A stiff but stylish take on the slasher genre, Maniac Cop features some beautiful city cinematography and schlocky gore. A fun, pretty, mindless gorefest.
2. Pieces
Another slasher flick, Pieces is slightly more informed by giallo and satire. This film is rife with logical inconsistencies, bad dialogue, and ridiculous moments, but its D-movie charm pulls it together.
3. Process Red
A short, three minute experiment of contrasting colors and vague nihilism, Process Red works best as a treat for the eyes.
4. The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant
A lush yet claustrophobic tale of 1970s morality and venomous codependency, The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant is a pioneer of LGBTQA cinema and is the standout film of the 22nd Berlin International Film Festival.
5. Ninja Scroll
Despicably violent and charged with rapine themes, Ninja Scroll is a heavy watch for an animated action cartoon. It's this uncomfortable atmosphere that warrants its intense cult following and critical acclaim.
Ivan The Terrible is a difficult beast to consider.
As an aesthetic object, it gives me great pleasure. The sets are beautiful. The costumes majestic and imposing. The lighting impeccable.
But, as a film with a message, the complexity of cold war thinking has left me confused.
Part of the problem has been balancing director Sergei Eisenstein's seemingly contradictory attitudes towards Joseph Stalin, attack and glorification. Another problem lies in Eisenstein's attempts to combine contemporary high and low brow cinema with its pained angles and grand melodrama.
Thanks to the scholarship of Joan Neuberger and Yuri Tsivian, who contributed some fantastic scholarship in the Criterion DVD editions, we now know that Ivan was a very courageous gesture, in its ambivalent and measured critique of Stalin.
Part I garnered Stalin's approval, but Part II, which shows Ivan in growing sexual delirium, was banned for over a decade following a Kremlin meeting with Eisenstein and Stalin himself. It appears that Eisenstein agreed to make some cosmetic changes but then edited the film to suit himself but them edited the film to suit himself before dying shortly after.
Even if he never got to finish Part III, what Eisenstein left behind in parts I and II is one of the most complex and nuanced works of soviet cinema, an acceptance of both giddy pop art and morbid medieval history.
The actors Eisenstein uses often look odd. Their features are sometimes exaggerated by lightning from below. His camera angles are strange and suffocating. Ivan's opponents are seen as grotesque characters. It is impossible not to look at those faces and not immediately think of the Danish silent film The Passion of Joan of Arc made by Carl Theodore in 1928.
Ivan is also reminiscent of Joan of Arc in its creeping, brooding set design.
Eisenstein's sets are unwieldy and large. Some are unadorned, shadowed walls, arches, nooks, staircases. Others, like the throne room, are covered in paintings of religious icons. The spaces have a curious dimensionality. Some spaces are clearly flat while others show the actors moving through seemingly-flat spaces. In many shots he uses real shadows to show Ivan's head, with its wicked pointed beard, dwarfing the members of his court.
Part I is serious and historical, while Part II is bombastic and loud and self-consciously over the top. I wasn't drawn into the plot personally, and I don't think many other people will be. The strength of its film is in its history and its spectacle.
Yet, Ivan The Terrible is routinely included in a list of great films and to hail it is more a duty than a pleasure.
Obsession with native art, the occult, folk-music, and slightly a distorted by new-age philosophy version of anthropology.
These obsessions calcified in a brain addled by drugs and 1950s New York bohemia and were spit out in the form of bizarre films. I think these films, like most, work best as visual eye-candy, but they have a certain repetitive, occult energy that seems to conjure the fleeting of the spirits.
Maybe Mr. Smith wasn't so crazy, or maybe I am.
These 5 films/compilations are my particular favorites, presented with no rank or file in perceived quality.
5. Early Abstractions
Seven animated abstractions. Watch in silence for maximum soul power.
4. Circular Tensions
An eye-melting study of geometry and motion. Brilliantly animated. One of Smith's most technically impressive films.
3. Mirror Animations
8 minutes of gorgeous red-tinted collage animation soundtracked by Thelonious Monk's Misterioso. Perfecto.
