Category Archives: docufiction

On the current state of cult film historiography

Gun Crazy

Dearest Jan,

The current state of cult film historiography is perhaps best exemplified by the book Cinema of Obsession. It’s just a pity that it’s rather clumsily written. This could have been a great book in the hands of Greil Marcus or David Toop. Excellent is its selection of films and its four tier ontology, of which three are useful: the male gaze, the female gaze, the fugitive couple. The category titled romantic implosion is rather enigmatic.

Its main merit lies in the thematic literary criticism, as it provides a useful contribution to the notion amour fou, mad love, sexual obsession, obsessive love and the war of the sexes.

Yours

Sholem Stein

The Killing of America (1982) by Sheldon Renan

L’Aventure hippie brings The Killing of America

“… a new breed of killer appeared …”

Above is the Charles Whitman episode, in 1966 he was the first instance of the “senseless killings” sniper variety.

Youtube has the whole film in parts at [1]

Here is another interesting episode, the case of Mark Essex:

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uiU0Tc0EIwU]

“… three black snipers set fire to this hotel in dowtown New Orleans …”

The Killing of America (1982) is an American documentary film tracing the origins of gratuitous violence in the United States. Directed by Sheldon Renan and narrated by Chuck Riley, the film was written by Leonard Schrader and his wife Chieko Schrader, with music by W. Michael Lewis and Mark Lindsay.

It featured notorious multiple killers such as Tony Kiritsis, Ted Bundy, Mark Essex, David Berkowitz, Kenneth Bianchi, Mark Essex, Jim Jones, Charles Manson, Herbert Mullin and Charles Whitman.

De Daemonialitate et Incubis et Succubis

La Dormeuse (1765) by Pierre Antoine Baudouin

Recent scholarship by Sholem Stein has revealed that the protagonist reader in this painting by French artist Pierre Antoine Baudouin had been reading either Sinistrari d’Ameno‘s Demoniality Or Incubi and Succubi or Claude Le Petit‘s “Apologie de Chausson.”

The woman reader was previously believed to have fallen asleep of boredom by reading Kant’s Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, professor Stein now confirms that she probably died of excessive lasciviousness.

I am the Dying Gaul

This is my death scene, I was not given a deathbed. I do not represent the most famous death scene. I am outdeathed by Jesus Christ who died on the cross and Jean-Paul Marat , both after me.

I seem to have been born in a culture of death, yet I was not given any last words. This fascination with death in Western culture. Why? Why so pervasive?

Why did Jane write A Death-Scene?

So I knew that he was dying-

Stooped, and raised his languid head;

Felt no breath, and heard no sighing,

So I knew that he was dead.

Why this fasicnation with crime scenes?

Why did Andy Warhol produce The Death and Disaster paintings?

And why is every sensationalist corner of video-libraries around the world filled with copies of Faces of Death?

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q5GDcs8i2ng&]

Bonnie and Clyde

Why do we enjoy the slow motion death of Bonnie and Clyde and countles other movie death scenes?

Aristotle, had I known him, would have answered me:

Objects which in themselves we view with pain, we delight to contemplate when reproduced with minute fidelity: such as the forms of the most ignoble animals and of dead bodies. —Aristotle via the Poetics.