Deep End is a 1970 psychological comedy drama film directed by Jerzy Skolimowski and starring John Moulder-Brown, Jane Asher and Diana Dors. It was written by Skolimowski, Jerzy Gruza and Boleslaw Sulik. The film was an international co-production between West Germany and the United Kingdom. Set in London, the film centres on a 15-year-old boy who develops an infatuation with his older, beautiful colleague at a suburban bath house and swimming pool.
The film premiered at the Venice Film Festival on 1 September 1970. Deep End, considered a cult classic, went unreleased for many years due to rights issues. In 2011, it was given a digital restoration with the co-operation of the British Film Institute and was released in theatres and on home media.
Mike (John Moulder-Brown), a 15-year-old bathhouse worker, develops a crush on his older, attractive co-worker, Susan (Jane Asher). At first they help each other secure bigger tips by swapping their respective male and female clients. But their tidy business arrangement is severed when Mike discovers that Susan has not only shunned him, but is cheating on her fiancé with an older swim coach. As Mike begins stalking Susan in an effort to break them up, his innocent crush spirals into obsession.
The film features the song "Mother Sky" by Can in an extended sequence set in Soho, and "But I Might Die Tonight" by Cat Stevens in the opening scene and finale; the previously unreleased version heard in the film was eventually released in 2020 on a reissue of Stevens' album Tea for the Tillerman.
Deep End was one of David Lynch's favourite films.
"I don't like colour movies and I can hardly think about colour. It really cheapens things for me and there's never been a colour movie I've freaked out over except one, this thing called Deep End, which had really great art direction." - David Lynch
Film shot for the occasion of CAN's free concert in their home town of Cologne on February 3rd 1972, attended by over ten thousand. During the event, the multitrack tape recorder meant for the film's audio sync failed, and the band was left with only a highly flawed cassette recording of the concert from the front of stage.
The decision was then made to overdub the tape at Inner Space Studio the following month, and to film the overdubbing as well as CAN in their regular mode of improvisation. Two tracks recorded for the film later ended up on the album Unlimited Edition, titled "I'm Too Leise" and "LH 702 (Nairobi/München).
CAN (stylized in all caps) were a German experimental rock band formed in Cologne in 1968 by Holger Czukay (bass, tape editing), Irmin Schmidt (keyboards), Michael Karoli (guitar), and Jaki Liebezeit (drums). They featured several vocalists, including American Malcolm Mooney (1968–70) and Japanese Damo Suzuki (1970–73). They have been hailed as pioneers of the German krautrock scene.
The founding members of CAN came from backgrounds in avant-garde music and jazz. They blended elements of psychedelic rock, space rock, funk, samba and musique concrète on influential albums such as Tago Mago (1971), Ege Bamyasi (1972) and Future Days (1973). CAN also had commercial success with singles such as "Spoon" (1971) and "I Want More" (1976) reaching national singles charts. Their work has influenced rock, post-punk, indie rock, post-rock and ambient acts.
The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension is perhaps the most densely packed, aggressively weird movie to ever emerge from a major studio. It posits a hero who is a neurosurgeon, particle physicist, rock star, and comic book hero all at once. Peter Weller plays the titular character with a deadpan cool that holds the madness together. The film throws the audience into the middle of a complex mythology without a map, featuring a team of sidekicks called the "Hong Kong Cavaliers," an alien invasion by "Red Lectroids" from Planet 10 (all named John), and a plot involving a jet car driving through solid matter.
Despite flopping at the box office, it became a legendary cult classic because of its refusal to explain itself. It treats its absurd premise as absolute fact. The cast is a marvel of 80s talent, including Jeff Goldblum in a cowboy outfit, Christopher Lloyd as a manic alien, and John Lithgow giving a scenery-chewing performance as Dr. Emilio Lizardo. The film’s aesthetic and tone—particularly the end credits sequence where the cast walks in sync to the synth-pop theme—have influenced directors like Wes Anderson. It remains a litmus test for sci-fi fans: you either bounce off its chaotic energy, or you become a lifelong initiate of the Banzai Institute, quoting, "No matter where you go, there you are."
In a retro-future world, Sam Lowry, a clerk in the ministry department, is given the task to rectify an administrative error. However, in the process, he becomes an enemy of the state.
There is so much I could say about this film. It has shaped my life in some ways. This film is a work of genius.
Ongka is a charismatic big-man of the Kawelka tribe who live scattered in the Western highlands, north of Mount Hagen, in New Guinea. The film focuses on the motivations and efforts involved in organising a big ceremonial gift-exchange or moka planned to take place sometime in 1974. Ongka has spent nearly five years preparing for this ceremonial exchange, using all his big-man skills of oratory and persuasion in order to try to assemble what he hopes will be a huge gift of 600 pigs, some cows, some cassowaries, a motorcycle, a truck and £5,500 in cash. As an example of the big-man familiar from written texts, Ongka is memorable, and the film manages to convey through this main character the importance of pigs, of exchange and of prestige in the life of these Highlanders. The film-crew never in fact managed to film the big moka, as the conspiratorial and complex manoeuvres involved in setting the date thwarted their plans. But we are shown Ongka replacing tee-shirt and shorts with his ceremonial feathers and setting off to a little moka where he collects pigs he `invested' with his wife's father. The interview with Ongka's wife raises the issue of the sexual division of labour and the importance of the wife's labour in pig-rearing and moka preparation, as well as the role of women in the establishment of a big-man.
A key component to Kawelka culture, the Moka ceremony finds those seeking to gain influence attempting to do so not by acquiring valuable objects, but by giving them away. This is similar to the Potlatch in Haida culture. Unfortunately, things do not go as planned and the leader of the tribe is ultimately threatened with violence as a result of his outwardly selfless act of giving.
Directed by Charlie Nairn, Ethnographer Andrew J. Strathern, In Disappearing World (London, England: Royal Anthropological Institute), 55 minutes
Produced in 1973. Directed by Antony Balch. Starring Michael Gough, Robin Ask, Vanessa Shaw. A pair of friends on a british rail trip soon find themselves in a secluded mansion with a slew of bizarre characters and an even more bizarre secret.
Robin Askwith (just prior to his shift into a sex comedy franchise) is a stressed out singer with a pop group. He decides to go for some R&R at a country retreat. He hooks up with Vanessa Shaw on the train journey in, and once they arrive at the retreat they find it's a bizarro world inhabited by mute bikers, lobotomised robots, a malignant dwarf and a mad doctor (Michael Gough) in a wheelchair!
The Secret of Roan Inish is a 1994 independent fantasy-adventure film written and directed by John Sayles. It is based on the 1957 novel Secret of the Ron Mor Skerry, by Rosalie K. Fry.
It is centered on the Irish and Orcadian folklores of selkies—seals that can shed their skins to become human. The story, set on the west coast of Ulster in the north-west of Ireland, is about Fiona, a young girl who is sent to live with her grandparents and her cousin Eamon near the island of Roan Inish, where the selkies are rumored to reside. It is a family legend that her younger brother was swept away in his infancy and raised by a selkie. Part of the film takes place in Donegal Town.
An in-depth exploration of several covens' and practitioners' Witchcraft traditions in 1977.
A businessman who studies witchcraft as a hobby and a businesswoman who heads a coven are interviewed about their beliefs and practices. Shows the initiation of new members into a coven and the attempt by a "circle" to heal a member.
Outer and Inner Space is a 16mm film of Edie Sedgwick sitting in front of a television monitor on which is playing a prerecorded videotape of herself. On the videotape, Edie is positioned on the left side of the frame, facing right; she is talking to an unseen person off-screen to our right.
Outer and Inner Space is a groundbreaking multimedia document. Edie Sedgwick appears to have a conversation with herself. Time is compressed into the moment and we read a face in four parts which seems to be communicating with itself.
