FINDERS KEEPERS RECORDS PRESENT HOCUS FOCUS
To mark the long overdue release of Polish arthouse-cum-Video Nasty masterpiece Possession on Blu-ray, Hocus Focus is proud to host a screening of the newly restored print alongside a very rare performance of Andy Votel’s critically acclaimed Kleksploitation – an audio/visual homage to Pan Kleks, a Polish trilogy of films for children from the 1980s and the unsung genius who scored them, Andrzej Korzynski.
Capturing the energy generated when two people whose lives are so intensely fused and woven are forcibly split, Possession is an emotional nuclear explosion. If all we were given were its operatic and shamanistic performances by leads Isabelle Adjani and Sam Neill, its impossible-to-describe music by Andrzej Korzynski, and its masterful, hyper-kinetical ballet of camera choreography — all delivered with the force of a long-suppressed traumatic memory — then Possession would already be the best film about divorce ever filmed. But when the angels and demons of our inner nature are literally incarnated in phantasmagorical form — the kind requiring the talents of Oscar-winning creature FX master Carlo Rambaldi (who, instead of making a cutey-pie E.T., concocts a tentacled Lovecraftian octo-sex-demon) — you have the kind of explosively cathartic and entertaining experience that leads to movie-lover nirvanic bliss.
One of the most enigmatic composers in 60s/70s/80s European cinema, Andrzej Korzynski’s unique experiments with jazz, pop, rock, orchestral and electronic music make his name synonymous with the most praised (Andrzej Wajda) and the most provocative (Andrzej Zulawski) Polish filmmakers. As an early patron of the Polish New Wave and a key exponent of the development of conceptual Polish pop music his expansive soundtrack portfolio deserved to find its place next to the work of Ennio Morricone, François de Roubaix and John Barry, yet for many years his works remained commercially unreleased in the West. Enhanced by a renewed interest in vintage art house film and a subculture of open-minded music collectors like Andy Votel, many Eastern European artists, such as Krzysztof Komeda (Poland), Zdeněk Liška, Jan Hammer (Czechoslovakia), and now Andrzej Korzynski have finally earned their rightful place alongside their Central European peers.
His long time collaboration and close friendship with leading Polish New Wave director Andrzej Żuławski has given audiences a potent creative fusion to match the work of Polanski/Komeda, Fellini/Rota and Argento/Goblin, amongst others.
Producer and musician Andy Votel became fascinated by Korzynski after an art school trip to Poland almost 20 years ago, he was particularly drawn to the use of the legendary TB-303 Roland synthesizer in his later progressive, psychedelic orchestral funk music. Through Finders Keepers, Votel and label partner Doug Shipton have already begun an important restoration project of the composer’s vast cinematic catalogue having already carefully remastered and made available his previously unreleased scores for Andrzej Zulawski’s surrealist 80s horror classic Possession and Third Part of the Night as well as Secret Enigma, a compilation of 22 rare and unreleased vintage tracks from experimental film, political allegories, lost television shows, sound libraries and radio.
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 we urge those who care, to embrace Hocus Focus in case it disappears into a puff of smoke.
