Terrific Outsider Film: Multiple SIDosis

Here's Sid Laverents' wonderful 1970 outsider film Multiple SIDosis (download video, MP4, 21 megs).

It opens on Christmas morning, with an extremely square-looking Mr. and Mrs. Laverents opening their presents, but don't let that scare you away. Adelaide has bought Sid one of the early consumer sound-on-sound reel to reel decks (an Akai M8), which he proceeds to play with, creating a multi-tracked version of the song Nola (one of those tunes you recognize instantly, but can't identify). It gets psychedelic as Sid adds to his foundation of ukulele and metronome, layering on tracks of ocarina, banjo, whistling, beer bottles and jews harp. Laverents, a former one-man-band performer on the vaudeville circuit, also confounded D.I.Y. filmmakers of the late sixties with his home-made multiple split screen techniques. Audio multi-tracking and split-screen techniques were both new ideas when Laverents started work on Multiple SIDosis in 1966. It was completed in 1969 and published in 1970.

The film has won dozens of international amateur film awards, and Multiple SIDosis was one of the only home-made films included in the Library of Congress' National Film Registry (along with the Zapruder film, among others). Sid Laverents is still alive - you can e-mail him at sidchar at CTS.com, and you can purchase other music and films from him: Sidney N. Laverents, 3705 Mesa Vista Way Bonita, CA, 91902-1135.

Here are MP3s of this version of Nola (mp3) and Sid's Fatman (mp3), thanks to Fatty Jubbo's Cake and Polka Parade. Sid's work has also been featured extensively in Roctober, the New York Times and Other Cinema. I stumbled across Multiple SIDosis the other day on Antville, although it's certainly been around the block, and for good reason.

Comments

[Detroitsuperfly]

That is the greatest thing I have ever seen!!!! I'm not exaggerating either!

[Zach]

This is truly incredible.