The movie
Show notes
1 hour version, first broadcast 5pm, 21st November 2016 on Resonance FM in London. Every month, interesting people talk about the music, films and music for films which have shaped their lives. In November, Roz and Tim revisit the locations of 1970s 'Nightbirds' on Commercial Street, Whitechapel, in East London. Made by gay American underground playwright, costumiere, screenwriter, actor, film producer, editor and director Andy Milligan, the horror critic Stephen King described another of Milligan's films as "the work of morons with cameras." An erotic drama filmed in black and white, 'Nightbirds' is about two young people who meet by chance and fall into like and into bed with one another, played by Julie Shaw in her only screen role and Berwick Kaler (now one of North England's leading panto dames). 'Nightbirds' depicts a vanished London of grubby lofts and peeling paint. Bringing a queer eye to a destructive straight liaison, Milligan's film is a meditation on the abject, the wretched but - unusually for underground cinema of the period, dominated by the likes of Kenneth Anger - in the heterosexual rather than LGBT realm. Unscreened at the time that it was completed, the only print of it was bought by Nicolas ('The Neon Demon') Winding Refn on eBay for $25,000, who worked with the BFI to restore it for DVD release. Critic and author Kim Newman discusses this and Milligan's other exploitation films made in England with us, and BFI's Vic Pratt and Will Fowler chat about BFI's Flipside DVD title. More... * Nicolas Winding Refn: My obsession with Andy Milligan's cult horror movies https://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2012/jun/14/obsession-andy-milligan-cult-movies * Flipside: the Art of Andy Milligan http://www.cageyfilms.com/2012/07/flipside-the-art-of-andy-milligan/ * BFI Flipside 'Nightbirds' Bluray http://shop.bfi.org.uk/nightbirds-dvd-bluray.html#.V7HUwqL-58E * Sex-Gore Netherworld: Nightbirds & The Body Beneath Disinterred http://thequietus.com/articles/09
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