De stad was van ons - It was our city (English subtitles)

This documentary is about the history of the Amsterdam squatters between 1975 and 1988. 28 former activist tell the story of the movement which caused considerable turmoil in the Netherlands. The film is made by Joost Seelen and Eric Duivenvoorden. It was nominated for the Award for Best Feature-Length Documentary at the International Documentary Festival Amsterdam in 1996.

ADM - The Lost Free State

 

ADM - The Lost Free State - complete SUBTITLED from Suwanne CCtv on Vimeo.

ADM was a squat in the Port of Amsterdam, to the west of the city next to the North Sea Canal. The squat lasted from 1997 until its eviction in early 2019. Around 130 people lived on the terrain of 45 hectares in buildings, on boats and in vehicles. Local Amsterdam television station AT5 produced a six part series on ADM called the Lost Free State (De Verloren Vrijstaat) in 2018. This the series combined into a single program with subtitles in English. Squatting never died!

Where Eagles Fly : Seven Years with Siberian Shamans 1994-2001

7 YEARS WITH SIBERIAN SHAMANS 1994-2001 from costanzo allione on Vimeo.

Follow the link to the film. From the ancient Mongol siber, Siberia means “the wonderful and pure earth”. It is a country of marvels, with great mountainous chains, golden hills and powerful rivers; it was like this at the time when the first explorers saw it, in the XVII century. It has stayed the same even now when we have ‘rediscovered’ it in our backward journey in search of Siberian shamanism: a kaleidoscope of peoples, ethnicities, religions and traditions. We wanted to lift the veil on this remote world, after seventy years of state-atheism, in order to understand whether this very ancient tradition had been able to survive the horrors of the Stalinist Regime. We travelled in the Transiberian, we trusted run-down buses, we crossed rivers on improvised barges, trying to sustain the rebirth process of ancient shamanic traditions. We helped the shamans revive and bring to light rites and ceremonies dedicated to the Master Spirits of these savage lands and we lived with them, gathering around the Sacred Fire, sharing the cold of the yurta and the magic of their shamanic chants. During these seven years of life together, we have collected the secrets of their magic arts and their spiritual testament: to respect Father Sky and Mother Earth.

The Notorious Bettie Page 2005

 

The Notorious Bettie Page is a 2005 American biographical drama film directed by Mary Harron. The screenplay by Harron and Guinevere Turner focuses on 1950s pinup and bondage model Bettie Page, portrayed by Gretchen Mol.

Bettie Page is an ambitious, naïve, and devout young Christian woman who longs to leave Nashville, Tennessee, following a childhood of sexual abuse, a failed wartime marriage, and a gang rape. In 1949, she departs for New York City, where she enrolls in an acting class. Amateur photographer Jerry Tibbs discovers her walking on the beach at Coney Island and she agrees to model for him. He suggests she restyle her hair with the bangs that would become her trademark.

Bettie becomes a favorite of nature photographers (including Bunny Yeager, who films her posing with two leopards), and she has no hesitation about removing her clothes for the photographers when asked. Before long images of the shapely brunette reach brother-and-sister entrepreneurs Paula and Irving Klaw, who run a respectable business selling movie stills and memorabilia, but also deal with fetish photos, magazines, and 8- and 16-millimeter films for additional income. Their top model Maxie takes Bettie under her wing, and she soon finds herself wearing leather corsets and thigh-high boots while wielding whips and chains for photographer John Willie, frequently at the request of Little John, a mild-mannered attorney with unusual tastes. Bettie is innocently unaware of the sexual nature of the images that rapidly are making her a star in the underground world of bondage aficionados.

In 1955, Bettie is called to testify before a hearing, headed by Senator Estes Kefauver, investigating the effects of pornography on American youth. Though she waits patiently for 12 hours to answer the committee's questions, Kefauver, for reasons unknown, decides to not bring her before the committee and dismisses her without an explanation. When it becomes apparent that casting directors are more interested in her notoriety than in any acting talent she might possess, Bettie heads to Miami Beach. Drifting along with limited career prospects and a virtually nonexistent social life, she stumbles upon a small evangelical church, walks inside and rushes forward to embrace Jesus Christ during the altar call. Although she insists she is not ashamed of anything she has done in her life, she appears happy to leave her past behind and return to her spiritual roots by preaching the word of the Lord on street corners.

In New York, Irving is highly stressed and suffering from poor health. He decides that he and his sister must burn their vast collection of erotic photos and movie footage to avoid potential prosecution. Paula reluctantly complies with her brother's request, but secretly saves the negatives of many of Bettie's pictures and movies from the bonfire, thereby ensuring that Bettie's work will survive for future generations. Click on the image above for the full film.

