The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, October 7-13
Manos: The Hands of Fate (1966)
Directed by Harold P. Warren
Outsider Art always has a note of tragedy behind it in that there is the sense of unfulfilment. An artist who never meets his public; or who never learned how to use the tools to which the rest of his would-be peers received access. In film that tragedy becomes much more monumental because stunted technique, frequently riveting as painting or poetry, looks nothing more than amateurish on screen. Untrained directors just look like hacks in the William Beaudine model. Behind fertilizer salesman Hal Warren’s insane directorial debut Manos: The Hands of Fate lay his untapped nightmares. Warren plainly had a lifetime of psychological torment and feelings of oedpial inadequacy he couldn’t properly translate to the mythological horror movie he saw in his head. But unlike Henry Darger’s or Loy Allen Bowlin’s, this work doesn’t look like a window into its creator’s soul. It just looks like one of the strangest bad movies of all time. And yet it remains a fascinatingly frustrating object that must be seen to be believed. Scout Tafoya (October 7, 7:30pm at the Nitehawk)