HEAD-PICS
SAYRE, NORA
HEAD-PICS by NORA SAYRE New York film critics—envisioned in Hollywood as eyeless parasites besotted with power—didn't deter vast audiences from crowding into An-tonioni's Zabriskie Point, just as...
...Their enormous eyes and mouths are especially provocative, as when a frilly fish with languid lids and mammoth bee-stung lips trails her see-through fins like a stripper's veils...
...Still, it might have startled the old animator had he known that his own fantasies would one day be reshaped by uppers and downers, grass, and the insight of acid...
...Disney causes you to swim in space, glide, and definitely fly, while shapes and objects dissolve and merge into each other, sensually satisfying in their mutations...
...The ultimate "trip" movie of early 1970 was Fantasia, which lost Walt Disney so much money in 1940...
...Kitsch and camp collide with spurts of Op and some exhilarating graphics...
...A five-minute misunderstanding unleashed some lovely dialogue, until the flyer mentioned the advantages of altitude...
...Moussorgsky's Night on Bald Mountain casts some hallucinatory spells: Satan's colossal hands trickle down a mountainside, their shadows blackening a town, while ghosts drift upwards from their graves...
...What's it like...
...However, other sections of the movie underline the hypocrisy of censorship in this country, from the Forties to the present...
...It is astonishing to see how contemporary Fantasia is now...
...Even evolution is sexy: orgasmic volcanoes yield to microscopic organisms teasing one another, and fission is perhaps the most erotic act of all: there's a happy little shudder when a round shape lengthens and divides...
...HEAD-PICS by NORA SAYRE New York film critics—envisioned in Hollywood as eyeless parasites besotted with power—didn't deter vast audiences from crowding into An-tonioni's Zabriskie Point, just as bad reviews failed to dent the voluptuous success of Stanley Kubrick's 2001...
...Bosoms are eliminated—although the female centaurs in Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony wear ghastly flower bras...
...NORA SAYRE is New York correspondent for The New Statesman (London...
...While the critics were accurate about the absurdity of Antonioni's America, the Department of Justice betrayed an unnecessary panic when it summoned some of the film's staff before a grand jury to testify about the movie's anti-Americanism...
...It is also far less sadistic than Disney's other pictures...
...In fact, grass fans and pill poppers have been expanding at movies for several years...
...During one California conversation about science fiction films, a man referred to his own plane...
...You can't miss the genital obsessions: even a shot of a hippo's uvula manages to be phallic, as are the dancing thistles, Mickey Mouse rising in a cone-shaped sorcerer's hat, the unicorns' horns, and a take of Stokow-ski's own silhouette on his conductor's platform...
...there is hardly a straight line throughout...
...On a recent visit to Hollywood, I found that quite a few youngish actors automatically assumed that anyone who liked their favorite movies must also drop acid...
...The animation of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring holds up well, as the dinosaurs march like a dying army, or the pounce of a predatory creature leaves a few floating feathers behind...
...Wow...
...Fantasia is all curves...
...It's the only way...
...Acid converts have told me that they "always" go to 2001 at intermission, so that their trips will last throughout the psychedelic passage...
...Those who worry about censorship on the screen had better picket Fantasia...
...Someone eagerly asked, "Do you fly high...
...There are plenty of pubic clouds...
...Throughout, Disney's gift for making you feel that you are in motion surpasses the effects that Timothy Leary used in his League for Spiritual Discovery "celebrations" of 1967...
...Here, sex is prettified and distorted for children—transferred to animals, which makes it safe...
...The "now" audience doesn't lie down with The New York Times or wake up with Newsweek or Time—a fact which ought to soothe the Nixon Administration about the influence of the media...
...Ave Maria is sung to an almost black screen: what seems to be a glimpse through a forest...
...There is also a birth trauma, when Mickey Mouse— bereft of his salacious grin—shoots on tidal waves through hallways and tunnels until he is sucked into a whirlpool...
...Yes, always...
...Movies do, of course, cleave to some compulsory suffering, such as Peter Fonda's in The Trip, or the random sobs of hallucina-tors in Easy Rider...
...Struggling with revulsion at some of this winsome guile, I couldn't fight off a spasm of awe: Disney must have known exactly what he was doing, and Fantasia is the only pornographic movie I've ever seen...
...The animals behave as though they have marvelous cleavage, and keep posturing in the pin-up poses of the Forties...
...At any rate, we can soon expect some films which thoroughly advertise the drug experience, since Hollywood is able to exploit it more quickly than the tobacco companies which may be considering the styles of advertisements for rival brands of marijuana—in the event of its legalization...
...He cautioned that flying on acid is bad for landings, "because you just wouldn't care...
...During Bach's Toccato and Fugue, hideously hoked-up by Leopold Stokowski, suggestions of violin bows chase each other like comets amidst all the blinks and blurts of light, and great striped waves of magenta and purple devour one another...
...But it's easy to foresee drug imagery being used as a pacifier as well as a "celebration"—and as a commercial enterprise...
...The film won't pollute any patriots...
...Also, one can't help suspecting that some officials in this country would rather see the young absorbed by "soft" drugs and drug culture than by radical politics...
...Leary used to describe the LSD trip—parts of Fantasia yield a heightened sensitivity, plus the pleasure of basking in yourself...
...During pictures like The Yellow Submarine and Monterey Pop, the smoking sections of many theaters almost bestowed a free "high," and usually smelled like the back of a Morocco bus...
...The castration sequences provoked abundant adult laughter, especially when a big female hippo flattened a sword-shaped male alligator, which later almost deprived a unisex elephant of its trunk and tail...
...his most abstract work was always his best...
...As some have noted, the Disney creatures have a bewildering sexuality, and they switch roles with all the deftness of a "mod" bisexual...
...Crotches are rather neglected but buttocks are stressed, whether huge and baggy (on elephants), heart-shaped' (cupids), or coyly exaggerated (on elongated fairies...
...Some of the "tolerant" responses to Woodstock showed a wistful desire to believe that the Chicago demonstrators of 1968 were tranquillized by pot and pills and music in 1969: that culture had served as a hush puppy...
...The style is far from psychedelic, although some might be able to trip to the mass feel-in scene —in which Antonioni claimed to evoke the heroine's sexual fantasies after smoking a single joint—or through the final recurring shots of the exploding house, where furniture and clothing, books and fluttering papers, drift quite beautifully in space...
...But long lines of the young have been forming at the box office because Zabriskie Point was advertised as what Variety calls "a head-pic": a film for those who are already turned-on...
...While you don't quite "tumble through the capillary networks"—as Dr...
...Its New York revival was jammed with heads and hippies, and the ticket line previewed all the underground fashions for the year...
Vol. 34 • July 1970 • No. 7
