downtown puppen

VENUS IN FURS update: Blu-ray; Jess Franco; versions: Manfred Mann; Mike Hugg; David Lynch, TWIN PEAKS; HD AL OTRO LADO DEL ESPEJO

VENUS IN FURS red room

TWIN PEAKS-THE RETURN red room

Two things: Can there please be a Blu-ray release of Jess Franco's VENUS IN FURS asap? After seeing PAROXISMUS (...puo una morta rivivere per amore?), the alternate Italian version, credited to Hans Bilian, edited by Bruno Mattei, I wondered and still wonder if that version is closer to what Jess Franco intended, as a Noir style fever dream, than the more familiar cut, which was post-produced without the director's final input, although Jess told me he did supervise a cut, but not the one in general release. Nor have I seem the reported 90m, as opposed to the 86 m BU DVD, German version, VENUS IM PELZ.

Also, the more I see of David Lynch's new TWIN PEAKS television series, and reviewing the feature TWIN PEAKS FIRE WALK WITH ME, I see some interesting similarities with Franco in general and VENUS IN FURS specifically, especially the scenes in the red curtained, zig zagged floored Black Lodge. Red is the primary symbolic color in both feature films and overwhelms all other hues.

Try watching TPFWWM back to back with Franco's 1973 father-daughter incest drama AL OTRO LADO DEL ESPEJO, the similarities may be coincidental, but they are there in terms of imagery, mirrors being a portal to the truth and other worlds in both, for instance. Both Franco and Lynch employ surrealist imagery to tell their tragic stories of young women destroyed by their fathers.

And an English friendly HD release of AL OTRO LADO DEL ESPEJO is needed. It's also one of Jess Franco's key works. More on this in a future blog posting...

Emma Cohen entering the mirror in AL OTRO LADO DEL ESPEJO (1973)


Laura Palmer in the mirror: TWIN PEAKS

TWIN PEAKS FIRE WALK WITH ME..




PAROXISMUS: I wanted to express my own personal reactions to this cut. Rather than a VIDEO WATCHDOG style comparison between this Italian version and the VIF we all know I plan do an ogoing series of shorter blogs on various aspects of both cuts, with some specific comparisons to come. First, the music. There was a fascinating online interview with Mike Hugg about his memories of composing and producing the music track for the original VENUS IN FURS, which unfortunately has been deleted.

 Maria Rohm as the object of desire in PAROXISMUS... PUO UNA MORTA RIVIVERE PER AMORE?

First and foremos,t BLACK ANGEL, as Jess envisioned it, was a love story steeped in the realm of jazz. Directly inspired by Chet Baker's observation that his own playing often transported him into a transcendent place. That element remains central in both versions.

Hugg states that he wrote the songs and the instrumentals were composed by him and Manfred Mann. But a lot of the music in the American cut came from other places, including US television, Stu Phillips library tracks, and cues from the score of the 1966 German made Jerry Cotton feature, THE TRAP SNAPS SHUT AT MIDNIGHT. Still other unidentified music is in the Italian version. I'm going to retry to locate the interview and publish a link if possible.

The film has always struck me as a unique musical-horror-fantasy on the themes of love and death. In a way all Jess Franco's films could be considered musicals, and he has described himself as a musician who makes films.

Manfred Mann, the popular Rock group which had a number of hit records in the mid 1960s before working on the soundtrack for VENUS IN FURS. They also appear performing their music in the film. 

Stay tuned for further information and commentary on PAROXISMUS, hopefully along with a review of the eventual Blu-ray release of VENUS IN FURS  It would be really interesting to have this alternate version as a special feature on an upcoming Blu-ray. 

Updated (C) Robert Monell 7/17

ESQUIZO, a film by Ricardo Bofill. Reviewed by Terence Ng.

Esquizo (1970) review

TN

Terence N

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Fri 6/30, 9:31 PM

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Hi Robert, here's my review of Esquizo. Sorry it took so long. I've attached it as a Word file but I've also included it in this message. The imgur links contain pictures of the film for illustration purposes. Make sure to also include the source and further reading links as well.

