Week 7 (Aug 2 – 8) – Muscle Distribution Catalog
Muscle Distribution is an exciting new venture that’s hard to sum up with words alone, but if you dig into the catalog, you find a shape that’s more well-defined than any mission statement. Liz is keeping it hot for us. From Muscle’s website: Muscle is a new film distribution company with a heavy repertory slant from historian, programmer, and filmmaker Elizabeth Purchell. Borne out of an understanding of the role that accessibility plays in shaping cultural histories, we’re dedicated to complicating and expanding the canon by shining a light on works that either never received their proper due or that have unjustly faded into obscurity, and championing uncompromising new works by some of today’s most exciting underground filmmakers. We love scrappy, misfit films that don’t fit into any particular box.
BIBLE!, also released as B.C. Scandals, is wild, unhinged 1970s movie madness at its absolute finest. Directed by Wakefield Poole, a filmmaker who made massive waves in the adult cinema scene with landmark projects like Boys in the Sand and Bijou, this film was completely misunderstood upon release and died in just a few weeks. Instead of delivering a standard, run-of-the-mill hardcore epic, Poole crafted a deeply personal, dialogue-free anthology art film heavily indebted to the avant-garde spirit of Kenneth Anger and Curtis Harrington, utilizing gorgeous textures, colors and classical music compositions.
It all kicks off with a nuclear explosion yielding to a forming fetus (blame Kubrick), before Adam (Bo White, a stage actor who was in Blue Summer and the groundbreaking gay film A Very Natural Thing) emerges naked from a rocky earth crevice and swims through a cavern onto a sunlit beach. He is soon joined by Eve (Caprice Couselle, also in Saturday Night at the Baths) rising from the sea like a siren temptress, leading to their intimate coupling and the fateful bite of the apple, punctuated by Eve’s singular, iconic line of dialogue: “I’m so hungry.”
We then meet Bathsheba (Georgina Spelvin, who was, of course, Miss Jones in The Devil In Miss Jones), who has grown frustrated as her husband, Uriah (Robert Benes), ignores her for a servant girl (Nancy Wachter). She stages an elaborate, playful strip routine to catch his attention, inadvertently captivating her secret admirer, David (Nicholas Flammel), who swoops in.
The final, most hallucinatory sequence reimagines Samson (Brahm van Zetten) as a boastful tribal strongman who slays a servant. Delilah (Gloria Grant) sets out to avenge the act by seducing him, culminating in his ritualistic seduction, oiling and hair-cutting.
The film concludes with an anachronistic tag featuring Mary wandering a desert landscape, approached by an angel bearing neon lights and a “Bethlehem Inn – No Vacancy” motel sign symbolizing the immaculate conception. Mary and the Angel were played by Bonnie Mathis and Dennis Wayne, stars of the Joffrey Ballet who add a bit of culture.
Poole deliberately shot the film almost entirely without dialogue—with the sole exception of Eve’s three-word exclamation—taking direct inspiration from the visual choreography of silent cinema and structuring the movement around classical music pieces by Vivaldi, Albinoni, Tchaikovsky and Prokofiev as an homage to Disney’s Fantasia. This was no cheap dirty movie. It was shot on location in Virgin Gorda and Puerto Rico, capturing stunning, sun-drenched natural backdrops that give the creation and desert sequences their distinct, dreamlike atmosphere.
What a strange and wonderful movie. Where else will you see a female-perspective, dirty take on the Good News?
