Apollo 17 was the final mission of the United States' Apollo lunar landing program, and was the sixth landing of humans on the Moon. Launched at 12:33 a.m. Eastern Standard Time (EST) on December 7, 1972, with a three-member crew consisting of Commander Eugene Cernan, Command Module Pilot Ronald Evans, and Lunar Module Pilot Harrison Schmitt, Apollo 17 remains the most recent manned Moon landing and the most recent crewed flight beyond low Earth orbit. After Apollo 17, extra Apollo spacecraft were used in the Skylab and Apollo-Soyuz Test Project programs.
Apollo 17 was the sixth Apollo lunar landing, the first night launch of a U.S. human spaceflight and the final crewed launch of a Saturn V rocket. It was a "J-type mission", missions including three-day lunar surface stays, extended scientific capability, and the third Lunar Roving Vehicle. While Evans remained in lunar orbit above in the Command/Service Module, Cernan and Schmitt spent just over three days on the lunar surface in the Taurus-Littrow valley, conducting three periods of extra-vehicular activity, or moonwalks, during which they collected lunar samples and deployed scientific instruments. Cernan, Evans, and Schmitt returned to Earth on December 19 after an approximately 12-day mission. The decision to land in the Taurus-Littrow valley was made with the primary objectives for Apollo 17 in mind: to sample lunar highland material older than the impact that formed Mare Imbrium and investigating the possibility of relatively young volcanic activity in the same vicinity. Taurus-Littrow was selected with the prospects of finding highland material in the valley's north and south walls and the possibility that several craters in the valley surrounded by dark material could be linked to volcanic activity.
Apollo 17 also broke several records set by previous flights, including the longest manned lunar landing flight; the longest total lunar surface extravehicular activities; the largest lunar sample return, and the longest time in lunar orbit From Wikipedia
APOLLO 17: ON THE SHOULDERS OF GIANTS DON WISEMAN (1972) NASA USA 28 MIN
Warhol worked across a wide range of media – painting, photography, drawing, and sculpture. In addition, he was a highly prolific filmmaker. Between 1963 and 1968, he made more than 60 films, plus some 500 short black-and-white "screen test" portraits of Factory visitors. One of his most famous films, Sleep, monitors poet John Giorno sleeping for six hours. The 35-minute film Blow Job is one continuous shot of the face of DeVeren Bookwalter supposedly receiving oral sex from filmmaker Willard Maas, although the camera never tilts down to see this. Another, Empire (1964), consists of eight hours of footage of the Empire State Building in New York City at dusk. The film Eat consists of a man eating a mushroom for 45 minutes. Warhol attended the 1962 premiere of the static composition by LaMonte Young called Trio for Strings and subsequently created his famous series of static films including Kiss, Eat, and Sleep (for which Young initially was commissioned to provide music). Uwe Husslein cites filmmaker Jonas Mekas, who accompanied Warhol to the Trio premiere, and who claims Warhol's static films were directly inspired by the performance. Batman Dracula is a 1964 film that was produced and directed by Warhol, without the permission of DC Comics. It was screened only at his art exhibits. A fan of the Batman series, Warhol's movie was an "homage" to the series, and is considered the first appearance of a blatantly campy Batman. The film was until recently thought to have been lost, until scenes from the picture were shown at some length in the 2006 documentary Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis.
Warhol's 1965 film Vinyl is an adaptation of Anthony Burgess' popular dystopian novel A Clockwork Orange. Others record improvised encounters between Factory regulars such as Brigid Berlin, Viva, Edie Sedgwick, Candy Darling, Holly Woodlawn, Ondine, Nico, and Jackie Curtis. Legendary underground artist Jack Smith appears in the film Camp. His most popular and critically successful film was Chelsea Girls (1966). The film was highly innovative in that it consisted of two 16 mm-films being projected simultaneously, with two different stories being shown in tandem. From the projection booth, the sound would be raised for one film to elucidate that "story" while it was lowered for the other. The multiplication of images evoked Warhol's seminal silk-screen works of the early 1960s. Other important films include Bike Boy, My Hustler, and Lonesome Cowboys, a raunchy pseudo-western. These and other titles document gay underground and camp culture, and continue to feature prominently in scholarship about sexuality and art. Blue Movie – a film in which Warhol superstar Viva makes love and fools around in bed with a man for 33 minutes of the film's playing-time – was Warhol's last film as director. The film was at the time scandalous for its frank approach to a sexual encounter. For many years Viva refused to allow it to be screened. It was publicly screened in New York in 2005 for the first time in over thirty years. After his June 3, 1968, shooting, a reclusive Warhol relinquished his personal involvement in filmmaking. His acolyte and assistant director, Paul Morrissey, took over the film-making chores for the Factory collective, steering Warhol-branded cinema towards more mainstream, narrative-based, B-movie exploitation fare with Flesh, Trash, and Heat. All of these films, including the later Andy Warhol's Dracula and Andy Warhol's Frankenstein, were far more mainstream than anything Warhol as a director had attempted. These latter "Warhol" films starred Joe Dallesandro – more of a Morrissey star than a true Warhol superstar.
