Alfonso Ossorio

Paying homage to the blazingly bizarre, boldly sincere life of Alfonso Ossorio (1916–1990), this docushort by Marianne Trench attempts a reflection on his life's work—most notably the 80-acre Long Island estate Ossorio left behind. It is an environment thoroughly extruded with pattern & motif, teeming with sculpture, topiary, bonsai, & works all but defying categorization. Across all its concomitant iterations, Ossorio's multidisciplinary stewardship of the land remains as four decades of evidence testifying to his aesthetic, ecological, & spiritual efforts. Ineffably beautiful & understandably brutal, archetypal powers unfold, revealing the fullness & emptiness of our own reflection—equal parts romantic & stark—leaving us to question how to continue or explain what has been started.

Over a booze-fueled, increasingly hectic five-day shoot in East Hampton, Norman Mailer and his cast and crew spontaneously unloaded onto film the lurid and loony chronicle of U.S. presidential candidate and filmmaker Norman T. Kingsley debating and attacking his hangers-on and enemies. This gonzo narrative, “an inkblot test of Mailer’s own subconscious” (Time), becomes something like a documentary on its own making when costar Rip Torn breaks the fourth wall in one of cinema’s most alarming on-screen outbursts.