Pestoni’s Picks: You Are My Everlovin Enema Bandit Hardcore
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Pestoni’s Picks
You Are My Everlovin Enema Bandit Hardcore
Screening Sunday July 26 at 7 PM
1) Hard Core.
Direction, music and soundtrack by Walter De Maria. 1969. 26:31 minutes.
Filmed in Black Rock Desert Nevada, “Hard Core” was commissioned by James Newman and the Dilexi Foundation, San Francisco in association with KQED, TV San Francisco, Channel 9 public television as an eight person project to let artists, musicians and dancers create and direct their own original work for television.
The sound track used for the film is from the artist’s CD “Drums and Nature” which features two independent pieces of music that were performed and recorded by the artist, “Cricket Music,” 1964 and “Ocean Music,” 1969.
The first public viewing was on September 27, 1969 part of the Avant-Garde West section of the 7th Lincoln Center Film Festival, New York. Subsequently, it was shown in the Dilexi Foundation’s artist’s series on public television as originally intended.
The film was shot in the Black Rock Desert of North Western Nevada in July 1969. The same location is now used annually for the “Burning Man” festival which first started in 1990.
Walter Joseph De Maria (1935- 2013) was an American artist, sculptor, illustrator and composer, who lived and worked in New York City. Walter de Maria’s artistic practice is connected with Minimal art, Conceptual art, and Land art of the 1960s.2) Laura.
Shūji Terayama. 1974. 9 minutes.
In ‘Laura’ the attack against the cinematic apparatus becomes a consummation between performer and spectator, which as a mark of Terayama’s outrageous wit, was reputedly inspired by the unfulfilled affair between Laura and Alec in the 1945 British feature, ‘Brief Encounter.’ The appearance onscreen of outrageous painted strippers who hurl insults at the audience is a cue for one spectator to literally enter the screen, from which he emerges clutching his torn clothes, after being stripped and assaulted on celluloid.
Shūji Terayama (1935-1983) was an avant-garde Japanese poet, dramatist, writer, film director, and photographer.
3)The Enema Bandit.
Black Randy and Chuck Roche. 1975. 14 minutes.
Black Randy (born John Morris, 1952) founded the band ‘Black Randy and the Metrosquad’ in 1977. They were a pivotal punk rock band from the late 1970s and early 1980s in Los Angeles. They gained notoriety not only for their surreal and smutty sense of humour, but also for their amalgamation of proto-punk, 1970s porn, pop, and avant-garde music. Black Randy died in 1988 of complications from AIDS.
4)Tanz für eine Frau.
Ulrike Rosenbach. 1974/5. 8 minutes.
The black and white video ‘Dance for a Woman’ shows the artist as dancer turning incessantly around her to the tune of the waltz ‘I dance with you into the heaven’ by Strauss. The action is filmed from above and visualizes thus the seemingly faceless centre of a spinning voile skirt.
The tune is constantly repeated reflecting the endless turnings of the dance. The image is both: dizzy and unsettling. The figure appears from above like the turning ballerina of a music box gentling swaying to and fro in the frame of the screen only to balance itself out again in the centre. The dancing woman resembles the core but, in this form, causes fright. She turns into a record stuck to the turntable of habit and role-playing. The togetherness suggested by the tune is missing completely. The artist paraphrases the title of the waltz ‘I dance with you into the heaven’ by relating it solely to herself. At the end of the tape she breaks down.
Ulrike Rosenbach (born 1943) is a video artist from Germany. She works with videotapes, installations, and performances.
5) Step performance (edited). Henry Flynt. Emily Harvey Gallery. November 2001. 11 minutes.
Henry Flynt (born 1940, Greensboro, NC) is a philosopher, avant-garde musician, anti-art activist and artist often associated with Conceptual Art, Fluxus and Nihilism.
6) Visual training.
Frans Zwartjes. 1969. 8 minutes.
A man and his female helper lather a blindfolded woman’s naked body with various foodstuffs.
Frans Zwartjes was born in 1927 and is a Dutch filmmaker, musician, violin maker, illustrator, painter, and sculptor. Best known for his experimental films, he began by making black-and-white films in the late sixties before moving into color and video work.
Tags: Black Randy, Chuck Roche, Frans Zwartjes, Henry Flynt, Jon Pestoni, Shūji Terayama, Ulrike Rosenbach, Walter De Maria