Reviews

"The Pleasure Garden" by James Broughton is a joyous musical fantasy celebrating Love in the Park. In this award-winning film the pleasure principle wins a sweet victory over all prudes and killjoys. Filmed in the United Kingdom in the ruins of The Crystal Palace Terraces, The Pleasure Garden is a playful and poetic ode to desire, and winner of the Prix de Fantasie Poétique at Cannes in 1954. The film features Hattie Jaques and Lindsay Anderson, with John Le Mesurier as the bureaucrat determined to stamp on any form of free expression.

Lovers of the history of Crystal Palace will find much to treasure in this 1950s time capsule of a film, which shows the Crystal Colonnade and the bandstand (both later demolished), the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve Memorial, and much of the statuary which was to be auctioned off in 1957.

WHAT OTHERS SAY ABOUT "The Pleasure Garden" "In Chaplin, Rene Clair, Buster Keaton, Jacques Tati we enjoy on a big scale the fruits of the poetic turned comic. Broughton is of their kind, except that he holds more strongly to feeling, makes short cuts they daren't, sees and sings out of himself, and never dilutes a joke or a movement. THE PLEASURE GARDEN thus combines the pleasure of Keystone with the love lyric. It springs like the lark, and mingles oddity, grace, satire, and laughter without a dead moment." – Sight and Sound "It's on the side of the angels. It's a great testimony for Love." – Allen Ginsberg

The short film TESTAMENT is "James Broughton 's exquisite self-portrait. A major figure in experimental filmmaking and poetry since the 1940s, Broughton views his life and life's work with irony, charm, humor, and a combination of joyous self-love and gentle self-depreciation. Scenes from his earlier films mix the elements of humor, magic, slapstick, melodrama, and romance which mark his aesthetic. A plethora of rich personal symbols is woven throughout the film, tied together by verbal games, Zen poems, anecdotes, songs, a child's prayer, dreams, and visions." – Karen Cooper

Years before the Beats arrived in San Francisco, the city exploded with artistic expressions – painting, theater, film, poetry. And at its center was the groundbreaking filmmaker and poet James Broughton. His remarkable story spans the post-war San Francisco Renaissance, escape to Europe during the McCarthy years, his special film prize at Cannes, his consorting with the Beats, making films celebrating the human body, meeting his soul mate at age 61, becoming a bard of Gay liberation, and dying a conscious death in 1999.

"Broughton's poetic skills are often highlighted in the films; such is the case in one of his boldest efforts, Song of the Godbody (1977). Here a male body — no doubt the filmmaker's own, as it is featured in so much of his work — is shown in closeup, a kind of landscape of flesh that the camera lovingly surveys. Broughton's beatific words accompany this exploration: "This is my body, which speaks for itself… This is my body, which sings of itself." The comparisons to Whitman are inevitable and Broughton is in a real sense Whitman's heir, celebrating the male body and male bonding unabashedly, and going further than Whitman in ways made possible in part by Broughton's appearance in the world decades later. What Whitman said, Broughton can say and show." -- Gary Morris, in Bright Lights Film Journal.

DEVOTIONS is the vision of a world where men have forsaken rivalry and taken up affection, thereby creating a society that relishes a variety of comradely devotions. The film takes delight in observing the friendly things men can do together, from the odd to the rapturous, from the playful to the passionate. These events appear in a series of cameo duets performed by men of all ages and appetites. The tapestry of changing scenes is strung on a narrative thread: the personal romance of the two makers of the film, as they discover their own affections and interweave them with those of their friends. In the end they assert their hope that loving comradeship may yet be the happy norm for the world. The film was made over a nine month period on locations from Seattle to San Diego, and included the participation of some forty-five couples.

"A High Kuku is, of course, a cuckoo haiku. In inventing this form James Broughton has concocted zany verses which are 'high' in the sense that they are often metaphysical and are keenly aware of the meta-comedy of things.... In the contemplation of lofty themes most people are serious, though not always sincere. Broughton, however, is always sincere but hardly ever serious. Indeed, seriousness is a questionable virtue; it is gravity rather than levity, and it was that devout Catholic, G.K. Chesterton, who maintained that the angels fly because they take themselves lightly. And, in company with the angels, Broughton laughs with God rather than at him." - Alan Watts