20. Sick: The Life And Death Of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist (1997)
What’s The Story? Dick’s doc focuses on cystic-fibrosis sufferer Bob Flanagan, who turned his life of “coming, coughing and bad runny bowels” into S&M performance art.
Among other things, this process involved skewering his cock on a nail.
What’s It About? Sick is a touching, bawdy S&M love story and memorial to Flanagan’s often-inspired takes on art, desire and illness.
Essentially, he's transcending his ailment by wilfully exceeding the pain it gave him.
According to Dick, that crucified-penis close-up was a purely aesthetic decision (“I thought the impact of the image would play well cinematically”).
Weird Fact: Flanagan starred in Nine Inch Nails’ widely banned video for ‘Happiness Is Slavery’.
17. Primer (2004)
What’s The Story? Engineer buddies Aaron (Shane Carruth) and Abe (David Sullivan) design a superconducting machine in Aaron’s garage. Then, er...
What’s It About? ...they realise that the machine can be used as a portal to ‘travel’ back to the time it was turned on - it works by creating a time loop.
As Abe says, it’s like “two ends of a street and both are cul-de-sacs”. So, entry to/exit from the machine can only happen safely at either the past or the future end of the street.
If you enter at the past end, you enter the back-side of the loop and, when you exit at the future end, you’ve effectively travelled back in time – but never further back than the start-up time of the machine.
Uh-huh...
Weird Fact: Shane Carruth made the film for $7,000 and had to keep it ultra-lean. The 78-minute running time came from cutting just two minutes out of the 80 originally shot.