The Bed (James Broughton, 1968)

Fitzcarraldo · Mensaje por **Fitzcarraldo** » Mié 18 Ene, 2006 07:41

The Bed

Broughton was apparently mostly busy in the 1950s and ‘60s with his poetry, but returned to filmmaking in 1968 with the fanciful The Bed. The film’s central image is arresting and hilariously absurd — an empty bed is traveling leisurely down a hill as if it were a car. Eventually it settles in a meadow and becomes the locus of all manner of strange scenarios and woodland trysts. Characters — mostly naked — appear suddenly on its sheets. Broughton pops in as a kind of laughing Pan, sitting nude in a tree serenading a series of revelers. He ridicules conventional rituals when a woman arrives and officiously begins making up the bed. More typical, though, are the polymorphous pleasures of wriggling bodies apparently liberated by the bed. Broughton brings nature in harmony with humanity in odd and intriguing ways, as when a woman in close-up encounters a spider and reaches out to kiss it. In another scene, a live lizard appears to slither out of a man’s mouth.

http://www.brightlightsfilm.com/27/broughton.html

THE BED

(James Broughton, USA, 1967)
Sacrilege remains attractive as long as God is still considered a worthy opponent. The spatially very specific juxtaposition of sex image and the accoutrements of organized religion provokes the usual tension of guilty
delight at the viewing of a forbidden image.