Guest
Sweet Movie (1974) is a masterpiece that dismantles our very psyche through humor, terror, and the raw bodily experience. This will be the first installment of monthly Film screening for 2017. In out current volatile state, The de-3levator series aims to showcase underground and radical cinema, with dinner included. Please join us JAN 1 2017 to kick off the New Year to 'rebirth culture with a positive ending.' Serene R ClrOffglss will give a introduce and contextualize the film and show additional clips from Otto Muhls performance art as well as a short clip from Makavejev's other film W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism (1971) *Stew and Refreshments provided with purchase of ticket Dušan Makavejev's Sweet Movie is full of REVOLUTION, SHOCK & EXCITEMENT; shot in France, West Germany and Canada, Sweet Movie is a powerful look into the underground cinema of Eastern Europe. It starts off with the wretched adventures of Miss Monde, a virgin who is sold off to a Texas billionaire... mortified she escapes in a suitcase and publicly elopes with a Spanish superstar in front of the the Eiffel Tower while a school of nuns walks by. Meanwhile, a ship with a giant papier-mâché head of Lenin floats down the canals of Amsterdam, a woman manning the bow picks up a soldier from the shore—she clearly warns, “If you fall in love with me, I will have to kill you.“ All havoc ensues when the transgressive performance artist Otto Mühl takes in Miss Monde to cure her of her 'humiliation.' Otto Mühl was center in developing 'Aktionen' the Viennese style of New York City Happenings. In Vienna, public regressive sex acts ensued: crawling around naked, screaming, orgying, defecating, urinating on one another, ETC. Otto Mühl and his obscene performative pyscho-therapy play a part in the entirety of the film's Brechtian quality—the desire to overwhelm the viewer and make them short-circuit some of the behavioral grids so embedded in the masses today. Sweet Movie brilliantly critiques the global industrial war machine intermingling Nazi footage (trigger warning) and concepts of violence, sex, and freedom; all under cauldrons upon cauldrons of chocolate sauce. A forward-thinking Yugoslavian film that is making fun of communism, religious worship and the outrageous and constant commodification and objectification of women.
