Joe Dante’s famed film blender Movie Orgy finds an audience at the Monaco Charity Film Festival this year in a special one-night event. The evening includes the four hour movie, a keg, and Joe Dante in the flesh. This is a night no one can afford to miss.
Bucking historical inevitability even as it serves history, the Museum of Modern Art’s month-long annual festival of film preservation, “To Save and Project,” could be retitled “To Save and Project . . . Film.” The Movie Orgy—which opens TSAP this Friday—is a digitally preserved version of the four-hour found-footage extravaganza first orchestrated by Joe Dante and Jon Davison back in 1968. But this anarchic assemblage aside, the only digital presentations in the series are the two 3-D programs (necessary in that their original format is no longer viable) and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ preserved print of the 1968 Saul Bass short Why Man Creates. The remaining 30-odd movies and programs are being presented on old-fashioned film stock, showing celluloid fans the actual stuff.
Film preservation takes many forms, some perilously close to Dumpster diving.
When the director Joe Dante was assembling his epic-length mash-up, “The Movie Orgy,” in the late 1960s, he scoured the East Coast for castoff footage — educational films, commercials, TV shows, forgotten drive-in features — that would lend itself to being creatively re-edited.
“Back in the day,” Mr. Dante said, “there were lots of mom and pop 16-millimeter rental sources, often attached to camera stores. When the prints became too tattered, they were often junked, in pieces. If you knew the guy behind the counter, sometimes he’d just give the stuff away.”
Working with Jon Davison, a friend and fellow student at the Philadelphia College of Art, Mr. Dante massaged his found material into a hilarious metamovie in which five or six stories seem to be going on at once (giant grasshoppers invade Chicago, as flying saucers attack Washington), constantly interrupted by prom night dos and don’ts, stomach-churning commercials for laxative pills and disturbing excerpts from children’s television shows (including a stuffed cat and mouse who perform “Jesus Loves Me” on piano and drums).
Articles and video courtesy of trailersfromhell.com.
SHINING SPIRIT, filmed in Canada, India & Tibet (2006-2009) documents a recording project that brings together the family of Jamyang Yeshi, through music and the use of multi-tracking recording technology. With the help of Western friends, Jamyang, in exile in Canada, and his brother, Tsundue, in exile in the United States, join voices with the family they left behind in Tibet. For the first time in over a decade, they sing together once again. Shining Spirit is a testament to the power of music, the resilience of the Tibetan culture, and the enduring bond of a family separated by politics & geography. For background information on our documentary, please go to the “