2. Heaven and Earth Magic
Smith's most popular and celebrated feature film. It has a certain rough, 19th century carny vibe, mostly due to the choice of black and white photographs.
It's recently been given new life at the Ann Arbor Film Festival, where it was scored live by experimental hip-hop producer Flying Lotus.
1. Mahagonny
At a grueling 221 minutes, Mahagonny is a triumph. Presented with a split screen, set to the entirety of the 1930s opera "Rise and Fall of of the City of Mahagonny."
Absolutely crucial, if you're somehow able to find it.
Hollis Frampton's Critical Mass is perhaps the most exhausting film I have ever had the pleasure to watch. It left me physically and mentally drained, nauseous, and lethargic. A film hasn't had this effect on me since Requiem For a Dream.
The concept is simple. Two lovers, male and female, argue over the man's unexplained, two-day absence. The man feels that the woman is overstepping her bounds and that she does not trust him. The woman feels that true trust comes in closeness and honesty.
The intensity of the film comes in the way its audio is chopped up, altered. Lines are repeated ad-nauseam, frames skip. Eventually, the audio falls out of sync with the visuals and the film collapses into a loud, feverish series of slow frames. Hanging on every word of an argument feels like digging your finger in a wound, reliving a painful moment over and over.
Even though there is very little plot and next to no exposition, we are still able to learn about the characters and the world they inhabit through some choice dialogue cues. The woman calls the man a hippie, indicating a political division between the two. The woman also accuses the man of being stuck "in his own head," a possible accusation of drug use.
Critical Mass is an anxious, obsessive piece of cinema, a work in bereavement instead of entertainment. Highly recommended.
Nothing captures the blank calmness of nihilism like film. Visuals are able to impart meaninglessness on a very primal level. Walking alone through rural snow is a good example. It's beautiful at first, but walk long enough and soon you'll be in tears.
Countless films have tried to plainly portray nihilism, but a majority of them have been ignored.
These five films, presented in no particular order of quality, are underrated gems by masters of meaninglessness. Not for the faint of heart.
5. I Saw The Devil
I Saw The Devil tells the story of the obsessive, cat-and-mouse conflict between Kyung-chul, a serial killer, and Lee Byung-hun, a detective. The genius of this film lies in the pace in which the violence escalates. The viewer is made to root for Lee, but as his pursuit of Kyung-chul grows more and more violent, we're left to wonder exactly who has the moral high-ground.
Hint: it's no one.
4. Begotten
This is perhaps the most notorious film on this list, and for a very good reason. Begotten is horrifying. Horrifying in its imagery. Horrifying in its plot. Horrifying in its sound.
Begotten is the kind of film that could easily have gained the memeworthy status of other shock horror films like the human centipede, if it wasn't for its devotion to 1920s avant-garde style cinematography.
In the first scene God disembowels himself. All you need to know, really.
3. Le Bete Humaine
A loose adaption of an Emile Zola novel, La Bete Humaine is a simple tale of spacial awareness and moral degradation framed by a relatively conventional murder mystery.
The characters in this film are all scum. Liars, killers, adulterers. Every time we meet a character who we think will possess a healthy moral character, they are revealed to be just as evil as all the others.
Special attention should be paid to the performance of Jean Gabin. The journeyman actor delivers a performance that is surprisingly subtle and nuanced for the era. Sublime.
2. Funny Games
Another thriller, Funny games takes the cinematic trope of the home invasion horror and add Ferris-Bueller esque fourth wall breaks and a creeping sense of unreality. It raises the ultimate nihilist question.
If the images on the scream are not presented as reality, if we cannot attach ourselves to the characters, suspend our disbelief enough to treat them like real people because of this pervasive unreality, then what is the fucking point of the images?
1. Under The Skin
The most recent film on this list, Under The Skin follows an alien woman who sexually preys on men in Scotland.
This premise, which could be ridiculous in anyone elses hand, is made effortlessly bleak by the direction and visuals.
The monsters black skin, the regular motif of empty husks, fog, all of this implies meaningless, failure.
Tokyo Story is a film that, in my opinion, best captures the emotional complexity of the relationship between a parent and their grow-up child.