The Naked Bunyip (1970)

 

Barry Humphries died today. This is one of his many films. The Naked Bunyip is a 1970 Australian documentary film directed by John B. Murray. The film explores sex in Australia using a fictional framework. A shy young man is hired by an ad agency to conduct a survey on sex in Australia. The somewhat clueless young man investigates homosexuality, transvestites, prostitution, and strip clubs along with every other variant on the "norm". While doing his interviews he meets celebrities, self proclaimed sex experts, prostitutes, female impersonators, pop stars, actors, and legislators as well as self appointed moral guardians.

The Naked Bunyip is a sex documentary and a blend of fact and fiction; "[it] incorporates the fictionalizing of the 'real' that had been a feature of tendencies in French 'new wave' and the American avant-garde narrative cinema." Graeme Blundell plays a shy young man who works for an ad agency, and the agency hires him to survey about sex in Australia. The film consists of "unrehearsed and unscripted" interviews as Blundell's character investigates a variety of sexual experiences, all except for the "normal" heterosexual experience.

Among the people interviewed are Dame Edna Everage, Jacki Weaver, Aggy Read, Harry M. Miller, and Russell Morris.

The Commonwealth censors insisted on five minutes of footage being removed but the producers refused, simply blacking out the offending images and bleeping the soundtrack. On the black footage, Murray inserted a picture of a bunyip performing a parody of the forbidden action. Murray also previewed the film without cuts to censors, angering the censor. This led to a debate about censorship which helped lead to a reform of censorship standards

GNAWA, MUSIC AND BEYOND - ENGLISH VERSION

 

Gnawa: Music and Beyond. Jacques Willemont, dir.; Viviana Pâques, scientific direction. Produced by Espaces, 2012; DVD includes English and French versions, both have Arabic with English or French subtitles; color, 58 mins. 

Jacques Willemont's documentary Gnawa: Music and Beyond explores the history, symbolism and ritual practice of Morocco's Gnawa traditions. The Gnawa are a population brought to Morocco from West Africa through a history of trans-Saharan slavery. In some ways mirroring syncretic traditions that grew out of trans-Atlantic slavery, like santaría in Cuba or condomblé in Brazil, the Gnawa fused West African religious and musical practices with Islam to create a musically-driven sacred healing ceremony called a derdba. Following an animal sacrifice, this all-night event moves through a series of spirits who possess adepts through trance. Willemont and his team draw upon years of interview footage to explore both how this ritual works and what its various components mean. To this end, the film relies heavily on interviews and analysis by Viviana Pâques, a French scholar of Gnawa music who provided scientific direction for the production. The film aims to demonstrate what can be a clandestine practice in Morocco by sharing a wealth of footage from these interviews with Pâques (who passed away in 2007) and from a recorded ceremony.

 
Structurally, Gnawa: Music and Beyond is built around the Gnawa ceremony as it has existed in Morocco for generations. To do so, the film layers three central types of content. Interview material with Al Ayachi, a ritual leader called a moqqadem, sits between documentary footage and interviews with Viviana Pâques, who presents an interpretive analysis based on her three decades of work with Al Ayachi and the Gnawa. Partly because of this structural choice, the film presents dual focal points: it aims to preserve and share the secret knowledge held within Gnawa ritual practice while it presents the importance of deep interpretive symbolism as studied by anthropologists like Pâques. She has been a central figure within the study of Gnawa music and ritual, most notably through her two books on the topic, L'arbre cosmique dans la pensée populaire et dans la vie quotidienne du nord-ouest africain (The cosmic tree in Northwest African popular thought and daily life [1964]), and La religion des esclaves: Recherches sur la confrérie marocaine des Gnawa (The religion of slaves: research on the Moroccan brotherhood of the Gnawa [1991]).

 
In the immense conglomerate of African fusions which we can explore today we find a wholly unique case: the Gnawa. The approach to the Gnawa’s musical expression, of profound social and religious implications, reveals to us not only an extremely rich cultural heritage but also one of the chapters that would have greatest effect on the development of North African societies during the last 500 years: slavery.

 
The term Gnawa refers to the brotherhood groupings (and, by extension, to their manifestations) of a minority ethnic-religious group of sub-Saharan origin but with an important presence especially in Morocco and, to a lesser extent, in Algeria and Tunisia, where they are known as Diwan and Stambali respectively. There is no unanimity on seeing the Gnawiya as a Tariqa or Sufi religious path in the way that some of those more rooted in the Maghreb can be, such as the Qadiriya, Issawiya or Hamdushiya, among others, with which, however, it shares an organisational structure and ecstatic and possession rites, in what are considered the limits of Islamic orthodoxy. The establishing of these syncretic expressions took place over several centuries, during which the animist ritual substrate gradually adapted to Islam, with variations which depended both on the geographic area and the social environment to which the different black communities had to adapt themselves.

 
The Origins The origin of the Gnawa, a word that seems to come from the Berber term agnaw/ignawen (dumb) in reference to their ignorance of Arabic and Berber must first be found in the diverse contingents of black slaves who between the 11th and 13th centuries were taken to the Maghreb strip from the Kingdom of Abyssinia, which occupied a strategic position in the caravanserai routes, and from the old Kingdom of Ghana (which today is part of Mauritania, Mali, Burkina Faso and Senegal). The traditional slave trade from the great Sudan intensified because of the conquest at the end of the 16th century of part of the Songhai Empire carried out by the Sultan of Morocco Ahmed Al-Mansur, a trafficking that continued until the early 20th century.

