In an age when The Walk­ing Dead pro­vides a week­ly dose of head-explod­ing gore, it’s easy to for­get how shock­ing the vio­lence of Stan­ley Kubrick’s A Clock­work Orange (1971) felt to view­ers at the time. Antho­ny Burgess’ nov­el was about crime and pun­ish­ment, the dif­fer­ences and/or sim­i­lar­i­ties between street-lev­el thugs and state-sanc­tioned vio­lence, and the impor­tance of vio­lence in a free soci­ety. Kubrick, hav­ing blown up the world a decade ear­li­er at the end of Dr. Strangelove, took on all these issues and made them into pure cin­e­ma. It elic­its a response even now—I have friends who res­olute­ly refuse to watch the film—despite its years spent on the com­post pile of post-mod­ern cul­ture.

For an exam­ple of how strong­ly peo­ple felt, check this quote from Peter Sell­ers, being inter­viewed by Gene Siskel in the Chica­go Sun-Times in 1972, five months after the film pre­miered in the States.

Peter Sell­ers: I hat­ed A Clock­work Orange. I thought it was the biggest load of crap I’ve ever seen for years. Amoral. I think because of the vio­lence around today it’s lam­en­ta­ble that a direc­tor of Stan­ley Kubrick’s dis­tinc­tion and abil­i­ty should lend him­self to such a sub­ject. I’m not say­ing that you can’t pick up that book [the Antho­ny Burgess nov­el upon which the film is based], read it, and put it down. But to make it as a film, with all the vio­lence we have in the world today – to add to it, to put it on show – I just don’t under­stand where Stan­ley is at.

Gene Siskel: Are you say­ing that it will influ­ence peo­ple to com­mit vio­lence that they would oth­er­wise not com­mit?

Peter Sell­ers: I think it adds to it.

Sell­ers had worked with Kubrick on both Dr. Strangelove and Loli­ta, so for a star to talk so ill of a for­mer direc­tor was quite shock­ing. He con­tin­ues in the inter­view to also denounce the vio­lence in Hitchcock’s Fren­zy, which had just been released. When Siskel press­es him on the por­tray­al of vio­lence and its neces­si­ty in a world that want­ed more truth and real­ism in its films, Sell­ers falls back on his recent involve­ment in yoga:

I must tell you first of all that I’m a yogi. I am against vio­lence com­plete­ly. Hare ommm. So you now know why. So there’s real­ly no point in ask­ing any more ques­tions about it.

Dur­ing the orig­i­nal pro­mo­tion for the film, Kubrick con­sid­ered crit­i­cisms of its vio­lence absurd:

No one is cor­rupt­ed watch­ing A Clock­work Orange any more than they are by watch­ing Richard III… The film has been accept­ed as a work of art, and no work of art has ever done social harm, though a great deal of social harm has been done by those who have sought to pro­tect soci­ety against works of art which they regard­ed as dan­ger­ous.

Yet as copy­cat crimes—or crimes that the UK’s press like to sug­gest were so—increased in the months after its release, Kubrick removed his film from cir­cu­la­tion in Britain. Despite Kubrick being behind the deci­sion, it was gen­er­al­ly thought that the UK had “banned” the film. It remained so until Kubrick’s death in 1999. Britain final­ly got to see an uncut ver­sion of the film in…you guessed it…2001.

via Dan­ger­ous Minds/ Stan­ley Kubrick Tum­blr

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Peter Sell­ers Cov­ers the Bea­t­les’ “A Hard Day’s Night,” “She Loves You” & “Help!”

Inside Dr. Strangelove: Doc­u­men­tary Reveals How a Cold War Sto­ry Became a Kubrick Clas­sic

Stan­ley Kubrick’s Rare 1965 Inter­view with The New York­er

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the FunkZone Pod­cast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

If you enjoy film in an even slight­ly seri­ous way, you’ve sure­ly heard the name Andrei Tarkovsky brought up dozens and dozens of times, some­times — or, if you run in cinephilic cir­cles, invari­ably — in the con­text of ver­tig­i­nous­ly high praise. Film-lovers wor­ship Tarkovsky, as do many oth­er film­mak­ers: no less an auteur than Ing­mar Bergman called him “the best of them all” (after dis­miss­ing Godard as “affect­ed” and Hitch­cock as “infan­tile”), “the one who invent­ed a new lan­guage, true to the nature of film, as it cap­tures life as a reflec­tion, life as a dream.”

