The Horse Hospital

Tav Falco Film Flicks

SATURDAY OCT 25th 2003
Doors 7.30pm, screening starts 8.00pm

In the first of our two days of events celebrating the cultural phenomena that is MEMPHIS,

kinoKULTURE and FRENZI Records & Films present

TAV FALCO FILM FLICKS

memphis – paris TOP GENRE NECROPHILIAC

LIVE EXCAVATIONS ROGUE MALE

An exclusive presentation of films by, of, about and featuring the legendary Tav Falco, in the presence of the artist!!

with work by directors
RAINER KIRBERG - ROBERT GORDON - RICHARD PLEUGER - TAV FALCO

Screening :

« Les Jeunes Filles Eclair » « Phineas Newborn, Jr. »
«Graceland » « Shade Tree Mechanic » « Honky Tonk »
« King Riders » « Indigenous Whites » « Johnny Woods »
« Memphis Beat » « Sleepy John Estes » « Ten Books of Basie »
« Born Too Late » « Love's Last Warning »

Special thanks to Max Decharne

Les JEUNES FILLES ECLAIR
1978
Memphis, Tennessee
50-min.
3/4 » Umatic Video original, B&W

Flash girls caught in the web intime between camera and lover, and lover and camera. Marginal secrets revealed in a time capsule aborted too soon.

PHINEAS NEWBORN, Jr.
August 17, 1975
Memphis, Tennessee
3-min. excerpt
1/2 » Open Reel Video original, B&W

Imagine yourself a prodigy, a jazz virtuoso of the 1950s. You have played with everybody from Duke Ellington to Charlie Mingus. Then POW… you are lost for twenty years. Your achievements and talents put into chemical and canvas straitjackets. Living with your mother. Treated like a miscreant. Then you begin to rise to the top again. This is one of the man’s first public performances before a public eager and waiting so long for his return.

GRACELAND
August 17 & 18, 1977
Memphis, Tennessee
30-min.
1/2 » Open Reel Video original, B&W

Study of crowd of mourners at the gates of the family mansion and on the spot interviews on the death of Elvis presley.

SHADE TREE MECHANIC
1987
Memphis, Tennessee
4-min.
16mm Film original, Color

A day in the life of the Unapproachable Panther Burns : their women, their house, their dogs, their cars, their motorcycles, their garage, their music, their bodyguards, their rituals. Directed by Richard Pleuger.

HONKY TONK
September 28,1974
Coldwater, Mississippi
26-min.
1/2 » Open Reel Video original, B&W

Saturday Night" in a north central Mississippi 'Tonk' called the Brotherhood Sportsmen's Lodge. We hear the blues expounded in its most volatile form. Delta Blues player Rural (RL) Burnside and friends clearly delineate the function of the honky tonk in rural black life.
Grainy, Jean Rouch-verite-style video original documentation of a hill-countryblues club

KING RIDERS
1986
Memphis, Tennessee
36-min.
1/2 » Open Reel Video original, B&W

Annual convention of King Riders Motorcycle Club, the largest black motorcycle organization in the US. Tav Falco goes into their clubhouse & shot festivities. Emblems of different gangs, social dances (including line dancing), electric blues band led by a man they called, Pig… "get on down & put your weight on it." Patches & logos on backs of leather & blue jean jackets : Royal Knights, The Easy Riders, The Ace of Spades, Gayhawks of Mississippi, Stroker Naptown Riders of Nashville, A-Town EZ Rider of Anderson, Indiana (Tanqueray Kid), Bobby Aries of the Easy Riders of Baton Rouge, LA., God's Sons of Tennessee (crude caricature of Satan), Creek Brothers; Rising Sons of Memphis; Memphis Gentlemen (skull wearing top hat & bow tie), Black Demons of Holly Springs, Mississippi, Sunset Riders of Brownsville, Kula Sisters of Memphis, The Hustlers of Memphis, Soul Stars of New Orleans, & the Foxy Ladies. Doctor D rapping about a girl who likes to freak-- ah, "the freak of the week." Man -wearing sunglasses & black satin jacket- performing on stage with orange-haired puppet. The puppet gets funky!

INDIGENOUS WHITES
July 27, 1975
Memphis, Tennessee
30-min.
1/2 » Open Reel original, B&W

One of the most stunning forays into the existence of poor people. Candid conversations with the scions of the early settlers of White Station, Tennessee. Family history, that great watershed of the shadowed dreamer, plays a dominant role in this indictment of certain human aspects of our time.

JOHNNY WOODS
August 24, 1974
Rabbit Ridge, Mississippi
3-min. excerpt.
1/2 » Open Reel Video original, B&W

Home grown harmonica at its best. He played with the legendary Fred McDowell during his twenty years’ submersion in Mississippi. Woods is tossed in the rough and tumble livingroom of his white Panola countyi mentors. This tape has been criticized for being racially bizarre (for an enlightened age). Johnny plays in the style of the late 19th. century medicine minstrel vagabond.

