From: Finn Brunton
Hey Bruce – (((yo!)))
I went to the showing last night here in NYC. I wouldn’t have known
about it except for your post, so in return here’s notes on the movie.
There’s a torrent of the 34-minute *Thaïs* available, but it’s
super-slow, only one seeder: http://www.greylodge.org/gpc/?p=364)
The original was 75 minutes or so; what we’ve got is a pretty good
stitched-together 25 minute print. The basic outlines of the story are
still discernible, and awesome: it’s a madcap diva melodrama that ends
in tragedy. Thaïs, surrounded by swarms of identical suitors in
gleaming top hats with jerky biomechanical movements (a bride with her
bachelors dutifully clattering after her) is the friend, maybe lover
and definitely rival of Bianca, vaguely Russian aristocrat. It’s a
story of warring aesthetic movements, too: Bianca is dark-haired and
in Pre-Raphaelite soft focus, wearing layers of flowing chiffon like
Isadora Duncan, seated before folk art tapestries and languid palms;
Thaïs is as bottle-bleached as a punk rocker, wears theatrical
costumes that make her look like Pierrot-meets-Road Warrior, and lives
in a magnificent spread of intricate Op Art chambers, full of
perspectival tricks, boxy skeletal furniture and and squared spirals.
(((Pretty good stuff, eh?)))
Her studio features a button she can press “to open a door to the
Great Beyond” when she gets tired of this life. Bianca, hurt by too
many betrayals on Thaïs’ part, goes for a ride on a horse called Devil
Mad (indeed) and gets thrown. Thaïs, crushed by guilt, goes to her
studio and presses the first button: fumes begin to pour out of a
horribly stylized mouth painted on her wall (the mouth looks
positively psychedelic, and wouldn’t be out of place on a Tadanori
Yokoo poster), and the doors close. She’s made her studio into a gas
chamber. Struggling for life, she presses the second button, and
collapses after much flailing under a grid of knives that have
projected from the wall, closing over her in an intricate pattern. The
end.
(The audience was depressingly civil: no stones, yelling, fights, rude
laughter or fisico-follia.)
ZANG tuum tumb,
Finn
