Forbidden Adventure/Forbidden Women (Something Weird). During the 1930s, cinematic transgression came to town in barnstorming blitzes, when abominable showmen like the infamous Dwain Esper would hoist a jury-rigged exploitation reel into a local grindhouse and hawk it as education, social exposé, or just “fact!” This double bill tells that tale: the first film, originally titled Angkor (1937), is a cobble-job primarily made up of Harvard expedition footage from Cambodia, shot in the teens, and “new” footage filmed in LA’s Topanga Canyon with a flea-bitten ape suit and a dozen topless African-American working girls recruited from a Selma Avenue whorehouse. Mix in stock shots, superimposed “shadows” to semi-obscure the nudity, and an explorers’-club narration, and it’s the movie Craig Baldwin and Guy Maddin could’ve made in a joint dream.
The secret history continues with Forbidden Women (1948), a Filipino nudie drama of tribal intrigue with skin added later by American distributors, as well as alternate versions, burlesque interludes, road-show ad art, trailers, etc.
The Wild Blue Yonder (Subversive Cinema). One of Werner Herzog’s strangest films and his only outright piece of sci-fi, this mock-doc chronicles a poisoned interstellar future where aliens (here, Brad Dourif, regaling us) are failed earth colonizers, and earthlings voyage into space to find alternative living quarters. What brought this about was Herzog’s eyes having fallen on the unreleased footage of the 1989 NASA shuttle mission STS-34, coupled with underwater Antarctic images standing in for the ruined alien planet, barren with a liquid atmosphere and a sky of ice. Disorienting poetry, as usual.
The Double Life of Véronique (Criterion). Arguably Krzysztof Kieslowski’s masterpiece, this 1991 epiphany — pivoting on the mysterious nexus between two girls, French and Polish, who possess in essence the same, parallel identity, and are both played by the bewitching Irène Jacob — is a rare, life-changing film experience. Whoever gets it as a present will be grateful. The generous additionals include three old Kieslowski shorts, two extensive documentaries, three new interviews, a booklet with essays (Slavoj Zizek!), and Harvey Weinstein’s alternate ending.
Animated Soviet Propaganda (Films by Jove). Are Soviet cartoons best swallowed as kitsch, as totalitarian creep-outs, as pure formal thrust, or as some bobble-headed conglomeration of all three? In this round-up of frame-by-frame short films, the imagery teeters from Politburo-inscribed slam-bang PSAs of the silent era to longer Cold War parables fashioned by obsessive artisans with more than dogma on their feverish minds. Today, these ideological screeds fire off like dystopic Popeye ’toons. What’s most shocking is when their critiques hit the bull’s-eye — lambasting Nazi monsters, exploitative wealth, and American racism. Hard to dismiss, for example, is the hellacious “Ave Maria” (1972), which features a Last Supper of Vietnamese peasants being obliterated by bombs and which also dares to sympathize with the families of dead American soldiers. Whew.
Forbidden Hollywood Collection Vol. 1 (Warner). Before the MPAA, there was the Code — an official film-industry system of self-monitoring that forbade virtually any inference to sex or iniquity. But that began in earnest in 1934. Before that, Hollywood movies routinely cha-cha’ed with bra-less suggestions of whoredom, rec sex, infidelity, and unpunished vice. This troika of racy early-talkies — Waterloo Bridge (1931), Red-Headed Woman (1932), and Baby Face (1933) — constitutes an assault of double entendre and sexual combat. When it comes to man-eating heroines Barbara Stanwyck and Jean Harlow, you have a frank vision of female sexual appetite that American films couldn’t come near until the ’60s. (These films get an official TV-PG rating today.) It’s all a healthy reminder than your grandparents fucked, too, and liked it.
