Retro Rough Cut

Steen E. Smithe sat on his sofa and spliced under a sepia light every hour, everyday. He had numerous cardboard boxes that neatly lined the walls of his tiny flat, all full of various types of tape and canned spools from 8mm, 35mm celluloid to 12.7mm magnetic tape wound spools and of course VHS. He had been acquiring them from the Yellow Pages since the 1979. Cutting edge technology at the time now antique. He had been experimenting with them ever since. They Filled his laboratory like mind where he worked on them methodically, obsessively - re-ordering – removing reversing missing shots replaced segments spliced and re-spliced - lost montage family memoires where edited with showcase – sitcoms, news events, post-mortems, pornography, assassinations, soap operas etc. Rolls and rolls - fast cut precisely - scenes - cross cut or re-arranged in deranged sequence. Steen was film-maker, his mother was terminally deranged, sectioned in Broadmoor mental hospital since 1982.

He had created hundreds of these cut-ups, the images now tattooed on the cerebral cortex, where on execution boxed/canned and labelled in alphabetical order then arranged around a D.I.Y cine-screen with fitted JVC HR-3300U VIDSTAR, Sony Betamax and reel projector that along with the television flickered every hour, every night.

The films* mostly inept perverse creations installed a sense of order, a sense control into his life. Self edited celluloids stitched and seamed together were his art, life - obsession.

*Film #69

Pop Art

WHAM! Napalm-haze-rains -

dripping-willow-eyes

Liechtenstein's dotted...senile-smile-is-seen.

*Film #46 

The Exploding Head

Kennedy-Pop! Gangrene-grass -

April imperial peaches -

Blossom's bloom- a fuchsia infection.

Bureaucratic grey conspiracy -

A needle passed through Misery -

Laced love – Euro-trashed – smeared street -

Blue Trojan Rats! – pink throats -

Deep-cut - he was it seams Frankly beat -

Butchered! Before The Madonna.

*Film # 178

Rovers Return

A Death-ship-Docs-men-beyond the amber-

Gulf -Vice-Viva Hooky-Street - God bless

Nikon -weeps as frosts melts

& Tarzan screams Daz-Bukkake!

*Film #200

Die

A fateful-night in Paris-

Pillows - whisper as engines

ROAR!

& family ties are severed.

Aroused Twins topple – ejaculating-

Nectarines!

Cocooning – Dallas - Ruby sleeps among the falcon crest.

Moon-rising – a black paw descends on a November Dynasty.

& walls of rumble-rouble-rise.-------------------------------------

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'Mondo - visions of a cannibal holocaust :

Emerge-from-the-golden-shower-a-blacken-shroud a

Hill-billy-leased-Arab-umbilical-cord-abound.' - Steen E. Smithe