16 May Barbed Wire Dolls (1976)

Captured

I’ve been involved in a dangerous business, diving into the catacombs of film, digging around in trash pits and seeing grand things.

Part of this endeavour comes from my appreciation for the vitality of film today which in large part is anchored by Spanish and Spanish-speaking filmmakers. There’s an easy sliding of realities, a nonchalance about linear narrative, an arbitrariness of trust in the narrators, and a vaginal honesty about many of the urges that pull the world.

And in this story about liquid storytelling, I place Franco, similar to the way he places himself and his lovers in his stories. Some of his films seem like random events, while others seem almost too perfectly prototypes for what we’ll see later with heavier ideas.

The danger is in taking him too seriously, as if his tinkering with the machinery of imagination inferred that he really had some ideas worth absorbing. He doesn’t and is honest about it. He toys with magical perversions and sometimes they are simply stupid, automatic.

Nude women in prison. A Nazi lesbian warden. Noir conspiracies layered on top of one another. A tortured redhead (his wife). Thwarted escape. All these he’d exploit bitwise elsewhere and with more charm and competence. This. Well this is a waste. For some reason, he’s chosen to make Romay look haggard.

You know, he has about 190 movies now. They are so choppy, but have plots that overlap and many of the same players for decades. Elsewhere, I’ve predicted a big business in the future for desktop filmmakers. Imagine having 600 hours of Franco. Or just the 100 movies he made with Romay! You could create your own Franco adventure, starting perhaps with “Vampyros Lesbos.” (Oh shucks, I see my comment for that movie has been deleted because of some Jesus nut!)

Or maybe it would be a prison. (Check out the synthesised “Justine”)

Posted in 2006

Ted’s Evaluation — 1 of 3: You can find something better to do with this part of your life.

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