L’Inferno
Francesco Bertolini, Adolfo Padovan, Giuseppe De Liguoro, Italy, 1911, 68 min
L’Inferno is a 1911 Italian silent film, loosely adapted from Dante Alighieri’s The Divine Comedy. L’Inferno took over three years to make, and was the first full-length Italian feature film ever made. (The Story of the Kelly Gang, released in Australia in 1906, is the first full-length film).
L’Inferno was first screened in Naples in the Teatro Mercadante on March 10, 1911. An international success, it took in more than $2 million in the United States, where its length gave theater owners an excuse for raising ticket prices. For this reason, L’Inferno was arguably the first true blockbuster in all of cinema. Today it is regarded by many scholars as the finest film adaptation of any of Dante’s works to date.
Lot in Sodom
James Sibley Watson, Melville Webber, USA, 1933, 28 min
Lot in Sodom is a short silent experimental film, based on the Biblical tale of the city of Sodom and Gomorrah. It was directed by JAMES SIBLEY WATSON and MELVILLE WEBBER
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Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) by MAYA DEREN (January 18, 2013) Altered States (1980) by KEN RUSSELL (May 26, 2011)
Heaven and Earth Magic
Harry Everett Smith, USA, 1957-1962, 66 min
Heaven and Earth Magic (also called Number 12, The Magic Feature, or Heaven and Earth Magic Feature) is an American avant garde feature film made by Harry Everett Smith. Originally released in 1957, it was re-edited several times and the final version was released in 1962. The film primarily uses cut-out-animated photographs.
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No. 11: Mirror Animations (1956-57) by HARRY SMITH (November 18, 2013) “Early Abstractions” (1946-57) by HARRY SMITH (October 27, 2010)
Following a theatrical run at ICA, Unsound, CTM and SF Doc Fest, Boiler Room presents the online premiere of Bight of the Twin, a new arthouse film starring counter-cultural icon Genesis Breyer P-Orridge (merci Pierre-Luc) :
Bight of the Twin
Hazel Hill McCarthy III, 2016, USA, 55 min
Serial transgressor Genesis Breyer P-Orridge travels to Benin, Africa, to explore voodoo twin cults and dark mysticism
Bight of the Twin tells the story of musician and artist Genesis’ journey to Ouidah in Benin to explore the origins of the Vodoun (Voodoo) religion. Transcending assumptions of what it means to be “gendered,” Genesis Breyer P-Orridge and h/er late wife Lady Jaye underwent a series of surgical procedures to become physically identical to one another, seeking to perfect a gender-neutral state through a process they termed ‘pandrogyny’.
In Benin, which has the highest national average of twins per birth in the world, twins carry sacred meaning and are venerated as gods. When one sibling passes away, the remaining twin remembers their lost other by carrying around a small, carved replica of their dead brother or sister.
Beginning as an investigation, the nature of the project changes drastically when Genesis is serendipitously initiated into the ‘Twin Fetish’ – a practice within Vodoun that honors twins by activating a dead twin’s spirit in order to allow for the living one to remain connected with the one who has passed. Through a series of sacrifices and ceremonies, Genesis reaffirms an eternal bond with h/er late wife Lady Jaye: a deeply interdimensional connection of Western civilization and African ritual.
Ultimately, during shooting the nature of the film changed from simply being a catalyst for audiences to gain a wider understanding and acceptance of Vodoun, to being itself, Vodoun—an object that has been activated by creation.
Bight of the Twin (2014) by HAZEL HILL McCARTHY III (July 1, 2014)
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Could it be magick? The occult returns to the art world (July 1, 2016) First Transmission (1982) by PSYCHIC TV (January 7, 2015) Les yeux de GENESIS BREYER P-ORRIDGE présentés à La Centrale (October 1, 2012) La bible psychique de GENESIS BREYER P-ORRIDGE (December 7, 2010) ‘Thee Psychick Bible’ A New Testameant By GENESIS BREYER P-ORRIDGE (October 27, 2009)
« Daughter of Horror » (also known in a slightly altered version as « Dementia ») is an American film by JOHN PARKER, incorporating elements of the horror film, film noir and expressionist film. It was produced in 1953, but not released until 1955.
A young woman awakens from a nightmare in a run down hotel. She leaves the building and wanders through the night, passing a newspaper man. The news headline « Mysterious stabbing » catches her eye, and she quickly leaves. In a dark alley, a whino approaches and grabs her. A policeman rescues her and beats up the drunken man. Shortly later, another man approaches her and talks her into escorting a rich man in a limousine. While they cruise the night, she remembers her unhappy youth with an abusive father, whom she stabbed to death with a switchblade after he had killed her unfaithful mother. The rich man takes her to various clubs and then to her noble apartment. As he ignores her while having an extensive meal, she tries to tempt him.
When he advances her, she stabs him with her knife and pushes the dying man out of the window. Before his fall, he grabs her pendant. The woman runs down onto the street and, as the dead man’s hand won’t relieve her pendant, cuts off the hand while being watched by faceless passerby’s. Again, the patrol policeman shows up and follows her. She flees and hides the hand in a flower girl’s basket. The pimp shows up again and drags her into a night club, where an excited audience watches a jazz band playing. The policeman enters the club, while the rich man, lying at the window, points out his murderess with his bloody stump. The crowd encircles the woman, laughing frantically. The woman wakes up in her hotel room, her encounters have supposedly been a nightmare. In one of her drawers, she discovers her pendant, clutched by the fingers of a severed hand. The camera leaves the hotel room and moves out into the streets, while a desperate cry can be heard.
