Of Blood, of Pleasure and of Death…or Some Films on ‘Sexual Disorientation’

The focal point of Of Blood, of Pleasure and of Death… is European avant-garde film from the 1920s and American underground film, with the term underground here being understood as both a noun and adjective, i.e., the underground as a specific film movement located in New York during the 1970s and as a concept of alternative, non-commercial, low-budget films with no defined social or aesthetic ideology. Since Manny Farber coined the term in 1957, underground has been synonymous with an anti-bourgeois subculture and, above all, anti-Hollywood film. These films are distinguished by their mixture of primitivism and coarseness, their ambivalence towards mass culture and, especially, by a deliberate and indecent attitude towards everything taboo, especially (hetero-homo) sexual taboo.