Midnight Movies: From the Margin to the Mainstream

Colour, 35 mm
Canada, 2005, 88 min
Section: Special Events

Synopsis

The six films El Topo, Night of the Living Dead, John Waters’ Pink Flamingos, The Harder They Come, Eraserhead, and The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Literally over night they changed from unknown footage into cult films through the revolutionary American cinematic phenomenon of the 1970s – midnight movies. The films’ radical generic experiments and breaking of sexual, religious and other taboos found a wildly enthusiastic response from young people who, like their peers from other parts of the world, were just then subjecting post-war social values to radical revisionism. Although attending midnight screenings started out as a fad, it quickly turned into a social ritual, as seen in period shots of theatres packed with raucous filmgoers. The directors themselves appear in the documentary and place the flamboyant ‘bad taste’ of their work in a socio-historical context. The film was screened at last year’s Cannes festival. 

About the director

Stuart Samuels (b. 1940, New York City) is a Canadian television director, screenwriter and producer interested mainly in documentary filmmaking. He co-directed Visions of Light: The Art of Cinematography (1993), winner of a New York Film Critics Circle Award. He also shared in the writing and directing of the documentary Hollywoodism: Jews, Movies and the American Dream (1998). From 1967 to 1981 he lectured in history at the University of Pennsylvania, he is a founding member of the Society of Cinema Studies and an acknowledged expert in the field of film history and film archiving.