W I D E R SCREENINGS TM presents...
WORLD EROTICA INDEX
ANGEL MINE (1978)
New Zealand Film Commission / ILA Productions DVD (region 0 NTSC)
d. David Blyth; pr. David Blyth, Warren Sellers; scr. David Blyth; ph. John Earnshaw; ed. Philip Howe; m. Mark Nicholas (played by Aukland Youth Orchestra), Peter Kerin and the Suburban Reptiles; cast. Derek Ward, Jennifer Redmond, Myra deGroot, Mark Wilson (68 mins)
________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Avant-Garde Transgressive, Surreal Porn marks first New Zealand Adult Film
New Zealand’s Film Commission sponsored director David Blyth’s 1978 Angel Mine, an avant-garde hour-long feature that Blyth made concurrent to his work in the horror genre on such as the cult classic Death Warmed Up but slightly reminiscent of the works of Luis Bunuel.
Blyth admits being influenced by Un Chien Andalou, adding “I like to pull rabbits out of hats and surprise people.” Surrealistic and delighting in visual textures, Angel Mine emerges as a Freudian allegory of human inter-personal (and sexual) need. A sailor emerges from the sea and swims to the beach where he approaches a naked woman sitting on a toilet. He gives her a white pill from a bottle he carries – subsequently offering a pill to the audience as the credits roll – and then proceeds to clothe the drugged, passive woman. The pill is Angel Mine, a new pharmaceutical product designed to help troubled marriages and as the voice-over intones its product placement, the appropriation of surrealism into advertising emerges as Blyth’s introduction to the nature of socialized construct.
The beautification and subordination of women into matrimonial, family-first tradition essentially renders them mute objects for male consumption.
Match-cutting segues from the advertising ideal of relationship bliss (the passive woman and active man) to the reality of domestic life in New Zealand – the reality of the flushed toilet: the real woman effectively dishing the preceding “construct” as shit. In the domestic scene, the woman is clothed and the man emerges naked from the shower, the complete inversion of the opening scene: reality is the opposite of advertising fantasy, and there is no quick pill cure-all to the sexual repression inherent in that reality. The couple bicker about banalities, the woman resenting having to “tart” herself up for a meeting with the man’s boss and the man resentful that she has to change her torn stockings, making them late. The unrelenting triviality of the inter-personal relationship socialized to a commercial quick-fix mentality is thus shown by Blyth as the epitome of banality, a prettified and sexless façade devoid of genuine communication.
______________________________________
Sexual Expression, Anarchy & Patriarchy
For Blyth, sexuality is the first and primary inspiration to human existence and it is the denial of, in particular, women’s sexual need through bourgeois pretence and answerability to Patriarchal morality (founded on religious principle) that inhibits them.
Yet, ironically, when a woman on a radio call-in talk show talks of her relationship, the host becomes embarrassed when she begins to describe her multiple-orgasms after she took a pill. Sexual expression – in contrast to the staid bourgeois existence Blythe establishes in long takes of domestic normalcy – is epitomized in the form of a gun-wielding couple who pick a house at random and plan to murder the couple therein, for no other reason than sexual pleasure: the film becoming a psycho-dramatic allegory of what might be described as an “anarchic fatalism”. Blythe contrasts domestic bliss of socialized bourgeois manufacture with the morally ambiguous nature of anarchy, a dynamic repressed in social rituals of ordinariness (shopping) and expressed in an increasingly sadistic sexuality that is conveyed herein through the intrusion of horror film iconography and editing techniques onto the surrounding stagnant melodrama.
To illustrate this dialectic, Blyth compares and contrasts two couple – one socialized and one anarchic (their defiance of convention symbolized in their sadistic folies a deux sexuality, reminiscent of such killer couples as that depicted in Leonard Castle’s The Honeymoon Killers) but both played by the same actors in different makeup and costume for a unique doppelganger effect.
1. fixing the image of self
2. longing in sexual contemplation
The sudden intrusion of anarchic passion onto socialized, normalized stagnancy is the appeal of the horror genre to Blyth and he utilizes the construction here in sly parallel to the type of experiments that in the USA were being done with Wes Craven when he re-worked Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring as Last House on the Left (banned for decades in Australia and around the world). Dualism interests Blyth: not of a simplistic Christian good and evil but of a Freudian Eros and Thanatos. Blyth parallels the domesticated woman’s prettified face with the punk makeup of the intrusive killer couple, Blyth seeing in punk a similar combination of anarchy and glamour to that which would later obsess Russian émigré Slava Tsukerman when he came to New York City to film the cult heroin-chic sci-fi of Liquid Sky.
______________________________________
Pornography as Cultural-Social Catalyst
Pornography is a cultural-social catalyst to Blyth – the simultaneous expression and recorded construct of human sexuality.
