Lost Media Associated w/ '60s Erotica and/or Italian Cinema
Feb 16, 2021 23:10:38 GMT
VHSUnderground, scifirenegade, and 3 more like this
Post by theCarbonFreeze on Feb 16, 2021 23:10:38 GMT
So, I've been on an interesting series of rabbit holes over the past year. It all started with finding "Mary's Theme" on a YouTube "recommended for you" playlist. After googling the name, and finding out that it came from a movie called Femina Ridens, the rest is history. Femina is honestly one of my top 5 favorite films now, and I wanted to know if there was anything else like it:
1) I started searching out other projects Stelvio Cipriani worked on, which introduced me to several of his contemporaries like Piero Piccioni, Armando Trovajoli, Piero Umiliani and Ennio Morricone.
2) I also sought out other Italian films, many of which are also among my new favorite movies. Among the best were The Libertine, Check to the Queen, The Girl from Parma and Crazy Desire.
3) Finally I learned that a man named "Radley Metzger" imported the flick to America, which led me to his filmography and the wider "Golden Age of Porn" in the US.
It's been a rewarding experience all things considered. I feel like I've expanded my horizons into some awesome semi-obscure art which deserves greater appreciation from the wider American public. And, to the point, it's exposed several instances of lost or nearly lost media to me. I'm going to list each individual case which I am aware of.
1) Arguably the biggest and most interesting of these is Penis, and that's already been saved. Penis predates the late 60s soft core, but artfully crafted, erotica films as well as the later 70s hard core porn chic stuff. It represents the only way you could get nudity on the screen in those days without resorting to making an 8mm loop in a seedy underground theater: film a bunch of random stuff and call it an art flick. So, as an important piece of "sex film" history, I'm so glad this was found. Still, I include it on the list anyway because there's still so much we don't know about this film, and we will probably never get answers. Also, and never forget this, half of the original 1965 version is still unaccounted for. The search, while cold and likely to remain that way, is far from over.
2) I also made a thread on the filmography of Giuseppe Rolando, director of about a dozen independent films focused on religion. Several of these are not accounted for after a thorough search online. (I searched every conceivable permutation of relevant terms I could think of on every search engine, I checked torrents as well.) Even though I was able to preserve a copy of Uccidere in Silenzio on YouTube and the Internet Archive, the print is still in terrible shape and in need of a restoration.
3) There is a golden age porn film called Not Just Another Woman (1973) that is unavailable to the public. To the best of my knowledge, it was never released to home media. It's not on the internet in any illicit streams, downloads or torrents. It was recently screened so there is at least one print floating around, but no way for the public to watch until or unless there are more screenings or some kind of release. It was probably little seen, because there are only 13 ratings on IMDb. I could only find the poster and a vintage newspaper review, no screencaps or publicity photos either. The plot involves a man in a polyamorous relationship with his wife, but when he sees her sister--who is a nun--he becomes obsessed with her.
4) Piero Schivazappa, the director of Femina Ridens, never went on to do anything else of note. It's shocking considering the level of technical proficiency and storytelling genius demonstrated throughout this lone masterpiece of his career. What makes it worse though, is that I could only find two of his other films: Incontro (1971) and even that only exists online in a low quality VHS rip with no english subtitles anywhere, as well as Lady of the Night (1986.) That leaves the following three unaccounted for: Crepa Padrone Crepa Tranquillo (1970), Una Sera C'incontrammo (1975), Un Amore Americano (1994)
5) Pasquale Festa Campanile directed dozens of films, many of them inventive sex-themed comedies. Check to the Queen and The Libertine are honest to god masterpieces in their own right, so I've wanted to sample the rest of his career. Several of his movies are very hard to find, many have never been released on home media and others are out of print. (More on that in #9.) The Libertine and Check to the Queen are lucky because they've gotten restorations and proper HD releases in the last few years. (Compare the before and after with this scene; it's like an entirely different film.) Others, like Il Merlo Maschio (1971), have not been so lucky. The one that's most enticing to me is The Sex Machine (1975) which has thus far eluded me. PFC was also a fairly prolific author of books too, but Amazon only offers a small sample of his work for purchase. The others, I imagine, are out of print and/or hard to find.
6) Catherine Spaak is my new favorite actress, bar none. I discovered her in The Libertine and you can see from the embedded links pertaining to that film that she's gorgeous. More than that though, she's talented as hell going from her films available on YouTube. She could play comedic roles, serious ones, and more than anything could carry a film by herself. Unfortunately, there are significant gaps in her filmography when it comes to home media. A few of these, even if they've never graced a DVD release, are at least available online. So far, of her '60s films, La Notte è Fatta per… Rubare (1967) and La Vedova Allegra (1968) have alluded me. I searched for these very extensively too. I have yet to seek out her '70s career and beyond, so fingers crossed for those...
