Underground U.S.A.: Filmmaking Beyond the Hollywood Canon 1903364493, 9781903364499

Citation preview

UNDERGROUND U.S.A.

Alterlmage a new list of publications exploring global cult and popular cinema

UNDERGROUND U.S.A.

FILMMAKING BYOND THE HOLLWOOD CANON

EDITED BY AVIER MENDIK & STVEN JAY SCHNEIDER

� WLLFLOWER PRESS !' LONDON and NW YORK

First published in Great Britain in 2002 by Walllower Press

5 Pond Street, London NW3 2PN

ww

.wall.owerpress.co. uk

Copyright© Xavier Mendik & Steven Jay Schneider 2002 The moral right of Xavier Mendik & Steven Jay Schneider to be indentiied as the editors of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transported in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owners and the above publisher of this book. A catalogue for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 1-903364-49-3 Printed in Great Britain by Antony Rowe, Chippenham, Wiltshire.

CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS FORWORD

vii x

I.A.: I-WON'T-SUCK-THE-MAINSTREM ART

lll

INT RODUCTION XPLORATIONS UNDERGROUND: AMERICAN FILM !AD)VENTURES BENATH THE HOLLWOOD RADR

1

loyd afmn

Xavier Menk & Steven Jay Schneider

01

'NO WORSE THAN YOU WERE BEFORE': THEORY, ECONOMY

ND POWER IN ABEL FERA'S 'THE ADDICTION'

13

Jon Hawkins

02

RADLY MTZGER'S 'ELEGANT AROUSL': TASTE, ESTHTIC DISTINCTION AND SXPLOITATION

26

CURTIS RRINGTON AND THE UNDERGROUND ROOTS OF THE MODERN HORROR FILM

40

'SPECIL EFECTS' IN THE CUTING ROOM

51

Elena Gaikl

03

Stephen R. Bissete

04

Tony Wiliams

05

REL!IST) HORROR: FROM XECUTION VIDEOS TO SNUFF FILMS

63

Joel Black

06

A REPORT ON BRUCE CONNER'S 'REPORT'

76

Mtin F. Norden

07

VOEURISM, SADISM AND TRANSGRESSION: SCREEN NOTES

ND OBSERVATIONS ON WARHOL'S 'BLOW JOB' AND '1, A MAN'

86

Jack Srgeant

08

YOU BLED MY MOTHER, YOU BLED MY FATHER, BUT YOU WON'T BLEED ME': THE UNDERGROUND TRIO OF MELVIN VAN PEEBLES Garret Chain-Quiray

96

09

DORIS WISHMAN METS THE AVANT-ARDE

109

Michael J. Bowen

10

FULL THROILE ON THE HIGHWAY TO HELL: MAVERICKS, MACHISMO AND AYHEM IN THE AMERICAN BIKER MOVIE

123

Bill Osgerby

11 12

THE IDAL CINEMA OF HARRY SMITH

140

HAT IS THE NEO-UNDERGROUND AND WHAT ISN'T: A FIRST CONSIDERATION OF HARMONY KORINE

150

Jonathan L. Crane

Benjamin Haligan

13

UNDERGROUND AMERICA 1999

161

Annalee Newiz

14

PHANTOM MENACE: ILLER FANS, CONSUMER ACTVISM AND DIGITAL FILMMAKERS

169

Sara Gwenlin Jones

15

FILM CO-OPS: OLD SOLDIERS FROM THE SIXTIES STILL STANDING IN BAILE AGAINST HOLLWOOD COMMERCISM

180

Jack Stevenson

16

'GOUTS OF BLOOD': THE COLOURFUL UNDERGROUND UNIERSE OF HERSCHELL GORDON LIS

188

Inteview by Xavier Mendik

17

THEORY OF XENOMORPHOSIS

198

NickZedd

18

VISIONS OF NEW YORK: FILMS FROM THE 1960s UNDERGROUND

201

David Schwrz

19

A TASTELESS ART: WATERS, KAUFMAN AND THE PURSUIT OF 'PURE' GROSS-OUT

204

Xavier Mendik & Steven Jay Scheider

NOTES INDX

221 229

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The Eitors would like to thk all of the writers who contributed so much hard work to his volme.

