The Purple Death

Visual trash: The disqualified, that without taste, ot thought of as worthy of serious study.

Buster Crabbe: Pilot of the 25th Century, and more importantly Flash Gordon in the 1940s. At that time, people would go to the cinema all the time - so there were all these serialised films.

[Flash Gordon conquers the universe]

These films were made for as little money as possible: Usin stock footage, music from other films, costumes and sets that happened to be lying around the studio. This is the beginning of cut-up cinema. The purple death is the first one in the series. It has this weird, jumbled understanding of technology: Kind of primitive and exoticised, but also mass-media and science fiction.

1944: Captain America The purple death

What is it about purple that these black and white films are obsessed with? For one, purple is the least common colour in nature: This is why it's associated with wealth and power. It's also the first artificial dye. So it's connected to the artificial, unnatural, but also power and wealth.

Cobra Woman (1944) Maria Montez aka The Queen of Technicolor

Jack Smith (1962): The perfect filmic appositeness of Maria Montez

The vast machinery of a movie company worked overtime to make her vision into seets. They achieeved only inept approximations. but one of the atrocious acing sighs suffused a thousand tons of dead plaster with life

Flaming creatures (1963)

Juvenile does not equal shameful and trash is the material of creators. It exists whether one approves or not.

I grew up in darkness, spending most of my time in darkness or with a broken brushful of putrid paind

Choppers Surfers Cross

Kids started to wear Nazi memorabilia that their parents had brought back from the war.

Time:

Dug out of attics and curio shops and freshly minted by the thousandsm the German Iron Cross has become the newsest surfer's emblem and high school fad.

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