Someone wears purple on Purple Day (International Epilepsy Day).

 

Both in The Wormwood Star (Curtis Harrington, 1956) and Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (Kenneth Anger, 1954), Marjorie Cameron wears shades of purple. Professionally known as Cameron, she was a follower of #Thelema, the philosophical movement founded by occultist Aleister Crowley.

“Purple beyond purple: it is the light higher than eyesight”

– Aleister Crowley, Liber AL vel Legis sub figura CCXX (1904)

Meanwhile in 1946, rocket scientist #JackParsons and (pre-Scientology) sci-fi author #LRonHubbard worked on a series of Crowley-related Magick ceremonies named Babalon Working. After Parsons declared the rituals a success, he encountered Cameron in his own house. She became the element required to continue the ceremonies, this resulting in her being declared Babalon, the Scarlet Woman.

In a small train station's waiting room, people #sleep. #Trains in the distance rumble along. #Snow covers footprints crossing nearby tracks and the wooden shed where travellers, strangers, huddle together in their shared fate. Pavel Kostomarov's cinematography and Sergey Loznitsa's direction capture the silence.

Owen Land explores meaning, wit, and #WordPlay, and manages to unite the #marketing of #umeboshi #plums in a wide variety of vessels, the brokering of #brides, and pandas discussing #Freud in all of the above contexts.

“My film is going to be introduced by a fake panda and it’s going to be about Japanese salted plums among other things.”

– FIRST PANDA

Amsterdam schoolchildren recite the words from a reading board while the traditional teaching method's pictures are interspersed with news photos of then-current events and children's drawings.

“Aaaaap” “Nooot” “Miiieees”

This short, and life, is haunting and violent; schools should be safe for all. Even if only to escape in a book.

Filmmaker, photographer and honorary surrealist Jean Painlevé made science films that verge on experimental art cinema. With custom-built camera setups, he explored the world above and below the water surface, and with that exposed human traits.

 

It's almost impossible to select one film from a filmography as vast as #Painlevé's. In honour of C.V. #Raman, lets go with his Transition de phase dans les cristaux liquides.

 

It's on Ubu, in case you wonder.

Legendary African-American #vaudeville performer Johnny Hudgins – in historically correct Blackface – plays an African explorer who descends onto 2028 Paris to learn about the primitive ways of the white natives. Soon, he discovers the Charleston.

“I have finally discovered my ancestors' traditional dance.”

– Johnny Hudgins

A fantastic Afrofuturist short, made a decade before Sun Ra's trip to Saturn.

23 actresses and one person in drag play the part of Québécois waitress Françoise Durocher in seven monologues.

“One grilled cheese, two slices of toast, two coffees. One pepper steak no chili and a plate of spaghetti and meatballs. Two glasses of milk. One plate of spare ribs. A chicken in a basket with three cups of honey. One lean smoked meat sandwich with pickles and mustard. One two-cream coffee and two club sandwiches. Two clubs.”

– Françoise Durocher

Watch the short on the NFB website.

CoBrA (1948—51) was a Copenhagen / Brussels / Amsterdam art collective whose manifest revolved around the liberation from the rigidity of art and life in drab, post-war Europe. Their spontaneous primal iconography and graffiti allowed them to not only regain the pleasure of painting, but also forge a new connection to colour and material. Especially the Dutch artists involved – Corneille, Appel, Lucebert, Constant – looked at the way children respond to the act of creation resulting in easy to comprehend semi-abstract paintings, sculptures and poems. The moronic “my child can paint that” that people still associate with modernist art can be traced back to (deliberately) misinterpreting these artists' objectives.

“Ik schilder als een barbaar van deze barbaarse tijd.”

– Karel Appel

After CoBrA broke up, Appel started treating his canvas not as something that merely props up an image, but as part of the artwork itself. Working in layers of paint and other media, with any tool at hand, he'd build a sculptural object that incorporates the movement of both artist and material. In order to film De werkelijkheid van Karel Appel, he cut a hole in the canvas through which the camera captures the physicality of the action and the emotional involvement of the artist.

 

For this film, and Karel Appel, Componist by photographer Ed van der Elsken (1961), Appel (in collaboration with Frits Weiland) composed tape loops to create a wall of sound complementing the image.

An escape of sorts, in love and lust.

“He puts his cheek to the wall. With a kiss he licks the vertical surface and the greedy plaster sucks in his saliva. Then a shower of kisses.”

– Jean Genet, Notre-Dame des Fleurs (1942/43)