"As spectacularly beautiful as it is a fascinating spectacle, Warhol’s spatially dynamic and dramatically lit film-and-video portrait of Sedgwick, Outer and Inner Space, 1965, is perhaps his most brilliant articulation of the schism between private self and public image, as well as a further exploration of the serial imagery in his paintings. Shot during the summer of 1965, publicly screened in 1966, and recently rescued from oblivion, this was his first double-screen film—The Chelsea Girls would follow in September 1966—and his initial foray into video. Given the chance by Norelco to experiment with a prototype home-video recorder, Warhol used the camera to create a half-hour portrait of Sedgwick (as well as other Factory denizens). He then shot two thirty-three-minute 16 mm reels of the actress sitting in front of a television playing her videotaped image. In the final product, the two reels are shown side by side." ArtForum
One of the original Angry Young Men along with luminaries such as John Osbourne (see Thomas Maschler's book Declaration), Colin Wilson (1931- 2013) first tasted fame with his book The Outsider, a treatise on outsider genius. As is the way, the mainstream elitist press turned on this working class self taught prodigy and hounded him out of London's class based literary scene.
He fled to the West Country and London's loss was Cornwall's and The World's gain. For over 50 years and 150 books he led us through science fiction (Mind Parasites) and esoteric knowledge (The Occult Trilogy). Truly a man before his time, in the age of The Internet, his philosophy will inform us for centuries to come. Strange is Normal is a late documentary containing interviews from his home in Cornwall with himself and his wife Joy.
Nickel Queen is a 1971 Australian comedy film starring Googie Withers and directed by her husband John McCallum. The story was loosely based on the Poseidon bubble, a nickel boom in Western Australia in the late 1960s, and tells of an outback pub owner who stakes a claim and finds herself an overnight millionaire.
Meg Blake is the widowed owner of a pub in a small desert town in Western Australia. Corrupt American mining executive Ed Benson starts the rumour of a nickel discovery to sell shares to gullible investors. Meg heads the rumour and stakes the first claim. Benson promotes her as the "Nickel Queen".
Hippie Claude Fitzherbert (played by the late John Laws) follows Meg into Perth high society and becomes her lover. Benson is exposed as a fraud, Fitzherbert deserts Meg and runs off with Benson's wife and Meg is reunited with an old suitor from her hometown.
The film depicts a figure sitting in an outdoor environment and wearing a robe and a Hannya mask. The film features receding and shifting images captured in a frame-by-frame manner; though these shots resemble zooms and pans, they were actually derived from positioning the camera on a series of a points.
Atman is a visual tour-de-force built on the idea of a subject fixed at the center of a circle created by 480 camera positions. Filmed frame by frame, the sequence accelerates into an increasingly rapid circular motion, turning stillness into disorienting rhythm.
The seated figure wears the devil mask of Hangan from Noh theater, accompanied by Noh music and the principle of acceleration often tied to Noh drama. The title itself, Atman is a Sanskrit term for "self," sometimes linked to destruction, infuses the film with spiritual unease.
What begins as meditation collapses into disintegration: a hypnotic, unsettling ritual where cinema dismantles identity through repetition, motion, and the terror of looking too long.
Spiral Tribe! [Rare] Exclusive interview that was given to BBC's Dance Energy programme [1991] about the for's and against's regarding the free party scene that was happening at the time! 👈😵💫👉 #Spiraltribe #Freeparty23 #Rave #Terratech
964 Pinocchio (1991) is a cyberpunk body horror film directed by Shōzin Fukui. The film tells the story of a memory wiped cyborg slave who after being discarded by his owners, wanders through an urban wasteland and meets a homeless woman suffering from memory loss and together they descend into a hallucinatory nightmare of identity, control, and transformation.
Fukui's film is a visceral assault on the senses, blending surreal imagery, kinetic handheld camerawork, and industrial noise into a fever dream of dehumanization and decay.
964 Pinocchio stands as a cult landmark of Japanese cyberpunk cinema, exploring the collapse of the body and mind in a dystopian, post-industrial world. It is widely considered as one of the best examples of the underground Japanese Cyberpunk genre.
Siddhartha is the story of a young Brahmin and his search for a meaningful way of life. His journey takes him through periods of harsh asceticism, sensual pleasures, material wealth, self-revulsion and eventually to the oneness and harmony that he had been seeking. The story is based on the best-selling novel by German Nobel Prize winner Hermann Hesse.
Directed by Conrad Rooks.
Based on the 1922 novel by Hermann Hesse.
Photographed in luminous Eastmancolor by Sven Nykvist.
Colour. 82 minutes.
Filmed on location in India, both in Bharatpur, Rajastahn and in the holy city of Rishikesh, Uttar Pradesh.
When its chairman dies, an advertising firm's executive board must elect someone to fill the position. Each member, unable to vote for himself, casts a secret ballot for Putney Swope (Arnold Johnson), the firm's only black executive, assuming he wouldn't receive any votes from the other members. But once in power, Swope makes radical changes to the firm -- like keeping only one white employee and refusing to advertise harmful products -- all under the firm's new moniker, "Truth and Soul, Inc."
Directed by Robert Downey Sr. in 1969, what unfolds is a chaotic, funk-infused critique of capitalism, hypocrisy, and the commodification of rebellion itself. Shot in stark black-and-white with bursts of surreal color, Putney Swope dances between absurdity and truth-using rhythm, satire, and unfiltered energy to mirror a society selling both progress and illusion.
House (Japanese: ハウス, Hepburn: Hausu) is a 1977 Japanese comedy horror film directed and produced by Nobuhiko Obayashi. It is about a schoolgirl traveling with her six friends to her ailing aunt's country home, where they come face to face with supernatural events as the girls are, one by one, devoured by the home. It stars mostly amateur actors, with only Kimiko Ikegami and Yōko Minamida having any notable previous acting experience. The musical score was performed by the rock band Godiego.
In Tokyo, a teenage girl known as Gorgeous, so called for her beauty, has plans for a summer vacation with her widowed father, a wealthy film composer who has been away in Italy on business. When he returns home, he surprises Gorgeous by announcing he has married a woman named Ryoko Ema. Distraught, Gorgeous goes to her bedroom and writes a letter to her aunt, asking if she can visit her for the summer instead. Her aunt replies and allows her to come. Gorgeous invites her six friends: Prof, who is highly academic and very good at problem-solving; Melody, who has an affinity for music; Kung Fu, who is athletic and especially skilled at kung fu; Mac, who has a big appetite; Sweet, who is bubbly and gentle; and Fantasy, who is a constant daydreamer.
House is a deeply psychedelic suspense thriller. In watching it we enter a confined and childlike world of psychological terror. The seven girls who feature in the film are aspects of a single personality, moving back through memories and trauma. Far Out described it as "a psychedelic trip like no other, featuring a flurry of animation, surreal violence and enigmatic Japanese energy [...] Obayashi suffuses his world with a mix of vivid hand-drawn animation and surreal cinematic choices to take the viewer on a dance of phantasmagorical absurdity."
Blackfella Charlie is out of sorts. The intervention is making life more difficult on his remote community, what with the proper policing of whitefella laws now. So Charlie takes off, to live the old way, but in so doing sets off a chain of events in his life that has him return to his community chastened, and somewhat the wiser.
David Gulpilil was a legendary Yolngu actor, a First Nations person of Northern Australia, born around 1953. The local missionaries gave him his birthdate of July 1, 1953, just as they gave him his Christian name David, although he admits he liked that name from the start. His last name, Gulpilil, was a totem, the kingfisher. He'd never seen a white person until he was 8 when he visited the mission school, but he never really allowed them to teach him anything. David died in 2021. He will never be forgotten.