In the early '70s, most of the films directed by Warhol were pulled out of circulation by Warhol and the people around him who ran his business. After Warhol's death, the films were slowly restored by the Whitney Museum and are occasionally projected at museums and film festivals. Few of the Warhol-directed films are available on video or DVD.
64 min documentary on Andy Warhol's cinema of the sixties, made for Channel 4 in association with THE FACTORY, MOMA and the Whitney Museum of Art and in collaboration with Simon Field. Directed & Produced Keith Griffiths.
Sympathy for the Devil (originally titled One Plus One by the film director and distributed under that title in Europe) is a 1968 film shot mostly in color by director Jean-Luc Godard. Composing the film's main narrative thread are several long, uninterrupted shots of The Rolling Stones in a sound studio, recording and rerecording various parts to "Sympathy for the Devil." The dissolution of Stone Brian Jones is vividly portrayed, and the chaos of 1968 is made clear when a line referring to the killing of John F. Kennedy is heard changed to the plural after the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy in June.
Interwoven through the movie are outdoor shots of Black Panthers milling about in a junkyard littered with the rusting cars heaped upon each other. They read from revolutionary texts (including Amiri Baraka) and toss their rifles to each other, from man to man, as if in an assembly line, or readying for an impending battle. The rest of the film contains a powerful political message in the form of a voiceover about Marxism, the need for revolution and other topics in which Godard was interested. One scene involves a camera crew following a woman about, played by Anne Wiazemsky, in an outdoor wildlife setting, dressed in a flowing white gown, and no matter what she's asked, always answers "yes" or "no". As can be seen from the chapter heading to the scene, she is supposed to be a personification of democracy, a woman named Eve Democracy. At least one quarter of the film is devoted to indoor shots of a bookstore that sells such diverse items as Marvel's Doctor Strange, DC's The Atom, and The Flash comic books, Marxist pamphlets for propaganda, and various men's magazines. Alternating with the shots of comic books, pinup magazines, and Marxist pamphlets, consumers casually enter the bookstore, approach a bookshelf, pick up books or magazines, exchange them for a sheet of paper, and then slap the faces of two Maoist hostages sitting patiently next to a book display. Toward the end of the scene, a small child is admitted for the purpose of buying a pamphlet and slapping the faces of the hostages. After exchanging their purchases and receiving their document, each customer raises his/her right arm in a Nazi salute, and leaves the store. Mimicking the earlier scene of the camera crew following Eve Democracy is the last scene to the movie where the camera crew mills about on the beach and from afar one man asks another "what are they doing over there?" To which the other answers "I think they're shooting a movie". A large winch or crane is positioned on the beach and a woman in white is laid down upon the end of the crane and elevated on the platform until she is well above the beach. She doesn't rise up but remains motionless, half-hanging off the crane, one leg dangling. From Wikipedia
SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL JEAN-LUC GODARD (1968) 110 MINUTES UK
Cocksucker Blues is an unreleased documentary film directed by the noted still photographer Robert Frank chronicling The Rolling Stones' North American tour in 1972 in support of their album Exile on Main St..
The film is under a court order which forbids it from being shown unless the director Robert Frank is physically present. This ruling stems from the conflict that arose when the band, who had commissioned the film, decided that its content was inappropriate and potentially embarrassing, and did not want it shown. Frank felt otherwise — hence the ruling. The provocative title notwithstanding, its nudity, needles and hedonism was incriminating enough to get the picture shelved, and this during a liberal climate that saw the likes of Cry Uncle!, Deep Throat, and Chafed Elbows playing in neighborhood theaters. A generic performance film, Ladies and Gentlemen: The Rolling Stones, was released instead, and Cocksucker Blues was forever shelved.
When the Rolling Stones returned to the U.S. for a 1972 tour, they let photographer Robert Frank bring a crew of film cameras along for the ride with the intention of releasing an honest, behind-the-scenes look at a big band's life on the road. The final cut was a bit more raw than the band had bargained for, though: When Mick Jagger and Co. watched Cocksucker Blues they decided they never wanted anyone else to see it. Frank won a 1977 court ruling that permits him to screen the film four times a year in an "archival situation" where he must be present. Early scenes depict the band in a dingy rehearsal space, jamming on "You Can't Always Get What You Want." The black-and-white camera shows a table of leftover cocaine lines and hangs on Charlie Watts, whose eyes are intense as he pounds away on his kit while a rail-thin Mick Jagger shouts the last few choruses in his direction.
