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.

THIRTY YEARS OF 'SAFE'

 

Todd Haynes 'Safe' premiered at the Sundance Festival in January 1995. 

If you haven't seen it, it stars the superb Julianne Moore as Carol White, an affluent suburban housewife who becomes seriously ill with something that can't be diagnosed, but seems to be an extreme reaction to her environment. After several unpleasant incidents, Carol ends up at a retreat / commune / leper colony for people with similar physiological and psychological issues and, cloistered in her bunker like quarters, finds a kind of equilibrium.

For me, it's one of great films of the 20th century, not least because it is so prescient about life in the 21st, when the whole world is sick, not just from disease but from stress, toxicity and fear - the Future Shock that Alvin Tofler wrote about in the 1970s not just made manifest, but compulsory. 

I don't have any answers, just a definite conclusion: people aren't supposed to live like this - we can't live like this. I'd like to take Capitalism and its proponents out into the city square and machine gun them - although rather than putting more money into the arms trade,  perhaps it would be more appropriate to beat them to death with a stick.

Happy 2025!