Flaming Creatures is a non-narrative, Dionysian orgy, complete with wild dancing, gender bending, and a climactic earthquake. The carnivalesque madness of the film is reinforced by the chaotic density of its formal composition. Jack Smith’s deliberate spatial disorientation creates a pansexual landscape of tangled body parts; just as the viewer is unable to situate the visual coordinates of the image, the creatures are unaware of which extremity belongs to whom.
Month: January 2022
Anthropology Professor Bruce Patterson has the natural British charm that allures women automatically. When his fiancée Helen Bushmill is abroad for an extended time, he has to fight the neighborhood ladies and his students away. Helen has failed to tell him that she has a seventeen year old daughter Libby who shows up at her mother’s home unaware that she in engaged. Bruce’s neighbor Mike and his mischievous dachshund also get mixed up in the all the shenanigans happening around the “bachelor flat.”
Racketeer Jim Barnes is trying to force the independent taxicab-drivers to join his ‘protection service” at the cost of five bucks a day. Champion race-car driver, Bob Kane, joins with his friends Lee and “Dad” Martin in a fight for the street rights of a big city.
Cinema arrives “for the first time” in the mountains… This Cuban documentary short film gathers the experience of a rural community in the mountains of the east of the island, where the cinema arrives for the first time, thanks to the mobile cinemas created for this purpose by the Revolution. The spectator receives the different emotions that an audience of men, women and children from the countryside provokes when they see the first film of their lives: “Modern Times”, by Charles Chaplin.
In Six O’Clock News, Ross McElwee pursues murder, mayhem and catastrophe the same way he pursued southern women in Sherman’s March. Made after McElwee becomes a father and finds himself at home watching a lot more TV, he becomes obsessed with the nightly tales of calamity reported on by the local news. This fascination soon turns into another cross country journey to unearth the full stories of those affected. As McElwee pursues this project he also finds himself in Hollywood preparing to direct a feature based on a fictional character much like himself.
Chris Munger directed this blaxploitation version of the popular skinflick Starlet! (1969). The story concerns Clara , an aspiring actress from the housing projects of Gary, Indiana, who goes to Hollywood in search of fame and fortune. Predictably, she is robbed, betrayed, and must hit the casting couch before her dreams can come true.
American reporter Mark English attempts to get an exposé on how magician/hypnotist The Great Vorelli manages his stage illusions, but is foiled when Vorelli sets his attention on English’s girlfriend Marianne Horn. Vorelli’s dummy Hugo seems to have a mind of its own, and the ability to walk … and for reasons that Mark can’t get anyone to believe, even after Vorelli puts Marianne in a coma-like trance.
——UPGRADED——
A man who has just embezzled money from his company is driving through the Nevada desert. He picks up a pretty girl and her seemingly goofy boyfriend. The girl is a Las Vegas showgirl and the boyfriend turns out to be a professional killer, and he has no intention of letting the motorist finish the trip.