Iggy Pop - Beside You (1993)

"a taste of delicious freedom amidst yawning pitfall" - Jim Clark

Directed by Mark Romanek

Your Ghost (1994): Kristin Hersh

"Your Ghost" is the first track from Kristin Hersh's debut solo studio album Hips and Makers (1994) featuring  additional vocals from Michael Stipe of R.E.M. The music video for the song was directed by Katherine Dieckmann and is an homage to Maya Deren's groundbreaking 1943 experimental film Meshes of the Afternoon.

Kristin Hersh - "Your Ghost" (featuring Michael Stipe)

Laura | MySpace Video

Jarmusch's Dead Man (1995): Neil Young

"If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite."

An enthralling music video cum trailer for Jarmusch's Dead Man (1995):

The Black Cat (1934) Meets Spies (1928): the eyes have it

He Who Gets Slapped (1924): A fool is always laughing

"Life is but a walking shadow, a poor player, that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more; it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

The melodramatic story of a scientist who after being robbed of his discoveries and his wife by a bourgeois swindler becomes a circus clown, He Who Gets Slapped, directed in Hollywood for MGM by Swede Victor Sjöström starred Lon Chaney, Norma Shearer, and John Gilbert, and was based on a  Russian play Tot, kto poluchayet poshchechini by playwright Leonid Andreyev.

A wonderfully expressionistic work which uses the circus ring cum spinning globe as a deeply pessimistic metaphor for life, love, and death.  A deeply profound performance by Lon Chaney in the lead role as He, the clown whose act is built on his being slapped for laughs as he repeatedly falls and gets up for more. Before a tragic finale he wreaks a terrible revenge on his tormentors. The final scene sees his limp body at the front of a spinning earth ringed by clowns unceremoniously swung into the void...

The Goddess ("Shen nu" China 1934)

"We are but a moment's sunlight fading in the grass"
- The Youngbloods


A silent masterpiece from Wu Yonggang starring Ruan Lingyu.

A mother's anguish a revolutionary act.  The existential  heroine made flesh. A profound and mesmerising critique of greed and bourgeois hypocrisy, set against the tender counterpoint of the bond between mother and child.  The streets of Shanghai a glittering purgatory. The fallen woman walks the dark streets of oppression and shame. Trapped and struggling, loving and kind, a whore and an angel, she soars with wings of  joy for a brief instant above the sordid infamy of vanity, exploitation, and deprivation.

Isle of Flowers: God Doesn’t Exist (Ilha das Flores Brazil 1989)

“The industrialized capitalist world has become an outside world of impenetrable material connexions and relationships” - Ernst Fischer, The Necessity of Art (1959)

Isle of Flowers is a 15 minute documentary film by Brazilian film-maker Jorge Furtado. This short is a fast-talking polemic on money capitalism and the failure of the human imagination. The critique is a sardonic ‘educational’ treatise on the food chain, consumerism, injustice, and how free markets operate. A spoiled tomato discarded by a middle-class housewife is tracked from a tomato farm to the slop fed to pigs on the Ilha das Flores, where the garbage not good enough for pigs is given to the landless poor in strictly controlled 5-minute intervals. There is no dialog only a voice-over narration.

On this trip we segue onto related topics as the story progress, in a canny prefiguring of the world-wide-web, where clicking on one hyperlink leads to another. The pace is frenetic with many scenes made up of dynamic collages of printed media and vivid unsettling scenes offering a banal yet forceful commentary on the theme. The narration is deliberately redundant and almost indifferent, and this technique enforces the visual irony. There is an element of the surreal as we are confronted with graphic imagery in the segues as juxtapositions to the common-place narrative which follows the food chain as metaphor. A metaphor of social hierarchies and oppressive imperatives. The soundtrack includes snatches of music as an effective counterpoint, and is most powerful over the closing scenes when a plaintive electric rock guitar riff ratchets up the emotional intensity.

Furtado is not so much portraying deliberately malevolent actions but the insularity of the bourgeoisie, who are protected not only from the stink and disease of their rotting waste, but from the realities of existence at the edge of an unequal society where pigs as a commodity rank higher than the poor who must scavenge after the fat porkers. Eisenstein move over.