MEMPHIS BEAT
February 2,1989
Memphis, Tennessee
3-min.
16mm Film original, Color

Filmed and directed by Robert Gordon ("It Came From Memphis") with cut-away footage shot by Tav Falco and Dan Rose. (Locations later used by Jim Jarmusch in his feature, "Mystery Train"). This is a filmic record of Panther Burns in action on the occasion of the anniversary of the group's 10th. year performance to the date. A temporary stage is erected in a cotton warehouse situated on the bluffs of the Mississippi River where the band plays to an audience of music lovers and unruly celebrants. Among the performers are the original formation of Panther Burns, including Tav Falco - himself, Alex Chilton, Ross Johnson, and Eric Hill. Joining them on stage are an array of Memphis artists who also had tenure within the line-up of the group: namely, Jim Duckworth, the Easley Brothers, George Reinecke, and certain members of their sister group, the Hellcats. Also featured is an appearance by pioneer rocker, Cordell Jackson (Moon Records), in addition to closing scenes at the voodoo counter of Schwabs on Beale Street.

SLEEPY JOHN ESTES
September 5, 1975
Brownsville, Tennessee
3-min. excerpt
1/2 » Open Reel Video original, B&W

The most lyrical and poetic of the Tennessee bluesmen. Shot in the front yard of the Estes’ house, we get a real insight into the Estes’ style with its ascerbic bite. The ominious shadow of the boss man falls across the scene at one point chilling like white ice.

TEN BOOKS of BASIE
June 6 & 7, 1975
Memphis, Tennessee
30-min.
1/2 » Open Reel Video original, B&W

Flower children of the '60s out in the attic moaning for those lost days of the intact nervous system. They wheel through the old times to come up with a pitiful hand-hold on the '70s. Lost in the thrill-kill present, prisoners of the ironclad past. Shocking.

This video-original footage is exemplary of the early open reel to reel prosumer equipment of the time it was shot: grainy, edgy, shaky, and less than stable. The footage is raw & gritty in the truest sense. A video happening, described by photographer Tav Falco as "an art action piece

BORN TOO LATE
1993
Budapest, Hungary
4-min.
Original Film: 35mm B&W

Filmic treatment of an original dirge fugue composed & delivered on screen by Tav Falco, himself…a singer, claims « Variety » who was the first to treat Fellini to a Mississippi mud pak. Filmed in the baroque Cupola Room of Club Fésék in Budapest by cinématographer, Sas Tàmàs, and directed with precision by Rainer Kirberg, an award-winning screenplay writer now living in Berlin. The Austrian actress, Nina Tischler, debuts her career as 'Belzina'... and the avant garde fashion designer, Tamàs Kiràly, known as the Jean Paul Gaultier of the east, appears here as a switch-blade wielding hustler. The Viennese dancer, Doris Ebner, performs a feline, tango ritual in the arms of Làszlò Attila who has been sublimely described as a dancing 'Bela Lugosi on acid'.

Premier broadcast in light rotation on MTV-Europe.

LOVE'S LAST WARNING
1996
Vienna, Austria
5-min.
Super-16mm Film original, Color

A moody lament of romantic longing and regret written and performed here by Tav Falco for the "Shadow Dancer" album. Under the direction of Rainer Kirberg, the piece was filmed at the notorious Hotel Orient in Vienna, a discreet bordello frequented by Orson Welles & Graham Green during the filming of the Carol Reed classic, "The 3rd. Man".
Featuring the Viennese stage and screen luminary, Ellen Umlauf, who began her career in dance, becoming a prima ballerina before entering acting. She has appeared in nulerous films and stage productions in Germany and in Vienna at the Burg Theatre.
Also featured is the pioneer underground filmmaker and author Kenneth Anger appearing as himself... shuffling a deck of tarot cards and presiding over the bizarre transformation of Tav Falco into the dagger whipping character of Fantomas . Kenneth Anger was a child actor in Hollywood in the 1930s and later the creator of such celebrated and daring underground films as the masturbatory "Fireworks" (which he crafted at age 17), and the seminal motorcycle cult movie, "Scorpio Rising", and "Invocation of My Demon Brother" (featuring Marianne Faithful and with music by Mick Jagger), and "Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome" (with Anaïs Nin). He is perhaps as famous for his books of movie industry scandal, gossip, and intrigue ~namely, Hollywood Babylon and Hollywood Babylon II. The former was first published in France in 1960 and the United States a decade later, and has become a worldwide bestseller that is, in the words of Susan Sontag, "as legendary as its subject". Anger remains an active and meticulous filmmaker now living in Palm Springs, California.

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