and when.

Currently Reading

Deep in Gilles Deleuze's essay 'Coldness and Cruelty' published as some kind of introduction to Leopold von Sacher-Masoch's Venus In Furs (Zone Books). Not the best of Deleuze's writings, but interesting regardless of its flaws. Also slowly reading Ray Brassier's Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment And Extinction (Palgrove), and, for light relief, Arcana V edited by John Zorn. All of these texts no doubt leading, in someway, to some footnote or later observation somewhere down the line.

Finally, partway through Werner Herzog's Conquest of the Useless(Ecco) which is a passioned journal into both the shooting of Fitzcaraldo and also into the director's inner landscape. One quote should suffice: "A vision has seized hold of me, like the demented fury of a hound that has sunk its teeth into the leg of a deer carcass and is shaking and tugging at the downed game so frantically that the hunter gives up trying to calm him."