Romero. Night. 50.

Joe Nolan — Tue, 05 Sep 2017 03:59:54 +0000

When we lost George Romero back in July it only helped to underline this year’s 50th anniversary celebration for the writer/director’s masterpiece, Night of the Living Dead. It’s still two months until Halloween, but I keep feeling like I want to jump-start the creepy cinema season. I’ll be seeing the IT preview this week so maybe I’ll just go with the fright flow and share this dead-eyed diamond. The movie’s Wiki page includes a hilarious “Controversy” section that includes some amazing quotes from Roger Ebert…

Night of the Living Dead premiered on October 1, 1968 at the Fulton Theater in Pittsburgh.[47] Nationally, it was shown as a Saturday afternoon matinée – as was typical for horror films at the time – and attracted an audience consisting of pre-teens and adolescents.[48][49] The MPAA film rating system was not in place until November 1968, so even young children were able to purchase tickets. Roger Ebert of Chicago Sun-Times chided theater owners and parents who allowed children access to the film with such potent content for a horror film they were entirely unprepared for: “I don’t think the younger kids really knew what hit them,” he said. “They were used to going to movies, sure, and they’d seen some horror movies before, sure, but this was something else.” According to Ebert, the film affected the audience immediately:[49]

The kids in the audience were stunned. There was almost complete silence. The movie had stopped being delightfully scary about halfway through, and had become unexpectedly terrifying. There was a little girl across the aisle from me, maybe nine years old, who was sitting very still in her seat and crying… It’s hard to remember what sort of effect this movie might have had on you when you were six or seven. But try to remember. At that age, kids take the events on the screen seriously, and they identify fiercely with the hero. When the hero is killed, that’s not an unhappy ending but a tragic one: Nobody got out alive. It’s just over, that’s all.

Response from Variety after the initial release reflects the outrage generated by Romero’s film: “Until the Supreme Court establishes clear-cut guidelines for the pornography of violence, Night of the Living Dead will serve nicely as an outer-limit definition by example. In [a] mere 90 minutes this horror film (pun intended) casts serious aspersions on the integrity and social responsibility of its Pittsburgh-based makers, distributor Walter Reade, the film industry as a whole and [exhibitors] who book [the picture], as well as raising doubts about the future of the regional cinema movement and about the moral health of film goers who cheerfully opt for this unrelieved orgy of sadism…50″[]

One commentator asserts that the film garnered little attention from critics, “except to provoke argument about censoring its grisly scenes

Night of the Living Dead famously became a public domain film when a copyright stamp was left off the film’s prints. You can find it anywhere you look online. Here’s the movie at my YouTube channel. Watch the movie below, and connect at the links at the bottom of the post.

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Mapplethorpe Still Matters

Joe Nolan — Mon, 07 Apr 2014 21:24:13 +0000

Controversial photographer Robert Mapplethorpe’s work is still catching eyes 25 years after his death in March, 1989. Mapplethorpe was practically the subject of Patti Smith’s outstanding memoir, Just Kids and the artist’s work is currently featured in two new exhibitions. In an article titled “The Resurgence of Robert Mapplethorpe,” T explains:

Two high-profile exhibitions are breathing new life into the work of a famous art provocateur. Here, the curator Clarissa Dalrymple, Mapplethorpe’s dear friend, recalls one of his many controversial images.

I met Robert when I was a waitress at Broome Street Bar in 1973 or 1974. He would come in every afternoon for pecan pie. Robert was obsessed with capturing things on film that you can’t easily capture, like passion and intensity. He was fascinated by the body and by sex. He was only too ready to abandon things if he didn’t think they were up to scratch.

There’s a famous photograph of my youngest son, Jesse, of whom Robert did a nude picture. Robert wanted to take this picture of Jesse, who was 4 or 5, seated on the back of a beautiful armless red chair that I had, in one of those teeny apartments on Thompson Street. It was held up in the Senate as an example of child pornography, but it really wasn’t anything. On the 14th anniversary of the photograph, when Jesse was an adult, Robert’s great friend Judy Linn was commissioned by The Village Voice to rephotograph Jesse. Holding Robert’s original photograph, Jesse sat naked on the back of the sofa, and in the background was Flora — the black standard poodle Robert had given me as a gift, which was named after a body of his work. It’s a magnificent photograph. Robert would have been tickled.

‘‘As above, So below’’ is on view Feb. 28 to March 29 at Ohwow, 937 N. La Cienega Blvd., Los Angeles; oh-wow.com. ‘‘Robert Mapplethorpe’’ is on view from March 26 to July 13 at the Grand Palais, 254/256, rue de Bercy, Paris; grandpalais.fr.

Here is a clip from a BBC documentary about Mapplethorpe which features footage from his influential, early art film Robert Having his Nipple Pierced…

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Romero. Night. 50.

Mapplethorpe Still Matters