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.
Tag: 1960s
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.”
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.
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.
A Jewish basketball coach discovers a group of black men playing great basketball in Harlem and turns them into the famous Harlem Globetrotters.
A bored insurance salesman quits his job to go into politics. He first starts preaching about how man is greater than he thinks and that man can live forever. He ends up forming his own political party, “The Eternal Man” party. He begins to be referred to as “God”. Then he starts having doubts about the eternalness of man.
An emotional and visually attractive portrait of timeless moments in human life. 235 000 000 was made on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the 1917 Revolution. Without any commentary, allowing images to speak for themselves to music.
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Noburo Nakamura’s film sees Yoshie Nogami work as a factory worker by day, while moonlighting as a bar hostess at night. Seduced by regular Eiji Kitami, she begins a passionate love affair, until Eiji’s demeanor changes and she is slowly forced into a life of prostitution. Living a life of despair, she eventually meets building engineer Fujii, who urges her to go straight and run away with him. But this swooning, tragic drama has other plans in store for her. A genuine rediscovery, The Shape of the Night is one of Japan’s great female-centered melodramas, to rank alongside those of Ozu, Imamura and Naruse.