#half absurdist science fiction satire

[mariocki]

Armchair Theatre: Invasion (ABC, 1963)

"Very odd looking tourists..."

"They're Americans I expect, dear."

"Well, they... didn't sound as if they were speaking English?"

"No darling, I said, they're Americans."

"They did look very odd!"

"Oh don't go on about it dear, we all know Americans are ghastly, but it doesn't do to say too much, in view of Russia and all that."

[aion-rsa]

Alejandro Jodorowsky 4K Restoration Collection Brings Clarity to Underground Film

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Alejandro Jodorowsky’s films are confounding, grotesque, beautiful and healing, often within the same frame. The post-violence images of the opening sequence of El Tropo are made more horrific as they are reflected through the eyes of a seven-year-old boy, still naked from a rite of passage. Jodorowky’s films are a gateway drug. The Alejandro Jodorowsky 4K Restoration Collection of his cult classics Fando y Lis, El Topo, and The Holy Mountain, as well as his new Psychomagic, A Healing Art, are a first taste. The most surrealistic of the psychedelic filmmakers had no special effects, or even fancy cameras in his earliest days. He had visions, and created a physical world to capture those visions inside of a camera.

No stranger to psychedelics, it was John Lennon who first brought Jodorowsky out of the after-hours circuit and into the daylight, which colored the films. Jodorowsky became the “father of midnight movies” because his 1970 spiritual western epic, El Topo, played at midnight or 1 am every night at the Elgin Theater in Manhattan’s Chelsea district. Lennon and Yoko Ono caught it a few times and advised their advisor, manager Alan Klein, to buy it. The ex-Beatle went on to fund The Holy Mountain, and ABKCO Films went on to have as problematic a relationship with Jodorowsky as the British quartet had with Klein. It was patched up, of course, by evidence of this brilliantly restored set of films.

The Holy Mountain was deemed controversial at the 1973 Cannes Film Festival because of its sacrilegious imagery but Fando y Lis, Jodorowsky’s first feature, caused a riot when it premiered in Acapulco, Mexico in 1968. Jodorowsky escaped hidden in a limousine as he was chased out of town by an angry mob, but the film established the Chilean-born son of Russian immigrants as an auteur of surrealist cinema. He became one of the most influential and creative forces on mainstream science fiction when the script, notes, storyboards, and concept art to his mid-70s would-be adaptation of Frank Herbert’s 1965 novel, Dune, made it to major film studios. You can see their shadows over Star Wars, Flash Gordon, the Terminator series, The Fifth Element, and 1979’s Alien.

You can feel shadows in this collection as well. You don’t need to look in Dune notes to find as diverse a gathering as the bar scene in Star Wars. There are enough varied character looks in the black and white film Fando y Lis, which has cannibals, zombies, vampires, freaks, horny old ladies, an army of transvestites, a man playing a burning piano, and a degenerate Pope played by Tamara Garina.

Jodorowsky made the film on weekends with nothing but a one-page outline. The film, which is an adaptation of the absurdist play by Spanish-born French author Fernando Arrabal, is Jodorowsky’s transition from live theater. Jodorowsky created a theater company while still at the University of Santiago. Alternating between Paris and Mexico City, he collaborated with Marcel Marceau for his mimeograms like “The Cage,” directed Maurice Chevalier’s comeback, and directed staged works of surrealistic and absurdist playwrights like Eugene Ionesco and  Samuel Beckett, launching the Panic Movement, which staged shocking theatrical events.

Jodorowsky had staged Fando y Lis, a story about young Fando (Sergio Klainer) and his paraplegic lover Lis (Diana Mariscal) as they quarrel their way to the magical city of Tar. But on film, the sparse natural landscapes and its vibrant and varied population take on surrealistic qualities by the very grain of the filmstock.

The real-life mime, which is being rehearsed at one point, is a microcosm of the varied worlds and the boxes they come in. Set in some post-apocalyptic rubble, the film travels through a world of perversions, murders, pedophilia, and sadomasochistic narcissism to make the viewer conclude the real world is an illusion.

El Topo is a Robin Hood western and Jodorowsky’s band of thieves are very merry men. They laugh at death. They also laugh at pain, suffering and any number of weapons. The film is  told in the mixed styles of Federico Fellini, Luis Buñuel, and Spaghetti Western auteur Sergio Leone, who found himself impressed by the work. “Sergio Leone, he went to see El Topo,” Jodorowsky told Den of Geek while promoting Psychomagic, a Healing Art. “And I cannot believe he appreciated it. I admired him a lot. He was a real artist of industrial movies. He understood what’s in industrial movies. You need to be very intelligent to do that, and he did it. The picture, all of his pictures, I love these pictures.”

