The End of Sexual Taboos: Homosexuality and Other Variants
“Sexual permissiveness – certainly destructive of established mores – has been an aspect of the ideology of the avant-garde from its inception. For this movement is forever at war with society and its values.” He calls necrophilia “one of the unconquered areas of liberated cinema.”
–
The Bloodthirsty Fairy (1968, Roland Lethem)
Delivery men unleash the title character, who goes out and beats a man to death, strangles a nun, blinds a boy. She’s collecting severed penises in jars, and they’ve got a metaphorical way of showing her chop a guy’s dick off, which unfortunately involved killing a chicken. I’m not wowed by the church organ soundtrack, and why the nazi credits? Vogel just says “The swastika that opened the film changes into Nixon,” while Lightcone points out nazi stuff in his other films.
–
Fragment of Seeking (1946, Curtis Harrington)
Wow, I was not expecting that. Overdressed Guy creeps around to dramatic music, observing all the women and one smiley man in the vicinity, all sharp compositions. He goes inside and takes off the raincoat, hat and glasses, and wanders into a girl’s room and kisses her – and she becomes a skeleton. He goes back outside, the smiley man is unresponsive and all the women are skeletons. Goes in another door and someone inside slowly turns their head towards him – you expect another skeleton but it’s himself, wearing a wig. My first by Harrington, who seems like a Ken Anger-caliber 1940s weirdo (complimentary).
Mouseover to turn your lonely-boy self into your wig self:
–
The First Mystery: Birth
It is difficult to believe that until about two decades ago, films of this process were not permitted to be shown publicly. Hollywood provided euphemistic or fraudulent paraphrases of birth, occurring either off-screen (with shots of anxious relatives waiting outside) or confined to the woman’s face, sometimes showing genteel and manageable discomfort; blood or screams were missing, except in the case of “loose women” who had to be made to suffer.
Kirsa Nicholina (1970, Gunvor Nelson)
Somewhere out there is a person in their fifties who I just watched being born. Soundtrack is folk music performed by the father, oh no.
Vogel:
As the baby, still half in the mother’s body, begins to emerge, the mother smilingly takes its hand in her own and holds it. This tender gesture would not be possible in a hospital delivery because of drugs and antiseptic precautions. Perhaps, indeed, life should be lived as an open-ended adventure and “security” cast to the winds if we want to become human.
–
The Ultimate Secret: Death
Necrology (1971, Standish Lawder)
I think he’s filmed a crowd of people on a busy down-escalator and reversed the footage, so it looks like a column of people ascending, facing us. What I thought would be a grim work turns out to be a gag film with joke credits.
Vogel, after commentary decrying the lack of contemporary nazi-made concentration camp documentaries, refers to Necrology’s “endless victims… in unbroken, heart-rending succession, to heaven, hell, or oblivion.”
