Jack Sargeant

Currently Reading 9

2011-12-06T16:16:00.000-08:00

Currently deep in Tobais Churton's exceptionally informative Aleister Crowley The Biography (Watkins) and about to start Niklaus Largier's In Praise of the Whip: A Cultural History of Arousal (Zone), a tome that moves from ascesis to theraputics via erotics. Also, a secondhand find from Cross Art Books, Sydney, Donald McCormick's The Hell-Fire Club: The Story of the Amorous Knights of Wycombe, published in 1958. Received from Headpress Jack Stevenson's Beneath Contempt and Happy To Be There: The Fighting Life of Porn King Al Goldstein a fascinating account of Big Al's life. Finally, and at long last, Bleddyn Butcher's Save What You Can The Day of the Triffids (Treadwater), an absorbing and epic biography of David McCombe and The Triffids.

Wriggle Like A Centipede.

2011-12-02T17:51:00.000-08:00

Background: on Tuesday the film Human Centipede 2 (Full Sequence) was banned by the Classification Review Board in Australia. Prior to this the film was passed by the Classification Board uncut and rated R and had played across Australia and at the Brisbane International Film Festival. The Review Board overruled this classification and all screenings of the film were suspended. I attended the Review Board at the invite of Monster Pictures - the local distributor - and presented in favour of the film. What follows below are the unedited indicative notes on which I based my talk, there are a couple of spoilers here too.

The film Human Centipede 2 was passed as created by its director by the OFLC, I believe that their decision was right and fair and based on their understanding of the current trends and styles of both filmmaking in general as well as the horror film genre. In the following bullet points it is my hope to address various elements both within the film and that exist in the discourses around the work, and contextualise these within the work.

To offer a brief context, Human Centipede 2 is a much talked about sequel to Human Centipede, a film that gained a small cult following amongst some horror fans and cineastes. Human Centipede 2 is a body horror film but it also plays on the wider tradition of European experimental and avant-garde film and underground cinema. These are works which come from an artistic tradition as much as a cinematic one. Audiences for Human Centipede 2 – which like it predecessor has screened at numerous international film festivals – are cinematically literate and understand the context the film has emerged from, indeed some horror fans dislike the film because of its roots in art cinema. As much as it can be placed in a tradition of horror Human Centipede 2 can also be viewed as part of a contemporary European cinema that includes films by the likes of Lars Von Trier and Michael Haneke. As the following points will illustrate the film should be read as coming from these traditions and its audiences should be seen as cinematically engaged.

1.   All films are marketed towards specific audiences, in the case of horror films the classic marketing campaign is about being scared or shocked. Some recent examples: Paranormal Activity “Don’t See It Alone” Paranormal Activity 2 “Last year you demanded it. But that was just the beginning” Paranormal Activity 3 “It Runs In the Family”. What these illustrate is a move from playing on a general sense of daring and scaring an audience to the textually specific, which plays on the audience’s knowledge of the cycle of the films. The same occurs in films such as Harry Potter, where the Deathly Hallows Part 2 had the tagline “It All Ends”. In horror the idea of scaring and daring has a long history, most famously in Alfred Hitchcock’s theatrical trailer for Psycho which saw him touring the set and in his plumy tones explaining the crimes of the film, while his 1963 feature The Birds was marketed with the line “…and remember, the next scream you hear may be your own!” The point in these campaigns is to seduce an audience, and such campaigns go back to the Grand Guignol of 1890s Paris which staged violent plays full of gore and horror to enthusiastic crowds. The taglines and marketing slogans in the media around Human Centipede 2 are a part of this tradition of spruiking a film. Indeed at the film’s screenings in Australia part of the campaign consisted of Neil from Monster Pictures handing people barf-bags, of course nobody actually vomited in them, the idea was a marketing gimmick, and, while funny, not exactly an original one, and over the years horror film makers have done everything from taking out fake insurance policies on people being so scared they die or employing actresses to dress as nurses in case people faint. The idea is purely market driven, and any historian of horror movies will be able to list a dozen examples, it is the horror version of ‘selling the sizzle not the steak.’

2.   Human Centipede 2 is a film intended for a niche audience, it belongs to a subgenre of horror films referred to by writers as body horror, which includes works such as the film The Fly and the book Frankenstein. These are works that explore ideas such as disease and so on rather than, for example, supernatural horror, which explores ghosts and hauntings. Body horror may superficially appear contentious because it is dealing with the representation of the physical rather than metaphysical, but in doing so it comments on various aspects of the body in culture, themes such as medicine for example may be dealt with in these works in the same way a ghost film may deal with the question of life after death. In a work such as Human Centipede 2 the work explores the fear of the breakdown of control over the individual body, of the idea of the individual becoming a part of the mass, of loss of control of the body. Some have evoked the term torture porn to describe some contemporary horror, but it should be noted that Human Centipede 2 is not within this subgenre, there is no sense of the audience enjoying the violence or the pleasure being in the suffering of victims, instead the story emphasises the psychological processes behind the protagonist’s breakdown and the violence exists to alienate us - as viewers - from him. A process of alienation that is also emphasised by the use of black and white film, which also distances the viewer from the work. There exists in film theory much writing about modes of identification and the way in which viewers relate to characters, and this film avoids these in order to create a distance between the viewer and the subject in the film.

3.   There are scenes of specific violence in the film that are intended to shock, most clearly a rape scene near the film’s end. However this scene is constructed as horrific, as alienating and as evidence of a psychologically wounded protagonist. The scene is purposefully horrific, its intent antithetical to any sense of sexuality or sexual satisfaction, instead it is about the character trying to both fuse with his creation and annihilate his own identity while simultaneously serving to, as I have already stated, further push the audience away from any kind of identification. It is a scene of horror that rightly disturbs the viewer. Much has been written about the depiction of rape in horror, and other, films, and the book Men Women & Chain Saws published in the UK by the British Film Institute and written by a feminist film critic Carol Clover makes it clear that these acts of violence are horrific scenes which may challenge and upset viewers but do not necessarily position the viewer with the perpetrator but often with the victim, this is clearly the case within Human Centipede 2. The book Men Women And Chain Saws has become a key text for film students across the world. There is also a pregnant woman in the film, clearly wearing a prosthetic device she functions as a narrative counterpoint to the central protagonist’s unloving mother. Other scenes of shock include brief flashes of surgery, but these almost act as a commentary on the media’s fixation with television programmes about using cosmetic surgery to change our appearance, parodying our cultural fixation with surgically enhanced beauty like a contemporary Rabelais.

4.   In addition to being a horror film, the work can also be viewed as part of a longer history of art and art cinema, with allusions to the surrealism of Bunuel and Dali’s cinematic masterpiece Un Chien Andalou, as well as visual art by the surrealists and by contemporary artists who also explore the transforming body. In terms of art the work also echoes more classical paintings such as Goya. The use of black and white film not only creates a distance as previously mentioned but also echoes art cinema, and the visual style of the film plays into a tradition of experimental cinema and visual art perhaps even more than horror

5.   Finally, Human Centipede 2 has screened across the Australian state capitals in the last few weeks, these screenings have seen large and appreciative audiences watching the film, and to the best of our knowledge nobody has complained or was upset at these screenings and we wondered if there had been spontaneous complaints from anybody who had seen the film.

Currently Reading 8

2011-09-10T20:58:00.000-07:00

Wallowing as ever in a whole slew of gloriously infernal texts: Valentine Groebner's Defaced The Visual Culture of Violence in the Late Middle Ages (Zone) which takes the reader through everything from the culture of facial mutilation to the ancient battle field. Branden W Joseph's Beyond The Dream Syndicate: Tony Conrad and the Arts after Cage (Zone) which uses the notion of minor history to explore the work of Conrad et al. Demetrio Paparoni's Eretica: The Transcendent and the Profane in Contemporary Art (Skira) which includes all manner of beautiful illustrations of work by the likes of Richard Phillips, Regina Jose Galindo and Jake and Dinos Chapman, amongst others. Finally, The Libertine Reader: Eroticism and Enlightenment in Eighteenth Century France (Zone) edited by Michel Feher.

State of Things 13

2011-08-21T19:46:00.000-07:00

The second issue of the journal Abraxas (Summer Solstice 2011) published by the fine people at Fulgur is now available. Alongside pieces on the likes of Ira Cohen, Barry Hale and Brion Gysin, it includes my lengthy interview with Adi Newton, whose experimental piece the Denizens can be seen below. Recommended reading.

A little biscuit tin, to keep panties in...

2011-08-21T16:19:00.000-07:00

My good friend the filmmaker Angelique Bosio, who made Lick Your Idols about the New York downtown underground film scene and The Advocate For Fagdom about Bruce La Bruce (both of which I appear in), is working on her a new movie Fifi Chachnil: Pretty en Rose. This documentary is about designer Chachnil who is famous for her sexy lingerie. Angelique has completed shooting, and is now looking for completion funds via crowd funding, you can donate money via KissKissBankBank.

Gysin Recordings: UbuWeb

2011-08-15T03:44:00.000-07:00

The ever excellent UbuWeb have a vast collection of Brion Gysin recordings available online, varying from ambient sound pieces to permutation poems as well as various songs. The classic - and broadly familiar - pieces such as Kick The Habit Man, Pistol Poem and Junk Is No Good Baby, are included alongside songs recorded with Ramuntcho Matta, Steve Lacy, Don Cherry and Lizzy Mercier Descloux, and released as Self-Portrait Jumping. Also featured is a selection of ambient and street noises entitled Bruits de Beaubourg and the rare album The Pool. But, perhaps the most interesting discovery is a 1958 piece Poem of Poems a recording of very early cut-up works by Gysin designed to demonstrate the use of the tape recorder in cut-up methodology to William Burroughs. Many hours of illuminated pleasures are to be had exploring these recordings.

State Of Things 12

2011-08-14T00:45:00.000-07:00

I am presenting a film session at Sydney Underground Film Festival and a selection of screenings under the banner of SUFF+PLUS. Now celebrating their 5th year, Sydney Underground Film Festival runs at the Factory from September 8th until 11th, with my session of extreme cinema, called From Eye Candy To Head Fuckage, screening on Saturday 10th at 10pm.

SUFF+PLUS takes place on Saturday 17th September at Sydney College of the Arts, the first screening kicks off at 11:30am and the last ends at 7:30pm. The program features the premiere of the Table of the Elements Film Series, and East Coast premieres of All My Friends Are Funeral Singers and Of Dolls And Murder as well as a talk with Jon Hewitt about his movie X. Full programs for both events can be found by following the links.

Sydney Underground Film Festival is also screening some great underground movies, these include The Ballard of Genesis and Lady Jaye, Profane, Heaven and Earth and Joe Davis and Dragonslayer. There's many other features (including Super, which is rumoured to be great) as well as numerous sessions of shorts, Stefan and Katherine have a sharp aesthetic and their program is never less than essential, so it's recommended that people attend the entire festival if they can.

Ballard And Trauma

2011-07-30T20:01:00.000-07:00

The following notes formed the basis for a talk at the Erotics Conference that took place at Griffith University in Brisbane in February and more recently a public talk as part of the Decadent Society. At some point a more literary version may well be completed for publication, in the meantime, read on.

My interests presented here are crashes, trauma, sex, fetishism, white bandages, bruises, suffering, discomfort and the desire to pay witness to this copulation as chaotic fusion of flesh and technology and eroticized wounds.

Invariably, opening with a quote, used elsewhere to describe both the work of JG Ballard’s Crash and car crash culture in general, but a pertinent point of entry: “She loved accidents: any mention of an animal run over, a man cut to pieces by a train, was bound to make her rush to the spot” – Emile Zola, La Bete Humaine, 1890. Here the swirling chaos of the Industrial Age accident emerges as a moment of spectacular eroticism, a moment in which the spectacle of the sex and death matrix becomes manifest. For the victim: the body losing control over its parts and function, at the mercy of the relentless machinery the coherent logic of the body experienced as coherent self is temporarily erased. In the car crash, thrown forward, wrenched and contorted the body is at the mercy of the vagaries of velocity and gravity, impact and resistance.

Car crashes are a moment in which, to paraphrase Georges Bataille, the profane enters the world of the sacred, where the car becomes a chariot which can deliver the inhabitant to the gods, and for those left behind the marks that remain, the scars of wounds and injuries, retain a hint of the sacred, the moment at which the subject briefly entered the realm of the sacred and subsequently bares its trace.

The scars and wounds of these accidents are, for some, as fascinating as the accidents themselves, a fetish than can be traced back in the case studies described in Psychopathia Sexualis by the pioneering sexologist Richard von Krafft-Ebing, who detailed the medical fetishists he saw in his consultancy: “Case 94. Fetishism -…Since his seventeenth year he became sexually excited at the sight of physical defects in women, especially lameness and disfigured fee…At times he could not resist the temptation to imitate their gate, which caused vehement orgasm, with lustful ejaculation.…Case 96. Fetishism - …Since his seventh year he had for a playmate a lame girl of the same ago. At the age of twelve…the boy began spontaneously to masturbate. At that period puberty set in, and it lies beyond doubt that the first sexual emotions towards the other sex were coincident with the sight of the lame girl. Forever after only limping women excited him sexually…”

In Ballard’s Crash the author is explicit in his analysis of the wounds from these accidents in his examination of back seat ejaculations, spectacular car crashes and wound fucking. Although fictional there is a parallel between the handful of individuals in Crash and the case studies of Krafft-Ebing.

