Étienne O'Leary

Étienne O'Leary

Born: October 24, 1944
Died: October 17, 2011
in Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Étienne O’Leary’s filmography consists essentially of three experimental films completed in Paris between 1966 and 1968. Day Tripper, Homeo (aka Homeo: Minor Death: Coming Back from Going Home) and Chromo Sud constitute a cinema of resistance. These brutally personal and subversive films form a body of work with few precedents.

Movies for Étienne O'Leary...

La deuxième femme
Title: La deuxième femme
Character: Self
Released: November 30, 2008
Type: Movie
Over the course of more than fifteen years, Clémenti films a series of intimate diaries, starting from daily encounters. In La deuxième femme, we see Bulle Ogier and Viva, Nico and Tina Aumont, Philippe Garrel and Udo Kier, a performance by Béjart, a piece by Marc’O, concerts by Bob Marley and Patti Smith (not always recognisable)... It’s like a maelstrom of psychedelic images that are passed through a particle accelerator.
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Visa de censure n° X
Title: Visa de censure n° X
Released: July 2, 1976
Type: Movie
Best known for his roles in Belle de jour, Sweet Movie, and many more, Pierre Clementi was also the architect behind a transgressive, high-minded, and disorienting cinema. Like an acid-soaked freefall, Visa de censure n° X is a rush of nudity and color from one of France’s most seductively watchable actors, set to an album's worth of psychedelic prog rock (performed by the Delired Cameleon Family, a group featuring members of French band Clearlight).
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U.S.S.
Title: U.S.S.
Released: January 1, 1970
Type: Movie
"At the time (1970) I had one foot in the Situationist movement, and another in the hippie movement, or what took place in Paris. This film is the result of the tension between the two, and reproduces it." - Alain Montesse
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Destroy Yourselves
Title: Destroy Yourselves
Released: May 10, 1969
Type: Movie
Detruisez-vous is a ‘primitive’ film which breaks all the rules of film-making. It’s the first Zanzibar film (and predates the very naming of the movement), an attempt to make a film which defies the rules of production, the production line of commerce
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Satan Bouche un Coin
Title: Satan Bouche un Coin
Released: May 4, 1968
Type: Movie
The film is a series of images, shown in short takes (anywhere from a few frames to 30 seconds), of more or less fetishistic imagery (something Bouyxou was particularly fond of). After a credit and title sequence written on naked human flesh, the viewer sees the brilliant Molinier standing sanctimoniously in front of a screen. Soon he is joined by a woman, and he fondles her breasts while retaining his signature grin. Molinier seems to almost be the 'ringmaster' of the incidents, with almost every minute episode cutting back to him. His presence is one thing that makes this film remarkable; the same sort of aura that exists in Moliniers famous self-portraits and cut-ups is present here, on screen. (esotika.blogspot.com)
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Chromo sud
Title: Chromo sud
Released: January 1, 1968
Type: Movie
One of the very few films made by Etienne O'Leary, all of which emerged from the French underground circa 1968 and can be very loosely designated 'diary films.' Like the contemporaneous films by O'Leary's more famous friend Pierre Clementi, they trippily document the drug-drenched hedonism of that era's dandies. O'Leary worked with an intoxicating style that foregrounded rapid and even subliminal cutting, dense layering of superimposed images and a spontaneous notebook type shooting style. Yet even if much of O'Leary's material was initially 'diaristic,' depicting the friends, lovers, and places that he encountered in his private life, the metamorphoses it underwent during editing transformed it into a series of ambiguously fictionalized, sometimes darkly sexual fantasias. - Experimental Film Club
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Homeo
Title: Homeo
Character: Self
Released: November 15, 1967
Type: Movie
Homeo is a mental construction made from visual reality, just as music is made from auditive reality. I put in this film no personal intentions. All my intentions are personal. I’ve made this film thinking of what the audience would have liked to see, not something specific that I wanted to say: what the film depicts is above all reality, not fiction. Homeo is, for me, the search for an autonomous cinematographic language, which doesn't owe anything to traditional narrative, or maybe everything. Cinema is, above all, part of a way of life which will become more and more self-assured in the years and century to come. We are part of this change, and that’s why I tried in Homeo to establish a series of perpetual changes, in constant evolution or regress, which tries, above all, to focus on things.
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Heads and Tales
Title: Heads and Tales
Released: November 15, 1967
Type: Movie
Directed by a friend of Étienne O'Leary, this film missive, whose words are images, was held in very high esteem by Pierre Clémenti.
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Sun Love
Title: Sun Love
Released: July 7, 1967
Type: Movie
A Happening in homage to LSD.
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Visa de Censure [Version 1967]
Title: Visa de Censure [Version 1967]
Released: April 6, 1967
Type: Movie
A unique copy of the 16mm experimental masterpiece by Pierre Clémenti, restored in 2003 by the Neyrac Films Laboratories.
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Day Tripper
Title: Day Tripper
Released: January 1, 1966
Type: Movie
A woman walks, loves, eats and washes herself, dances. It all takes place in a bedroom. At times flashbacks, or visualizations of previous or following scenes. Unless her life in the bedroom becomes an obsession, she lives through the other scenes.