Monthly Archives: December 2014

I ask of cinema what most North Americans ask of psychedelic drugs

Above is the trailer to  Alejandro Jodorowsky’s first film in 23 years

The Dance of Reality (2013) is an autobiographical film by Alejandro Jodorowsky (born 1929).

Other films of 2013 I have enjoyed:

Subliminal phalli

The subliminal film still of an erect penis [1, nsfw] in the MTV-style film montage at the beginning of Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (1966) appears to have been imitated [2, nsfw] in the film Fight Club (1999). The difference is that in Bergman’s Persona the film still is several frames long, clearly visible to the naked eye, whereas in Fight Club it is only one frame long, it can only be consciously seen by pausing the video.

RIP Giulio Questi

RIP Giulio Questi, 90, Italian director and screenwriter, known for Django Kill and La morte ha fatto l’uovo (Death Laid an Egg).

The enigmatic clip above is from La morte ha fatto l’uovo (1968) starring Jean-Louis Trintignant and Ewa Aulin. It appears to be a piece of YouTube bricolage. Perhaps the music in the clip is from the film, music by Bruno Maderna?

I’ve previously mentioned Death Laid an Egg.

Update: the full movie in English:

Update:

The full soundtrack is online:

The soundtrack is indeed composed, arranged and conducted Bruno Maderna and it appears to be the best thing of the film. However, the high modernism of Maderna in combination with this piece of genre cinema makes the film a perfect example of nobrow artsploitation and had I not been three years old when this film came out, I would have surely wanted to see it.

Thematically, the film reminds me of Pasolini’s Pigsty. That’s probably because in both films a victim is fed as animal food, in Pigsty (“eaten by pigs in the sty”) as pig food, in Death Laid an Egg (“the farm chickens feed on Marco’s ground corpse”) as chicken food. Which reminds me of Soylent Green, the film in which, after euthanasia, dead humans are made into crackers  and fed to living humans.