OCTOBER 15, 2015
at THIRD MAN RECORDS
DOORS at 7pm, FILMS at 8pm
Non Belcourt-Member tickets available for $10
*Come early for a collection of interviews and trailers from the course of Harrington's career!
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Before directing his first feature (1961's enigmatic horror/fantasy NIGHT TIDE, with Dennis Hopper) Curtis Harrington was already a uniquely positioned figure in the American avant garde. He was a protégé of Maya Deren, a friend and collaborator with Kenneth Anger, and an author of some of the earliest scholarship on the career of Joseph Von Sternberg. His psycho-sexual, death-obsessed short films - pioneering works of the emerging "New Queer Cinema" - suggested he may have been the American answer to Jean Cocteau. Furthermore, he prominently figures into the nebula of Aleister Crowley-associated occultists, having shot Kenneth Anger's PUCE MOMENT and acted in his INAUGURATION OF THE PLEASURE DOME. Indeed, his 1946 short A FRAGMENT OF SEEKING is often considered to be one half of a pair with Anger's seething, queer expressionist film FIREWORKS. Another of his works, THE WORMWOOD STAR, is a profile of artist/actress Marjorie Cameron, another Anger collaborator and the wife of rocket scientist/Thelemite/would-be Antichrist Jack Parsons.
Though his work in the realm of feature-film would find him at the helm of several atmospheric horror and thriller pictures for Roger Corman, AIP, and Universal Pictures, he eventually slipped into obscurity as a television director, shooting episodes of CHARLIE'S ANGELS, DYNASTY, and so on. Today, thanks to preservation efforts by The Academy Film Archive and a recent Blu Ray edition from Flicker Alley & Drag City, Harrington's mysterious and groundbreaking early works are finally ripe for reappraisal.
