Somewhere between Fleischer and Plympton is Bozzetto, whose 1976 satire of Fantasia sliced up animation's tropes and let loose. Rarely screened in revival. Many tangents in Allegro's animation, like other innovations of the 70's, were discarded by the mainstream.  A must see. Here's Sibelius's Valse Triste, where an anti-Aristocat makes wall art while exploring the edge's of Bozzetto's momentary genius.

This scant black and white masterpiece photo book, like another black and white photobook Wisconsin Death Trip, is composed of entirely found negatives, culled from historical, industrial and governmental archives (the defense industry is well in evidence). Evidence, made of some of the greatest late 20th century images of American photography, is precisely how future anthropologists will asses our near past. Specifically it will be an introductory map to our various archives of visual data which will acompany the factual data, in a time/era without very much filming/taping ability. Each image the tip of an iceberg of thousands upon thousands of negatives. Services might even rebuild motion events from a series or even a single still of an experiment, and discover what really went wrong. Documentary movies will probably be made from stills in the future, tracking algorithms can spot each speed of a street in motion's objects, render them for seven seconds. The blur has micro blurs in the negative. Evidence will come to life. First published in 1977 (the equally great Wisconsin Death Trip was published 1974). Reprinted recently.

An Anthro-Bio-Chemist, Ott has botanically observed hundreds, perhaps thousands of plants that yield varying amounts of altered states, from a library and research lab in Mexico, recently damaged by arson. For proof of his studies, check out Pharmacotheon. He analyzes many chemical forms, shows inferior paths, and discusses policy and history. Footnotes tell the real story, and are half the size of each chapter. Continuing Gordon Wasson's unusual and maybe ground-breaking constructions of ancient ceremonies utilizing medicinal tools that altered users, Ott writes the only ethnopharmacogosy of entheogenic drugs. A chemical zoom lens into the brain. Volume 2 is delayed, but Volume 1 is a must have.

Now in its third year at NY's Anthology Film Archives, William Lustig Presents is a retro festival of the most dynamic suspense/exploitation films of the 60s and 70s. While Lustig himself directed some shocking 80's-style horror hybrids (Maniac), he chooses nuanced and bizarrely exciting long forgotten titles cut from backlists, most are major studio product that have never been screened since their releases. Most have never even made it past their first VHS release. This year he opens with the above Robert Evans era Paramount release, a high tension thriller (produced by Star Wars greenlighter Ladd Jr.), and follows it with Friedkin's only successful hybrid, the comic-robbery genre buster The Brinks Job. Savvy exploitation fare from 1966's The Incident (a psychopathic precursor to The Taking of Pelham 1,2,3) to near upper tier spaghetti western Navajo Joe follow.

It says we're doomed to comprehend even the simplest tools for our advancement. MIT's Evelyn Fox Keller goes after an absurdity in human perception that has far-reaching restrictions for our evolution as a semi-conscious species. A collective whoops that reads: for every one step forwards we go three steps back. Her observations should be simplified and slotted on every news outlet to shift perception. Here's a NYRB review of her book The Mirage of a Space Between Nature and Nurture.

"It is our despair at the textural inadequacies of

language that drives us to heighten the structural ones toward"

From the back cover:

"THE SUN HAS GROWN DEADLY...

THE WORLD HAS GONE MAD, SOCIETY HAS

PERISHED, SAVAGERY RULES

OVER ALL. ALL THAT WAS KNOWN 

IS OVER, ALL THAT WAS FAMILIAR IS

STRANGE AND TERRIBLE. TODAY

AND YESTERDAY COLLIDE WITH TOMORROW.

IN THESE DYING DAYS OF EARTH, 
A YOUNG DRIFTER ENTERS THE CITY"

Yannick Monget, European climate specialist, issued this coffee-table nightmare in 2006 (by the artbook making Abrams), and exhibits cities and their gear in final arrest, with zero human occupance, which is a perhaps happy fantasy of humans. Erasure of the sentients, sparing us the nightmares really due to frighten, and leaves us in peace. Plantlife gorging its maw on the rust.  Awaiting some arrival from above (the time travellers) or below (the next sentitents). It's like soft-core apocalypse, but it does avoid gimmickry and has some subtle touches. One imagines a photo book of our present made from photos of cities in flux, a post apartheid 1999 downtown Johannesburg (fled immediately by whites), a post-Auto age 2010 Detroit (fled by all). Cover: Paris / New York's financial district.

The Event resurfaces for week two and shows its hand as a 66 year-old conspiracy logjam. As a breakneck parody of Lost's air-disaster gone-awry source, The Event tries for the sci-fi hybrid with 24, but its technique has already lost too much steam. The ever-growing conspiracy is a dead form, here it requires too many secret agents posing as lonely highway patrolmen, piling up too many leaky possibilities. In dangerous times we project the conspiracy's secret responsibilities as a salve to our fears ("oh, someone must be in charge of this") but the integration of this looniness into narratives exposes the conspiracy, both the one we mistake in real-life and the one we are trying to look inside through fictional realms, as sheer impossibilities of logic. They are phantoms the scales of dragons, and like spectres, very difficult to slay. Where is the future form of this myth? The confusion between what is collective and what is conspiratorial (and/or the satire of the in-between) is the next-level of media. The Event has already settled into a slow-drip water torturer of limited facts, most of which seem DOA.  Hostages and body counts and blood-test falsifying add to the semi-crazed mayhem.

"!pleH, pleH"