7) Radley Metzger commissioned novelizations of every '60s erotica he directed or imported from Europe to the US. I was able to snag copies of the Femina Ridens and The Libertine novels and that was a miracle, let me tell you. Are they great works of literature? Admittedly no, but each was a fun read as well as a good companion piece to their respective film. There are at least nine others according to this source, and if they're anywhere near as hard to come by as the two I have, then I'm doubtful a complete set will ever be gathered. Admittedly I haven't searched out the other nine, because even I have my limits, and I only want those associated with the films I actually enjoy. The releases I own from this collection set me back $20 each and were the last available copies online at the time of purchase. Now, if this new listing is anything to go by, sellers are beginning to recognize the rarity of these books and collecting will become increasingly hard on the wallet. As you can imagine, this series is long out of print and considering they are cheap paperback sex books, it's doubtful buyers in the 60's have taken good care of them through the decades. Further complicating matters is that the publisher "Award Books" has since gone out of business, and some of the authors like Jacapo Massimo are ghosts in terms of their digital footprint (or lack thereof.) There's other novelized adult films too.
8) Many of these soundtracks are highly revered and available on LP/CD, even if the films themselves are niche. Femina Ridens in particular has been well-treated in this regard. But there's several which fell through the cracks and have been denied the honor of a proper home media release despite their merit. The biggest three cases I can think of are the scores of: Venus in Furs (1969), Devil in the Flesh (1969) and The Girl From Parma (1963). Only the title theme for Venus is available on YouTube, the many other beautiful compositions from the film are not, and they've never been officially released. I had to upload my own versions of the tracks from Devil, but due to the circumstances they come with ambient noise from the film. The DVD release from Shameless Films is so disrespectful it even cuts out the ending theme before the vocals kick in. As best I can determine, Parma only got a 15 minute medley on a Piero Piccioni themed CD.
9) Out of print DVDs. I have yet to take an extensive inventory of the films only available on out of print DVDs, but I assure you it's many. Usually I don't mind as long as the film is available somewhere online in fair quality. With Catherine Spaak films though, I prefer to have a physical copy. Besides The Libertine, she made two other movies with director Pasquale Festa Campanile: Adulterio all'Italiana (1966) and Il Marito è Mio e L'ammazzo Quando Mi Pare (1967). The latter instance is especially annoying because the film itself isn't streaming/downloadable or torrenting anywhere online. If you want to see it, as I do, you have to take the pluge and buy one of these things. As these DVDs become increasingly rare, and crackdowns on piracy persist, these movies will get harder to find. Several are overdue for a restoration.
1) I started searching out other projects Stelvio Cipriani worked on, which introduced me to several of his contemporaries like Piero Piccioni, Armando Trovajoli, Piero Umiliani and Ennio Morricone.
2) I also sought out other Italian films, many of which are also among my new favorite movies. Among the best were The Libertine, Check to the Queen, The Girl from Parma and Crazy Desire.
3) Finally I learned that a man named "Radley Metzger" imported the flick to America, which led me to his filmography and the wider "Golden Age of Porn" in the US.
It's been a rewarding experience all things considered. I feel like I've expanded my horizons into some awesome semi-obscure art which deserves greater appreciation from the wider American public. And, to the point, it's exposed several instances of lost or nearly lost media to me. I'm going to list each individual case which I am aware of.
1) Arguably the biggest and most interesting of these is Penis, and that's already been saved. Penis predates the late 60s soft core, but artfully crafted, erotica films as well as the later 70s hard core porn chic stuff. It represents the only way you could get nudity on the screen in those days without resorting to making an 8mm loop in a seedy underground theater: film a bunch of random stuff and call it an art flick. So, as an important piece of "sex film" history, I'm so glad this was found. Still, I include it on the list anyway because there's still so much we don't know about this film, and we will probably never get answers. Also, and never forget this, half of the original 1965 version is still unaccounted for. The search, while cold and likely to remain that way, is far from over.
2) I also made a thread on the filmography of Giuseppe Rolando, director of about a dozen independent films focused on religion. Several of these are not accounted for after a thorough search online. (I searched every conceivable permutation of relevant terms I could think of on every search engine, I checked torrents as well.) Even though I was able to preserve a copy of Uccidere in Silenzio on YouTube and the Internet Archive, the print is still in terrible shape and in need of a restoration.
3) There is a golden age porn film called Not Just Another Woman (1973) that is unavailable to the public. To the best of my knowledge, it was never released to home media. It's not on the internet in any illicit streams, downloads or torrents. It was recently screened so there is at least one print floating around, but no way for the public to watch until or unless there are more screenings or some kind of release. It was probably little seen, because there are only 13 ratings on IMDb. I could only find the poster and a vintage newspaper review, no screencaps or publicity photos either. The plot involves a man in a polyamorous relationship with his wife, but when he sees her sister--who is a nun--he becomes obsessed with her.
