Via the
Maddogmovies blog: Encore's new documentary,
Midnight Movies: From the Margin to the Mainstream, directed by Stuart Samuels, is screening out of competition at the Festival de Cannes -- as a midnight movie.
"
Midnight Movies: From the Margin to the Mainstream ... focuses on movies that re-invented the film medium while pushing the boundaries of 'bad taste' and 'social taboos.' These filmmakers shared a common desire to upset the traditional aspects of making films -- taking filmmaking beyond the norm by making films for ritual viewing, not box office success."
"Exploitation movies were over [by the 1970s]," explains John Waters. "Sexploitation was over; porn was legal, and
Deep Throat became radical chic... I had to go further than something like
Deep Throat... [to make a film] that society [hadn't] made up a law for yet!"
"These films grew out of 'an America split down the middle' by the Vietnam War," Samuels is quoted as saying on the
JSOnline Web site earlier this year, when the doc screened at the Sundance Film Festival. "The reason they were on the margin at the time was because they offended everybody. To break taboos as an indication of political, social and individual worth was new with these films."
Of course, subversive cinema had been around long before the 1970; Amos Vogel's
Film as a Subversive Art (reprinted this year by
CT Editions and distributed by
DAP) traces transgressive tendencies in filmmaking to much earlier periods in the history of film. What was really pioneered in the 1970s -- and which Samuels' documentary, loosely based on Jim Hoberman and Jonathan Rosenbaum's book
Midnight Movies, illustrates in great detail -- was the practice of programming films like Alejandro Jodorowsky's
El Topo in arthouses for open runs at midnight -- which made the film an "event" and also allowed it to build a much larger audience through word of mouth.
"Midnight movies were pothead movies," says Waters. "They were a party for ironic insomniacs."
"Midnight movies loosened up everything else," he added, "and then everything changed... As soon as video came out, it was over. You [could have] your own midnight movie in your own home: you could smoke pot, you could have sex, you could do everything people did at midnight movies [in the privacy of your own home]."
"The 'original purpose of such films was to throw a finger in people's face -- to make them wake up or think about things,' says Samuels... Once they were absorbed by the mainstream... that intent had 'become neutralized.' All that remained of their roots was their ability to shock."
"I don't think I've changed," says Waters. "I think my humor is the same. I think the American public has changed."
Following the broadcast premiere of
Midnight Movies on August 5th, Encore will air a series of midnight movies that have achieved cult status, including
El Topo,
Night of the Living Dead,
Pink Flamingos,
The Harder They Come,
Eraserhead, and the most commercially successful of all midnight movies,
The Rocky Horror Picture Show.
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# posted by Steve Gallagher @ 4/22/2005 03:57:00 PM
Comments (1)
My review of Midnight Movies is now online at maddogmovies.com
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posted by Mike Boas @ 8/04/2005 2:49 AM
