Doris Wishan: Making Fils in Hell – FESCH.TV

FESCH.TV INFORMIERT:

Not quite five feet tall but a giant of no-budget ingenuity and brain-boggling cinematographic invention, Bronx-born Doris Wishman was in her mid-forties by the time she directed her first feature, beginning her filmmaking career after the sudden death of her husband in 1958—and once she’d started making movies, she made ones that looked and sounded like nobody else’s. Starting first in Florida with so-called “nudie cuties,” nudism-themed films that abounded beginning in the late ‘50s, Wishman’s return to New York corresponded to her joining the mid-‘60s fashion for producing “roughies,” movies that satisfied a taste for titillating violence as well as bared flesh. In the years to come, Wishman would try her hand at softcore semidocumentary and slashers, in her every outing evidencing the weird, pawky sense of humor and thrillingly muddled mise-en-scène that could only be called Wishmanesque. Metrograph celebrates the Queen of Exploitation and an artist unlike any other with a collection of her nudie cuties, roughies, and more, all recently restored by the American Genre Film Archive.

Screening September 13th to October 14th, 2021