Operation Petticoat [1959]
Of all the actors, writers, musicians, and directors who passed through Chandler and Hartman’s portals, the most famous was Cary Grant. Grant took LSD more than sixty times, and although he was considered one of Hollywood’s most private stars, he found his enthusiasm for the drug hard to contain. It finally overflowed during the filming of the movie Operation Petticoat. The scene was appropriately bizarre. There was Grant sitting on the deck of the pink submarine that was Petticoat’s principal set. He had an aluminum sheet attached to his neck to facilitate his tan and he was chatting with two reporters, both of whom were prepared for the usual hour of teeth pulling that an interview with Grant required. But today Cary was totally relaxed, a condition he attributed to the insights he had achieved using an experimental mind drug called LSD.
“I have been born again,” he told the astonished reporters. “I have been through a psychiatric experience which has completely changed me. I was horrendous. I had to face things about myself which I never admitted, which I didn’t know were there. Now I know that I hurt every woman I ever loved. I was an utter fake, a self-opinionated bore, a know-all who knew very little.
“I found I was hiding behind all kinds of defenses, hypocrisies and vanities. I had to get rid of them layer by layer. The moment when your conscious meets your subconscious is a hell of a wrench. With me there came a day when I saw the light.”
Although Grant, his lawyers, and MGM all tried to kill the story, it appeared in print on April 20,1959, and while it didn’t alter Grant’s popularity one iota, it was an enormous shot in the pocketbook for LSD therapists like Chandler and Hartman. Suddenly everyone in Hollywood wanted to be born again.
Whether it was Chandler and Hartman that Aldous Huxley had in mind when he dropped the following note to Humphrey Osmond is unclear, but they certainly fit the general description. “What frightful people there are in your profession,” Huxley had written. “We met two Beverly Hills psychiatrists the other day, who specialize in LSD therapy at $100 a shot—and, really, I have seldom met people of lower sensitivity, more vulgar mind! To think of people made vulnerable by LSD being exposed to such people is profoundly disturbing.”
Excerpt from Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream by Jay Stevens
Broadway by Light (William Klein - 1958)
“An experimental meditation on Times Square marquees and iconic advertising, Klein’s first film captures the concurrently seedy and dazzling aspects of New York’s Great White Way. Illustrative of Klein’s transition from photographer to filmmaker, Broadway by Light was declared by Orson Welles to be “the first film I’ve seen in which color was absolutely necessary. —calendar.walkerart.org”
Decasia by Bill Morrison. Music by Michael Gordon
“Created by award-winning avant-garde director Bill Morrison, DECASIA was edited entirely from found film footage left in archives that had decayed over time. The severe emulsion deterioration reveals the film stock in its basic chemical form and the images are stripped to their most primitive emotional state. The film was shaped to Michael Gordon’s moving symphony performed by the 55-piece basel sinfonietta. The soundtrack is decaying itself: Gordon took the orchestra to musical extremes by detuning the instruments and using prepared pianos to further emphasize the powerful hallucinatory visual experience. ” text via plexifilm website
UK 81 minutes
London is neither feature film nor documentary but a provocative essay in the form of a journal, recording fictitious journeys through a very real city. Writer, director and photographer Keiller shot the film during 1992, a year which witnessed the re-election of John Major, the continuation of the IRA bombing campaign and the beginning of the ‘fall of the house of Windsor’. The narrator employed by the enigmatic and unseen Robinson, gives many wry insights into the city and its mysteries.
UK 38 minutes
A man and his gay friend Robinson, are recruited as spies. They set out on seven trips around England - to the west and east of London; Oxford and Bristol; the West Midlands; Birmingham and Liverpool; Manchester and Hull; Scarborough and Whitby; and Blackpool and Sellafield.
Mary Ellen Bute - Synchromy No2 (1936)
Mary Ellen Bute (November 21, 1906 – October 17, 1983) was a pioneer film animator who did much of her work in visual music. She was one of the first female experimental filmmakers in the U.S. From 1934 until 1953, she made 14 short, musical abstract films, working in New York. Many of these were seen in regular U.S. movie theaters, such as Radio City Music Hall, often before a prestigious film. Several of her films were also called “Seeing Sound” films.
Four Lions (2010), Directed by Chris Morris and written by Morris, Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong.
Four Lions is a comic tour de force, which tells the story of a group of British jihadists who push their abstract dreams of glory to the breaking point. As the wheels fly off, and their competing ideologies clash, what emerges is an emotionally engaging (and entirely plausible) farce.
(video not working? - view here)
All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace (2011) - Ep. 2 by Adam Curtis
All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace (2011) - Ep. 1 by Adam Curtis
80 Blocks from Tiffanys (1979), Dir.Gary Weiss
“The gangs in the South Bronx (about 80 blocks from Tiffany’s in more ways than one) are handled with kid gloves in this one-hour treatment by Gary Weis. The more articulate members of the Savage Nomads and Savage Skulls are interviewed while the less articulate minorities who incongruously brandish swastikas are glossed over. Aside from gang members venting about “social injustice” and cops, there are interviews with the police, a priest, and some community workers. In general, the documentary indicates that this one small part of the U.S. would gladly be engaged in a mini-civil war if left to ferment on its own. ~ Eleanor Mannikka,”
if… (1968), Dir. Lindsey Anderson
Famous for its depiction of a savage insurrection at a public school, if… is associated with the 1960’s counterculture movement because it was filmed by a long-standing counter-culture director at the time of the student uprisings in Paris in May 1968. It includes controversial statements, such as: “There’s no such thing as a wrong war. Violence and revolution are the only pure acts”. It features surrealist sequences throughout the film. Upon release in the UK, it received an X certificate.
The film stars Malcolm McDowell in his first screen role and his first appearance as Anderson’s “everyman” character Mick Travis. Richard Warwick, Christine Noonan, David Wood, and Robert Swann also star, and Rupert Webster is featured as the young boy Bobby Phillips.
if…. won the Grand Prix at the 1969 Cannes Film Festival.
Get Carter (1971), Directed by Mike Hodges
Get Carter is a 1971 British crime film directed by Mike Hodges and starring Michael Caine as Jack Carter, a gangster who sets out to avenge the death of his brother in a series of unrelenting and brutal killings played out against the grim background of derelict urban housing in the city of Newcastle upon Tyne. The film was based onTed Lewis’ 1969 novel Jack’s Return Home, itself inspired by the real life one-armed bandit murder in the north east of England.
The film was Hodges’ first as a director; he also wrote the script. The production went from novel to finished film in eight months, with location shooting in Newcastle and Gateshead lasting 40 days. It was produced by Michael Klinger and released by MGM. Get Carter was also Alun Armstrong’s screen debut.
In 1999, Get Carter was ranked 16th on the BFI Top 100 British films of the 20th century; five years later, a survey of British film critics in Total Film
magazine chose it as the greatest British film of all time.
