When Samuel R. Delany’s short film The Orchid debuted at a 1971 sci-fi convention, the audience was so outraged that they literally tried to rip the screen down. (That’s according to Delany, anyway, who also admits he wasn’t there to see it.) It’s not hard to imagine, though, that a roomful of Piers Anthony types weren’t quite ready for Delany’s zero budget film, complete with extended full frontal hippie nudity. If you’re at all familiar with Delany’s fiction, though, that’s a line he rode often. The iconoclastic author is doing a week-long residency at Brown with a number of public events. The Orchid is screening along with The Polymath, a 2007 documentary about Delany’s very odd life.
The Orchid
