VILLAGE VOICE, NYC - 13 MARCH 2001

"Perhaps the nuttiest project here [New York Underground Film Festival] is Maldoror, a Super 8 adaptation of Comte De Lautremont's proto-surrealist bile-ooze, which originated when London's Exploding Cinema collective and Germany's Filmgruppe Chaos assigned one chapter each to 15 directors. Only twelve returned and the resulting omnibus, depite it's variegated textures, has a dogged, demented integrity. "

THE GUARDIAN GUIDE - 27 JANUARY 2001

"one of the strangest films to come out of Britain in y ears"

FORTEAN TIMES - 10th November 2000
Review by Mark Pilkington

It takes the courage of a fool or the genius of a madman to attempt the impossible and there's plenty of both on display in this celluloid working inspired by the infamous proto-surrealist text of 1868. Written under the name of Lautreamont by the young Parisian Isidore Ducasse, Maldoror is an astounding work; a mercurial outburst of rage and beauty narrated by the daimonic misanthrope Maldoror. Ducasse himself died an anonymous death in 1870, at the age of 24, but his creation lived on to become a key inspiration for the Surrealists.

This collaboration between London's Exploding Cinema and Germany's Filmgruppe Chaos is a wilfully erratic portmanteau of 12 five to ten minute films, four German and eight from the UK, shot on Super 8 and blown up to 16mm. Each interprets a different section of the book, a chapter, line or moment, the only connecting thread being Maldoror's narration - though in some sections even this is abandoned. The results vary wildly in approach. Some attempt to follow the text literally - notably in a sequence where Maldoror copulates with a (toy) shark - while others are more impressionistic mood pieces.

A kaliedoscopic range of techniques is displayed here, often within the same segments; viewers are assaulted by an orgy of wonderfully disturbed clay (or was it?) mation, blurs, stills, washes and loops. Similarly the tone of the pieces ranges from the malevolent to the downright daft. Some segments capture the book's essence more successfully than others, and it's only natural that people will respond to each according to their own aesthetic. But the constantly shifting tableaux of sounds and images ensure that everyone should find something here to enthral, disturb or revolt, so echoing the book's own unpredictable nature.

As Maldoror himself warns at the opening of his narration "Only a few will be able to savour this bitter fruit with impunity." Made for under £2,000 over two years and "a complete nightmare" according to co-ordinator Karsten Weber, this is true underground cinema. Currently, screenings are limited to the odd film festival - like the upcoming Volcano in London - but catch it if you can, and hold on tight.

FORTEAN VERDICT: Delicious malodorous potpourri

Fearlessly disregarding cinema's generally hapless history of portmanteau films, this genuinely no-budget collabroation between members of Exploding Cinema and Filmgruppe Chaos - 'the notorious no-bility of Underground Cinema' - takes a cleaver to the Comte de Lautréamont's 1868 pre-surrealist anti-novel 'Maldoror'.

Fifteen film-makers were dispatched into the night with but a chapter of the book (a vile, nightmarish poetic paean to the author's Satanic alter-ego) and a Super 8 camera to their name; 12 have returned, and from the cauldron of their labours, delivered forth this wild and bewildering affront to common civilised cinema.

Dissonant and depraved, it's of course a motley stew, the individual shorts variously indigestible, inconsequential, inventive, evocative, comic, pornographic, illicit and ridiculous, linked only by an overload of narration from the book.

Cumulatively, the effect's akin to both a good night at a film club, and a disorienting trip into the head of a stark raving misanthrope. In the film-makers' own words: "Despite its subject matter Maldoror is perhaps the most realisitic feature film ever made, for although the big budget mutiplex features strain with every tense and twisted fibre to conjure a world of carefree spontaneity they cannot compete with the reality of filmmakers who really don't give a fuck."

Hard to argue with that.

100 minutes of film, 100 minutes of barrage by images in 12 episodes. To be seen at the premiere in the MAX. How should one with this flood of images control the short circuit in one's brain, how should one name it? One shouldn't win the upper hand, one shouldn't chase it through the portals of descriptive reason. One should be sucked under by this whirlpool of blood and semen, of poetry and obsession. If there is ever a message from the "12 songs of Maldoror" by Comte de Lautreamont, then this is it.

Even the text, by Feridun Zaimoglu, beseechingly mumbled from the off like a constantly circling and flailing prayer is a zoo of poetic images, one's floating in the power of words, a self-confident sublimation of the author into the gaping mouth of the text.

The filmed episodes by the 12 Super-8 pirates from England and Germany are like this at any time. There's a girl not only being mauled by a mastiff but also fucked, not just because 'feeding' and 'fucking' alliterate nicely. Nosferatu comes back to life at the fresh-blooded body of a boy. Jack-Arnold-spiders drill their tentacles into eyes.

A white female shark snaps at the heads of the spectators before the biblical mating with Maldoror and a canary perishes in the squashed cage.

However, fans of horror and gore are not served here. The terror is not contained in the images, instead it is between them, in the other half of time where it is night in the cinema because the image changes, in the moment where the images echo. The cinema is created in the head, so say some filmologists. Here it happens in the intestines of the spectator, starts off thoughts and associations which are so convulsive like the infernal rumbling in the bowels.

Yet not everything sinks in the 'desolate morass of images'. In the episode "Girl chases bus" by the Munich-based "Filmgruppe Abgedreht" clay is magically animated. Even a torn off head seems somehow cuddly - applause for the shot.

Extraordinary is also Caroline Kennedy's episode "The Lamp". Maldoror's bloody incest with an angel from a magic lamp is told with frozen pictures, and she asks with them what movement is in fact. And exactly this standstill, this pause at the dark snapshots of existence, at the zero points, moves.

Turned into stone one sits as the credits roll, tortured on the rack of images. However, just like in classical tragedy where the violent rage of the gods causes heads to roll, one is also cleansed by this catharsis of obsessive poetry. And one steps purified into the night, into 'the gentle night of souls'.