The Movie Orgy (1968) - Joe Dante
Related: orgy - film - stock footage - collage - 1968 films - American cinema - Joe Dante
Description
SON OF MOVIE ORGY?!?!?!
In 1972, my first year of college, I saw a great "film" called SON OF MOVIE ORGY. It was a two-hour long mess of a montage, consisting of clips from public domain features like REEFER MADNESS, U.S. Army training films, old TV commercials, and trailers for bizarre flicks like THE SHOEMAKER AND THE ELVES. The juxtaposition of the mainstream stuff with the titillating stuff made it quite a shock to the senses, and I still recall parts of it vividly to this day. This was probably part of Joe Dante's MOVIE ORGY condensed for the Midnight College Movie circuit? Who knew? Good stuff, anyway! Sponsored by Budweiser Beer, if I recall. The same series showed THE MASK (aka EYES OF HELL) and of course, MARIHUANA. Ah, the '70s... --Son of Cathode from New England, 23 November 2002 via IMDb.com, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0270523/combined [Mar 2005]
His first film, made with his friend Jon Davison, was a seven-hour movie marathon, consisting of assorted clips from films, commercials and trailers, and titled-appropriately-The Movie Orgy (1968). --http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/directors/03/dante.html [Mar 2005]
Scholars call this very American Sublime "post-modernism," a term that only its failures deserve. In Dante's work its name is "montage," a word that comes easily to the filmmaker because he also started as an editor, putting bits of found footage together to create a 7-hour compilation film, The movie orgy, that was screened on college campuses during the early 70s: montage of signs (the collision of two pieces of celluloid, two clichés, two styles of narrative, character, image, musical accompaniment) and montage of meanings (two contradictory ideas, emotions or attitudes colliding in the spectator's head while listening to Phoebe Cates' Santa Claus speech in Gremlins or watching one of the Commando Elite get his lower parts ground up in a garbage disposal in Small soldiers [US 1998]). Invaluable as a tool for satire, montage is also Dante's preferred formal procedure for producing what most modern filmmakers try to produce through its opposite, duration: the experience of the Sublime, which is consciousness of self raised to an apocalyptic pitch. --http://www.latrobe.edu.au/screeningthepast/firstrelease/fr1201/bkfr13a.htm [Mar 2005]
Seven Hour All-Night Once in a Lifetime Atomic Movie Orgy (1968) - Joe Dante
While attending the Philadelphia College of Art, Dante and his friend Jon Davidson put together The Movie Orgy (1968), a 7-hour compilation of kitschy film clips that was screened on the college-campus circuit under the sponsorship of Schlitz beer. --http://movies.yahoo.com/shop?d=hc&id=1800010390&cf=biog&intl=us [Mar 2005]
see also: montage - compilation - curator - trailer - orgy - film
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