Esquizo (1970) dir. Ricardo Bofill

http://imgur.com/hxeoHOK.jpg

The Escuela de Barcelona movement thrived in Spain during the 60's to early 70's and was notable for its low budgets and often avant-garde experimentalism. Several of its directors included Vicente Aranda (Fata Morgana), Jorge Grau (Acteón), Pere Portabella (Cuadecuc Vampir), Carlos Durán (Liberxina 90), Jacinto Esteva (Dante no es unicamente severo) etc. Interestingly, Ricardo Bofill, the famous architect whose abstract buildings can be seen in several Jess Franco films (She Killed in Ecstasy, La comtesse perverse, Eugenie - historia de una perversión, La noche de los sexos abiertos), was an active participant in the movement. As an actor, Bofill appeared in Carlos Duran's BiBiCi Story (1969) and the wacky home-movie Barcelona (1967). As a writer, he co-wrote Aranda's Brillante Porvenir (1965) and as a director, he made the short film Circles(1966), which explored the circular geometry of various ancient monuments, and Esquizo (1970), "a fictitious report on the architecture of the brain".

http://i.imgur.com/vxDEVsD.jpg

Synopsis:
The film opens in a mental clinic. A red-haired patient (Serena Vergano, Bofill's wife at the time) lies on an operating table with electrodes plugged in. Her scalp is split open with a scalpel, we enter her brain with a loud jarring noise. Against a white background and nonsensical ramblings, we see the woman with three young men (Jose Luis Argüello, Modesto Fernández, Jesús Sastre) doing various interpretive dance movements for approximately 15 minutes (a restless old man next to me got up and left). The group create various arches with their limbs, they embrace each other, touch private parts, and get naked (some people giggled). We hear the woman wanting to learn the letter 'o'. Eventually, there's an unfocused shot of a disabled kid walking with crutches while a voiceover talks about schizophrenia. There's a long, drawn out scene of various deformed female patients babbling and giggling. We then see naked toddlers playing with one dollar bills at a beach while the crazy patients "dub" the toddlers' dialogue. The toddlers play about in the sand and suddenly, there are close ups of their private parts (at this point, I saw several people get up and leave immediately). A sudden cut to the young adults "attacking" us with their hand gestures, like synapses of the brain firing messages. A toddler cries. The toddlers bury each other up to the neck (the surreal image of their heads popping out of the sand made the remaining audience chuckle). A mixture of all these scenes is edited together. The young adults do more 'attacking'. Then they lay on top of each other crotch-to-crotch. Abattoir footage of animal carcasses being ground up by a machine plays suddenly. More mixing of the various scenes. Finally, we leave the brain and the scalp closes up. The woman takes a shower. There's a narration about man being the new god because of the increasing advancements in technology, some closing text (but the subtitles were too hard to read) and the film ends.

http://i.imgur.com/8Ujtuug.jpg

I saw this rare film at the Melbourne International Film Festival 2016 along with three other Escuela de Barcelona films. Going in, I had no idea what to expect and to say I was baffled and confused is a huge understatement. I had never seen such a large portion of the audience walk out before and when the film ended, I just didn't know what to make of it. In Daniel Kasman's IFFR 2016 article on Mubi, he draws parallels between the film's incomprehensible nature, the inability to speak, and the voices silenced by the Franco dictatorship.¹ This parallel might not be completely unfounded since some Escuela de Barcelona films seemed to have anti-Franco themes. For example, in BiBiCi Story, a woman listens to BBC English lessons and becomes indoctrinated into gunning down a crowd of prisoners, while in Liberxina 90, an underground revolutionary group in a dystopian society have access to a rare drug that can erase "establishment" conditioning from the human mind. Even Portabella'sCuadecuc Vampir has been interpreted as anti-Franco by some writers.

http://i.imgur.com/5AJ1A2i.jpg

Overall, I can't say I liked Esquizo; it is extremely drawn out, sluggishly paced, and overstays its welcome. With or without nonsense, I feel it probably would have worked better as a short than as a feature. However, I am glad to have had the opportunity to see this rarity directed by Ricardo Bofill and it did ignite a desire within me to track down more Barcelona School films. A DVD release with a director's commentary (andCircles included as an extra) would be most welcome.

Review written by Terence Ng.