Jodorowsky plays the enigmatic master-gunfighter whose nickname, “The Mole,” supplies the title for the film. His son is played by the director’s real life twelve-year-old son Brontis Jodorowsky, who spends the entire film nude and half of it either on a horse or collecting arms. It is the boy’s seventh birthday. His first day as a man, and he has to bury his first toy and a photograph of his mother, then he has the entire world washed away as The Mole goes off to duel only to be left to die in the sun. El Topo doesn’t die though, he wakes up 20 years later to find himself worshipped by a cult of dwarves in a subterranean community. They raise the cash to tunnel out of the cave only to find the world a vastly different and darker place.

The Holy Mountain (1973) opens with the fly-covered Thief (Horacio Salinas) who is hung on a cross by a gang of young, naked boys and a deformed man who lights cigarettes with his elbows. Jodorowsky plays the Alchemist, who transmutes the Thief’s shit into gold. The film is a satire of capitalism, consumerism, and militarism. Tourists pour into the central town to film public executions while chameleons and toads reenacts the Spanish conquest of Mexico. There are “Christs for sale” signs on display throughout the streets. Jodorowsky’s work is about transformation, and the Alchemist, the Thief, and seven wealthy thieves from seven different planets go on a metamorphic pilgrimage to kill the Nine Masters of the Summit in exchange for eternal life.

Producer Allen Klein wanted Jodorowsky to follow The Holy Mountain with an adaptation of Pauline Réage’s S&M classic novel Story of O, but Jodorowsky threw himself into the Dune adaptation. For the comic allegory The Holy Mountain, Jodorowsky cast transvestite actors he found at Max’s Kansas City in New York. He famously avoids working with stars, but for the science fiction adaptation, he assembled a cast which included Salvador Dalí, Orson Welles, Gloria Swanson, Mick Jagger, and David Carradine; he brought in Pink Floyd and the prog band Magma to do the score; and Swiss artist H.R. Giger and French comic book artist Moebius for design. He would try his hand at a mainstream film, with mainstream stars with his 1990’s The Rainbow Thief, which starred Peter O’Toole and Omar Sharif. But his greatest works are his most intimate.

Jodorowsky developed a form of personal therapy he called “psychomagic” in the 1980s. The practice combined Jungian psychology, the tarot and confrontational art. In 1965, Jodorowsky’s avant-garde “Movement Panique” gave a four-hour long performance called “Sacramental Melodrama,” in which he got whipped, symbolically castrated a rabbi, slit the throats of two geese, and nailed a cow’s heart to a cross. He is no less confrontational when faced with trauma. For Psychomagic, A Healing Art, the director escaped his emotion prison to enter the pain of the world.

The film contemporaneously breaks the wall between reality and performance. The documentary is intercut with scenes from some of Jodorowsky’s films. In a revealing clip from his movie The Dance of Reality, a mother teaches her son not to be afraid of the dark by having him strip nude and be painted black to match the hue of darkness. The healing concepts of Psychomagic are personal yet universal, and the film continues themes Jodorowsky has explored since he began making movies.

Jodorowsky supervised the color correction of the restorations. The Alejandro Jodorowsky 4K Restoration Collection also contains the 1957 short film Le Cravate, a mime adaptation of a Thomas Mann story about a young man, played by Jodorowsky, who falls in love with a French woman who owns a shop where you can buy human heads. In all these films, you see why he has been cited by everyone from Steven Spielberg to Marilyn Manson, to Kanye West, whose “Yeezus” tour was inspired by The Holy Mountain.

The Alejandro Jodorowsky 4K Restoration Collection is essential viewing for visual artists and fans of the visual arts. The images may have lost the full power of their brutality because of the subsequent works they inspired, but the messages are all applicable today, and will be tomorrow. Art can heal or destroy, Jodorowsky shows how it can do both and still be a work in progress.

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The Alejandro Jodorowsky 4K Restoration Collection is available on Blu-Ray now. Psychomagic, A Healing Art is also available on Alamo on Demand.

The post Alejandro Jodorowsky 4K Restoration Collection Brings Clarity to Underground Film appeared first on Den of Geek.

from Den of Geek https://ift.tt/33OZVWS

[newyorktheater]

Harlem9

Two members of a book club for Black women have invited M’Balia, an author who advocates violent revolution, to speak to their group and perhaps help turn it into a revolutionary cadre, in “The Noir Femme Avengers.” The play by Brittany K. Allen was the most thought-provoking of the six short new works that were presented online in the “48 Hours in Harlem” tenth anniversary festival over the weekend.

The set-up of Allen’s play at first feels satirical.  The women, Char and Zee (portrayed by Shavanna Calder and D. Wood), seem middle-class, fun-loving, young. M’Balia the author (Patricia R. Floyd), although she says things like “power will not relent without bloodshed,” is an elderly woman dressed in a church-going hat.  She tells them she can’t spend much time with them. “These anti-racist reading lists are blowing up my schedule, so to speak.”

But, once M’Balia signs off from their Zoom meeting,  it becomes abruptly clear that these are not just bougie girls playing at being serious.

