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Dark Cabaret at WARP54:

Dark Cabaret is comprised of the cult film director Marcelo Von Schwartz favourite frames from his feature film Dark Bridge. The text is by cult poet and film actor Antonio Pineda, whose lysergic novel The Magick Papers is a legend in the Californian underground. Dark Bridge is in the process of making the tour of the international film festivals in the year to come.
The book is in the tradition of Le Nouvelle Vague. Jacques Rivette, Eric Rohmer, Francois Truffaut, and Jean Luc Goddard formulated the manifesto for the New Wave, with their writing for the mythic Cahiers de Cinema. Breathless, filmed by Goddard in 1960, fueled the inception of this cinematic revolution which embraced innovations such as jump cuts, hand held cameras, the eschewing of artificial music soundtracks for real sounds and improvisation.

The existential decadence of the Swinging Sixties inspired young film makers like Von Schwartz, to cut film from a different cloth than the commercial clichés that existed. Neo Realism was the bridge between surrealism and the new breed of cineastes. Books extolling the creation of film, and promoting innovation among poets, painters, script writers and cineastes were then the norm, rather than the exception and Dark Cabaret explores this concept.

Bacchus promoted harmony among the revelers. Pan played his festive pipes, as Pineda read excerpts from Dark Cabaret in an inspired reading, followed by Von Schwartz who spoke regarding the film and the book. Clips from the motion picture were screened on the wall. Among the revelers were film directors, actors, models, and celebrities that make up the strata of cineastes, writers and painters in Bangkok. Signed copies of the book by its authors were on sale, and the crowd availed themselves of this collectors item.

The night sang and flowered like a surrealist gala, where the beautiful women and impossibly sophisticated gents promoted literature, painting, cinema and philosophy. The book launch for Dark Cabaret may now be history, but the screening of the motion picture Dark Bridge, will be celebrated in Bangkok at a future date. You dear reader, are invited to this confluence of art and culture, so keep your eyes and ears open to attend the next installment of this ongoing experiment in cinema by Von Schwartz et allii.