Filmmaker of a cult movie… perhaps.

PostED ON OCTOBER 17 2022

Every day, Lumière features a little-known filmmaker and a movie worth discovering; doing justice to these forgotten films in the history of cinema is also the role of the Lumière Film Festival.

Who is he?

A man who directed only one film, if that at all… Officially, John Parker (1925-1981), son of an Oregon theatre owner, used his mother's money to shoot this oddity, a silent, partially improvised movie, unlike any other, in six days. But the supporting actor Bruno VeSota, who bears a slight resemblance to Orson Welles in the film, spread the word that he himself had directed most of it. Who was telling the truth? John Parker would never shoot another movie.

Dementia, 1955

His film at the Lumière Film Festival?

Unusually short (less than an hour), ‘Dementia’ is a dreamlike and (vaguely) horrific trip that follows a woman's nocturnal wanderings through the streets of Los Angeles. Overloaded with Freudian symbols - the heroine relives her father's death in a cemetery that looks like something out of an Ed Wood movie - the story emits a permanent unease, which is relevant to revisit today in the light of the fight for violence against women. A proto-feminist nightmare? Nearly.

What makes it worth discovering?

After a short run, ‘Dementia’ became an underground success more than twenty years after its shooting thanks to the fashion for midnight screenings. Apart from its visual invention, which brilliantly mixes influences (silent expressionism, film noir realism, Orson Welles' style), the film shows how close to the avant-garde 'exploitation' cinema (called ‘Z series’ for purely commercial purposes) is. This is what we take away from this strange work, which apparently influenced David Lynch. Thank you, John Parker.

A. F .

Screenings:

Dementia by John Parker (1955, 56min)
Institut Lumière Mon. 17 10:30pm | UGC Confluence Sat. 22 4:15pm