“Scarred hands explored the worn fabric of the seat, marking in semen a cryptic diagram: some astrological sign or road intersection.” (p.135).

While elsewhere he writes:

[The protagonist] “Watched her thighs shifting against each other, the jut of he breast under the strap of her spinal harness” (p.145)

Later:

“I explored the scars on her thighs and arms, feeling for the wound areas under her left breast… during the next few days my orgasms took place with the scars…in these sexual apertures formed by fragmenting windshield louvers and dashboard dials in a high-speed impact…” (p.148)

Ballard’s novel – famously condemned by one pre-publication reader as the work of somebody who needed professional help – is the Ur text for the transgressive fantasies of car crashes, traumaphilia (arousal from wounds and trauma) and symphorophilia (arousal from staging and witnessing an accident). The book, which follows the author’s namesake who survives a car crash and becomes immersed within a community that fetishises car crashes and the resultant scars and wounds. A book that takes meticulous pains to examine and describe the texture of semen, the moisture of vaginal secretions, the texture of vinyl seats and the musculature of the rectum: “still parting his buttocks, I watched my semen leak from his anus across the fluted ribbing of the vinyl upholstery” (p.166). Anal sex experienced through both homosexual and heterosexual liaisons (as if these simple phrases matter in this world of car crash and wound focused paraphilia, as if gender ever enters the world of the unconscious in which the specificity of the act is what defines the fetish not the gender of the object choice) recurs repeatedly in Ballard’s novel.

This transgressive sexual act, that negates reproduction and so fascinated the Marquis de Sade, finds a link here to the ‘base’ to the annihilation of the self. Sade’s sadism has been described by Gilles Deleuze in Coldness And Cruelty as almost mathematical, with its “repetitiveness” (p.28) and the multiplications of victims and sufferings and in some way Ballard’s attention to detail is similar, but replacing the mathematics with oblique references to technical detail (Ballard and his associates at the literary publication Ambit once organized a stripper – the perfectly named Euphoria Bliss - to performing while a scientific paper was read allowed).

Details matter (from the short film Crash directed by Cokliss): “Her ungainly transit across the passenger seat through the nearside door. The overlay of her knees with the metal door flank. The conjunction of the aluminized gutter trim with the volumes of her thighs. The crushing of her left breast by the doorframe, and its self-extension as she continued to rise. The movement of her left hand across the chromium trim of the right headlamp assembly. Her movements distorted in the projecting carapace of the bonnet. The jut and rake of her pubis as she sits in the driver’s seat. The soft pressure of her thighs against the rim of the steering wheel.”

They contribute to the apparent authenticity of the fantasies articulated here. Mere action is not enough, details matter, from Vaughan’s Lincoln to the description of the flickering lights of indicators of police vehicles illuminating the twin copulations associated with human coitus and the metallic penetrations of accidents.

The nihilism of Crash is overwhelming, the protagonists negation of nature and even the self, again echoes Sade, the desires are so all consuming, they consume other and self, until all that is left is ruined metal, Vaughan’s desires are to kill his target and himself simultaneously. As a protagonist Vaughan recalls Sade’s sovereign man – that figure who exists beyond the sadist / masochist dyad, an affirmation of lived experience – in Vaughan manifest as sovereign man pursuing his own desires up to and including his own annihilation, experiencing every pleasure (up to an including the pleasure of annihilation).

The roots of the story of Crash can be found in Ballard’s previous book, the experimental novel The Atrocity Exhibition and in an April 1970 show curated by Ballard at the New Arts Lab in London. Crashed Cars featured three car crash ruined cars, dragged from wrecking yards and exhibited in the gallery. The opening night of the exhibition was marked by the presence of a topless model (although she was meant to be nude when she saw the ruined cars she refused) asking questions of the audience. According to Ballard’s autobiography Miracles of Life (p.240) over the following month viewers responded with outrage, with people attacking the cars and even, bizarrely, Hari Krishna’s throwing white paint on the cars. If Vaughan’s sperm scribblings described previously are some primitive sigils then this seems to be a form of ritual cleansing, as if both driving out and calling in the forces of autopic chaos.

Little known, and barely mentioned beyond Ballard fan circles, is the short film Crash directed by Harley Cokliss (aka Cokeliss – a director known for b-movies and tv shows [as either if these was bad]), this short film made for the BBC who broadcast it on BBC2 at 8:30pm two days before Valentines Day in 1971, can be found on Youtube, starring Ballard and actress Gabreille Drake (then famous for appearing in the television series UFO) it follows as Ballard – also seen onscreen - expands on the general themes that would subsequently inform Crash, while Drake enacts the role of driver and, of course, invariably, sexy car crash casualty. Thanks to – presumably the BBC Radiophonics workshop – the short film is scored by pre-industrial music / avant-garde noise, while Ballard – in beige suit - describes the human relationship to the car, the highway, while noting in fetishistic detail the movements of women climbing out of cars. Juxtaposing forms of car with curves of women’s bodies, creating a montage of eroticism. The second part of the film is dedicated to the car crash, with the author walking around ruined cars describing the fictions of the everyday manifested through consumption and car crashes, “if we really feared the car crash” he says “none of us would be able to drive a car.” In the wrecking yard Ballard glimpses women. Before discussing the style of the instrument panel as the model of our wounds. Footage shows Drake – moments before seen in the shower, her flesh, her curves and her nipple dripping with fresh water – now blood soaked and slumped over her steering wheel, the soundtrack a synthesized alarm escalating in intensity.

Ballard’s glorious fusion of sex, injury and death in the car crash realized in this short film plays on images of blood and sex, the thick heavy blood pooling on her skirt indicative of abdominal injuries, perhaps even genital injuries, her breast “bruised”. Realized with greater clarity in the subsequent Crash where the author speculates on such injuries before, later, describing a back seat fuck resulting in “bruised vulva”.

I do not want to examine David Cronenberg’s 1996 film here today. A thorough interpretation of the source material, it dances through the themes with vigor, although its cold tones never fully embraces the inherent fetishism of the traumatic, however the sight of Gabrille’s (Rosanna Arquette) legs gripped in braces as she rubs herself against a car, her short skirt rising high, is powerful, it is undone by the crass climax of the scene which sees her leg braces tearing the leather upholstery. Such images stop the film from being as unsettling - perhaps even uncanny if Ballard’s psychological description is correct - as it should be.

Instead I wish to move on to examine the emergence of traumaphilia as a source for others working in the post-Ballardian universe. Traumaphilia – the paraphilia in which the subject is aroused by wounds (sometimes referred to as traumatophilia) – can be seen in the medical art of French photographer, occasional filmmaker and fine artist Romain Slocombe whose fetishistic artistic practice depicted Asian women wrapped in crisp clean white bandages (and, to a lesser extent, in the popularity of the nurses uniforms and bandages that can be seen at some fetish clubs worn as fetish wear, although the nurses uniform is not primarily related to trauma, when played alongside bandages and the accoutrements of the emergency room, there is an element of traumatic fascination at play).

While the traumaphile is not necessarily interested in how the injured object choice came to be hurt, Crash and the car crash serve as a common source of injury and the interest in the injury. In his book Tristes Vaccacion (Sad Vacation), Slocombe’s paintings of bruised and bandaged girls are punctuated with descriptions, which detail the injuries and their sources, positioning the text / artwork within the same realm as the Sadean lists. Slocombe’s work continued to explore these themes in the collection Japan In Bandage includes images such as L’Ar Medical (1982), which depicts a naked patient in a hospital bed, bandages and orthopedic devices holding her – like bondage – in place. In the background there is an image of a car, similarly Bonne Route (1992) depicts a heavily bandaged woman standing next to a poster of a car.

The violence, as Slocombe has stated, in his work is located in the past. He is not necessarily interested in the moment of violence, the single act but the process of recovery. Car crashes, with their speed and rapid climax, are violent moments that are almost instantaneous, like film a rapid cut, a gap in time, then impact. The pleasures of watching the process of recovery – or recovering in a hospital bed - can neither be fully sadistic or masochistic, traumaphilia appears to operate in both yet neither zone, concerned as it is with everything from the mise-en-scene of the hospital and patient (white bandages, clean tiles, sheets) through to suffering (the patient restrained by surgical devices) through pain (the bruises heeling yet simultaneously so sore), and so on.

If Slocombe visualized the trauma, then American underground filmmaker Usama Alshaibi has taken it to the next level. Working in Chicago since the 1990s, Alshaibi has directed a string of short films, each lasting only a matter of minutes and exploring aspects of sexuality and fetishism (he has also made features and documentaries, but these are often very different to his shorts). In Convulsion Explosion a woman painted white and wrapped in bandages squirts red paint / stage blood from her rectum, the play here is not necessarily on the recreation of trauma so much as on the play of colours, the red and white, the texture of bandages and painted skin. In Traumata the camera plays over a naked young woman’s body the bruises, bandages and leg cast indicative of unspecified injury, while he dour expression indicates her humiliated discomfort. As if the audience and camera were intruding on her pain. In Gash the camera is turned onto an open wound a few centimeters from a woman’s vagina. The erotic potentialities of penetration doubled. In Patient a not quite naked woman writhes on a bed, her head wrapped in a bandage. These films play with trauma and traumaphilia, recognizing the fetishistic gaze onto the ‘wounded’ female, whose suffering – already in the past – is nevertheless born out on the marks that criss-cross the soft flesh.

No explanation is proffered in the films, short vignette in which the gaze on the injuries and suffering flesh appears as both first cause and intent.

There is a violence here that has happened, death has been momentarily thwarted, but the marks on the flesh remind the viewer (and the subject) of the transient nature of existence. But there is more at play here, more at stake, in paying witness to the accident and recuperation there is a sense of power of life over death. The ruined but healing body emerging as a locus of visual pleasure. To quote Paul Morrissey’s Flesh For Frankenstein, “to know life… you have to fuck death in the gallbladder”.

Salo

2011-07-20T01:45:00.000-07:00

A review of Salo first published in FilmInk last year. For readers unfamiliar with the censorship of the film in Australia the film was finally released for home consumption in October 2010, when this was published.

Salo has a checked history with the censors in Australia but after years of on- again / off-again banning, it is now available uncut. Taking its theme from the Marquis de Sade’s masterwork The 120 Days of Sodom and mirroring the circular structure of Dante’s Inferno, the film locates its narrative in the fascist Republic of Salo in the final days of the Second World War. Four fascist libertines, storytelling prostitutes, a cadre of handsome gun toting soldiers and their beautiful prisoners are ensconced in a rural estate. Here, amongst works of modern art and lavish furniture, the libertines enact their desires on the docile bodies of their victims. Filmed in long takes, with few close-ups, the viewer is compelled to watch the action with an almost dispassionate gaze, as the victims are forced to meet the libertines’ demands, sinking into a world of psycho-sexual obsession, scatological mayhem, degradation and violence.

While Salo draws its characters and basic premise from Sade’s work the tortures and torments owe little to the novel. Famously the film’s credits include a reading list for students of Sade, but the work is as mired in Pasolini’s experiences of fascism, post-war politics and consumer society as it is literature. Salo traces the erasure of the individual under power; the soldiers and the victims are largely nameless figures who exist simply to please the whims of the libertines. In Salo youth is annihilated for the pleasures of those in control and everybody feasts (literally) on shit.

Never explicitly pornographic, there is little opportunity for voyeurism in the nudity, the degradations the subjects are forced to experience detour eroticism into horror. Salo’s unflinching exploration of power and pleasure is controversial, in part, because it implicates the viewer within the film, an effect best emphasised in the final scenes.

Alongside two versions of Salo a second disc includes Philo Bregstein’s 1981 documentary Whoever Says the Truth Shall Die alongside documentaries on the film’s production and ongoing cultural relevance. Also included are Julian Cole’s short film Ostia and a video for Coil’s song ‘Ostia (The Death of Pasolini)’. One of the few films that will genuinely challenge the viewer, Salo is a must have.

Chaos Reigns.

2011-07-03T03:33:00.000-07:00

Lars Von Trier did interviews via Skype for the release of Antichrist, I was lucky enough to have 15 minutes with him, and this interview formed part of a lengthy career overview piece published in FilmInk on the release of the film. What follows is the unpublished literal transcription of the interview.

I wanted to say I loved the film, I enjoyed it very much.

Thank you.

I notice that some people have described this as a horror film, but it strikes me that it’s less about horror than grief and personal pain, and I wondered how you felt about it being described as a horror film?

Well, I think it was myself who descsribed it as a horror film, or, to put it another way, I started off wanting to make a horror film. But, you know, personalize it, then it is not hitting the genres completely. You know, I tried to make a musical once and it didn’t really hit. But the inspiration was the horror genre.

That’s interesting, because I just found the pain struck me as so much more internal in Antichrist, where as in the horror film it is about the audience – scaring the audience – where as in this film I felt emotionally moved by it.

Yeah, but as I said it’s where I start, and then I come to something in between.

One thing I found interesting is the act of madness in the film, the way in which the madness moves in Charlotte Gainsbourg’s character from trauma in her mind to trauma enacted on her body and then on her partner’s body, and I wondered what made you conceptualise madness in this way, to bring madness to a physical thing on the body?

To me the film is very much about anxiety, something that I have lived with for a long time and there’s this cognitive therapy that she is undergoing, well the most important thing about this therapy is saying that these things are thoughts, they are not real, and somehow, when you are the patient it is very real so that is where the bodily things comes from, that it becomes real.

