Kenneth Anger: The Complete Magick Lantern Cycle

Kenneth Anger (born Kenneth Anglemeyer, 1927, Santa Monica, California) began to make amateur films as a child using the family's 16mm camera and moved rapidly into personal works that explored his interest in myth, magic, and homoeroticism. His first mature film, 1947's Fireworks, caused a sensation and confirmed him in his path as an independent filmmaker. He spent much of his years as a young man in Europe, specifically Paris, returning briefly in the early fifties to make Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954), his first intensive exploration of the mythology of one of his great influences, the English writer-adventurer-mystagogue Aleister Crowley (1875-1947), of whose works and ideas he has made a lifelong study and whose pagan religion, called Thelema, he adopted. He returned to the US in the early sixties and in New York made Scorpio Rising (1964), one of his most sensational and best-known works, after which he moved to San Francisco, where he hobnobbed with figures on the fringes of the sixties counterculture and embarked on his major work Lucifer Rising, a project with many ups and downs which was only finished in 1981. He released no new material for the next two decades, beginning to make new films in 2000. An avid collector of Hollywood gossip, he wrote Hollywood Babylon in 1959, and Hollywood Babylon II in 1986, two books relating the choicest, most scandalous anecdotes of Hollywood stars and directors from the silent era on. This year saw the release by Fantoma of Kenneth Anger: The Complete Magick Lantern Cycle, a two-DVD compilation of his major films which is certain to be the go-to resource for anyone interested in his work.

Fireworks opens the first disc of the Magick Lantern Cycle and shows the surrealist influence which was nearly omnipresent among avant-garde film of the time. Anger plays a young man who dreams that he approaches and is beaten and eviscerated by a group of sailors. A brutal sado-erotic fantasy showing the predilection for strong, muscle-bound types that abound in his work, the film also relays a vivid sense of the insecurity that plagued gay men at a time when anyone who dared to act on his desires was subject to police entrapment (something that had already happened to Anger) or violence. The film was reportedly prosecuted for obscenity on its release. A print of the film was purchased by sex researcher Albert Kinsey for the archives of the Institute for Sex Research (now the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction in Bloomington, Indiana), and he and Anger became close friends until Dr. Kinsey's death in 1956. His only other surviving film of the period is 1949's Puce Moment, a scene from a projected, longer homage to the vamps and sirens of the silent era in Hollywood, in which a young woman, apparently a Hollywood celebrity, chooses from her dresses and perfume and sets out with her borzois (an elegant breed of dog fashionable at the time). A fascination with Hollywood -- its artifice, spectacle and glamor, as well as the sleaze and scandal which populates the pages of Hollywood Babylon, and which is also a constant theme in gay culture -- is evident here.

Rabbit's Moon (La Lune des Lapins, 1950) and Eaux d'Artifice (1953) are the only finished and extant films Anger made during his stay in Europe, during which Anger met French writer and filmmaker Jean Cocteau (also an early admirer of Fireworks) and Henri Langlois, founder of the Cinémathèque Française, who allowed Anger to store materials and to browse the holdings of the cinémathèque. Shot on the unused soundstage of Les Films du Panthéon during the French vacances, Rabbit's Moon was the only film Anger has made in 35mm and is a fabulistic fantasy combining commedia dell' arte figures with a motif from Japanese folklore (Japanese children believe -- much as Western children believe in the man in the moon -- that a rabbit fond of rice cakes lives in the moon, and leave him snacks of rice cakes when the moon is full). The melancholy clown Pierrot offers the moon to the lovely Columbine, who rebuffs him for the wily trickster Harlequin. Shot on a set constructed by Anger, the characters were played by students at Marcel Marceau's school of pantomime. The overall look and feel of the film owes much to Max Reinhardt and William Dieterle's 1935 adaptation of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream starring Mickey Rooney, in which Anger claimed later to have appeared as a child actor (a claim which not borne out by archived studio documents). This was followed in 1953 by Eaux d'Artifice, which was originally conceived as part of a larger work on the 16th-century occultist Cardinal d'Este. The film is a visual study of the many fountains and waterfalls in the water gardens of the Villa d'Este in Tivoli in Rome, as a small, masked figure (allegedly a dwarf referred to Anger by the filmmaker Federico Fellini, chosen to make the setting look bigger) in eighteenth-century costume wanders through the gardens. Printed in cyan with hand-tinting in emerald, the film is tranquil, sensual, and delicate. Both these films are possibly Anger's most accessible and easily enjoyable, even if it is true that the water-garden footage was originally intended as a allusion to Cardinal d'Este's alleged sexual fetish for urination.

