RON RICE CHUMLUM (1964)

Director: Ron Rice

Year: 1964

Time: 23 mins

Music: Angus MacLise with Tony Conrad

Eye of Sound: Somewhat reminiscent of Cohen's Thunderbolt Pagoda, but more refrained, compounded and elegant, Chumlum was shot during the making of of Jack Smith's Normal Love and features such "stars" from the Factory/NYC underground as Beverly Grant, Mario Montez, Tiny Tim and Smith himself. As in Thunderbolt Pagoda, actors are depicted in pseudo-oriental costumes, engaging in orgiastic feasts and general dolce fare niente hammock ethics, in what seems to be an endless opium sea-trip under the signs of sensual imagery and gender ambiguity. Chumlum's forte is, as you may have guessed from the pictures, the constant superimposition of images, veiling each actor and scene behind another and fragmenting the screen's integrity to a point in which background and foreground are often no longer discernible. Limbs and faces pile up in disruptive forms, creating collages we thought possible only in animation films. Dimensions accumulate layer upon layer, and even individual layers often comprise several levels of visual depth, actions being constantly hidden behind a translucent object of some sort. This intensive nesting of dimensions could well be like a sea-sickening trip, and part of the reason why it isn't may be found in MacLise's soundtrack. Unlike his contribution for The Thunderbolt Pagoda, where more was thought to be more and the final result sounded like a huge soup bowl where any ingredient could be added without altering the global flavor, MacLise's journey into exotic tunings and instruments is here very focused and restrained. Played with cembalo (and barely audible tablas) under the musical direction of Tony Conrad, MacLise's Chumlum is a solid take on minimalism in which micro-change makes dissonance and consonance lose their significance. Strange as it may sound, it is perhaps MacLise's pattern-repetitions that hold Chumlum together and render its dangerously vertiginous multi-layered movements a soothing experience.

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IRA COHEN THE INVASION OF THE THUNDERBOLT PAGODA (1968)

Director: Ira Cohen

Year: 1968

Time: 31 mins

Music

Angus MacLise

Sunburned Hand

Acid Mothers Temple

Eye of Sound: There is, at the beginning of this hippy-trippy cult film, a vague promise of a vague narrative line. But soon the acid starts kicking, and all hopes or fears of a plot of some sort disappear. The Thunderbolt Pagoda starts in a proto-ceremonial setting. Actors dressed in pseudo-Oriental clothes gather around a human corpse (Cohen himself) and perform a ritual burial in the muddy ground. Slow ritualistic movements lend the scene a dignified, if otherworldly, tone. Then the corpse rises from its grave, and the psycho-court rejoices in this mystical rebirth. The music changes and the setting and colors make it clear that such a rebirth is but an entry into an acid-drenched dimension. Actors from the Universal Mutant Repertory Co. (including Tony Conrad, MacLise, Ziska Baum and many others) are now living in a world of incensed perception, distorted mirrors and blurred colors. Except for opium smoking, action is no longer perceptible: the screen has been taken by distorted shamanic visions of elves, princesses, snake-men, nymphs and other creatures from the 60s fairy-tale psyche. Appropriately, MacLise's soundtrack is an acid soup in which ingredients morph into one another beyond recognition, and in which less is not more. Building a continuous racket of fast-beat tablas, minimalist sitar, distorted vocals, free-wheeling flutes, etc, it recalls the primordial, monotonous and saturated drive typical of everything MacLise ever recorded. While there are certainly more accomplished emic documents of the 60s lysergic culture, one could argue that the reason Thunderbolt Pagoda attained cult status was not so much its hypnotic, languid and somewhat mind-boggling visual and aural rhythms, but the ability to portray and reflect a collective druidical dreamscape that can be evoked or imitated but never truly restored.

Note: The file includes recent alternative soundtracks by Acid Mothers Temple and Sunburned Hand, as well as audio commentary by the director.

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