4) Piero Schivazappa, the director of Femina Ridens, never went on to do anything else of note. It's shocking considering the level of technical proficiency and storytelling genius demonstrated throughout this lone masterpiece of his career. What makes it worse though, is that I could only find two of his other films: Incontro (1971) and even that only exists online in a low quality VHS rip with no english subtitles anywhere, as well as Lady of the Night (1986.) That leaves the following three unaccounted for: Crepa Padrone Crepa Tranquillo (1970), Una Sera C'incontrammo (1975), Un Amore Americano (1994)
5) Pasquale Festa Campanile directed dozens of films, many of them inventive sex-themed comedies. Check to the Queen and The Libertine are honest to god masterpieces in their own right, so I've wanted to sample the rest of his career. Several of his movies are very hard to find, many have never been released on home media and others are out of print. (More on that in #9.) The Libertine and Check to the Queen are lucky because they've gotten restorations and proper HD releases in the last few years. (Compare the before and after with this scene; it's like an entirely different film.) Others, like Il Merlo Maschio (1971), have not been so lucky. The one that's most enticing to me is The Sex Machine (1975) which has thus far eluded me. PFC was also a fairly prolific author of books too, but Amazon only offers a small sample of his work for purchase. The others, I imagine, are out of print and/or hard to find.
6) Catherine Spaak is my new favorite actress, bar none. I discovered her in The Libertine and you can see from the embedded links pertaining to that film that she's gorgeous. More than that though, she's talented as hell going from her films available on YouTube. She could play comedic roles, serious ones, and more than anything could carry a film by herself. Unfortunately, there are significant gaps in her filmography when it comes to home media. A few of these, even if they've never graced a DVD release, are at least available online. So far, of her '60s films, La Notte è Fatta per… Rubare (1967) and La Vedova Allegra (1968) have alluded me. I searched for these very extensively too. I have yet to seek out her '70s career and beyond, so fingers crossed for those...
7) Radley Metzger commissioned novelizations of every '60s erotica he directed or imported from Europe to the US. I was able to snag copies of the Femina Ridens and The Libertine novels and that was a miracle, let me tell you. Are they great works of literature? Admittedly no, but each was a fun read as well as a good companion piece to their respective film. There are at least nine others according to this source, and if they're anywhere near as hard to come by as the two I have, then I'm doubtful a complete set will ever be gathered. Admittedly I haven't searched out the other nine, because even I have my limits, and I only want those associated with the films I actually enjoy. The releases I own from this collection set me back $20 each and were the last available copies online at the time of purchase. Now, if this new listing is anything to go by, sellers are beginning to recognize the rarity of these books and collecting will become increasingly hard on the wallet. As you can imagine, this series is long out of print and considering they are cheap paperback sex books, it's doubtful buyers in the 60's have taken good care of them through the decades. Further complicating matters is that the publisher "Award Books" has since gone out of business, and some of the authors like Jacapo Massimo are ghosts in terms of their digital footprint (or lack thereof.) There's other novelized adult films too.
8) Many of these soundtracks are highly revered and available on LP/CD, even if the films themselves are niche. Femina Ridens in particular has been well-treated in this regard. But there's several which fell through the cracks and have been denied the honor of a proper home media release despite their merit. The biggest three cases I can think of are the scores of: Venus in Furs (1969), Devil in the Flesh (1969) and The Girl From Parma (1963). Only the title theme for Venus is available on YouTube, the many other beautiful compositions from the film are not, and they've never been officially released. I had to upload my own versions of the tracks from Devil, but due to the circumstances they come with ambient noise from the film. The DVD release from Shameless Films is so disrespectful it even cuts out the ending theme before the vocals kick in. As best I can determine, Parma only got a 15 minute medley on a Piero Piccioni themed CD.
9) Out of print DVDs. I have yet to take an extensive inventory of the films only available on out of print DVDs, but I assure you it's many. Usually I don't mind as long as the film is available somewhere online in fair quality. With Catherine Spaak films though, I prefer to have a physical copy. Besides The Libertine, she made two other movies with director Pasquale Festa Campanile: Adulterio all'Italiana (1966) and Il Marito è Mio e L'ammazzo Quando Mi Pare (1967). The latter instance is especially annoying because the film itself isn't streaming/downloadable or torrenting anywhere online. If you want to see it, as I do, you have to take the pluge and buy one of these things. As these DVDs become increasingly rare, and crackdowns on piracy persist, these movies will get harder to find. Several are overdue for a restoration.