Oth­er artists, too, have paid Tarkovsky trib­ute: Geoff Dyer devot­ed an entire book not to the direc­tor’s career, but to just one of his movies, Stalk­er (see its orig­i­nal trail­er above). As we told you five years ago, and it deserves repeat­ing again, you can watch Stalk­er (here) free online, along with oth­er major Tarkovsky films. Stalk­er alone can give you a pow­er­ful sense of just why the sev­en fea­ture films Tarkovsky left behind when he died in 1986 have only drawn more acco­lades over time. And it will per­haps whet your appetite to start watch­ing four oth­er Tarkovsky films free online on this page, includ­ing his 15th-cen­tu­ry Russ­ian icon-painter biopic (to only par­tial­ly describe it) Andrei Rublev and his Stanis­law Lem adap­ta­tion (and “answer to 2001: A Space Odyssey”) Solaris. 

You can also watch 1975’s Mir­ror, which some Tarkovsky enthu­si­asts con­sid­er his great­est work. If you do watch it, bear in mind the Bergman quote above: if the best of all film­mak­ers won that title by ren­der­ing life as a dream, then it only stands to rea­son that Mir­ror, the most dream­like of all his work, would rise to the top of his fil­mog­ra­phy. It will make you under­stand why, despite the hun­dreds and thou­sands of pages on Tarkovsky’s work writ­ten by crit­ics, aca­d­e­mics, and pure fans, you can only appre­ci­ate these films through direct expe­ri­ence. As with the dif­fi­cul­ty of describ­ing a dream com­pelling­ly in words, text can’t do jus­tice to Tarkovsky, but when you watch one of his cin­e­mat­ic dreams, you dream it along with him — and like the most vivid dreams, frag­ments of them will stick with you for­ev­er.

Note: The Tarkovsky films list­ed above were put online by the offi­cial Youtube chan­nel of Mos­film, the stu­dio for which Tarkovsky made the films.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Tarkovsky Films Now Free Online

Watch Solaris (1972), Andrei Tarkovsky’s Haunt­ing Vision of the Future

Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris Shot by Shot: A 22-Minute Break­down of the Director’s Film­mak­ing

“Auteur in Space”: A Video Essay on How Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris Tran­scends Sci­ence Fic­tion

Andrei Tarkovsky’s Mas­ter­piece Stalk­er Gets Adapt­ed into a Video Game

Watch Stalk­er, Andrei Tarkovsky’s Mind-Bend­ing Mas­ter­piece Free Online

A Poet in Cin­e­ma: Andrei Tarkovsky Reveals the Director’s Deep Thoughts on Film­mak­ing and Life

Andrei Tarkovsky Cre­ates a List of His 10 Favorite Films (1972)

Andrei Tarkovsky’s Very First Films: Three Stu­dent Films, 1956–1960

Col­in Mar­shall writes else­where on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, and the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future? Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

“One of the first video record­ings of a David Lynch inter­view dates from 1979,” writes The New York­er’s Den­nis Lim. “The twen­ty-minute black-and-white seg­ment was pro­duced for a tele­vi­sion course at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia, Los Ange­les, and con­duct­ed in the oil fields of the Los Ange­les Basin, one of the loca­tions that con­sti­tut­ed the bar­ren waste­land of his first fea­ture, Eraser­head (1977).” And it is Eraser­head these UCLA stu­dents, in what Lim calls “the moment of Lynch’s first brush with cult fame,” want to know about, putting a vari­ety of ques­tions to the young film­mak­er, and putting his abil­i­ty to answer them con­crete­ly to the test.

You may well learn more about Eraser­head in the the­ater-lob­by audi­ence respons­es col­lect­ed for the video, where­in the view­ers — view­ers, remem­ber, from a now hard-to-imag­ine time when the name David Lynch car­ried no mean­ing at all — exit­ing a screen­ing express reac­tions rang­ing from great plea­sure (some of them boast of hav­ing seen it as many as eight times already) to pre­dictable bewil­der­ment (“I’ve got­ta think about it for a while”) and even more pre­dictable dis­taste: “The weird­est thing I’ve ever seen.” “It’s ter­ri­ble. I did­n’t like it.” “Some inane, bizarre per­son with a dis­turbed mind wrote that film.” But does the man stand­ing there sub­mit­ting to a stu­dent inter­view in the mid­dle of an oil field seem so bizarre, so dis­turbed?

