Sándor Reisenbüchler’s animated film of the Ferenc Juhász poem is a magical mythological tale featuring numerous folklore symbols, in which due to the horrors of war and the evil of man the Sun and the Moon vanished from the sky. This visionary film singing of the universal struggle between fairy tale Good and Evil was considered by the director a sort of ars poetica. The film was shortlisted for an Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film in 1969.
Tag: 1960s
A helter skelter of late 60’s counter-culture psychedelia played in two separate screens, images of student riots, drag queens getting ready for a night in town, fires, juxtaposed against swinging hippies, Japanese women casually arranging their wardrobe, people commuting to work, and various cartoon strips, all this played over a collage of news report snippets telling about the Communist threat, radio recordings, Rolling Stones, Japanese pop tunes, and Hitler speeches, while flickering images of fires and disfigured babies flash over the screen now and again. It’s all pretty anarchic and adds up to no concrete narrative but it all makes sense in a purely audiovisual way.
Fifth short film directed by István Szabó. It was presented at the Cannes Film Festival, where it won a Special Award. There is practically no argument, because it is nothing more than an act of love for Cecília Esztergályos, who at that time was Szabó’s girlfriend.
Charlie Gordon, a mentally challenged man who is eager to learn, is given an experimental operation to increase his intelligence to genius level. The experiment seems to work, until one of the lab animals the procedure was tested on begins to lose its intelligence…
In this short film from Yugoslavia, a boy wanders the city alone on a hot summer’s day. More and more unnerved by his own shadow, he attempts to escape it, but ends up finding a new friend instead. Grounded in the architecture and infrastructure of the city, the film turns into a literal flight of fantasy.
Bruce Conner deconstructs the repetitive imagery and messages from media coverage of the Kennedy assassination, fabricating an image track out of the fragments of the paltry documentary footage. The film is divided into two unequal parts, a longer, first section that Conner has called ‘the death of Kennedy’ and an ‘epilogue’ that imaginatively unpacks the Kennedy myth. It is also an astounding exposé of the media’s modes of creating meaning, of constructing messages, and ultimately of controlling information.
Flesh was filmmaker Paul Morrissey’s first production for Andy Warhol. The story concerns a bisexual hustler who does tricks so that he can pay for his wife’s lover’s abortion. The film made headlines when it was confiscated by the police during one of its earliest showings in 1970. Though this event is unlikely to repeat itself, Flesh is still explicit enough to elicit gasps from even the most jaded of underground-film enthusiasts.
This BBC2-screened film is a look at the European art world of the late 1960s, and a meditation on the nature of art and the pricing of art, shot by Tony Williams. The origins of this film are suitably cosmopolitan. It was initiated by an Iranian student – and underwritten by Jeremy Fry from Cadbury Fry Hudson. Its focus is Takis, a Greek artist who creates kinetic sculptures out of discarded electronic objects (at times reminiscent of Len Lye’s work), and plans to mass produce cheaper versions of his work to make his art accessible. But will it still be art?