Storyline
Featured review
Evocative and influential experimental short
Willard Maas directed the all-time classic GEOGRAPHY OF THE BODY, my personal favorite among the experimental films that I saw in the '60s when first exposed to avant-garde cinema. This later work was apparently disliked in its day, but holds up extremely well decades later.
Burdened by a heavy narration track, which styles it as a "film poem", I found concentrating on the visuals to be highly rewarding. The young hero's journey through urban landscapes has a definite homo-erotic overtone, complete with crotch shots, male dancer and a body builder on display. Recurring vertigo image of movement at the bottom of a "well" alley-way space between buildings is cryptic but highly suggestive.
There's endless symbolism here, including a princess bringing an urn, containing a dove, Marie Menken as the hero's mother, and even a strange trip aboard an el train. Hero eventually arrives at a cemetery, soon covered by a snowfall, and the statuary there raises plenty of religious imagery, as well as Biblical connotations, with an urn containing a snake this time. Downbeat ending is de rigeur.
The beautiful black & white vistas of vintage Manhattan are lovely to see, and I detected an influence upon subsequent experimentalists, even showing up in the hetero (subsituting Uta Erickson for the hero) porn opus of the Amero Bros., BACCHANALE.
Burdened by a heavy narration track, which styles it as a "film poem", I found concentrating on the visuals to be highly rewarding. The young hero's journey through urban landscapes has a definite homo-erotic overtone, complete with crotch shots, male dancer and a body builder on display. Recurring vertigo image of movement at the bottom of a "well" alley-way space between buildings is cryptic but highly suggestive.
There's endless symbolism here, including a princess bringing an urn, containing a dove, Marie Menken as the hero's mother, and even a strange trip aboard an el train. Hero eventually arrives at a cemetery, soon covered by a snowfall, and the statuary there raises plenty of religious imagery, as well as Biblical connotations, with an urn containing a snake this time. Downbeat ending is de rigeur.
The beautiful black & white vistas of vintage Manhattan are lovely to see, and I detected an influence upon subsequent experimentalists, even showing up in the hetero (subsituting Uta Erickson for the hero) porn opus of the Amero Bros., BACCHANALE.
helpful•00
- lor_
- Apr 19, 2011
Details
- Runtime26 minutes
- Color
- Aspect ratio
- 1.33 : 1
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