Recommend me some psychedelic films

jonny mugwump

exotic pylon
Jarman's early super 8 movies with Throbbing Gristle soundtracks- Shadow of The Sun etc- they're compiled on a DVD but cannot find the link tight now.

Oh, ALL Harry Smith films- hard to track down- expensive from the States but all incredible. Jack Smith too and maybe some Brakhage might qualify. Sorry, this is vague. I'll come back with some links in a while.
 

zhao

there are no accidents
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the FUCK is up with the embedding function!!!

anyhow here is link:
 

jonny mugwump

exotic pylon
Thanks Zhao.

Heaven & Earth Magic is the masterpiece- over an hour of proto-python Gilliam collage with the most disjointed soundtrack imaginable.

These are all available at the Harry Smith Archives on DVD at last- there really is nothing like them.


Jack Smith's Flaming Creatures is brilliantly loopy but his stuff is next to impossible to find- i have some downloads though if anybody is interested so you can email. It might take a little while...
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
"Possession is really great too although it's a different kind of thing."
Watched this a couple of days ago. I thought it was completely fantastic. I can see that not everyone would like this - the acting is so over the top - and extremely shouty - as to be ridiculous (although bizarrely she won some award for her role didn't she?) but I just got right into it. I can't remember a film that has had me pinned to my seat all the way through like this. At the end I was just kind of sitting staring at the screen, probably open-mouthed. Don't really know what the hell it was about but so what - whatever it was about it was about in a really powerful, not to say demented, way.
I've got On The Silver Globe by the same director at home as well which I must get round to watching if it's anywhere near as good.
 
Don't really know what the hell it was about

Allegorical response to Zulawski's artistic exile from Poland. or just a very effective horror film if you prefer...(though psychedelic it isn't! ;) this thread title is tickling my inner pedant) i really like Heinz Bennett in this, a great character performance...& Carlo Rambaldi with the inspired creature fx as usual
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
"Allegorical response to Zulawski's artistic exile from Poland. or just a very effective horror film if you prefer...(though psychedelic it isn't! this thread title is tickling my inner pedant) i really like Heinz Bennett in this, a great character performance...& Carlo Rambaldi with the inspired creature fx as usual"
Yeah, but not exactly horror I thought.
But regarding the pedantry, I think these two posts make it ok and fit the bill:

"they don't have to necessarily psychedelic as such (bad choice of words in the title)"
"That's cool, I didn't really mean psychedelia as such, I mean anything that's kinda odd really and that was a sort of lazy shorthand."
 

mistersloane

heavy heavy monster sound
Possession's probably my favourite film ever, it's just got layers and layers and layers. That and Performance were my 'test out drugs' films lol.

I think it's about a bad relationship, it's quite literal, no? Just a kind of monster take on relationships and the creative process of making a film about them. I love the handheld bits where it looks like he was filming the actors workshopping, so inspiring. Watching it feels like watching consciousness.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
"Possession's probably my favourite film ever, it's just got layers and layers and layers."
Glad you said that, makes my comments sound less stupidly enthusiastic.

"I think it's about a bad relationship, it's quite literal, no? Just a kind of monster take on relationships and the creative process of making a film about them. I love the handheld bits where it looks like he was filming the actors workshopping, so inspiring. Watching it feels like watching consciousness."
Yeah, that seems about right to me. The end of their relationship is a monster that is literally born (or miscarried) from her madness and her madness is created by the horribleness of their relationship. Don't really understand the end though when SPOILER the monster turns into a new Sam Neill and then the kid goes and lies face down in the bathtub while nuclear war(?) seems to break out.
You're totally right about the camera - it's so weirdly disorientating, you feel as though you are flying around the actors the whole time and getting sucked into a deranged home video.
 
Yeah, but not exactly horror I thought.

close enough for it to have initially been marketed in the US as a horror film in a cut which dispensed with the talking and all that shit

But regarding the pedantry, I think these two posts make it ok and fit the bill:

yeah sure, that's why the thread title. it's just a personal thing with the p-word. i'll have to learn to ATC better ;)

with regards to the film's allegorical qualities, that's how zulawski conceives of it himself rather than how i read it. but as we can see it offers many interpretations.
 

mistersloane

heavy heavy monster sound
Haha yeah the ending is fucked up, I think maybe something to do with the inevitability of (male) fear of intimacy being compounded. But I like the fact it's just a great ending, I think Fincher nicked it for the end of Fight Club in some way, it has that same emotion.