Right, it’s interesting I got the sense watching the film that you had a huge empathy for her pain, very much from your own experience.

Yes. That is right, it is very much based on my experiences.

And you’ve talked about how you were drawn to Strindberg’s Inferno and your own dark period when you were writing the film script, and I thought that was very interesting because there is a section called Hell Let Loose in the English translation and I was wondering if you were drawing a parallel between Hell Let Loose and Chaos Reigns, this moment of the apocypltic coming out of you.

Yeah, I haven’t thought about it, but it sounds good.

I think it is interesting is that in Kingdom you have this idea of the marshland and fens beneath the hospital, then you have the modern hospital on top and now in Antichrist you say that "nature is Satan's church" and I was wondering if this was almost a repetition, the idea that nature in some way is always below dragging us down, and I wondered what you relationship to nature was?

Well, nature to me is the opposite of civilization and that goes for green stuff and for the nature within people themselves. But it is definitely a repetition also from my first film Element of Crime where we also always talked about nature as something dangerous. It’s quite interesting because I really am a nature man, I like very much to be in nature.

Because obviously you are a gardener, that’s one of your hobbies.

Yeah, I am a lazy gardener. It’s something that I treasure.

So in that sense, when you say “nature is Satan’s church” do you personally identify Satan with this endless fecundity of nature, or darkness with this endless kind of growth in nature…

I don’t know if I so, but in Danish we have a saying that “this is a free nature of God” where we compare nature with God. And to me nature is the place of ultimate suffering for all the beings, so yeah I think it has more to do with the discussion if God created nature.

The other aspect of nature is Warner Herzog’s description of nature as deadly the whole time, is that something you were thinking of when you were writing the script?

Maybe I was not thinking it but I am a big Herzog fan, yeah it may have come from there.

There are lots of really potent symbols in the film; the fox, the deer, the blackbird are these symbols important to you personally or have you drawn on them from other sources?

All these animals come from, at a certain time in my life I was experimenting a little with shamanic journeys that you are probably familiar with, and the image of the animals comes from there.

That’s interesting, so in your own personal experiences of shamanic journeys are you drawing on that in your scriptwriting for the film, besides the symbolism for the animals, are there other aspects you are drawing on?

To me, I am an amateur, but I have read some books and then I do these drum things, and do these journeys on a drumbeat. These are just experiences I had on these journeys.

Is this something you are still practicing, do you still engage with that shamanic journey, or is that very much in your past?

No, that’s something I do now and then. Actually we have invested in something called a floatation tank. Something that when Ken Russell made that film Altered Experiments…

Altered States. Yes, it’s a fantastic film.

Yeah. They are just building this place, we should have this isolation tank, we will try everything, or I will.

That’s really interesting because obviously part of what you are doing in the film, to me, is about these journeys about interior space, people’s psychological functioning. Leading on from that, there’s one moment in the film where you say, or one of the character’s says, “Freud is dead” and I think that to me you are saying the opposite in the film, because you have polymorphic perversity, the death drive, thanatos and so on. The sex and death aspect of the film. So I wondered what your interpretation of that notion of Freud being dead was.

This cognitive therapy that I have been undergoing for three, four-years it’s very important for these people that Freud is dead, but I take a fantastical point of view on the therapy. So, I am not so sure he is dead but the therapists are so sure, it is an important point.

In terms of symbolism and dealing with the drives of the unconscious there is so much in Freud - I don’t know whether it is god or bad or real or not real – but there is so material in his notion of the unconscious and the dream and so on.

I believe also, yes.

I want to move on to the character doing the study about evil and the idea of women as evil, and reading some of the reviews and the criticisms they seem to draw on the notion of the woman as evil, but to me it seems much more about pain than evil, about suffering than evil, although she is reading women as evil within the film, it seems to me you are doing something much more complicated about personal pain and personal suffering. I wondered what your take on that was.

You know, if I wanted to say women were evil I would only say that in a few words. This is something else, I see this woman as being very human, and having an anxiety in nature, with her own nature, and anxiety with her sexuality also.

It’s much more about anxiety than evil.

Oh yes, oh yes. This thing about women being evil is nothing, it’s not my words.

This leads me to ask you, what made you call the film Antichrist?

Well it was very much this feeling that God is dead, instead of Freud. That if all these things that we call the free nature of God, and all that, is basically evil to me that’s a statement that, you know, to find God as not being present there.

It’s the absence of God and absence of meaning in a way.

Yeah I would say, yeah. But then, furthermore it is a very good title.

Stylistically it is very beautiful, the way the sound and vision work together. It is almost the opposite from Manderlay and Dogville. What drew you back to this richness of sound and vision? What made you want to make Antichrist in this way?

Well, whenever I work I try to go to the extremes, and the theatre like [style] that was in the films before, I did not really see the opportunity to go further in that direction, so then you have to go a little back and try again.

And how did you find it going back? Did it effect the way you wrote the script and directed the film?

Yeah, it allowed me to use this talent – I hope it is – for producing controlled images.

Do you identify that notion of control very differently from what you did in Dogville, Manderlay and The Idiots?

Yeah. I think it’s quite close to films I started of with. I was using some of the same techniques then.

How willing were the actors to go along with your vision, because I mean obviously you were making great demands on the actors, how did they find it?

They were amazing, we didn’t have any discussions like that. But we had a lot of discussions before hand when they were cast we talked through the script a lot. I am really admiring them for that, and especially Charlotte, but there were no problems whatsoever.

You’ve made a horror film, you’ve made a musical, can I ask what is next?

I’m writing a film called Melancholia that has to do with a giant planet crashing into the Earth and destroying it completely. I think it’s about time that I skip all these happy endings.

Gestured 2

2011-07-02T06:56:00.000-07:00

Notebook page on aesthetics and Thundercrack alongside trio of 'found' photos.

Life Extinguisher.

2011-07-02T01:48:00.000-07:00

Another FilmInk column, this time on the death film genre.

As the exotic thrills of mondo movies became more familiar, and with the increasing availability of hardcore porn thanks to Deep Throat (Gerard Damiano, 1972) and its ilk, the seventies exploitation ‘documentary’ market was looking for new, cheap, cheap thrills. Enter the death film.

Sharing the salacious voyeurism of the mondo genre but focusing only on death (or, more often, gore), these films combined suitably gross-out stomach churning newsreel footage with staged recreations of grisly deaths. These sequences were woven together via a narrator who’s role, like that of his mondo predecessors, was to offer a commentary that would move from crass quasi-psychological insights to pseudo-moral tongue clicking and oblique supposedly existential observations on the nature of mortality.

The genre’s best known, and most successful movie, was Faces of Death (1978), directed by Conan Le Cilaire, the film is narrated by the brilliantly named Dr Francis B. Gross (actually actor Michael Carr). The good ‘doctor’ offers such quasi-homilies as, “Now it is time to witness the final moment, to discover the circle that forever repeats itself. The end of the beginning or the beginning of the end? I'll leave that decision to you”. Meanwhile the movie depicts everything from (faked) executions through to stock scenes of seals being culled, a woman jumping from a building and tourists eating monkey brains (faked again).

The film played the grindhouse circuit on 42^nd street, but didn’t do much business with the jaded crowd, however international audiences, especially in Asia, flocked to see the movie. In 1980 Faces of Death made the top twenty highest grossing films of the year in Hong Kong, while legend has it that in Japan, where it was released as Junk, the film outgrossed Star Wars on some screens. Despite being banned in many territories (although its fake gore effects are fairly average and the newsreel footage is often familiar) Faces of Death found its natural home on the emergent home video market. Boasting the tagline “banned in 46 countries” gore hungry snuff fixated adolescents flocked to rent the video, and, when the film was banned, nth generation copies often circulated amongst horror and shock cinema fans.

The movie spawned six direct sequels and inspired various other films including Traces of Death (Brain Damage, 1993) and Faces of Gore (Todd Tjersland, 1999), both of which have also produced numerous sequels. With their simplistic, bluntly descriptive shock titles and we-dare-you style taglines (“banned” appearing to be the stock phrase) these films were ultimately, like most exploitation films, about marketing.

The growth of the Internet has meant that supposedly ‘shocking’ footage is far more readily available and circulated via email almost continually. Moreover, for anybody anxious to watch images of gore or death television offers numerous medical themed shows and the news is as ever filled with scenes of suffering. A somewhat strange subgenre of the mondo movie, the death film probably says more about the vagaries of video marketing in the '80s and salacious audiences than about death.

Currently Reading 7

2011-06-29T16:34:00.000-07:00

One book occupies my time currently; Nick Land's Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987 - 2007. Published by Urbanomic and wrapped in a beautiful cover by the Chapman brothers (from their Disasters of War IV), these essays engage with the kind of cutting edge of radical thinking that Land is best known for. Only read two chapters and already proving to be essential, an utterly engaged dance through the abyss.

Flaming Creature

2011-06-21T04:15:00.000-07:00

FilmInk column:

Jack Smith (1932 – 1989) was a vast influence on the underground, he created beautiful art as a photographer of vividly coloured exotic tableaux, he wrote, he worked as an actor appearing in underground films by the likes of Andy Warhol and Ken Jacobs in the ‘60s and Beth & Scott B and Ela Troyano in the ‘80s, he created theatrical events and he directed movies.

In the early ‘60s Jack Smith collaborated with filmmaker / musicians Tony Conrad, Angus MacLise and John Cale on a series of recordings at their shared apartment on Ludlow Street, in NYC’s Lower East Side. MacLise and Cale would go on to form the Velvet Underground, while Conrad would compose experimental music and direct the film Flicker (1966). But Smith’s masterwork was the underground movie Flaming Creatures (1963), a film which includes the immortal line, “Is there a lipstick that doesn’t come off when you suck cocks?”

Dionysian mayhem reigns throughout the film, as exotically attired figures grope, dance, laugh and seduce one another, culminating in a ‘rape’, orgy and earthquake. Shot on the rooftop of the old Windsor Theater in NYC, Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures was – and still is – one of the most radical of underground movies. Filmed on grainy, outdated stock the film is a pure exotic celebration of sexuality, fancy costumes and orgiastic mania. For the cast Smith gathered together various friends, performers and artists, drawing on the local community of drag queens, cross-dressers, beatniks and poets, and swathing them all in exotic costumes constructed from thrift store finds, transforming the bohemian cast into the ‘creatures’ that populate the film. Influenced by the luxurious splendour of movies starring the likes of Sabu and Maria Montez, Flaming Creatures recreated the mysterious Hollywood Orient of the b-movie world of Arabian Nights and Sinbad the Sailor on a downtown rooftop. Smith scored the whole movie with Latin pop, rock and roll and Chinese music, adding further layers to its complexity.

When Flaming Creatures was screened at lofts and artists' spaces in NYC it had instant cult status, with its lavish scenes of camp debauchery, but, in 1964 the city wanted to clean up and their targets included underground filmmakers. The police raided a screening of the film, seizing the print. Despite the likes of academic essayist Susan Sontag and beatnik poet Allen Ginsberg defending Flaming Creatures it was branded as obscene in June 1964.

Over the following years, as various censorship battles were won, the film gained a mythical status, not least because it was technically banned in NYC. Smith, meanwhile started work on other films Normal Love (1963) and No President (1967) but these works were never formally completed and he would screen footage as part of expanded performances which would take place in his Manhattan apartment to enthusiastic audiences.

But it is for Flaming Creatures that he is best remembered, a genuinely unique example of cinema and essential for any fans of underground film.

State of Things 11

2011-06-03T19:36:00.000-07:00

The next session of the Decadent Society has been scheduled for Sunday 12th June, full details on this month's lecture can be found here. Needless to say those with an interest in the stranger areas of culture are encouraged to attend.

Currently Reading 6

2011-06-03T19:31:00.000-07:00

About to devour Paul Hegarty's Noise / Music: A History, having just worked my way through Touch & Go: The Complete Hardcore Punk Zine 79 - 83. Two versions of 70s into 80s sonic culture, both offering their own insights. Michael Goss's Young Lusty Sluts: A Pictorial History of Erotic Pulp Fiction which features some incredible sleazy-beautiful-exploitation artwork that once graced the covers of sordid spunk stained paperbacks is a fascinating resource. Also, just read Grant Morrison's perfectly realised graphic novel The Filth, which proves to be an incredible exploration of everything that is repressed, hidden in the unconscious and in the decay of the everyday. Then there's Marlin Marynick's Charles Manson Now, purchased on a recent visit to the ever wonderful Museum of Death in Hollywood, this book sheds some new light onto both Manson and those who are, in various ways, part of his life now. Finally, the new volume of Collapse is imminent and will no doubt be essential reading.

Funereal Expectorations.

2011-05-17T02:55:00.000-07:00

My review of the remake of I Spit On Your Grave at the Film Ink blog.

State of Things 10

2011-05-14T00:59:00.000-07:00

The latest publication from Strange Attractor is The End: An Electric Sheep Anthology a book of essays on cinema edited by Virginie Selavy, the volume includes my piece on the film Human Centipede. The publication is due to be released on 16th May. Check it out. This essay also formed the basis of a paper given at a recent conference in San Antonio.

The Revelation Perth International Film Festival starts on 14th July, once I again I have curated the event. I'll post a link once the programme is formally announced.

No Wave Cinema

2011-05-02T17:25:00.000-07:00

Looking through Youtube clips recently I discovered that somebody has posted some films by Beth and Scott B, including the excellent Letters To Dad (1979), an exceptional study of power and obedience drawn from letters written to Jim Jones.

