Coming Apart (1969, Milton Moses Ginsberg)

“Where would we get a duck? I don’t even have a dresser.” Pervert Month continues, as psychologist Rip Torn sets up a hidden camera to watch him have sex with all his neurotic patients, and anyone else who knocks on his door.

Women who join Rip include Julie “daughter of John” Garfield (Ishtar)… Viveca Lindfors, the Swede in Run For Cover… and Sally Kirkland of Demme’s Crazy Mama. The online plot description say Rip induces his own mental breakdown, but it’s Sally who aims a gun at herself then trashes his office in slow-mo at the end. Rather than emphasizing breakdown, Amos Vogel tells the story as Rip’s “increasingly problematic sex life.”

From Film as a Subversive Art: The End of Sexual Taboos: Erotic and Pornographic Cinema, Vogel goes on and on (usefully) about censorship laws. “One can only hope that eventually arousal of erotic feelings in the cinema will take the place of the aggression and violence predominant in films today,” sorry sir. The director is better known for Werewolf of Washington, a movie so notorious that pd187’s review of it was removed by a moderator.

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The Bed (1967, James Broughton)

A bed romps stop-motion through a field, then a nude couple materializes and romps around the bed. More and more people appear through the magic of editing, some of them nude. The music is ghastly electro-harpsichord.

Favorite scenes: a woman reads to her dog… lizard crawls out of a guy’s mouth and transforms into a girl… wild girl with horse tail rides old Colonel Sanders guy until he runs away.

Vogel:

The actors, who exuberantly perform scenes of the human comedy, include Imogen Cunningham, Alan Watts, and other San Francisco artists and writers. While even avant-garde nudity seems often to betray an absence of joyful or uncomplicated sex, The Bed displays a smiling, polymorphously-perverse eroticism.

Nuptiae (1969, James Broughton)

Sound is awful again (panpipes and poetic narration) but concept is good (legal government marriage ceremony juxtaposed with ancient/traditional portraits of marriage). Incredible that you could hire Stan Brakhage to photograph your little movie. “The union of opposites, the wedding of pleasure and pain,” oh, is this a Hellraiser thing?