by ·Comments Off on Clive Barker’s early shorts

Salome (1973)

Girl finds a mostly-nude boy in the catacombs, they start making out but he strangles her. The vibe is a murkier, cultier Jean Rollin, with light and fog effects so heavy they turn the actors into abstract imagery. It’s content to roll along in its slow dreamy way without getting caught up in story – I suppose if you’re familiar with the Oscar Wilde play you can follow along but I’m going by a few year-old memory of the Ken Russell version. Music sounds newer than 1973, like Coil Concrete – aha, this must’ve been recorded for the late 1990s home video release, which means I am free to listen to Secret Chiefs 3’s Horrorthon during the next film.

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The Forbidden (1978)

Horrorthon mentions Faust in the dialogue clips, and if you skip the “preview” first track and start the album with the movie, the circus music that plays when the nude man (Barker?!) starts dancing around is very funny. Barker made these films and his theatrical works before writing the Books of Blood – I always thought of him as a novelist who came to filmmaking late, but I was off. This has the most nudity in any Faust film outside the pornography realm. The image processed in negative, surfaces seem to glow. The opening mathematica and later full-body tattooing recall Book of Blood, and rotating light over pins/nails predict Pinhead and Leviathan at once.

by ·Comments Off on Fausto (2018, Andrea Bussmann)

It’s time once again for Locorazo, a home viewing series of films that played the Locarno Festival five years ago. This one played in the “Filmmakers of the Present” section for first and second features – in this case it’s her first solo feature, the previous two being collaborations with her husband Nicolas Pereda (Fauna), who only assists on this one (plus thanks in the credits to Joshua Bonnetta and Matias Pineiro).

Stories about lingering ghosts and missing shadows, a witch, psychic animals and astronomical events, told at night, often via narrator. “We live in a conscious universe, we just do not realize it.”

Dudes hanging out smoking, usually at night. The subjects of the stories are sometimes seen at an indifferent distance from the camera. A few unique visual moments: a text list of animals that can see better at night, a beach shot with an absurdly low horizon line.

The director in Mubi:

The concept of the search and searching was a central idea in the film and in the Faust myth. Much of the time we learn the characters are searching for a shadow, a man, et cetera. The theme of the search was something important for me to use, but also important to continue without a resolution. Faust, after all, wants nothing more than to unlock the keys to the universe and himself—something that, like Faust, we are far from doing. I’m never looking for a particular thing, but I’m always in the process of searching and exploring. I’m consumed by questions, which through the seeking of answer continually opens up new questions.