Push another item onto the ever-growing, never-overflowing media stack: Ira Cohen’s Invasion of the Thunderbolt Pagoda (more about it here and a trailer here. A more intense and arguably freakier preview over at The Wire.)
This hyperinsane-looking film was recently released for the first time on DVD by Saturnalia, an offshot of Arthur Magazine. And as that trailer to some extent reveals, Cohen often employed sheets of Mylar to distort/fragment/recombine the images he shot. The result, from what I can see on these here previews, is really honestly pretty psychedelic… in that sort of creepy grotesque Max Ernst way, or maybe like the cover of Pink Floyd’s A Saucerful of Secrets.
One question: who is the Universal Mutant Repertory Co.? Aha: “The Universal Mutant Repertory Company are most known as a group that included drummer Angus MacLise, multimedia avant-gardist who was the original drummer of the Velvet Underground.”
More on this if I can get my hands on this disc!
(found over at the great blog dataisnature)