The documentary portrayed the tour as tumultuous. A shirtless (and toothless) Richards plays a boogie-woogie piano vamp with track marks covering his left arm. Bill Wyman looks a zombie in his appearance on the Dick Cavett Show. In an infamous scene, a roadie has sex with a reluctant-looking groupie on a plane while the band bangs on percussion instruments. The Met audience collectively gasped once, at a scene where a young groupie sits on a hotel room bed and injects her arm with heroin. Still the musical performances were electrifying though gritty, the camera sound natural and unmixed. The band duets with Stevie Wonder on a Motown-style medley of "Uptight" and "Satisfaction." Between songs, a John Belushi-sized horn player takes a swig from a whiskey bottle and spins back to his mic.
Monster Road is a feature length documentary exploring the wildly fantastic worlds of legendary animator Bruce Bickford. Tracing the origins of Bickford's iconoclastic worldview, the film journeys back to Bickford's childhood in a competitive household during the paranoia of the Cold War and examines his relationship with his father, George, who is facing the onset of Alzheimer's Disease.
Monster Road premiered at the 2004 Slamdance Film Festival where it won "Best Documentary," eventually screening at over 85 festivals around the world, winning sixteen awards before premiering on Sundance Channel in June 2005.
Biography:
Bruce Bickford was born in 1947 in Seattle Washington . He began animating clay in the summer of 1964 at the age of 17. He graduated from high school in 1965; and engaged in military service from 1966 to 1969. Upon his return he resumed animation, and did his first line animation in 1970, then in 1973 he went looking for work in Los Angeles -where he met Frank Zappa. He worked for him from 1974 through 1980. Afterwards, he returned to Seattle and resumed animating mostly his own personal work.
American Grindhouse is a 2010 documentary directed and produced by Elijah Drenner. The film made its world premiere at South by Southwest on March 13, 2010. The documentary chronicles the history of the American exploitation film from the days of Thomas Edison to contemporary films of the 21st century. The film features exclusive interviews with John Landis, Joe Dante, Jack Hill, Don Edmonds, Fred Williamson, Allison Anders, James Gordon White, Larry Cohen, William Lustig, Herschell Gordon Lewis, Judy Brown, Jeremy Kasten, Jonathan Kaplan, Bob Minor, Lewis Teague, David Hess and Fred Olen Ray. The documentary also features film historians Eddie Muller, Kim Morgan and Eric Schaefer. The narration is by actor Robert Forster.
After a bombastic opening credits sequence and an introduction that promises tons of gratuitous and sleazy sex, nudity and violence, the documentary American Grindhouse settles into something really hardcore: A hardcore history lesson.
Directed by Elijah Drenner, this chronicle of the seedy underbelly of film history does a damn fine job of showing how the notorious exploitation cinema racket is really the history of all cinema, that even from the days of Thomas Edison, all movies focused on the salacious and the bloodthirsty in order to draw in audiences. However, it is the grindhouse films that makes no bones about appealing to prurient interests while so-called mainstream films hide their licentious side under the cover of art.
One type of obscure, mostly-forgotten film covered in American Grindhouse are the ’50s childbirth films that were produced and promoted as allegedly educational tools, but were for the most part a cover so perverts could publicly gawk at a woman’s exposed hoo-haw and feel like stand-up pillars of their community. Drenner takes the opposite approach than that with his own documentary, promising the most vile, degrading acts ever committed to celluloid and offering up an actual, educational history lesson. Don’t get me wrong, though, American Grindhouse is packed to the gills with primo clips and trailers from the outrageous films being discussed. If you happen to want to gawk at a woman’s exposed hoo-haw — albeit with a baby popping out of it — and feel like a budding film historian, then this is the film to see. Lots of experts walk us through this seamy history, from film professors like Eric Schaeffer (Emerson College) to historians like Eddie Muller and Kim Morgan. In fact, even though the word “grindhouse” typically conjures up images of Times Square palaces showing horror, blaxploitation and skin flicks 24 hours a day in the ’60s and ’70s, American Grindhouse seems to linger more on the prior evolution of the exploitation film, including the wild, pre-Hays code days of Hollywood and the institution of that code, which set the stage to independent film hucksters to create the sordid types of entertainment that audiences truly crave. It’s a truly fascinating history and presented in a truly entertaining way by Drenner. In addition to the professors and historians, there are lots of great interviews with the actual makers, including established directors like Joe Dante and John Landis who got their start making exploitation-eque type features and obviously big fans of the genre. Although, at certain points, one almost wishes the entire documentary was just a long sit-down with the giddy, over-opinionated — in a good way — Landis mouthing off about different films and filmmakers. He’s interview gold. But there are also interviews with a few masters of the exploitation circuit, such as Don Edmonds (Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS), Jack Hill (The Big Doll House), Ted V. Mikels (The Corpse Grinders) and the wizard of gore Herschell Gordon Lewis. In fact, one of the most intriguing sections of American Grindhouse is the debate over whether Alfred Hitchcock‘s Psycho (1960) or Lewis’ Blood Feast (1963) was the beginning of the modern slasher movie craze. The only place where American Grindhouse falters is by being struck with title-card-itis, a disease that afflicts many documentaries. Generally, the film follows a linear path, moving from the birth of cinema up to the ’70s. But even with that structure clearly in place, Drenner still breaks up each time period, and the types of exploitation picture that dominated them, with a title card to tell the audience what it’s about to watch.
