Rome ’78

If Federico Fellini had been an autistic British queer with next to nil artistic talent living abroad in NYC during the late 1970s, and attempted to adapt Satyricon using his uniquely untalented dope-addled degenerate friends as actors and a couple East Village apartment and pseudo-classical landmarks as settings, it might begin to describe the unsurprisingly forgotten, ludicrously low-camp micro-epic Rome ’78 (1978) directed by British painter James Nares (TV Faces, No Japs at My Funeral). Best remembered today as a footnote in American underground filmmaking history than a revolutionary piece of cinematic art, Nares’ first (and last) narrative feature is considered a landmark work of the so called No Wave Cinema, which was a highly derivative and obscenely overrated NYC film movement that probably contributed less to the (de)evolution of the art of cinema than Robert Redford or Whoopi Goldberg. A virtual who’s who of late-1970s dope-addled NYC hipsterdom, Rome ’78 features actor/filmmaker Eric Mitchell (Underground U.S.A., The Way It Is), lecherous lard ass Lydia Lunch, musician James Chance (Teenage Jesus and the Jerks), actor and musician John Lurie (Stranger than Paradise, Down by Law), platinum blonde East Village diva Patti Astor, and homo proto-reality-TV star Lance Loud, among various other sub-popular figures of the then somewhat artistically incestous ‘No Wave’ scene. Notable for being “the first and only No Wave epic,” Nares’ one-time excursion into Super-8 feature films is easily the most superlatively shitty and compulsively campy ‘sword-and-sandal’ flick ever made as a work that unequivocally proves that the (anti)aesthetic of Andy Warhol and the man that made his films, Paul Morrissey, can be utilized for making epic costume films. In fact, Nares would confess in an interview with The Village Voice regarding his glaring influences, “I think the films I was most thinking about then were the Warhol/Morrissey films—LONESOME COWBOYS, TRASH, that sort of thing.” Indeed, like the shot-on-video Tennessee Williams adaptations of proud ‘aesthetic nihilist’ John Aes-Nihil (The Drift, Suddenly Last Summer), Rome ’78 can be described as one of the true bastard (anti)cinematic bastards of the Factory brand of films. Like the early costume films of Derek Jarman (Sebastiane, The Tempest) stripped bare and lacking the high-camp aesthetic integrity and hyper homoeroticism, Nares’ film is riddled with botched lines, obnoxious unintentional laughter, and the in-camera flash-frames that are a grating signature quality of the early Warhol-Morrissey projects like My Hustler (1965) and Bike Boy (1967). Despite featuring the aesthetic grace of wino vomit, Rome ’78 is, for better or worse, one of the true ‘classic’ films of the almost wholly disposable No Wave Cinema movement and thus is a must-see film for any cinephile that is masochistic enough to endure it. Indeed, if you enjoy toothless art fags slurring marvelously moronic dialogue, posturing homo hipster man-children trying in vain to resemble heroic Roman soldiers, Lydia’s Lunch’s unclad thunder thighs, and non-fratboy oriented toga parties where the only ones probably giving head are the men, Nares’ film is probably for you. 

 While seemingly ceaselessly stupid and senseless on the surface, Rome ’78 ultimately features a triple-layer allegorical critique of the decadence of three different cultures, including (but probably not limited to) the ancient Roman Empire, the post-counterculture American plutocracy/pseudo-empire, and the No Wave movement itself, with the latter obviously seeming like the most hopelessly decadent and depraved of them all. Not featuring a single drop of testosterone during its over-extended 80-minute running, Nares’ film is delightfully and distastefully tongue-in-cheek to the core in its flagrant, flaming American fag approach to Roman decadence, as a work that ultimately makes Tinto Brass’ abortive Gore Vidal adaptation Caligula (1979) starring Malcolm McDowell seem like Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus (1960). While featuring a bodaciously bitchy and insanely infantile dictator antagonist that likes little boy dicks named Caesar, Rome ’78 is clearly an aberrosexual cinematic molestation of the tragic story of Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus (aka Emperor Caligula), who has always been the victim of ahistorical cinematic obloquy, but never to such a uniquely unflattering extent. Indeed, the so-called ‘Caesar’ of Nares’ film is a literal motherfucker and prissy pederast portrayed by ‘visual artist’ David McDermott (of the duo McDermott & McGough, which is best known for using various archaic 19th-century style photography processes) who screams about realizing his deluded dreams which involve, among other things, Bolshevik-esque methods of genocide and theft. Partly filmed illegally on private property (Nares would pose as a potential renter and would unlock the windows in buildings so that he and his crew could break into the apartments later and film their scenes), as well as neoclassical tourist attractions in NYC like Ulysses S. Grant's tomb, Tribeca's American Thread Building, and a couple places that look too elegant and aesthetically pleasing to be located in the rotten Big Apple, Rome ’78 is ultimately a particularly potent reminder that aesthetic autism has always been an innate characteristic of American underground cinema.  Featuring a somewhat obvious combination of both scripted dialogue and wayward acting and inexplicable dialogue that was improvised right on the spot, the film was notably described by filmmaker Nares in the documentary Blank City (2010) directed by Celine Danhier as a work where, “I typecast my friends in roles where they could sort of act out what was going on in their real lives in a way.”  Indeed, it is quite apparent while watching Rome ’78 that Nares had certain ‘Superstars’ in mind when he assembled the film, which bleeds a certain collective ‘scenester’ excess and all around degeneracy that one can only assume epitomized the post-punk No Wave scene.

