Category Archives: Uncategorized

RIP Lino Capolicchio (1943 – 2022)

Lino Capolicchio was an Italian actor, screenwriter, and director known for performances in such films as Escalation (1968), The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (1970) and The House with Laughing Windows (1976).

Opening scene to Escalation, a film qualifiable as the Italian version of The Trip . Lino is the young man on the bicycle.

RIP Hermann Nitsch (1938 – 2022)

Concrete Flesh concert with projection of Hermann Nitsch”

Hermann Nitsch was an Austrian artist who is known for his transgressive performance art.

His seven minute short “Maria-Conception-Action: Hermann Nitsch” (1969) illustrates how the past is a foreign country.

The performance is a combination of a sadomasochistic performance, artsploitation and carnography.

A typical scene from Herman Nitsch’s happenings featured cruelty, sexuality, blood and violence.

In the “Maria-Conception-Action: Hermann Nitsch” a young women is crucified and defiled with a disemboweled lamb carcass.

That film is not featured on YouTube but it can be faintly seen on footage of a concert by the band Concrete Flesh.

The closest I ever came to witnessing a spectacle like this is, is seeing Tier Mon (1988) by La Fura dels Baus in Antwerp when I was 23. And then there was Abattoir Fermé, the Belgian theater group whose aesthetics sometimes flirt somewhat with that of Nitsch.