ICE-Vision: The American Soldier (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1970)
Thursday, September 8 at 8 PM
Lamar Dodd School of Art Room S150

Film Studies major Will Stephenson continues ICE’s informal weekly series, selecting a variety of world cinema classics and subcultural curiosities.

“Fassbinder’s American soldier is actually a German, who comes home to roost as a hired killer in the Munich underworld. The miasma into which he sinks involves an aging rent-boy whose time is up, a roving porn-shark-cum-supergrass called Magdalena Fuller, a mother with a pinball machine in her living-room, and a two-timing moll called Rosa von Praunheim. There is no attempt at plausibility, just a relentless insistence on mood (manic depressive) and behaviour patterns (ex-film noir). The gangsters in Fassbinder’s earlier movies were sad, pale shadows of their American prototypes; by this time, they’ve become full-fledged Neuroses. In other words, this film marks a decisive step towards ‘real’ Fassbinder: the absurdity of its world of second-hand experience invests every cliche with a meaning it never had before.” -Time Out

“Director Rainer Werner Fassbinder described this 1970 film as “what’s left in the minds of the German people who see a lot of American gangster films.” What’s left, apparently, is some of the seediest mise-en-scene I’ve ever encountered – flat, grainy, spatially incomprehensible, and way too dark. And naturally, it’s fascinating. This is Fassbinder before he froze up as a Douglas Sirk impersonator: a real punk movie, full of wonderfully half-baked ideas. In German with subtitles. 80 min.” -Chicago Reader

ICE-Vision: Sweet Smell of Success (Alexander Mackendrick, 1957)
Thursday, September 1 at 8 PM
Lamar Dodd School of Art Room S150

Film Studies major Will Stephenson continues ICE’s informal weekly series, selecting a variety of world cinema classics and subcultural curiosities.

“A fizzingly clever big-city satire and deeply strange late noir classic from 1957, directed by one time Ealing comedy maestro Alexander Mackendrick with a superb script by Clifford Odets. Burt Lancaster is the creepy star columnist JJ Hunsecker, peddling celeb gossip and reactionary opinions, and convulsed with ambiguous protective concern for his sister; Tony Curtis gives the performance of a lifetime as Sidney Falco, the cringing, self-loathing press agent. Like vampires, Hunsecker and Falco only operate at night: in the clubs and bars around Broadway and Times Square, seeding the public prints with rumour, innuendo and paranoia. The all-knowing, all-hating Hunsecker is a hideous amalgam of Walter Winchell and J Edgar Hoover. Unmissable.” -The Guardian

ICE-Vision: Sins of the Fleshapoids (Mike Kuchar, 1965)
Thursday, August 25 at 8 PM
Lamar Dodd School of Art Room S150

“Mike Kuchar’s first 16mm film, the sci-fi extravaganza Sins of the Fleshapoids, is set far in the future, when highly evolved robots take care of the daily chores while their masters lead lives of pleasure. But when two robots fall in love, it’s not just their circuits that go haywire. Starring George Kuchar as an evil prince and Bob Cowan as a love-seeking robot, Sins helped launch American underground cinema. Mike’s obsession with Hollywood artifice is lavishly on display in his vividly colorful costumes and sets. Mike calls it ‘my most dearest dedication to commercial American movies – or, to put it another way, it is a joke that cost me a thousand dollars.’ It is also one of John Waters’s favorite films: ‘Sins of the Fleshapoids really shows what an underground movie was . . . [George and Mike] were the first to do vulgarity in an almost opera style.'” -Pacific Film Archive

“No art form demands as much spontaneous, imaginative improvisation as low-budget filmmaking, and no American low-budget filmmakers are as imaginative as George Kuchar and his twin brother Mike. Major figures in the American Underground film movement of the sixties, they are the acknowledged pioneers of the camp/pop aesthetic that would influence practically all who came after them, from Warhol and Waters to Vadim and Lynch.” -Bright Lights Film Journal