 A former slave turned glorious Roman soldier with a low IQ but lofty intentions named Metellus (Eric Mitchell) is scheming to overthrow the government and murder young degenerate Emperor Caligula (David McDermott) with the help of some campy conspirators, or as he brags to a comrade, “Just between you and me, I don’t give a shit about Caesar. Nothing could be more convenient to me than the disappearance of that little brat.” Metellus is fucking Caligula’s wanton wife Lydia Lunch (who stoically states, “My marriage was just a formality”), but the emperor couldn't care less because, as the Roman soldier says, “Besides his sister, he only really likes boys.” Indeed, proud widower Metellus cannot get enough of the Empress’ “imperial ass” and she is more than willing enough to give it, so long as the philistine soldier feeds her grapes when not plowing her puss. When Caligula sees Metellus and his wife lying together, he is far from angered and instead cries like an autistic toddler, “No one likes me anymore” in the hopes of being comforted by his apathetic ladylove. Metellus uses the opportunity to berate Caligula for the decline of the Roman economy and then argues regarding his own plans to fix things, “We’re thinking about going into the business of selling the Roman way of life.” Assumedly stealing his ideas from the bolshevik playboy, Caligula argues that he plans to fix the economy be killing all Roman children and then forcing their parents to give the Roman Empire their inheritance, arguing, “They’ll be so happy the emperor came to visit them and then they will die.” Indeed, Caligula immediately begins carrying out the plan by rounding up children and slaughtering them, but it ultimately proves to be a bad idea because it just gives his people more reason to welcome his seemingly inevitable assassination. While having his soldiers arrest young children, including newborn babies, Caligula proudly declares he is the only one in Rome that is allowed to wear purple and then proudly states, “I’m the only baby in the room” when all the kids have been cleared out. 

 As a supremely infantile megalomaniac that loves hearing the sound of his own superlatively gay voice, Caligula likes standing outside and screaming things like “I am the Emperor of the universe” and that he is a “god” that “owns everyone” because he created them in a “dream.” Unfortunately for him, no one seems to listen to Caligula, which probably has to do with the fact that he is an incest-inclined pederast who has been cuckolded by an ex-slave. When an eastern empress named Queen of Sheba (Anya Phillips) shows up with her own personal fuckboy (musician James Chance) and attempts to create a merger with Rome and her all the more backward nation, Caligula immediately blows her off, stating, “No one can join with Rome. Rome is too great," and then complains that slaves outnumber civilians and asks for troops. Apparently, Sheba is desperate to join Rome because her own nation is being overrun with a cancerously growing slave population, which absolutely disgusts Caligula as indicated by his remark to the empress, “Well, I have to admit a nation run with slaves would be most distasteful.” Meanwhile, John Lurie, who thinks he is Jesus Christ, laments regarding the current sorry state of Roman art that it is certainly also true for the No Wave movement, “Our artists are the worst.” Later, while hanging out with Mr. Lurie, Caligula goes on an insane tirade and screams while sounding like a lovelorn poof who has just discovered that his size queen beau has just cheated on him with an AIDS-ridden Puerto Rican, “If my fantasy does not rule, Rome will decay…And the trash and the filth and the garbage of the barbaric tribes will sweep into my city and everyone’s civilization will end…And the beauty and the culture that has been handed down from century to century will be lost…Lost to idiots and morons.” Of course, since Caligula’s “fantasy” involves cross-dressing and buggering little boys, it is nothing compared to the moronic martial prowess of Mettelus, who plans to take out the gutter queen posing as an eternal emperor for once and for all. 

 Needless to say, when Mettelus is told by a stunning blonde beastess named Octavia (played by Patti Astor) that “someone…is after your blood” and “It seems that there is a price on your head,” he decides he needs to take decisive action and carry out his Game of Thrones-esque coup d’état. Knowing that various factions want him murdered, Caligula decides to fake his own death by telling everyone in Rome that he was murdered in his sleep. Before faking his death, Caligula’s brother attempts get him to runaway with him, pleading, “We can’t die. If we die, we’ll kill the empire ourselves. They’re going to murder us now. We have to sustain the life of the empire. Somehow through it all, we are gods. We have to survive,” but the Emperor refuses, stating, “Why didn't you tell me this when we were six years old? Why did you wait until I killed twenty million people to ask me to go live on a farm with you?!” After it is announced that the Emperor has died, Caligula appears in drag under the name “The Deity Venus” and then proceeds to have a couple of his enemies murdered, including John Lurie/Jesus Christ. Caligula-as-Venus also rebukes Metellus, bitching to him, “How dare you want to sexually abuse the emperor. How dare you, you piss. How dare you want to use the emperor like a woman […] You can’t have the emperor…You can’t.” Needless to say, macho Mettelus is hardly impressed with Caligula’s queen-ish spiel. After killing the Emperor’s guard and virtually everyone else, Metellus asks “Who’s next?” and proceeds to murder Caligula, who pathetically pleads, “I’m only six years old. I’m just a baby.” Using his trusty sword, Metellus proceeds to slaughter Caligula and then shoves his weapon in his mouth like it is a giant cock. While taking the phallic sword in his mouth, Caligula cries, “I’m still alive,” but Mettelus makes sure to inform him, “You’re dead.” 

 Notably, auteur James Nares would brag in an article for The New York Observer regarding an audience response after a screening of Rome ’78, “I heard laughter, which was good […] I think I saw people leave and then they came back again. Very encouraging. This was not very well received and we intended it that way,” thus reflecting his hopelessly hipster-like mentality when it comes to his intentionally lackluster style of filmmaking Somewhat fittingly, Nares seems to consider the film to be nothing more than old news as indicated in an interview with The Village Voice where he stated, “It's my only attempt at a narrative film with actors. It has its moments—quite funny at times, quite beautiful at times, too. But it doesn't interest me so much now.” Personally, I consider Rome ’78 to be, at the very least, one of the ‘masterpieces’ of the No Wave Cinema movement. It should be noted that virtually all of the greatest films associated with the movement were directed by foreigners, including the campy WWII ‘thriller’ The Long Island Four (1980) directed by Swedish twink Anders Grafstrom and starring Klaus Nomi as a Nazi spy, as well as French-born filmmaker Eric Mitchell’s Underground U.S.A. (1980) and The Way It Is (1985) starring a very young Vincent Gallo. Unlike the later works associated with the movement like those of Scott B and Beth B (who helped spawn the innately inferior ‘Cinema of Transgression’ movement), Nares and Grafstrom’s films rely on attitude and gutter grade comedy as opposed to cheap and sensational sex and violence, among other banal beaten-to-death things. While Nares never directed another narrative feature, he did direct some video art work, as well as the fairly worthwhile and brilliantly title documentary No Japs at my Funeral (1980), which features a candid interview with an IRA member. Despite being a decidedly decadent piece of innately amateurish celluloid swill that is ultimately as debasing as the dying cultures it criticizes, Rome ’78 is ultimately of Spenglerian proportions as far as No Wave Cinema is concerned, thus making it a work worthy of following in the lo-fi cinematic tradition of it's proudly conservative influence Paul Morrissey. While not exactly depicted from a flagrant conservative angle like Morrissey’s film, Nares’ micro-budget epic surely manages to express the worst of the worst in terms the particular zeitgeist it belongs to. Indeed, as a work that features homely perennial whore Lydia Lunch as an empress, a frog wimp like Eric Mitchell as the most macho and murderous of Roman warriors, a toothless raging queer queen portraying Caligula, and various deadbeat dope-addled NYC art fags standing around and talking about nothing while acting as the supposed movers and shakes of the Great Roman Empire, Rome ’78 indubitably demonstrates that Sir Nares was quite right when he stated regarding No Wave Cinema in the documentary Blank City, “I do think that…the movies were somehow, all about New York…Even when they were about ancient Rome.” I almost hate to state it but, despite being a totally tasteless piece of hipster trash, Nares' film is ultimately even more effective than Fellini Satyricon (1969) when it comes to making parallels between the decadence of the Roman Empire and the contemporary Occident and especially NYC. Additionally, I not only had more fun watching Rome ’78 than the obscure Fellini rip-off Satyricon (1969) aka The Degenerates starring Tina Aumont, but also Kubrick's Spartacus (1960) and virtually any other Hollywood sword-and-sandal or Italian peplum epic that I have ever seen.  After all, when I see a man sporting a dress, it better be for comedic effect, even if he is portraying some sort of genocidal Roman dictator.

