Armoreska's comments - page 6

The unlikely -- and alien -- subject of a detailed drum lesson
becomes a celebration of counterculture values as (without
being subjected to "explanations" or "editorializing"), we
discover the painful process of learning, the inevitable failures,
the ultimate triumph and the power relation between teacher
and taught. An original and consciousness changing message
from a world so odd we never knew we could learn to care about it

A bizarre comment on American civilization.
The total demolition of suburban houses (to make
room for a new highway), seen in strongly accelerated motion, transforms the stubbornly charged
bulldozers into ominous, devouring monsters.

US Navy footage permits us to participate in Vietnam bombing
runs, as the plane's camera follows the inexorable trajectory
of air-to-surface rockets to their destination: the huts,
woods, people of Vietnam. Combined with a rock love
ballad, the eerie shots of bombs bursting like brilliant
orange flowers give the film a visually pornographic quality.

A man, accidentally trapped beneath a church bell about to be
installed "walks off" with it. The sight of a church bell majestically
moving through Paris streets and suburbs, creating inevitable havoc,
is a splendidcinematic equivalent of a surrealist object in action,
created by simple displacement from its customary surroundings.

The entire plot of this delightful cartoon is based on the
shock effect of "misplaced" sounds: a cow that honks, a
horn that moos, a baby that screeches marches. Here sound
instead of object is torn from its customary surroundings.
One of the few examples of "aural surrealism" on record

The violent pornographic surrealism of
American underground cartoon magazines
finally invades film animation. In an
unfathomable universe, huge vaginas
and penises are protagonists of bizarre,
violent, and pornographic events;
the mixture of monsters and sexuality,
the perverse and the apocalyptic
are reminiscent of Bosch.

Several taboos merge to create instantaneous,
unconscious shock; nudity, unacceptable sex change,
vulgar desecration of national leaders, and, worse
still, of the dead. But is it an insult to be a woman?

This black comedy contains cinema's most completely
disgusting food orgy, as a man (assisted by a fake nun)
gorges himself into a semi-comatose state, vomits whatever
he eats, and finally collapses into his excretions in a cleansing of body and soul. An extreme, fully accomplished work.

To show the viability of superstitious belief, this
documentary records a still-continuing religious
holiday in Cuba, at which Holy Lazarus is simultaneously celebrated as "Babalu" because of the
strange mingling of Catholic and African religion
in primitive societies. As the believers crawl
painfully towards his shrine, shots of a new
generation doing calisthenics are intercut.

A clandestine political argument, presented in the form of satirical songs
and vulgar couplets about nutrition
and sex, foreign policy, and the belief
in the future. Instead of complaints,
there are lyrics, music, and wine.

An in-the-kitchen interview with a young American girl
just back from cutting sugar cane in Cuba, turns into
a moving, thought-provoking discussion of the differing
value systems of the two civilizations and indicates how
the girl's consciousness was changed by the experience.
As she prepares sandwiches for herself and the filmmaker,
we also get a glimpse of her uncorrupted idealism

A severed limb is always frightening, the more
so when it is about to be nonchalantly consumed.
Both eater and victim are well-groomed: cuffs, nail
polish, and wedding ring add to the over-all effect.
Most unsettling is the very while plate and the impending dissection of a finger, the position of knife and fork
impeccably conforming to European eating etiquette.

A curious, controversial film (produced
by an all-woman crew), consisting entirely of
"tales" of sexual adventures (or fantasies) told
by a group of youngish New Yorkers gathered
in an apartment. One story prompts the next;
the atmosphere is informal; the result -- a
censorable, liberating example of verbal
eroticism, quite shocking in its impact.
It is the very absence of descriptive image
and the ability secretly to observe "real"
people freely recalling erotic experiences,
that accounts for the film's effect: but the
eroticism unquestionably also flows --
non-verbally -- from the faces, hesitations,
and gestures of the individual participants.

Ironically, it seems easier nowadays to see films of documentary
sex than of documentary tears (undoubtedly because the former
is more enjoyabhle to wach than the latter); this work, so full of
real tears of self-realization and healing, redresses the balance,
unexpectedly turning into a cleansing, liberating experience,
neither depressing nor exhibitionistic. This is a cinema of experience rather than entertainment. The filmmaker, a product
of the American documentary movement, places 20 California
adolescents in a week-long therapy setting in a rural retreat; all
action is spontaneous. After a series of innocuous interchanges,
more difficult areas are touched; a girl, called upon to strike her
"mother" (acted by another member of the group), cannot do so
in a poignant moment of impotent hesitation, and bursts into
tears; another girl realizes that she accepts all viewpoints because she herself has none; a boy discovers, among prolonged
sobbing, that one is ultimately alone. The sweet innocence of
sex, displayed by some, is revealed as repression; seemingly
real experiences emerge as frauds. At the end a black girl,
who never gave love because she never received any, finally lapses into a silence of self-realization so total that
it stuns. For staying with her face and ending the film
in this manner, we must thank a sensitive filmmaker

In recording the life and ideas of an old
poverty-stricken peasant woman living alone
in a ramshackle hut, the film, the producers
assure us, lets us listen in to the dead traditions
of the old generation. In reality, however, we
seem to be confronted with a proud non-conformist
perhaps even a semi-heroine in the filmmaker's eyes
who knows the name Lenin only as that of a "regent"

A young woman -- Miss Boissonas -- sleeps, walks, lies,
or sits at the bottom of a huge metal cylinder which
fills the entire screen. The camera, in a fixed position
throughout, is suspended from above the cylinder along
its central axis and points downwards. There is a hole
at the bottom and side of the cylinder, from which water
or sand sometimes flows to submerge the young woman
who remains passive throughout. For minutes on end
there is no action; she is either immobile or changes position only slightly. No camera movement occurs during the
13 "scenes". The "events" of this provocative, oppressive
example of minimal cinema repeat themselves. The film
is circular and has no temporal progression. Its minimal
form becomes a metaphor of the human condition.

This film portrays the cultural and mythological significance
of the Japanese sword, its painstaking, loving fabrication,
manifold varieties and uses, poetic grandeur, and sacred
symbolism; it is meticulously edited and accompanied
by Wagner music. A truly seditious recreation of the
imperialist glory and fascist tradition of old Japan.

Unlike slick propaganda films or carefully manufactured
political indictments, this is a cry of anguish by the young
filmmaker at Vietnam and the Kent State University killings
of anti-war students by the military. Two young men first
decorate a dead pig, placed on an American flag, and then
(with disjointed expressions of anger, impotence, anguish)
remove its eyes, cut off its ears, furiously smash into it
with an axe. Finally, shoving the flag into the carcass
from behind, they cut off its head: "The Pig Is Dead".