Both couples watch an adult movie in a theatre but although the punk couple are turned on, the chaste married couple are self-conscious and fearful of the audience who respond to porn, depicted explicitly on screen in a static shot of two people having sex. Of this inclusion of explicit porn, Blyth said the film “represents the coming of age, if you like, of the young couple but also of New Zealand cinema erotica.” Blyth’s point here is that human sexuality is the motivating force behind social anarchy as celebrated in faddish social defiance, epitomized in the late 1970s by the punk movement (the killer couple being recorded for television in a sexual dance). The recognition of this is essentially what makes pornography a radical discourse inherently threatening to the mass-produced construct of socialized marital bliss that Blyth deconstructs from the outset in Angel Mine. But while these are solemn discourses, Blyth maintains a detached irony: the killer couple embrace to the porn film accompaniment whilst the idealized marital couple depart the theatre to use the toilet – another sly equation between the socialized constructs of inter-personal bonding and human waste matter. While the killer couple enact their fantasies, the socialized woman retreats into fantasies as her only means of an emotional, passionate existence. Of such, Blyth said:
“I am very interested in the viewer-media transaction. All that enables us to survive in the cities are our fantasies, our dreams, our daydreams. What's worrying me though, is that these escape-routes have been closed off through the media, particularly television.” (Art New Zealand)
1. Maritally Discontented Couple - appearance is all
2. Punk: The Transgressive fusion of Eros and Thanatos
In this, Blyth is also heavily critical of religious morality, comparing New Zealand’s abortion policy to a moral view which seeks to discourage and regulate women’s sexuality in deference to male standards of human conduct, modelled on the myth of the crucified, sexless Jesus and embraced primarily by nuns (women who have renounced sex to serve a masculine construct of holiness – the crucified Jesus the nun carries with her, a cure-all the equivalent of the Angel Mine pill which introduces the film). Such is the choice facing the socialized woman – between the nun and the anarchic punk girl. Hence as the socialized woman retreats into fantasies of dominance as the means of her sexual liberation (whipping her husband and leaving him to be sodomized by a stranger) she increasingly seeks to impose her moral reaction against her husband’s strict sense of propriety by initiating sex, only to be rejected by him as he ironically watches the immoral porn film.. Ironically, it is her desire for sexual satisfaction – and his indifference – which underpins her surrender to fantasy, the sexual anarchy of which summons not simply Eros but its concurrent component in anarchy, Thanatos in this film’s Freudian surrealism – hence the sexual fantasy segues into the appearance of death, again sanitized by a commercial (this time for beer, another stimulant). The segue from sex to death (inherent after all in the oft-used term for orgasm, “the little death”) represents the anarchic embrace of human individuality away from socialized religious inter-personal construct.
______________________________________
Sexual Fantasy, Sexual Socialization & Sexual Self-Expression
To embrace sexual anarchy is to recognize the hypocrisy of socialized inter-personal construct (a religious imposition that considers women to be prettified, sexless angels not allowed control of their own body re: abortion) and, in confrontation with death – symbolic of course of human mortality (there being no heaven to go to) – is the subversive celebration of a human nature based on Freudian thesis of Eros and Thanatos, again a dualism that director Blyth sees inherent not simply in the horror movie but in the incorporation of sexually explicit material within a melodramatic reference to the horror film.
The socialized individual has no recourse but fantasy, the sublimation of their individual desire expressed in the iconography of pornographic sexually explicit fantasy – sex may be liberation (as was the catch-cry of the free love generation spawning this film) but the liberation of Eros brings with it its Yin-Yang partner – Thanatos – and its expression in the sadistic impulses of human nature underlying the horror-movie psycho-drama as Blyth sees it and epitomized in the punk couple’s kill and fuck agenda.
But while Blyth is contemptuous of socialized societal norms and enamoured of the ability of the horror movie (and its genesis in surrealism) to subvert and destroy them so too he sees the alternative – anarchy – as essentially an animalistic self-gratification: the pleasure principle is Blyth’s obsession here, the impulse within human sexuality towards self-destructive self-expression.
Thus, while the commercial constructs surrounding human inter-personal relationships are illusory, Blyth stages the anarchic reality as a base, gluttonous physicality which is almost as repugnant as it is subversive. Indeed, the attraction-repulsion complex in Blyth’s visualization of excess and indulgence here renders the film a potent evaluation of human complexity, socialized to prettify human baseness in abstract construct epitomized best in advertising as a genre impacting people’s expectations of worth, value and socialized ideology. Thus, the socialized couple watch pornography whilst the killer couple are inspired by it to embrace their inevitably darkest human drives – the impulse towards death, murder and torture that underpins horror as a genre and which Blyth skilfully deconstructs in Freudian terms. Finally thus, anarchic passion destroys socialized moral pretence (or, hypocrisy as Blyth depicts it) in the liberation of the id – the twin impulses of Eros & Thanatos – from the socialized control enacted by the superego: anarchy is left cruising the New Zealand streets by night.
______________________________________
DVD Collectible Treats
Also included on the DVD is Blyth’s first short film Circadian Rhythms, far more evocative of Bunuel’s influence in its non-linear surrealistic construction and with an industrial sound that anticipates the work of David Lynch. Fragmented and bizarre, Circadian Rhythms is indebted to the surrealistic juxtaposition / inter-relationship between experience, memory and fantasy and in its editing blurs what might be construed as an objective reality in any sense except the psychodramatic subjectivity of the protagonist in a series of titled vignettes. It was also Blyth’s first encounter with nudity and sexuality, with an extraordinary scene of nude dancers symbolically copulating in a circle around the clothed protagonist. The rhythms and iconography of interacting nude forms has a decadent, abstract beauty in Blyth’s work, an awareness of human sexuality that here passes through the mix of Eros and Thanatos that Blyth was to examine with more coherence in the subsequent Angel Mine and an awareness of homosexual vanity in staring at mirrored reflections of oneself, as the protagonist does, touching himself before the a full-length mirror and detaching his penis as if a breakaway piece of clay.
______________________________________
DVD PURCHASE INFORMATION: Filmmaker David Blyth
RELATED DAVID BLYTH TRANSGRESSIVE CINEMA VIEWING
