Nude on the Moon
Chicago Filmmakers
Chicago Filmmakers
?When I die I will make films in Hell!?
The final installment of Who is Doris Wishman (and why does she make those incredibly weird films?) features Nude on the Moon (AKA Moon Dolls, 1962, 75 min.) which was made at Coral Castle Homstead, Florida in 1961 when nudist camps were all the rage.
10/22/1995 - 10/22/1995
The final installment of Who is Doris Wishman (and why does she make those incredibly weird films?) features Nude on the Moon (AKA Moon Dolls, 1962, 75 min.) which was made at Coral Castle Homstead, Florida in 1961 when nudist camps were all the rage. This film, then known as the weirdest, silliest and corniest of them all, today appears even more so in that it is so tame by today?s standards. Two rocket scientists use their own money to secretly fly to the moon where they discover a population of nudist ?moon dolls? with pipe cleaner antennae growing out of their bouffant hairdos.
?Women auteurs are rare among the directors of ultra cheap sleaze flicks. But starting after her husband died in 1960, self-taught filmmaker Doris Wishman wrote, directed, edited, and produced over two dozen charmingly crude films with names such as Bad Girls Go to Hell and Keyholes Are for Peeping. Unlike camp icon Russ Meyer, whose big-breasted features have long been championed by Roger Ebert, Wishman has only recently been treated to retrospectives.
Beneath her outlandish plots lurk a crypto-feminist critique of the male gaze. In Double Agent 73, made in 1974, Chesty Morgan plays secret agent Jane Genet, whose left breast is equipped with a surgically implanted camera for documenting her hits. Men are the victims here; they die with eyefuls of blurry flesh. Let Me Die a Woman, a 1978 documentary on transsexuals, includes a lurid castration scene. A doctor is interviewed while holding a pointer to his patient's penis and saying, "His one and only all-consuming thought and desire is to get rid of his hated penis and testicles." Nude on the Moon, filmed in 1962, is about two young rocket scientists--one smokes a pipe with Hugh Hefner urbanity--who travel to the moon, where they obsessively photograph a matriarchy of nude moon maidens. But they're deprived of their photographic trophies when they leave their camera behind.
These three films will be shown at Chicago Filmmakers' Kino-Eye Cinema, 1543 W. Division, as part of the program Who Is Doris Wishman (and why does she make such weird films)? The series may not completely answer this question, but Wishman has always let her work speak for itself.?
