The Third Daughter of the High Priestess

I am the white crow with the red beak,
and a black sheep that is always asleep.

Listen to the dream I eat and you may meet
my most precious malady, ‘cause in this heat
nothing is what it seems,
and nobody bleeds.

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Salomé (Téo Hernandez, 1976)

☼☼☼☼☼☼☼☼(☼) out of 10☼

If the films could touch their audience, the long, slender fingers of Téo Hernandez's Salomé would probably feel like tulle, satin or silk covered with strass, or maybe like tepid sea water mixed with fine sand...

For the viewer enamored with arthouse, experimental, experiential and extremely lyrical cinema, it takes less than five minutes to get wholly immersed in this ethereal, boldly unconventional phantasmagoria which eschews historical/biblical narrative in favor of the sensual visuals and chic baroque atmosphere. Although it does feature the Dance of the Seven Veils, it refuses to tell the (familiar) story and instead opts for satiating our appetite for aesthetic pleasure. 'Ars gratia artis' it may be, yet it hardly ever fails to impress, holding you in its gentle embrace.

Its pure, unadulterated magic relies on soft light, warm colors, strong chiaroscuro, deliberate pacing and slow-motion 'action' which turns the archetypal characters into partakers of a strange ritual of unfathomable purpose. As Eros and Thanatos dance like they are making love, the ripe darkness that surrounds them engulfs their hypnotized worshippers and drives them into sublime ecstasy. However, it is not only them who are under hypnosis, but us as well, with our gazes transfixed to the screen and ourselves lost in contemplative reveries.

Told or rather shown via abstractly evocative and thematically related vignettes (which blur the boundary between high camp and high art), Salomé seduces us with its dreamy, lavish, mystifying beauty reflected in the ostensibly incongruous symbiosis of intoxicating, 'Kenneth Anger by way of Werner Schroeter' visuals and glamorous soundtrack fuelled by assorted vintage ballads and entwined voices of nature, with enticing solos by crushing waves...

St. Nicholas the Four-Eyed Killing the Minotaur

I’ve seen the blackest of their noises and dreamed of dancing the tango of death with their obfuscated emanations. I’ve stretched my weak arms as far as I could, only to touch the Emptiness and feel her soft, throbbing skin under my scrawny fingers. I’ve opened my tired eyes before the Dark Light and begged him to take me away and chain me to Eternity, with Time voraciously devouring my withered memories. Now, I float alone in this vast Unknown, surrounded by the pieces of broken mirrors, but failing to recognize myself...

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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