Some of Lynch’s answers, as when he describes Eraser­head as “not like thrown-togeth­er abstract” but “meant-to-be-that-way abstract,” may strike you as inane at first, but cer­tain­ly noth­ing he says cross­es the line from inani­ty to insan­i­ty. In the almost 40 years since the film’s first show­ing, Eraser­head has grown more artis­ti­cal­ly divi­sive even as its fan base spans a wider and wider range of gen­er­a­tions and nation­al­i­ties. Both its pro­mot­ers and its detrac­tors may some­times won­der if even Lynch him­self under­stands it, but to my mind, this ear­ly inter­view hints that he does. He made what he calls “an open-feel­ing film,” a fount of an infini­tude of inter­pre­ta­tions, and for that rea­son an endur­ing work of art. And he meant it to be that way.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Paint­ings of Filmmaker/Visual Artist David Lynch

David Lynch’s Unlike­ly Com­mer­cial for a Home Preg­nan­cy Test (1997)

David Lynch Teach­es You to Cook His Quinoa Recipe in a Weird, Sur­re­al­ist Video

What David Lynch Can Do With a 100-Year-Old Cam­era and 52 Sec­onds of Film

Col­in Mar­shall writes else­where on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, and the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future? Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Herk Har­vey had a suc­cess­ful career as a direc­tor and pro­duc­er of edu­ca­tion­al and indus­tri­al movies in Lawrence, Kansas, but he longed for some­thing more. After all, fel­low Kansas film­mak­er Robert Alt­man had made the leap from indus­tri­al flicks to Hol­ly­wood, so why couldn’t he?

The result­ing movie, Car­ni­val of Souls (1962), became a cult clas­sic influ­enc­ing the likes of George Romero, James Wan and David Lynch. Mary (played by Can­dace Hilligoss, the only trained actor in the cast) mys­te­ri­ous­ly sur­faces after an ill-fat­ed drag race sends her car off a bridge and into a deep riv­er. Unmoored and unable to remem­ber what hap­pened, she flees her home­town and ends up in Salt Lake City where she takes a gig as a church organ­ist. She tries to make a life there but is plagued by an oth­er­world­ly stranger with a paper white mask of evil (played by Har­vey him­self.)

Now in the pub­lic domain, Car­ni­val is a slow burn of dread that relies on few cheap jumps and lit­tle gore. Instead, Har­vey cre­ates a sparse world of alien­ation and creep­ing hys­te­ria like an Edward Hop­per paint­ing gone psy­chot­ic. Harvey’s inspi­ra­tions were clear­ly more art house than Ham­mer hor­ror. Echoes of F. W. Mur­nau, Ing­mar Bergman and Jean Cocteau abound. Yet the curi­ous­ly som­nam­bu­late act­ing exhib­it­ed by most of the cast along with the movie’s freaky organ sound­track gives the film the vibe of a par­tic­u­lar­ly night­mar­ish Ed Wood movie.

Car­ni­val made a mod­est show­ing on the dri­ve-in cir­cuit when it came out but it didn’t become a cult clas­sic until lat­er in the 60s when it start­ed play­ing on late-night TV. Har­vey, how­ev­er, nev­er made anoth­er fea­ture.

You can watch the com­plete movie above, or find it in our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Ed Wood’s Plan 9 From Out­er Space: “The Worst Movie Ever Made,” “The Ulti­mate Cult Flick,” or Both?

The Cab­i­net of Dr. Cali­gari: See the Restored Ver­sion of the 1920 Hor­ror Clas­sic with Its Orig­i­nal Col­or Tint­ing

Time Out Lon­don Presents The 100 Best Hor­ror Films: Start by Watch­ing Four Hor­ror Clas­sics Free Online

Mar­tin Scors­ese Names the 11 Scari­est Hor­ror Films: Kubrick, Hitch­cock, Tourneur & More

Jonathan Crow is a Los Ange­les-based writer and film­mak­er whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hol­ly­wood Reporter, and oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. You can fol­low him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veep­to­pus, fea­tur­ing lots of pic­tures of vice pres­i­dents with octo­pus­es on their heads.  The Veep­to­pus store is here.