All Hail the Great Gorilla's Emerald Trauma!

And outside, Phantasia reflected on the burden imposed by a double-tongued Psycho, yet it was rather easy to bring all of her children together. Besides, there was no way she would allow herself to leave the Spaceless Room behind the Peerless Portal.

“Stand where I can see you!”, yelled the Queen of Clubs masquerading as a harpy with Electra complex. She just wanted to emphasize the importance of vintage TV sets for the future of Hollowheads. 

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Would You Care for a Glass of Lemonade?

In the meantime, on the other side of the diner, a young gentleman proposed a surreal deal to a ginger-haired lady. Every single one heard what he said, but pretended to be deaf or suffering from a cosmic headache.

“Would you care for a glass of lemonade?”, the inner voice asked, summoning a spell for unification of Hydra’s body parts. A perfect circle was formed instead.

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Blueberry Pied Piper of Orange Sauce

When Rat ordered a blueberry pie, he didn’t know that it had been poisoned by the Evil Chef. Piece by piece, he devoured his last dream and entered the state of eternal remedy. “Nice job!”, he thought to himself, breaking the third rule of triangular reflection...

It was five minutes to midnight in the Land of Happy Baboons, so nobody was sleeping.

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Theory PAL / NTSC (Rouzbeh Rashidi, 2008)

☼☼☼☼☼☼☼☼ out of 10☼

Last night, I went to bed earlier than usual, slept for two hours or so, and woke up to a 'light nightmare' about wandering around an unknown city, so I ended up watching a pair of Rouzbeh Rashidi's medium-length films which appeared as the continuation of the said 'nightmare'. Shot in Tehran during the period 2000-2002 and edited in 2008, Theory PAL and Theory NTSC could be labeled as 'the cinematic Siamese twins', considering that they work best when watched as a double bill.

Their deliberately disjointed narratives seem to be about a lonely man (Ehsan Safarpour) haunted by a specter of cinema (eventually embodied by Pooria Nick Dell in Theory NTSC) that throws him off balance and turns his daily routines into a surreal series of puzzling sensations, events and conditions. The (confounded?) protagonist is simultaneously the film itself, the director's alter ego (silently conversing with himself, the film, the potential audience and his predecessors' heritage), as well as the reflection of the viewer's elusive, scrambled thoughts oscillating between enchantment and bewilderment.

He knows that he is at home, yet he feels that something is off, which is further emphasized by some sort of meta-filmic, Twilight Zone-esque intrusions. As his reality dissolves into a dreamlike state, the mundane becomes supermundane, with the mystery thickening and irrationality growing into a self-sufficient entity that inspires you to create and look for the alternative ways of re-experiencing the films. For that reason, the rest of this review will be consisted of grainy mobile photographs recently taken by myself and mostly influenced by Rashidi's works, even though these pictures may not speak a thousand words...

 A-Void-Ing

 Between Two Worlds

 Ghost

 In the Eye

Sudden Infinity

Invocation of Pleasure During the Rabbit's Sun Rising

With both title and imagery alluding to Rabbit's Moon, Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome, Scorpio Rising, Invocation of My Demon Brother, as well as Lucifer Rising, it's pretty easy to deduce this collage pays homage to Kenneth Anger's esoteric (and if you're into cult cinema, highly recommended) works of Magick Lantern Cycle.

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'The Birth of Imperial Rebis' Diptych

Above the fields of golden wheat, she floats.

Wrapped in the bubble of tears, her dreams dance

to the sounds of silence.

Below the rocks of memories, he notes

a piece of eternity, pierced by a broken lance.

Damned are the sirens!

In Her Own Image: The Empress of Whispers

In His Own Image: The Tzar of Hullabaloo

Unrest (Philippe Grandrieux, 2017)

☼☼☼☼☼☼☼☼ out of 10☼
 

An impenetrable meditation on 'la petite mort', Unrest gags and bounds its viewer with simultaneously erotic, ethereal, primordial, disquieting, mysterious and brooding imagery that gets progressively darker with each act, from hypnotizing superimpositions of treetops and a young woman's masturbation to spiritual intercourse with the void to eventual merging with ultimate darkness.

Unapologetically unconventional, this sexually charged enigma resting on 'murk is more' principle may have no and the vast myriad of possible answers simmering beneath the obfuscated surface. In equal measures, it appalls and delights, tires and titillates, demanding from you a heavy dosage of patience, superhuman concentration and complete surrender to its radical, word-defying, sublimely perverse starkness.

So, here's a humble homage to its inspiring elusiveness...

Un cauchemar blanc (© Nikola Gocić)