Cruising + The Cage 16

Cruising + The Cage

EN
The Cage

The Cage

(Ori)

Shūji Terayama

  • 1964
  • Japan
  • Metaphysical / Experimental
  • 11mn
  • Black and white
The pioneer of Japanese avant-garde invites us to a journey into the unknown, a bewitching woken dream that questions the human condition, caught in the chains of time. With his green tinted black and white, so specific to his cinema, Terayama takes us by the hand, and loses us in Chronos’s mazes. J.A. Seazer’s haunting musical score nourishes this existential awe: one of a life that seems condemned to repeat itself, as if the hands of the clock were eternally stuck on the same hour, though we nevertheless continue to age. In ten fascinatingly dense minutes, this metaphysical and poetic masterpiece captures the curse of existence with dizzying acuity.

Credits

  • With : Eiko Kujo, Mr. Nippon, Yoshihiro Tatsuki, Debuko Ôyama, Ishihara Yuko, Ken Takeuchi...
  • Screenplay : Shūji Terayama
  • Photography : Yoshihiro Tachiki
  • Music by : J.A. Seazer
  • Production : Akinori Konishi, Eiko Kûjô

Rebeka Warrior

I discovered Japanese experimental, post-punk and avant-garde cinema when I was a teenager thanks to a song by Bérurier Noir called “L'Empereur Tomato Ketchup”, which was also a film by Terayama. For L'Étrange Festival, I’ve chosen two short films by this director, The Cage and The Songs of Maldoror. The first one evokes the concept of time, which was my thesis subject at the Beaux-Arts and the second one, inspired by the eponymous poetic pre-surrealist novel by the Comte de Lautréamont, reflects my love for poetry.
Cruising

Cruising

William Friedkin

  • 1980
  • USA, Western germany
  • Psychological thriller
  • 1h42mn
  • Original version with French subtitles
  • Color
As a wave of murders aimed at the homosexual leather scene strikes New York, Steve Burns, a young police officer in charge of the case, accepts to go undercover in the Greenwich Village gay community…
Beyond the scandal and controversies, Cruising remains a terrifying and monumental masterpiece, a depiction of Hell on Earth, carried by a hallucinated and hallucinating Al Pacino. Friedkin wanders along the corridors of a homophobic America with this nocturnal philosophical nightmare that flirts with the fantastic. He pursues his explorations of the maze of human psyche and of our darker impulses, that he had initiated in Sorcerer, through the brilliant idea of a killer who adopts a new face with each murder, an allegory for a faceless ungraspable and eternal evil. Timeless and immersive.

Credits

  • With : Al Pacino, Paul Sorvino, Karen Allen, Richard Cox, Don Scardino...
  • Screenplay : William Friedkin, based on the novel by Gerald Walker
  • Photography : James A. Contner
  • Editing : Bud S. Smith
  • Music by : Jack Nitzsche
  • Production : Jerry Weintraub

Rebeka Warrior

Several years ago, with Marlène Saldana and Jonathan Drillet, we started a collaboration to readapt movies that impressed us for the theater. They handle the directing and I the music. After Paul Verhoeven’s Showgirls, we chose to work on Cruising, considered upon its release in 1980 as a sensationalist homophobic dud. In retrospect however, the film appears almost visionary with its description of a hellish world where the gay community is struck by an uncontrollable, incomprehensible evil that foreshadows the devastation of AIDS. Al Pacino disowned the project and the 40 “lost” minutes that Friedkin cut out of the film to avoid an X rating fueled its legend.

Screenings

11/09 • 17h00 • Screen 300

Presented by Rebeka Warrior