Dementia (1955)

Director: John Parker
Starring: Adrienne Barrett, Bruno VeSota, Ben Roseman
Duration: 56'

The night odyssey of a lonely woman in the streets of the big city leads her to dark alleys of sexual desperation and insanity, in this truly bizarre and yet unexplored from the wide audience film noir which has no dialogues and leaves everything to the language of the expressionistic images.

The film screening will be accompanied by live music from The Boy

«Dementia» is one of those rare exploitation pieces of horror and artistic experimenting that are simply not made any more. 

As a genuine ancestor of the distraught women of «Carnival of Souls» (1965), the anonymous heroin (performed by the director’s secretary Adrienne Barrett) wakes up from a nightmare in a filthy hotel room only to start an equally nightmarish tour among the Freudian memories from her adolescent past and the dark alleys of a hospitable Los Angeles (in the same location where Orson Welles did the shootings of «Touch of Evil»). There she will become the pray of the shameless gaze of the men which will reignite her deadly instincts. It doesn’t require particular effort for the contemporary viewer to understand that those desperate night walks will end badly, but «Dementia» ’s attitude seems bizarre even to this day.

A compilation of cheap psychoanalysis and noir influence, where the expressionistic b-movie aesthetic meets Maya Deren’s experimental editing, «Dementia» shot down every possible ban of the Hays Code. As a result, even though the film was completed in 1953, the director John Parker had to fight year after year with New York’s censorship, in order to watch his film find its way into the movie theatres. However, even then, distributors stood baffled confronted with this forceful as well as deductive back and forth course between fantasy and reality, the often surreal illustration, the total absence of dialogue and the few but shocking scenes of violence.

So it came not a surprise that Parker, who did the film mostly with his mother’s money, disappeared, creating that way doubt…that he ever even really existed. 

Thanasis Patsavos

The film screening will be accompanied by live music from The Boy