-Ty E

Our Trip to Africa

After recently watching Austrian auteur Ulrich Seidl’s most recent piece of pleasantly perverse cinéma-vérité, Im Keller (2014) aka In the Basement, and witnessing the almost surreal scenario of a small and stocky elderly Austrian mensch happily discussing his various hunting expeditions on the Dark Continent and how his wife once made Wiener Schnitzel out of one of the the various warthogs that he had killed, I decided it was about time that I watch the legendary landmark experimental doc Unsere Afrikareise (1961-1966) aka Our Trip to Africa directed by Peter Kubelka (Mosaik im Vertrauen, Arnulf Rainer) so I could witness some of these strange Schluchtenscheisser hunters in action while in the company of mostly naked black Africans. A 12 ½ minute doc with an almost hypnotic (meta)montage structure that was very meticulously and consciously edited together over a shocking 5 year period from about ten hours of sound recordings and a few hours of footage, Kubelka’s film unequivocally makes a playful mockery of the Viennese petit-bourgeois European hunters it depicts and that is surely one of it's greatest strength.  Although he deeply resented the hunters, Kubelka decided to work on the film because he was unemployed at the time (in fact, not until after the filmmaker came to New York City in 1966 and screened Our Trip to Africa did he receive great praise and, in turn, gainful employment as a legendary film lecturer) and very much wanted to come into contact with real negro tribesmen. Although hired by the hunters to record their exotic safari, Kubelka cinematically defecated on his boss’s in a manner that was somewhat typical of his curious filmmaking career, as a mensch that thrived on being intolerably difficult and seemingly senseless in his rebellion against the people and companies the commissioned him to make films for them. Indeed, when Kubelka was hired in 1957 to create a commercial for the powerful beer company Scwechater, he senselessly shot footage with an ancient camera that lacked a finder featuring barely visible people (apparently, the director was given the opportunity to use some of the most beauteous models in his country, but he surely let that opportunity go to waste) pretentiously drinking beer out of wine glasses, only to be sued by the company that hired him and be subsequently forced to leave the country upon completing the completely commercially worthless 1 ½ minute avant-garde ‘advert,’ which had the ironical title Schwechater (1958). Clearly, by the time he got around to making Our Trip to Africa, Kubelka thankfully had yet to learn a single lesson from the negative backlash and personal misfortune that his iconoclastic and aesthetically nihilistic avant-garde antics and overall seemingly pathologically passive-aggressive behavior (not surprisingly, Kubelka was raised in what he described as a “matriarchal situation,” which was the result of his half-Jewish father never being around) caused him and seemed apathetic about the prospect of being perennially unemployed, so he ultimately unleashed what is probably the most intricately obnoxious and schizophrenic yet strangely jolly vacation home movie ever made. Indeed, it might deeply offend certain absurdly anally retentive cinephiles to say this, but Kubelka’s film is unquestionably the Africa addio (1966) aka Africa Blood and Guts of avant-garde and experimental filmmaking.  As Our Trip to Africa delightfully demonstrates, when you mix Mondo Cane-esque imagery and ‘Structuralist’ filmmaking (or what Kubelka himself calls ‘Metric Montage’), you get the most compulsively curious of results, as opposed to pretentious banality like much of Kubelka's other work.

 Admittedly, I am not the greatest fan of so-called ‘Structural film’ or Structuralist filmmakers (notably, Kubelka has made the claim that his second film Adebar (1957), which he later turned into a ‘sculpture’ after damaging a frame, was the first Structuralist film ever made), especially of the seemingly aesthetically autistic sort that is peddled by the likes of Lithuanian-born NYC underground cinema/avant-garde gatekeeper Jonas Mekas and his best bud Kubelka is certainly no exception, but with Our Trip to Africa the Austrian auteur actually managed to create something that would appeal to people other than those sad souls that diddle themselves to hopelessly avant-garde works like Stan Brakhage's anti-erotic experimental birth flick Thigh Line Lyre Triangular (1961). Described by the director's fellow Slavic-blooded and deleteriously cinephiliac European homeboy Mekas as, “the richest, most articulate, and most compressed film I have ever seen,” Kubelka’s somewhat sardonic slice of the then-recently-decolonized Dark Continent is indubitably one of the most consciously convoluted and obsessively edited films ever made as a work where countless brief shots are juxtaposed with seemingly unrelated audio (which he calls ‘sync events’), but there is certainly a sort of hermetic method to the (anti)movie madness. Like Werner Schroeter, Philippe Garrel, and Straub-Huillet and various other arcane avant-gardist who truly did not seem to care if anyone understood their films, Kubelka—an uncommonly articulate man that is more than eloquently fluent in English as his legendary film lectures demonstrate—never screens Our Trip to Africa with subtitles, which seems pretty senseless when one considers that the film loses a lot of it's comedic tone when the viewer is unable to understand what the hunters are saying in Viennese gutter German. Basically, Kubelka saw it fit to juxtapose stupid things that the obscenely arrogant and buffoonish Austrian hunters said with scenes of hunting, wounded and dying animals, naked negroes, and other largely uncomfortably ‘goofy’ scenarios that will surely seem like conspicuous clichés to Americans and Western Europeans who have had the misfortune of learning everything that they know about Africa from Hollywood movies. Luckily, in the truly epic 232-minute documentary Fragments of Kubelka (2012) directed by Martina Kudlácek (In the Mirror of Maya Deren, Notes on Marie Menken), the Austrian filmmaker not only translates the dialogue for most of Our Trip to Africa, but also gives a shot-to-shot breakdown of the entire film and it's somewhat unconventional production history, thus revealing important and insightful contextual information about the footage that one could not possibly know otherwise. 

