DANCE AWAY

Luis Bunuel's 1965 film Simon Of The Desert is a huge favourite of mine for a number of reasons, a mere eight of which I will now detail below:

1. I have come to consider Bunuel as the single greatest film director of all time.

2. This film is a superb example of his mature style, being beautifully staged and filmed, but without any fussiness or obtrusive 'artistic' interventions.

3. It's ostensibly the story of a 5th Century Syrian Saint who lived on top of a pillar for 39 years, but Bunuel makes it far more relatable and, no pun intended, down to earth. Simon is just trying to get on with stuff, but it's just one thing after another for the guy.

3. It is very funny, particularly in how petty and pathetic and powerless the Devil actually is (see also Bedazzled).

4. It doesn't have the 'logic' of a dream, but it does work in the same way as a dream, i.e. it makes sense as you are having it rather than when you later remember it. This may, of course, be the point of Surrealism in general.

5. Fanatical religiosity is intrinsically weird and disturbing, a mental disorder, so Bunuel doesn't have to labour the weirdness, he just shows us the basics.

6. Bunuel cuts only when necessary, and each shot is exactly the right length no matter how long or short it is.

7. The film is only 45 minutes long, which, again, is exactly how long it needs to be.

8. It ends in an extraordinary way*.

* The Devil (Silvia Pinal) transports Simon Stylites (Claudio Brook) six thousand miles and fifteen centuries into the future to a nightclub in contemporary New York. They smoke, sip beer and watch the kids lose their shit to a groovy band. The frenetic dance, according to the horned one, is called Radioactive Flesh. 

Bored and out of his element, Simon wants to leave, but the Devil tells him he'll have to stick it out - he'll have to stick it out to the very end. Such is the lot of the Ascetic, I suppose. 

ADDITIONAL ABSTRACTION

 

More from Sweet Rhythms.

THE ESSENCE IS MOVEMENT

 

From Sweet Rhythms, d. Kazimierz Urbanski (1965)

A short film ostensibly about aspects of bee keeping, with added abstract visual effects, and music by Krzysztof Penderecki. What more could anyone possibly require?

OPTICAL CARNIVAL

The Responsive Eye was an exhibition of optical art held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York from February to April 1965. Some of the artists represented included Josef Albers, Bridget Riley, Frank Stella, Victor Vasarely and the French collective Groupe de Recherche d'Art Visuele.

Curator William C. Seitz said "unlike most previous abstract painting, these works exist less as objects to be examined than of generators of perceptual response, of colours and relationships existing solely in vision; of forms, presences and variations often entirely different from the static stimuli by the artist'.

The first night audience, captured in a short film (one of the cameraman was Brian de Palma), is clearly drawn from the upper echelons of Manhattan society (the men are wearing black tie; the women evening gloves), and seem largely indifferent, being far more interested in themselves and each other. 

Some medical professionals are on hand to talk about the physiological effects the pictures and objects might be having on the viewer, and the curators and the artists work hard, talking about concavity and convexity, transience and translucence, perhaps trying to ensure people understand that this is ART, not a set of fairground mirrors. 

David Hockney says that he detests some of the work because it 'makes my eyes blink', a statement he thinks very clever indeed, but then he's always been an obnoxious little prick.

RITUALISTIC

Storm de Hirsch (1912-2000) could have been content simply with having one of the greatest names of all time, but she was also a groundbreaking film maker. The screenshots here are from Peyote Queen, the second part of a trilogy called The Color Of Ritual, The Color Of Thought in which she scratches, etches and paints directly onto 16mm film and then adds a kitchen sink load of optical effects to create something wild and weird and psychedelic that reflects her early experience as an abstract-expressionist painter.

EMPIRE

 

 

In June 1965, Andy Warhol went to the 41st floor of the Time Life Building in New York, set up an Auricon camera and, over two consecutive nights, filmed the Empire State Building from the window. When projected in slow motion (16 frames per second, as specified by Warhol) the six and a half hours of footage runs for eight hours and five minutes.

An exercise in watching (and feeling) the passage of time, the film is, of course, pretty boring, despite the fact that there is, actually, quite a lot going on. Lights blink, the window mists, the picture blurs, the frame wobbles, stuff like that. 

The whole project embodies one of Warhol's key principles: 'when nothing happens, you have the chance to think about everything' (see my previous post for another embodiment of the maxim). It's a quote that has genuinely been one of my biggest influences in terms of both art and life, so if you ever find me staring blankly into space, I'm not inactive, I'm just thinking about everything. 

FRANKENSTEIN UNHINGED

Frankenstein Meets The Space Monster, d. Robert Gaffney (1965)

What sort of film is Frankenstein Meets The Space Monster? Well, it's terrible.

But who cares about all that Andre Bazin stuff, anyway? It has big eared aliens and girls in bikinis, what more do you want: plot, point, performances, a budget, mise en scene?

YOKOO, YEAH, YEAH, YEAH

Kachi Kachi Yama, d. Tadanori Yokoo (1965)

There simply aren't enough cartoons in the world where Alain Delon and Brigitte Bardot murder Elizabeth Taylor, forcing a grieving Richard Burton to team up with The Beatles in order to get his revenge.