February 15th, 2015
5pm
@ Alamo Drafthouse at the Ritz
320 East 6th Street, Austin, TX 78701 (map)
$8.25 (BUY TICKETS)
Celebrating our third anniversary, Experimental Response Cinema is pleased to offer its third installment of Avant Erotica, a post-Valentines Day double-shot hangover remedy of sexual disorientation. Leading off is avant garde artist Peggy Ahwesh’s notoriously provocative The Deadman (1990, 16mm, 39 mins.), made with Keith Sanborn and based on the transgressive novel by George Bataille, charting “the adventures of a near-naked heroine who sets in motion a scabrous free-from orgy before returning to the house to die — a combination of elegance, raunchy defilement and barbaric splendor.” (Jonathan Rosenbaum)
Completing the program is the 1975 feature Let Me Die A Woman (1977, 35mm, 79 mins.) — part documentary, part exploitation film — profiling the work of “sex reassignment” surgeon Dr. Leo Wollman and his various transexual patients, directed with equal parts sensitivity and titillation by low budget sexploitation queen Doris Wishman, who is arguably the most prolific female filmmaker of the post-silent movie era. Programmed by Scott Stark. Special thanks to Peggy Ahwesh, the Alamo Drafthouse at the Ritz, and the American Genre Film Archive!
PLEASE BE ADVISED: This screening contains explicit sexual content and graphic depictions of violence and human degradation.
The Deadman by Peggy Ahwesh
40 min / 16mm / sound / 1989
Made with Keith Sanborn. Featuring performances by Jennifer Montgomery, Roman Quanta la Gusta, Scott Shat, Diane Torr and Leslie Singer.
Based on Le Mort by Georges Bataille, the story of Marie and her last night of extremes.
“The film grew out of Ahwesh and Sanborn’s interest in the work of Georges Bataille and in particular Bataille’s text Le Mort which Sanborn translated and on which the film is loosely based. Bataille’s investigations of the morbid and the transgressive found sympathy with Ahwesh’s Romero-inflected interest in the horror film. Shot in black and white 16 mm, The Deadman actually begins as a sort of horror film: its opening images are of a white frame house, shot from below, the time either dusk or dawn. On the soundtrack someone gasps in (what sounds like) agony. Next we hear the sound of breaking glass and the beating of bird wings, as the image cuts, first to a close up of chandelier, creaking as it sways from the ceiling, next to a shot of a man lying naked on rumpled bed sheets, his penis flaccid in the cradle of his thighs. Scoring the last image is the sound of a buzzing fly – a metonymic soundtrack of death and decay. The next shot is from the outside of the house again, as a woman, naked but for a thin plastic raincoat, leaves the house running. The naked man is the film’s ‘Dead Man’, the woman, Marie. Ahwesh’s camera then follows her as she fucks, pisses, shits and vomits her way through the rest of the film.” – John David Rhodes, Senses of Cinema
Let Me Die a Woman by Doris Wishman
78 min / 35mm / sound / 1978
From Doris “Queen of Exploitation” Wishman comes LET ME DIE A WOMAN, one of the most jaw-dropping and unclassifiable films ever to ooze forth from the Seventies grindhouse. A stunning sleaze-umentary on the medical condition known as gender dysphoria, this doco-style sleaze-fest includes unabridged interviews with post-ops, bull dykes and drag queens, probing anatomical examinations, and real medical stock footage from an actual sex change operation! It’s enough to make you want to put on an iron jock strap!
See a man turn into a woman right before your eyes! Watch as ambiguously gendered he-shes perform unspeakable sex acts (or at least pretend to)! Probe the secret mysteries of the esoteric transsexual cult! Do you dare to watch? If so, look for cameos by porn icons Harry Reems and Vanessa Del Rio, too! (via Synapse Films)