The Death of the Gorilla

Tish Gray had a baby and gave it up for adoption. She is contacted by a second childless couple who want her to have the husband's baby because of the wife's inability to have children. She accepts but finds that knowing the parents, and developing a relationship with them for the entire pregnancy complicates the simple arrangement.

Five young adults meet on a rainy night in Los Angeles and enter as a group into a series of dreams. Various adventures occur. Sister Midnight allows one of the guys to enter her mind; as a result of this invasion of her privacy, she is reborn.

The meanderings of a mountain stream are followed for a few miles. Recorded on 8mm Kodachrome and "cluster" edited to create a highly formal, fugal experience.

A highly personal work of dubious nature. An attempt is made to balance and equate the realms of human beings, plants, the sky and light. The birth, blossoming and eventual decay of plants is seen as a parallel, indeed, a paradigm of our own dubious existence as creatures and creations of libido. Vortices of unseen and uncharted "vibrations", we expand and retract according to our season. The processes of nature are inevitable but fulfilling if fully engaged in.

A trance film originally released in 1966 as THE STAR CURTAIN, about the settling and relaxation of the senses after a climax. "Sentences" of cosmic imagery were added in 1969 to form the vision glimpsed in the trance. Dialectic opposition of picture and sound. TANTRA played at the San Francisco Film Festival of 1970.