Set in 1950s Calcutta, মহানগর is a story of emancipation in a changing society. Arati (Madhavi Mukherjee) is a housewife from a traditionalist family, who – in order to support her relatives' lavish demands – goes out to work as a door-to-door saleswoman. Slowly, she discovers her independence.

“I've got it. Film star! You'd be perfect. Dark glasses, lots of red lipstick, and 100,000 rupees per picture. And if it's a Hindi film, we'll all fly to Bombay.”

– Bani

“Just you wait, it won't be long, The man in black will soon be here, With his cleaver's blade so true, He'll make mincemeat out of you!”

– children singing

“I done wrestled with an alligator, I done tussled with a whale; Handcuffed lightning, thrown thunder in jail; Only last week, I murdered a rock, injured a stone, hospitalized a brick; I’m so mean I make medicine sick.”

– Muhammad Ali

One day, in a quiet village, a traveling movie theatre appears. The proprietor has no words for the miracle he brings in on the reels. When it's finally time, and the whole town is crammed into the crumbling impromptu playhouse, and the lights are dimmed, a word of warning. This is the story of Dr. #Frankenstein, it starts.

“Just close your eyes and call him… It's me, Ana… It's me Ana…”

– Teresa

The old folk in the audience remember their first brush with cinema, and life, and death. For sisters Ana (Ana Torrent) and Isabel (Isabel Tellería) it may be their first, and it may as well be real. The creature, Isabel assures her younger sister, is not dead. He's a spirit and you can call for him.

 

When you're little, everything is a miracle. Milagros is the name the maid answers too. And so does the landscape, the mushrooms, the heart, and the magic of cinema.

American artist Matthew Barney dreamt of playing #AmericanFootball at Yale. His body, too short for the demanding game, became his personal battleground by way of torturous prosthetics and art performances testing its endurance. A fascination with biology – he considered medicine as his profession – is a recurring motif in his art. This will teach us that stage 1 of the cremaster cycle is the moment when the cremaster muscle – the muscle in the biological male responsible for the ascent and descent of the testes – is at its most ascended or undifferentiated state.

 

Cremaster 1, the second of the five part Cremaster cycle (1994—2002), is set at the Bronco Stadium in #Boise, #Idaho, Barney's hometown. Due of his personal connection with the place he was able to secure the stadium for a lush musical revue, complete with chorus girls and Goodyear #blimps. Instead of cheerleading yells and the crushing noise of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, we find ourselves quietly poised in an airship high above the field.

 

In each airship there is an ethereal woman (both played by gender-ambigious Marti Domination), arranging and rearranging grapes in intricate shapes, illustrating the development of the foetus from non-gendered to male. Below on luminous blue AstroTurf, the chorus line follows the same patterns.

 

Cremaster 1 is arguably the most accessible instalment of the cycle. Everyone, even if not familiar with the name Busby Berkeley, recognises the kaleidoscopic choreography. And those who have never watched a game of football in their lives, may pick up the subliminal patterns created by men dressed to overemphasise their already excessive masculinity.

Le temps d'une chasse is the definition of unease. It starts at dawn, when two old friends pick up their buddy Richard (Marcel Sabourin) from the home he shares with his wife and son. The son, the wife insists, comes along. The men have planned a #hunting trip, in a cabin far away from #Montréal, far away from everything, with a beer-filled cooler at hand. The last they need is an underage kid towing along. But the boy comes along, she insists. With a trunk full of Dutch courage and a mouthful of boasting, the men find themselves at a hotel instead of the expected cabins.

“Tomorrow morning we'll get up early.”

Hotel days are short and its nights long and booze-filled, commanding their own temptation and regret.

28 is no age to die, regardless if your name is Susan Superstar or Edie Sedgwick. But it happened, right during the wrap-up of Ciao Manhattan. Edie was gone, just like that, snuffed like so many of the other #Warhol Superstars. What did remain was footage, so much abandoned footage shot in the 60s when those stars were shining at their brightest. That footage, set in glitzy black-and-white Manhattan, is where Edie and Paul America race around town on amphetamine. Or see a doctor to get shots of some sorts.

“Speed is the ultimate, all-time high. That first rush. Wow! Just that burning, searing, soaring sense of perfection.”

– Susan

And there's colour footage too. Susan, topless, semi-(un)consciously dragged around the floor of her empty pool-turned-Superstar-temple. She babbles, drinks, dances around in her panties. And she ODs. Like Edie would even before this movie had seen the light of day.

 

They snuff so fast, these bright Superstars.

It's August 30, #Frankenstein​day.

“If you're not sure a mushroom's good, don't pick it. Because if it's bad, and you eat it, it's your last mushroom and your last everything too.”