Decadent Literature.

2011-05-02T03:37:00.000-07:00

The Decadent Literature events for 2011 start this Sunday. Full details can be found here, the first event focuses on underground comics, with future events planned on fetishism, magickal eroticism etc.

State of Things 9

2011-01-27T21:06:00.000-08:00

The latest issue of the journal Headpress features my lengthy interview with / essay on 'industrial' musician, artist, performer and cynic Monte Cazazza. It's available via their website. Published in full colour, hardbound limited edition, one of the definitive and essential underground / counter culture publications, readers here should be familiar with it, if not now would be a good time to start.

Typecast yet again, Jon Hewitt has completed X and it is a great hardboiled feature. Shot in and around Kings Cross, Sydney, my cameos as a john and as a patron in a strip club make a few seconds of screen time. Here's a screen grab from said movie of my leering appearance.

Also, anybody in Berlin during the film festival should check out Angelique Bosio's latest movie The Advocate For Fagdom which has its world premiere on Valentine's Day. I can be spotted in this film discussing Bruce LaBruce's movies alongside John Waters, Rick Castro, Richard Kern, Harmony Korine and Gus Van Sant.

Currently Reading 5

2011-01-22T23:33:00.000-08:00

Two current books: The Book of Symbols and Solitary Sex.

The Book of Symbols, authored by The Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism, is an 800 page book full of essays with titles such as 'sperm', 'honeybee' and 'witch', lavishly illustrated in full colour this makes suitably fascinating reading. Especially in terms of examining the various manifestations and interpretations of a symbol across cultures, for example 'thunder' is traced through Japanese, Hindu and Norse deities amongst others, before dancing through The I-Ching. Like The Golden Bough there's a lot of leads to be found here.

Perhaps a more 'obvious' choice for my reading, Solitary Sex examines the cultural construction of masturbation from the Enlightenment onwards. another 500 page book, its equally absorbing reading.

Currently Reading 4

2010-12-31T19:16:00.000-08:00

Cinema Inferno edited by Rob Weiner and John Cline (I am featured the companion volume From the Arthouse to the Grindhouse). Cinema Inferno features the likes of Stephen Barber on the Vienna Aktionists and Johannes Schonherr on Hated, as well as many other writers examining a wide range of exploitation and sleaze movies. Also re-reading Burroughs Live edited by Sylvere Lotringer, a selection of interviews with the author spanning his entire career, pretty much essential reading. Excellent cross reference with Burroughs' Letters 1945 - 1959. An oddity for fans of occulture also, The Occult Explosion by Nat Freedland, which examines the cultural changes around the occult in the 60s.

State of Things 8

2010-11-24T20:52:00.000-08:00

The London Underground Film Festival kicks off on December 4th at the Horse Hospital, London. I've programmed the screenings on Sunday 5th December, which start with Nude Study at 12:00pm, followed by Anywhere USA at 2:30pm, Words of Advice: WIlliam Burroughs on the Road at 5:00pm and The Family Jams at 8:00pm. These are all great movies and at least three are UK premieres. There's a full website here for the festival, check it out.

LA Zombie

2010-11-16T18:55:00.000-08:00

Below is a copy of the letter of support and recognition sent to the Melbourne Underground Film Festival, their lawyers and the media last Friday following the raid on the home of the festival director. Several people have subsequently told me that they wanted to sign the letter but in order to respond at speed this letter was written, signed and delivered the day after the raid.I would suggest that people write their own letters of support and send them to the various Melbourne and Australian newspapers.

An Open Letter In Support of The Melbourne Underground Film Festival

Bruce LaBruce is an internationally renowned filmmaker and writer. His works have screened across the globe: at the New York Museum of Modern Art, the Sundance Film Festival, Berlin Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival, the Hong Kong Lesbian and Gay Film Festival and many others. Several of his films have also screened to appreciative Australian film festival audiences. His films are readily available to rent and buy, both internationally and nationally, where many have been released on DVD.

Mixing black comedy, politics, genre, melodrama and porn, LaBruce's films tell stories of homosexual desire, of lust and love, all shot through with a low budget, post-punk aesthetic that pays homage to both underground cinema and Hollywood classics. He has a dedicated cult fan base and his work is central in both indie film and contemporary GLBT cinema, a documentary study of LaBruce's work is due to premiere at a major European film festival in 2011.

His most recent movie, LA Zombie follows a 'gay' 'zombie' who, rather than killing brings the dead back to life by having sex with them. The sex, much of which is faked, is, behind the ʻshockingʼ concept, gentle and loving. Beneath the stage- bloodied zombie movie is a tender film about the regenerative powers of sex and love.

Film fans across the world were surprised when LA Zombie was ʻbannedʼ during the Melbourne International Film Festival. When the film was subsequently screened with no police interference to an appreciative audience as part of the Melbourne Underground Film Festival many praised the event for enabling an audience to see the work.

It is, then, troubling that Richard Wolstencroft, the director of the Melbourne Underground Film Festival, had his house raided on 11th November by detectives searching for a copy of the film. The involvement of Victoria Police and the threat of legal action simply for screening a film that has already played to global audiences is deeply disturbing.

The image of the police and courts enforcing censorship is never pretty; when the target is the work of an internationally famous gay filmmaker it is downright shameful. The threat of legal action simply for screening a film is part of an increasingly hysterical response that can only have a detrimental effect to filmmakers and audiences in Australia.

As filmmakers, film fans, and consenting adults, we roundly condemn the banning of this film and the possibility of legal action against the director of an independent film festival.

Jack Sargeant

Richard Sowada

Anne Demy-Geroe

Julie Rigg

Dov Kornits

Christina Andreef

Fiona Patten

Maija Howe

Dominique Angeloro

Dan Angeloro

Jon Hewitt

Stefan Popescu

Katherine Berger

Dean Bertram

Mathieu Ravier

Daniel Palisa

Michael Adams

Dejan Ognjanovic

David Leadbetter

Matthew Clayfield

Jane Louise

Brendan Walls

Dave de Vries

Frank Howsom

Bec Sutherland

Leigh Barnes

Joel Brady

Ian Drummond

Simon Strong

International:

Craig Baldwin

David Flint

Carl Ford

Mitch Davis

Michael Tierney

Roughies

2010-11-02T16:54:00.000-07:00

This piece on 'roughies' was originally published in FilmInk in slightly edited form.

With one foot in the nudie camp movie and one foot firmly placed in the tradition of lowbrow men’s pulp magazines such as Adventure, Man’s Book and New Man, famous for their cover paintings that depicted scantily clad women being tormented by Nazis and / or Commies, the roughies offered cinema audiences hardboiled narratives alongside some sex and a whole lot of violence. These movies presented pure, raw machismo on screen, with women as either weak victims or buxom seductive villainesses (or both). They spun stories of semi-clad brutalised babes and tough guys in tales that were equal parts brutal no-nonsense thrillers and cheesy fantasies spun straight from the darkest confessions to emerge from the analyst’s couch.

There’s invariably some debate about the source of the genre, though Russ Meyer’s Lorna (1964), is commonly considered the first roughie. It features all of the key elements, with the titular Lorna, the sexually unsatisfied wife being raped by an escaped con and finding her libido subsequently unleashed. The results are sex, violence and punishment. But Meyer had his own agenda, and while he directed the excellent Mudhoney! (1965) and Motorpsycho (1965) more often it was the men who were dominated by the women in his movies, most famously in Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965), and as the decade progressed he turned to the larger than life vividly coloured cartoonish movies for which he is best known.

Other roughie classics include the David Friedman produced Scum of the Earth, directed by Herschell Gordon Lewis (1963) and The Defilers (1965) directed by Lee Frost, as well as Doris Wishman’s Bad Girls Go To Hell (1965). What all of these films share is stories in which women - or ‘girls’ according to the taglines- are humiliated and generally abused by bad men.

Some people may argue that these films wallow in a testosterone filled sleaze pit - like that’s a bad thing - but there’s a joyful pleasure to be had from them. The characters are so much larger than life and there’s an exaggerated male-melodrama at play that is gloriously un-PC. Playing in the grindhouses of the inner city and rural and suburban drive-ins these films found their audiences and made a buck, but mostly they escaped the film historians' grasp. Maybe their dubious pleasures were just too damned low-brow.

As censorship laws loosened-up, and with the growth of hardcore porn, the roughie slid from view, eventually replaced by gory exploitation movies and sex films that catered for the same lascivious tastes, but revelled in depicting it in more graphic detail. The age of the roughie never truly ended – its roots can be seen in numerous films to this day - but the strange and savage charm of the genre in the heyday of the sixties will probably never be equalled.

Notes: examples of men's magazine covers were reproduced in the book It's A Man's World: Men's Adventure Magazines, The Postwar Pulps by Adam Parfrey published by Feral House, recommended reading. Something Weird Video have released numerous roughies on DVD, including a double bill of Scum of the Earth and The Defilers.

Decadent Literature 2

2010-11-02T16:15:00.000-07:00

Two photos by Lyndal Irons from October's Decadent Literature Night at Moon Age.

I am talking about Harry Crosby, death, modern poetry, spectacular lives, suicide and the Black Sun as metaphor, amongst other things.

B-Movie Prognosticator

2010-10-31T17:15:00.000-07:00

I wrote this for FilmInk, and it was published a couple of months ago. Seems like a good idea to post it here for Halloween.

Jeron Criswell King started as a newspaper writer, but slipped into the role of a Hollywood prognosticator. In tinsel town he was the personal psychic for Mae West, who periodically chauffered home cooked meals to him which he would share with his friends. On one occasion the actress sold him her old Cadillac for a dollar.

With his silver hair, aristocratic manner and slightly sing-song exaggerated thespian voice he was a natural for movies. It was the master of visionary cinema Edward D Wood Jr who recognized Criswell’s cinematic talent and cast him in the legendary Plan 9 From Outer Space (1956). At the film’s opening Criswell appears – as himself - sitting behind what appears to be a card table. The camera pulls in and he starts speaking: “We are all interested in the future because that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives, and remember my friends future events such as these will affect you in the future.“ As an opening spiel to a b-movie there are few stranger, or more enigmatically compelling. There are many elements in Plan 9 worth celebrating - from the wild plot concepts to the wonky props and the b-movie acting - but Criswell’s cameo is perhaps one of the strangest.

A close friend of Ed Wood, Criswell also appeared in Wood’s movie Night of The Ghouls (1958). Once again offering an opening monologue, this time delivered from a coffin: “I am Criswell, for many years I have told you the almost unbelievable, related the unreal and showed it to be more than fact. Now I tell you a tale of the Threshold People…” Criswell even appeared in the Wood scripted 1965 sexploitation movie Orgy of the Dead, here he provided an intro to the movie and appeared in the role of The Emperor.

Criswell’s most accurate prophesy occurred in 1963 on The Jack Paar Program - a popular variety show, when he stated “I predict that President Kennedy will not run for re-election in 1964 because of something that will happen to him in November 1963”. But he is best known and remembered for his astonishingly inaccurate yet fantastically imagined predictions which including Mae West being elected president and floating icebergs in the atmosphere prohibiting air travel.

In the ‘50s had his own television show on KCOP in Los Angeles: Criswell Predicts. Something of socialite he would invite friends to the Brown Derby every Friday after shooting his show, where they would drink cocktails. As his fame grew Criswell appeared on The Tonight Show, often as the source of mirth to Johnny Carson and his studio audience. Legend has it that he slept in a coffin, which may not be true, but makes good copy.

Criswell wrote three books: Criswell Predicts: From Now To The Year 2000!, Criswell Predicts Your Next Ten Years and Criswell’s Forbidden Predictions and recorded an album The Legendary Criswell Predicts (available on CD if you search for it) which included such nuggets as “I predict embalming by radar, where the body is turned to indestructible stone!“ and “I predict that flying saucers will land on the lawn of the White House… mark this date on your calendar: May 6^th 1991".

Criswell; a true star of bizarre Hollywood.

State of Things 7

2010-10-24T18:57:00.000-07:00

The Fantastic Planet Sydney Science Fiction and Fantasy Film Festival starts in Sydney on 29th October running until November 6th. I have programmed a screening of The Return of the Living Dead as part of the Saturday 30th Zombiethon and will be introducing the screening at 7:00pm at the Dendy, Newtown. Haven't seen The Return of the Living Dead for years, so looking forward to this.

Currently Reading 3

2010-10-22T17:32:00.000-07:00

Revisiting two classics of underground and cult cinema, Amos Vogel's Film As Subversive Art (Random House) and Hoberman & Rosenbaum's Midnight Movies (Da Capo). Great to be immersed in these writers and their examinations of cinema. Also, deep in Lowenstein's Shocking Representation (Columbia), an exploration of - amongst other things - allegory, trauma theory and horror movies. Once again I find myself taking copious notes and exploring numerous lines of flight and potentialities.

The Hiliker Curse - James Ellroy's latest book, sees the author exploring his relationships with women, from lust to love, all haunted by his relationship to his murdered mother. Not as powerful as My Dark Places, but Ellroy's writing style always makes for an enjoyable read.

Finally, independent publishing house Inkblot have issued a limited edition paperback of a previously unpublished essay by Brion Gysin Living With Islam, an examination of his experiences as a westerner living in Tangiers in the 50s. Expect a 'review' to be posted here soon.

Decadent Literature

2010-10-20T22:35:00.000-07:00

Three images by Mclean Stephenson taken at the Decadent Literature event, that capture something of the atmosphere of the evening.