Anger returned briefly to the United States after shooting Eaux d'Artifice on the occasion of a death in the family, and renewed his ties with the local artistic-bohemian community in Southern California. Invited to a costume party held by artist Renate Druks and her husband Paul Mathiesen with the theme "Come As Your Madness," he conceived the film Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954), and asked some of the other attendees to appear in the film. The film was shot at the home of Samson De Brier, who at one time worked in Hollywood but had since become a recluse noted for his collection of jewelry, curios, Oriental furniture and artworks. In the film a number of figures from the Egyptian and classical pantheons gather and share a magical, vision-inducing potion. De Brier appears in the film in a number of roles, including Osiris, Shiva, Nero, Cagliostro and the Great Beast 666. Others in the cast include Marjorie Cameron, widow of American Crowley disciple Jack Parsons, Curtis Harrington, a boyhood friend of Anger's and a fellow filmmaker who began with experimental works and became a director of low-budget Hollywood films such as Queen of Blood, the novelist and diarist Anaïs Nin as the moon goddess Astarte (and whose account of the original party and impressions of Anger can be found in the published version of her diaries), and Anger himself as the Greek goddess Hekate, who brings the hallucinogenic brew. With a visual sense influenced by Art Nouveau design and glowing Kodachrome greens, reds and yellows, the film's images sometimes border on kitsch (I tend to hear Les Baxter rather than the Janacek the filmmaker chose for the soundtrack), but the imagery is also well thought-out and well paced and represents Anger's first successful attempt to convey in film the Crowleyan mythology he had been studying as well as Crowley's emphasis on spritual exploration through drug-induced trances and sexuality. Inauguration also pioneers cinematic psychedelia with its heavy use of multiple superimpositions. The film was praised and won prizes in Europe, and he would prepare a special three-screen version for the 1958 Brussels World Fair, as well as a "Sacred Mushroom Edition (intended to be experienced under the influence of hallucinogenics) in 1966.

Anger returned to the US in the early sixties, and his vision became less surreal and precious, and more harder-edged and montage-oriented. Probably Anger's best known and most popular film, Scorpio Rising (1964) follows the lives of a loose group of motorcycle enthusiasts he found hanging out under the roller coaster at Coney Island in New York City. He filmed them working on their bikes, preening, fooling around at an impromptu beer-blast, and racing at a bike rally where one of the competitors wiped out on his bike, fatally breaking his neck in front of Anger's camera. He embellished the verité portions of his footage with Nazi iconography, images from popular culture alluding to death and rebellion, footage of a cheap religious film of the life of Jesus Christ that had been mistakenly been delivered to his doorstep and which he incorporated into the film, and Tom Of Finland-esque images of muscular bikers in black leather. He particularly followed one of these bikers, a blond, speed-snorting, comics-reading, James Dean-obsessed ex-marine named Richard McAuley, or Bruce Byron, depending on who you believe, but who was called Scorpio after his astrological sign (a sign referring both to the sex organs and to machinery), as he primps, goes out, and harangues, Nazi-style, an imaginary audience in a derelict church. Set to a soundtrack of pop songs by artists such as Bobby Vinton and Peggy March, the film builds, montage-style, a vision of youth culture as a gathering force with the potential to overturn the old Christian order. By any standard, Scorpio Rising was a sensational film: if Fireworks made some people take notice, and Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome garnered accolades, then Scorpio Rising made Anger an out-and-out celebrity in the world of underground film and in the rising counterculture of the sixties. He moved to San Francisco where he made Kustom Kar Kommandos (1965), a film initially conceived as something of a Scorpio for the custom car culture, but which ended up as a three-minute film of a young man polishing his hand-built dragster, set, like Scorpio, to a popular song (the Paris Sisters' "Dream Lover"), with equal fetishistic attention given to both his tight jeans and the powerful, exquisitely crafted machine he has built.

