Thirty-third year

1645.) As a sort of Deceased Artiste tribute to the late, great absurdist filmmaker Bertrand Blier, I am proud to present scenes from his final film, Convoi Exceptionnel (with the lousy-sounding title “Heavy Duty” in English). This 2019 comedy-drama draws on the seeds planted in his earlier films, especially Buffet Froid, Merci La Vie, and Actors, where characters wander from reality to reality — and older actors find that their lines have been taken away in rewrites by an unseen author…. The lead characters, played by Gerard Depardieu and Christian Clavier, meet each other by chance amid a traffic jam and find out that their fates are inextricably tied together by a script that keeps rapidly changing. The keynote of the film (since I suspect M. Blier knew this was his last cinematic outing) are very moving speeches given to the three lead characters, the third one played by Farida Rahouadj (who is M. Blier’s widow).

1646.) The film that set me off on a “bender” to see all of Elio Petri’s work is the subject of this week’s episode (part 1 of two). Todo Modo (1976) is several things: a whodunit, a dark comedy about religion, a Seventies paranoia film par excellence, a political satire, and a massive provocation in the time and place in which it was made. The film concerns a retreat for politicians where the spiritual exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola are undergone; the retreat also serves as a kind of think thank for a certain political party (intended to be the Christian Democrats, a center-Right party disguised as a center-Left party). As murders begin to occur at the retreat (which is happening while there’s an epidemic, replete with mandatory vaccinations!), the two lead characters come to the fore: one is the president, known solely as “M.” (Gian Maria Volonte, doing his best Aldo Moro impersonation), who is constantly suffering and looking irredeemably tortured; his adversary is the leader of the retreat, Don Gaetano (Marcello Mastroianni), a priest who is both the most corrupt man among the assembled and the most moral (since he does believe the guilty must be punished, and he knows what the participants are guilty of….) Todo Modo deserves a cult for its bold mixture of elements and its unflinching statements about the private lives of politicians.

1645.) The second of two episodes about Elio Petri’s brilliant Todo Modo (1976), a film that is at once (deep breath): a whodunit, a dark comedy about religion, a Seventies paranoia film par excellence, a political satire, and a massive provocation in the time and place in which it was made. The film was the subject of controversy when it was first released in Italy and it has been underseen in the U.S. but is very deserving of cult appreciation. The lead performances by Gian Maria Volonte (portraying a government leader based on Aldo Moro, as a perennially suffering martyr) and Marcello Mastroianni (as the priest who has “kompromat” on all the politician he knows – but is the most moral figure in the film) are sublime, as is the atmosphere that Petri created with production designer Dante Ferretti. The plot centers around a real event – an annual gathering of politicians from a wildly corrupt political party participating in Christian spiritual exercises in an odd underground labyrinth – during which fictional events (namely, murders) start taking place. In this show I discuss the film’s curious ending, which proposes a solution to the murder plotline that might not be noticed by an inattentive viewer. But it does relate to Petri’s inherently political view of society, as well as filmmaking.

1646.) My series of episodes about Italian filmmaker Elio Petri comes to an end with, naturally enough, Petri’s last film, the comedy Good News (1979). The Italian film industry was in a downturn in the late Seventies, and Petri was already infamous for his last film, Todo Modo. Thus, he entered a series of deals that floundered and died, except for the one that produced Good News, which is basically a sex comedy, albeit one with a higher intelligence than most. Giancarlo Giannini (who also produced; his presence got the film made) stars as a television executive who carries himself with pride but is quickly losing his skill with the ladies, most prominently his wife (Angela Molina), with whom he “switches roles” in one scene. Add to that the reappearance of an old friend from school who wants to commit suicide and asks Giancarlo to help him, and you’ve got a peculiar Commedia all’Italiana that reflects on that classic Seventies topic, women’s liberation and how it affected the male chauvinist mindset.

