Ron Rice
The Flower Thief
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Add rightsFormat DVD Interzone
Original format 16mm
Year 1950-1982
Language(s) English
Artist(s) Ron Rice
Author(s) Wheeler Winston Dixon, Barry Clark, Marry Batten, Ron Rice
Booklet 56 pages (French, English)
Running time 113 min
Films
THE MEXICAN FOOTAGE (1950) 8'30
THE FLOWER THIEF (1960) 58'
SENSELESS (1962) 24'
CHUMLUM (1964) 23'
OUTTAKES - THE QUEEN OF SHEBA MEETS THE ATOM MAN (1982) 6'
Description
"The Flower Thief, filmed by and starring New York and San Francisco beats, is a collection of improvisations. Ron Rice, the film's creator, attempted to ignore or break all the rules of cinematic art in making this film. Its form is the picaresque novel, a genre dating from the Middle Ages in which a rogue lives through a series of loosely connected adventures that reveal his personality and his relationship with the world around him. Don Quixote in the Renaissance, Huckleberry Finn in the 19th century, and Charlie Chaplin's tramp in our time are picaresque heroes. Ron Rice's contribution to this tradition is his flower thief, a harmless, mad homosexual. Wandering the streets of San Francisco with his teddy bear, indifferent to authority, stealing flowers because he loves them, and experiencing the most basic human emotions, he is also The Noble Savage."
— P. Adams Sitney, Film Culture
"I continue to think that The Flower Thief is one of the most important modern films, a magnificent absurd poem. The bullfight in negative is a fantastic shot, as is the sequence with the beatnicks on the beach in Acapulco, or the train theft episode, or the shot of the Virgin of Guadalupe surrounded by light, or the oil wells at night. It's beautiful and wild."
— Jonas Mekas