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"Maison du jouir," says Gauguin, everyone's invited. Gold chain like a serpent, up the screen and down the gullet. Bejeweled hands on red velvet, just Lord Shiva (Samson De Brier) preparing for the bacchanal, a most attentive host. The Great Beast and the Scarlet Woman (Marjorie Cameron), gift of fire for the reefer from heaven. Aphrodite (Joan Whitney) out of the flame, Isis (Katy Kadell) a frisky odalisque, Lilith (Renate Druks) the mask behind the mask behind the mask. Amid crimson suffusions lies the blue apparition of Astarte (Anaïs Nin), fashionable in her Magritte birdcage-headwear. The full Kenneth Anger panoply, out of Coleridge and Crowley, a sustained pagan splendor and a shindig of kimonos and perukes and eyelashes. Cesare from Caligari (Curtis Harrington) like Lurch in The Addams Family, the drinks served are courtesy of Hecate. Glowing skin as if illuminated from within, the smoky unconscious and its passageways, lysergic brew in ornate chalices. Pan the doomed hunk (Paul Mathison), smiling fatuously before a very bad trip. "Par délicatesse. J'ai perdu ma vie." (Rimbaud) Music by Janácek, Glagolitic Mass on top of a fiendishly layered and refracted image. Talismanic flashes, infernal backdrops, a certain kinship with Picabia and Trouille. Parody of communion, the green grin overseeing it all. Flaming color, sardonic montage, ingredients of Anger's alchemy, a sort of malevolent camp. Ecstasy accelerated, death by any other name. Cocteau and Deren go in, Russell and Parajanov come out, with special mention to Schumacher's uncredited blockbuster dilation in Batman & Robin.
--- Fernando F. Croce |