Hal on Himself's audience films — "The Medusa v. The Odalisque’ ’s…"
‘The Medusa v. The Odalisque’ ’s own audiences didn’t think too much of the thing, because the film audience never does get much of a decent full-frontal look at what it is about the combatants that supposedly has such a melodramatic effect on the rumble’s live audience, and so the film’s audience ends up feeling teased and vaguely cheated, and the thing had only a regional release, and the cartridge rented like yesterday’s newspapers, and it’s now next to impossible to find.
Context
The real audience survives by being cheated: the camera withholds exactly the full-frontal sight that kills the diegetic audience, and the price of the withholding is commercial failure. Read as an inverted blueprint of the Entertainment — a film that protects where the samizdat delivers — though that framing is inferred, ours not the raw's. The rarity note ("next to impossible to find") is filmography-archive texture of the n.24 world.