Here’s a bizarre cinematic relic that we can barely believe exists. Way back in 1971, at the International Film Festival in Belgrade, a number of the attendees were given the assignment of shooting a 3 minute magazine of film that would be edited together with the footage from the other participants, a sort of cinematic Exquisite Corpse.
This was not a new idea. It has been done before. But what makes this so special is the level of talent involved here. Just check the list of directors who worked on this film:
Frederick Wiseman
Paul Morrissey
Dusan Makavejev
Buck Henry
Milos Forman
Tinto Brass
and a couple of local Yugoslav lads:
Mladomir ‘Purisa’ Djordjevic and Karpo Acimovic-Godina.
The location (a tiny attic bedroom) was the same for each, some cooperative actors were on hand, and each director was required to include the line “I miss Sonia Henie.” Henie, if you don’t know, was a Norwegian figure skating champion turned movie star turned minor camp icon.
The final product is about as discontinuous as could be expected, but as a time capsule of the aesthetic, intellectual, and humor currents that flowed through international (male) Euro-American film culture at the time, it tells us a lot.
The video transfer quality is pretty poor here. Though it improves a lot in part two.
Hey, nobody said this art film stuff was going to be easy.
René Laloux’s wild psychedelic masterpiece FANTASTIC PLANET is one of the most popular films we’ve ever shown at the AFS Cinema. The look and feel complement the old-school sci-fi paperback moral of Roland Topor’s story perfectly. American audiences are largely unfamiliar with the rest of Laloux’s filmography as it was not widely distributed in the States (and remains hard to find), even as other stoned French sci-fi and fantasy art garnered a strong following here by way of Heavy Metal magazine, the domestic counterpart of the French publication Métal Hurlant.
Laloux would mine the Métal Hurlant aesthetic by collaborating with two of the magazine’s core artists on his next several projects. The first was the 1982 space adventure TIME MASTERS, featuring art by the internationally-renowned Moebius – who also collaborated with Jodorowsky on his Incal graphic novels and made an indelible impression on a young Japanese animator named Hayao Miyazaki. For the rest of the 80s, Laloux formed a creative partnership with Philippe Caza, and together they produced the 1988 feature GANDAHAR, and two shorts, HOW WANG FO WAS SAVED (1987) and the surreal LA PRISONNIERE (1988), which we present here for your enjoyment.
If you were one of the statistically rare people who owned a television in 1949, and you lived within range of the broadcasting tower of the Los Angeles TV station KTLA, you might just have tuned in one night and witnessed a remarkable sight – and sound. That was the date of the first episode of KORLA PANDIT’S ADVENTURES IN MUSIC. The show became a major hit for KTLA and audiences tuned in regularly to enjoy the hypnotic organ sounds – and equally mesmerizing eyes – of the man who, as the story propagated by KTLA went, was an immigrant from India, son of a high-caste government official and a French opera diva.
After years of success in Los Angeles, Pandit and his family moved to San Francisco, where he was also a hit with Bay Area audiences. He began to add mystical readings to his musical programs and, as the late ’50s zeitgeist began to pick up more Eastern Spirituality, he added more of it to the mix.
It’s already a fascinating story, but that’s just the beginning. The man who called himself Korla Pandit was actually a black man named John Roland Redd, who came to California from Missouri to seek better career opportunities in the less segregated West. Soon he found that even in sunny California his racial identity was an impediment, so he at first changed his performing name to Joan Rolando, in hopes that he might find more acceptance as a Mexican-American. This opened a few more doors for him, but his next transformation – into the exotic Korla Pandit – changed everything. He was still the same person, with the same musical virtuosity, but now he was able to gain a much greater foothold with white audiences and entertainment gate-keepers.
For many years after his television fame ended he played club engagements and turned out self-pressed records which he signed in the tens of thousands for adoring fans. Many years later he was rediscovered as an exotica music icon and had a last blush of fame, even appearing in Tim Burton’s film ED WOOD, before his death in 1998 at age 78.
