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Rosemary's Baby (Roman Polanski, 1968)
Apr
30
Hairstyle Appreciation Day
“It's by Vidal Sassoon. It's very in.”
– Rosemary Woodhouse
Both the lady's movie husband Guy Woodhouse (John Cassavetes) and real-world husband Frank Sinatra were incensed by the bold move. Of course, in Rosemary's Baby the haircut is Rosemary's attempt to make sense of the changing world around her. Moving to a new city, an unexpected pregnancy, all those lovely new neighbours to socialise with… a girl needs to feel in control!
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Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (Kenneth Anger, 1954) & The Wormwood Star (Curtis Harrington, 1956)
Mar
26
Purple Day
1: The Scarlet Woman (Marjorie Cameron) wearing a fantastic peacock-like robe and crown. DP: Kenneth Anger.
2: Cameron as herself. Here too she wears references to the peacock Aiwass, who dictated The Book of the Law to Crowley.
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”
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Les sorcières de Salem [The Witches of Salem / The Crucible] (Raymond Rouleau, 1957)
Mar
7
National Town Meeting Day
The townspeople meet in the barn to judge the accused. DP: Claude Renoir.
Raymond Rouleau's Les sorcières de Salem – with a screenplay by Marxist philosopher Jean-Paul #Sartre – is a very early film adaptation of Arthur Miller's 1953 #TheatrePlay The Crucible. An allegory of #McCarthyism, the play is a (partially dramatised) retelling of the #SalemWitchTrials, a dramatic episode in early US-American history. During several court and town meetings, 200 people were falsely accused of meddling with the Devil; 19 of them were eventually executed.
“If she is innocent! Why do you never wonder if Parris be innocent, or Abigail? Is the accuser always holy now? Were they born this morning as clean as God's fingers? I'll tell you what's walking Salem — vengeance is walking Salem. We are what we always were in Salem, but now the little crazy children are jangling the keys of the kingdom, and common vengeance writes the law!”
– Arthur Miller, The Crucible (1953)
Miller himself was accused of un-American activities in 1956 and convicted of contempt of Congress for refusing to identify others present at meetings he had attended. Which doesn't mean that #WitchTrials are a thing of the past. As easily one can transplant Puritan religious mass hysteria to 1950s McCarthy anti-socialism, as easy is it applicable to the state of the world today.