Once (1974): Lost(?) Allegorical Fantasy With Marta Kristen

[MrRING]

(I'm totally cribbing my own posts from another board to post this here)
While looking up Marta Kristen's career, I came across the existence of a film called ONCE. From the Marta Kristen FANSITE comes this description:

Creation (Christopher Mitchum) washes up on a beach. He awakens to find himself alone. In this barren world, Creation and Destruction (Jim Malinda) exist in balance. Creation makes life, and Destruction, failing in attempts to create, simply destroys.
Then Creation creates Humanity (Marta) for companionship. It takes little time before Humanity becomes a pawn in the bitter struggle between Creation and Destruction.

When Humanity becomes vain and independent, Creation strikes out at her hubris. Unrepentant Humanity begins to embrace Destruction's path, as evidenced by the building of a house of branches (civilization). But soon, Destruction's true nature becomes evident, and Humanity is all but destroyed by the fiery collapse of the house. Creation saves Humanity, and only then does Humanity realize the gift that Creation offers. In a climactic battle, Creation uses the newfound love by Humanity to finally defeat Destruction.​

All the reviews I read have been very helpful, and it makes me think that many wouldn't like it, but I think I would. This sounds exactly like the sort of crazy 70's art/fantasy cinema that I dig. Weirdly, it seems like the storyline of Once would make it an interesting counterpoint to the art horror of Begotten. It was directed by Morton Heilig, who apparently created a 3D virtual reality machine called Sensorama in 1962!

Here's a video on it:

http://www.mortonheilig.com/

Two of the songs are on Youtube - the trippy synth-laden soundtrack definitely still exists:

Interesting in finding out more about it, I contacted the Morton Heilig website, and this is what I ultimately heard about it from Mr. Heilig's daughter in law:

"Once" was shown a few times in the US. Then, since Mort couldn't get a distribution contract for it, it was put away in cold storage,

Recently his widow, Marianne passed away, and his inventions and his movie "Once" were donated to the University of Southern California (USC), School of Cinematic Arts (Just now, on Dec. 15th, 2018. They tell us the original films are not in very good condition. They plan to patch up the film at least to the point that it can be digitized and put on DVD. Until then we all have to wait. (I myself have never seen the film either)

My question about this now is what happens next? If USC has it, is the film relegated to being something where you have to go to USC to see it? Or do distributors sometimes pick up films held by USC for DVD/BluRay distribution?

 

[EnolaGaia]

The film is already cited on the USC Hugh M. Hefner Moving Image Archive website:

http://uschefnerarchive.com/morton-heilig-once/

... but no further info is provided on its state or any plans to copy or distribute it.

Since it was a theatrical release, there might be multiple copies of it still in existence.

 

[EnolaGaia]

Here's a 1975 review of the film from Cinefantastique ...

ONCE Is an extraordinary allegorical and aesthetic film experience, one of the simplest and most unique fantasies ever. It has only three players: Christopher Mitchum as Creation, Marta Kristen as Woman, and Jim Ma- linda as Destruction. It has no dialog, and only one location, an island. A visual experience. both in Intellectual and emotional terms, ONCE proves cinema’s limitless capacity to tell a story without a strict literary structure.

ONCE is the first feature to be directed by filmmaker Morton Heilig who has. up to now, concentrated on the production of short documentary films, mainly for television distribution. His twenty-minute color short DESTINATION MAN. produced for the United States Information Agency, has been screened at the Trieste Science Fiction Film Festival, and he produced two segments, "Survival In Space" and "The Thinking Robot," for the excellent CBS documentary series THE 21ST CENTURY. Like most filmmakers, Heilig has a trunk full of unfilmed projects—notes, treatments, sketches and scripts that never got off the ground. It was his wife Marianne who pulled ONCE out of the trunk and got the ball rolling. After twenty-five years in the film business with numerous and successful short films to his credit, Heilig still yearned to do his first feature and conceived of ONCE as something he could realistically afford to make. "From experience," he told me at his home in Pacific Palisades, "I came to the conclusion that it would have to be a film with no interior lighting, no costumes, no sets, no sound and just a handful of people."

Urging from his wife eventually led to investment parties, scouting locations, and finally borrowing enough money to begin the actual production. As luck would have it, they had found the ideal location on the island of Espirltu Santo, Baja California, Mexico, and the $17,000 they had raised got them there, with generous help from the president of F&B/ Ceco of California in the form of deferrer e- quipment expenses. Everyone, cast and crew, deferred payment to work for a percentage of the picture, and ONCE was born.

"At the time," says Heilig, "I was very much involved in a kind of religious introsection. One illusion man can't have is to 'affect the universe.' We can turn rivers, dam hikes, and move the landscape around, but it's obvious that our effect on the universe is minimal. If we can't make our mark that way. our major function then is consumption, not material. but more as an act of appreciation. There's a very strong strain of this in the Judaic religion where their posture is one of a- doration, of admiring God's works. In some strange way, our primary function then is to give love back to the creative force. From this 1 began to formulate a love story. There is a creative force and a destructive force who are subordinate to God. like demigods. These I symbolized in terms of the male actors and made 'mankind' in the form of a woman. I was influenced by short films, especially AN OC- CURANCE AT OWL CREEK BRIDGE, which poetically communicates ideas in cinematic terms without the use of words.”

While Hellig's film sounds pretentious in the extreme, in viewing, the potentially heavy handed, simple-minded symbolism is magically transformed into warm, appealing, and strangely moving story-telling. Heilig uses his trio of characters to visualize symbolically the struggle between good and evil for the soul and adoration of mankind. His actors have a graceful, almost balletic intensity. Jim Malinda is especially fine as "Destruction," a dark-haired, animalistic force, conveying a demonic intensity with carefully balanced emoting.

ONCE was screened out of competition at the Cannes Film Festival in 1974 where it was greeted with a standing ovation and shouts of "Bravo!" and "This is cinema!" The film received just praise from French reviewers, but has not fared as well in America. Late in 1973 the film received a one-week commercial run in Westwood to qualify for Oscar consideration, but was passed over by the Academy. Screening the same year at the Atlanta Film Festival also failed to create excitement or elicit awards. Like James B. Harris' SOME CALL IT LOVING, ONCE is an artistic American fantasy film vainly in search of an audience in its homeland.


ONCE Communication Design. 12 73. 100 minutes. In Color. Produced by Marianne and Morton Heilig. Written, directed, edited and photographed by Morton Heilig. Music by Aminidav Aloni. Cast: Christopher Mitchum. Marta Kristen, Jim Malinda.

Dale Winogura

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SOURCE(s):

Cinefantastique Vol 04 No 1 (Spring 1975), p. 42

Accessible in original layout at:

https://archive.org/details/CinefantastiqueVol04No1Spring1975/page/n41

This text sourced from:

https://archive.org/stream/Cinefant...fantastique Vol 04 No1 (Spring 1975)_djvu.txt