Those original live TV shows were never videotaped, but there are some kinescopes and transcriptions of some of these performances. We think you’ll agree that these are unique and fascinating – somewhat narcotizing – artifacts of broadcast history.
There is a fine documentary from 2015 called KORLA about the man and his music that is well worth your time. It is currently streaming on Fandor. Watch the trailer here.
Last month we hosted a member-exclusive Zoom discussion with Professor Caroline Frick of the University of Texas and the invaluable Texas Archive of the Moving Image (TAMI) on the subject of the precode film THREE ON A MATCH. The following discussion covers a good deal of the history of Hollywood’s self-censoring production code, and the films made before it was strictly enforced.
We should warn you that the discussion gets into the particulars of the plot of THREE ON A MATCH. It is guaranteed to spoil the film for you if you haven’t seen it. Fortunately, as of this writing, the film can be seen on the Criterion Channel, which has a special sign-up deal for AFS Members.
Special thanks to Dr. Frick and all the AFS members who participated in the conversation. Be sure to join us for our next AFS Discussion Club on October 27th, which will focus on the 1971 art-horror classic DAUGHTERS OF DARKNESS (which happens to include a few nods to Pre-Code film and fashion). Sign up here >>
You can listen to the podcast below or stream it via your preferred podcast host.
In the run-up to the greatest holiday of the year, Halloween, we are typically packing the AFS Cinema with enthusiastic audiences for obtuse, oddly disquieting Art-Horror films.
This year the world itself is providing the obtuseness and odd disquiet, so we have compiled a list of Art-Horror films that you might enjoy at home. Many of these are available to watch on the various streaming services, some of the more obscure ones have been uploaded on popular video sharing sites by fans. All are highly recommended for the adventurous explorer of cinematic frontiers.
A tip for using Letterboxd lists: Click on the little “Read notes” button to the right of the List name so you can see our annotations specifying which streaming services are carrying each film.
There’s a really special group here in Austin that is helping to preserve Texas’ moving image history every day. It’s called TAMI – the Texas Archive Of The Moving Image. This October they are doing their latest Round-Up. This is a mass digitization collection in which people are encouraged to send in Texas-related home movies as well as – this strikes our fancy with a resounding gong – local television programs that you or your parents or grandparents may have taped back in the day. Those DESIGNING WOMEN episodes that Grandma (or Grandpa) taped might be full of news bulletins or TV commercials that are now historic in their importance. TAMI is accepting film, camcorder tapes, VHS tapes, you name it.
You can find out all about how to participate – it’s a mail-in event this year for obvious reasons – here. And while we’ve got you, here are some of the best local TV oddities from TAMI’s site.
A local news piece debunking misperceptions about dangers to pregnant women, some of them of medieval vintage but still going strong.
A couple of different cuts of a 1987 commercial for early-generation mobile phones featuring some extraordinarily happy phone owners, underscored by two increasingly frantic versions of “He’s Got The Whole World In His Hands.”
And from way back in the day, here’s a Pearl Beer commercial that features a bunch of people square dancing. Presumably, just after this the director called cut, they all got totally housed on Pearl, but that footage is now lost to history. Is it in a shoebox somewhere in your storage locker? If so, you know what to do!
Hindsight is a tremendous aid to critical thinking. And fifty years of it allows for a great deal of critical thinking about any art form – even a bit of overthinking, if we’re honest about it. But that’s part of the fun of auteur cinema.
With the benefit of the five succeeding decades of reflection we can see 1970 as a fairly extraordinary year for auteur cinema with some of the old lions roaring for the last time, the new guard roughly shoving its way into the arena, and what might be termed as the sophomore class continuing to produce work of a high standard.
For purposes of this list, we are including some auteurs that the Big Daddy of auteurism Andrew Sarris might have classed as “Expressive Esoterica” or even “Lightly Likable” among the pantheon.