Source: 

1. Rotterdam 2016. Acting Out by Daniel Kasman. https://mubi.com/notebook/posts/rotterdam-2016-acting-out

Esquizo (1970) dir. Ricardo Bofill

The Escuela de Barcelona movement thrived in Spain during the 60's to early 70's and was notable for its low budgets and often avant-garde experimentalism. Several of its directors included Vicente Aranda (Fata Morgana), Jorge Grau (Acteón), Pere Portabella (Cuadecuc Vampir), Carlos Durán (Liberxina 90), Jacinto Esteva (Dante no es unicamente severo) etc. Interestingly, Ricardo Bofill, the famous architect whose abstract buildings can be seen in several Jess Franco films (She Killed in Ecstasy, La comtesse perverse, Eugenie - historia de una perversión, La noche de los sexos abiertos), was an active participant in the movement. As an actor, Bofill appeared in Carlos Duran's BiBiCi Story (1969) and the wacky home-movie Barcelona (1967). As a writer, he co-wrote Aranda's Brillante Porvenir (1965) and as a director, he made the short film Circles(1966), which explored the circular geometry of various ancient monuments, and Esquizo (1970), "a fictitious report on the architecture of the brain".

http://i.imgur.com/vxDEVsD.jpg

Synopsis:
The film opens in a mental clinic. A red-haired patient (Serena Vergano, Bofill's wife at the time) lies on an operating table with electrodes plugged in. Her scalp is split open with a scalpel, we enter her brain with a loud jarring noise. Against a white background and nonsensical ramblings, we see the woman with three young men (Jose Luis Argüello, Modesto Fernández, Jesús Sastre) doing various interpretive dance movements for approximately 15 minutes (a restless old man next to me got up and left). The group create various arches with their limbs, they embrace each other, touch private parts, and get naked (some people giggled). We hear the woman wanting to learn the letter 'o'. Eventually, there's an unfocused shot of a disabled kid walking with crutches while a voiceover talks about schizophrenia. There's a long, drawn out scene of various deformed female patients babbling and giggling. We then see naked toddlers playing with one dollar bills at a beach while the crazy patients "dub" the toddlers' dialogue. The toddlers play about in the sand and suddenly, there are close ups of their private parts (at this point, I saw several people get up and leave immediately). A sudden cut to the young adults "attacking" us with their hand gestures, like synapses of the brain firing messages. A toddler cries. The toddlers bury each other up to the neck (the surreal image of their heads popping out of the sand made the remaining audience chuckle). A mixture of all these scenes is edited together. The young adults do more 'attacking'. Then they lay on top of each other crotch-to-crotch. Abattoir footage of animal carcasses being ground up by a machine plays suddenly. More mixing of the various scenes. Finally, we leave the brain and the scalp closes up. The woman takes a shower. There's a narration about man being the new god because of the increasing advancements in technology, some closing text (but the subtitles were too hard to read) and the film ends.

http://i.imgur.com/8Ujtuug.jpg

I saw this rare film at the Melbourne International Film Festival 2016 along with three other Escuela de Barcelona films. Going in, I had no idea what to expect and to say I was baffled and confused is a huge understatement. I had never seen such a large portion of the audience walk out before and when the film ended, I just didn't know what to make of it. In Daniel Kasman's IFFR 2016 article on Mubi, he draws parallels between the film's incomprehensible nature, the inability to speak, and the voices silenced by the Franco dictatorship.¹ This parallel might not be completely unfounded since some Escuela de Barcelona films seemed to have anti-Franco themes. For example, in BiBiCi Story, a woman listens to BBC English lessons and becomes indoctrinated into gunning down a crowd of prisoners, while in Liberxina 90, an underground revolutionary group in a dystopian society have access to a rare drug that can erase "establishment" conditioning from the human mind. Even Portabella'sCuadecuc Vampir has been interpreted as anti-Franco by some writers.

http://i.imgur.com/5AJ1A2i.jpg

Overall, I can't say I liked Esquizo; it is extremely drawn out, sluggishly paced, and overstays its welcome. With or without nonsense, I feel it probably would have worked better as a short than as a feature. However, I am glad to have had the opportunity to see this rarity directed by Ricardo Bofill and it did ignite a desire within me to track down more Barcelona School films. A DVD release with a director's commentary (andCircles included as an extra) would be most welcome.

Review written by Terence Ng.

Source: 

1. Rotterdam 2016. Acting Out by Daniel Kasman. https://mubi.com/notebook/posts/rotterdam-2016-acting-out

Images of the film taken from: https://iffr.com/en/1970/films/esquizo

Further reading: https://letterboxd.com/brian_davisson/list/la-escuela-de-barcelona/