Category Archives: Saturday Matinee

Saturday Matinee: A Short Vision

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The Night Ed Sullivan Scared a Nation with the Apocalyptic Animated Short, A Short Vision (1956)

Source: Open Culture

On May 27, 1956, millions of Americans tuned in to The Ed Sullivan Show, expecting the usual variety of comedians, talents and musical guests. What they weren’t prepared for was a short animated film that Sullivan introduced thusly:

Just last week you read about the H-bomb being dropped. Now two great English writers, two very imaginative writers — I’m gonna tell you if you have youngsters in the living room tell them not to be alarmed at this ‘cause it’s a fantasy, the whole thing is animated — but two English writers, Joan and Peter Foldes, wrote a thing which they called “A Short Vision” in which they wondered what might happen to the animal population of the world if an H-bomb were dropped. It’s produced by George K. Arthur and I’d like you to see it. It is grim, but I think we can all stand it to realize that in war there is no winner.

And with that, he screened the horrific bit of animation you can watch above. At the height of the atomic age, this film was a short sharp shock. Its vision of a nuclear holocaust is told in the style of a fable or storybook, with both animals and humans witnessing their last moments on earth, and ending with the extinguishing of a tiny flame. The mostly static art work is all the more effective when faces melt into skulls.

Many children didn’t leave the room of course, and the website Conelrad has a wonderful in-depth history of that night and collected memories from people who were traumatized by the short as a child. One child’s hair–or rather a small section of his hair–turned white from fright.

It was as formative a moment as The Day After would be to children of the ‘80s. The papers the next day reported on the short in salacious detail (“Shock Wave From A-Bomb Film Rocks Nation’s TV Audience”) and Sullivan not only defended his decision, but showed the film again on June 10.

The film was created by married couple Peter and Joan Foldes, and shot for little money in their kitchen on a makeshift animation table. Peter was a Hungarian immigrant who had studied at the Slade School of Art and the Courtlaud Institute and apprenticed with John Halas where he learned animation.

(Halas is best known for the animated feature version of Orwell’s Animal Farm.)

A Short Vision would go on in September of that year to win best experimental film at the 17th Venice Film Festival. (Peter Foldes would later make another disturbing and award-winning short called Hunger.)

Once so shocking, A Short Vision fell out of circulation. But a generation grew up remembering that they had seen something horrific on television that night (in black and white, not the color version above.) For a time, it was hard to find a mention of the film on IMDB and a damaged educational print was one of the few copies circulating around. Fortunately the British Film Institute has made a pristine copy available of this important Cold War document.

Saturday Matinee: Le Orme (aka Footprints on the Moon)

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From Archive.org:

“Le Orme” (a/k/a “Footprints on the Moon” and “Primal
Impulse”) has been described variously as an Italian giallo, a sci-fi film, a
mystery, or a psychological thriller. Ultimately, it defies pigeonholing.

It stars Florinda Bolkan as Alice Cespi, a professional
translator, who is tormented by a recurring nightmare; in it, a lunar-landing
team deliberately abandons a colleague on the moon’s surface as part of a scientific
experiment.

Alice arrives for work one day and is summarily canned. The
reason? She’d walked out of an international astronomy conference and disappeared
for three days, incommunicado.

Those three days are a complete blank for her. Alice finds a
few vague clues — a torn postcard from Garma, a resort she’s never visited; an
earring, a unfamiliar bloody yellow dress that fits her perfectly — and sets out
to learn what has happened.

When she arrives in Garma, all of the strangers are
delighted to see her “again” — but claim that she’s another person entirely. And that’s
just the beginning…

Although the storytelling in “Le Orme” is fairly linear, it’s also disorienting — so you’ll
have to pay attention to it. There are blind alleys, red herrings and
(possibly) misleading implications throughout.

Cast includes Bolkan, Peter McEnery, Nicoletta Elmi, and a cameo by Klaus Kinski.

Titles and credits are in Italian, but all dialogue is in English.

Saturday Matinee: The President’s Analyst

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“The President’s Analyst” (1967) is a political satire written and directed by Ted Flicker. James Coburn stars as Dr. Sidney Schaefer, a psychiatrist recruited by the U.S. government to serve as the president’s private psychoanalyst. Overwhelmed by stress and paranoia, he goes on the lam and is promptly hunted down by foreign and domestic intelligence agents as a pawn in a technocratic plot to control the world. The film’s comedic sensibility is at times dated but features themes which are even more relevant today such as the conflict between power and ethics, transhumanist aspirations of Big Data corporations, the ever-encroaching surveillance state and resultant loss of privacy.

Watch the full film here.

Saturday Matinee: The Constant Gardner

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“The Constant Gardner” (2005) is a conspiracy thriller directed by Fernando Meirelles (City of God) with a screenplay based on a John le Carré novel of the same name. Loosely based on a actual incident in Nigeria, the plot follows Justin Quayle (Ralph Fiennes), a British diplomat based in Kenya who while investigating the death of his activist wife Tessa (Rachel Weisz), uncovers criminal activities of a Big Pharma corporation with connections to the highest levels of power.