 
The descendants of these slaves, together with other free emigrant black peoples who arrived through the caravanserai routes, mixed with the local population and formed a group that despite its diverse origin acquired its own identity thanks to the figure of Sidi Bilal, the first slave of Ethiopian origin freed by Mohammed and who was the first Muezzin of Islam. These communities would also be known by other names in reference to their geographical origin (Sudani, Bambara), their social status (Ousfan, slaves), their religious affiliations (Bilali) or some of their practices of origin (Bori, in reference to the dance of possession practised by the Hausa taken to Tripoli). The large concentration of the black community in cities such as Marrakech and Essaouira (formerly called the port of Timbuktu) was because both cities had been important slave markets connected to the trans-Saharan route.

From Gnawa: Music and Spirit by Mª Elena Morató

Without Walls: The Cardinal And The Corpse (Iain Sinclair / Chris Petit 1992)

"Now that world has passed. It's a question of people knowing more about things. Everything has been discovered in a way, or at least priced. So one is not really interesting, or the greater world is not interested in you and what you are discovering. I am sorry. But I am sure that somewhere there is something that will once again set my heart on fire again. I don't doubt it." - Martin Stone (musician and book dealer)

A Channel 4 documentary on the now lost world of second hand book dealers and runners, the criminal underworld and counter culture in London. Interestingly it features a young Alan Moore, the occult graphic novelist (Watchmen, V for Vendetta, Promethea etc.) as he searches of a mysterious book that "connects everything.... the key to the city". Even the legendary Brian Caitlin makes an appearance (adding gravitas to the whole thing).

Former aristo turned crime writer Robin Cook (aka Derek Raymond) sets the tone ('All life is ultimately about death. It's what I call the general contract') while Michael Moorcock ('Moorcock schmoorcock,' mutters a Charing Cross Road dealer) casts doubt on Driffield's claim that a pulp novel, The Cardinal and the Corpse by Stephen Blakesley, is actually the work of Flann O'Brien. Petit and Sinclair's film is a deliberately jarring, oddly engaging rogues' gallery that even makes room for Tony Lambrianou, a former associate of the Krays ('I don't like the word gangster: I feel embarrassed when people use that word')."

Suburbia (1984)

Runaways, punks and outcasts calling themselves The Rejects group together in an abandoned house just outside of town. It explores many things people would assume to be covered in this kind of film. Cast consists of real punks and Flea from RHCP. Also live performances by TSOL, D. I. and the Vandals.

He Died With a Falafel in His Hand

 

He Died With A Felafel In His Hand from helen raymond on Vimeo.

A 2001 Australian comedy-drama film directed by Richard Lowenstein and starring Noah Taylor. The film draws on the 1994 memoir of the same name and consists of a series of vignettes from a young man's experience of sharing accommodation with a variety of characters.

The True Story of Artaud le Mômo (1993 Eng Sub)

 

"The True Story of Artaud le Mômo", by Gérard Mordillat and Jérôme Prieur, produced in 1993. Attendees: Luciane Abiet, Jacqueline Adamov, André Berne-Joffroy, Annie Besnard-Faure, Gustav Bolin, Denise Colomb , Pierre Courtens, Alain Gheerbrant, Alfred Kern, Gervais Marchal, Domnine Milliex, Minouche Pastier, Henri Pichette, Marcel Piffret, Rolande Prevel, Marthe Robert, Jany Seiden de Ruy, Paule Thévenin and Henri Thomas.

Note:
Poet, man of the theatre, actor, Antonin Artaud (1896-1948) is the author of an immense body of work among which is The Theater and its Double, The Voyage to the land of the Tarahumaras, Van Gogh the suicide of society, Artaud the Mômo... On May 26, 1946, after nine years of internment in various asylums and finally at the Rodez hospice, Antonin Artaud returned to Paris, welcomed at the Gare d' Austerlitz by his friends Henri and Colette Thomas, Jean Dubuffet and Marthe Robert... Arthur Adamov and Marthe Robert having guaranteed his material life, he will now live at the Maison de Santé in Ivry, under the authority of Dr. Delmas who will provide him with a pavilion and will leave him completely free of his time and his movements. We want to revisit the friends of Antonin Artaud, his loves, his companions the path he took, to find in their memory the places he frequented, to redo his journey between the clinic of Ivry and Saint-Germain-des- Prés, in the Paris of the immediate post-war period. That is to say that we want to find the voice of Artaud, his face, his presence, in the voice, the face, the presence of those who accompanied him, and whose life he changed: Paule Thévenin, Henri Thomas, Marthe Robert, Anie Besnard, Jany de Ruy, Rolande Prevel, Henri Pichette...