Round two of films from the book "Film as a Subversive Art" written in 1974 by Amos Vogel, the founder of the Cinema 16 in New York, New York Film Festival and Lincoln Center Film Department. Reviewing over 500 films (many of which are banned and rarely seen), Amos Vogel ruminates upon "how the aesthetic, sexual and ideological subversives use film medium to manipulate our conscious and unconscious, demystify visual taboos, destroy dated cinematic forms, undermine existing value systems and institutions." Among the filmmakers featured are Steve Arnold, Stan Vanderbeek, Bruce Conner, Robert Breer, Robert Mitchell and Dale Chase, Peter Kubelka and others.

THE LIBERATION OF MANNIQUE MECHANIQUE 16mm, 15min, 1971
Director: Steve Arnold
(Chapter: Expressionsm the Cinema of Unrest)

A haunting, genuinely decadent work about mannequins that may be real and girls that may be models, journeying through strange universes towards possible self-discovery. An exorbitant, perverse sensibility informs the ambiguous images and events.

A la Mode 16mm, 10min, 1961
What Who How 16mm, 8min, 1955
Director: Stan Vanderbeek
(Chapter: Dada and Pop: Anti-Art?)

A la Mode: A satire on fashions, style, vanity, and the female form divine. The film attacks the visual excesses of our time, using girlie and glamour magazine cut-outs as raw material. "A cine-igmatic comment on the mythology of women".

What Who How: Ethereal Vogue models, terrible beasts, and bedraggled knights in a grotesque animation collage concerning "the unexpected beneath the real".  However much the image draws attention to its own artificiality, one cannot avoid uneasiness at the displacement of  "real" face and the resulting "emptiness".

Cosmic Ray 16mm, 4min, 1962
Director: Bruce Conner
(Chapter: Dada and Pop: Anti-Art?)

Eight images per second flash by at the brink of retinal perception in this extraordinary pop art collage of a nude dancing girl surrounded by Academy leaders, war footage, Mickey Mouse, and the raising of the American flag at Iwo Jima.
An attempt at a total audio-visual experience, this hypnotic four-minute film contains two thousand different images.

Blazes 16mm, 3min, 1961
(Chapter: Straining Towards the Limits)
Homage to Jean Tinguely's Homage to New York 16mm. 9.5min, 1968
(Chapter: Dada and Pop: Anti-Art?)
Director: Robert Breer

Blazes: 4000 frames of film, featuring 100 basic images in breathtakingly rapid sequence produce a single kinetic impression.   As in Vertov's experiments, two different images immediately following each other on consecutive frames create superimpositions that do not exist in reality.

Homage... Eighty bicycle-, tricycle- and wagon-wheels, a piano of sorts, some metal drums, an addressing machine, a bathtub, bottles, a meterological balloon powered by fifteen motors; the film records the short life and sudden demise of Tinguely's bizarre protest against mechanized society, the "self-creating and self-destroying" machine that committed suicide in the garden of New York's Museum of Modern Art in 1960.

Further Adventures of Uncle Sam 16mm, 12min, 1971
Director: Robert Mitchell and Dale Chase
(Chapter: Dada and Pop: Anti-Art?)

An original and sophisticated animated film, with strong pop art and surreal influences. Uncle Sam and the Statue of Liberty are in chains in a future totalitarian America ruled by Pentagon and Dollar Men.  The Statue of Liberty is finally tied to a stake in Yankee Stadium, but rescued by Uncle Sam and they go off into the sunset.

Arnulf Rainer 16mm, 6.5min, 1960
Director: Peter Kubelka (Austria)
(Chapter: The subversion of form: Straining towards the limits)

This is the first frame by frame abstraction that entirely dispenses with the image and consist solely of carefully orhcstrated alternations of blank, black or white frames.

Mickey Mouse in Vietnam 16mm, 1968 tentative
Director: Lee Savage
(Chapter: The West: Rebels, Maoists and New Godard)

In this one-minute film, Mickey joins the army, arrives in Vietnam and is immediately killed. The destruction of this national symbol -- in itself subversive -- also implies the destruction of the American myth by the Vietnam War.

Two Men and a Wardrobe 16mm, 15min, 1957 (Poland) tentative
Director: Roman Polanski
(Chapter: Subversion in Eastern Europe: Aesopian Metaphors)

Two men emerge from the ocean with a mysterious wardrobe -- and are promptly rejected by "socialist" society no longer in need of (possibly dangerous)
miracles, preferring corruption, indifference, and crime.  A pioneering work of the Polish "thaw" of the late fifties by the then unknown Polanski.

The limited Polish reform movement that brought Gomulka to power in the late 50s also expressed itself in the cinema.  At the 1958 International Avant-Garde Film Festival in Brussels, there surfaced, to  everyone's astonishment, seven 35mm films -- produced and financed by the Polish State Film Industry! -- ranging from surrealism to dadaism, from abstract to expressionist art. Two of the films -- Two Men and a Wardrobe and Dom, received the top awards at the festival. Viewed in 1958 as heady harbingers of the possible end of sterile, "socialist realism", they now stand as melancholy reminders of a short-lived period of reform; significantly, their directors, Borowczyk, Lenica, and Polanski now live and work in the West. Two Men and a Wardrobe succeeds, by means of poetic imagery and conception, in blending what superficially seems light fantasy with social comment of the utmost severity. Two men emerge from the sea, proto-mythological fashion, however not with a fabled treasure but a dilapidated wardrobe. Outsiders, they attempt to make contact with organized society, to interest it in the symbolic value of the wardrobe, but to no avail; even their efforts at helping others fail, nor can they sit with it in coffee houses, ride on buses, or get involved with girls.  As they pursue their task, pickpockets, murderers, and drunks crowd the edges of the frame.  It seems that society has no room for ambiguous (and possibly dangerous) treasures, preferring to follow its own set and corrupt ways.  In a provocative  ending,  the appropriate conclusion is drawn by the two protagonists, the only people shown to be human: they return to the sea and disappear. In retrospect, this and Polanski's other short films (An Angel Has Fallen, The Fat and The Lean, Mammals), all made before he turned to features, emerge as his most personal, most subversive works.