 As Kubelka reveals in Fragments of Kubelka regarding the genesis of Our Trip to Africa, “The plan was that I make a travelogue for the benefit of these people who had taken me on the trip. I had accepted in order to meet archaic people, so when I filmed I had not a definite plan, but they had, so many of the shots have been commissioned. All my films were commissioned films, which I then derailed into something else.” Featuring various emotionally eclectic brief juxtapositions that range from hilarious to horrific and hokey to hopeless, Kubelka’s tightly yet hysterically edited travelogue is ultimately impossible to peg with a specific central theme due to its erratic emotional range, innate abstractness, and discombobulating structure. Indeed, after watching the film, the viewer will have no idea if the safari went well, anyone on the trip got fucked or did some fucking, the slayed animals were actually eaten, or if the negroes like or disliked their strange Aryan guests. In short, the only thing one knows for sure after watching the short is that Kubelka has a tendency to take close-up shots of unclad jigboo genitals (including that of a little boy) and that the filmmaker thinks that the hunters are moronic just as the hunters think that the negroes are moronic.  It should be noted that the schizophrenic emotional tone of Our Trip to Africa is completely intentional, or as Kubelka told his comrade Mekas as revealed in P. Adams Sitney's classic text Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde, 1943-2000 (2002), “My films have a function (this goes for the African film)—I play with the emotions and try to tear the emotions loose from the people, so that they would gain distance to their emotions, to their own feelings [...] When you see certain images or hear certain sounds you have certain emotions. So I must always cry when I see moving scenes, when I see the hero getting the first prize for the biggest round and they play the national anthem . . . I have to cry . . . or when they bury somebody, I have to cry. At the same time, I am angry at myself, because I know that it's just the emotional mechanisms. So, with the African film. I do a lot of this, I trigger a lot of those mechanisms at the same time and create a lot of—at the same time—comic feelings, sad feelings.” Indeed, Kubelka's film might not be as emotionally penetrating as Gualtiero Jacopetti and Franco Prosperi's masterpiece Addio zio Tom (1971) aka Goodbye Uncle Tom, but it is most certainly the most emotionally involving Structuralist film that I have ever seen.

 While edited in an innately non-linear fashion, completely lacking in character development (one never even hears the name of a single one of the subjects), and seemingly all but totally incoherent, Our Trip to Africa is surely guaranteed to give the viewer a nice big chuckle or two, not least of all during an oftentimes repeated shot of a stereotypically dressed white safari hunter resting his rifle on a negro servant’s shoulder while he aims at and eventually shoots a poor zebra. In Fragments of Kubelka, Kubelka notes that, if psychoanalyzed, one could argue regarding the white hunters in the film that, “They couldn’t get the women, so they shot the animals.”  Of course, considering that he personally collects primitive Africa Venus figurines and statues (including a life-size one featuring a giant derriere, which he proudly shows off in Fragments of Kubelka), it seems that Kubelka is projecting his own fetish for dark meat onto the white hunters.  After an opening shot of a white hunter aiming his weapon that the director has described as a sort of ‘protagonist’ (even though the viewer can never clearly see the man's face), one is exposed to various shots that are frantically spliced together involving the hunting of a hippopotamus and a zebra with shots of the Hunters, including a Viennese woman and Arab man, lazily lounging on a boat juxtaposed with one Hunter asking, “What did we shoot?” and another replying “Tell me!,” which is followed by a verbal list of animals that they killed, including a wild boar. After a shot of a dying zebra’s leg moving juxtaposed with a hunter saying “Let’s go,” the film segues into a frame from an African Muslim wedding where, to quote the director, a “very proud” young negress with “fake arrogance” provocatively moves her cloaked head during the ‘Dance of Dove’ where she attempts to appeal to potential male suitors with her provocative passive-aggressive glances. In a shot that is assumedly used to illustrate the ‘cruelness’ and ‘post-colonial arrogance’ of Europeans, an ostensibly wicked white Hunter rides a camel that is being lead by a servile negro guide juxtaposed to the somewhat unnerving sounds of some unseen fatally injured animal succumbing to it's wounds. Of course, Kubelka makes it quite clear that there is no honor in killing beautiful exotic beasts with state of art weapons that have turned hunting, not unlike war, into a lame and reasonably safe lackluster sport as opposed to in the past when it was somewhat of an art and took a special certain talent that involved, among other things, respecting one's prey.  Like with the negroes, one gets that senses that the hunters are sneering at the animals, even after killing them, so Kubelka fights fire with fire by cinematically sneering at his fellow Austrians.  As the virtual all-seeing and all-knowing god of his cinematic realm, Kubelka condemns the hunters to hell while portraying the Africans as the blessed meek who will inherit the earth.

