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Four characters go through a series of deeply emotional, psychedelic, sensual, sexual encounters, evoking the times and textures of the 1960s underground.
Director: Stephen Dwoskin
Overview
Intensely psychodramatic and compelling, Stephen Dwoskin’s seminal underground first feature resists the straightforward, naive script of the sexually-emancipated hippy-dream. Instead, darkness, introspection, power play and doubt are given increasing prominence over the pleasures of the flesh as a man and four women interact and test their personal limits.
This deep immersion in dislocated narrative, captured on hand-held 16mm, arguably reflects Dwoskin’s borderless, émigré experience. It’s something he shared with at least one of the cast – the important, highly influential, multi-media American artist Carolee Schneemann who was in London at the time. Other cast members include Verity Bargate (novelist, theatre director and co-founder of the cutting-edge Soho Theatre Company) and Maurice Colbourne (Gangsters, The Day of the Triffids, Doctor Who and Howard’s Way). Gavin Bryars provides the warm, warping drone score that holds us together – viewers and participants/characters - in this strange, Orphée-like netherworld where there is no dialogue and Dwoskin weaves in numerous formal experiments.
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