Episode Details
Back to EpisodesKANSAS BOWLING: CUDDLY TOYS, 35mm & Letting the Audience Decide
Description
Filmmaker, actress and provocateur Kansas Bowling joins The Fixate & Binge Podcast to revisit her audacious film CUDDLY TOYS, now returning to audiences with a striking new 35mm print.
Originally shot on Super 16mm, CUDDLY TOYS adopts the deceptively innocent language of 1960s and ’70s educational films to present a surreal, unsettling series of vignettes featuring a cast of 100 actresses. The result is a film that can be funny, shocking, disturbing and deliberately difficult to pin down.
Kansas joins Joe to discuss the film’s unusual production, its distinctive visual language, working with such an enormous ensemble, and what it means to see CUDDLY TOYS given a new life on 35mm.
But what does CUDDLY TOYS actually mean?
Bowling isn’t particularly interested in answering that question for us.
In a conversation about authorship, interpretation and the sometimes dangerous temptation to explain art, Kansas discusses why she prefers to leave CUDDLY TOYS in the hands of the audience — allowing viewers to wrestle with its images, provocations and contradictions and ultimately decide for themselves what they’ve just experienced.
🎙️ Kansas Bowling joins The Fixate & Binge Podcast to discuss CUDDLY TOYS — and why sometimes the filmmaker’s final word is letting the audience have theirs.
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