Here is an inevitably incomplete list of some of 1970’s auteur cinema offerings. Just imagine checking the newspaper every Friday to see what movies are opening and seeing some of these. We have noted some of the films that are streaming on widely accessible services as of press time.
Robert Aldrich
TOO LATE THE HERO
Robert Altman
M*A*S*H
BREWSTER McCLOUD
Roy Andersson
A SWEDISH LOVE STORY
Michelangelo Antonioni
ZABRISKIE POINT
Michael Apted
7 PLUS 7 (The second film in Apted’s ongoing 7 UP series)
Dario Argento
THE BIRD WITH THE CRYSTAL PLUMAGE
Hal Ashby
THE LANDLORD
Bernardo Bertolucci
THE CONFORMIST
THE SPIDER’S STRATEGEM
John Boorman
LEO THE LAST (Amazon Prime)
Mel Brooks
THE TWELVE CHAIRS
Luis Buñuel
TRISTANA
Donald Cammell & Nicolas Roeg
PERFORMANCE
John Cassavetes
HUSBANDS (Amazon Prime)
Claude Chabrol
THE BREACH
LE BOUCHER
Chang Cheh
VENGEANCE
THE WANDERING SWORDSMAN
Věra Chytilová
FRUIT OF PARADISE
Sergio Corbucci
COMPANEROS
Roger Corman
BLOODY MAMA
GAS-S-S-S (Amazon Prime)
Costa-Gavras
THE CONFESSION
David Cronenberg
CRIMES OF THE FUTURE
Ossie Davis
COTTON COMES TO HARLEM
Jacques Demy
DONKEY SKIN (Criterion Channel)
Brian De Palma
DIONYSUS IN ’69
HI MOM!
Jacques Deray
BORSALINO
Vittorio De Sica
THE GARDEN OF THE FINZI-CONTINIS
SUNFLOWER
Blake Edwards
DARLING LILI
Rainer Werner Fassbinder
THE AMERICAN SOLDIER
GODS OF THE PLAGUE
WHY DOES HERR R. RUN AMOK?
Jesús Franco
COUNT DRACULA
EUGENIE…
Georges Franju
THE DEMISE OF FATHER MOURET
John Frankenheimer
I WALK THE LINE (Amazon Prime)
William Friedkin
THE BOYS IN THE BAND
Ruy Guerra
OF GODS & THE UNDEAD
Howard Hawks
RIO LOBO
Werner Herzog
EVEN DWARFS STARTED SMALL
John Huston
THE KREMLIN LETTER
Shohei Imamura
HISTORY OF POSTWAR JAPAN AS TOLD BY A BAR HOSTESS
Alejandro Jodorowsky
EL TOPO
Phil Karlson
HORNET’S NEST
Krystof Kieslowski
FACTORY (Criterion Channel)
Akira Kurosawa
DODES’KA-DEN (Criterion Channel)
David Lean
RYAN’S DAUGHTER
David Lynch
THE GRANDMOTHER (Criterion Channel)
Jerry Lewis
ONE MORE TIME
WHICH WAY TO THE FRONT?
Barbara Loden
WANDA
Joseph Losey
FIGURES IN A LANDSCAPE
THE GO-BETWEEN (Amazon Prime)
Sidney Lumet
KING: A FILMED RECORD… MONTGOMERY TO MEMPHIS
Joseph L. Mankiewicz
THERE WAS A CROOKED MAN…
Maysles Brothers & Charlotte Zwerin
GIMME SHELTER
Paul Mazursky
ALEX IN WONDERLAND
Jean-Pierre Melville
LE CERCLE ROUGE
Russ Meyer
BEYOND THE VALLEY OF THE DOLLS
Vincente Minnelli
ON A CLEAR DAY YOU CAN SEE FOREVER
Mario Monicelli
BRANCALEONE AT THE CROSSROADS
Mike Nichols
CATCH 22 (Amazon Prime)
Nagisa Oshima
THE MAN WHO LEFT HIS WILL ON FILM (Criterion Channel)
Marcello Mastroianni (born September 28, 1924) was one of the great actors of the screen and an international superstar for decades.