1647.) Vintage: The fifth and final episode in my series of episodes devoted to the work of cult Czech filmmaker Vera Chytilova. In this show, I discuss and show scenes from Pleasant Moments (2006), her last fiction film. It follows straight on from Traps, featured in the last show, as it is a social satire that begins in a more broadly comic vein and then becomes a psychodrama as chaos takes over the life of the protagonist, a psychologist whose patients (and family, and her patients’ families) are driving her nuts. By this point in her career Chytilova was fine with expanding her storylines from the main character outward (thus many subthreads in the film I don’t discuss on the show), but the focus here is on the psychologist who is supposed to help her clients set their lives straight while hers has turned upside down.

1648.) Vintage: I take great joy in celebrating the careers of those departed whose work I loved, and so this week I present part one of my two-part Deceased Artiste tribute to Anna Karina. This episode covers the more familiar titles – but, as always in the Funhouse, I have added a title that very rarely plays in the U.S. The films you have should have heard of include her features (and one short) with her first husband, Funhouse fave “Uncle Jean,” aka Jean-Luc Godard. From 1960’s Le Petit Soldat (where Anna is so adorable she is subject of a bet as to whether the lead character will fall in love with a mere look at her) to 1966’s Made in USA, Anna was Godard’s muse and frequent lead actress. I show scenes from the films they made together, most notably the masterworks Vivre Sa Vie and Pierrot Le Fou, but also spotlight a film that isn’t all that great, but in which she was (as always) luminous. The picture in question is Ce soir ou jamais (Tonight or Never), a stagey 1961 romantic comedy with Anna as the girlfriend of a pretentious theater director. The film is minor, but Deville mimicked Godard (and some other classic auteurs) by having the characters speak directly to the camera and he did block off a segment for Anna to do a frenzied dance with a male character in a party scene.

1649.) Vintage: The second and last part of my Deceased Artiste tribute to Anna Karina focuses on the post-Godard years when she was an actress-for-hire, appearing in an array of weird misfire pictures funded by U.S. and U.K. studios, and her first directorial effort (one of only two she made as writer-director). We start off with a discussion of, and scenes, from the post-’67 films that are jarringly misguided but have big-name casts and seem like they could have (possibly) been good if better thought out (The Magus, Laughter in the Dark, Justine). We move on to Anna’s own film, Vivre Ensemble (Living Together) from 1973. The film follows a troubled relationship, filled with substance abuse and jovial but directionless behavior, that takes place in Paris and Manhattan. I will be giving the American TV audience the first look at the NYC-shot scenes, which are mostly in English or feature little dialogue. Anna and her male lead visit Central Park (during an anti-war rally), stay in an apartment in Harlem (thus affording us a view of 125th St), meet friends at the Metropolitan Museum, and go out for a bite to eat downtown (after wandering on the Deuce) in fascinating “wandering” sequences. Vivre doesn’t cohere as a film because the stormy relationship at its center seems destined to fail and is comprised of giddily-happy scenes followed by tragic ones. But Anna’s radiance as a performer and her choice of locations for the doomed-to-fail relationship make the film worth watching, and saluting on the Funhouse.

1650.) Finishing up a run of Labor Day episodes about Jerry Lewis sparked by rare footage and very interesting reading matter, this year I present a two-part Jerry episode that shows both the light and dark sides of the guy. The majority of the show is devoted to readings from the recent biography The REAL Jerry Lewis Story by Lewis’s friend and one-time manager Rick Saphire. The biography has its share of virtues and failings; the latter come from a non-chronological approach (which never “closes” the relationship between author and subject). The virtues come via Saphire’s research into the first decades of Jerry’s life, in which he informally changed his birth name before taking a stage name – this is only one of the many things that became cornerstone untruths of Jerry’s life and career, explored in the book. The second part of the episode centers around the only Tashlin-directed Lewis vehicle that hasn’t yet been featured on the show, The Geisha Boy, a comedy about Japanese culture shot entirely in L.A. but still containing a few great Tashlin sight-gag sequences.

