Shorts (8 Films)1969

OLD TIME COMEDY NIGHT - 1969 - 11 min

"In David Devensky's picture the audience is shown an audience. We are looking at a picture of them and they, it turns out, are looking at a picture of themselves. At the same time, the suspicion grows that these purposely gross caricatures of the average movie spectator are looking past their own dark flickering images to something else. As in THE LICKERISH QUARTET there is the uneasy feeling that the actors and teh audience have changed places and that these parodies of ourselves, facing us, looking straight into the camera, are looking through the screen and seeing us - and that they find the spectacle hilarious." Donald Riche - Music of Modern Art

"An Uninhibited vulgar skit." New Cinema Review; Ann Arbor, Yale, etc Awards. Preserved in the Permanent Archives at MoMA

BEETHOVEN CHICKEN - 1970 - 6 m.

"...consists of chickens being butchered and hung on hooks, to the accompaniment of the Fifth Symphony. As the films progresses, the imagery mutates from the nearly documentary to the nearly surreal. An eyeball-slashing scene recalls "Chien Andalou" yet Devensky hold it on-screen much longer than Dali and Bunnuel. Finally a chicken's skull is pounded to bits by a hammer and each time we think (or wish) the final blow has fallen another follows it. The camera peeks all the while and one is uncertain what is more disquieting - the action on the film, or the ridged stare of the Camera." Richard Koszarski - New York American. "Raw and cooked chickens, hanging by hooks, are synchronized to the First Movement of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. Powerful, if not distasteful imagery as chickens graduate to lambs and pigs. Guaranteed to please or disgust!" - Devensky

CATERPILLARS and ANTS - 1970  6m

The apotheosis of Devensky’s work is Caterpillars and Aunts which technically resemble a Lumiere film. The camera stares at a man eating caterpillars for the entire running time. The spectale is so repulsive that the hand-held camera begins to shake wildly, Devensky himself admits that he had to look away during part of the filming. Thus the camera did the looking for him and for us. The experience is quintessentially voyeuristic, as even the filmmaker did not experience first hand what was going on”  Richard Koszarski - New York American “Dave Devensky’s “Caterpillars and Ants” shows actor John Oken devouring, regurgitating, and again devouring canned caterpillars, scratching his noise and head and augment his lunch with the proceeding“ - Show Business

COFFEE GRINDS - 1969  8m 

“A sunny comedy about a young man who finds himself destined to spill coffee on everyone he meets, whether they be friend or foe” - Devensky

EVOLUTION’S STEP - 1970 10m

“Devensky’s evolutionary theory...The same man as in “Caterpillars and Ants” is sitting alone in an apartment with an immense accumulation of debris, listening blankly to a fragile Kreisler-like melody on an old gramophone. During the film the camera peers at him and his junk and even swoops around in lengthy tracking shots. At times it rests solely on close-ups of his craggy face (another Devensky preoccupation). The man begins to freak out as “phantoms” appear and collapses amid the rubble. The melody appears once more and this time he reacts to it. If the film’s title indicates a continuation of thinking in “Proof” than what is seen is modern man surrounded bt his accumulations of things, at first dulled and insensitive to beauty (the fragile melody) but finally becoming responsive to it after a harrowing “rite de passage.” - Richard Koszarski - New York American
 

PROOF - 1970  25m.

“Proof” is a film so personal that it approaches therapy, but there are certain Devensky  preoccupations which become readily apparent to everyone familiar with his work. Perhaps the finest sequence is the investigation of fifty-year-old tombstones in a Jewish cemetery - a scene which bears close resemblance to Devensky’s scrutinizing of old photographs in other films. Indeed, many of the graves bear photographs of their inhabitants and Devensky imbues the scene with that same romantic nostalgia....”Proof” closes with a 2001-style light show and a direct statement of Devensky’s evolutionary theory.” - Richard Koszarski New York American

HOMECALL - 1971 10m 

“a gentle personal revelry “ Roger Greenspan  New York Times “Consisting  basically of home movie footage of family, relatives, unknown others and myself during the mid-1940’s, I have included loops of certain sequences and actions that have attracted me. Invariably people find “Homecall” a warm film however, upon closer scrutiny, quite another facet is visible.”  Devensky   Best of the Ann Arbor Film Festival   Whitney Museum of American Art.

VAMPEER - 1972  10m 

“Vampeer is told through a color mist and floating vales. A non-narrative film in the tradition of the Weber-Watson “Fall of the House of Usher” (1928), “Vampeer” retains all the genre cliches but uses them atmospherically. A study in color and light.  Devensky