This month's event will be on Wednesday 27th at Moon Age and I will be talking about Harry Crosby.

Ubu Lives

2010-10-14T01:36:00.000-07:00

UbuWeb is slowly coming back online.

Vale Ubu?

2010-10-13T17:36:00.000-07:00

The best online resource for avant garde film, sonic art and texts relating to these topics, Ubuweb has been hacked and appears to be offline. I'm not going to re-iterate arguments about copyright, my belief is that the site was akin to a library and was an essential resources for disseminating cutting edge work to people who may otherwise have no opportunity to see it. The piece below was first published in FilmInk.

The maniac, anarchist and monarch known as Pa Ubu was the central character in Alfred Jarry’s absurdist play Ubu Roi, a theatrical work that transformed Shakespeare’s Macbeth into a celebration of corruption and mayhem, fallen kings and despotic self-indulgence, all punctuated with outrageous tirades of scatological abuse. The 1896 premiere performance saw the Parisian audience run riot, so scandalized by the production they were driven to violence. Now recognized as a key text in the avant-garde literary cannon, Ubu Roi and its sequels influenced dada, the Surrealists, experimental poets, modern theatre, punk musicians, cutting-edge sonic artists and visionary filmmakers.

Given this cultural lineage, it is no surprise that UbuWeb has named itself in part as an homage to the figure of Pa Ubu. A website which celebrates and disseminates key works of the global avant-garde. UbuWeb started in 1996 as a website dedicated to concrete and sound poetry, over the ensuing decade it has expanded to include a massive visual archive of around 1,000 underground, experimental and avant-garde films, alongside sound recordings and writings. It has been described as “a never-ending work in progress” and an “unlimited resource”, and it remains an utterly unique online museum / resource / archive.

The film archive includes works by many artist filmmakers including surrealist photographer May Ray, artists Hans Richter and Yoko Ono alongside movies by underground filmmakers including Ron Rice, Maya Deren, Shirley Clarke and many others. These names probably won’t mean much to most people, and there in lies the central importance of UbuWeb – it is creating a vast online archive in which these works can be accessed by anybody, making works normally only seen by art students or those living near a cinematheque available to anybody with access to a computer.

UbuWeb’s curatorial policy is simple, if a suitable work is unavailable or out of print they will add it to their archives and make it available online. They are careful to observe that if something subsequently becomes readily available, or if an artist wants a work removed, they will take it down. The truth is, however that often artists like having their work available on UbuWeb.

Crucially UbuWeb is a free open access resource, they are not selling works nor do they charge people to watch them, as the web site proudly states: “It’s all free. We know it’s a hard idea to get used to, but there’s no lush gift shop waiting for you at the end of this museum”. There are no adverts on UbuWeb. Server space and bandwidth have been donated by some institutions but these supporters have no say on the content.

So, if you want to watch some of the rare classics of the underground and avant-garde, UbuWeb is essential, the site represents open access at its best and is surely what the Internet is for.

Currently Reading 2

2010-10-10T22:33:00.001-07:00

I am currently reading Jack Stevenson's latest study Scandinavian Blue: The Erotic Cinema of Sweden and Denmark in the 1960s and 1970s (McFarland) an absorbing history and analysis of exploitation and sex movies produced in Scandinavia. The section on I Am Curious (Yellow) is exceptionally interesting as is the study of the 1974 movie The Sinful Dwarf. Recommended reading for any student of the nether regions of the true world cinema.

Also, revisiting Gary Indiana'a Salo or The One Hundred Days of Sodom (BFI) one of the best books on a single film published and absorbing reading for those interested in Pasolini's movie and / or in de Sade's writings.

A piece on Jack's book is forthcoming.

Feral Desires

2010-10-10T22:32:00.000-07:00

Samantha Sweeting’s work has followed a number of strands, which entwine in themes around a specific body, her own, as a zone that is simultaneously nurturing, consuming, sexual, and animal. Her earliest works as a performer were presented under the name Jezebelle, the Phoenician princess who worshipped Baal the male fertility god associated with holy prostitution.

The Jezebelle works existed as an anonymous website and as a series of projections of her super-8 film One Night Stand. Showing the artist sleeping, the film was screened at a London striptease bar and a female sex shop. She also carried out a performance with her longterm partner, the intensity of which provoked the collapse of their relationship.

"I had asked my partner to follow me (I was dressed in a red wig and tight clothing) as I walked from my apartment to the striptease bar where my sleeping film was showing. He had to photograph me from a distance. I went inside the bar, saw my video and watched the stage show as some men tried to talk to me. I left and walked back home, with him following me all the way. The performance was called Jezebelle and the Underworld and lasted about an hour. It exploited the emotional and physical gulf that had opened in our relationship. He reacted very badly."

Fundamental to Jezebelle were a number of barely seen, private photographic images. These were records of a personal performance of a sexualized self, produced as an engagement with the self-as-seducer and self-as-object. The central images were made as a long distance dance of eroticism following a chance meeting in New York, wherein the veils were temporal and geographical rather than finely woven silk. They were part of a personal journey into a period defined by the physical excesses of dietary restriction and what the artist has referred to as excessive masturbation. The interest was not in the philosophical nature of Baal, but in the celebration of the performer’s desire to seduce and to probe her own sexuality.

These photographs existed as an initiatory moment, where the artist turned her body into a source of artistic meaning, the personal images acting as documents of a journey into an eroticised becoming which both affirmed and annihilated her identity. In many of the images, her face is absent or blurred into abstraction. The focus is simply her body, the curve of her belly, the roundness of her buttocks and implicitly her cunt; in one image the curve of her belly flows down to her pubis, in another, taken from the artist’s perspective in the bath with her legs slightly parted all that is visible is limbs, yet the intention is clear.

These images are not intellectual but visceral. Any meaning is retrospective projection, the initial response is designed as sexual, but not as erotic, these images are not hidden behind the simple pretence of aesthetics but are raw recognition of desire. These photographs are illicit. A status emphasised by the use of Polaroid film.

Several years later...in a field in rural England Sweeting was photographed on all fours by artist Tom Hunter, as part of a collaborative series of pinhole performance photographs. The picture is framed as a classic image of the British countryside, only the centrepiece is different. In a dark dress with an apple in her mouth she appears like a woman deranged, spun into animalism, her eyes closed in concentration, as if she is willing to be out-of-her-human-skin. As the photographic series progresses her clothes vanish, on hands and knees surrounded by wind-fallen fruit she grasps an apple in her mouth. Rendered like a bestial Eve, consuming an excess of apples, her sin marked by her animalistic posture. Naked, her eyes are closed, but the look on her face is no longer one of concentration, but something more, she is becoming lost within the role. But her hair is still tied back; she has not become fully feral.

The intensity of this performance haunted the artist as she returned to a more visceral engagement a year later in rural France for a video camera rather than a photographer. In this video entitled Like a Pig in Shit – again a personal exploration devoid of an audience – she eats an apple, but the framing of the image has been reworked and her appearance has transformed. Crouching in mud and grass, the image grabs have specific titles, beginning with Piggy In The Mud. Nude, her untied hair appears heavier, dirtier, the half chewed fruit lying before her on the ground. As the series progresses it becomes clearer, her hands are sinking in the mud, clutching handfuls of dirt. Mud clings to her chin. She is becoming a human-as-pig, wallowing in soil and filth, removing herself temporarily from the confines of the organized and policed body.

Yet the sexuality of the earlier work is still apparent, in a second series produced at the same time, she eats as an animal on a crudely made bed, the white sheets contrasting with the images of her engorgement, her mouth stuffed with apple. In a place commonly reserved for dreams and copulation she has lost herself as animal. The last image of the series, depicting Sweeting looking at the core of the fruit is titled simply Post. Post climatic. She has returned to being human.

These personal experiments are performances that chart an annihilation of the social self. They form a dance with the feral and the states of hunger for food and sex that exist as consuming primal urges. These images of personal performances suggest that she is pushing ever closer to a moment during which she will fully forget herself. A moment in which it is the human itself that becomes consumed.

Over the Wall

2010-10-02T01:14:00.000-07:00

My old friend Jim Morton, co-author of the brilliant and influential Re:Search Incredibly Strange Films book, is producing a new blog on East German cinema, but as you would expect these are not the movies most people talk about. Check the blog out here. Jim attended Revelation this year and screened clips from some of these films as part of his lecture on incredibly strange films and both this blog and his ongoing research into this largely uncharted area of cinema promises to open-up an entire new world of movies to the reader.

For those who don't know, Jim also writes the Pop Void blogspot, once again necessary reading.

Mache-merde

2010-09-30T20:52:00.000-07:00

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

2010-09-27T22:22:00.000-07:00

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

2010-09-26T19:20:00.000-07:00

(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

2010-09-23T22:43:00.000-07:00

(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

2010-09-22T22:19:00.000-07:00

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!

2010-09-19T18:56:00.001-07:00

(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

2010-09-16T22:10:00.000-07:00

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

2010-09-13T15:05:00.001-07:00

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

2010-09-13T04:01:00.000-07:00

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

2010-09-04T03:04:00.000-07:00

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."

State of Things 4

2010-08-17T20:32:00.000-07:00

Arriving in the post this morning a copy of From The Arthouse To The Grindhouse: Highborow and Lowbrow Transgression in Cinema's First Century, published by Scarecrow Press, it's edited by John Cline and Robert G Weiner, two dapper academics from Texas. This hardbound volume features contributions from Jack Stevenson, Michelle Clifford, David Kerekes, Stephen Barber, Johannes Schonherr and Mel Gordon, amongst others. My offering to this epic guide to the nether regions of cinema is an interview with legendary actor Jamie Gillis focusing on his appearance in the film Waterpower aka The Enema Bandit aka Water Power. For those who haven't seen this soiled film it is a epic of '70s exploitation cinema, featuring enemas, enemas and more enemas, all spun around a narrative that is part Taxi Driver and part police procedural porno. Gillis agreed to do the interview on the proviso I send him a gift, so I sent him a copy of Deathtripping and we did the interview on the phone a few weeks later. He was funny and easy to talk to, and his death earlier this year was a loss.

You'll Get the Bends

2010-08-16T18:06:00.000-07:00

The Sydney Underground Film Festival returns this September screening the likes of Trash Humpers (Harmony Korine), and Victor Niewenhuijs & Maart Je Seyferth's study of butchershop psychosis Meat. I haven't seen Korine's movie yet but can recommend the surrealistic study of sex and flesh in Meat. The main festival runs from 9 - 11th September at the Factory, and includes the usual combination of experimental works, transgressive films, plunderphonics, material works, shorts, features, documentaries and indie movies. For those who want a taste there's a warm-up screening co-presented with A Night of Horror Film Festival at the Mu-Meson Archives this Thursday.

I am assisting in the programming, curating / co-curtating the post festival day of movies, food and drink at SCA (Balmain Road) on September 18th. Starting at 10:30am with a screening of Usama Ashaibi's transgressive The Amateurs, followed by urban myth documentary Cropsey and Cat Ladies, both films that SUFF directors Stefan and Kath enjoyed at this year's Revelation.

The full program can be found on the Sydney Underground Film Festival website.

State of Things 3

2010-08-16T17:53:00.000-07:00

Monochrom #26-34 is a classic telephone book sized tome, heavy and with some 500 oversized pages of writing and visuals that recalls - although is uniquely different from -such publications as Vague and Semiotext(e). Amongst it many features and essays is a piece I wrote on Serge Gainsbourg's film Je t'aime... moi non plus, and it's great to be included in this volume. Available online for 18 euros or $24 US this volume promises much reading and stimulation.

Calenture 3

2010-07-30T03:59:00.000-07:00

A couple of months ago there was a burn-off in the mountains and smoke swept over the entire city. At dusk the sunlight filtered through the haze, the rich smell of burned wood in the air. Standing in the (invariable) crowds taking photos of the thick smoke, there was something of strange voyeuristic mood combined with an apocalyptic feeling, as if the city itself was burning, an instant of Ballardian collapse.

Flower Gods

2010-07-23T22:56:00.000-07:00

One of the most unique publications and publishing companies I have been involved with have a blog here, publishers of unique beat and visionary literature they are a secret yet essential source for knowledge. Their xochi23 journal covers everything from jazz noise damage to lesser known visionaries, and is a source for counter cultural information in the true sense. Their previous publications include world on and by Burroughs and Gysin, including W S Burroughs' Unforgettable Characters, for which I wrote the introduction.

Of related interest I am currently deep in Wade Davis' absorbing study of Haitian culture, zombis and voodoo The Serpent and the Rainbow and WSB's Letters 1945-59. Both of which are recommended reading, and a part of some larger engagement.

State of Things 2

2010-06-13T16:53:00.000-07:00

The current / new issue of arts journal Broadsheet features my essay on the band the Tiger Lillies. There's also an interview with me in the current issue of RealTime discussing both this year's Revelation Film Festival and, briefly, my programming of the Sydney Biennale.

For those interested Revelation starts on 8th July in Perth, while the Sydney Biennale film program continues until August 1st.

Exit Through The Windshield

2010-06-10T21:58:00.000-07:00

This weekt I did a ten-minute / twenty-slide presentation as part of the Pechakucha nights at Superdeluxe at Artspace. Based loosely on my chapter on car crash pop songs in Mikita Brottman's Car Crash Culture book - but shredded through my own subsequent thoughts naturally - I waxed lyrical about car crash songs from Red Sovine to The Normal, and especially the Shangri Las, as well as J G Ballard's Crash. For those interested a fascinating 1971 TV appearance by Ballard based on ideas that subsequently found life in his car crash novel can be found here (in my regular FilmInk column I wrote about this a couple of months ago, and I'll probably post a version of that here in the near future).