1651.) I very rarely move into the world of short films on the Funhouse, since we only have 28 minutes on the air and shorts need to be seen in their entirety. But this week I must present the first of two episodes devoted to the shorts of the great Luc Moullet, a contemporary and good friend of the New Wave, who made 10 feature films on a shoestring and a greater number of shorts with actual decent-sized budgets (thanks to TV networks, academic institutions, and other concerns that have deeper pockets than your average indie filmmaker). This week I present the first two that struck me as “must sees” for the Funhouse audience. The first is a simple short with a simple comic premise: how to open a bottle that refuses to open (in this case, the earlier Coke bottles, which had sharp metal on the underside of the cap). The second is a 2010 study Moullet assembled from years of footage of newer machines appearing on the scene in France. It may be from several years ago, but the film’s amusing view of automation replacing human workers is (sadly) uncommonly timeless.

1652.) Part 2 of my presentation of the shorts of critic-turned-filmmaker Luc Moullet showcases two more of his amusing (and occasionally moving, in the manner of a time capsule) short subjects. In this episode, I present his Eighties portrait of various libraries in France and his wonderfully imaginative and amusing (and useful!) study of how to jump the turnstile in the subway. Moullet’s features might have been made on a shoestring but some of his shorts were well-funded by established networks and other classy institutions. Thus, while his features show him working around low budgets, his shorts show him using his budgets wisely (as in the library film) and putting enough money aside to make personal items (like the turnstile film).

1653.) Vintage: One of the most fascinating culture-clash creations I’ve watched in the last few years is the subject of the show this week. The film in question is Topo Gigio and the Missile War, a 1967 vehicle for the renowned Italian mouse-puppet that entertained kids in Europe, America (most notably on The Ed Sullivan Show – “give me a kiss, Eddie…”), and with incredible success in more recent decades in Latin America. The Missile War film was an authorized “adventure of the character (by the puppeteer who created him, Maria Perego, who recently died at 95), but with a major twist – it was made in Japan by the much-lauded filmmaker Kon Ichikawa (Fires on the Plain, The Burmese Harp, Tokyo Olympiad)! Ichikawa tackled the subject by making a very minimalist film (jet black backgrounds with characters and objects in primary colors, giving the film an oddly Sixties/JLG look). The plot is derived from an Italian caper film (namechecked in this film, twice) about a gang of crooks trying to break into a bank from a nearby prison. Of course, in this instance the friendly but sleep-obsessed Topo stumbles onto the robbery and ends up foiling it. In the course of matters he falls in love with a red balloon. As is often the case with items from the Sixties (that period that “keeps on giving and giving and giving…”), you have to see it to believe it was ever made.

1654.) Vintage: In the realm of “low trash,” there are few truly stunningly clueless auteurs. One of the “greatest” in this regard was Doris Wishman, a woman who spent her time making sexploitation films that weren’t sexy, nor were they coherent. And so, I present on the show a discussion of, and scenes from, her penultimate movie, a truly gonzo piece of unsexy what-have-you called Dildo Heaven (2002). The movie is a video shot in her adopted home state of Florida that finds three women trying to date their bosses. (Doris’s scripts were frozen in the Sixties.) While doing this, we also see a guy who lives in their building, a nerdy young man, peeking into the keyholes of the other residents of their apartment complex – as in her famed Keyholes Are for Peeping, this allowed Doris to intercut scenes from her other movies, or from more competently shot items that she acquired the rights to (or were in public domain, so who cared?). The video is truly one of a kind – so much so that all copies of it that show up on the open market have a “For Screening Purposes Only” disclaimer on them. Certain things in the universe are a constant, and it’s nice to know that Doris Wishman’s unskilled and bizarre approach to moviemaking (shoot the feet, shoot the phones, shoot the wall hangings, get a reaction shot from a pet or a stuffed animal) was one of those constants.