The inmates and guards of a modern, clean and efficient maximum security wing are slowly and increasingly brutalised until they erupt in violence. Dark and macabre, and based in truth, the story is told in a traditional dramatic style combined with telephone interviews and narration.
More than ever, this dark postindustrial vision of the cacereal society, where one man is imprisoned in order to lock up the minds of the entire world, is relevant. The cruel and brutal inevitability of the prison system, where boys are mutilated into men, with violence and fear, power and intimidation. Everything has a price, and a cost. In this savage account of an isolated maximum security prison in the Central Australian desert that is in lockdown. Pressure is building in the facility and the weak will not survive what is coming. It is almost like the screws are making it happen. Boiling the pot hotter and hotter, until it boils over. And it will.....Welcome to Hell.
Ghosts... of the Civil Dead is a 1988 Australian drama-suspense film directed by John Hillcoat. It was written by Hillcoat, Evan English, Gene Conkie, Nick Cave, and Hugo Race. It is partly based on the prison diaries of Jack Henry Abbott.
The story is set in Central Industrial Prison, a privately run maximum security prison in the middle of the Australian desert. An outbreak of violence within the prison has resulted in a total lockdown. A committee is appointed by the prison's governors to investigate the cause of the outbreak, but their findings are in stark contrast to the facts behind the riot.
It is revealed that both the prisoners and the guards are slowly and deliberately brutalised, manipulated and provoked into the forthcoming eruption of violence by the government and the private company that runs the prison, in order to justify the construction of a new and more "secure" facility.
The script was based on the book In the Belly of the Beast by Jack Henry Abbott and research done with David Hale, a former prison guard at Marion, Illinois. who features as a character in the film.
Satyricon (1969) is one of Federico Fellini’s most ambitious and unconventional works, a surreal reimagining of Petronius’s fragmented Roman novel Satyricon. Rather than a straightforward adaptation, Fellini crafts a dreamlike, episodic journey through the decaying grandeur of ancient Rome, where morality, identity, and meaning seem perpetually unstable.
The film follows Encolpio (Martin Potter) and his companion Ascilto (Hiram Keller) as they drift through a series of bizarre encounters: orgiastic banquets, strange cult rituals, grotesque performances, and fleeting romances. Their wanderings resemble a hallucinatory odyssey rather than a structured narrative, with each episode reflecting themes of excess, alienation, and the fragility of human desire.
Fellini deliberately embraces fragmentation. Just as Petronius’s original text survives only in pieces, the film resists conventional storytelling, immersing viewers in a world of spectacle and disorientation. The visuals are striking: elaborate costumes, distorted sets, and surreal imagery create a sense of both awe and unease. Every scene feels like stepping into a fever dream, where boundaries between history, myth, and fantasy dissolve.
At its core, Fellini Satyricon is less about Rome itself than about the human condition—loneliness, lust, cruelty, and the desperate search for meaning in a world governed by chance and chaos. Fellini portrays Rome not as a glorious empire but as a crumbling society consumed by decadence, where beauty and horror coexist inseparably.
The film’s haunting atmosphere, unconventional narrative, and overwhelming imagery make it polarizing. Some see it as confusing and alienating, while others regard it as a masterpiece of visionary cinema. Its refusal to offer clear resolutions leaves audiences unsettled, but that ambiguity is precisely Fellini’s intention.
Ultimately, Fellini Satyricon stands as a cinematic experience rather than a traditional story—a vivid exploration of a world where history becomes dream, and myth reflects the chaos of existence itself.
Valerie and Her Week of Wonders (Czech: Valerie a týden divů) is a 1970 Czechoslovak gothic coming-of-age surrealist dark fantasy film co-written and directed by Jaromil Jireš, based on the 1935 novel of the same name by Vítězslav Nezval. It is considered part of the Czechoslovak New Wave movement. The film portrays the heroine as living in a disorienting dream, cajoled by priests, vampires, and men and women alike. The film blends dark fantasy, eroticism and Gothic horror genres.
Before Bad Brains, the Sex Pistols or even the Ramones, there was a band called Death. Punk before punk existed, three teenage brothers in the early '70s formed a band in their spare bedroom, began playing a few local gigs and even pressed a single in the hopes of getting signed. But this was the era of Motown and emerging disco. Record companies found Death’s music— and band name—too intimidating, and the group were never given a fair shot, disbanding before they even completed one album. Equal parts electrifying rockumentary and epic family love story, A Band Called Death chronicles the incredible fairy-tale journey of what happened almost three decades later, when a dusty 1974 demo tape made its way out of the attic and found an audience several generations younger. Playing music impossibly ahead of its time, Death is now being credited as the first black punk band (hell...the first punk band!), and are finally receiving their long overdue recognition as true rock pioneers.
A one-off documentary highlighting the extraordinary story of musical pioneering, which took the audience into the world of White-Noise, Saw-Tooth, Square-Wave and Digital Sequencers, as well as other highly melodious sounds created by a variety of novel instruments never imagined before.
A documentary about obsessive 8-track tape collectors, the film documents a cross-country trip looking for those passionate few for whom the 70s never died.
"Hannah Arendt: Facing Tyranny" is a documentary film exploring the life and work of the German-American political theorist Hannah Arendt, focusing on her insights into totalitarianism and the human condition. The film, part of the PBS American Masters series, examines how her experiences as a political prisoner and refugee during World War II shaped her thinking about political power, the rise of authoritarianism, and the dangers of unchecked power.
Niagara is a 1953 American noir thriller film directed by Henry Hathaway and produced by Charles Brackett. Brackett also wrote the screenplay alongside Walter Reisch and Richard Breen. It stars Marilyn Monroe, Joseph Cotten, Jean Peters, Denis O'Dea, and Max Showalter (credited as Casey Adams). Set in Niagara Falls, the film tells the story of two couples: one, a pair of newlyweds on their honeymoon, and the other, a husband and wife whose turbulent marriage is wracked by jealousy and deceit.
Unlike other films noir of the time, which were typically black-and-white, Niagara was shot in "three-strip" Technicolor (one of the last films to be made at 20th Century Fox in that format, as a few months later the studio began converting to CinemaScope, which had compatibility problems with three-strip but not with Eastmancolor).
Niagara was a box office success and received positive reviews from film critics. It was one of 20th Century Fox's biggest box office hits that year. Monroe was even top billing in Niagara, which elevated her to movie star status. Monroe's next two films, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and How to Marry a Millionaire (both 1953), were even bigger successes commercially.
This was effectively Marilyn Monroe's breakthrough film, where he look had its beginnings- she effectively became the character that she was later expected to be. The birth of a goddess.
Devi (1960), directed by Satyajit Ray, is a haunting critique of blind faith and patriarchal control. Set in 19th-century Bengal, it tells the story of a young woman who is suddenly declared a goddess by her father-in-law. What follows is a slow, painful unraveling of her identity and autonomy. Through quiet visuals and subtle performances, Ray exposes the dangers of superstition and the suffocating expectations placed on women-making *Devi* one of his most powerful and unsettling works.
Fellini's Casanova (Italian: Il Casanova di Federico Fellini, lit. 'The Casanova by Federico Fellini') is a 1976 Italian film directed by Federico Fellini from a screenplay he co-wrote with Bernardino Zapponi, adapted from the autobiography of 18th-century Venetian adventurer and writer Giacomo Casanova, played by Donald Sutherland. The film depicts Casanova's life as a journey into sexual abandonment, and his relationship with the "love of his life" Henriette (played by Tina Aumont). The narrative presents Casanova's adventures in a detached, methodical fashion, as the respect for which he yearns is constantly undermined by his more basic urges.
Shot entirely at the Cinecittà studios in Rome, the film won an Academy Award for Best Costume Design, with the Oscar going to Danilo Donati. Fellini and his co-writer Bernardino Zapponi were nominated for a Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar. The film also won BAFTA Awards for Best Costume Design and Best Production Design, and a David di Donatello for Best Score.
