If you step out of ranks, in porn or any other walk of life, you risk getting squashed. Such is the case of Roberta & Michael Findlay's MNASIDIKA, an admirable attempt at avant garde porn that has been rejected both in its original theatrical lifetime and as a latter-day video.
Buried in the Something Weird catalog, this strange exercise clearly lives up to the video label's mandate: resurrecting weird movies. However, it has been misunderstood and is still overlooked to this moment.
The Findlays' best known earlier work was also experimental, often closer to the Midnight Underground Movies (Cinema 16 circuit) in intent and content than the prime time porn playing at adult theaters. But its silliness within an almost-normal narrative, combined with comic book violence won an appreciative latter-day viewership.
With MNASIDIKA the Findlays get pretentious with a capital P. The closest thing resembling it is Ken Russell's familiar TV movies of the same period, like DANCE OF THE SEVEN VEILS and DANTE'S INFERNO, where sheer flights of Silent Film fancy combine with a classical music score to create odd moods.
Here we have the poetry of Pierre Louys, plus I'm pretty sure some poetry by Sappho thrown in, accompanying an MOS-shot Silent parable, scored to classical music. Its cryptic elements are on purpose, but the audience has to be willing to participate, rather than bask in the usual vicarious masturbation tale. (Oops, there's another similarity to dear Ken's work!)
Roberta's adventurous cinematography is cutting edge late '60s (techniques like Vaseline-smeared lens and spectacular tracking shots used by Jean-Gabriel and Quinto Albicocco in their classic LE GRAND MEAULNES), bookending the movie with striking landscape shot of sunrise and sunset at the shore. Michael casts himself as a lonely figure on the rocks overlooking the sea (also similar to Russellian motifs) who seems to be committing suicide, but the film's synopsis poses what follows as a dream instead. I think it plays better as afterlife, but that's just my interpretation.
He suddenly appears clad in toga instead of modern dress on an island, presumably Lesbos. A beautiful, buxom, short-haired woman (Maria Lease, star of Joe Sarno's ALL THE SINS OF SODOM) gets caught by a tree branch and Michael frees her. He then starts to molest her, but being Michael Findlay naturally beats her to a bloody pulp with a large branch. I guess that was a sop for the fans.
Action from this point on is strictly abstract, and fairly controversial in some respects. We see Melantho, a busty queen-like figure with her 3 handmaidens, including Uta Erickson and Linda Boyce, cavorting and indulging in lesbian sex, but generally wearing leafy thong-like bikini bottoms. Along with the murdered Lease, these five leading ladies are certainly performing within the limits of 1969 soft porn.
But halfway through the film another set of three nymphs (one of them a stunning young redheaded beauty), not recognizable with tons of porn credits like the other five, appear and horse around fully nude. Roberta's extreme closeup photography of their vaginas and caressing that comes just a silly millimeter short of penetration (see her solo movie THE ALTAR OF LUST for the full move into XXX fingering) is cutting edge porn content for a film released in late '69, when "split-beaver" shots were all the rage in stag/arcade loops. The film plays as if this explicit material were added later to the main film, as Lease, Boyce and Erickson appear relatively covered up in the storyline sequences.
After reel after reel of adoring glimpses of female flesh, both exterior and interior, plot returns with a ritual sacrifice of Michael by the Fab Five nymphs, including the murdered girl Lease who has conveniently been resurrected. They place 5 phallic gourds at his crotch and destroy them symbolically before whipping out five huge swords to castrate Michael. Sort of a happy ending in Findlaysland, though for symmetry's sake we end up back on the Gothic seaside rocks where the Five pose, and more Louys poetry ends with the word "Silence".
Now if this had been made by a certified underground filmmaker, say Ed Emshwiller, Stan Vanderbeek or Ron Rice, and Taylor Mead had been cast (easy to imagine him cavorting in a toga) instead of Mike, it would have been automatically stamped as an art film, not porn. Even Curt McDowell's aggressively obscene THUNDERCRACK! a few years later was always pigeon holed as underground cinema, not XXX, especially since it was diametrically opposed to the porno chic craze of its day.
But the Findlays, like so many latter-day cult figures discovered by a frankly ignorant legion of wet-behind-the-ears film buffs, have been carefully pigeonholed and written off. It's like the Italians: few watch their films with a knowledge of the richness of Italian cinema tradition dating back to the Silent Era -no, they're just giallo makers, or gore hounds or sex filmmakers put on artificial, inverted pedestals.
So my plea, starting with MNASIDIKA as a challenging example, is for people to watch films with an open mind, rather than an urge to consume/obliterate them by finding just the right "category" to file them in. Ken Russell's work is unclassifiable, and therefore merely stuck in the "Cult" section of our current virtual video store, and so too is this work by kindred spirits from New York.