1655.) Returning to the work of the late, incredibly great Uncle Jean (aka JLG, aka Godard), this week I devote an entire episode to one of the early works that he made with his collaborator and partner, Anne Marie Mieville. Ici et Ailleurs (Here and Elsewhere) runs under an hour, but to my mind it is the best of their Seventies collaborations, as it tackles an extremely important issue while also deconstructing the way in which that issue was initially presented. The film is built around clips from “Until Victory,” a film about the Palestintine Liberation Organization shot in 1970 by Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin but never edited together. Ici shows us segments from that film, allowing the message about the PLO and their struggle against Israeli colonialism to come right through. Godard offers his reflections on the unfinished film, noting that all the PLO members who spoke on camera had since died in combat. While clearly having no problem with the political message of the original film, Mieville does note in the narration the manipulative ways that Godard and Gorin framed that message, with fictional moments incorporated into the documentary; both Godard and Mieville also discuss the way television news covers struggles for independence. The film remains one of Godard’s most controversial because it is the work where he first delved into the Israel-Palestine issue in depth and offered a series of striking juxapositions that can still strike sparks today. (One of them drove Andrew Sarris into a self-acknowledged fit of liberal guilt, saying he could not give the film a good review despite thinking it was excellently made.)

1656.) I’ve presented clips on the show from just about every major feature by Marco Ferreri, who was an interview subject in the Funhouse nearly three decades ago. This week I discuss and excerpt the one major film by Ferreri that was impossible to see, until a restoration was done in Italy a few years ago. It’s the model for his “men with a crazy obsession” films, Break-Up (aka The Man with the Balloons, 1967). The film stars the always fearless Marcello Mastroianni, who was willing to play unlikeable characters if he felt the film was enough of a challenge. Here, he’s a man driven by a singular obsession, namely how much air can be put into a balloon before it bursts? His character is a candy manufacturer who pursues this question to the point of abandoning his marriage, driving some engineers he knows crazy, and forsaking everything until he can find out the answer. In the process, Ferreri (who expanded this film into a feature from a short included in an anthology film) uses various trippy Sixties techniques, including editing “on the beat,” using fumetti-like still frames (thanks, Mr. Marker), and including a wild nightclub party sequence shot in color (the rest of the film is in b&w).

1657.) Robert Bresson’s films are considered models for filmmakers looking to strip down their craft and deliver behavior and plot rather than spectacle. The topic for this week, his film Une Femme Douce (1969), has been “missing” (read: no home entertainment release or U.S. distribution deal) for decades. Based on a story by Dostoevsky, the film begins with the suicide of a young woman and then recounts her relationship with a pawnbroker, via the pawnbroker’s narration. Dominique Sanda, in her first movie role, plays the young woman, who marries the pawnbroker to escape her relatives but ends up in a relationship that neither partner is truly content with. The film was Bresson’s first one in color and it contains some masterful imagery, but what is most impressive (as it is with nearly all of Bresson’s cinema) is that there is a surplus of emotion in the proceedings, despite Bresson’s minimalism and sedately stylized approach to storytelling.

1658.) Vintage: Halloween gets underway in earnest with a series of episodes about the late, great monster-movie icon Bela Lugosi. In this first episode I explore Bela when he was riding high – as an immigrant from Hungary (via Germany) nabbing starring roles in melodramas and scene-stealing supporting parts in comedies and thrillers. His life story is filled with peaks and valleys, mostly because he was one of the single-worst decision makers in all of Golden Age Hollywood – due to agreeing to take a sub-standard rate as a movie star to play Dracula and a tendency to spend money as soon as he earned it, he declared bankruptcy within a year of the release of Dracula. In that same year (1932), though, he made three exceptionally creepy and unforgettable films – Murders in the Rue Morgue, White Zombie, and Island of Lost Souls, and essayed his first totally nuts modern mad scientist in Chandu, the Magician. I discuss Bela’s early career with clips of, and quotations from, the man, concluding near the end of the first “monster cycle” in the mid-Thirties.

