Das Filmforum der HBK präsentiert im Wintersemester 2015/2016:
Montag | 14.12.15 | 19:00 h
Jack Smith / Anna Thew – Normal Love (double feature)
Teetering on the brink of other sexuality, polymorphous catastrophes and delicious romps and filmed from never before filmed camera angles – Cling Film is strictlly close up POV from a femme's eye hand held view, whereas Flaming Creatures reaches the height of voyeuristic naughtiness with swirling saucy tableaux filmed from directly above or mid action. Neither of these films could ever have been made without the willing antics of talented all artists and performers troupes / the playful and unsuspecting naughtiness and exhibitionism of innocent life loving youth.
Both films are laden with references of the films we love, with Jack it's Josef von Sternberg's the Devil is a Woman (epitomised by Mario Montez in a mantilla), whereas with Anna (me) it's another Joseph, Cornell's Rose Hobart, Kenneth Anger's Scorpio Rising, Takahiko Iimura's toe wiggling AI Love and Dali Bunuel's Un Chien Andalou. Both films are bound together by extraordinary collages of music tracks, half lifted (pickpocketed) half made, both have a Latin edge Flamenco, both have Bela Barṭk and Nosferatu hinged coffin sequences, yet I never saw Flaming Creatures in the flesh until a print resurfaced in London in 1994 (Cling Film is 1993) and we showed it on the opening night of Flux Projections and then again and again and again.
(Anna Thew)
Jack Smith – Flaming Creatures
43 min | 1963 | 16mm | bw | sound | OV (nodialog) | US
Anna Thew – Cling Film
23 min | 1993 | 16mm | col+bw | sound | OV (nodialog) | UK
Jack Smith – Flaming Creatures
43 min | 1963 | 16mm | bw | OVen | US
Jack Smiths Filme sind von einer ungewöhnlichen Low-Budget-Schönheit und von ästhetischen Innovationen geprägt, die sofort das Lob der Kritiker auf sich zogen. Doch ihr offener Umgang mit Sexualität wurde auch Zielscheibe der Zensur. 1964 löste der Film FLAMING CREATURES (1963) einen der größten Skandale der Filmgeschichte aus: Er wurde verboten. Bald danach begann Smith Film nicht mehr als eigenständiges Werk, sondern als Bestandteil von Performances einzusetzen. FLAMING CREATURES feiert in schimmernden schwarz-weiß-Bildern eine tumultartige Harem-Party, die die Möglichkeit grenzenloser erotischer Ausschweifungen ergreift.
(http://films.arsenal-berlin.de/index.php/Detail/Object/Show/object_id/8914)
Anna Thew – Cling Film
23 min | 1993 | 16mm | col+bw | sound | Oven | UK
Cling Film uses the tricks of the avant-garde trade, real life, real people, fast montage, rubber clothing and “never before filmed camera angles” to make a safer sex film with a difference. (AT)
[ Abbildung oben: aus dem Film „Cling Film“ von Anna Thew ]