In San Francisco Anger networked with the counterculture forming in the area, performed public rituals at the Straight Theater, and began to conceive a new film, Lucifer Rising, a film intended to evoke the god Lucifer, not the Devil of Christian mythology but a being of light and beauty heralding a sort of millenial period called "the Aeon of Horus" by Crowley. Believing that the person who would play Lucifer in his film must be a living embodiment of Lucifer, he at first thought he found his Lucifer in a struggling young musician, Bobby Beausoleil, who agreed to appear in the film on the condition that he be allowed to form a group to record the film's soundtrack. The relationship between the two men resulted in a falling-out, after which Beausoleil became involved with Charles Manson and his "Family," and went to prison after carrying out a murder at Manson's bidding. Anger went to London in 1968, where he met the Rolling Stones' Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, and Led Zeppelin's Jimmy Page, who was also interested in Crowley. He used much of the footage he had shot for Lucifer Rising, as well as footage shot in London, for Invocation Of My Demon Brother (1969). Set to a soundtrack improvised by Mick Jagger on a recently-acquired Moog synthesizer, Invocation is a twelve-minute montage of ritual, arcane symbols, footage of Jagger, Richards and Richards' girlfriend Anita Pallenberg, and young men sleeping and wrestling, all running past the viewer as quickly and furiously as a tab of DMT, ending with a joke uncharacteristic of Anger as a dressed-up lawn jockey holds a sign: "Zap You're pregnant That's witchcraft", and all bracketed by three circles arranged in a triangle, first pointing upward, then pointing downward as though to mark the close of the ritual; Anger has always considered his films to be magical invocations; he has been quoted comparing making a film -- any film -- to casting a spell, and he has also referred to cinema as his own "magickal weapon."

Meanwhile Anger still intended to make Lucifer Rising, and managed to obtain a grant of £15,000 from the British National Film Finance Corporation, which enabled him to shoot scenes in Egypt and in Germany as well as in Britain. He initially wanted Mick Jagger to play the part of Lucifer but eventually found a young steel-worker named Leslie Huggins to play the part. After initially enlisting Jimmy Page to record the soundtrack, the two men had a quarrel and Anger decided not to use Page's music, and Bobby Beausoleil, now serving his time in prison, and with whom Anger had reconciled in the meantime, wrote and recorded a progressive-rock soundtrack with the help of fellow inmates and an advance for equipment from Anger. The film opens with Isis and her consort Osiris; we also see Lilith, played by Marianne Faithfull, and an adept played by a Canadian biker named Hayden Couts, and Anger himself plays the Magus, abolishing Chaos (played by a dotty old man named Sir Francis Rose, once a Crowley associate) from the magic circle, all cut with footage of volcanoes erupting and images of Huggins as Lucifer in a rainbow-colored jacket. Here my grasp of the esoteric symbolism fails me, but the film flows with a stately pace and shows what Anger could do with a real budget (large enough to make a small indie feature). Special effects such as a flaming opening title and flying saucers appearing over one of the giant Egyptian monuments appearing in the film (something which Anger claims actually did happen during the shoot and which he took as a sign) were supplied, gratis, by Wally Veevers, who was a member of Stanley Kubrick's special-effects crew in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Osiris was played by Donald Cammell, who directed Jagger and Anita Pallenberg in the film Performance.

