Barbareveuse

‘L’apocalypse selon saint Godzilla. Ce kaleidoscope d’images empruntà ®es à d’autres films pourrait n’être qu’une compilation brillante , mais banale . C’est , en fait, une oeuvre de re-creation à ®tourdissante d’inventività ®, de fureur et de libertà ®.’ (Jean-Pierre Bouyxou ) The sequence in Roger Vadim’s Barbarella (1968) in which the villainous Milo O’Shea fails spectacularly to dispose of Jane Fonda in his machine for making women die of pleasure provides the bookends for this farrago of excesses – much like the falling factory chimney in Cocteau’s Le Sang d’un poète . My Barbarèveuse is sub-titled : a dream in four elements – earth, air, water and fire, the superior of the elements. Tony Rayns called it a ‘cosmic-scale collage’ (which takes) ‘ the montage of attractions to places Eisenstein dreamed of, but didn’t dare write down’. About three years in the making, it was put together out of hundreds of fragments culled from a pretty formidable ‘archive’ of found, borrowed, snitched and home-made material. All this going on late in the evening to the sounds of John Peel’s famous record programme featuring the most adventurous pop music prior to Punk – some of which inevitably found its way onto the sound track.