WHERE ARE WE NOW?

Chris Burden: Poem for L.A (1975)

SINISTER NEW AGE DOINGS

Die Totale Therapie, d. Christian Frosch (1996)

A slightly manic tale of what happens when a murderous psychopath joins a a therapy group, this film combines two of my favourite cinematic things: sinister New Age doings and murder. I wouldn't say it's a classic, but it feels great or, rather, it has a great feel. Features meditation and squabbling, often at the same time.

I LOVE THE SOUND OF PERCUSSION MUSIC MIXED WITH TIRES SKIDDING AND SCREAMS

Coming soon: a  slight return. Where have I been? I don't know yet.

A COMMON COMPLAINT

From Finisterrae, d. Sergio Caballero (2010)

FSR

A very brief sojourn into the wild world of Flying Saucer Review, first published in 1955, and apparently going strong. The truth is still out there, just not in W.H Smith.

EYE IN THE SKY

A menacing presence in the sky that calls to mind the constant scrutiny of our CCTV monitored existence. It doesn't seem to bother us much, but then humans have always been surprisingly comfortable with the idea that someone in the sky watches everything we do and silently judges it. 

From  Tashio Matsumoto's disquieting 1975 experimental short Phantom.

A WOMAN IS A WEAPON

Valie Export was once loosely aligned with the Viennese Actionists, a group of confrontational performance artists who sought to challenge the post-war complacency of Austrian society, particularly with regard to their conveniently forgotten / ignored complicity with the Nazi regime. Whereas many of the Actionists were macho and aggressive, Valie was an avowed feminist, and much more subtle, though no less thought provoking.

In Tap and Touch, she walked the streets of Vienna, a large box attached to her chest. Passing men were offered the opportunity to reach inside the box, where they would be able to fondle her bare breasts. Watch the film. For all their old world respectability, the Austrian men are eager to cop a feel, queuing up to intimately touch a stranger in a way that, if it happened to their wife, girlfriend, daughter or mother, they would be horrified. Naturally, the media blamed the breasts, not the fondlers, even going as far as to suggest that Valie was a witch who should be burned.

Action Pants: Genital Panic is not only the greatest title for any work of art ever, but it is also a brilliantly simple but incredibly clever concept. Valie, her hair wild and strange, is photographed holding a machine gun. Wearing crotchless trousers, her exposed genitals are obviously the focus of the piece, but it takes a while for the eye to register her exposure, which makes it about her, rather than us, the observer. She looks like a dangerous revolutionary, a precursor to the Red Army Faction, but she knows that her vagina is the source of her power, not the gun.

A TO Z

The Alphabet, d. by David Lynch (1968)

This film, his longest since Six Figures Getting Sick, cost $1,000, and was inspired by his wife Peggy's niece, who once recited the alphabet during a nightmare. A room was painted black and Peggy was painted white to provide a suitably unsettling visual effect. The soundtrack includes a montage of unsettling things like the wind, a siren and a baby crying, all captured on a broken tape recorder. 

INSPIRATIONAL QUOTE OF THE DAY

From I Saw The Devil, d. Kim Jee-woon (2010).

THE PRESENCE OF PLEASENCE

Multiple maniacs during a powercut slasher film Alone In The Dark (1982) features dear old Donald Pleasence at his most free-wheeling and jocular, playing Dr. Leo Bain, the head psychiatrist at an asylum where treatment is a journey, a voyage of self-discovery. In his corduroy suit and Adidas trainers, Donald has obviously been touched by the psychedelic brush of hippydom, and still lives by those tenets, not least when he fills a pipe with ‘Oregon Sensimillia’ and puffs away in front of a bemused junior doctor (played by Dwight Schulz, Howling Mad Murdoch from The A-Team, ironically the sanest character in the film).

Donald plays Bain as a cuddly, enthusiastic, sensitive, supremely eccentric man: someone who could just as easily be inmate as overseer. Bain is clearly a mickey take of R.D Laing, and his nuthouse is a haven where the patients are encouraged to find their own cure – or not, it’s entirely up to them. This liberal attitude proves to be his undoing, unfortunately, as it turns out that psychotic maniacs (played by a wildly wigged Martin Landau and the always terrifying Jack Palance, amongst others) just aren't that easy going.