Teenage Caveman (also known as Out of the Darkness in the United Kingdom) is a 1958 American independent black-and-white science fiction adventure film produced and directed by Roger Corman, and starring Robert Vaughn and Darah Marshall. The film was released by American International Pictures in July 1958 as a double feature with How to Make a Monster.
Originally filmed as Prehistoric World with some 8x10 publicity stills retaining this title, AIP later changed it. Years later, Corman stated in an interview, "I never directed a film called Teenage Caveman." Vaughn stated in an interview that he considered Teenage Caveman to be the worst film ever made. It was later featured on the mocking television series Mystery Science Theater 3000.
In Haiti, a black female plantation owner enacts a voodoo curse, and revives zombies for revenge on a white male neighbour, who has chosen a white woman over her for marriage.
Ouanga, also advertised as The Love Wanga, is a voodoo-themed 1936 American film starring Fredi Washington. George Terwilliger wrote and directed the film. The film's themes include miscegenation and it features various racial stereotypes and portrays the people who practice voodoo as primitive. The movie is considered to be perhaps the second zombie film ever made after White Zombie.
Funeral Parade of Roses (薔薇の葬列, Bara no Sōretsu) is a 1969 Japanese drama art film directed and written by Toshio Matsumoto, loosely adapted from Oedipus Rex and set in the underground gay culture of 1960s Tokyo. It stars Peter as the protagonist, a young transgender woman, and features Osamu Ogasawara, Yoshio Tsuchiya and Emiko Azuma. A product of the Japanese New Wave, the film combines elements of arthouse, documentary and experimental cinema, and is thought to have influenced Stanley Kubrick's 1971 film adaptation of Anthony Burgess' novel A Clockwork Orange (although many of the points of comparison can also be found in earlier movies such as Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Love Is Colder Than Death).
In ’60s Japan, Gonda the owner of a gay bar runs a parallel drug business there. He is in a relationship with a transvestite Leda who manages the place for him. But with Leda losing her youth and her geisha-sensibilities ageing, Gonda shifts his attention to the young and pop-cultured Eddie, another transvestite working at the bar.
Funeral Parade of Roses follows a non-linear narrative with throwbacks to Eddie’s childhood without a father who left early and a mother who found his masculinity amusing. It all pieces together in the end while also capturing and satirizing the buzz of the underground drug, film and gay scene of ’60s-’70s Japan.
This was one of Stanley Kubrick's favourite films.
Ladakh, or 'Little Tibet', is a wildly beautiful desert land high in the Western Himalayas. It is a place of few resources and an extreme climate. Yet for more than a thousand years, it has been home to a thriving culture. Traditions of frugality and cooperation, with an intimitate and location-specific knowledge of the environment, enabled the Ladakhis not only to survive but to prosper. Then came 'development'. Now in Leh, the capital, one finds pollution and divisiveness, inflation and unemployment, intolerance and greed. Centuries of ecological balance and social harmony are under threat of modernization.
Ancient Futures is much more than a film about Ladakh. The breakdown of Ladakh's culture and environment forces us to re-examine what we really mean by 'progress' - not only in the 'developing' parts of the world, but in the industrialized world as well. The story of Ladakh teaches us about the root causes of environmental, social and psychological problems, and provides valuable guidelines for our own future.
I travelled in Ladakh in 1996 between September and November, spending time in Leh, the Nubrah Valley, Shey, Thiksey and Hemis monastries and on the road back to Manali, which I hitchhiked along for three days, travelling 500 kms. I worked for Helen Norberg-Hodge's Ladakh Ecological Development Group (LEDeG) while I was in Leh, selling water in the street. It was a life changing experience.
I spent three nights in Diskit Gompa, built by Changzem Tserab Zangpo, a disciple of Tsong-kha-pa, the Diskit Gompa dates back to the 14th century. In this recording there are around 70 monks chanting in the main hall of the monastery. Bowls of butter tea and sampa can be heard occasionally sliding along the benches as some monks take a break and others step forward to take their place. The chanting went late into the night from very early in the morning for three days.
This film accompanied the 1992 techno compilation "Shamanarchy in the UK" (see video below) which was produced by Fraser Clark (1943 -2009). Fraser was one of the leaders of the global technogaian movement. As founder and editor of Encyclopaedia Psychedelica International, he outlined his views on entheogens and nature, and was a key advocate of the outdoor rave movement, hosting regular, small, indoor festivals such as those held at his central London clubs, Megatripolis and The Warp.
Clark believed the 1990s were the 1960s upside-down (9 being an upside-down 6). He advocated a new form of hippie—the "Zippie"—who would balance the "techno right brain" with the "hippy left brain", embracing nature, peace and love, as well as technology. In 1989, he and Marcus Pennell organised the first Zippie Picnic on Hampstead Heath in London. Zippie Picnics continue to this day.
Clark staged many pranks, particularly against the government of Margaret Thatcher and then John Major. He opposed the Poll Tax and later Criminal Justice Bill.
Also in 1989, the EPi team were joined by northern graphic designers the Scooby Doobies who brought with them a love of rave culture. This led to the creation of Evolution magazine in 1990, and regular small underground parties which laid the way for the launch of the Megatripolis nightclub in 1993.
Megatripolis was an innovative, underground London nightclub created by Encyclopaedia Psychedelica editor and founder of the Zippie movement, Fraser Clark, together with a great many others. The club combined New Age ideology with Rave culture to create a vibrant, festival-like atmosphere presenting a wide variety of cross-cultural ideas and experiences. Club nights ran regularly from 1993 until 1996, and from then intermittently until 2001, being the focus of much of the Zippie movement. The club and its related activities also helped to popularize ideas such as cyberculture and the Internet between those years.
History & Venues
The club first started at The Marquee in Charing Cross Road as a collaboration with Tribal Energy in June 1993 with Terrence McKenna's opening lecture and DJs Nik Sequenci and resident DJ and co founder Jez Turner. A disagreement between the Tribal Energy and Megatripolis crews led to the latter being thrown out of the venue eight weeks later. After a practice run at the Stanstead Tree Party in September 1993 they consolidated into a bigger crew with much bigger ideas. In October 1993, the cathedral-like arches and winding passages of the Heaven nightclub under Charing Cross Station became home to Megatripolis. Heaven was London's original gay-only nightclub, but had run non-gay (known as Pyramid) nights for many years.
The Megatripolis 'Festival in a box' on Thursday nights attracted a diverse patronage from a wide age range, many of whom would not otherwise have considered going clubbing. By early 1994 it had also taken over the adjoining Sound Shaft nightclub and turned it into an ambient space with frequent all-night sets by Mixmaster Morris on the club's fourth separate sound stage. Megatripolis also put on several large parties at Bagley's in Kings Cross and escalated its political agenda by renting an armoured car for the Criminal Justice Bill protest rally in July 1994.
The club ran until New Year 1995 when internal pressures split it apart. It continued with a diminished agenda on an underground basis until October 24th 1996. A UK tour and two shows in Athens took place in spring / summer 1996. A 3-CD album representing the club was released in July 1996 featuring mixes by DJ regulars and completely packaged on paper made entirely from hemp. All production materials owned by the club were distributed amongst it's crew members. At a court case in London in June 1998 brought by Clark remaining rights to the name "megatripolis" were given to Clark. A single Megatripolis event organised by Fraser Clark took place at Heaven in May 2000.
Culture & Events
Megatripolis proved popular, although some reporting of it suggested a dichotomy between an avowed downplay of psychedelic substances and perceptions of substance use by some club-goers. In any event, the club provided a meeting place of like-minded people and served as a platform for social awareness and activism as well as more traditional nightclub fare.