 Undoubtedly, one of the most absurd aspects of Our Trip to Africa is the various shots it features of mostly smiling white hunters interacting with the largely docile and content black natives. While most of these shots feature a primitively dressed negro helping the white hunters in some glaringly slavish and undignified fashion, there is one shot in the film that is almost borderline homoerotic where an Austrian man gently lights a pipe for a grateful negro who seems excited about trying what might be described as a ‘European peace pipe’ for the first time. In another scene, a short white female hunter is depicted making fun of a very tall black game warden in a fairly harmless way that is made to seem almost sinister via obnoxious laughter that has been synced with the scene. Ultimately, Kubelka makes fun of the female hunter by cutting from a shot of her shooting a rifle with the help of her assumed lover to a shot of a dangling darkie dick, as if to imply that the Hunteress would love to castrate colored cocks. While many of Leni Riefenstahl’s detractors attempted to accuse her of fetishizing the unclad African negro body with her best-selling 1970s photographs of the Nuba people of Sudan (in fact, Judaic dyke Susan Sontag even went so far as to absurdly describe these photos of stark-naked negroid bodies as being “fascist aesthetics,” as if physical healthiness and natural pulchritude is somehow fascistic), Kubelka makes no attempts to shield the fact that he is obsessed with decidedly dark African genitals, which include relatively long close-up shots of the breasts, derrieres, and beavers of black women, as well as the swinging wild black snakes of both a man and a little boy. In fact, the film concludes with a shot of a boy’s penis juxtaposed with an African stating in broken English, “I like to visit your country,” which then cuts to an ironical shot of a peasant women treading through snowy Austria synced with the same African saying, “If I find [a] chance.” 

 Near the beginning of the less than radical documentary Free Radicals: A History of Experimental Film (2012) directed by Pip Chodorov, Peter Kubelka stoically states regarding his films, “I never made compromises and really already a long time ago, I didn’t care anymore if anyone likes it or not.” After examining Kubelka’s shockingly small (despite being a filmmaker for well over half a century, he has only made eight short films that barely add up to an hour worth of material) yet admittedly rather singular oeuvre, I certainly have no reason to doubt the truthfulness of filmmaker’s remark in Free Radicals to the point where I would argue that the ‘entertainment value’ of Our Trip to Africa, which is totally absent from most of his other films, is largely the result of a circumstantial fluke. While the auteur is certainly responsible for bringing highly subjective meanings to these scenes with his sync event editing technique, it was actually the hunters who demanded that Kubelka shoot the various specific shots in the film, including the ones where they make themselves seem quite buffoonish and cruel, or so the filmmaker readily admits in Fragments of Kubelka while referencing various specific shots (including a rather unflattering close-up of a hunter proudly holding up the completely lifeless head of a giraffe only a moment or so after ruthlessly killing it). Notably, in a scene towards the end of Our Trip to Africa that is as equally heartbreaking as it is humorous, a wounded lioness that was shot by one of the hunters starts heading towards the camera and tries in vain to attack Kubelka while taking one of its last gasps. In his own highly idiosyncratic way, Kubelka creates a sort of ‘filmic funeral’ for the lioness that tried to attack him by juxtaposing shots of the dead beast being lifted onto the roof of a large truck by half a dozen negroes with a sort of curiously jovial dirge that makes the animal's senseless death seem like a sick joke. 

 Surely one of the greatest aspects of Our Trip to Africa is that, despite the director’s glaring disdain for his Austrian traveling companions and their decadent and destructive bourgeois ways, it is quite apparent that Kubelka had a fun and exciting trip where he got to admire both exotic wild animals and naked negroes in their indigenous habitats. Undoubtedly, I found the film infinitely more intriguing and rewarding than any of the works I have seen by frog commie anthropologist-cum-documentarian Jean Rouch, whose ethnographic films feel rather patronizing in their depictions of Nigerian negroes (notably, native African filmmakers often criticized his films for distorting reality). Thankfully, Kubelka makes no attempts to portray himself as an expert on African tribes or tribal culture in Our Trip to Africa, thus the film has aged much more gracefully than the work of French far-leftist filmmakers like Rouch and René Vautier. Indeed, while I am not an autistic avant-garde film fanboy who rates a film on how hermetic and over-edited it is and thus would hardly describe the work as “one of cinema’s few masterpieces” like the filmmaker’s puffery-inclined comrade Jonas Mekas once did, I would be lying if I did not admit that Kubelka’s glorified travelogue indubitably provides for a highly mesmerizing and unforgettable experience that demonstrates that there are actually filmmakers out there who have made motion pictures that are more ‘compressed’ and meticulously edited together than that of Guy Maddin, which is certainly no small accomplishment. As an intricately edited montage film that somewhat spastically cuts from scenes of dying animals, unclad negroes, and boorish post-colonial Europeans, among countless other seemingly incongruent things, without warning, Our Trip to Africa is sure to offend and discomfort contemporary whites and blacks living in the West who have been weaned on the venomous teat of post-Trotskyite political correctness, which is rather unfortunate considering that Kubelka seems like a fairly happy-go-lucky chap that does not have a single hateful bone in his body, even when he is going to strikingly extravagant lengths to cinematically mock and ridicule his fellow countryman in a film that they commissioned him to make. 

-Ty E

Malatesta's Carnival of Blood

As someone who has lived in a beach resort area for about half a decade and spent most of my life before then visiting the same place on a monthly basis, I have a special nostalgic affection for carnivals and amusement parks, even if I have a very low tolerance for these places nowadays due to the multicultural mutants and miscreants that typically inhabit them, so naturally I am a sucker for strange films about strange carnivals. Naturally, as a fairly obsessive cinephile that was bred on horror cinema but long ago gave up on virtually anything that slithers out of Hollywood, I also have an unhealthy obsession with offbeat, avant-garde, experimental, arthouse, overlooked and/or otherwise strange and singular genre flicks. Of course, my dual love of antiquated carnivals and idiosyncratic arthouse horror is probably best personified in relatively low-budget early 1960s cult flicks like Curtis Harrington’s Night Tide (1961) and Herk Harvey’s Cocteauian Carnival of Souls (1962), though the acid-addled late-60s and early 70s surely produced its fair share of truly ‘carnivalesque’ chiller cinema, with the once-lost and largely forgotten but thankfully now found psychedelic art-horror celluloid fever dream Malatesta's Carnival of Blood (1973) directed by one-time-auteur Christopher Speeth being arguably the most superlatively strange, shockingly rewarding, and conspicuously ‘cinephiliac’ of these works. Assumed lost for about three decades until it was released on DVD in 2003 after being remastered at Francis Ford Coppola’s American Zoetrope Studios, Speeth’s rather impressive debut was shot in Philadelphia in 1972 and is probably the most preternatural and phantasmagorical work of ‘horror’ cinema to emerge from the post-industrial bowels of the surely shitty east coast city aside from David Lynch’s masterful debut Eraserhead (1977) as a work that seems like a uniquely unholy marriage between Federico Fellini, Jack Smith, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Andy Milligan (notably, Daniel Dietrich of Milligan’s Fleshpot on 42nd Street (1973)) plays the eponymous villain), and George A. Romero (Dietrich also appeared in Dawn of the Dead (1978) as ‘Givens’).  As a work that is drenched in psychedelic surrealism, darkly eccentric humor, and even a bit of cross-dressing, Speeth's film is probably the closest thing to a horror equivalent to the films of Salvador Dalí protégé Steven F. Arnold, which include all-too-queer high-camp surrealist works like The Liberation of the Mannique Mechanique (1967) and especially Luminous Procuress (1971). A largely nonlinear and obsessively oneiric work that puts Tobe Hooper’s The Funhouse (1981) to great shame when it comes to making the viewer feel like they are actually trapped inside an obscenely outmoded yet ominous amusement park, Malatesta's Carnival of Blood tells the considerably convoluted yet nonetheless incessantly entrancing tale of a beauteous young brunette who joins a dubious carnival with her parents in the hope of finding her missing brother, only to discover said brother is probably long dead and fell prey to a virtual army of subterranean zombie-cannibals that are led by the titular villain and his sun-shy vampire and hook-handed comrades. 

