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WHEN "THE MOVIES" WERE STILL A WORLD UNTO ITSELF, THE COMPILATION-FILM MASTERPIECES OF JOE DANTE AND KEN JACOBS HAD IT ALL-LITERALLY
There is, Or once was, a movie universe - a quasi-autonomous realm of plotlines and personalities, coincidences and cross-references, quasars and black holes. Not just stargazers but anyone who frequented the world's movie houses lived there, at least part of the time. Some of us still do although, thanks to television, the movie universe had by the early Sixties become a subset of a larger media universe (or a second life) that was, by the late Nineties, itself subsumed in cyberspace.
As the "movi-verse" contracted, it became a subject of nostalgia and, as anachronistic things often are, was increasingly mapped, studied, and even reproduced as a discreet experience, or trip. One such experience was The Movie Orgy, the epic barrage of cheap creature features, civil-defense training films, kiddie TV shows, trailers, cartoons, skin flicks, and newsreels of Richard Nixon, with which Joe Dante and Jon Davison entertained hippie audiences in the early Seventies. The original movi-versal work, however, was Louis Feuillade's Les Vampires - not the 10-part serial initially released in 1915 or the fondly remembered Surrealist cult enthusiasm of the Twenties, but the movie as it was rescued from the garbage by Henri Langlois who subsequently revived it, after his own fashion (having removed and lost the intertitles), at the Cinémathèque Française. Langlois showed the entire six-hour serial sans intertitles in one sitting, and it was in this pure, if disorienting, form - a foaming cornucopia of conspiratorial madness - that Feuillade was embraced by a new generation of French cinéastes.
By the time the third New York Film Festival presented the Langlois Vampires at Lincoln Center's Philharmonic Hall on the evening of September 13, 1965, as a sort of Pop Art happening, American underground filmmakers had already begun exploring the movi-verse in even more radically material form. One harbinger appeared in June 1958 as a 16mm film produced by junk sculptor Bruce Conner for inclusion in his first one-man show in San Francisco. Every image in this 12-minute assemblage, save the title card (a movie by bruce conner) was secondhand - a compilation drawn from an array of newsreels, travelogues, stag...