1659.) For the first time I host the Funhouse from a different country! The episode in question was shot (as one of three; the other two eps should appear soon) when I was visiting Tokyo a few months back to celebrate a friend’s birthday. That friend, Jim Gonis of the “Monster Party” podcast, cohosts with me as we discuss a cross-cultural marvel — namely, the time that beloved character actor Herb Edelman costarred in a Japanese comedy. The film in question, Tora-San’s Dream of Spring (1979), is an entry in the longest-running film series ever (48 films starring the same actor, Kiyoshi Atsumi), about the adventures of a traveling peddler and his interactions with his family. “Dream of Spring” finds Tora-San meeting his American equivalent, an American salesman whose product (a special brand of vitamins) isn’t selling. He seeks a place to sleep for the night and ends up at the home of Tora-San’s relatives; Tora is initially furious that an American is sleeping in his room, but the two eventually form a friendship. The film is an odd creation: a gentle-hearted Japanese situation comedy that has a character who seems to have dropped in from a Neil Simon comedy. The piece winds up working, though, since one of the scripters was Leonard Schrader (who collaborated with his brother Paul on various projects and scripted Kiss of the Spider Woman on his own). Schrader and company craft Herb Edelman’s character as if he were Willy Loman peddling vitamins in a land far away from his home (which is Arizona in the film). Dream of Spring also doubles the formula for most of the Tora-san films (in which Tora has an unrequited love) by supplying not one but two middle-aged salesmen who have unrequited loves.

1660.) Something different for the show this week. I’ve chosen commercials included in two collections that were released on DVD in Japan (via a French producer who put them together and claimed director credit) as Kings of Ads, volumes “001” and “002.” (No idea.) Included are the works of a number of purebred auteurs who changed modern cinema, working for hire to sell perfume, cigarettes, liquor, cars, pasta, and even a certain brand of zipper. I’ll leave the names out here, so the show can be something of a surprise — when the auteurs in question delivered a fairly “normal” ad for the product they were supposed to sell, or when they took the time to create something that aligned with the rest of their filmography.

1661.) Vintage: Few things are as admirable as a life well lived, and so this week I offer a Deceased Artiste tribute to the actress Annie Girardot, who started out as a sex kitten in the Fifties and wound up being a respected character actress from the Eighties through the Aughts. I’ll be focusing on the most colorful section of her career, when she essayed very odd characters for Funhouse favorite Marco Ferreri and also played middle-aged women caught up in the psychedelic whirlwind that was the Sixties. There’ll be a bit of Mme. Girardot with “B.B.” and a bit of her acting for Il Grande Marco, but the feature presentation is most definitely Erotissimo, a super-psych comedy about a wife who wants to win back her husband’s affection and thus starts exploring the sexier side of pop culture. The film lifts entire chunks from the visual playbook of a certain Uncle Jean and its music sounds like the work of a certain Serge, so it was an absolute must for the Funhouse.

1662.) Returning to the notion of “political cinema,” I present two episodes about Ken Loach’s brilliant The Price of Coal, a two-part film about miners in Yorkshire that moves from light comedy in the first part to heavy drama in the second. This episode centers around the first part, which chronicles a group of miners who have to “clean up” the pit and surrounding areas for a forthcoming (very brief) visit by Prince Charles. In the process, there are some serious discussions about the Royals and their (non-)relation to the average British citizen. But, for the most part Loach and writer Barry Hines (who wrote Loach’s much-loved feature Kes), set up the characters in a series of pleasant situations that will be turned upside down in the second part of the production.

1663.) This week I discuss and present excerpts from Part 2 of Ken Loach’s telefilm The Price of Coal (1977). The first part gave us a light tale of life among the miners of South Yorkshire as they prepped for a visit from Prince Charles. In this part, we come back a month later and witness an explosion that produces a cave-in in the mine and endangers the lives of the characters we were charmed by in the first part of the film. Loach and writer Barry Hines (Kes) include a motif that can be found in nearly every Loach film, namely meetings between the characters where they discuss in informal language (actually, the language of the actors and non-actors themselves in many cases) the social forces that have brought them to the boiling point they are at. But politics is not in the foreground here; what is focused on is the lives of the miners and the ways in which their wives are aware that every time their husbands go out to their job they may not come back. And even if they are among those saved by the expert rescue teams, you still will hear a stray cough as they go about their day….