Space Weather

2010-06-04T19:23:00.000-07:00

We've had lots of extreme weather phenomena in NSW this week, including waterspouts and high winds, as well as exceptionally heavy rain. Now according to ABC online a spiral shaped light / UFO was spotted at around 6:00am over NSW and Queensland. Those interested in such things will recall the spiral light phenomena over Norway last December.

While I am not a huge follower of UFO phenomena, it is always interesting when something like this happens. One thing that immediately occurs to me is Irwin Allen's The Time Tunnel and, of course Doctor Who. It also recalls Ouroboros, given that the phenomena occurred shortly before sunrise today it is interesting that some Jungians see Ouroborus as the pre-dawn state.

Update: As I said, I'm not big on UFOs. and this turns out (as I suspected) to be readily explainable, the whole thing may have been simply the Falcon 9 rocket, the launch times and trajectory all fit, though conspiracy theorists suspect otherwise. Regardless, not just an interesting visual effect but also interesting to see how people responded to the experience of unusual phenomena.

Calenture 2

2010-06-03T05:19:00.000-07:00

Calenture

2010-06-02T18:22:00.000-07:00

I am always interested in the elemental, this sky over Hyde Park a few weeks ago seemed wild enough to be documented.

The Old Men Smiled

2010-06-01T21:55:00.000-07:00

Finally, I am reading Oliver Harris & Ian MacFadyen's Naked Lunch at 50. A collection of essays on WSB's best known book. There are several interesting pieces in this edition, which is proving to be a good read. The entire notion of interzones - such as Tangiers in the '50s - as geographical locations rather than just states of mind seems to have slipped into nostalgia. But reading this book, and re-reading WSB always hints at potentialities yet to be discovered.

For those interested my own piece on Naked Lunch - originally presented as a lecture to mark the anniversary of the infamous book's first publication - should be published soon, following a cursory editing job to correct a couple of errors and illuminate some further information. Full details to be announced soon.

My essay on the concept of flicker and Brion Gysin's Dreamachine was published in the journal of strange phenomena the Fortean Times, a couple of months ago. The piece explores BG's artwork and the theory behind it, drawing out flicker to the practice of scrying and even cave painting, in relation to expanded consciousness. I am hoping at some point to present a collection of these essays in a single volume, we shall see.

State of Things

2010-05-05T16:11:00.000-07:00

I have just programmed the films for Sydney Biennale, for those interested in Harry Smith, Ira Cohen, Nick Zedd, Craig Baldwin, outsider art, etc. There's also two live soundtrack performances one by Lawrence English for Harry Smith's Early Abstractions and one by Noko. A combination of documentaries and underground movies most of which haven't been previously screened.

I've also just finished this year's Revelation Film Festival, which starts in Perth in July.

For H.C

2010-04-22T07:20:00.000-07:00

This footage of the Sun is incredible.

Rosaleen Norton

2009-10-30T15:43:00.000-07:00

Some great footage of Sydney in the 1960s focusing on Kings Cross and Rosaleen Norton, the artist and bohemian commonly known as The Witch of the Cross.

The Legend

2009-10-29T19:03:00.000-07:00

I am meant to be posting more often, invariably other deadlines stymie this. Regardless, here is a lengthy book review of The Legend that was written for, and published in, the Fortean Times.

The salacious and ever prurient British public has always been excited by lascivious tales of sex and decadent celebrity, add in ritual magic, and especially ‘black magic’, and the media hit pay dirt. These stories sell papers and the general public can best enjoy them when they can mask their interests via the moral tongue clicking of suitably outraged columnists.

During his lifetime Aleister Crowley’s name always sold newspapers, the readers scandalized and titillated by the tales they read about “the wickedest man in the world”, despite the fact these stories were invariably sensationalized hearsay and often mere fiction. Of course Crowley also luxuriated in playing up to his public image as the Beast 666 and certainly at times he enjoyed the notoriety.

First published in 1930 by Mandrake Press The Legend was the work of Percy Reginald Stephensen co-founder of the publishing house who in the late 1920s were central in publishing many of Crowley’s works, including Moonchild and The Confessions, amongst others. An enthusiastic Australian ex-pat who also translated Nietzsche’s Der Antichrist and oversaw an edition of the then banned Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Stephensen saw in Crowley a liberating poetry that was analogous to Nietzsche and D H Lawrence’s work. For Stephensen, Crowley’s importance was not necessarily metaphysical but in his writing, his humour, and philosophy, as he wrote in The Legend Crowley was “a dangerously good poet both in his poetry and in his life”.

The Legend was the first serious attempt to challenge the ongoing vilification of the poet, mountaineer, magician, and Thelemite. Drawing attention to Crowley’s work from the an aesthetic and philosophical perspective, and the tabloid press’s rote response to it, Stephensen’s book offers what would could be considered a bastardized version of a deconstructive media analysis, albeit written in a voice that owes more to Edwardian jurisprudence than Post-Modern theory.

Now re-published in full – including, for the first time, Stephenson’s opening philippic against James Douglas, then editor of the Sunday Express – the book and its exhaustive and engrossing introduction by Stephen J King, offers a unique perspective on the contemporaneous response to Crowley’s work.

As editorial advisor of this new edition, published by Australian OTO affiliates Helios Books, Ian Drummond makes clear "The Legend is important to the contemporary reader in a number of respects. The introduction and the central work by Stephenson place the 'legend' in the context of 20th century press campaigns of panic and vilification, and show how easily journalism and the economies of the media not only misunderstand but grossly distort the lives and ideas of those who others recognize as representing the avant-garde of consciousness and culture."

It’s notable that some of the accusations directed at Crowley still resonate. Thus , for example, Raoul Loveday died of enteric fever caught from drinking contaminated spring water according to his wife’s autobiography[1], yet contemporaneous reports in the Sunday Express stated that Loveday “died under such mysterious circumstances”[2]. Similar charges were repeated in Gary Lachman’s piece in FT231:48 where he writes that Loveday died “after supposedly drinking the blood of a sacrificed cat”. Some tabloid stories are still too good to waste.

Similarily Crowley’s sexual treatment of women scandalized the 1920s media, with descriptions of women kept for orgies. His ‘outrageous’[3] sexual acts still have the power to shock, but what seems to be ignored by most commentators is that these women chose to participate in these acts (and may even have enjoyed participating in sex magic rituals).

The Helios Books volume of The Legend also features a number of tabloid articles written by Crowley, which, as Drummond observes, “show his attempts to leverage the tabloid form and his own notoriety to shed a more positive light on his occult activities and Thelema.”

"Contemporary Thelemic groups still face the challenge of overcoming the misinformation generated by the press in the period discussed in The Legend" states Drummond, who notes that while more recent biographies about Crowley present a more reasoned exploration of both his life and Thelema, "the scandalous journalism of the past still has its effects, periodically rehashed in the press and often emerging in strange new forms in contemporary, and often unconsciously 'gnostic', conspiracy theories."

Much of the modern mainstream media still views anything to do with ‘magick’ or ‘the occult’ derisively, often it is merely a topic to be plundered at Halloween or as a tie-in to a book or film. Likewise the Satanic Panic of the eighties was fuelled largely by uninformed journalists who were more than willing to believe in the existence of an international network of Satanists hell bent on overthrowing the God fearing souls of North America through the processes of back-masking on rock albums and introducing (evil) magical themes to children’s cartoons. Most serious was the mainstream media’s hysteria around the non-existent phenomena of Satanic Child Abuse.

Pop histories of Satanism or ‘examinations’ of the Illuminati frequently evoke Crowley’s name despite his lack of connection to either. His name is often a touchstone for conspiracists ever anxious to hypothesize an imaginary lineage from the Bavarian Illuminati through to Skull and Bones via the (pseudo) arcane rituals of the global elite that transpire annually in the Northern Californian woodlands. Crowley was responsible for many headlines and is still too often associated with ‘evil’ rather than the liberation of the human spirit under the maxim “do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law” and “Love is the law, love under will”.

[1] Betty May, Tiger Woman, cited in The Legend, p.141.

[2] Sunday Express, March 4^th 1923, cited in The Legend, p.145.

[3] Supposedly sexually outrageous acts are of course both culturally specific and culturally constructed, clearly some things that upset uptight 1920s Britain – such as homosexual relationships or orgies - will not upset most people in 2007.

Australia's Dead Centre: Wake In Fright

2009-09-14T05:03:00.000-07:00

this was first published in FilmInk last year.

In Australia the sun tortured geography and appearance of seasonless non-changing weather create a desolation that can tug on the most fearless of souls. Suffering and murder are written large in the continent’s last two centuries, and both heroes and villains emerge from morally ambiguous figures such as the bushranger. Against this backdrop the gothic seems a natural choice for Australian literature, art, and, of course, cinema.

The first Australian director to be declared a cinematic auteur was Charles Chauvel, a filmmaker who sought to tell ‘real’ Australian stories located in an authentic Australia. His cinematic masterpiece was Jedda, the first Australian colour feature and the first to focus primarily on the lives of indigenous Australians and foreground an indigenous relationship. But, even in this 1955 feature, the outback is presented as slowly, almost invariably, bending to the will of white Australians, whose stiff upper lips and tenacity enables them to herd cattle in this most inhospitable environment.

In Jedda the central theme is the internal conflict of the Aboriginal girl who gives the film its name as she is torn between the white world of her adoptive parents who have educated her and the world of her blood. The film reflects the period it was produced in and, despite its acknowledgement of indigenous culture and beliefs, the dominant attitude presented is of the allegedly civilizing aspects of white culture.

Sixteen years after the release of Jedda another film was produced that also explored life in outback Australia, but found a very different world from that presented by Chauvel. Instead of basing its story within the classic narrative of the ‘process of civilization’ it presented a very different story rooted firmly in the Australian gothic, the film was Wake In Fright, and was based on the 1961 hardboiled novel by Kenneth Cook.

Wake In Fright was Cook’s second novel, and took its name from the ancient curse "May you dream of the Devil, and wake in fright". The book was successful internationally and was even taught in schools. The story is deceptively simple, and tells of John Grant a bonded teacher stationed for two gruelling years in the outback. Grant is returning home to Sydney for the Christmas holiday before the start of his second year trapped in the middle of nowhere. On his journey he must spend a night in Bundanyabba where he loses all of his money playing Two-up. Trapped in the small town he is invited to stay with the alcoholic Doc Tydon, here Grant engages in excessive alcohol consumption, goes hunting, and has a brief encounter with Tydon, before trying – and failing to hitch to Sydney. Forced into utter alcohol induced despair Grant realises there may only be one escape from existence in the small town.

The first talk of adapting the novel for cinema occurred in 1963, with Dirk Bogarde and Joseph Losey but nothing emerged from this, author Morris West then brought the rights, but again nothing happened. Finally the rights were acquired by NLT and Group W who produced the film, casting it with a combination of both new actors and familiar faces.

The cast included Gary Bond a comparatively unknown screen actor who was better known for his theatrical work, including an acclaimed stint in Joseph And His Technicolor Dreamcoat. On the film’s release Grant was compared by several commentators to Peter O’Toole. The role of Doc Tydon was played by Donald Pleasance, whose performance maintains an air of understated, world weary menace throughout the film.

Wake In Fright opens with a slow, majestic shot of the outback, turning a full 360 degrees through desert shrub and flatness as far as the eye can see. The shot turns across a railway track, allowing the viewer to witness two structures facing each other across the lines and the wooden platform that forms the remote Tiboonda Station: the school and the hotel. The music is haunting and pensive, with a baleful undertow, as the action moves into the school. Here the teacher, John Grant, sits facing the students, there is the relentless ticking of the clock, until finally it is time for the Christmas holiday to start. Locking the school Grant, a self-described “bonded slave of the education department”, crosses the railway line from the school to the hotel, checks out and heads to the rickety platform to await his train to Sydney and civilization.

The train, filled with men drinking and singing, takes Grant to Bundanyabba. On the train an atmosphere of drunken camaraderie dominates, and as soon Grant steps onto the carriage he is offered a beer. From Bundanyabba – or just the Yabba to locals – he plans to catch the plane to Sydney. But in the Yabba, the “friendliest place in Australia” he is told by locals, everything goes wrong. In the crammed bar the local police office Jock Crawford buys him a beer, and soon the two are drinking and heading to a game of Two-up. By the end of the night Grant has gambled away his pay and savings, and awakes destitute and hung-over in the Yabba.

Taken in by local drinker and one-time-doctor Doc Tydon Grant is forced to experience life with nothing but the continual flow of alcohol, bush meat, and bennies, offered to him in lieu of healthy sustenance, and drunken male company with all of its increasingly dangerous vagaries, culminating in a night of drunken insanity. What follows is a harrowing journey into alcohol fuelled psychological and physical degradation driven by the nihilism of beer and violence, as the film’s tagline read: “have a drink, mate? Have a fight, mate? Have a taste of dust and sweat, mate? There’s nothing else out here.” One thing is certain, Wake In Fright’s depiction of the outback is about as opposed to Jedda as it is possible to be.

