Movies Til Dawn

Behold "The Losers", a 1962 one-hour episode that aired on the anthology show 'The Dick Powell Theater'. It stars Lee Marvin, Keenan Wynn and Rosemary Clooney and was directed and co-written (with Bruce Geller) by Sam Peckinpah. It was Peckinpah's first piece of work after completing his second feature, the highly regarded 'Ride The High Country'. Unfortunately, that now-revered western had been poorly released by MGM as the bottom-half of a double bill paired with a Frankie and Annette beach party movie. Peckinpah was forced to go back to television, where he had toiled for a decade prior to his feature career. TV was not the 'thing' that it's become since--it was a definite step down the food chain. Nonetheless, Peckinpah--never one to not take his work seriously--dove back in with relish and created the above-posted very funny, quite eccentric and ultimately moving one-hour 'featurette'. I recall seeing it years ago and then not be...

When I was a pre-teen, I was given a Super 8mm camera and editing machine for Christmas one year. I was already deeply into filmmaking and wasted no time in beginning my oeuvre--which turned out to be loose remakes of Three Stooges shorts starring friends of mine from school. The Columbia two-reeler format was my bedrock of film education (for some reason). But sometimes, in between films, I'd restlessly piece together some scraps of footage just for fun--no actors, no scripts! Just me and the editing machine. I'd shoot footage of 'I Love Lucy' off the TV. I'd shoot strange, arty shots of my cat Rusty. Once I shot a piano roll playing--the slits on the paper that represent the notes being played were quite mesmerizing. I'd also grab some outtakes from my latest Three Stooges remake and jumble it all together. It was weird and stupid fun. Like I said I was thirteen. What I didn't realize at the time was that I was actually participating in the movement kn...

When I was a young man going to Bard College I took a course in the history of avant-garde cinema, about which I knew nothing. Having come from a Hollywood family that thrived on classic movies, and having already become a certified movie-geek myself, I was curious to see what this other side of the cinematic universe had to offer. At first the films confused me. Maya Deren, Sidney Petersen and others of their ilk were making their strange little films in the 1940s. A little esoteric, a little boring but worth puzzling through. Then as the work progressed I grew steadily more annoyed--Stan Brakhage, the AG cinema's saint, threw me completely with his stuff--painting on film? Really? But it was Michael Snow's 'Back And Forth' (posted above) that finally unleashed the torrents of hatred and contempt that I felt for the whole Avant-Garde cinema movement. And I wasn't alone. I recall sitting in the unheated barn of a theater that we watched these films in (the 16...