the lickerish quartet (1970)
A moment in time has passed before the mind can ever realize it. To know the moment, then, is something that can only be achieved through memory, to look back on the moment, sometimes replaying it over and over, to discover its meaning. Thanks to the ability to record them, moments in life are, now, easily relived. We can capture them, review them, see them in a way over and over, even play them in high speed, or in reverse. It's the rest of the experience we're missing. What about what we felt in that moment? Did we ever really feel it? Or is it, perhaps, just an imagined feeling that we wish had gone along with the moment? It all passes so quickly, all washes away so easily. Things can vanish in an instant, *snap*, like that. Visions, memories, and the futility of record; that's what makes up Metzger's masterpiece, The Lickerish Quartet. How fleeting is the imprint that memory leaves, even a film reel can't be trusted to play the same way twice in this cinematic dreamscape. Life is nothing without the meaning we attach it to it, and the meaning is everything whether life happens around it or not. This is the central mystery of Metzger's film, though it's no closer to being solved when the projector stops whirring. Rather, Metzger here, fleshes out not the answer but the question itself through the course of the film's terse 90 minutes.
The Lickerish Quartet is indefinable. Too crass to be respectable, too heartfelt to be exploitative, too avant garde to be entertainment. To call Metzger’s film anything but softcore pornography would be disingenuous, but its existential narrative goes further. The film is much like the characters who inhabit it, the innocent youth, the angelic visitor, the wounded mother, the lecherous father.