SHOOT THE WHALE
dir. Philip Makanna
1972, USA
78 minutes
Preceded by a short excerpt from Philip Makanna’s subsequent film WITH ENOUGH BANANAS.
FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 2 – 7:30 PM
WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 7 – 7:30 PM
FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 16 – MIDNIGHT
SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 18 – 5 PM
MONDAY, NOVEMBER 26 – 7:30 PM
Special thanks to Unseen Worlds.
SHOOT THE WHALE will be preceded by a short excerpt from Philip Makanna’s subsequent film WITH ENOUGH BANANAS.
*****
UNDER THIS SKY
THERE IS NO BEGINNING NO MIDDLE NO END
UNDER THIS SKY
EVERYTHING HAPPENS AT ONCE
THESE EVENTS
ARE FRAGMENTS OF A TRUE STORY
CAREFULLY CHOSEN
AND PRESENTED EXACTLY AS THEY HAPPENED
*****
Filmed in 1970 in Death Valley, Mono Lake, Hoover Dam and a local Greek temple, then edited in a glorious year at Francis Coppola’s American Zoetrope Studios, SHOOT THE WHALE follows a madcap troupe of revolutionary philosophers through an endless American purgatory. Dubbed by the filmmaker as “the one and only WWII Cowboy Circus Electronic Musical Comedy,” it is desert-gonzo street theater.
Philip Makanna came to filmmaking through painting and sculpture, teaching a spectacularly early course of fine arts video (says Makanna “we called it television”) in the late ’60s at the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland. He was commissioned by Jim Newman of the Dilexi Foundation to make his first foray into broadcast television, The Empire of Things for KQED, described by Gene Youngblood as an “Expressionist painting of green shadows and purple highlights quivering in a liquid mosaic of hues.”
In SHOOT THE WHALE, Makanna continues to experiment with video manipulations, interspersing the improvised action with expressionistic circus performance.
The film enlists an intriguing array of Bay Area counter-culture fixtures. Performing duties are assumed by the East Bay Sharks, a street theater troupe that included Darryl Henriques (later of JUMANJI and STAR TREK VI). The score was composed by Robert Ashley and “Blue” Gene Tyranny at the Center for Contemporary Music at Mills College. Jim Newman, its producer, followed SHOOT THE WHALE with Sun Ra’s SPACE IS THE PLACE soon after.
Though the film was screened at Cannes and enjoyed some rabble-rousing midnight screenings around the Bay Area, it has gone largely unseen until the recent re-discovery of its masters – lost for 30 years and rescued by the Prelinger Archive.
This screening marks the NYC debut of its restoration.