However, once the documentary hits the free-for-all ’70s when all manners of perversion and slaughter were exploited for entertainment, that clear linear flow gets tossed out the window and the title cards jump from genre to genre no matter what specific year is being covered. Thus, the film gets too jumpy for it’s own good and it feels as though certain subjects get crammed in and glossed over just to make sure nothing gets overlooked. For a quick example, there are title card sections for “horror” and “blaxploitation,” yet a film like Blacula only gets a brief clip in the “horror” section without a discussion of hybrid exploitation because the overall documentary is hamstrung by it’s title cards. With so much loving detail exhibited in the first three-quarters of the films, the lack of detail towards the end is incongruous and jarring.
Overall, though, all history lessons should be as much fun as American Grindhouse. Drenner has crafted a very loving tribute that should satisfy those who are already fans of the world of exploitation and those who know nothing about it. The fans get the great clips and trailers and serious discussion of their beloved medium, while the novices will actually learn a thing or two. Of course, those things will be a little disturbing, but that’s the fun and the thrill of the grindhouse experience.
- Bad Lit The Journal of Underground Film
AMERICAN GRINDHOUSE ELIJAH DRENNER (2010) 81 MIN USA
Pull My Daisy (1959) is a short film that typifies the Beat Generation. Directed by Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie, Daisy was adapted by Jack Kerouac from the third act of his play, Beat Generation; Kerouac also provided improvised narration. It starred poets Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky and Gregory Corso, artists Larry Rivers (Milo) and Alice Neel (bishop's mother), musician David Amram, actors Richard Bellamy (Bishop) and Delphine Seyrig (Milo's wife), dancer[1] Sally Gross (bishop's sister), and Pablo Frank, Robert Frank's then-young son. Based on an incident in the life of Beat icon Neal Cassady and his wife, the painter Carolyn, the film tells the story of a railway brakeman whose wife invites a respectable bishop over for dinner. However, the brakeman's bohemian friends crash the party, with comic results. Originally intended to be called The Beat Generation the title Pull My Daisy was taken from the poem of the same name written by Kerouac, Ginsberg and Cassady in the late 1940s. Part of the original poem was used as a lyric in David Amram's jazz composition that opens the film. The Beat philosophy emphasized spontaneity, and the film conveyed the quality of having been thrown together or even improvised. Pull My Daisy was accordingly praised for years as an improvisational masterpiece, until Leslie revealed in a November 28, 1968 article in The Village Voice that the film was actually carefully planned, rehearsed, and directed by him and Frank, who shot the film on a professionally lit studio set. Leslie and Frank discuss the film at length in Jack Sargeant's book Naked Lens: Beat Cinema. An illustrated transcript of the film's narration was also published in 1961 by Grove Press. Pull My Daisy was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress in 1996, as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". The impromptu narration juxtaposed with particular shots portray the Beat Generation in an autobiographical sense. The film editing process began with a picture lock and was a conservative, narrative story arc conceived by Jack Kerouac, directed by Alfred Leslie and shot by Robert Frank. The narration was then improvised by Kerouac resulting in a film that defines the Beat Generation, making a comment on a number of topics representative of conservative America, including protests against industrialization, education, anti-Semitism, sexuality, gender roles, religion and patriotism.
PULL MY DAISY ROBERT FRANK & ALFRED LESLIE (1959) 30 MIN USA
a strong love for creative expression runs through Davids veins. as a young child he excelled in artistic and athletic forms. all other activities fell to the way side however, after he discovered his love for skateboarding in his early 20s. a piece of art that he and his friends could enjoy and look back on is all he wanted out of his first film. he got much more. the feel good atmosphere and the flow of Don't Sport on my Passion(DSOMP) can be appreciated by all ages of skaters and nonskaters alike. the people in this film are simply doing what they love to do and would be doing anyway. this is a side of Seattle that many don't see or understand but for those in this movie skateboarding is a way of life. Hopefully DSOMP will put a smile on your face and you might get a taste of the obsessive madness and joy that a skateboarders life is full of.
DONT SPORT ON MY PASSION DAVID ROSENTHAL (2010) 34 MIN USA
