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The most accomplished work of America’s foremost surrealist filmmaker. This is a hypnotic, obsessive nightmare of parricide and compulsive attempts to undo the deed. The basic images – the blood, the knife, the bread voraciously attacked – shock by their atavistic simplicity. The hallucinatory effect is reinforced by the extraordinary soundtrack, an enigmatic exploration of two old English ballads, scrambled in jam session style and interwoven with experimental sound.Read More »
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More consciously experimental than Whitehead’s other works, this film draws on a variety of sources, including sequences of London shot while Whitehead was at the Slade School of Art, glimpses of the singer and model Nico, and footage of the psychedelic underground nightclub UFO. There is also on-screen text, a voice critiquing it, and music from Pink Floyd, at this point still fronted by Syd Barrett–Whitehead’s old painting friend from Cambridge. The track here, “Interstellar Overdrive”, was recorded by Whitehead before the band signed to EMI and is much more exciting and beat-driven than the version they would later record for the label. There is no explicit link between the content of the film and the Cochrane Theatre, which is is named after, but the theatre was used as a venue for the Spontaneous Festival of Underground Films in 1966.Read More »
PLOT:
A housewife is preparing a duck à l’orange in her kitchen. But the reluctant bird tries to escape from her but the woman manages to recaptures it and plucks it savagely. Once the duck is put in the oven, an alligator unexpectedly appears in the kitchen, threatening the cook. She tries to escape from it first, then pursues it and finally sits down at the table with it. Meanwhile, the duck succeeds in opening the the door of the oven and flies away through the open window.Read More »
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On 11 June 1965, the Royal Albert Hall played host to a slew of American and European beat poets for an extraordinary impromptu event – the International Poetry Incarnation – that arguably marked the birth of London’s gestating counterculture. Cast in the role of historian, as a man-on-the-scene, and massively elevating his limited resources, Whitehead constructed the extraordinary Wholly Communion from the unfolding circus. As Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gregory Corso, Harry Fainlight, Alexander Trocchi and others took to the stage, Whitehead confidently wandered with his borrowed camera, creating a participatory and anarchic film that is as much a landmark as the event itself, and launched his career.Read More »
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“A quest for identity through a series of disguises that do not involve costumes but gestures, materials and objects. The theorem of cross-dressing: by superimposing a different behavior, one that is socially defined, in the middle of everyday life, subjects search for the most intimate layers of their identity. In this sense, their relationships with materials, gestures and objects function as instances of exploratory “acting out”.Read More »
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A modern recreation of the legend of Hyppolytus subtly reveals homosexual and incestual motives among its three protagonists as it mingles reality and memory. Particularly noteworthy is the attempt to portray thoughts and flashes of memory by inserting bursts of single-frame, almost subliminal shots into the main sequence which proceeds in different time and space.Read More »
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Between Broadway act, classical music and operetta – cinema never came that close to the good old mixtape!
In MY WIFE IN FIVE, Schlingensief composes tracks and takes to a shimmering cinematic music piece. The playlist changes constantly between the styles, as if this record had a jump – Irving Berlin’s This Is The Army, Mr. Jones, an Ave Maria Variation and Jacques Offenbach’s world-famous Infernal Galop can be heard. Equally to the music the pictures also have scratches.
The music film MY WIFE IN FIVE was created during a sound seminar by Christoph Schlingensief with students of the Hochschule für Gestaltung Offenbach. It already contains all forms of cinematic means and alienation, which he later used in his theatre and opera productions.Read More »
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This film (with a soundtrack by Brian Eno) is largely filmed with an exploration of the film medium in certain aspects.
It is also concerned with making certain conceptions about time in a more illusory way than I have been inclined to explore in many other of my films. It attempts to deal with some of the paradoxes of the relationships of the “real” time which exists when the film was being shot, with the “real” time which exists when the film is being screened, and how this can be modulated by technical manipulation of the images and sequences.Read More »
A child’s ruminations take form in fantasies of colour, during the last of the innocent summer holidays in the archipelago.Read More »