1664.) There are so many brilliant filmmakers I haven’t had time to salute on the show. This week I’m glad to single out one whose work is seen in the U.S. only at certain deep-dive arthouses. Ulrich Seidl is an Austrian who has made a number of great emotionally wrenching yet darkly funny films over the past few decades. I center in on one television documentary for this episode, Fun Without Limits (1998). The film concerns a specific amusement park in Germany and the woman who loves it — who is, in fact, a world champion amusement park visitor. Seidl has received wonderful praise by both Werner Herzog and John Waters, and it is Herzog who viewers might be reminded of in Fun, as Seidl introduces each figure in the film via static images of the person standing in front of the place they work (or entertain themselves). He also shares Herzog’s fascination with odd behavior and darkly humorous situations, although I can assure you that, the more I watched Fun to prepare this episode, the more I was aware that Seidl did want to ennoble rather than make fun of the woman who is the subject of this documentary.

1665.) Part 1 of my new, second interview with the legendary “underground” filmmaker Mike Kuchar. I last spoke to Mike in 2009 when his brother George was alive and Mike was regularly making videos. I’m proud of that interview, since we covered a lot in very little time, but there were a number of questions left unasked, so I was very happy to be able to connect with Mike again a few months ago in his apartment in San Francisco. In this new interview (which will be broken into a few parts), I cover the time before and after the eras discussed in our first chat. Thus, this part goes back to the beginning and starts off with the magical gift of an 8mm camera that the Kuchar bros (born as twins in 1942) got from their mother. From there we move to the attitude that Mike and George had about their film shoots (they were declared “parties,” to get the attendees in the right mood) and the times that the Kuchars first showed their films in public, leading to important friendships with their first mentors, well-established “undergrounders” Ken Jacobs and Jonas Mekas

1666.) A celebration of Beat Takeshi’s return to filmmaking after what seemed like a long time off (from 2016 on), I am happy to give the American premiere to his large-scale samurai opus Kubi (2023), which received no theatrical distribution or disc release in the U.S. This week’s episode is part 1 of two parts and focuses on the first half of the film, in which we meet several feuding clan leaders and then see their interactions; this erupts into some violence but the biggest battles are saved for the film’s second half. The film was based on a novel by Beat himself, set in the late 1500s; it was well-liked in various quarters, most notably by Akira Kurosawa who said it would make a great movie (he compared it to his own Seven Samurai). Beat (aka Takeshi Kitano) took several decades to make it into a film, until he got what he believed to be his dream cast. The film does resemble the samurai films of the great AK, although it does contain elements that are pure Beat, including the gay life of the average samurai (some of it based on male love, some of it based on physical dominance) and the importance of the neck (kubi means neck in Japanese) since one won a battle in the era depicted by beheading one’s opponent and showing the head to one’s superiors and the clan.

1667.) Vintage: I revisit the joy that is Funhouse favorite George Kuchar through the vehicle of his wonderfully talented student Curt McDowell, who asked George to script his first feature film – and out popped Thundercrack! I’ve talked about this amazing 1975 cult/underground/camp/porn/horror/comedy/act of subversion a few times before on the Funhouse but this time out I’m discussing not only the film itself but the supplements that are present on the Synapse Blu-ray of the film (yes, it was all cleaned-up for High Def video!). Thus, I will talking about the production of the film, its strange schizo nature (in which McDowell’s subversive underground tendencies and ambi-sexual plot twists are counterpointed by Kuchar’s love of old movies and his taste for ripe dialogue and lurid plot twists), and its place in cult movie history, as well as showing bits from the George-narrated trailer, outtakes, a rare interview with McDowell and star Marion Eaton (without her oddly drawn-on eyebrows), and a rarely shown McDowell short made shortly before the commencement of the brilliance and craziness that was (and is) Thundercrack!