Lucifer Rising was shot around 1970 and was only completed in 1981. He came out of his period of retirement from filmmaking in 2000 and has made a number of shorts over the past decade, one of which, The Man We Want To Hang (2002), a short documentary of an exhibition of Crowley's paintings and drawings, is included on The Complete Magick Lantern Cycle.

Anger, now 83, lives in Los Angeles, a proud (often to the point of vanity) and mercurial (sometimes to the point of malice) and fiercely independent artist who has stuck to his guns and his own vision over six decades. He has also prepared but not published (due to a section on Tom Cruise and the notoriously litigous Church of Scientology) a third volume of Hollywood Babylon. His official website can be seen here.

In addition to the major works of Anger's career (all digitally restored) and the more recent film The Man We Want To Hang, Fantoma's two-DVD set of Kenneth Anger: The Complete Magick Lantern Cycle includes commentary on all films by the filmmaker, in addition to an alternate soundtrack to Invocation of My Demon Brother (using recordings made by the band Bobby Beausoleil assembled for the original version of Lucifer Rising), restoration demonstrations, and a booklet featuring appreciations by directors Martin Scorsese, Guy Maddin, and Gus Van Sant, along with an account by Bobby Beausoleil of his relationship with Anger and the recording of the Lucifer Rising soundtrack.

Battleship Potemkin (1925)

Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin is one of the great films of the silent era and one of the films that defined the medium aesthetically. It put Russian film on the cinematic map and also made Eisenstein's name as a director and artistic visionary with its extensive use of his evolving theories of montage in cinema. It was also one of the big moments in the short history of Soviet modernism, the brief period when, galvanized by the revolution, writers, composers and visual artists in the new Russia answered the promise of a new society with new, dynamic and advanced art, making Soviet Russia, at least until Josef Stalin took over, the home of some of the most modern artistic ideas in the world.

Originally conceived as part of a series of films relating the events of the year 1905, in which strikes, uprisings and popular sentiment brought the country closer to revolution than at any time before 1917, Battleship Potemkin focuses on one of these events: on an armored cruiser on the Black Sea in 1905, sailors mutinied and sailed for 11 days under a red flag. In the film, tension between sailors and officers explodes over the quality of the food, and the sailors, faced with rifles, turn on their superiors, throw them overboard and hoist the red flag. The people of the port city of Odessa welcome the revolutionary sailors with open arms and are promptly massacred by the Czar's soldiers, for which the Potemkin shells the local military command in reprisal. The sailors of the Potemkin then learn that a squadron of ships is being sent to the area and prepare for battle, not knowing whether they will have to fight or whether their fellow sailors will join them. Potemkin's bold images and masterful cutting orchestrate the emotions of the audience as we share the comradely affection of the sailors, rage at their treatment, indignation at the massacre of civilians, and apprehension and tension as the squadron of ships approaches. Battleship Potemkin is not simply a museum piece, fodder for film historians or simple propaganda: it's also exciting and moving entertainment that engages the brain and the emotions alike.

Originally an engineering student, Sergei Eisenstein went in for the arts after serving in the Red Army during the Civil War. He first worked in theater and began to develop his ideas about montage -- the communication of emotions and ideas through the juxtaposition of visual elements -- in the context of stage production. A film buff since his student days, Eisenstein was aware of American director D. W. Griffith's innovations in film cutting which did so much to establish the unique visual language of film. Another influence on Eisenstein was his study of Japanese, and the system of Chinese ideograms on which Japanese writing is based. Gravitating towards cinema, his first feature, Strike, began to put his ideas about montage into film. Strike was not particularly successful at home, but it did well enough abroad to lead to a commission to make another feature which would result in Battleship Potemkin. Strike also introduced Eisenstein to cinematographer Eduard Tisse, who guided the inexperienced director in the practical problems of putting his visions on film and became a valued friend and collaborator for most of Eisenstein's career.

