Seeds of Destiny (1946) by David Miller
Saturday, October 29, 1983, 8:00 pm
Derriere-Garde
Found Films collected by Craig Baldwin.
762 Valencia Street San Francisco, CA, 94110
Though accounting for the bulk of total film production, the industrial film and its various cousins (educational, promotional, military, etc.) receive little attention in the rarified atmosphere of fine-art showcases. But for those post-modern cineastes annoyed at the self-conscious academism of the avant-garde and its throwback cult of the individual “artist” on the one hand, and the crass predictability of the narrative “entertainment” film on the other, these unearthed vehicles offer a delightful rear entry into a pop-cultural limbo of transcendent banality, the sublimely ridiculous, and the ideologically absurd. But beyond simple “bad cinema,” the stylistic aberrations of these deformed discourses oftimes hint of a genuinely original cinematic intelligence. Some titles: Angry Boy, About Fallout, Seeds of Destiny, Don’t Be Afraid, anti-Japanese propaganda, Liberace. -C.B.