 Featuring a literally and figuratively ‘underground’ collective of grey-faced and longhaired hippie-like cannibals that look and act like zombies and spend most of their time watching silent era Universal Horror and German Expressionist horror films when they are not drinking the vital fluids and eating the guts of normal folk, Malatesta's Carnival of Blood probably features some sort of message about the counterculture movement (judging by the film and it's absurd non-storyline, bizarre humor, and insane imagery, I think it is safe to say that Speeth, the set-designers, and various actors and crew members were regularly consuming whatever drugs that they could get their hands on while they were making the film), but it ultimately works best as a shameless piece of horror cinephilia that was written (the story is credited to a playwright named ‘Werner Liepolt’) and directed by people that thankfully understand that horror was actually once, long ago, one of the most technically innovative and artistically merited film genres. Indeed, like the Teutonic Expressionist masterpiece The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), of which an excerpt actually appears in the film, Speeth’s flick owes most of its singular atmosphere and overall potency to its preternatural mise-en-scène and stunning tableaux as a work that ultimately feels like an unlikely marriage between darkly campy exploitation horror and the nihilistic avant-garde films of goofy Guido Carmelo Bene (Nostra Signora dei Turchi aka Our Lady of the Turks, Un Amleto di meno aka One Hamlet Less). Indeed, just as Andy Milligan used the genre as a means to make his marvelously misanthropic and misogynistic crypto-melodramas more palatable to less discerning audiences and thus more monetarily profitable, Speeth seems to have utilized horror as a means of showcasing various ‘trippy’ and entrancing abstract sets that will probably dumbfound the average half-braindead gorehound, slasher fanboy, or Romero retard. Interestingly, the sets were designed by a seemingly LSD-inspired troupe out of Philly called ‘Alley Friends,’ who would go on to become somewhat successful architects that were responsible for designing everything from passive solar buildings to eco-friendly high-rise condominium buildings around Pennsylvania. With Malatesta's Carnival of Blood, the threesome managed to assemble what is nothing short of an aesthetically nihilistic avant-garde netherworld that seems like a sort of allegorical representation of mutated post-counterculture America and features a hysterically hungry horde of hippie cannibals that make the Manson Family seem like a tiny collective of failed drug dealers and pseudo-pimps. Of course, like David E. Durston's classic rabid hippie horror flick I Drink Your Blood (1970), Speeth's film does make some superficial allusions to Charlie's family. 

 In a scene that certainly establishes the somewhat campy yet uneasy and foreboding tone of Malatesta's Carnival of Blood, a cross-dressing gypsy-like fortuneteller named ‘Sonja’ (AIDS victim Lenny Baker, who played the lead in Paul Mazursky’s Next Stop, Greenwich Village (1976)) uses tarot cards to give a reading to young brunette protagonist Vena Norris (Janine Carazo in her first and last film role) while bitchily yelling at her “Don’t touch my cards” and even physically assaulting her, as if he is one of those unconventionally misogynistic tranny fags who hate women because they are jealous that they have actual biological tits and vaginas. After the tarot reading, Vena asks Sonja how much he owes him and he curiously replies, “Owe me? Hahaha. The service is free…free to all new employees. This was no true reading, Vena, you must come back again when the cards have calmed themselves,” thus hinting that something horrible is brewing at the overtly ominous theme park. Mr. and Mrs. Norris (Paul Hostetler and Betsy Henn) and their debutante daughter Vena have become reluctant carny employees because their missing son disappeared somewhere around the carnival, though it soon becomes clear that their little boy has probably met a grisly end. As seeming suburbanites of the fairly conventional sort, the Norris family sticks out like sore thumbs among most of the other carnival employees, which include a campy and exceedingly effete ‘queen’ named Mr. Blood (Jerome Dempsey of Sidney Lumet’s Network (1976)) that acts as a manager and a sort of ‘master of ceremonies,’ as well as an antisocial chap with a hook for a hand and a deathly pale complexion named Mr. Bean (Tom Markus) that likes reading ancient Satanic material and discussing the merits of cannibalism. While Mr. Blood and Mr. Bean are sort of ‘generals’ of the carnival, the eponymous Malatesta, who may or may not have been named after the similarly swarthy Italian anarchist of the same surname and who likes to mostly get things done behind the scenes like the titular character of The Phantom of the Opera, is most certainly the true Führer, even if he seems too young for such a prestigious position. 

