Cinematic folk art

Soon after the US invastion of Iraq, Iraqis were producing DVDs which I guess had some popularity. They combined patriotic music and scenes of resistance to the U.S. occupation of their country. There was an Iraqi filmmaker with a camcorder who started production of a more conventional movie. I was always curious about those. I wanted to see some, some cinematic folk art.

Then there were Thailand and Burma. Thailand's capacity to make sound movies was snuffed out by World War Two. For years, the country's movie production took the form of silent 16mm films with live narration in theaters. Francois Truffaut mentioned this during his discussion of Psycho with Alfred Hitchcock. By the late '60s, spurred by the popularity of Indian musicals, all Thai movies were 35mm with sound and color.

Burma had a couple of major studios that produced only silent movies at least into the 1970s.

And there were reportedly 16mm silent films being made in San Francisco for audiences in Chinatown in the 1950's.

I'd like to see those movies. I've been curious about them for years. I might be disappointed.

I was disappointed by the few Nollywood movies I've seen. I have this fascination with "no budget" movies, but they're usually not that good and you don't really know what they mean by "no budget". I've heard of serious cinematic works made for $50, but some of these "no budget" movies cost tens of thousands of dollars. That sounds like a budget to me.

I did see what I thought were some pretty good movies made by kids on Community Access TV.

One was made during the Anne Rice craze. A silent movie. We see a high school student at his locker. He stands there. He looks around. The looks at his locker again. He looks around again. An intertitle tells us that he's planning to go out that evening.

We see him walking through a cemetery where he's attacked by several girls who are vampires who drag him into the cemetery. The last half of the movie (it was half an hour) shows the girls getting a celebratory tattoo, which made me wonder if they were high school kids or college kids, or maybe high school seniors, since I prefer to believe that children under 18 can't legally get tattoos.

There was another made by a middle school kid. It had little plot. It was done as a school project so there was nothing remotely rebellious about it. Something about a kid who's reunited with a friend at the beginning of the school year. There's a brief food fight. They're required to write essays about why fighting with food is bad. Some kids are confused by other kids who aren't part of any identifiable social group. The movie was an hour long but might have had twenty minutes worth of material, so they padded it with long takes of classroom scenes with pop music playing on the soundtrack.

And there was a movie I've only heard about made by a five-year-old. They used some sort of computer animation. The main character spends much of the movie fighting, then eats and takes a nap.

And there were movies that sound less interesting but I still wouldn't mind seeing.

Like, there was a married couple who Mike Kuchar discussed somewhere. They would go into the financial district in New York. If you go there in the early morning before places open for business, the streets are deserted. I saw this in the financial district in Boston. It's kind of cool.

But this couple would go there and make movies where the woman was walking down the street and a man would run up to her and rip her dress off. I don't know if there was any more to it than that. Kuchar mentioned it because the woman appeared in Sins of the Fleshapoids and she insisted on a scene where the Fleshapoid tears her dress off.