Experimental

From Experimental Cinema:
In April of 1966, the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York opened an exhibit by the true Jay Gatsby of American art, Andy Warhol. Silver Clouds, as it was called, consisted in its entirety of a roomful of silver, metalized plastic pillow-shaped balloons inflated with helium and oxygen. They floated … that’s all they did … held aloft by the gallery’s own air vents. In comparison to Warhol’s yellow and pink Cow wallpaper exhibit then-ongoing in another part of the gallery, this was a dynamic work, but it was not without its charm for some.Read More »

Quote:
Four characters go through a series of deeply emotional, psychedelic, sensual, and sexual encounters, evoking the times and textures of the 1960s underground.Read More »

Orgasm forms part of The ABCs of Death, a horror shorts anthology that unites a diverse collection of international directors in their ability to disgust, amuse, and – perhaps most importantly – provoke its audience. Orgasm certainly is provocative as the film documents a sadomasochistic sequence that includes the erotic asphyxiation of a woman that (perhaps) ends in her death.Read More »

Mental Masturbation, a Super 8 short imbued with a blessed soundtrack of trance music (an element that would be recurrent in all his latter films), was a point of start into what would be the most appreciated (and hated) element of Manuli’s cinema: The rescue of the absurdist to paint an atmosphere of freedom, in which music (in this case, electronic music) serves as the only link of meaningful communication between its characters, or between its protagonists and the settings of his films, the relation man-man and man-nature.
(translated from desistfilm.com)Read More »

An unnamed man wanders into a mysterious basement, only to find his own corpse laying among rusty metal. The two lock eyes, a gloved killer appears.Read More »

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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 »

Quote:
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 »

Quote:
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 »