 Aside the Norris family, a fairly normal wisecracking young chap named Kit (Chris Thomas) has also just started working at the carnival and he soon develops a crush on buxom brunette Vena, who is unfortunately actually waiting for her boyfriend Johnny (Paul Townsend) to meet her at the carnival. As Kit somewhat cynically states to Vena upon first meeting her, “I run the Tunnel-of-Love. I flunked out of school and, providing that I work like hell, Mr. Blood has given me the dubious distinction of running that questionable wreck they call the Tunnel-of-Love.” When a hilariously violent and vulgar little Hebraic girl named Toby Davis (Karen Salmansohn) ends up riding the Tunnel-of-Love with her two parents, Kit, who is initially not paying attention to working because he is too busy reading a copy of the classic counterculture tome The Last Whole Earth Catalog: Access To Tools, is startled to see that the family is missing from their boat when it reaches the end of the ride. Indeed, the only thing Kit finds left of the Davis family is a pair of smashed glasses and some blood, thus leading the reluctant carny to assume that something sinister is going on at the carnival, so he informs Vena of the precarious situation. Meanwhile, Mrs. Norris pleads to her husband, “This place is evil…I can feel it” after the two discuss how their missing son is probably dead.  Assuming the worst, Mr. Norris pulls out a handgun and declares he plans to carryout revenge against whoever harmed his sole male progeny. As a Svengali-like individual who seems like he is lurking around every corner and whose shadow haunts the side of buildings in a fashion not unlike Count Orlok in Murnau's Nosferatu, Mr. Blood soon realizes that the Norris family and Kit are on to him and his ghoulish compatriots and thus prepares to take appropriate action. Unbeknownst to Kit and the Norris family, Mr. Blood is a bloodthirsty vampire with a large gut and a voracious appetite and Mr. Bean is the head a large family of cannibalistic Satan-saluting quasi-zombie-cannibals that live under the carnival and have never seen a single ray of sunlight, though they regularly indulge in the greatest films that silent horror cinema has to offer while wobbling around like autistic automatons in front of a subterranean large movie screen. 

 While he is an evil little fellow that does his fair share of killing and terrorizing, a swarthy midget named ‘Bobo’ (Hervé Villechaize of Richard Elfman’s Forbidden Zone (1980) and Robert Downey Sr.'s Greaser's Palace (1972)) provides lead Vena with some poetic hints of the horrors that await her via menacing melodies he sings to her and a couple other characters. Indeed, after singing, “Beware of evil who’s caught in the shadow of the dream. Beware of the mystery of the carnival who shall remain nameless,” Bobo points a shotgun at Vena in a threatening fashion and then scampers away like a rabid Chihuahua that is looking for something to sink it's teeth into. Meanwhile, Mr. Blood informs Kit while absurdly riding a bumper car that Vena has a lover named Johnny and that she is waiting for him to arrive at the carnival, thus crushing the young man's romantic interest in her.  Of course, Mr. Blood's queenish gossiping does not stop Kit from attempting to act as Vena's knight in shining armor.  In a pleasantly protracted scene that blurs the line between dream and reality and involves a malefic masked phantom in a forest, an eccentrically stylized car-turned-bed that hang upside from a ceiling, seemingly haunted archaic swinging angel and negro statutes, zombie-cannibals watching The Phantom of the Opera (1925) while tossing popcorn at the female lead as she stands in front of the movie screen, and a sort of giant condom trap, Vena is thrown into a sort of real-life nightmare that ends with her suffering a mental breakdown after finding the corpse of Kit with a knife in his heart riding on a decrepit old ferris wheel. When Mr. Blood finds Vena crying while crouching down in the rain in her pajamas, he arrogantly pokes her with his cane and less than sensitively states, “My dear, you’re so upset. My dear, it’s too bad about poor, poor Kit. Don’t be so upset though.” Meanwhile, Vena’s parents’ mobile-home is attacked by a motley crew of flesh-eating cannibal hippie deadbeats. While Vena manages to violently murder a sort of blind and elderly longhaired ‘zombie janitor,’ she is soon attacked and captured by Dr. Blood while he is channeling Bela Lugosi. Ultimately, Mr. Blood brings Vena to Malatesta, who fittingly stands over the girl while a scene from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is projected in the background where somnambulist Cesare sneaks into the character Jane's room while she is sleeping and snatches her from her bed. While Mr. and Mrs. Norris manage to escape from their trailer, Vena is taken prisoner by Malatesta.  Naturally, it is all up to Vena's boyfriend Johnny to finally show up at the carnival and save his dimestore damsel in distress from the ravenous wrath of the hippie cannibals.

 With would-be-loverboy Kit already dead, Vena’s boyfriend Johnny predictably finally shows up and inevitably becomes the new male protagonist, though he is slightly less charming than his pretty boy predecessor. Naturally, upon arriving at the carnival, Johnny finds Mr. Blood's claims to be more than a little bit dubious when the discernibly deceptive vampire informs him that Vena and her parents “died in their sleep of a freak accident” and that he should not “take it so bad” since he has a “long life” and “there are a lot of fish in the sea.” When Johnny begins looking around the carnival and walks into a dimly lit building where he finds an occult text with medieval satanic illustrations and arcane writing, he becomes fairly uneasy, especially when hook-handed cannibal Mr. Bean soon shows up and begins going on a preposterous pro-cannibal rant. Indeed, when Mr. Bean states, “Say listen, lad. They say meat builds blood and flesh and gives you new life. Do you believe that?” and Johnny reluctantly replies, “Yes, I guess so,” the cannibal makes the protagonist run out of the room as if he is scared for his life by adding, “So, wouldn’t it follow that a man could live longer and longer if he ate more of the same?” and then waving his hook in his face. When Johnny runs into menacing Asiatic midget Bobo, he is somewhat startled when the tiny terror sings to him, “Very, very not yet dead…Stupid Johnny, use your head. Put your feet where evil stands…The knife cuts quick, the blood pours red. Stupid Johnny, use your head…Very, very not yet dead.”  Compared to his enemies, Johnny is indeed quite moronic and he certainly has no chance of outwitting, let alone defeating, a bunch of highly predatory vampires and zombie-cannibals who have been hunting and killing humans for god knows how long, but at least he tries.

