Over the past few months Finders Keepers Records and Manchester’s Dancehouse Theatre have been experimenting with a number of alternative cinema events in their Mancunian hometown attempting to open inquisitive and creative minds to a new world of lost cinema and film music which has seldom, if ever at all, made it to UK theatres in the past. Combining niche genres such as werewolf Hells Angels vs. satanic Aussie biker cults or Czech witchcraft for kids, Finders Keepers has gathered modest audiences in an attempt to bring something unique to fans of alternative cinema while providing a wider perspective to the previously unreleased soundtrack albums we have spent almost a decade remastering and releasing for the loyal global fan base that keeps our cogs turning in these times of uncertain prospects for the independent music, film and art industries. For those who have chose to join us to watch films, listen to our DJs soundtrack collections and drink beer thus far we are very grateful and happy that there is still a community of hopeless cultural escapologists who thirst for unknown pleasures expands beyond the comfort zones of pre-packaged pop and spoon-fed Hollywood designer drivel. The outsiders, the unknowns, the unpolished and the over politicised. Banned, canned and critically slammed. The lost films that make up the Hocus Focus monthly schedule in many cases have simply had nowhere else to go in the last 40 years and the selection at our latest and probably greatest installment will be no exemption. You’re certainly not going to see these films anywhere else anytime soon.
Returning to an unintentional recurring witchcraft theme the two films shown this Friday had been at the top of our curatorial want list for almost two decades before some global digging missions eventually wielded these forgotten VHS treats. Illustrating their joint subject matter via two very different cinematic disciplines Hocus Focus presents both a 1972 hallucinogenic proto-manga animation about a persecuted French witch, and a fly-on-the-wall true life American/Italian documentary about a young witch from the Italian mountains.
The latter of the two, Vali – The Witch Of Positano by Sheldon Rocklyn is a virtually unobtainable filmic document of an Australian born artist/dancer cum wiccan herbalist and spellmaker who via New York and Paris became acquainted with the likes of Salvador Dalí, Django Reinhardt, Jean Cocteau, Patti Smith and Ira Cohen (of Thunderbolt Pagoda infamy) before living in isolation on the Amalfi Coast in a small hut with a fox, a crow and a donkey to keep her company. Her poetic tongue, flame red hair and self-tattooed persona make this 1967 celluloid insight a beguiling slice of cross continental alternative film that simply wouldn’t (and couldn’t) be made in this day and age.
Comparatively speaking, the former selection, Belladonna Of Sadness by Eiichi Yamamoto literally pulls and pushes the boundaries of 70s cinema from the opposite end of the creative spectrum. Presented in inky animation this bizarre poetic adaptation of Jules Michelet’s French non-fiction book Satanism and Witchcraft? evokes visual parallels with the likes of Aubry Beardsly and Gustav Klimt, Jean Forest and Guy Peellaert. Having never received an official translation for English speaking audiences this screening will be rescored live by vocalist Jane Weaver (having recently provided soundtrack music to modern vampire film Kiss Of The Damned directed by John Cassevetes’ daughter Xan) in collaboration with film editor Andrew Rushton (NeoTantrik/Kleksploitation). Excerpts of this custom made soundtrack will appear on a forthcoming LP for Finders Keepers Disposable Music library series.
Hocus Focus is proudly presented in a unique (and eerily unfamiliar) theatrical venue that evokes a likeness to an old communist picture house or a haunted seaside function room. The Dancehouse is the hidden jewel amongst Manchester’s dwindling big screen landscape and is worth the price of admission alone for that warm distant nostalgic hit. This series of maligned outsider films also mark lost era in film history where experimental cinema appeared and disappeared without a trace. These anti classics and their diminishing returns were never designed for posterity. Blink and you might miss them which is why i urge those who care, to embrace Hocus Focus in case it disappears into a puff of smoke!