Thrower write some good stuff on it in his Eyeball magazine which there's a compendium of

:http://www.fabpress.com/vsearch.php?CO=FAB047

Kinda Nietzsche take on it, plus Freudian hysteria. Don't think he goes far enough with it though, but it's truly kind of endless. I know people say stuff like this but I must have literally watched that film 50 times by now, and it doesn't stop being fascinating and I don't stop rethinking what each bit means.

I'm scared to watch any more Zulawski in case it's not as good. I love the story about Adjani slashing her wrists after watching herself in the film for the first time. Genius.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
"I'm scared to watch any more Zulawski in case it's not as good. I love the story about Adjani slashing her wrists after watching herself in the film for the first time. Genius."
Well, I didn't have time to watch Silver Globe yesterday but I've heard that that ended up not being the film he wanted it to be due to constraints on the filming. I've heard that Diabel is good though.
 
^^^ The silver globe and diabel are good, though they aren't at the same hysterical pitch. i haven't seen the later erotica based stuff though. some of it's coming out on r1 DVD later this year supposedly. i don't know...it doesn't appeal as much. sex is boring

I must have literally watched that film 50 times by now

sloane you maniac. i'm not sure i'd ever watch it again having seen it twice. it's exhausting
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
"i don't know...it doesn't appeal as much. sex is boring"
In general or just on film?

"sloane you maniac. i'm not sure i'd ever watch it again having seen it twice. it's exhausting"
Yeah, exhausting is exactly the word. I can see that a lot of people wouldn't like it at all becuase of the way it so quickly goes straight into madness. In about five minutes Sam Neill is throwing chairs around, next scene he is a gibbering sub-human mess, there is no arc of descent, it just throws you straight into a load of screaming nutcases slashing their own necks and murdering their friends.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
"...oh, and one more great historical sci-fi film: Sergei Paradjanov's "Ashik Kerib". His "Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors" is like a giant Ukrainian fever dream as well. Incredible stuff!"
I watched Ashik Kerib and also The Legend of Suram Fortress a week or two ago. I don't think that they were exactly what I had in mind with this thread but they were both totally amazing none the less. I didn't know anything about Paradjanov before this but he really deserves his own thread... actually I'll just start one I think.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
I feel that I've watched a few more films recently that could fit into this thread. As well as working my way through most of Alain Robbe-Grillet's bizarre back catalogue I've watched Black Moon, Singapore Sling, What Is It? and, perhaps weirdest of all, Wax or The Discovery of Television Amongst The Bees.

Black Moon is directed by Louis Malle and seems to be the story of a (possibly insane) girl reaching puberty and attempting to escape a (literal) battle of the sexes by driving her car off the road and entering a beautifully shot, dreamlike landscape filled with unicorns, suicidal sheepherds and a bizarre family consisting of a mad old lady and mute twins - one of whom breast feeds her mother. Loads of references to Alice in Wonderland make this film a good companion piece to Alice Ou La Dernier Fugue and this is even more dreamlike and peculiar - although maybe, at times, a little slow and repetitive. I must confess I lost concentration at times in the middle which was a shame as the start was so intriguing and instantly exciting.

Singapore Sling
A bizarre Greek film that is best described as being somewhere between a film noir (specifically Laura which I'm sure is deliberately referenced) and Sweet Movie - and possibly Misery. An injured detective searching for his lost love (called Laura) arrives at the house of an insane mother-daughter duo who are just in the process of burying their chauffeur. They promptly imprison the detective and subject him to bizarre sex games involving vomit and electric shocks and then the film then gets pretty confusing, moving about in time via flashbacks and the like as the detective's voice over is delivered in a noir style. The film becomes a battle for power as the victim tries to play both of the women against each other. Also there is a load of stuff about the father/husband who is missing and the peculiar sex games they used to play with him. All shot in a claustrophobic and grimy black and white this is a truly odd film.
 
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