Saturday Matinee: Tomato Is Another Day

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Un(der)seen Cinema: Tomato Is Another Day

By TNI AV

Source: The New Inquiry

James Sibley Watson, doctor and Western Union heir, will be famous to some as publisher and president of The Dial, the literary magazine which, more than any other publication, brought Modernism to America. Under Watson’s patronage, the magazine was the first to publish T.S Eliot’s The Waste Land stateside, brought the work of Picasso, Munch, Chagall and many others to a major American audience for the first time, and regularly featured D.H Lawrence, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, Virginia Woolf, Edmund Wilson, Bertrand Russell, John Dos Passos, etc. etc.

To others, Watson will be known for directing The Fall of the House of Usher and Lot in Sodom, important early works in the American Avant-Garde. Heavily influenced by the poetic theories of Ezra Pound and E.E Cummings (Cummings worked with Watson on treatments for Usher) and the cinematic innovations of German Expressionism and Jean Cocteau, these films are literary, hallucinatory and often nightmarish experiments in film language and the unconscious.

We here at A/V, however, prefer his even less well known Tomato is Another Day, which strikes us as an unparalleled bit of Dadaist pranksterdom and parody whose pun-heavy critique of Hollywood writing and directing styles, at six and a half minutes long and eighty-two years old, still resonates more forcefully and hilariously then most that have followed.

Saturday Matinee: Fellini Satyricon

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“Fellini Satyricon” (1969) is a surreal fantasy written and directed by Federico Fellini and loosely based on Satyricon, written by Petronius during Nero’s reign over imperial Rome. The film’s episodic structure follows the scholar Encolpius and friend Ascyltus as they navigate a dreamlike and decadent Roman landscape.

An English subtitled version of the film can be found here.

Saturday Matinee: The Monkees (The Frodis Caper)

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“The Frodis Caper” (aka Mijacogeo) was the final episode of the music/comedy series The Monkees, and originally aired on March 25th, 1968. Directed and co-written by Mickey Dolenz, the plot focuses on the Monkees’ efforts to thwart a conspiracy by the Wizard Glick (Rip Taylor) to control the minds of the masses via television hypnosis with the aid of an alien Frodis plant. Besides the episode’s thinly veiled critiques of mass media, The Frodis Caper is notable for its’ overt psychedelic references, anti-war Monkees song Zor and Zam, and a transcendent solo acoustic performance of Song of the Siren by Tim Buckley ( a song which was later popularized by an arguably superior version performed by Elizabeth Fraser).

Saturday Matinee: Good Morning Mr. Orwell

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PETER GABRIEL, LAURIE ANDERSON, OINGO BOINGO, ALLEN GINSBERG, JOHN CAGE & OTHERS USHER IN 1984

By Martin Schneider

Source: Dangerous Minds

George Orwell’s sinister novel Nineteen Eighty-Four made it inevitable that the arrival of his eponymous year would be a media event. Decades after his death, Orwell made it onto the cover of Time magazine in late 1983, but on the big day itself—January 1, 1984—TV visionary Nam June Paik ushered in the year with an ambitious international video program called Good Morning, Mr. Orwell that was broadcast live simultaneously from New York (WNET public television), Paris, and San Francisco, with broadcasters in Germany and South Korea also carrying the transmissions if not contributing content.

According to Plimpton, Paik aptly referred to the project as a “global disco.” As the title suggested, Paik’s take on 1984 was considerably rosier than that of Orwell. In the spirit of Fluxus and/or technological optimism, as you please, Paik gathered a roster of artists with less inclination to lean on bleak themes such as Peter Gabriel, Laurie Anderson, John Cage, Allen Ginsberg, Merce Cunningham, Salvador Dalí, Oingo Boingo and many others for a stimulating showcase of art, music, theater, and video manipulation. One might imagine a band like DEVO being invited but it’s difficult to imagine Mark Mothersbaugh and Jerry Casale mustering up any enthusiasm for a project in which it was unironically asserted that technology is a boon to mankind.

The show was hosted by George Plimpton—the John Hodgman of his day, kind of—with assistance from the Centre Pompidou in Paris. In a move you can’t imagine happening today, Plimpton enthusiastically names the satellite—Bright Star—assisting with the remote sync-up. We would consider that akin to singling out the dedicated server permitting YouTube to bring you a video.

Among the performances: Gabriel and Anderson combine on a duet called “Excellent Birds”; a fitfully amusing comedy sketch called “Cavalcade of Intellectuals” in which a transatlantic discussion devolves into an interpersonal spat (a gag that worked better in Airplane! using airport PA announcers); a sprightly song by Yves Montand; John Cage plays “amplified cacti and plant materials” with a feather (so great); Oingo Boingo perform a song called “Wake Up (It’s 1984)”; Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky sing a little ditty about meditation to the cello stylings of Arthur Russell; and much more.