Doris Wishman

[WorldForgot]

Although her status iz that of Exploitation Favorite, it's her spirit as to the whys and hows of filmmaking that excites me as much as the filmography itself. Starting her own thread as there are so many filmz to consider, and I hope we talk about Doris Wishman for yearz to come.

May 31, 2022

The Films of Doris Wishman: The Twilight Years (1970-1977) on blu-ray from Vinegar Syndrome partner label AGFA



No one will ever make movies like Doris Wishman made movies. One of the most prolific women filmmakers in the history of American cinema, writer-director-editor Wishman created collisions between surrealism and exploitation that feel like they materialized from an alternate universe. THE FILMS OF DORIS WISHMAN: THE TWILIGHT YEARS surveys the last major era of Wishman's career. From DEADLY WEAPONS and DOUBLE AGENT 73 (crime epics starring the iconic Chesty Morgan) to LET ME DIE A WOMAN (a semi-documentary about transgender people), AGFA + Something Weird are honored to present these triumphant DIY treasures in dazzling new restorations.

August 30, 2022

The Films of Doris Wishman: The Moonlighting Years (1965-1969) on blu-ray from Vinegar Syndrome partner label American Genre Film Archive



No one will ever make movies like Doris Wishman made movies. One of the most prolific women filmmakers in the history of American cinema, writer-director-editor Wishman created collisions between surrealism and exploitation that feel like they materialized from an alternate universe. THE FILMS OF DORIS WISHMAN: THE MOONLIGHT YEARS surveys the mid-period, gutter-noir era of Wishman's career. From BAD GIRLS GO TO HELL (Wishman's iconic crime epic) to INDECENT DESIRES (a horror-tinged sexploitation mindwarp), AGFA + Something Weird are honored to present these triumphant DIY treasures in sparkling new restorations.

View this post on Instagram

[Alethia]

I've been in an intense and ongoing Doris Wishman phase since a few of her films appeared on the Criterion channel last year: Nude on the Moon, Bad Girls Go to Hell (which poster I have framed up on my wall), Double Agent 73, Indecent Desires, Deadly Weapons, and the documentary Let Me Die a Woman - an exploitative yet empathetic look into the lives of a few transwomen in the late 70s. 

(Incidentally, I've been writing something that involves Doris as a key supporting character for a few months now...)

Also picked this up at Metrograph a while back:

[WorldForgot]

Lovely!! Thank you for those photos.

[WorldForgot]

Elena Gorfinkel writes for Artforum - Dangerous Liasons
Who's Afraid of Doris Wishman?

HAVING RESURFACED late in life due to a revival of her sex films, an eighty-nine-year-old Doris Wishman, clad in leopard print and wedge sandals, appeared on Late Night with Conan O'Brien in 2002. Conan is flummoxed by Wishman's spiky retorts and willfully evasive manner. Affecting sheepishness when asked for the name of her latest (penultimate) film, she finally discloses the title: Dildo Heaven. Sensing discomfort, Wishman asks, "Conan, are you afraid of me?" The other guest, Roger Ebert, enters the fray to discuss Wishman's work, announcing his familiarity with Deadly Weapons (1973) and Double Agent 73 (1974), which stars Chesty Morgan and her seventy-three-inch bustline. Ebert states that the only reason to watch these films, in his view, is to see Morgan entirely nude, and yet she remains mostly clothed. Wishman cannily replies: "Well Roger, I'm sorry you're frustrated . . . Is there anything I can do?" Reframing male cinephilic desire as pitiful erotic disappointment, Wishman's bait and switch is both the work of a cunning "exploiteer" in the old-school tradition, with some Borscht Belt thrown in, as well as a testament to the blurring of contraries she and her films embody: feigned prudery and ribald provocation, sincerity and self-consciousness. Asking Ebert why he didn't put Dildo Heaven on his "Best Of" list, the filmmaker is met with the critic's blanching reply—of course he likes to see films first before reviewing them! Wishman scoffs: "Ugh, how ordinary!"

