Peter Emmanuel Goldman
A stripped-down account of a young man's existential reckoning. "As dust hides a mirror, lust hides the self," reads one of the film's Vedanta-sourced intertitles. And indeed, while the Pierre Clementi protagonist's inner life remains obscure, the Saint-Germain-des-Pres neighborhood that offers his temptations appears in harrowing detail.
Pestilent City covers Manhattan from South to North, from Times Square to Harlem, finding along the way ever more poverty, violence, rage and tragic drunkenness.
A chronicle of the lives of twenty-somethings adrift in New York City, finding tremendous pathos in the smallest moments: a furtive glance across a museum gallery, girls putting on makeup, a stroll beneath the pulsing lights of Times Square marquees.
The Queen of Sheba Meets the Atom Man" is a high art underground film made on a super-low budget, silent, and in black and white. Filmmaker Ron Rice announced it as a three-hour epic, but the longest cut of the footage works out to 108 minutes and that was not achieved until 20 years after the film was made. Taylor Mead completed the film in 1982.