Kenneth Cook’s novel describes the nation’s geographical interior as the “silent centre…the Dead Heart”, this could almost be a description of the men who inhabit the silent landscape. The film emphasises this distinction between the lush green coasts and burned red centre. It depicts an Australia divided between the cosmopolitan cities on the coast and the raw communities of the interior, a division that is marked not just by geography but also by the inhabitants’ relationship to the landscape. Grant is middle class, an educated schoolteacher, and longs for the beach, surf and his girlfriend, all of which are seen in flashback. In sharp contrast those who live in the Yabba are working class and are proud of their town, they do not question their lives spent sweating and working in the outback, drowning out the relentless heat, eternal sun and any existential angst with the dull roar of endless drinking. Stranded, John Grant enters this nihilistic world and is unable to escape.

In America the small town is imagined as the home of American values, it represents the certainties associated with mom and apple pie, it is the world of films as diverse as Frank Capra’s It’s A Wonderful Life (1946) and Richard Donner’s The Goonies (1985), even when the small town appears in horror films the monstrous primarily comes from outside rather than within. In sharp contrast the Australian small town is frequently a source of gothic darkness. A difference of meaning resulting from the differing histories of colonialism between the Pilgrim Fathers and their search for a new Eden in America and the First Fleet and their human cargo of malnourished convicts and undesirables exiled to the antipodes.

Like those convicts stranded in an inhospitable landscape Grant is trapped, as crime novelist Peter Temple observes in his introduction to Cook’s book. Even with his job he is compelled to work as a bonded teacher for the education department in the middle of nowhere. In the Yabba without money he is utterly marooned. The parallel to the convict history of the continent is clearly alluded to in the film’s original promotional materials that state, “The Outback cages him, strips him bare, and tortures him”.

Wake In Fright falls into the similar Australian gothic as films such as Peter Weir’s Picnic At Hanging Rock (1975) and The Cars That Ate Paris (1974), and John Hillcoat’s The Proposition (2005) stories that emphasise a swirling darkness that emerges through the interaction between the protagonists and the eternal untamed landscape, as Ray Winstone’s Captain Stanley asks of the heat in The Proposition “what fresh hell is this?” The hell so clearly shown in Wake In Fright is the endless oppressive heat, the endless buzz of flies, the endless drunken stink of pure male company and the endless meals of undercooked kangaroo flesh and relentlessly drunken tinnies. It is the hell of boredom and time spent rotting like the rusted cars that litter the land around Doc’s shack.

Directed by Canadian filmmaker Ted Kotcheff – who would go on to make the inaugural Rambo movie First Blood (1982) and currently works on Law And Order: Special Victims Unit - the film maintains an outsider’s perspective not just as a result of its narrative but also because of the director’s nationality. This outsider’s perspective is further emphasised by the script, which was written by Jamaican born British writer Evan Jones, and the cinematography, which was undertaken by British director of photography Brian West. Exactly how alien Australia felt was summed up by Brian West, as Anthony Buckley recounts, when West arrived in the country at the start of the shoot he climbed from the plane in bright sunlight simply stated “this country is one stop overexposed”.

The filmmakers appear to have gazed into Australian outback culture, and the rituals associated with its male inhabitants, and recreated them with an absolute attention to detail; the one-minute pause for remembrance in the pub where all activity is momentarily suspended before exploding into life again as the silence ends, the hose splashing beer into rows of schooners stationed along the bar, and the details of the gamblers’ faces as they bet their hard earned wages on the random flicking of a pair of coins.

This unflinching gaze into outback-Australian culture reaches its peak during Wake In Fright’s infamous central sequence in which Grant, Doc Tydon and two other men, Joe and Dick, drunkenly drive into the bush in order to kill kangaroos. The ensuing violence is shocking, as the animals are meticulously hunted and slain. Grant compelled by drunken cock-swaggering bravado, attempts to ‘box’ and kill a wounded bloodied kangaroo, spinning the animal in the darkness lit only by a single spotlight.

The horror of the hunt is made all the more visceral because the footage is authentic, with film of a hunt undertaken by licensed hunters used. The emphasis is on documentary, on presenting the audience with the authentic outback hunting experience. Lit using only the glaring spotlights on the front of the car the scene takes on a nightmarish feel as the whoops and laughter of the men is punctuated with the snap of gunshots in the darkness with only the bright circle of light momentarily catching the stunned animals as they stare with blank stupidity into their oncoming doom. The spotlit action, swirling camera, and hum of the soundtrack add to the nightmarish drunken hunt, a nightmare punctuated by breaking glass, drunken abuse, brawling, and cheering.

The swagger of the drunken men, the dog stationed on the backseat of the car, the bludgeoning mateship rituals of monotonously swigging beer, all are unmercifully presented for the camera. This is an Australian outback far removed from the tourist friendly, good-natured lovable larrikin nature of the eponymous Crocodile Dundee.

With Broken Hill - where Cook lived and worked during the period he wrote Wake In Fright - doubling as the Yabba the film captures the sweltering heat of the tin roofed buildings, the relentless buzz of flies, and the stink of rotting sweat drying on the drunken / hung-over / drunken men’s dirty clothes. With shooting starting in January 1970 the average temperature on a working day was 43C and on occasion reached 46C, the heat is palpable to the viewer. The film’s editor – and the man eventually responsible for saving it from destruction – Anthony Buckley describes the creative process behind Wake In Fright as a collaborative and supportive experience.

With United Artists acquiring the distribution rights the film was premiered at Cannes in 1971, where Ted Kotcheff was nominated for the Golden Palm, although in the final eventuality the prestigious award went – coincidentally considering his early interest in Cook’s novel - to Joseph Losey’s The Go-Between (1971).

The French took to the film, which was released under the title reductively simplistic title Outback in July 1971. In Paris Outback reportedly screened for five months (some accounts put the run as long as ten months for a cinema on the Boulevard Sant Michel). The re-titled film also saw a British release in October 1971, where it was moderately successful, and an America release the following February.

On its domestic release in 1971 Wake In Fright was praised critically but failed at the local box office. In Sydney the film played for ten weeks at the Embassy, but was unpopular for the first few weeks until word of mouth spread, unfortunately such support came too late and the film was taken off at the end of its run. The lack of interest in the film among some audiences made an evidentially infuriated Peter Timms write in Lumiere “they baulk…at anything labelled ‘Australian film’”. Of course, the local audience may not have been ready for such an unremittingly nihilistic, and perhaps honest, portrait of outback Australia.

In the ensuing decades Wake In Fright slowly vanished from sight, although it had ardent fans. The film has a clear influence on subsequent Australian cinema, not least in its depiction of the brutal masculinity of the small town and the Australian gothic. Wake In Fright was the first of the Australian films of the seventies that presented the world with a different, brutal side of the continent. By the time it was re-evaluated, alongside other Australian classics from the same period, in the ‘90s – and considered to be a classic - the film was believed to be lost. Television rights had expired and most prints had vanished, with only a scratched print in Dublin, Eire, known to exist.

According to some reports Wake In Fright had never been released on video, and this explained why the film was so hard to see. However, according to the website www.pre-cert.co.uk a VHS video of Outback was released by Intervision in March 1983 with the tagline “From nowhere he came, through hell he went”. This may help explain the number of people who have actually seen the film despite it being considered lost.

In the mid ‘90s Wake In Fright’s editor Anthony Buckley started searching for the negative of the film. Originally it was believed the negative would be readily available in London, although this proved to not be the case, and after extensive searching the parts were eventually located a decade later in 2004. Eventually 260 reels of the film, including tri-separations, negatives, and soundtrack, were found in Pittsburgh, USA, in a container marked “for destruction”. The cultural importance of the find was such that the parts were shipped back to Australia within a month for restoration.

This restoration process has taken more than a year, with the National Film and Sound Archive using digital technology to preserve the film. According to Anthony Buckley the new digitally restored print will offer the viewer the chance to see the film with a new clarity of vision, with the colour improved from the slight muted tones on the original version of the print and the night scenes brought to vivid new life.

Wake In Fright remains a unique vision of the Australian outback, a world it defines as caged in alcohol, violence and heat. With the restored print set for cinematic screenings in late 2008 / early 2009 and the long hoped for DVD release in sight then an entire new audience can see this long lost classic of the Australian screen. Whether it will set tourism back twenty years, as Peter Temple half-jokes in his introduction to the novel, remains to be seen.

Who Let The Mice In?

2009-08-16T03:16:00.000-07:00

A variant of this appeared in the Fortean Times in 2007.

“THE GREAT GOD PAN IS NOT DEAD BUT ALIVE AND WELL AND LIVING IN THE LITTLE HILLS OF MOROCCO” – Brion Gysin

The Master Musicians of Joujouka are steeped in mythology. Introduced to the west through the artist, writer and beat affiliate Brion Gysin, who saw in their music an accompaniment to his ethereal paintings and the spinning hypnogogic magic of the Dreammachine. The music adding to the multi-coloured flashes that played across his eyelids as he sat facing the spinning Dreammachine - the only piece of art you look at with your eyes closed - the patterns transforming into shapes, the music taking him across oceans, to other worlds and transformed realities.

Lost Rolling Stone Brian Jones famously recorded the Master Musicians and in the ensuing years musicians ranging from Ornette Coleman to Bill Lazwell to the Islamic Diggers have collaborated with the villagers.

The Master Musicians’ music echoes back through generations, intimately linked to the village community, culture, and their saint the Sufi mystic Sidi Achmed Scheich, who one-thousand years ago heard in their music and circular breathing techniques melodies that could cure illness. As Master Musician Abdelslam Eertoubi states, "Joujouka has the sanctuaries of four saints. If you have a bad back or sore bones you visit Sidi Ghari's tomb and lie on the stonewall. This will help. My family are descended from Sidi Achmed Schiech who founded the village a long time ago. This is his land. He is the Cultivator with Lions and Healer of Crazy Minds. He used a lion to plough the land. People still come if they are disturbed in the mind and we play music of Sidi Achmed Schiech for them. They sit in his sanctuary and it helps them.”

Their genealogy has roots in a combination of mysticism, Sufism, Islam, mythology and local geography. The group play mountain music and it is informed by the magical nature of the landscape; “Joujouka has Boujeloud, the goat man. His cave outside the village is a special place.”

The music is based in the story of the young shepherd Attar who would let his flock feast on the lush greenery by a cave. To enter this cave was taboo, but Attar would enter its depths and sleep. While sleeping he was entranced by beautiful music, hauntingly played across the threshold between sleep and wakefulness, between the sacred and profane worlds. As Attar awoke he saw Boujeloud – the Father of Skins - playing a pipe. Echoing descriptions of Pan, a situation further confused by Gysin’s writing on Joujouka, Boujeloud appeared as a satyr; part man and part goat. Boujeloud taught Attar the secrets of the flute under two conditions, he would never share the music, and he would provide a bride from the village of Joujouka. Attar broke his oath, and played the music for the villagers. The enraged Boujeloud swore to take a bride, but the villagers tricked him by presenting him with Aisha Kandisha, the mad woman. But her insane dancing tired Boujeloud, who, sated but exhausted left the village alone. In his wake the harvest was successful. Each year he would come to Joujouka when he heard the music, and each year he would return to his cave without a bride but leaving a rich harvest in his wake. Eventually Boujeloud vanished, but the ritual continued, with Attar dressed in sheep skins re-enacting Boujeloud’s dance and with local boys taking the role of Aisha.

This mythology informs the ritual, as the group play the music taught to Attar, Boujeloud is manifest through a chosen performer while other boys dress as women. The music reaches a trance-like plateau before finally blasting into an ecstatic revelry, celebrating and banishing Boujeloud for another year. In his wake he leaves fecundity and a blessed harvest.

While the music is passed from generation to generation, each player adds to the music. This is a living ceremony, which develops over time, "We have all played music since we were boys” says percussionist Ahmed El Attar, “each time we play together it is different, even if it is the same music. Joujouka music is healing music. It is of the moment.” The music is passed through families and the wider community, rhiata player Abdellah Ziyat states, "It is not so much that we teach younger musicians. If you grow up in Joujouka then this music will be in your blood. You hear it at weddings and festivals. If there are musicians in your family you will hear it at home. Young people learn the rhythms, some might play the flute. If they want to become musicians then they must play with the group and learn little by little. We can all play drums or flutes but we do what we are best at. We are always teaching someone, we talk about music and argue about the correct way to play. A young musician must go step by step but the Masters, if we take him as one of us we will teach him." Music and dance informs all of daily life as Mohamed El Attar observes his sons started playing flute while minding sheep, they danced to the music and now dance as Boujeloud.

While the Master Musicians have released - or been featured on – numerous recordings the complete rites of Boujeloud have not been released. Now Sub Rosa have issued a CD featuring a series of recordings of Boujeloud from the 1990s. Although the music is part of the spiritual and cultural life of Joujouka its effects stretch beyond North Africa, Ahmed El Attar: "If you dance to Boujeloud, if you stamp his rhythm it will bring you good health. Morocco, London, America it is the same. People have come to Joujouka and they could not have babies, and after listening to Boujeloud they later had children. People from all over Morocco have traditionally come to Joujouka. They like to see it, they like to be in the country of Sidi Achmed Schiech. It is good for them.”

The first notes of the Joujouka pipes echoing into the hills, from his cave Boujeloud returns to dance and bless the community once more.

Thanks to Frank Rynne for putting my questions to the Master Musicians.

The Master Musicians of Joujouka, Boujeloud, Sub Rosa, 2006.