We would lso lke to ofer or sincere haks Lloyd Kauman for contribuing not only the foreword but also for he enlss support and enthusiasm he ofered his project. Ths also to ary Cohen, Herschell Gordon Lewis, nd David F. Friedman for their time nd ssistnce wih tracking don llustraive materil. We wold lso lke to hnk Melissa Scheld, Stephen Abbot, and MathewBucher at Columbia Uiversiy Press, Christopher Golden, Adrien Glover, The Amerin Museum of the Moving Image (for ind help with slls), Elyse Pellmn and Katheryn Winnick, as wel as Howard Martin, Kate

Cochrne nd the stffat OPI Meia.

We would lso like to express our gratiude to colleagus and friends in he School of Culurl

Studies at University College Northampton. In pticular, we ofer sincere thaks to George Savona, Peter Brooker, and the course tam of he Media nd Populr Culure degree for their support in

establising the Cult Fm Archive and the writing projecs which have emerged rom this resource. Finaly, we ofer our thks to Yoram llan, John Atnson, Hnnh Patterson and Howrd Sl

at Walllower Press whose assistnce nd advice with tis volume, and the Alte!mage book seris s a whole, remins invaluable. The imags used to illsrate the chapters 'Doris Wisman Mees the Avnt-Grde' (wih the

exception of one imge rom the personal collection of Michael ] Bowen) nd '"Gouts ofBlood": The .

Coloul Underground Universe ofHerschell Gordon Lewis' are courtesy ofSomehing Weird Video,

Inc and we would like to ofer our sincere thanks to Lisa Petrucci who did so much to ssist

s

wih

inding llustraive materil. Readers wising to accss iformation on the compny's extensive atalogue of underground lms should contact: Something Weird Video, P.O. Box 33664, Seatle, WA 98133, ww.sometingweird.com.

The stlls used to illstrate the foreword nd he chapter 'A Tsteless t: Waters, Kaufman and

he Pursit of "Pure" Gross-Out' (Troma images oly) are cotesy of Troma Entertainment, for wich we thank Doug Skmnn. The rst of the images contined in he book are the propety of the production or istribution

compnies concened. They are reproduced here in the spirit of pubicity and the promotion of the ms in question.

is book is dediated with love to Nicola.

�OTES ON CONTRIBUTORS iTEPHEN R. BISSiE ws a professional atist, auhor, editor and publisher in the comic book 1dsay for 23 yers. His original novella Aliens: Tibes won he Bram Stoker Award in 1993. His lm

Vieo Watchog. Steven is currenly working on a histoy ofVermont lms

riticism nd scholrly icles have appeared in numeros periodils, nwspapers and books, nd he

; a reular contributor to

nd lmmkers to be published by Universiy Press of New England.

The Aesthetics ofMurr: A Study in Romanic Literaure and Contemporay Culture Q ohns Hop­

OEL BACK teachs comparative literature and im at he Universiy of Georgia. He is the auhor tf

ins Universiy Press, 1991),

The Realiy Eet: Film Culure and the Graphic Imperative (Routledge,

�00 1), s wel as numerous essays on literare,

critical heory nd cltral histoy.

IICAEL J. BOEN is a PhD nidate in the Deptment of Cinema Sudies at New York

Jniversity's Tisch School of he s. He has writen on exploitation lmmaker Doris Wishmn for mmeros pubiations nd is currently completing a book about her lfe.

RRTTCHAFIN-QUIRAY received his BA nd A rom the Universiy of Souhern California )chool of Cinema-Television. He hs sponsored a lm festivl, taught corses on V and cinema 1stoy nd published movie nd video reviews. His reserch interests include pornography and vio­ ence, post-Wr American cinema, representaions of Vietnam nd the 1970s. He has also managed nformation tenoloy for n invstment bk, had a dot-com adventure nd now lives in New York :iy riting criticism, short-lengh iction and his fouh novel.

IOATHAN L. CRANE is ssistnt Professor in he Deptment of Communiation at he Univer­ :iy of Noh Crolina at Charlote. He has published widely on such topics s Top 40 radio, horror

lm speatorship nd msic censorship. His book, Teror and Eveyday Lt: Sinular Moments in the %toy ofthe Horor Film, ws pubished by Sage in 1992.

