The Playlist passes along word that MVD is gearing up to release a new DVD set featuring previously unreleased film and video work by photographer/experimental filmmaker Richard Kern. The disc includes six “bonus” shorts, which might be enough for any Kern fan, but here they’re ancillary to the main event, called Extra Action. Theofficial synopsis of Extra Action reads like Girls Gone Wild with hipster cred:
Photographer Richard Kern likes real women: unpretentious, unadorned, and definitely undressed. Those who love Kern’s books know each is an invitation to join him as he follows them through their homes-or his New York apartment-from backyard to kitchen to bathroom to bedroom, capturing every sexy and embarrassing moment. Whenever Kern photographs one of these energetic, clothes-dropping exhibitionists, he brings out a video camera and asks them to “roll around and do something interesting for a few minutes”. Extra Action documents 60 of these innocent amateur incidents set to an original musical score by Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth.
I wonder if this is just marketing copy, or if Extra Action is as cheesy as it sounds. I’m a fan of the Kern shorts that I’ve seen, because even when they’re grotesquely sleazy (or, in the case of Straw Dogs, mostly just grotesque), they’re also funny and even witty. And Money Love (which I think is the same think as Scooter & Jinx, which is included as a bonus on this DVD) actually plays like punk critique of pornography. In the hopes that Extra Action is something along the same lines, I’ve embedded it above.
Above: a video for Sonic Youth’s “Jams Run Free”, from their Rather Ripped album, shot by French cinema bad girl Claire Denis. Daniel Stuyck writes about this, and the four other videos Denis has made for the band, in the new issue of Film Comment:
The antecedent to these pieces is not so much Denis’s previous films as Bruce Conner’s Cosmic Ray. Conner’s 1961 short, an essential demonstration of the maxim that pop songs are teenage symphonies to God, reads like a list of chemical ingredients for any of these videos: rock and roll; erotic tension (as P. Adams Sitney is at pains to point out, Cosmic Ray predominantly features the “irreverent dance of a naked woman, which he [Conner] photographed himself”); bland images of daily life and consumer culture (Mickey Mouse, hitchhiking Indians, neon signs, the H-bomb) transformed into something surreal. In other words, a strange alchemy—an area where science and religion meet, not unlike drugs. And that ultimate drug state—ecstasy—is what Conner and Denis are ultimately fixed on: Denis’s unfocused whip pans as Sonic Youth slams into its chorus create the same sensation as Conner’s image of skulls birthing from crotches in an instant between two shots, a revelation of new meanings created by a strange combination of elements.
