Stephen Sayadian | Offscreen
Festival Guest:
Stephen Sayadian (aka Rinse Dream, °1953) is a native Austrian but moved to Los Angeles in the late 1970s. After a career as the creative director of the erotic magazine Hustler, he made his first feature film in 1981 at the request of a porn producer. “Nighdreams” turned out to be a highly unusual porn movie that immediately set the tone for the rest of his film career. Average hardcore watchers did not quite know what to think of this surreal, absurd work and its experimental soundscapes. They qualified it as being 'too artistic', while art film audiences found it too pornographic. Barely one year later, “Café Flesh” was released in 1982 and acquired a cult following with its dystopian science fiction narrative of sex and desire in a post-apocalyptic universe. With “Dr. Caligari” in 1989, Sayadian made a semi-sequel to Robert Weine's silent film classic. It may be the most bizarre and intriguing work in his filmography: a film that excels in surrealism, humour, poetry and camp.
Stephen Sayadian will personally introduce his films at the festival.
Dr. Caligari
Her uncontrollable nymphomania gets Ms. Van Houten locked up in a psychiatric clinic run by the sadistic Dr. Caligari. Theatrical and nonsensical dialogues, unreal sets bathing in eighties dayglo – this campy semi-sequel to the German Expressionistic classic is the closest thing to a legal hallucinogen.
Nightdreams
A film like a delirious wet dream drenched in the new wave aesthetics of the 1980s: surreal and iconoclastic hardcore featuring a lesbian threesome set to the tunes of Wall of Voodoo, a blowjob for a man hidden in a giant cream of wheat box, while a dancing slice of toast plays a saxophone in the background.
Q&A with Stephen Sayadian
JJ Marsh (Erotic Film Society) delivers a talk on the end of the golden era of porn cinema. Inviting Stephen Sayadian on stage, they overlook his career: first as the artistic director of Hustler, then as a film director, with special attention for “Café Flesh”. Followed by a Q&A session with the audience. Free entrance.
Café Flesh
After a nuclear war, 99% of humanity is incapable of having intercourse at the risk of becoming violently ill. In the Café Flesh they force the healthy minority to perform bizarre sex acts on stage while they look on with both shock and desire. Post-apocalyptic avant-garde pornography and uncut cult mastery.
Offscreen photostream
