Introduction of David Blyth before “Wound” screening

I was at a screening of a David Blyth documentary just over a year ago where he was disingenuously introduced to the audience as a “man who used to be famous”.  Celebrity is a fickle beast of course and there is often scant connection between an artist’s worth and his or her current notoriety.  David’s place in the history of New Zealand filmmaking is too little celebrated these days.  For those not in the know the man whose new work we are gathered here to watch tonight made this country’s first horror film a full four years before Peter Jackson’s “Bad Taste”.  David Blyth’s own debut feature “Angel Mine” was produced 6 years earlier, in 1978, and remains today one of the most remarkable and uncompromising New Zealand films.  As is equally evident in his more recent documentaries on the S & M scene, David brings something to our national cinema that no other director does: sensuality.  Any who have enjoyed his 1976 short “Circadian Rhythms” will attest to the fact that he is also our answer to Luis Bunuel, a kiwi surrealist, if that’s not a contradiction in terms.  One haunting image in “Circadian Rhythms” is impossible to forget, anticipating as it does the 1992 King Missile song “Detachable Penis” by some 16 years.

Ladies and gentleman, without further ado, David Blyth.