“I don’t know if I want to be out there taking lives, Char,” Zee says. “When somebody dies, they’re just gone, and it’s cold comfort even if they die for a good reason.”

“Your brother was killed for no reason,” Char replies. “He was shot and he’s gone, and no one has paid for it.”

“Yeah, because no one can…”

There is an extra layer to the characters’ ambivalence.  The play was inspired by Richard Wesley’s 1971 play “Black Terror,” about a black revolutionary assassin who becomes full of doubt about whether violence is the answer.

That two playwrights are speaking together simultaneously from two moments in history is not a coincidence; it’s by design. Every year, the theater collective known as Harlem9 hands one of a half dozen classic African-American plays to each of a half dozen African-American playwrights and gives them 48 hours to write a new play inspired by the previous work.

For its tenth anniversary, Harlem9 used the same plays it had used in its inaugural festival. So, in 2011, George C. Wolfe’s “The Colored Museum” inspired Dominique Morisseau to write “The Masterpiece.” In 2020,  Wolfe’s play inspired Keith Josef Atkins to write “The Last White Man in Power Play.”

Atkins’ play takes place in the future, with three characters have been living in “a sanctuary pod,” bickering, while an ominous sounding “organization” is getting rid of white people in power, and about to set Black people free. Like Allen’s play, Atkins’ offers a healthy dose of ambivalence, suggesting there would be no utopian future even if there were no white men. In such plays as Atkins’, the connection between the old and the new work isn’t always self-evident, sometimes not even to the playwright.  But the results can be impressive, as I  reported last year,

That Harlem9 has spent ten years creating works about the Black experience would suggest, now that the Black experience has taken center stage, that this is their moment. And it is. But they are no longer alone. “Center stage” is not just a metaphor.  Earlier this month, to pick one example, the #WhileWeBreathe anthology produced similar results.

Still, Harlem9’s festival this year continued its well-honed  mix of entertainment, inspiration and provocative context.

In “Day of…What?” three of the whitest characters imaginable — named Chad, Karen and Becky — wake up in the morning having turned Black. Two scream. One is initially shocked that she’s so tanned but winds up delighted.

This is the first year that 48 Hours in Harlem was presented online, and the directors did a good job of making the Zoom bearable – none more inventively than Marjuan Canady’s staging if Tracey Conyer Lee’s “House of a Negro, Funny,” which was inspired by Adrienne Kennedy’s “Funnyhouse of a Negro.” It’s also a play that began inaccessible — oh, this is going to be one of those abstract, absurdist plays — and became increasingly specific and powerful.

The last play in this year’s “48 Hours in Harlem” was entitled “I Hate Everything” by Jeremy O’Brian, about a support group for people who hate everything, and who are meeting to try to avoid committing suicide. The play was inspired by “Dutchman,” Amiri Baraka’s 1964 play about a white woman who flirts with a Black man in a subway train, and then stabs him to death. In O’Brian’s play, Star (Kaaron Briscoe) tells her fellow support group members the story of riding in a subway, and seeing how the other passengers treated a little Black boy rudely, but formed a protective circle around a dog. So Star stabbed the dog to death, she says matter-of-factly, while her listeners go slack-jawed in shock.

It’s a provocative take on a play that has been revived twice this month alone — by the Seeing Place Theater, and by Play-PerView starring Dule Hill and Jennifer Mudge, reprising their roles from a production in 2007 at the Cherry Lane, which is where the play debuted.  It’s fascinating to look over the different reviews of this play in the New York Times over the years –

 In 1964: an explosion of hatred rather than a play. It puts into the mouth of its principal Negro character a scathing denunciation of all the white man’s good works, pretensions and condescensions…..If this is the way even one Negro feels, there is ample cause for guilt as well as alarm, and for a hastening of change.

 In 2007: “Dutchman” possesses a single objective: to produce guilt. But 43 years after it made its debut…it fails to do even that….What emerging feminists in the audience must have made of all this four decades ago is something to wonder. The notion that a woman might embody all the power and evil of American empire when she still could not make her way out of the broom closet must have had the vague semblance of science fiction.

In 2020:In this tale of Adam and Eve — and in the real story of America — a Black person who’s smart and well aware of his position and willing to speak out is danger, a fire waiting to be extinguished. But even more frightening, a Black person may be killed simply because, like Adam biting the apple and getting punished with the curse of mortality, Black death has become a perverted inevitability of life in America. Here’s the story: We do or we don’t take a bite of the apple, but either way we choke.

Whatever else we can take away from these remarkably different reactions to the same play, it helps demonstrate how useful the project Harlem9 has set for itself in “48 Hours in Harlem” – to keep looking anew at both the Black Experience and Black Theater…from a Black perspective.

48 Hours in Harlem 10th Anniversary Festival: A New Take on Classic Black Plays Two members of a book club for Black women have invited M'Balia, an author who advocates violent revolution, to speak to their group and perhaps help turn it into a revolutionary cadre, in “The Noir Femme Avengers.” The play by Brittany K.