Potemkin's premiere at Moscow's Bolshoi Theater was an artistic triumph, but as was the case with most of the work of the artists of the new Soviet modernist scene, the film was still too new and too sophisticated for many ordinary Russians, and the film did less well in box office terms. But the effect of the film abroad, especially with Eisenstein's counterparts in the world film community, was nothing short of electrifying: filmmakers all over the world applauded Eisenstein's achievement and he quickly became an international celebrity.

But the export of Potemkin abroad led directly to the problem that has bedeviled the film for eighty years: censorship and the lack of a definitive version. At issue was, of course, the film's politics -- after all, this was a film from the Soviet Union, and it depicted rebellion against state and especially military authority -- and also its violence, especially in the Odessa Steps sequence, in which Czarist soldiers fire on the people. This is one of the most celebrated passages in cinema and a tour de force of Eisenstein's montage technique, but it was also unsparingly violent for its time -- a small boy is nearly trampled to death; his mother, holding his body and appealing to the soldiers, is cut down by rifles; an unattended infant in a perambulator rolls down the stairs; an old woman is slashed in the face by a sword-wielding Cossack. Before Potemkin could be shown in Germany in what was for all practical purposes the film's international debut, the German government required cuts of the most violent and inflammatory content. In this case at least, the required cuts were achieved in consultation with the director, who re-edited the film in order to accomodate the cuts without sacrificing the film's integrity, and a score was written by German composer Edmund Meisel at Eisenstein's request. When the film was shown in other countries, other cuts, not so mindful of the director's vision, were made, and the film was also subject to the prevailing political winds at home: an opening quotation by Leon Trotsky, for example, was excised after Trotsky was expelled from the Party in the late twenties. For most of the film's existence, there have been a number of versions of the film but no definitive version representative of Eisenstein's original intent.

Which is where Kino International's 2007 DVD release of Potemkin comes in. The restored version on this DVD is the fruit of decades of work, in part by Russian film historian Naum Kleinmann, who used materials in the possession of Eisenstein's widow as well as the archives of the state film school VGIK in an attempt to reconstruct the film in the seventies, and by the director of the current project, Enno Patalas of the Deutsche Kinematek, with input from the British Film Institute, the Gosfilmofond in Moscow and the Munich Film Museum. As the only film score specifically written for the film, Edmund Meisel's score is used, as adapted by Helmut Imig (the score was, after all, written for a shortened version of the film) and performed by the Deutsches Filmorchestra. The restoration was completed and premiered in 2005 in honor of the 100th anniversary of the Potemkin mutiny, and is probably the closest to a definitive version we will ever see.

Battleship Potemkin made Sergei Eisenstein world-famous, but his subsequent career was hampered by unremitting frustrations. His work in the Soviet Union was subject to increasing scrutiny from political bosses, and his independently funded project, Que Viva Mexico, collapsed amid time and budget overruns. He did manage to make Alexander Nevsky in 1938, and the first two installments of Ivan The Terrible, a projected epic trilogy of the life of Ivan IV, the king who first declared himself czar (emperor, literally "Caesar") and unified Russia in the 16th century, in 1945 and 1946. Teaching and writing provided solace for the director from the unending, frequently humiliating problems of filmmaking, but overwork and stress overtook Eisenstein and he passed away in 1948 at the age of 50.

Richard Kern, again

Folks who read my post about the films of R. Kern are directed to this page at the wonderful archive of avant-garde culture Ubu Web: two films by Kern, My Nightmare and Thrust In Me are available there for download, along with other material by Nick Zedd, Jon Moritsugu, Tessa Hughes-Freeland, and others, and also a manifesto of the "Cinema of Transgression" by Zedd. The films are in .avi (xvid) format and range from about 3mb to over 260 mb.

