USA,
1982, 112 min
Shown in 1983 / 1999
CREDITS
- dir
-
Slava Tsukerman
- prod
-
Slava Tsukerman
- scr
-
Slava Tsukerman, Anne Carlisle, Nina V. Kerosa
- cam
-
Yuri Neyman
- editor
-
Charyn Ross
- cast
-
Anne Carlisle, Paula Sheppard, Bob Brady, Susan Doukas, Otto Von Wernherr
- source
-
Cinetron Productions, 20 East I4th Street, New York, NY 10003. FAX: 212-645-8623
-
COMMENTS
Shown as part of the Indelible Images series in 1999, selected by Jon Moritsugu; Slava Tsukerman and Jon Moritsugu in person.
OTHER
Although Slava Tsukerman came to us from Mother Russia, Liquid Sky—his first feature and a startling debut—is a wild, thoroughly New York movie. The plot concerns a tiny alien creature in a dinner-plate-sized spacecraft which lands on a rooftop apartment in lower Manhattan. The creature kills and instantaneously absorbs the various sexual partners of the beautiful model who lives there, because at the moment of orgasm their brains produce a heroin-like substance which the alien creature craves. Perhaps it would suffice to say that the plot combines elements of science fantasy with echoes of New Wave lifestyle in Manhattan. Anne Carlisle, cowriter and costar (in a provocative double role) is a remarkable screen presence. She is described as a prototypical American WASP from Connecticut and some of the incidents of the film are based on details of her life. The rest of the actors—from Germany, England, Canada, France and New York—are a hilariously mixed bag. By turns erotic and violent, sophisticated and naive, poetic and banal, Liquid Sky represents a fusing of European and American sensibilities which festered and bloomed in the chaotic freedom of New York’s independent cinema movement.
—Paul Bartel
FACTOID #123
San Francisco native Mervyn LeRoy, director of the Hollywood classics Little Caesar and Goldiggers of 1933, was honored with the Festival’s first tribute October 22, 1965.
