The Right Side of My Brain

Richard Kern's The Right Side of My Brain is, from what I've seen so far, his dreamiest and most hypnotic effort, frighteningly potent with its saturated black and white photography and frequently haunting with its narration by its lead actress, Lydia Lunch. Lunch plays a woman, who uses the entire twenty-four minutes of the short to voice her rambling opinions on sex, her own self, and the entirety of existence. It's a short that gets pretty immersive for a few minutes, but the monotonous and overall dreary style gets tiresome far too quickly for its own good, leaving the short sort of wading in the water for the latter half. Even an intriguing fellatio scene involving Black Flag's Henry Rollins doesn't add much variety to a short that kind of talks around itself and never finds a great deal to say.

It ends, however, with probably the most potent quote of Kern's short filmography that I have seen, which could very well serve as his defining motto for life. That quote is, "we'll take the bad with the bad and make it worse."

Starring: Lydia Lunch and Henry Rollins. Directed by: Richard Kern.

This has excellent soundtrack. Worth watching for this alone. This is really sexy short, shot in black & white as all Kern first films. All I can say is that Lydia Lunch is a beauty.

If you like this check german director Jorg Buttgereit

Richard Kern made so many great films with brilliant soundtracks. Off the norm. Actually if you think the fellatio scene is Henry Rollins I don't know what to say. Actually J. G. Thirlwell. Richard used a lot of his music in his films. Henry Rollins and Jim Thirlwell actually do look totally different. Jim and Lydia actually were in a relationship, I believe, at the time.

To quote:

"In 1985, the New York City 'zine "The Underground Film Bulletin" published a manifesto credited to one "Orion Jeriko" that defined a new cinematic movement that would henceforth be know as "The Cinema of Transgression". The architects of this movement included a close nit group born of the lower-east side NoWave scene that included Nick Zedd (who used the alias of Jeriko to pen the article), poet/punk musician Lydia Lunch, artist David Wojnarowicz, and filmmakers Beth B, Casandra Stark, Tessa Hughes-Freeland, Tommy Turner and Richard Kern. Along for the ride were musical collaborators like Henry Rollins, Sonic Youth and Foetus (J. G. Thrilwell). Declaring that "nothing is sacred" they commanded that the violation of all that had come before was nothing less than the end game of their movement.

A dream like art film based on Lydia Lunch's life experiences. This movie is both erotic and disturbing. Depravity... violence, and sex... twisted beauty...

:also starring all your favorite no-wave, industrial, and punk icons...

soundtrack = excellent