With simple dialogue and palpable emotion, director Yasujiro Ozu has managed to make, perhaps, the most thorough, complete-feeling film of all time.
The story – never the Japanese master’s greatest interest – is a simple one. It followsthe visits paid to their children in Osaka and Tokyo by an elderly couple (Tomi, 68, and Shukishi, 70) from the southern seaside town of Onomichi. The couple are shown subtle, but substantial cruelty by their children.
The film’s early scenes delve into the cluster of families around Tomi and Shukishi – busy, inattentive doctor Koichi; hair-salon owner Shige; sweet, widowed daughter-in-law Noriko – observing their sad relations with little or no introduction. Shukishi goes on a sake binge with old pals and they discuss their estrangement from, and disappointment with, their offspring.
All of the roles here are wonderfully acted, particularly Chieko Higashiyama as mournful grandmother Tomi Hirayama.
Ozu's cinematic style is as exceptional as the rest of the film, with its so-called ‘pillow shots’ (introductory shots of yet-unhabited rooms), low, static camera position, unhurried pacing and elaborately composed frames, offering a refreshing feeling of modernism.
This film is a triumph, and there is absolutely no reason why you shouldn't watch it.
Besides running Left Hand Path Tapes, a distributor of some of the scummiest, most uncomfortable punk around, Will is the sole director of the Paranoid Anxieties tapes, a no-wave influenced, vhs shot documentation of the Texas punk.
I talked to him recently about his influences and his goals.
First off, could you introduce yourself and tell us what you do?
Hello, my name is Will Mecca. I'm from North Texas, I run a small label and distro called Left Hand Path Tapes and film/shoot shows I go to. I'm 22 years old.
I was really attracted to your work because of how it stands out from a lot of punk/hardcore concert film. You use one camera that distorts the sound of the music. You generally take a position below the band while filming. What is your artistic goal in utilizing these methods, if any?
Well the angles I use to film I normally chose because it's safest for myself and my equipment while still being able to get the maximum footage I can out of a show. Even from where I stand I still tend to get hit by someone in a crowd. And rarely ever do I post edit sound from what I shoot (other than to pan it out from mono to stereo) a lot of the distorted sound I get is just the in camera mic.
Why do you think the vhs tape and other “dead” formats like the floppy disk have made a comeback in punk and hardcore? So many powerviolence bands here put out floppies.
Probably nostalgia in the beginnings. When I first started going to DIY shows I was taken aback that cassettes had made a comeback. But after working with VHS for two years I sort of like it more than digital, kind of gives a more organic feel. As far as floppy disks this is the first I'm hearing of it.
Would you describe yourself as a filmmaker? If so, what is your dream film project?
Not really at this point, filming stuff has been a hobby of mine since I was 13 and now it's taking off into something I can do, in my opinion, interesting things with. One day I'd maybe want to do some homage to 80's shot on video horror, or maybe a legit documentary, I have no idea at this point really.
Do you have a favorite movie? Favorite director?
I dunno if I have a favorite, there's a lot of movies I really like, like Clerks, Gummo, In The Mouth Of Madness, Repo Man. Kevin Smith in the 90's is probably a favorite of mine, as well as John Carpenter.
What is your affiliation with Left Hand Path Tapes?
I run it, well attempt to at least. So far it's just been me putting out my own stuff as well as things I like that I haven't seen represented in a physical medium yet. It's been over a year since I started and I'm at 16 releases now so I guess it's something now.
Punk obviously plays a huge part in your art. It’s your main focus. How would you define punk? Would you even want to?
I dunno really how to define it. Maybe something along the lines of DIY ethics. If you're willing to get up yourself and do something you think is cool, that's punk. I don't know if I could describe it any other way.
What other film work are you involved in besides the paranoid anxieties tapes?
Not really, a couple years ago some friends and myself were going to make a short horror film together, but life happened. My friend Mitch had this project he was working on for years called Consuming Impulse that I got drug in as an extra a couple times but aside from that Paranoid Anxieties has been it.
What Texas bands do you think we should all check out?
Sin Motivo
Any final words?
Film what you love, take pictures of what you love, have some fun and do something dumb. And thanks for taking the time to interview me!
