4th October 2000
Nick Bradshaw
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'.
Read More...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.
There’s enough going on in this cinematic deluge to keep one’s brain babbling to itself for days. Its creators have called it “the last film ever made”—and the proclamation isn’t as bolshy and hubristic as it might sound. The implications of this kind of filmmaking are huge.
Read More...Cinema history is full of neglected masterpieces, that get rediscovered years after they were made, rescued from obscurity by a sensitive critic or a new generation of fans.
Read More...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.
Read More...Saturday, 1 April 2000
The Songs of Maldoror : Poetry of Obsession
By Joerg Meyer and translated by Simone Stumpf
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.
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