Richard Kern

In the eighties, when the feminist critique of sex and violence in the media was making headlines and gaining adherents on both the left and the right, "transgressive" and "confrontational" were the mantras for any artist working for "underground" cred, and New York City filmmaker Richard Kern made a reputation with no-budget Super-8 shorts full of violence, eroticism, gore, sleaze, and black comedy. In making these shorts Kern had the help of some very high-profile names on the cutting edge of the music and art community at the time: Lydia Lunch, Henry Rollins, David Wojnarowicz, Karen Finley, J. G. Thirlwell (probably better known as Foetus), the Butthole Surfers, Sonic Youth, Clint Ruin, and Nick Zedd were some of the people who appeared in or contributed music to Kern's films. Film Threat put out a collection of these films on a two volume VHS edition called Hardcore, and lately I picked up a double sided DVD from Third Wave Media called The Hardcore Collection: The Films of Richard Kern.

Kern's films are painted with a large brush and indulge just a little too enthusiastically in shock to be quite disturbing. Kern takes pleasure in flaunting taboos and engineering collisions of sexy and violent images, but does not, with the exceptions of The Right Side Of My Brain (1985) and Fingered (1986), which were both scripted by Lydia Lunch, go seriously into problems or issues, but stays mainly in a sort of neo-exploitation groove. The two Lunch collaborations explore her ambivalent attraction to -- and repulsion from -- male violence. The Right Side Of My Brain is narrated by Lunch while she appears in fantasy sequences with various ominous-looking men, before she in turn dominates another woman (and, yep, that tattooed guy there is indeed Henry Rollins). Fingered is a tale of Lunch and her psycho boyfriend on the road on a sort of punk-Starkweather rampage, sparked by the guy's jealousy and his penchant for spontaneous violence, with Lunch's character eventually becoming herself brutalized and brutalizing by the end of the film. These are also probably Kern's best films. The balance of Kern's work is rather spotty, with a collection of shorter films, Manhattan Love Suicides, showing some odd little stories, such as a grimacing man following a middle-aged artist home and who spontaneously loses an arm and busts open a jugular when he doesn't get attention, in "Stray Dogs." You Killed Me First, with David Wojnarowicz and Karen Finley as the uptight parents of a misunderstood, rebellious daughter played by Lung Leg, a frequent Kern player, is a hilarious black comedy. Other films, like Submit To Me (1986) and Submit To Me Now (1987), are sorts of post-punk stag film which string together a lot of sexual and violent images with little concern for structure or theme, or the filmmaker indulging his interest in various kinks, which have a sort of peep-show charm to them, if you enjoy that sort of thing. The Evil Cameraman (1986) and My Nightmare (1993) are digs at Kern himself as a pervy filmmaker who gets rebuffed by women who come to his shoots.

In essence, Kern's aesthetic in these films is little removed from that of the kid who takes the opportunity of getting his friends together to make as wild a film as he can while his parents are away, which makes his work look more energetic and surprisingly less nihilistic over time. In time and in general tenor of material, he has a lot in common with "transgressive" underground artists and musicians like Genesis P-Orridge and G. G. Allin, without the pompous baggage that often went along with their work. In recent years Kern has been working mostly as a photographer, continuing a fascination with eroticism and voyeurism but in a lighter vein than at the time he made these films, but his films have had some influence, mainly on the fringes on the culture where art, porn, and the underground meet, as on the popular website Suicide Girls and their punk-meets-pinup aesthetic, and in the films of Bruce LaBruce, an underground filmmaker based in Toronto, who paid homage to Kern in his Super 8 1/2 with a cameo by Kern and a parody called Submit To My Finger.

