The Purple Death
The Purple Death is a technologically transmitted epidemic made up from old movie clips, radio announcements and newspaper headlines. Second-hand clichés and shopworn costumes conspire with stock footage to spread a mass contagion for an age of mass communication.
Visual trash: The disqualified, that without taste, ot thought of as worthy of serious study.
Buster Crabbe: Pilot of the 25th Century, and more importantly Flash Gordon in the 1940s. At that time, people would go to the cinema all the time - so there were all these serialised films.
[Flash Gordon conquers the universe]
These films were made for as little money as possible: Usin stock footage, music from other films, costumes and sets that happened to be lying around the studio. This is the beginning of cut-up cinema. The purple death is the first one in the series. It has this weird, jumbled understanding of technology: Kind of primitive and exoticised, but also mass-media and science fiction.
1944: Captain America The purple death
What is it about purple that these black and white films are obsessed with? For one, purple is the least common colour in nature: This is why it’s associated with wealth and power. It’s also the first artificial dye. So it’s connected to the artificial, unnatural, but also power and wealth.
Cobra Woman (1944) Maria Montez aka The Queen of Technicolor
Jack Smith (1962): The perfect filmic appositeness of Maria Montez
The vast machinery of a movie company worked overtime to make her vision into seets. They achieeved only inept approximations. but one of the atrocious acing sighs suffused a thousand tons of dead plaster with life
Flaming creatures (1963)
Juvenile does not equal shameful and trash is the material of creators. It exists whether one approves or not.
- Sontag: Notes on Camp
- Newman, Benton (1962): The New Sentimentality
- Kenneth Anger (1964): Scorpio Rising. Here he basically invents the pop video - editing footage to pop songs of the day. He also didn’t like:
- Warhol
- Tom Wolfe (1965): Pariah Style
- Warhol (1964): Empire. The Empire State Building is from the 1930s - the same time as Maria Montez
- Horror at Party Beach (1964)
- Von Dutch was a hero of 1960s teenage America. In the world of custom cars, pinstriping became a way of hiding seams and whatnot (also made each car different). See also the flying eyeball logo.
- Also: Ed ‘Big Daddy’ Roth.
I grew up in darkness, spending most of my time in darkness or with a broken brushful of putrid paind
- Druid Princess (1966)
- Rat Fink (Mickey Mouse turned inside out - the adolescent male made cartoon flesh)
Kids started to wear Nazi memorabilia that their parents had brought back from the war.
Time:
Dug out of attics and curio shops and freshly minted by the thousandsm the German Iron Cross has become the newsest surfer’s emblem and high school fad.
- 1965: Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill!
- Conquest of the Universe (1967) by Playhouse of the Ridiculous
- Destroy All Monsters, Mike Kelly
- Invasion of the Space Lobsters
- (1981-Present) Christine Binnie (Neo Naturists)
- Spartacus Chetwynd (2010): A Tax Haven Run By Women