Typical evenings combined lectures and workshops with live musical performances and DJing playing mostly progressive house accompanied by video imagery and live theatre. Visits from speakers such as Allen Ginsberg, Terence McKenna, George Monbiot, Howard Marks and Ram Dass were common, as well as from guest DJs including Colin Dale, Alex Paterson, Paul Oakenfold, Andrew Weatherall and Mr C with resident DJs Marco Arnaldi, Darius, Richard Grey and Nik Sequenci. Atmospheric music combined with sound effects was often played along to films in the "chill-out rooms" set apart from the dance floors.
Further to the club's festival theme, the usual security staff were supplemented by fluorescent jacket-clad "minders"; new-age style stalls occupied the central hallway selling non-alcoholic energy drinks, body jewellery, alternative "small press" comics and magazines (such as the short-lived, but influential Head Magazine), as well as T-shirts and other clothing.
Also notable were early demonstrations of the World Wide Web at a time when most patrons were just beginning to be aware of what was then termed cyberculture, something seen as an important, if not defining, part of the Zippie future. Underground bulletin boards such as London's pHreak hosted live "cyber events" from the club. In what was seen as very progressive at the time, a live video interview with Arthur C Clarke was conducted via satellite from his home in Sri Lanka and Timothy Leary was transmitted via isdn for a video interview direct from his home in the Los Angeles hills into the club (he had been banned by the British government from entering the UK in person). A lecture by His Holiness the Dalai Lama was also broadcast at the club from the Barbican centre.
Environmental issues were an important part of the club's make-up with anti-road protests advertised on its noticeboards, hemp fashion shows, environmental debates and pedal-bike sound-systems playing on a regular basis..
Megatripolis West
An offshoot of the club was started by Fraser Clark and others, in San Francisco in late 1994. It ran for five consecutive weeks before closing.
The sixth and final night of the club was a "launch rave" hosted by Ronin Press for Timothy Leary's book Chaos And Cyber Culture. In true "illegal UK rave" tradition, patrons were given the event's location at a nearby burger joint. Leary jammed and performed jazz skat with famous Bay Area musician Maruga. He was later kidnapped by the Zippie Soundsystem and forced to release a statement condemning the UK Prime Minister John Major and the Criminal Justice Bill, which famously banned outdoor parties with music that included an "emission of a succession of repetitive beats".
Leary exerted a powerful influence over the philosophy of the club and the Zippie movement overall. An indication of this can be found in the introduction to his posthumous book The Fugitive Philosopher (Ronin Press, September 2007) written by Fraser Clark. The original title of the piece, published in Clark's online magazine the UP!, was Timothy Leary Was A Saint Who Will Be Remembered & Celebrated Long After Jesus, Mohamed and Elvis Are Forgotten Megatripolis Reunion Benefit for Fraser Clark.
In 2008 Fraser Clark announced that he had inoperable liver cancer and a farewell Megatripolis was held at Heaven on 13 November. He died on 21 January 2009.
The "slow cancellation of the future" is the idea that culture is re-running itself within the larger frame of capitalist consumption. Endless return to "classic sounds" within music, the revival of "retro fashion" or yet another band from the past getting back together to play their hits. There are millions of examples of how we are stuck culturally in a nostalgia extraveganza. Why this is so could be debated, but I believe it is to do with the promise of market capitalism now being exhausted under the weight of economic and ecological failures. Even the presently much flouted Artificial Intelligence is a dominance of technology over content, with much of it being derivative and process oriented.
The result is a need, from economic, social and political perspectives, to maintain the ideology that supports consumption. But at the same time there is a necessity to pacify and direct the population within the possibilities of culture, towards a benign state of passive consumption.
To quote Fisher:
“The slow cancellation of the future has been accompanied by a deflatioat then of expectations. There can be few who believe that in the coming year a record as great as, say, the Stooges’ Funhouse or Sly Stone’s There’s A Riot Goin’ On will be released. Still less do we expect the kind of ruptures brought about by The Beatles or disco. The feeling of belatedness, of living after the gold rush, is as omnipresent as it is disavowed. Compare the fallow terrain of the current moment with the fecundity of previous periods and you will quickly be accused of ‘nostalgia’. But the reliance of current artists on styles that were established long ago suggests that the current moment is in the grip of a formal nostalgia, of which more shortly.
It is not that nothing happened in the period when the slow cancellation of the future set in. On the contrary, those thirty years has been a time of massive, traumatic change. In the UK, the election of Margaret Thatcher had brought to an end the uneasy compromises of the so-called postwar social consensus. Thatcher’s neoliberal programme in politics was reinforced by a transnational restructuring of the capitalist economy. The shift into so-called Post-Fordism – with globalization, ubiquitous computerization and the casualisation of labour – resulted in a complete transformation in the way that work and leisure were organised. In the last ten to fifteen years, meanwhile, the internet and mobile telecommunications technology have altered the texture of everyday experience beyond all recognition. Yet, perhaps because of all this, there’s an increasing sense that culture has lost the ability to grasp and articulate the present. Or it could be that, in one very important sense, there is no present to grasp and articulate anymore.”
― Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures (Full PDF)
Taghounja (1980), Moroccan-Italian filmmaker Abdou Achouba’s ode to Sufi poet Abderrahman el Majdoub’s Qasidas starring Larbi Batma and Omar Sayed, two of the members of Nass El Ghiwane, who will also compose the film’s soundtrack. The film charts a quest for identity by two characters: one, a lyricist and musician (Batma), who strives to immerse himself in his country’s rich cultural heritage; the other, a young boy, who looks at the world around him through the eyes of innocence. Bringing to mind Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Uccellacci e Uccellini (1966), to whom the film is dedicated.
At Omar Sayed’s instigation, Larbi Batma desperately wanders through a mystical Morocco tirelessly collecting oral poetry, sounds and rhythms primarily drawn from popular music and the repertoire of the traditional religious brotherhoods (Gnawa, Aissawa, Heddawa, H’madcha, Jilala, etc.) While classified as fiction, Taghounja is, strictly speaking, a docu-fiction. However, its approach is markedly different from that of Transes (Maanouni’s essay film about Nass El Ghiwane). Instead of a biopic, it dramatizes the group’s lyrics, sometimes literally, within the sociopolitical life of the time. The parallel wanderings of the musician and the child mirroring the state of affairs of late 70s Morocco, a country still alienated by colonialism, neo-colonialism and the perversion of certain customs and traditions. The quest comes to nothing and Abdou Achouba refuses to give audiences an answer, preferring instead an open-ended conclusion.<å>
Taghounja was awarded a prize at the Venice Film Festival and the Carthage Film Festival, and was widely acclaimed by French intellectuals and artists. However, the politicised audience of students at the Maison du Maroc in Paris gave Achouba a reserved welcome, reproaching him for not being critical enough of the regime. Moroccan film critic and Abdou’s former philosophy teacher Noureddine Saïl said in his weekly radio program, Écran noir, “You may like or dislike Taghounja, but you have to admit that the film includes certain shots that are on a par with works of art.”
Two literary rebels. Two unforgettable lives.
In this documentary, we explore the brilliant yet turbulent journeys of Oscar Wilde and Charles Baudelaire—two iconic writers who defied convention, embraced beauty, and paid a heavy price for their genius.
From Baudelaire’s provocative Les Fleurs du mal and his battle with censorship, to Wilde’s meteoric rise in Victorian society and his tragic downfall, this video delves into their personal struggles, controversial works, and the cultural legacies they left behind.
A young archaeologist thinks he is cursed by an Aztec mask that makes him have strange nightmares. Before committing suicide, he sends the mask to his psychiatrist, who soon plunges into the mask's nightmarish world.
