THRUST IN ME | Richard Kern 1985

Richard Kern, THE CINEMA OF TRANSGRESSION (Manhattan Love Suicides)

About necrophilia, suicide, and bathtubs.  Nick Zedd plays dual roles in this short-film as a street-wandering guy and a suicidal female. The male character finds the woman dead in the tub, and decides that since she's dead... well...


Man / Woman... Nick Zedd
Pimp... Don Houston
Whore... Margo Day
Girl... Dee Finley

I HATE YOU NOW | Richard Kern 1985

About a deformed guy and his girlfriend the film repeatedly taunts the notions of “deformity” & “ugliness”. Richard Kern-artistic-underground-erotic-sick-fetishistic... the spirit of underground cinema... no compromise, explicit scenes, eroticism meets death. The type of stuff that Hollywood fare wouldn't dare to produce, and which the typical film buff wouldn't even care to look at. But if you're here, that's not you.


Man... Tom Turner
Woman... Amy Turner
Pot Head... Bob


"For those of you joining the party late, Richard Kern is a New York City based filmmaker/photographer who during the 1980's created a slew of short films that highbrow critics call "cinema of transgression" and everybody else calls "some sick and twisted s"""."  Fusing the arthouse aesthetic of Godard meets grindhouse horror meets porn, Kern created a look and language for the post-punk subculture that grew (festered?) in the Lower East Side at the time."

BOGGY DEPOT | Curt McDowell 1974

A demented ‘rural opera’ riffing the musical genre in which a young woman (Lulu) falls in love with a guy (Damon) who’s been hypnotized into leaving his shorts on her doorknob, with an obscene message scrawled on them…


Lulu... Ainslie Pryor
Damon... George Kuchar
Neighbor... Kathleen Hohalek
The Mean Brothers... Mark Ellinger and Curt McDowell

NAUGHTY WORDS | Curt McDowell 1974

"NAUGHTY WORDS was a Curt McDowell work covering the gamut of cinematic profanity."
... with some ass-istance from his sister Melinda...

THE FLOWER THIEF | Ron Rice 1960

Taylor Mead traipses with elfin glee through a lost San Francisco of smoke-stuffed North Beach cafés, oceanside fairgrounds and collapsed post-industrial ruins. Boinging along an improvised picaresque up and down the city’s hills, Mead teases playground schoolkids, sniffs wildflowers, gets abducted by cowboys in the park, and has a tea party on a pile of rubble with a potbellied bathing beauty…  With Eric "Big Daddy" Nord, Beat Generation-era nightclub owner, poet, actor, and hipster, beat poets living in North Beach and the poet Bob Kaufman (who in Bagel Shop Jazz, called its patrons "...shadow people...mulberry-eyed girls in black stockings, smelling vaguely of mint jelly…turtle neck angel guys...".)   and shot using surplus black-and-white 16mm film  from film cartridges left over from aerial gunnery equipment used during World War II.

 (Taylor Mead, Jeffrey Joffen, Ron Rice)

 

FLAMING CREATURES | Jack Smith 1961

The film, in full. 

The most famous (and arguably most notorious) of Jack Smith's films, a satire of Hollywood B-movies and a tribute to Maria Montez and made using discarded color reversal film stock .  Authorities considered scenes to be pornographic and copies of the movie were confiscated at the premiere (in 1967) and it was subsequently banned (and technically, are to this day).

Inspired by Maria Montez, with whom Jack Smith never met as she died (drowning in her bath) before he began making films, he prayed to her calling her "the Holy One" and "the Miraculous One." After a screening of one of her films, he told a friend, "The Miraculous One was raging and flaming. Those are the standards for art."

"It is a world of flowers of evil, of illuminations, of torn and tortured flesh; at  which is at once beautiful and terrible, good and evil, delicate and dirty... 

PULL MY DAISY

Pull My Daisy (1959), the quintessential beat film.

Based on an incident in the life of Neal Cassady and his wife Carolyn, Daisy tells the story of a railway brakeman whose painter wife invites a respectable bishop over for dinner. However, the brakeman’s bohemian friends crash the party, with comic result.

For the beatnik at heart, a tortured poet, a lover of Kerouac, Ginsberg, Orlovsky, Corso, Burroughs.

PULL MY DAISY | David Amram with Lynn Sheffield

      ginsberg corso                                                 neal cassady