Raphael Montañez Ortíz

An associative view of the days, nights and characters that enclosed the life of Arthur Janov, which defines in the conclusion "It's never too late to have a happy childhood". Arthur Janov (1924-2017) was a classic instance of being the right charismatic therapist at the right time - the zeitgeist. Dr. Janov first heard about the embryo to the primal scream through one of his patients when he performed conventional psycho dynamic therapy. It was an absurd theatre performance by Raphael Montañez Ortiz called "Mommy, Daddy" presented in London, 1966. The birth of Primal therapy happened when Arthur Janov's book, "The Primal Scream" was published early 1970.

1996 / U-Matic / color-b&w / sound / 1S / 12' 00

A remix film combining elements of found footage and structural filmmaking by combining Humphrey Bogart's quote from Casablanca with found footage of explosions, emphasized by repetition.

Raphael Montañez Ortíz manipulates and distorts a scene from the classic film Freaks using digital editing techniques to give the scene a destructive quality.

Randomly spliced pieces of a newsreel featuring notable news from 1946.

The same year that Bruce Conner completed his famed A Movie, Montañez Ortiz destroyed a 16mm print of a banal Western, Winchester '73, with a tomahawk. He then placed the scraps of film in a medicine bag "to release the evil," intoned a ritual chant he had learned from his Yaqui grandfather, and spliced together the exorcised fragments in a random order.

In the mesmerizing Beach Umbrella, 1985, a shapely woman in a white bathing suit tears across the sand at a panicked clip, pursued by the Technicolor trio of the Three Caballeros. When the woman at last collapses, the cartoon characters descend, seething in a manic swarm over her body, a scene somewhere between a feeding frenzy and a gangbang. Once satisfied, the trio zoom off, allowing the woman time to stand before they begin the chase anew.

Raphael Montañez Ortíz takes a scene from the film Winchester '73 and creates a redux of his 1958 works 'Cowboy' and 'Indian Film' using LaserDisc technology to recreate that original destructionist viewing experience.