The Mask (re-released as Eyes of Hell and The Spooky Movie Show) is a 1961 Canadian surrealist horror film produced in 3-D by Warner Bros. It was directed by Julian Roffman and stars Paul Stevens, Claudette Nevins, and Bill Walker. It was written by Franklin Delessert, Sandy Haver, Frank Taubes and Slavko Vorkapich.
In a contemporary review, Howard Thompson of The New York Times commended the film's acting and cinematography but criticized the film's nightmare sequences, soundtrack and melodramatic plot. The Hollywood Reporter praised the film as "a superior horror film".
In retrospective reviews, Time Out panned the film, deeming it "a bland and hackneyed murder mystery that was spiced up by surreal nightmare sequences" and "tacky" use of 3D. Brad Wheeler of The Globe and Mail gave the film one out of four stars, similarly criticizing its 3D and plot and stating that its appeal was "limited to genre fetishists and popcorn-chomping ironists". Conversely, Chris Coffel of Bloody Disgusting felt that, despite a thin story, the film's psychedelic visuals, makeup effects and set pieces made it an enjoyable B-movie in the vein of William Castle.
The film has since gained a fan following over the years and is now considered a cult classic.The film was also featured in a season 13 episode of the cult science fiction series Mystery Science Theater 3000.
Murray Siple's feature-length documentary follows a group of homeless men who have combined bottle picking with the extreme sport of racing shopping carts down the steep hills of North Vancouver. This subculture depicts street life as much more than the stereotypes portrayed in mainstream media. The film takes a deep look into the lives of the men who race carts, the adversity they face and the appeal of cart racing despite the risk. Shot in high-definition and featuring tracks from Black Mountain, Ladyhawk, Vetiver, Bison, and Alan Boyd of Little Sparta.
Honeyland (2019) is a stunning, meditative documentary that unfolds like a quiet epic about nature, tradition, and survival. Set in a remote village in North Macedonia, the film follows Hatidze Muratova, a lone, middle-aged beekeeper and one of the last in Europe to practice wild beekeeping in harmony with the land.
Living with her ailing mother in a crumbling stone hut, Hatidze climbs cliffs, whispers to her bees, and harvests honey with care — always leaving “half for the bees.” Her existence is simple but dignified, rooted in an unspoken code of balance and respect. That delicate balance is disrupted when a nomadic family with seven children and dozens of cattle settles nearby. At first, Hatidze welcomes them with warmth. But when the family’s patriarch decides to take up beekeeping himself, driven more by profit than sustainability, tensions rise. Greed clashes with wisdom, and nature bears the cost.
Filmed over three years, directors Tamara Kotevska and Ljubomir Stefanov use no narration or interviews. Instead, they let the camera observe, allowing the story to emerge organically through breathtaking visuals and deeply human moments. The cinematography captures the stark beauty of the landscape and the quiet poetry of Hatidze’s daily rituals.
At its core, Honeyland is about more than bees — it's a microcosm of global issues: climate change, capitalism, and the fragile balance between humans and nature. Hatidze emerges as a quietly heroic figure, both resilient and heartbreakingly alone.
The film is both intimate and universal, minimalist yet emotionally rich. Nominated for both Best Documentary and Best International Feature at the Oscars, Honeyland is a rare gem that speaks volumes without ever raising its voice — a powerful testament to harmony, loss, and the price of exploitation.
Click on the above image to watch the entire film.
"Story of a Prostitute" (Shunpu Den) is a 1965 Japanese film directed by Seijun Suzuki. The movie is set during the Second Sino-Japanese War and follows the story of a young woman named Harumi, played by Yumiko Nogawa, who becomes a prostitute for the Japanese army. The film explores themes of love, sacrifice, and the dehumanizing effects of war. Seijun Suzuki's direction is characterized by his bold visual style and unconventional storytelling techniques, and "Story of a Prostitute" is no exception. The film features striking imagery and imaginative camerawork that enhance its emotional impact. "Story of a Prostitute" received critical acclaim for its powerful performances and gripping narrative. It's considered one of Suzuki's masterpieces and a highlight of Japanese cinema from the 1960s.
Directed and cowritten by Jess Franco, this West German-Spanish collaboration was released in Spanish as Las Vampiras. It was shot in Turkey in 1970 and featured a notable soundtrack that was released in the 1990s as Vampyros Lesbos: Sexadelic Dance Party, which became a hit on the British alternative charts. Soledad Miranda stars as Countess Nadine Caroday, who uses her erotic nightclub act to lure and then kill nubile young women.
"Number One" (1973) is an Italian crime-thriller film directed by Gianni Buffardi. It stars Renzo Montagnani, Luigi Pistilli, and Claude Jade, and it's loosely based on a real-life story about crime and drugs in the Rome underground. The film explores the dark underbelly of Rome in the early 1970s, revealing drug use, crime, and sexual scandals.
Click on the image for the full film.
The Devil Rides Out (U.S. title: The Devil's Bride), is a 1968 British horror film directed by Terence Fisher and starring Christopher Lee, Charles Gray, Niké Arrighi and Leon Greene. It was written by Richard Matheson based on the 1934 novel of the same title by Dennis Wheatley. It is considered one of Terence Fisher's best films.
Click on the image above to watch it.
Good Copy Bad Copy is a documentary about copyright and culture in the context of Internet, peer-to-peer file sharing and other technological advances, directed by Andreas Johnsen, Ralf Christensen, and Henrik Moltke.
It features interviews with many people with various perspectives on copyright, including copyright lawyers, producers, artists and filesharing service providers.
A central point of the documentary is the thesis that "creativity itself is on the line" and that a balance needs to be struck, or that there is a conflict, between protecting the right of those who own intellectual property and the rights of future generations to create.
Shanghai Express is a 1932 American pre-Code film about a group of train passengers held hostage by a warlord during the Chinese Civil War. It was directed by Josef von Sternberg and stars Marlene Dietrich, Clive Brook, Anna May Wong and Warner Oland. The screenplay was written by Jules Furthman based on a 1931 short story by Harry Hervey. Shanghai Express was the fourth of seven films that Sternberg and Dietrich created together.
Short Cuts is a 1993 American comedy-drama film, directed by Robert Altman. Filmed from a screenplay by Altman and Frank Barhydt, it is inspired by nine short stories and a poem by Raymond Carver. The film is set in Los Angeles, in contrast to the original Pacific Northwest backdrop of Carver's stories. Short Cuts traces the actions of 22 principal characters, both in parallel and at occasional loose points of connection.
"Los Angeles always seems to be waiting for something. Permanence seems out of reach; some great apocalyptic event is on the horizon, and people view the future tentatively. Robert Altman's 'Short Cuts' captures that uneasiness perfectly in its interlocking stories about people who seem trapped in the present, always juggling." - Roger Ebert
A overly produced documentary about the development of club culture, from rave to stage. Has some interesting contributions to make but should not be taken too seriously. For me the real crucible of rave happened in fields and abandoned factories, with little documentation surviving the night/day in question.
B-MOVIE: LUST & SOUND IN WEST BERLIN is a documentary about music, art and chaos in the Wild West Berlin of the 1980s. The walled-in city which became the creative melting pot for a special kind of sub and pop culture, attracting ingenious dilettantes and world famous celebrities alike. However, before the iron curtain would fall, artists and communards, squatters and hedonists of all kinds would enjoy Berlins unconventional lifestyle. It was not about long-term commercial success, but about living for the moment - the kick - the here and now. With mostly unreleased TV and film footage, photos and original interviews, B-MOVIE tells the story of life in the divided city, a cultural interzone in which everything and anything seemed possible in a place unlike anywhere else in Europe. It's a fast-paced collage of stories from a frenzied but creative decade, starting with punk and ending with the Love Parade, all from a city where the days are short and the nights are endless. This is a time when Berlin was like a B-MOVIE: Colourfully cheap and trashy, threatened and thrown together, anxious and ambitious, clubbed and caned, stoned and strung out, drunk, drugged and - just very special.
