Cinematic Wonder plays at the New Jersey Film Festival Jim Haynes AV Concert
The opening shot of the planet Jupiter’s swirling rings of fire, in Anita LaBelle and Albert Gabriel Nigrin’s 2024 experimental film Ascension from the Disco Inferno, becomes deeply ominous in retrospect, as a vision of an uninhabitable, hellish orb. As the film tracks the descent of two club girls into an infernal discotheque—seemingly located in the cavernous basement of an abandoned mall, and lit by a glittering disco ball that bathes the space in crimson-colored sparks—the two women are revealed to be modern-day maenads, i.e., female followers of Dionysus, in search of a mindless state of bliss summoned via the copious ingestion of liquor and rituals of ecstatic dance.