For Americans, who saw many of his best films during the art cinema import boom that began in the late ’50s, he simultaneously embodied a kind of swaggering screen presence that was no longer de rigueur for Hollywood leading men, as well as a sort of built-in ironic critique of the pose. The whole effect, when transposed over his natural charm and good looks, was devastatingly effective and he was, for a time (to the great annoyance of those poor employees who had to change the letters on theater marquees) a potent box office force in the U.S.
Occasionally, his American fanbase dictated that he visit the New World, which he did from time to time without ever really grabbing more than a tiny bit of the language. Somehow, this added to his already considerable appeal, as you will see from this television interview with David Letterman. Mastroianni’s command of English is very tentative, but he gets his point across quite well, and the interview has several big laughs.
Jean-Luc Godard once said that all Americans are good actors. We’re guessing that he missed the following educational short film on how to vote from 1955. Only a portion of it features dialogue, but that portion is certainly worth the (free) cost of admission. It’s always curious to see how people behave differently when a camera lens is pointed in their direction, and for some reason zombified and stilted seems to be the default.
Another interesting aspect here is the enormous CITY OF LOST CHILDREN-style voting machine that was, no doubt, the state of the art at the time. This, and the whole film, are reminders about how much easier it is to vote in America (for most of us anyway).
Back in 1992, Hong Kong director John Woo (born on September 22, 1946) was still a bit of a cult figure among adventurous American cinephiles. It wasn’t until he made his first Hollywood films HARD TARGET (1993), BROKEN ARROW (1995) and FACE OFF (1997) that he became well known to mass audiences as an action film director par excellence.
Here’s a fascinating video time capsule of the period in 1992 when Woo was making HARD TARGET, a reasonably modest-budgeted Jean Claude Van Damme vehicle. You can see the level of ambition in the way Woo sets up the shots. The technical crew is shown marveling at the number of firearm rounds he uses (around 50,000) and there’s a great subtle moment – at 13:07 – when the pyrotechnics guy asks Woo if he wants to set some stunt men on fire. Woo nods serenely, as if he’s just been asked if he wants cream and sugar with his coffee.
Throughout the piece, we hear from Quentin Tarantino, Walter Hill, Sam Raimi and others about their admiration for Woo’s skill and inventiveness. It’s a pretty enjoyable little video. Enjoy.
We find ourselves going down odd little rabbit-holes of movie history sometimes, and it can be pretty rewarding. Like in the case of this well-made, though appealingly cheesy, hour-long doc about movie effects – both visual and sound – from 1984. This period was an important time in the development of these effects, with many technicians still in the business who had gained a mastery of optically printed compositions, and a new generation just beginning to grasp the possibilities that digital technology offered.
It’s amusing in hindsight to see how much time is spent with the makers of ANDROID (1982), an ambitious, but not especially well-executed sci-fi movie. The whole presentation is interesting now in ways that were not necessarily obvious in 1984. The workspaces, the laborious techniques that are now achieved with the push of a computer key, in many ways, it is most fascinating as the end of an era rather than the beginning of one.
We’ve been very fortunate here at AFS to have some remarkable guests join us at the Cinema. In 2018, we were joined by one of our favorite filmmakers Olivier Assayas. The occasion was the restoration and rerelease of Assayas’ 1994 film COLD WATER. AFS Artistic Director Richard Linklater did the honors of hosting the event – a double screening of COLD WATER and SOMETHING IN THE AIR – and the audience was treated to a very special meeting of the minds. Here, for those of you who were not able to make it then, is a video of their discussion and Q&A session.
If you haven’t seen COLD WATER yet, don’t worry — the restored version COLD WATER is available right now on the Criterion Channel. Plus, if you’re an AFS member who hasn’t tried the streaming service yet, we have a limited time offer where you can receive 50% off your first three months. If you missed the code, reach out to our membership team here to get it — the offer expires August 31.
