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| "You can't unsee a Foam-O-Graph™!" |
This isn't Dementia 13, film fans. Nor is it the 2015 Dementia, about a war veteran with Alzheimer's and a sinister nurse, like the poor sap didn't have enough on his plate. This is the original 1955 Dementia before th' dumb bastids added a catastrophic, mood-destroying voiceover and re-released it as Daughter Of Horror.
It's genuinely, unsettlingly weird. David Lynch must have used it as his playbook. There's no dialog, just one disturbing scene after another. Primitive, powerful imagery that'll haunt your sunlit Sunday!
Want your own copy? Ankle over to MediaHuman, and download their swell YouTube downloader app!
ReplyDeleteDearie me. And here I thought, all these years, that I had to do all sorts of horrible things to damage my health to get dementia. Now I can do it without leaving my own home.
ReplyDeleteViewing this saves you decades of cooking with aluminum pans.
DeleteAnd still seven years before Timothy Carey shows us the real thing!
ReplyDeleteSomewhat disturbing...like any workday routine in Los Angeles. But, is this a dramatized attempt at dementia, or sociopathic psychosis? The city is wound pretty tight nowadays. This was like a modern day alcoholic blackout. You don't remember...
so, you don't really know.
Main point:
There are no abnormal thoughts...
only abnormal behavior.
Gold chains are fine a la carte...
but hold the hand. I'm trying to quit!
(There are no bad guys...only disturbed guys).
I forgot the words to the second verse...
but the grocery list...I knew!
Thank you, Farq.
Easy does it!
One day at a time!
It's 7pm on Saturday here in California!
DeleteSunday is another country!
(And, I'm stone cold sober)
It's midday Sunday here, and Sanity Clause won the first at Hialeah by a gnose ...
DeleteHere's another take on the scenery in the movie; Giorgio De Chirico-Milton Erickson 1958-Aldous Huxley-Krishnamurti 1967 Amsterdam Can there be total freedom-seeing without like or dislike.
ReplyDeleteOh and throw in Shorty Rogers for the music-Ken Nordine-beatnik jazz
The mossbrain© mainframe belies the name (by any other name, a familiar 4/5 guy under an aka): no moss (or wool) gathering here!
DeleteI saw "Dementia" for the first time in the early 70's on a double bill with Alain Resnais’s "Last Year at Marienbad" at the sorely missed Thalia Theatre, that was Manhattan's classic art house.
ReplyDeleteDavid Lynch probably watched it hundreds of times. I also saw "Dementia" again on a double bill with "Eraserhead", also at the Thalia Theatre.
Wait Is that a young Sharon Stone?
ReplyDeleteI'm in.
Cheers
ObeygravitY
Try this on for size, fits all......https://archive.org/details/1955-dementia-john-parker
ReplyDeleteTanks fer dis. Slick as snot.
DeleteCinephiles will recognise "slick as snot" from the Cahiers Du Cinema 1955 review.
DeleteThanks for the link, Rob - 153 views?!?!?!
DeleteSad state of affairs....
ReplyDeleteThis piece got wayyyy more views, so that's good.
DeleteNY, NY; https://archive.org/details/0310_Day_in_New_York_A_11_00_49_00
ReplyDeleteI used to live a couple of minutes walk from downtown Venice, where the police chase scene was shot.
ReplyDeleteVery cool.
Uh huh. Venice Beach. I went for a walk there once, looking at the little houses on the canals in the sunshine, thinking how perfect it all was. Then I became aware of someone following me, on the other side of the street. Stopped when I stopped. Turned away when I turned my head. Not many people walk in L.A., and we were the only ones on the street. I took a couple of turns, walking quicker, my shadow keeping pace. I was sweating, and it wasn't the heat. There were two of them now, one on my side of the street. I ran, got back to the basketball game on the beach court, got lost in the crowd, my heart pumping.
DeleteNothing remotely like it happened in the real Venice, where I've walked the streets alone at all hours, well away from the tourist attractions. There is always that threat in the air in L.A., the worm in the apple. Once, up the coast somewhere near Santa Barbara, I was walking in an idyllic little enclave of tucked-away houses, the ocean right there, and a woman on her knees in the street, her hands pressed into her eyes, screaming, "this place is hell".
City of the Angels?
I never had the problem you describe in Venice, though that was just luck. I certainly heard similar stories.
ReplyDeleteI agree with the larger point of the sense of impending doom that seems to blanket LA. People there seem to take it in stride.