Beautiful Dreamers + February re-cap
This week on Art & Trash, episode 28 - Beautiful Dreamers: Lost and Found in the Forbidden Zone.
Through the course of the 1970s, Richard Elfman led the avant-garde surrealist street theatre troupe and band The Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo. In 1978, Elfman would make Forbidden Zone, a feature-length musical fantasy that sought to translate the band’s stage show into a movie. The result is an absurdist, vulgar, ‘pataphysical cabaret. Forbidden Zone begins in minstrelsy; its world is one of hallucination and perversity and transgression. In this video essay, I focus on the film's absurdism as an act of fantastical reflection on our rude world.
This episode is adapted from a text that I wrote for Bright Lights Film Journal last year, which can be read here.
After my episode on Coming Apart, I spent the remainder of February dealing with a really diverse range of films. My public audio commentary was on Yvonne Andersen and the Yellow Ball Workshop’s The Amazing Colossal Man …
In this audio commentary, I look at the first film of the Yellow Ball Workshop, a workshop of child animators led by the visionary educator Yvonne Andersen. The film is considered for its glimpse into the unrestrained imagination of children. Working in papier-mâché stop motion, they tell the story of a towering monster invading an amusement park and its defeat by the military (and the subsequent destruction of the planet earth!). Andersen’s work in harnessing the imaginative powers of the children in this collective isn’t a matter of luck, as her pedagogical books evince: she has an astonishing generosity of spirit, and her sense of the dignity and agency and maturity of children, which led first with respect, is the conducting force of these wonderful films.
February’s patron-exclusive video essay is on Stephen Tyler’s The Last Slumber Party, a bizarre slasher made in the regional boom of independent commercial cinema that came with the home video market. The film is not what you might expect, by any means - a Caligari-esque nightmare of unreliable perspectives colliding in a strange climax, an omen told by an idiot…
Its characters occupy an oneiric space where dreams and other digressions challenge the asserted reality of plot, a messy extemporization of campfire storytelling. It is a surreal slasher, bowing to the intuition of dreams, the concealed truths of the subconscious, indicative of the collaborative dreamlife of adolescent friendships and of the strange fear that creeps in when dreams reveal themselves.
In this video essay, I argue that Tyler's film develops, from its clichéd premise, into an imaginative film about dreams and omens.
I'm interested in the question of how it achieves this, and I have come to the conclusion that there are only two possible responses, and they're just different sides of the same answer: the uncharitable take is, 'accidentally', and the charitable take is, 'through amateur passion'. When I first saw it (on February 3, 2012), I was struck with a feeling immediately afterward that I had dreamed it. A rare experience...
Watch the episode here. Great news came since I put this episode out: the American Genre Film Archive will be putting Tyler’s film out on blu-ray!
Finally, for the patron-exclusive audio commentary last month, I wrote on an incredibly rare object, seldom seen, Freude and Scott Bartlett’s Stand Up and Be Counted.
The utopianism of the 1960s was itself a diverse collision of lifestyles and perspectives. Naturism (nudism) gained a new relevance to a generation of flower children fleeing cities, building communes, going back to the land. With this audio commentary, I explore this rare collaboration between then-married filmmakers Scott Bartlett and Freude, a film of simple beauty and complex execution that plays like an advertisement for a better future. Stand Up and Be Counted joins Bartlett's optical printing mastery with Freude's declarative humanism, in a gesture that reminds that the growing Family of Man includes everyone and every way of loving.
The film itself has long been out of common circulation, an artifact of a vanishing order (when did humanism become so embarrassing, and what's so funny about peace, love and understanding?) I'm currently working on a long-form piece about Freude's films (working title: Her Life in Art) that will, I hope, return them to a place of prominence in experimental film discourse. You can expect that later this year!
Other Art-&-Trash-related news: in the past day, the new issue of Sight and Sound released with a wonderful profile on Black Zero, the home video label that I publish focused on Canadian avant-garde film. If you get the chance, read it! It has a special emphasis on my releases of films by Josephine Massarella and R. Bruce Elder, two of Art & Trash’s favourite filmmakers.
Next week, the first of two public audio commentaries for March will launch, on Kenneth Anger’s Puce Moment (1949/1970), one of the greatest and most decadent underground films of all time. Our next audio commentary will also be public, coming March 22: on David Lynch’s student film The Alphabet (1968).
Coming later this month to Art & Trash patrons: a patron-exclusive video essay (!) on Charles Henri Ford’s legendary, erotic, controversial feature Johnny Minotaur (1971), and a patron-exclusive audio commentary on the great Bruce Conner’s classic collage film Cosmic Ray (1962). It’s a packed month! Five weeks of Fridays!