Each OFFICIAL LIMITED EDITION BOOTLEG in the PULP VIDEO COLLECTION is a hand-made NTSC all-region DVD-R, numbered and signed by Charles Pinion, in editions of 313 copies.

Below: my “Pulp Video Manifesto” which I published in FIREBALL NEWS in 1994. This “excerpt” (there was never a longer version) subsequently inspired Tony Labat’s “Pulp Video” class at the San Francisco Art Institute, whose catalog quoted from the Manifesto verbatim - attributed to its “author”, Tonya Chthonic.

 

(Tonya Cthonic is the percussionist for Zombie Torment, the “Industrial Consciousness” band - made up of Vic Torment (vox and samples), Sticky Libido (bass) --fictional characters all -- that appears in the yet-to-be-realized epic DIMENSION DOOR.)

This is the modern exploitation cinema. Pulp Video is where the narrative limits for sex, violence and depravity can be expanded and transcended. The makers need answer to no one but themselves. Gruesome and prurient surface narratives combined with affordable reproduction techniques make pulp video “the bastard amalgam of the Hollywood B-Picture and the Xerox machine” (Tonya Chthonic).

 

Before the modern world’s waking rem sleep (at thirty frames per second) reading was an activity much treasured. Fine books are still a beautiful aesthetic experience: acid-free archival papers made of rag, marbled end papers, and hand-tooled leather covers. Content: writing of the masters. Ponder and snort while drinking  your port. Meanwhile, people have always loved junk: the dime novels and horror magazines, their brown and crumbly pages (made of wood pulp) turning your fingers a shiny black. The kind of popular-culture detritus that painter Robert Williams referred to as “the garbage... the good stuff!!”

 

The cigar-chomping moguls of the past, coming from an environment of adversity (Eastern Europe), shot from the hip and went with their gut. As the expense of making a Hollywood film has grown more bloated and obscene, these latter-day risk-taking mensch have been replaced by corporate-style CEOs with the collective heart, aesthetic, and eye for figures of an accountancy firm...”

 

How long will our nascent police state tolerate these obnoxious examples of creative autonomy?

 

- Excerpted from A Pulp Video Manifesto, by Tonya Cthonic (1994)

PULP VIDEO

Sigh. Granted, there was a naive faith here in video’s subversive potential. I was shooting in VHS, 8mm and Hi-8 video, unaware that digital video was coming down the pipeline to change everything. The “video feature” became less an obnoxious post-punk art statement and more of “the way things are”. As a filmmaker, today, I couldn’t be happier. As a rebellious shit-stirrer, I am somewhat subdued by it.

 

- Charles Pinion, 4.12.06