Word: cinemas
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Inevitably, the kooks and the kinks have given the new cinema a bad press. At the center of the movement, however, stands a creative cluster of imaginative moviemakers. Among them...
Robert Nelson, 36, a 6-ft. 3-in. San Franciscan, is a black-and-blue humorist who made one of the comic classics of the experimental cinema. Oh, Dem Watermelons is a daffy documentary about all the horrible things that can happen to watermelons. They get kicked like footballs, gutted like chickens, smashed on sidewalks, slashed with ice skates, riddled by bullets, split open and rubbed over the bodies of beautiful women. The monstrous irrelevance of it all is fracturingly funny-until suddenly the spectator realizes that the watermelon is meant to symbolize the Negro...
...most creative craftsmen. A fanatical occultist, he practices the blood rites of devil worship and has splashed the walls of his San Francisco pad with a Nazi banner and words written in blood. Anger's notorious Scorpio Rising is a jaggedly cubistic piece of black cinema that examines the big strong she-men who gun along with the cycle cult. The movie concludes with a satanic black-jacketed bacchanal that looks like the last stages of an amphetamine nightmare...
...Rice, a hard-living New Yorker who died in 1964 at the age of 29 while shooting a film in Mexico, made the most affecting movie that the new cinema has turned out to date: The Flower Thief. Certainly a vagrant, possibly an imbecile, the film's hero wanders the streets of San Francisco by day, a grown man pulling a little wagon that carries his Teddy bear. At night he goes back to the abandoned factory where a gang of derelicts chases him through the cellars with a terrible silent intensity. As interpreted with a marvelous simplicity...
Stan Brakhage, 37, a husky hypochondriac who lives with his wife and five children in a log cabin in Colorado, has radically rewritten movie grammar. By fragmenting his films into frames, Brakhage has established the frame in cinema as equivalent to the note in music; whereupon he proceeds to make films with frames the way a composer makes music with notes. His Art of Vision, an attempt to do for cinema what Bach did for music with his Art of the Fugue, is an ambitious example of what Brakhage calls retinal music. One problem: to watch the violently flickering flick...