Click on the image above to be taken to the film.
„B-Movie“ ist eine Dokumentation über Musik, Kunst und Chaos im wilden West-Berlin der 80er Jahre. Bevor der eiserne Vorhang fiel, tummelten sich hier Künstler und Kommunarden, Hausbesetzer und Hedonisten.
With music by Ravi Shankar. Alice in Wonderland is a 1966 BBC television play, shot on film, based on Lewis Carroll's 1865 book Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. It was adapted, produced and directed by Jonathan Miller, then best known for his appearance in the satirical revue Beyond the Fringe.
Miller's production is unique among live-action Alice films in that he consciously avoided the standard Tenniel-inspired costume design and "florid" production values. Most of the Wonderland characters are played by actors in standard Victorian dress, with a real cat used to represent the Cheshire Cat. Miller justified his approach as an attempt to return to what he perceived as the essence of the story: "Once you take the animal heads off, you begin to see what it's all about. A small child, surrounded by hurrying, worried people, thinking 'Is that what being grown up is like?'"
The rise of the so called "sex-guru" Bhagwan and his model commune in Poona and Oregon in the 1970s and 1980s told by his former close disciples, his personal secretary and bodyguard.
Fist of Jesus is a 2012 Spanish splatter comedy short film about Jesus Christ in a zombie apocalypse.
During a sermon, Jesus learns from Jacob that Jacob's son Lazarus has died. Jesus promises Jacob to resurrect him. Lazarus is resurrected, but as a zombie. He attacks Jacob and Jesus can only barely escape alongside Judas. The zombie epidemic spreads rapidly, as Jesus and Judas run from the zombie hordes, which now include the Roman occupying forces and a gang of cowboys. Judas hangs himself out of panic, but is successfully resurrected by Jesus.
When the pair are surrounded by zombies, Jesus asks Judas for a weapon, receiving only a fish. Jesus then multiplies the fish, which he and Judas use to kill the zombies. After a bloody battle, Judas laments that they were unable to evangelize anyone. Jesus reassures him by saying that they have at least sent many souls to Heaven.
The plot of Fist of Jesus and the accompanying short films are peppered with visual references to special effects from other great horror and splatter films.
Vagabond (French: Sans toit ni loi, "without roof or law") is a 1985 French drama film directed by Agnès Varda, featuring Sandrine Bonnaire. It tells through flashbacks the story of a vagabond who wanders through the Languedoc-Roussillon wine country one winter, beginning after her body is found. The film premiered at the 42nd Venice International Film Festival, where it won the Golden Lion. Vagabond was nominated for four César Awards, with Bonnaire winning Best Actress. The film was the 36th highest-grossing film of the year with a total of 1,080,143 admissions in France.
Click on the image above and you are there for the entire film.
If the entire world is bad, why shouldn’t we be? Adopting this insolent attitude as their guiding philosophy, a pair of hedonistic young women (Ivana Karbanová and Jitka Cerhová), both named Marie, embark on a gleefully debauched odyssey of gluttony, giddy destruction, and antipatriarchal resistance, in which nothing is safe from their nihilistic pursuit of pleasure. But what happens when the fun is over? Matching her anarchic message with an equally radical aesthetic, director Věra Chytilová, with the close collaboration of cinematographer Jaroslav Kučera, unleashes an optical storm of fluctuating film stocks, kaleidoscopic montages, cartoonish stop-motion cutouts, and surreal costumes designed by Ester Krumbachová, who also cowrote the script. The result is Daisies, the most defiant provocation of the Czechoslovak New Wave, an exuberant call to rebellion aimed squarely at those who uphold authoritarian oppression in any form.
Velvet Goldmine (1998) dir. Todd Haynes (Click on the image and you are there)
In 1984, journalist Arthur Stuart investigates the mysterious rise and fall of glam rock icon Brian Slade, a Bowie-esque figure who staged his own disappearance a decade earlier. As Arthur pieces together Slade’s story—his relationship with wild American rocker Curt Wild, his transformation into a glittering star, and his ultimate downfall—the film becomes a kaleidoscopic meditation on identity, fame, and reinvention.
Todd Haynes crafts a dazzling, surreal homage to the glam rock era, blending fictionalized history with mythic storytelling. The film’s striking visual style, inspired by 1970s glam culture, embraces bold colors, theatrical costumes, and dynamic cinematography. The soundtrack, featuring original and reinterpreted glam rock classics, amplifies the film’s electric, nostalgic atmosphere.
Beyond its extravagant aesthetic, Velvet Goldmine explores themes of artistic evolution, sexual fluidity, and the commodification of rebellion. The film blurs the line between reality and illusion, mirroring how icons are created and dismantled. Arthur’s journey reflects the bittersweet loss of youthful idealism, as he reconciles his past with the present.
Premiering at Cannes, where it won the Special Jury Prize for Artistic Contribution, Velvet Goldmine divided critics but gained a devoted cult following. It remains a defining queer rock opera and a love letter to the era that celebrated beauty, excess, and transformation.
The Witch's Cradle, sometimes billed as Witches' Cradle, is an unfinished, silent, experimental short film written and directed by Maya Deren, featuring Marcel Duchamp, and filmed in Peggy Guggenheim's Art of This Century gallery.
The surrealist film shows repetitive imagery involving a string fashioned in a bizarre, almost spiderweb-like pattern over the hands of several individuals, most notably an unnamed young woman (Pajorita Marta) and an elderly gentleman (Duchamp).
The film also shows a shadowy darkness and people filmed at odd angles, an exposed human heart, and other occult symbols and ritualistic imagery which evokes an unsettling and dream-like aura.
The Witch's Cradle was written and directed by experimental filmmaker Maya Deren. The film was developed at a comparison between surrealists' defiance of time and space and that of medieval magicians and witches. Daren developed the film over a period of one month, lasting from August to September 1943. However, long after principal photography for the film commenced, she abandoned the project, leaving the film incomplete. Some of the film's outtakes were found and stored at the Anthology Film Archives, while several sequences that were shot appear to be lost. Surviving shots from the film are mostly semi-edited sequences, including one particular sequence that Deren had engineered during post-production to be played backwards.
In her essay taken from her dissertation for her doctorate at The University of Southern California,
“So I Would Move Among These Things: Maya Deren and “The Witch’s Cradle,” Fox Henry Frazier revives
the important legacy and cultural importance of Ukrainian-born, avant-garde poet and filmmaker Maya Deren,
who died too young of a brain hemorrhage in 1961. Frazier’s analysis of Deren’s filmic semiotics reminds
present day readers not only of Deren’s groundbreaking work as a filmmaker in the nineteen forties and fifties,
but her poetic genius as well for creating memorable surrealistic imagery in both her poetry and films. By
documenting Deren’s particular brilliance for converting a torturous, misogynistic ritual called “The Witch’s
Cradle” at the hand of the writer and “adventurer” William Seabrook, Frazier explains just how Deren
ingeniously converted her torturous experience with Seabrook into her own visionary feminist film starring
Marcel Duchamp under the same title, thus not only exposing Seabrook’s ritual for his thinly disguised enactment
of one of his perverse sexual fantasies in the guise of witch-training for broom-riding, but co-opting it
as her own with a far superior philosophical conceit for betraying the complexity of the feminine psyche via
the symbolic use of string. “Deren’s interest in the power of objects may feed into bigger questions triggered
by the Rhinebeck episode,” Frazier writes, “questions, for example, about bodily/embodied autonomy for
female and femme people, and subject-versus-object power within that context…We might ask,” she goes on
to suggest, “whether there is an implication here that, if these objects have subjectivity and agency, then perhaps even a woman who has been reduced to an object, in a violent way, might then more easily be able to envision herself possessing subjectivity and agency—even if that, too, must be achieved by supernatural or occult means, i.e., witchiness.” –Chard DeNiord
The year is 1939; Nazi Germany has recently invaded Poland, and many small towns and villages have already become victims of the German raid. A regiment of Nazi soldiers arrive upon a small church nestled in the sprawling wheat fields surrounding the small town of Leczyca. As they enter the church grounds, a low-ranking soldier is ordered into the catacombs deep beneath the church to search for valuables and items of historical and cultural significance for appropriation. Reluctantly, the young soldier heads down, and discovers he has been tainted by the stolen goods, further building the Legend of Boruta.
