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This entertaining film, from a delicious early novel by Henry James, takes place in a New England Arcadia that stands for everything beautiful, pure, and good. Into this Eden come a sophisticated European brother and sister who turn up unexpectedly on the doorstep of their staid American cousins, the Wentworths. The fortune-hunting Eugenia (Lee Remick) and her high-spirited brother Felix (Tim Woodward) turn this Puritan world upside down.Read More »
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Benning’s 18-minute study of moonfall in the morning sky– A close cousin to his film “two moons”. A lovely rendition of ‘Moon River’ accompanies the footage, filmed July 24th, 2019.Read More »
“It’s spring, it’s spring, and I feel I’m giving birth myself, to something monstrous, something ugly.” Gibbons enters the woods to begin his destructive campaign against spring, snapping the buds off trees while babbling maniacally. Sabotaging Spring is an impressionistic peek at Gibbons’s paranoid fancy; he explains to his dog, Woody the facts of life, evolution, and whistling.Read More »
A portrait of a filmmaker confessing his remorse at the scandalous manner in which he gathered material for his voyeuristic film, Spying. here an eerie interpersonal relationship is developed between the filmmaker and his camera which culminates in violence…Read More »
A man saves a woman who had been kidnapped by Comanches, then struggles to get both of them home alive.Read More »
Shot with a cell-phone camera, focuses on the sound of rain and visuals of pretty, multicolored lights blurred in a watery car window.Read More »
Confessions of a Sociopath is a 60-minute autobiographical film on digital video and Super 8 film, conceived as a real-life version of Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape. In this film, Joe Gibbons plays a fictionalized version of himself as he discovers a roomful of Super 8 footage from his own life, detailing events he can no longer recall. This footage shows his earlier film experiments, his descent into destructive behavior, and his “bottoming out” on drugs and alcohol. At a certain point, the films are replaced by random photos, police records, and psychiatric hospital records. In the role of the narrator, Gibbons uses psychiatric terminology to describe his past exploits, as a way of poking fun at both his own misfortune and at psychiatry’s ability to medicalize non-conformity. Through Confessions of a Sociopath, the now-reformed narrator seeks to understand his life, and make amends.Read More »
From Amos Vogel’s Film as a Subversive Art:
A bizarre, yet mild version of “Sunset Boulevard” a la Warhol, with a bevy of voracious females of varying proportions vying for the casual favors of a passive Joe Dallesandro. The dialogue is fresh, simple, funny, as is the relaxed, improvised acting. Fellatio and demythologized sex make their usual appearance, though – for Morrisey – in a curiously reserved manner. While these desperate people and their always-interrupted sex acts are perhaps too small really to engage one’s concern, Morrisey’s talent for a new, weird kind of naturalism (as in his Trash) now seems fully established. Most notably, sex is both ubiquitous and joyless, an almost inevitable chore that can neither be avoided nor really enjoyed.Read More »
From Amos Vogel’s Film as a Subversive Art:
A high-camp “love story” of an outrageously handsome heroin junkie and his trash-scavenging girlfriend (played by a female impersonator), this film skips from fellatio to seduction to foot fetishism in its attacks on soap opera myths and Hollywood. A playful perversity, an acceptance of the soft underbelly of bourgeois society, a strange poignancy informs this fable of impotence, drugs, and sex. In the climactic love scene, the hero — remaining impotent — suggests to the lusting “girl” — reclining on a rumpled bed among objects gathered from garbage cans — that she use a beer bottle instead; she does, while he solicitously inquires whether she is coming, then holds her hand and promises to do better next time. In a second scene, she accuses him, in rage, of not even letting her “suck” him off. What with an antiwar Welfare worker revealed as a malignant foot fetishist, assorted females as sexual aggressors against the forever innocent male, drug-fixes or penises casually displayed, the mounting intrusions upon the viewers’ value system mark this as a truly seditious work.Read More »