1668.) Vintage: A salute to a performer who always deserves a salute: Udo Kier. Kier has been in dozens of films in roles of different size, but few directors have ever figured out how to use him properly. I discuss this principle on this episode by showing scenes from the work of the late German filmmaker Christoph Schlingensief (who mostly made high-key, shrill, apocalyptic, self-referential fantasy films). First up is what should’ve been the dream film, 100 Years of Adolf Hitler (1989), which stars Udo as Hitler (with a cast of Fassbinder stalwarts as the others in the bunker); suffice it to say that the film doesn’t work, despite its noble deranged intentions. Next is The 120 Days of Bottrop (1997), an odd homage to, and abuse of, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, populated by many of his stars (and his producer, and his editor, Funhouse interview subject Juliane Lorenz)! The film finds a mentally disabled man playing RWF and the principals making a no-budget remake of Pasolini’s Salo while waiting for the star (Helmut Berger) to show up; it’s not easy viewing and the in-jokes will only work for major Fassbinder fans. The final film in the trio under consideration this week is the one that provides us with the best use of Udo – Egomania – Island Without Hope (1986), which features Udo in full flourish, relishing his dialogue, making faces, popping his eyes out, and giving what is definitely a perfectly Udo performance. The dialogue Schlingensief provides him with is prime choice – some stuff about him being “The Devil’s Aunt” and how he must kill Tilda Swinton’s baby. (Tilda is young and adorable; Udo is older and ready to kill a baby.)

1669.) The second of 2 parts about the great Beat Takeshi’s return to cinema, Kubi (2023), his swordsman epic, based on his own novel. In this part of the proceedings, we reach the point where the viewer isn’t figuring out the names of the feudal chieftains anymore and is absorbed entirely by the way that they’re killing each other. Beat (real name: Takeshi Kitano) draws both on the classic model of the samurai film as made by Kurosawa and his own vivid imagination, which brings to light some aspect of the samurai lifestyle not covered by the great filmmakers. These aspects include the love stories between and sexual dominance of various samurais, plus the way that various warriors claimed victory over their opponents — namely by displaying their severed head. (Thus, the title, kubi, which means neck.) The film is both entertaining and beautifully made; it serves as a great reintroduction of Beat to cinema (and he’s already made and released and another film, and is working on yet another as I write this.)

1670.) A film that was seemingly lost has been found in a bizarre state, which only adds to its weirdness. The title in question is Cleopatra (1970) by Michel Auder, an ultra-low-budget evocation of the Taylor-Burton fiasco starring various Warhol superstars (most of whom had by ’70 fallen out of favor with Andy). The film itself rises or falls on one’s affection for these performers – I enjoy them a lot, so I found this mostly ad-libbed effort to be entertaining, if overlong and in need of an actual finale. The cast is indeed a motley but enjoyable lot, from Viva in the title role, to Village fixture Taylor Mead, to the very funny (and way too deep into his roles!) Ondine and the unpredictable Andrea “Whips” Feldman. Making the viewing experience even stranger is the fact that the print that has been found contains various pornographic scenes that are censored (with a card that literally says “censored”) and, truly bizarre, one can readily see in any scene with any kind of sign behind the characters that the film was processed backward (flipped left to right, right to left). Add to all that weirdness the fact that the protracted last segment of the film was shot in a pretty impressive set at the great Italian studio Cinecittà, and you have the recipe for a film that could’ve only been made in the Sixties, the decade that is the gift that keeps on giving and giving and….

1671.) In Part 2 of my second, more in-depth interview with the great Mike Kuchar (conducted in his apt in San Francisco), I talk with him about some of the more noted “underground” filmmakers he met when his brother George and he became celebrated in that sphere. Then we discuss his switchover in the later 20th century from 16mm to mini-DV video. He offers reflections on that and some of the lighting advice he used to give his students at the San Francisco Art Institute. I punctuate this discussion, as always, with choice moments from Mike’s films and videos. Also: a reflection by Mike on his brother George’s “diary” videos.