Sunday 27.10.24 @ OFFLINE | 12.00
1hr 30m | Digital | 40th Anniversary
Arf and Omega are the Berry Boy Twins. And when the Berry Boy Twins are not pursuing their occupation as tag-team wrestlers, they often indulge in bits of Indian occultism. This is one of those times.
“The notorious and ultimately unfinished project by The Residents, Vileness Fats, was a triumph of content over technology. Imagined as an epic “movie”, enacted on gorgeous and crazed sets of riotous shapes and colors, The Residents could only economically create it on what was known in the early 1970s as the “Porta-Pak” video video system: 1/2″ black and white tape that was delicate and finicky, and cameras equipped with tube image pickups that couldn’t register detail very sharply and blew out in bright light. In their attempts to make a mountain from this mole(show) hill, the group and their various co-consipirators, such as designer and director Graeme Whifler, set out to shoot on this black and white video format and then transfer it to 16mm film for editing and the creation of a soundtrack, a truly insane workflow from the start.
After several years of arduous production, with all the shooting done with only the “throwaway” on-set sound picked up by the camera mics but never intended to be used, the project was abandoned when it became obvious that they had created an unwieldy monster that couldn’t capture the incredible level of detail they needed… let alone color.
For the first time ever, the Cryptic Corporation vaults have been opened, and we now catch many more glimpses of this legendary unseen effort – the 1983 edit, Whatever Happened to Vileness Fats?, only scratched the surface – culled from 15-ish hours of raw videotape, laboriously restored by Cinema Preservation Alliance with the “secret” audio from the sets intact. Peek under the Residents’ eyeball masks and immerse yourself in the deranged vision that never did become Vileness Fats.”
Peter Conheim
Cinema Preservation Alliance/Red Channels
C/w Outdated Cultural Depictions
NB the entire Weird Weekend programme is presented with descriptive subtitles and optional audio description.
Thanks to Homer Flynn and The Cryptic Corporation, Peter Conheim & Screen Scotland
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