BRUSH WITH GREATNESS? Lung Leg was one of Kern's more frequently-appearing performers, both as model and in speaking roles, and her presence in these films is hard to forget. Fragile and gangly in appearance, she looked hurt and vulnerable, but also tough and, above all, full of rage. Her presence embodied the "punk" attitude in Kern's films probably even better than Lydia Lunch's appearances. Lung Leg also appeared on the cover of Sonic Youth's album Evol in a photo taken by Kern at the time when Kern and the band were collaborating. When I saw these films for the first time about five years ago, I discussed them with my friend Susan and she told me that Lung Leg actually lived here in Minneapolis for awhile, which made me remember when I worked for a Kinko's on Lake and Hennepin some years ago and had some encounters with a woman who occasionally came in to make copies. She was pale, mostly dressed in black, with dark hair, cat-eye glasses, and dark lipstick which always seemed to be smeared. As a customer I remember her as somewhat curt and antisocial. I also seem to remember her waiting for buses in the neighborhood. I never learned her name or met her socially, and it was only years later, after having seen these films and discussed them with Susan that I began to wonder whether this mystery woman might not have been Lung Leg. If so, what brought her to Minneapolis? Did underground film fans recognize her on the street? What did she think of the films she made with Kern? After a few encounters, I never saw her again, and I don't think these questions will ever be answered.

Quiet Days In Clichy

Quiet Days in Clichy appeared in 1970 and was stopped at the border when Grove Press, having done reasonably well with distributing another controversial film, I Am Curious (Yellow), attempted to import the film for distribution in the US. After a court battle and a brief distribution in the US, the film disappeared and only in recent years has been viewed again, and is now on this DVD put out by Blue Underground a couple of years ago.

By a coincidence, this film, made in the Place Clichy area described in the book, was being shot at the same time that another film adaptation of Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer starring Rip Torn, was being shot, also using authentic locations in a neighboring quarter. Both this film and IAC(Y) have tended to overshadow this film's reputation during its long absence, as has the court case surrounding the film, one of many battles that Grove Press's Barney Rosset fought against US censorship. Rosset was inspired to go into publishing by Henry Miller, and had fought in court to publish his books in the US, so it was appropriate for them to follow up IAC(Y) with something adapted from Miller.

Directed by Jens Jørgen Thorsen, a filmmaker, artist, and prankster associated with the Situationists and close to the radical art and intellectual life of Europe in the sixties, I liked the film for its spontaneous style and rough, underground feel, as well as Country Joe McDonald's soundtrack, but I wasn't bowled over by it. More artsploitation than art film, the story concerns an American writer named Joey (Paul Valjean) and his French buddy Carl (Wayne Rodda, who was originally Australian, as it turns out) as they live for the day, cadging meals and bedding chicks, mostly the latter. There is nothing too terribly experimental in the film apart from its frank depiction of sex which is somewhere in between the simulated writhings of sexploitation and the clinical closeups of the adult feature film of later in the decade. No politics intrudes or diatribes against the bourgeoisie or the military industrial complex, just Joey and Carl living life to the full, which apparently entails looking for "cunt" (one of Miller's favorite words) and a day trip to Luxembourg, shown mostly in stills.

Quiet Days in Clichy was probably appealing to those who wanted a movie with sex but found I Am Curious (Yellow) too boring and full of politics. It wears badly today mainly due to the sexism of its storyline and its dialogue. Miller was a long-winded writer, but blunt to the point of callousness on the subject of sex, not using any flowery circumlocutions or euphemisms, and he was very much a product of his lower middle-class, turn-of-the-century Brooklyn upbringing, as comes across right away in this film. Probably the crudest attitude comes from Rodda as Carl, who takes in a simple-minded teenage runaway and keeps her around to cook, clean and provide sex until her parents come to pick her up, and who says about one woman, "She's got a cunt like a suction pump." The persistently insensitive comments and general attitude about women was not, for me, a reason not to watch the film, but there were plenty of moments that made me cringe. You just don't hear that kind of talk anymore, or at least I don't, and there are definitely folks who don't want to hear it, and they are probably better off giving this movie a miss.