Calendar : Of The Occult
17 August 2006 7:00pm
Screening With Live Music in Globe Theatre, Valley, Brisbane with Films including Haxan and Dante's Inferno. Live Soundtracks provided by the Brothers of the Occult Sisterhood, Castings, and Ray Off.
Thursday 17th August
SOOB and Otherfilm present
OF THE OCCULT: An offering, of celluloid adventures into witchcraft, ritual and the awaiting inferno.
The Globe Theatre, 220 Brunswick Street, Fortitude Valley
7pm – 9.30pm $7
Part 1: Religious Evils
"Religion is the connection to salvation, yet it also binds us to death and evil"
Haxan - Witchcraft Through the Ages, Dir. Benjamin Christensen 82 mins, 1922, Denmark
This combination of dramatised fiction, documentary footage and animated sequences was based on the records of witchcraft trials in the 15th and 16th centuries. Christensen (who also plays the devil) adopts a sceptical attitude to the occult in a portrayal, in turn grotesque and humorous, of witches' sabbath and black mass, extraction of confessions and contemporary scenes of possession.
L'Inferno (Dante's Inferno), Dir. Guiseppe de Ligouro 1909, Italy
Presentation of short extract from full length cut
Virgil escorts Dante through Hell so that he may see the terrors which await sinners.
An early version of "Dante's Inferno" showing in explicit detail all the tortures, demons, and horrors from fixed long to medium shots, but even by today's standards the horrors are gruesomely portrayed.
Live Soundtracks provided by the Brothers of the Occult Sisterhood, Castings, and Ray Off
"Music to induce visions of many faced gods. In an attempt to avoid structure, a new structure is formed".
Part 2: The Magick Lantern Cycle by Kenneth Anger
"A follower of Aleister Crowley's teachings, Anger is a high level practitioner of occult magic who regards the projection of his films as ceremonies capable of invoking spiritual forces. Cinema, he claims, is an evil force. Its point is to exert control over people and events, and his filmmaking is carried out with precisely that intention."
Invocation of My Demon Brother 11 mins, 1969, USA
This is a fast moving collage of Magick elements drawn from Aleister Crowley without the narrative elements of Anger's other films. Indirectly it is about the power of art to achieve a concentration of the imagination. The montage suggests the trance of music, drugs, possession by war, suicide and sexuality as 'the dynamic of imaginary initiation' invoking Lucifer. Anger himself is the Magus (priest) - his face in black and gold. With a soundtrack by Mick Jagger on Moog synthesizer.
Added by joel on 9 August 2006