The Guardian has excerpts from the expat Spanish writer Juan Goytisolo’s Cinema Eden: Essays from the Muslim Mediterranean. In a memory straight out of the seedy phase of Cinema Paradiso, Goytisolo writes about packing into “fleapit” theaters in Barcelona, Tangier, and Marrakech, to watch kung fu movies with raucous crowds of semi-literate cinema junkies.
One film he remembers stands out: The Dialectic Can Break Stones, a Taiwanese chop’em up given the What’s Up, Tiger Lily? treatment by ’68-ist activists. Supposedly, some Maoist cinephiles acquired the (Moroccan?) rights to the film, replaced the subtitles with their own revolutionary storyline, and showed in to unsuspecting immigrant audiences. While pummeling his way through a roomful of evil bureaucrats, the hero would cry out, “Now you’ll find out about the muscle-power of a pupil of Nietzsche and Lou Andrea Salome!”
Hey, sounds more plausible than The Dreamers.
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the making of, by greg allen