About

Screens with The Exquisite Corpus 2015.

This masterly found-footage film by Gustav Deutsch reflects on what 'film is' and takes as its theme early cinema's relationship with sex and violence. The drama in five acts (Genesis, Paradeisos, Eros, Thanatos, and Symposion) draws on tinted images and sequences from silent fictional, erotic, and scientific footage. Deutsch's extraordinary montages combine with the score to create a dreamlike effect, surreal in the true sense of the word. The film opens with Annie Oakley shooting at a target and concludes with an iconic shot of a cowboy aiming his gun at the audience; what we see in between has been mined from film archives, including (with privileged access to hitherto unseen footage) those of the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction.

Ages 18+