Inner city Sydney in the 1980s and 90s was a very special place. I first spent extended amounts of time in Newtown from 1991. The creativity and energy of the community was amazing. Music, art, performance and writing as well as dancing, singing, sculpting and raving were happening everywhere. Large loft-style warehouse spaces could be rented for a few hundred dollars a week and large groups could live in them too. I moved permanently to Sydney in late 1992 and the city was my base late 1999. The city has changed a lot since then and on my first and only visit back since, in 2023, it was almost unrecognisable.
This is the story of Bryan Cook. A local inner city photographer and Australian independent music lover who captured some of the most unique, unseen photos around the inner city pubs like The Hopetoun, The Vulcan, The Sydney Trade Union Club The Evening star, The Strawberry Hills Hotel and more.
His love of film and digital photography inadvertently captured a music scene that was never given a lot of attention or documented by the mainstream press. Dr Gregory Ferris, an esteemed academic from the UTS, discovered Cookie's extensive, extraordinary and rarely seen photos and exhibited them at the Powerhouse Museum in an interactive display that recreated the Hopetoun Hotel. Cookie has confirmed that the total number of photographs taken over the years exceeded 80,000, a monumental achievement.
This video was the concept of Ed Garland and Nick Bleszynski, who were determined to expose to the world the amazing photography of Bryan (Cookie) Cook and his accidental documentation of a unique time in Australian music history.
Interviews:
Clyde Bramley (Hoodoo Gurus)
Jon Roberts (The Barbarellas)
Geoff Datson (Samurai Trash)
Susie Beauchamp (Box the Jesuit)
Dr Gregory Ferris (UTS Academic)
Ed Garland (Waxworks)
Credit to Nick Bleszynski for footage at the Moshpit Newtown and the scene with Dr Ferris.
My Dinner with Andre is a 1981 American comedy-drama film directed by Louis Malle, and written by and starring André Gregory and Wallace Shawn as fictionalized versions of themselves sharing a conversation at Café des Artistes in Manhattan. The film's dialogue covers topics such as experimental theater, the nature of theater, and the nature of life, and contrasts Andre's spiritual experiences with Wally's modest humanism.
Twenty-four hours straight of live experimentation and improvisation, featuring experimental/noise/drone bands and artists from the Bay Area and beyond. A KZSU tradition since the '90s; this is the 20th Day of Noise. Listen in on 90.1 FM in the Bay Area and https://kzsulive.stanford.edu around the world.
Part I (12am-12pm)
Part II (12pm-12am) https://www.youtube.com/live/BqVmpZ7tyvU
The LAFMS have created a huge collection of homemade musical instruments throughout their history. A large selection of these objects will be on display in the space, exposing their playful and ingenious approach to sound. The selection on display includes both historical and new instruments made by Rick Potts, Tom Recchion, Joe Potts, Joseph Hammer and others. Rick Potts’ Hinge Neck Guitars, Tom Recchion’s “Strunagaphone” and Spring Boards, Joe Potts’ Chopped Optigan, and Paul McCarthy’s Sonotubes will be among the plethora of functional sculptural objects included. Films by John Duncan, Michael Intriere, Doug Henry, Tom Recchion, Rick Potts, Jonathon Rosen, Janie Geiser and more will be screened. A “record store” ala Poo-Bah Records, a scene of the early development of the LAFMS, will offer CDs, Vinyl, Cassettes and other objects for sale. A non-linier, historical, wall-sized collage of flyers, drawings, notes, correspondence, photos and other ephemera will also be on display.
Another focal point of the exhibition will be a major collection of photographs taken by Fredrik Nilsen. Nilsen, now a well-known exhibition and art photographer, will show prints documenting the LAFMS between 1972 and 1981. These images that have been printed especially for this exhibition, portray the beginning of this pivotal movement. Photographs documenting this vast scene by Tom Recchion, Kevin Laffey, Dennis Duck, and others will also be shown.
Brief History-
The foundation of the Los Angeles Free Music Society goes back to 1973 when Rick Potts, Joe Potts, and Chip Chapman—began making tape experiments and improvised music mixed from TV cartoons and material appropriated from Chapman’s eccentric record collection. A year later, with Tom Potts and Susan Farthing- Chapman they formed Le Forte Four. In Pasadena they became acquainted with Tom Recchion who worked at Poo-Bah Records and kept locals informed of new experimental and avant-garde records. Concurrently at Poo-Bah’s, late night improvised music experiments were taking place in the back room, with Tom and customers-now friends Dennis Duck, the Ace of Space, The Professor, Fredrik Nilsen, Juan Gomez and Harold Schroeder. Out of those sessions Tom and Harold formed The Two Who Do Duets, and went on to form the Doo-Dooettes with the inclusion of Fredrik, Juan and Dennis. It was only a short while later that the factions joined forces under the LAFMS moniker when it became obvious that there was a symbiosis to their approach and aesthetics, as well as strength in numbers. Ace Farren Ford, also affiliated with Poo-Bah, was part of Ace and Duce, also joined the ranks and the first LAFMS concert was produced in 1975 featuring Le Forte Four, the Doo-Dooettes and Ace and Duce, billed as The Los Angeles Free Music Society. Members of the avant-rock group Smegma, who had already been in existence since 1973, also developed out of and beyond the Poo-Bah Records scene before moving to Portland, Oregon in 1975. John Duncan, another Poo-Bah customer and subsequent acquaintance of Tom’s became part of the collective, releasing several of his earliest recordings as part of the LAFMS canon. AIRWAY, Joe Potts’s project and one of the first “noise” bands, emerged spurring on the development of “noise as art” aesthetic, becoming a global influential force and the idea of “maxmimalism.” Influenced by everything from Zappa/Beefheart to Cage, Terry Riley and One String Sam, they were ahead of the curve and their DIY aesthetic presaged Punk Rock, releasing their own efforts and self-produced concerts.
This was only the beginning. As years went on many groups and affiliations began to spring up and each member of the LAFMS began to emerge as solo artist in both visual arts and musical fields as well as collaborate and join other groups.
LAFMS’s work and performances have been pivotal figures in L.A.’s history of experimental art and sound and have had a global impact with international recognition. They are not simply a NOISE group, but embrace all forms of music and have demonstrated an adept capacity for tonal, improvised music, sound art, rock, musique- concrete, “turntablism”, humor, drone, minimalism, etc.
Since 1975, the LAFMS has released over 25 recordings on their own label and participants have released or have appeared on hundreds of releases from labels around the world. A merchandise store with some of these releases will operate throughout the exhibition, where visitors can find in-print and rare out-of-print items available for purchase including a new 2012 edition of “Lightbulb”, an occasional magazine published between 1977—1981 by the LAFMS.
A few infamous quotes about LAFMS
“Free ears and minds are one thing, but what about aesthetics?”—Hal Clark, Electronic Music Festival Hovikkoden, Norway (1974)
“For decades, [the LAFMS] has influenced literally dozens of free-improv weirdos and avant-garde musician/non-musician types—who in turn have influenced thousands of others.”—LA Weekly (2011)
“A bunch of Hoodlums!”--- Director of Pilot Theatre, LA 1977 (upon canceling a show by AIRWAY and the Doo-Dooettes)