Born in 1912, a Jewish New Yorker and child of Ukrainian émigrés, Wishman was hardly ordinary. By the time of the Conan interview, which aired five months before her death, she had titillated and bewildered adult and cult film audiences for many decades with idiosyncratic movies rife with sexual degradation, grotesque and preposterous bodily perfidy, and, as one of her advertisements blared, "Girls without Restraint!" Among the most prolific American women directors of the postwar period, her vastly eccentric body of work, counting thirty features, remains unknown to many film connoisseurs. In Wishman's audacious films, breasts avenge crimes and kill their oglers (Deadly Weapons); a transplanted penis bestows on its host sociopathic intent rather than sexual prowess (The Amazing Transplant, 1970); a stalker controls a young woman by manipulating a found doll (Indecent Desires, 1968); an all-woman nudist colony inhabits a lunar landscape (Nude on the Moon, 1961); and viewers are shown explicitly graphic gender-affirmation surgery as part of a queasily sensationalizing yet oft sympathetic quasi-documentary on trans people (Let Me Die a Woman, 1978). Her films overflow with the strangeness and plasticity of sexed and gendered bodies, simmering with promises of corporeal liberation and its attendant dangers. Her devotees include trash royalty John Waters and avant-garde film and video artist Peggy Ahwesh, who once documented an encounter with the filmmaker in a sex shop in Miami's Coconut Grove—where Wishman worked in the 1990s—for her Wishman fanzine in 1995.

Wishman, Ahwesh wrote, "had a feel for the newly exposed tawdry human body of the early '60s." In that decade, a cottage industry of sexploitation films emerged due to the recent legalization of onscreen nudity following a court battle over Max Nosseck's 1954 Garden of Eden. Wishman was one of few female directors working in this burgeoning independent market. Entirely self-taught, she came to moviemaking as a widow in middle age, producing her first film, the nudist escapade Hideout in the Sun, with $20,000 borrowed from her sister Pearl. Before long, she was the biggest producer of nudist camp pictures, releasing eight in the early '60s before shifting into black-and-white sex melodramas, or "roughies," as the sexploitation mode adjusted to darker, more violent subjects and a grittier aesthetic inflected by noir, art cinema, and variants of realism. In her work, Ahwesh finds "a seedy underlying resonance of the fear and hostility toward women in our world, which Doris describes in her own profound and tawdry way." The pleasures of watching Wishman's bawdy, crass, absurd, and kitschy skin flicks heighten across their proliferative form, as the gimmicks, stiletto heels, polyester curtains, ashtrays, vases, and black lace panties pile up from reel to reel. They are replete with the contradictions of a time in which shame jostled liberally with pleasure, and "tease" was the code word of a popular culture teetering at the precipice between prohibition and release.

Wishman's penchant for tawdry profundity and her disjunctive style flowers in the black-and-white roughies she made on the cheap in the mid-1960s. Wishman biographer Michael Bowen recounts that she would bristle when asked about her aesthetic, quipping, "What style? The lack-of-money style?" Wishman shot her films mostly using figure models as actors, without synchronized sound. She would then hire voice actors to dub in the lines, producing distinct aural and visual tracks that shirk the artificial coherence of continuity editing. The alchemy across these disjunctions between performance and soundtrack, image and sound, would induce its own hypnagogic effects. The opening of The Sex Perils of Paulette (1965), her first roughie, bears this out. A conversing couple in Central Park is heard over shots of a pond, walking paths, and a carriage driver; they reappear on the image track only a few times. A Lichtensteinian declaration of love is spoken by the boyfriend over a shot of a squirrel climbing down from a tree: "I've never felt about any girl the way I feel about you! You're so good, so pure!" Without a stabilizing image of the couple to suture the narration, a viewer is left with the effects of befuddling distanciation as well as an ambiguous or unintended irony. Such strategies produce a cinema of fascinating visual and aural discontinuities that contain their own oneiric logic.

Behind-the-head shots and avoidances of moving mouths ostensibly enable an easier sound montage, but they also require other fill-ins; in Wishman's world, this means a predilection for ornament, her version of the "pillow shot" of Ozu. This montage aesthetic is what Wishman is now most known for in the cult sphere, her "cutaway style," per Bowen. Actors are frequently filmed not for their faces, but for their bodily extremities—shoe-clad feet in all varieties being a notorious Wishman delectation. She was a cinematic materialist and a true bricoleur, as evidenced in her films' sustained attention to bodies, decor, props, costume, and framing. After her nudist camp period in Florida, she typically shot in and around New York, which lent her images a denotative quality, a raggedly jazzy thereness. An inveterate recycler of her own used and unused footage, Wishman also used and reused locations, including her Woodside, Queens, apartment, whose orientalized furnishings adorn many of her films. Objects recur, becoming their own intertextual threads and traces of habitus: that ceramic vase here, that foliate textile there, this wood-paneled office, and that checkered sectional making repeat cameos, a bric-a-brac-laden photogénie. Of the ashtray used by her heroine Meg to kill her rapist in Bad Girls Go to Hell (1965), Wishman joked, "That ashtray has committed so many murders!"

[...]