LUCIFER RISING  1973
Directed by Kenneth Anger
30 minutes
No language

Kenneth Anger's brooding, electrifying, mysterious half-hour short. Shot on site in Egypt with its ancient ruins as the backdrop, Anger's visually dazzling psychedelic flick remains one of the most riveting experimental movies of the last century.  Needless to say, it is a film that needs to be experienced on the big screen. Complete with a mind-expanding progressive-rock music score by Bobby Beausoleil, that was recorded in prison. Starring Mick Jagger's brother Chris along with director Donald Cammell cast in the role of the god Osiris, and singer Marianne Faithfull as the goddess Lilith.

This will be a high-definition screening.
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SPECIAL GUEST: ANDY DITZLER

Andy Ditzler is an America musician, interdisciplinary scholar and curator of rare experimental and counter-culture cinema, and one of the founders of the Atlanta-based Film Love series. He will be traveling to Cavia to present an eclectic program of documentation, selected especially for our audience here in Amsterdam.
 
Andy's program will be chosen from original VHS broadcast tapes that are housed in the Special Collections library at Emory University. He will focus on an off-beat program that was known as The American Music Show. This was a community access cable television show, produced in various basements of Atlanta, Georgia and broadcast weekly from 1981 to 2005, and was a heady mix of twisted talk show, drag queens alongside rural Georgia characters, music videos by the likes of the Smilin’ Mighty Jesus Singers and John Sex, and poignant video segments taped on the streets of a city now almost unrecognizable today. In addition to all this, the show attracted a young RuPaul – then a denizen of Atlanta’s underground scene, now an international drag icon – who made dozens of early appearances on the show in many guises.

With its one-take aesthetic and anarchic humor, the show is a classic of do-it-yourself media, and was a beacon for Atlanta’s underground, LGBT, and musical communities. A unique conjunction of U.S. southern culture, queer performance, Black Civil Rights history, and cable television as art medium, The American Music Show remains outrageous, forward-looking, and above all, an entertainment experience of “always low standards.”

Andy Ditzler will be at Cavia to present the program, and also have a lively public discussion with me afterwards.