My third selection is ‘Daisies’, 1966, directed by Věra Chytilová

After a montage of explosions, we meet to two doll like young women. Since everything is going bad in the world, they decide that they are going to go bad too. Wearing an ironic “virginity” flower crown, one of the young women is slapped into a field of daisies and their surreal adventure ensues.

Delicate daisies, these women are not. Mischievous, giggling and greedy, these friends team up to tease and prank much older men who are trying to date them. This brazen attitude challenges stereotypes and critiques a male attitude towards sex. Chancing upon a massive banquet table piled high with delicacies, they take whatever they want. Trashing the spread, they dig up handfuls of cake, taste everything and even dance on the desserts.

This Czech New Wave film was created during a fraught time. It was banned upon its initial release, in part due to the depictions of wasted food. Only one year later, the Prague Spring brought a loosening of political and cultural restrictions. The new era of freedom ended later that same year due to a Soviet invasion. For the rest of her life, Chytilová was basically blacklisted from making films.

#marvelousmoviemondays

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5jpSOGIf_Eo

My second selection is ‘House’, 1977, directed by Nobuhiko Obayashi

“a modern masterpiece of le cinéma du WTF?!”
-Chuck Stephens, from his essay for The Criterion Collection

‘House’ is an extreme work of psychedelic horror. This experimental film follows seven teenage girls on a trip to visit one their aunts. Visually stunning, the gory depictions of dismemberment are more ridiculously surreal than scary. It’s not surprising to learn that Obayashi’s eleven year old daughter came up with most of the violent plot twists.

Although it is refreshing and rare for a movie to be almost entirely comprised of female actors, the one-dimensional characters are unfortunately sexualized in a realm of school girl exploitation.

On the train out of town, the main character regales her giggling pals with the backstory of her aunt. In a short flashback sequence, we see her narration come to life in the frames of black and white film strips. A tragic love story from the 40s, it suggests an ominous tone for the haunted home they are about to experience. This greyscale sequence is interrupted with two pops of red; a foreboding draft card, and a wilting, thorny rose that draws drips of blood. As with the rest of my selections this month, flower symbolism is paired with the explosion of a bomb. A Hiroshima native, the director lost most of his friends to the blast.

The clip below is an excerpt of this scene. I recommend tracking down the full feature for the demonic insanity that follows.

http://www.tcm.turner.com/…/Hausu-Movie-Clip-Over-The-Rainb…

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Says who?

For the final film in this series, we’ve got Emma Cooney’s hilarious yet melancholy AUTOMATIC DOOM. Inspired by a Sunday night family ritual, the film is a masterful supercut, drawing us in to the weird and world-weary mind of the legendary radio and television writer Andy Rooney. Compiling clips from “A Few Minutes with Andy Rooney,” the long-running (1978-2011) concluding segment of the weekly news magazine “60 Minutes,” AUTOMATIC DOOM subverts dominant paradigms of traditional televisual authority figures, celebrating Rooney as an intensely self-aware and humble authoritative voice. Deeply cynical yet deeply sincere, Rooney (and the film) offer the viewer a long curmudgeonly sigh, a humorous rumination on mortality, environmental catastrophe and the virtues and vices of sleep. AUTOMATIC DOOM is a profoundly humane work, showing us not that misery love company, but that company can provide much-needed relief from misery. Through Rooney’s open-hearted reflections on the terrifying miasma of precarity that shapes contemporary life, we feel a little bit less alone in the daily struggle just to muddle through, and to get a good night’s sleep.

Enjoy AUTOMATIC DOOM!

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https://vimeo.com/332580083

Says who?

This week we’ve got the Khalil Brothers’ and Jackson Polys’ bold yet ruminative 2017 short, THE VIOLENCE OF A CIVILIZATION WITHOUT SECRETS. The film recounts the struggle of five Columbia Basin tribes to rebury the remains of one of their ancestors, known as “The Kennewick Man,” whose skeleton was discovered in 1996 along the banks of the Columbia River in the south eastern part of Washington state. Their demand was thwarted by a group of forensic anthropologists, who filed a lawsuit claiming that the cranial features of “The Kennewick Man” indicated that he was of European descent, and therefore not a tribal ancestor. (This lawsuit was gleefully endorsed by white supremacist groups, who claimed that the discovery proved their status as indigenous peoples.) The forensic anthropologists’ claim on “The Kennewick Man” for the purpose of “scientific study” was upheld by the courts, who asserted that the tribe’s oral histories constituted unreliable evidence. This decision was finally overturned in 2014, when advancements in DNA testing proved that “The Kennewick Man” was in fact an ancestor of the tribes, at which point he was reburied in a secret location.

In recounting this horrifying (and horrifyingly typical) incident, THE VIOLENCE OF A CIVILIZATION WITHOUT SECRETS offers a bracing meditation on the central role of enlightenment institutions and ideals–such as the museum, the archive, the courts and the scientific method–in enacting and maintaining hegemonic violence by the settler colonial state against indigenous peoples. The authority of these institutions to determine what constitutes valid forms of “evidence” and “knowledge,” is revealed to be a fundamental tool in maintaining control over every aspect of the lives, deaths, histories, and memories of subaltern peoples.

Enjoy THE VIOLENCE OF A CIVILIZATION WITHOUT SECRETS: https://vimeo.com/217342747