VOICE CHOICES ARCHIVES The Flower Thief
by Jim Hoberman
Dir. Ron Rice (1961).
Encouraged by Pull My Daisy, unknown beatniks Ron Rice and Taylor Mead used outdated, 16mm to document Mead’s arbitrary tour of SF bohemia. Unscripted and (unlike Pull My Daisy) genuinely haphazard, The Flower Thief posited life as a movie and made the wistfully infantile, dementedly fey Mead an underground star. To call the movie self-indulgent is to state the obvious—and also miss the point.
Fri., May 21, 9:30 p.m., 2010