 In a somewhat unlikely twist, Mr. Blood shows up to the room where Vena is imprisoned while the cannibals are mindlessly watching Wallace Worsley’s classic The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923) adaptation starring Lon Chaney and tells her that he wants to save her, stating, “I want to help you out of the frying pan,” but she finds his motives dubious yet still decides to follow him because she clearly has no other options. While leading her to ostensible safety, Mr. Blood explains to Vena regarding the amusement park and its secret cannibalistic inhabitants, “This carnival is constructed over a series of natural limestone caverns. That is how Bean has kept his family undetected for so many years…And they’re cannibals, every one. Most of them have never seen the light of day. That’s why they look so ghastly…Live like animals. No one has ever told them it is wrong, so how are they to know?!” In a scene that hints that he might be not only a bloodsucker but a cocksucker as well, Mr. Blood describes how he was forced to join the carnival after being run out of town and that he only realized later when it was too late that he “could not leave.” Of course, Mr. Blood ultimately reneges on his promise to Vena and delivers her to mysterious mad man Malatesta, but he makes the mistake of drinking the young girl’s “precious blood” beforehand without receiving the proper permission and is punished with a less than glamorous death by his fairly cold and brutal master. Upon approaching Vena as she is tied to what looks like a sort of Satanic operating table, Malatesta charmingly states to her, “I am a man of one thousand faces, Vena. Mr. Blood has seen my face, but to you I show a kinder face,” as if he plans to make her his lover instead of cannibal/vampire meat. Meanwhile, after poking his head through a gigantic wooden Confederate flag while pretending to be just another stumbling cannibal-zombie, Johnny finally manages to find Vena, but their untimely reunion does not last long. As F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922) is screened, Mr. and Mrs. Norris also attempt to rescue their daughter in the cannibal abyss, but the latter is soon hacked up by midget Bobo and subsequently eaten alive in a Romero-esque fashion. Of course, Mr. Norris is also soon killed after Malatesta drives a stake into his eye and then lets his flesh-eating underlings finish off the distraught father. After getting separated from Johnny, Vena is approached by tranny fortuneteller Sonja who, not unlike Mr. Blood, offers to show her a way out of the carnival catacombs, but ultimately makes her a prisoner of Malatesta again. The next day, after a cop shows up at the carnival and unwitting drowns Johnny upon playing a amusement park game that is rigged by Bobo, Malatesta celebrates his victory over mere mortals by riding some of his own rides while Vena begins to perish while in captivity.

 Make no mistake about it, although blatantly flawed in many respects, Malatesta's Carnival of Blood is certainly a lost cult classic of sorts with seemingly infinitely replay value.  Indeed, I do not feel like I am succumbing to puffery when I say that watching Speeth's film for the first time offered me more or less the same enjoyment as when I first saw some of my favorite horror flicks like Carnival of Souls (1962) or Lemora: A Child's Tale of the Supernatural (1973).  Notably, I discovered the film after reading about it while flipping through NIGHTMARE USA: The Untold Story of the Exploitation Independents (2007) and could not help but immediately hunt it down upon reading it be described by author Stephen Thrower as being, “Like the Euro oddity FREAK ORLANDO (1981), it’s really a showcase for the director and his art designers to go berserk with acid-tinged visuals.” Indeed, like Freak Orlando and many of Ulrike Ottinger’s other films (including, of course, her doc Prater (2007), which is about the history of the famous Viennese amusement park of the same name), Speeth’s film is a truly ‘carnivalesque’ experience that is the next best thing to being at an old school amusement park that is inhabited by actual living and breathing freaks. Unlike the films of sub-underground avant-gardist Fredric Hobbs like Troika (1969), Roseland (1971), and Alabama's Ghost (1973), Malatesta's Carnival of Blood is a rare forgotten American ‘artsploitation’ flick that can not only be enjoyed by annoyingly discernibly cinephiles like myself, but also braindead Romero fanboys that get a hard-on from seeing a reanimated corpse ripping out and gorging on the intestines some hapless cop or soldier while they are still alive. While obviously the rediscovering of Speeth’s film is not as important as if, say, Tod Browning’s legendary lost film London After Midnight (1927) aka The Hypnotist starring Lon Chaney were actually found one day, Malatesta's Carnival of Blood is indubitably an invaluable and singular work in that it is a true testament to the artistic potential of low-budget horror cinema, which is certainly needed in a era when so-called ‘independent’ filmmakers find themselves mimicking the style, morals, and formulaic storytelling of Hollywood horror when they should be using their relative artistic freedom to test the bounds of the all too contrived and mostly mediocre genre.  Surely, an open-minded novice filmmaker would find more artistic inspiration in Speeth's film than in all the films directed by the likes of Craven, Carpenter, Hooper, and Romero over the past two decades combined.

 As a work that manages to shuffle darkly campy comedy, convention-bending horror, entrancing avant-garde tableaux, counterculture buffoonery, and a psychedelic approach to cinephilia, Malatesta's Carnival of Blood ultimately makes marginally comparable films like Ray Dennis Steckler’s bottom-of-the-barrel schlock anti-masterpiece The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies!!? (1964), Yabo Yablonsky’s The Manipulator (1971) starring Mickey Rooney, and Alan Gadney’s Moonchild (1974) seem like the closest thing to a horror equivalent to Federico Fellini’s Giulietta degli spiriti (1965) aka Juliet of the Spirits. Also, judging by Oliver Stone’s rarely-seen horror debut Seizure (1974) aka Queen of Evil, which incidentally also stars Hervé Villechaize, it seems that Speeth should have probably been the one that had a successful filmmaking career and had the opportunity to direct a Jim Morrison biopic and truly psychedelic serial killer flick instead of the softcore Hollywood conspiracy theorist. For a film that was so poorly budgeted that the actors that played the ghouls were paid a mere $5.00/day plus doughnuts and where the ‘director’s cut’ was intentionally destroyed to make trailers because the producers did not have enough money to make an extra print, Malatesta's Carnival of Blood, not unlike the oeuvre of Berlin-based blond beast Jörg Buttgereit, demonstrates why horror makes for a great genre to work within if you have little money to work with yet you want to create inspired celluloid art that has the potential to gain a loyal following.  Not unlike Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz's Messiah of Evil (1973) aka Dead People, Curtis Harrington's Ruby (1977), Lamberto Bava's Demons (1985) and Bigas Luna's Anguish (1987), it also probably makes for the ultimate movie theater experience.  Indeed, while I could easily list various glaring flaws that the film suffers from, my only real complaint regarding Malatesta's Carnival of Blood is that I have not been afforded the grand opportunity of seeing it play on the big screen.  After all, it is not often that one gets the opportunity to watch a movie about cannibals watching German Expressionist movies.

-Ty E