Seeing is Believing

In 1917 sixteen year old Elsie Wright and her nine year old relative Frances Griffith were playing in the Wright family garden in Cottingley, England. Elsie borrowed her father’s camera to take some photos of Frances playing and a few months later she borrowed the camera again with both girls snapping photos. When the photos were developed, both girls but mainly Frances, were seen cavorting with what looked like fairies. Elsie’s father thought the photographs were faked but Elsie’s mother believed they revealed actual sprites and the photos were revealed to the public in 1919, creating an international sensation. The incident attracted the attention and support of the Theosophical Society in Bradford, England and prominent people like author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who was involved in the spiritualist movement, found the evidence convincing. The photographs were also denounced by non-believers like Harry Houdini, who famously campaigned against fraudulent psychics and mediums. For years, the Cottingley fairies remained a source of mystery and fascination and, in 1997, strangely enough, two different movies on the subject were produced and released in the U.K., FairyTale: A True Story and Photographing Fairies.

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Follow the Money

In an amoral world where everyone is a liar, cheat, assassin or ruthless opportunist, can there be any heroes? It all comes down to a matter of charisma and underdog appeal in West German director Klaus Lemke’s Negresco – Eine Todliche Affare (1968), which is also known by the far more suggestive title, My Bed is Not for Sleeping. The film is a flashy, colorful bauble of swinging sixties cinema that flirts with several genres without committing to any. Is it an espionage thriller? A sexy jet-set romance? A cynical expose of the La Dolce Vita crowd and their pretentious lives?  Continue reading

Totally Mod

Duffy (1968)The Hollywood film industry is usually a few beats behind the rhythm of any new emerging counterculture and by the time they try to capitalize on it the parade has usually moved on. Duffy (1968) had the misfortune to be released in the dwindling days of the swinging sixties when the mod look of films such as Blow-Up and Kaleidoscope (both 1966) was being edged out by an rougher, less glamorous subgenre of youth oriented movies about bikers, drug dealers and rebels giving the finger to the establishment.    Continue reading