European tour details www.joujouka.net

Pulp Biographical

2009-08-13T18:28:00.000-07:00

I was writing for an Australian magazine a couple of years ago, ostensibly producing potted bios of slightly off beat and / or scandalous celebs. The piece below was re-written to make it more tabloid friendly (and it's already pretty simplistic), but a suitably entertaining celebration of the great musician and composer.

Serge Gainsbourg once described the elements that gave meaning to his life as “an equilateral triangle of Gitanes, alcoholism and girls.” His music, writings, films; indeed his very existence was fuelled by and dedicated to these essential passions. The son of Russian emigrant Jews, Lucien Ginsburg, was born in Paris1928. he had a natural interest in music even before his musician father started his piano lessons when he was 4.

With the outbreak of the Second World War the Ginsburg family, who maintained a broadly secular lifestyle, found themselves at risk. Lucien’s father moved to the South of France, sending for his family shortly after. While they were able to survive the war, it was not before the young Ginsburg was forced to wear the yellow star demarking him as a Jew.

Returning to the French capital after the war, Ginsburg, a natural artist, left school without passing his exams, intending to study art. Loosing his virginity to a Parisian prostitute in 1945, the young artist then commenced a relationship with Elisabeth Levitsky, secretary to George Hugnet, a close friend of surrealist artist Salvador Dali.

The young couple borrowed the keys to Dali’s apartment and had sex amongst the works of surrealist art. Ginsburg was impressed by the surrealist’s interior décor, which consisted of black rooms with careful lighting illuminating various works. When he became famous Gainsbourg would decorate his house in a similar fashion.

Already dedicated to smoking 60 unfiltered Gitanes per day, and, following a year in the army, an enthusiastic drinker, Ginsburg began playing piano at various Left Bank clubs, performing in order to support his unsuccessful career as an artist.

In 1954 Lucien Ginsburg registered his first authored songs, and in the process changed his name to Serge Gainsbourg. He also announced he would give up painting – something he was merely only good at – and dedicate himself to music, something in which his genus could flourish. He began to write and record numerous songs that mixed cool jazz, pop, and even traces of exotica.

In 1959 Gainsbourg also began performing in films, commonly being typecast as the villain or outcast. By the end of his life he would appear in more than 40 movies.

In 1965 Gainsbourg penned the winning Eurovision Song Contest entry for Luxemburg, writing a classic pop song – Poupee De Cire, Poupee De Son - performed by16-year old France Gall. The teen pop star was more than happy to sing Serge’s songs, until somebody told the slightly too innocent girl that her Serge penned hit song Les Sucettes (Lollipops), nominally about sucking on lollipops until the anis flows down her throat, was a metaphor for sucking on something else. She was horrified. Gainsbourg’s reputation as song writer, composer, and poetic libertine was assured, and his songs would be known for their inventive lyrical prowess that would combine the interests of classical decedent French poetry, surrealism, popular culture, metaphor, and, most obviously sex.

Considered by some to be unattractive, Gainsbourg declared that “Ugliness is superior to beauty because it lasts longer”, and vowed only to bed the most beautiful women in the world. No casual boast, Gainsbourg began a relationship with the legendary actress Brigitte Bardot in 1967.

The two recorded numerous songs together including a homage to the outlaw couple Bonnie and Clyde, as well as the songs Initials B.B and Intoxicated Man. But their most infamous recording was Je T’Aime, Moi Non Plus, a song deemed to be so steamy by Bardot that it went unreleased for two decades. Their relationship didn’t last.

Then, in 1968, Serge appeared in the film Slogan opposite young British actress Jane Birkin, twenty years his junior. After initially disliking each other the couple soon fell in love, and remained together for the next 12 years.

1969 The Erotic Year.

Their relationship in full swing, the couple recorded an album of classic Gainsbourg songs that combined his unique mixture of jazz and slightly twisted pop, all wrapped around lyrics that merged French and English into a poetic affirmation of love, sex and lust. The songs included classics such as ‘69 Annee Erotique and Manon. The couple also recorded a new version of Je T’Aime, Moi Non Plus, which was promptly released to international acclaim and scandal.

For those who haven’t heard the song, it mixes a hymn like organ sound with throbbing bass, and Serge’s deep whispered lyrics that – even to non-French speakers – sound clearly sexual and possibly crude. In case this wasn’t enough, Jane Birkin sings her part of the song sounding like a young girl, at least, until she starts having an orgasm, all moans and little gasps. So convincing were these noises (at least to the general public in the ‘70s) the song was long rumoured to feature a real orgasm on it.

The uptight BBC banned the song, the Vatican had it banned in Italy and the head of the record label was excommunicated, it was banned in Spain and even liberal Sweden. Such an outcry guaranteed its success, and the song has subsequently entered the realms of a musical and erotic classic. The mystique of the song was added to by its lyrics that at least hint at anal sex.

From Sex to Swastikas.

As the seventies began Serge produced his first concept album Historie De Melody Nelson. Focusing on a man who, while driving his Rolls Royce, knocks the 15-year old Melody Nelson off her bike and is immediately seduced by the vision of her white underwear. The album tells the story of the relationship between the older man and teenage girl. In the beautifully twisted pop of Melody Nelson Gainsbourg created an entirely new pop mythology.

With his career progressing well Serge was floored by a heart attack in 1973, but this didn’t top him from smoking his beloved cigarettes. Instead, he continued to record, producing the scatology themed album Vu De L’ Exterieur (1973), which featured songs such as Des Vents Des Pets Des Poums (Wind, Farts, Booms) and numerous other shit themed songs. Seven years later he wrote a novella Evguenie Sokolov about a man who could not stop farting and made his fortune from his bowels.

He also began making plans to write and direct his first film Je T’Aime, Moi Non Plus.

Released in 1976 the film featured Jane Birkin as Johnny, an androgynous woman who begins a relationship with a gay dustman played by Warhol movie star Joe Dellesandro. Driven by rampant desire the couple keep attempting anal sex, but are forced to break it off when Jane starts screaming, eventually the couple are able to reach their climax while making love in the back of his garbage truck, naturally the scene is accompanied by the strands of the hit song that gave the film it’s title.

Now regarded is a cult classic, on its release the film was condemned by typically outraged critics. This failed to halt Serge’s directing career, and he directed numerous TV commercials and three more films.

Coming to terms with his own experience growing-up in occupied France Gainsbourg recorded a concept album Rock Around The Bunker in 1975. The album features songs such as Nazi Rock, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes and Yellow Star.

Pure Outrage

Always on the look out for new music, and already a fan of exotica and world music, in 1978 Gainsbourg travelled to Jamaica to record a reggae album with Sly and Robbie and vocalists The I Three. The all star reggae musicians weren’t too sure about the eccentric Frenchman, until they found out he had been behind the song Je T’Aime, Moi Non Plus, which they all knew and loved. The ensuing album Aux Armes Et Caetera was a massive hit, and its use of La Marseillaise – the French national anthem - outraged the French extreme right and death threats followed. In response to the extreme right, and always one to enjoy his wealth, Gainsbourg brought the original manuscript of La Marseillaise.

In 1980 Jane Birkin and Gainsbourg split up, while he was heartbroken the couple maintained a close friendship for the rest of his life. Gainsbourg’s increasing alcoholism led to his developing a new persona Gainsbarre, as he named his drunken alter ego. Appearing on a television talk show in 1984 he set fire to a 500-franc note to moan about excessive taxation, the appearance caused outrage in socialist France. That same year he appeared on TV alongside Whitney Houston, drunkenly slurring his desire “to fuck you”, to which Houston looked first puzzled, then screamed in outrage.

Also in 1984 Gainsbourg wrote a song for his 13-year old daughter Charlotte, on which the two performed together. Entitled with typical aplomb Lemon Incest, the song was a typical Gainsbourg statement of shock, outrage, and humour, but some in the media believed he had gone too far. This probably wasn’t helped by father and daughter appearing in a video together singing the song in a gigantic bed.

As the eighties wore on, Gainsbourg continued to write albums and songs, and produced work for Vanessa Paradis and his new lover Bambou. By the end of the decade, however, a lifetime of non-stop drinking was showing serious effects, and in 1989 he had two-thirds of his liver removed. Unbelievably this did not slow him down, and he went on to direct his final film, Stan The Flasher in 1990, before finally succumbing to a heart attack in 1991, while alone at home.

He was 62 years old, he had changed popular music, re-invigorated European culture, and periodically scandalised a nation. He was a genius and legend. As was befitting he was buried at Paris’s famous Montparnasse cemetery, where his grave is still surrounded by flowers placed by legions of fans.

Metro

2009-07-24T02:22:00.000-07:00

The current issue of Metro features my piece on Australian bushranger movies The Proposition and Mad Dog Morgan. Two great 'period thrillers' (otherwise cursed with the inappropriate non-generic term Australian westerns) which paint a bloody portrait of 19th century colonial Australia.

Cinematic Folds

2009-03-01T22:04:00.000-08:00

My essay on Coum Transmission's legendary film After Cease To Exist appears in the book Cinematic Folds: the Furling & Unfurling of Images edited by Firoza Elavia. It can be purchased online here.

Jeff Keen

2009-02-17T03:22:00.000-08:00

At long last the great underground filmmaker Jeff Keen is having his work issued on DVD (and Blu Ray) by the British Film Institute. I contributed to the accompanying booklet alongside Jeff Keen and others. The 4 DVD set contains most (maybe all?) of Keen's movies and is recommended viewing.

Sonic Cut-Ups

2009-01-23T18:35:00.000-08:00

My piece on the experimental recordings of William Burroughs (often assisted by Ian Sommerville, Brion Gysin), albums of his readings, and his collaborations with various musicians is in the new issue of The Wire, out now I believe.

Red and Black

2008-11-25T01:02:00.000-08:00

I have just received a box of copies of the new expanded edition of Naked Lens: Beat Cinema. Published by Soft Skull, it looks rather nice, designed by my friend Elinor who also did the new edition of Deathtripping published last year. Coincidentally, I have also been working on a new DVD release of Decoder.

Scapegoat

2008-10-26T17:04:00.000-07:00

I always find it absurd how often pornography is demonized. This article from the Guardian online shows where scapegoating may lead thanks to new legislation in Britain. What I find most disturbing is that people seem increasingly willing to give up their freedoms in order to be 'protected' by paternalistic leaders.

Crispin Glover Interview

2008-10-01T17:04:00.000-07:00

I recently interviewed actor and director Crispin Glover for the Australian magazine Film Ink, check it out.

Wake In Fright

2008-09-29T17:46:00.000-07:00

My piece on this 'lost' film is in the current issue of Film Ink.

September

2008-08-28T15:52:00.000-07:00

For the first time in more than a year I will be presenting a night at the Mu-Meson Archives in Sydney, screening the documentary Words of Advice: William Burroughs on the Road (directed by Lars Movin & Steen Moller) on September 18th at 7:30. This will be the first time the film has screened in Sydney. I will also be presenting a related lecture. As ever with the Mu-Mesons they provide supper with the event.

For those unfamiliar with the archives check out their website because, as is obvious from even a cursory view of their screenings, these people are a genuine resource for obscure, neglected, underground, and counter cultural film screenings.

Closing Options

2008-08-22T22:26:00.000-07:00

When it was published a few years back I enjoyed the book American Hardcore (Feral House). For those that don't know the work it compiles interviews with musicians and so on, offering an insight into the American hardcore music 'scene' from 1979 - 1986. Feral House also published a quasi-companion volume on the grindcore scene and (perhaps best of all) a book on the Germs. I have reviewed at least one of these books for Headpress.

Anyway, American Hardcore inspired a film of the same name which I finally saw this week, somewhat unbelievably locating it in my local mainstream rental outlet. The film uses numerous interviews and some great archive footage (especially of Bad Brains, Flipper and Black Flag) to tell the same story as the book.

While my youth wasn't spent around much hardcore I was a fan some bands (most obviously Black Flag who really created the hardcore style and then moved on from that, moving from scorched earth punk to almost jazz derived guitar damage. But what appealed most about Black Flag was they appeared to negate the clearly delineated politics that informed so many hardcore and punk bands lyrics, likewise they wrapped their records in sleeves with Raymond Pettibone's brilliant black and white images that avoided most of the trappings of the genre, I digress). But the film is remarkable in the way it catches the energy and excitement of the period alongside the d-i-y aesthetic that genuinely transformed the way independent music was created, distributed, and supported.

There is, watching this film, a real sense that a small creative space opened for a short time and that so much was possible, and, I can't help but wonder if such a space will ever exist again. While some may point to social networking sites as zones in which people can share information and promote their bands I feel such optimism is misguided. The possibilities seem somehow limited.

Interzones

2007-03-03T22:47:00.000-08:00

The interface between economic worlds, between developed and developing, is evident throughout Hong Kong. This photo, while perhaps aesthetically average, catches this divide. The first floors are shops specialising in hi-tech entertainment gadgets and the kind of sub-Hello Kitty toys that are so popular, while the top floors are cheap hotels and rooms. There are many Indian eateries in the building, offering food to the residents and passing tourists, and at the entrance visitors are swamped by Indians handing out brightly coloured credit card sized discount vouchers and promising their cafe's food is the best that can be had.

Walking through the stores it became clear that while the economic miracle was evident at the front of the building, the stores at the rear were in many cases empty shells, still waiting to be leased, The bright lights, glass, mirrors and aluminium shutters, combined with the thin web of walkways in the mall gave an effect not unlike a crazy house at a fun fair.