ELENA GORFINKEL is a PhD ndidate in the Department of Cinema Studies at New York

Universiy's Tisch School of he s. Her dissertation focuses on Amerin sexploitation ilms of he

L960s.

SA GENLLAN JONES lectres in Television and Digital Media at Cardif Universiy, Wales.

She is currently writing a book tiled Fantsic Jf Intesiies:

Cult Teevision (Edwrd Arnold, 2002) and is co The jounal of Cult Media (ww.cult-media.com).

-

eito r

BENJAMIN HALLIAN letures in lm at York StJohn Colege. He is currenly preparing a criil bioraphy of Michael Reeves for Mnchster Universiy Press. lON HAWKINS is

n

Cuing Edge: At Hon·or and the Horic

ssociate Profssor in the Department of Communication nd Culture at

lvant-Garde (University of Minnsota Prss, 2000).

[nina University, Bloomington. She is he author of

he General Editor of the AlterImage series. He has published, broadst nd toured cinema evens

AVIER MENDIK is Director of he Cult Film rchive at Universiy College Nohampton nd n this ra include (as co-editor) Unuy Plesurs: The Cult Film and its Criics (Fab Press, 2000), Daia Argento s Tenebrae (Flicks Books, 2000) nd (as editor) Shocking Cinma ofthe Sevenies Noir Publishing, 2001). He is currently resrching his next book, enitled Fear at Four Hundred Derees: Sucture and Sxualiy in the Fils ofDaio Argento. Beyond his aademic research in his ra, he hs around the themes of psychoanalysis nd its appliation to lt and horror cinema. His publications

also conducted inteiews ih many of he leading iures of clt cnema s wel as sitting as a jury

member on several leaing Eropan m festivals. Detals of his inteiews nd jury accounts fond on ww.kamera.co.uk where he uns he m colmn 'Screm Theory'.

n

be

NNALEE NEWITZ is founder of he webzine Bad Subjects (ww.esever.org/bs) which is sll going

The Bad Subjects Anthooy

strong; and has published wo books,

White Trsh: Race and Css in Amrica (Routledge, 1997) and

(New York University Prss, 1998). In 1998, she graduated rom the

Universiy of California at Berkeley with a PhD in English and mericn Stuies. Currenly, she

The Indusy Stanar, Altenaive Press

is at work on wo books - one about sx nd technology, the other about apitlism and monster

Feed, SFGate.com, Gear, Neve.com, The Une Reader Review, Nw York Press, The San Fancsco Bay Guardian, The Mero nd

movies. Her work has appered in magins and papers such as Slon. com, Gettinglt.com,

and anthologies.

Oline,

severl academic jounals

MARTIN F. NORDEN taches lm s Professor of Communication at he University of Mas­

sachuses-herst. Hs tticles on moving-image media have appeared in nmeros jornls and anthologies. He is currenly at work on a colection of essays that exmine the representaion of evl in popular ilm nd teleision.

BILL OSGERBY is a Senior Lecrer in Culural Stuies at the University of Noh London nd

Youth in Bitain Since 1345 (Blacwell, 1998), Payboys in Paradse: Msculiniy, Youth and Lesure-Syle in Mon Ameica (Berg/New York University Press, 2001) nd a co-eited ntholoy, Action : Tough-Guys, Smooth Opeators and Foy Chicks (Routledge, 200 1). He has never ridden a has written widely on youth, gender and British nd merin culural istoy. His publiaions

include

motorcycle, but stll resents being hassled by The Mn.

Dathipping: the Cinma of Transression

1996), Naked Lens: Beat Cinema (Creaion Books, 1997) and Cinema Conra inema (Fringecore BD, 1999); he is he co-editor (wih Stephanie Watson) of Lost Highways (Creation Books, 2000) and the eitor of Suure (1998, volume two forthcoming from mok Books). He hs contributed to

JACK SARGEANT is he author of

numeros publiations including Headpress,

(Creation Books,

Biare, BEGU, Panik, nd WordArt. He has curated

nmerous ilm seasons nd lectured on underground lm nd outlaw culture across hree continens,

as well as acting as an advisor to the Briish Flm Instiute on contemporary underground m. He has appeared in numerous television prorams discussing underground culre and its manifestaions, and has also had meo rols in several underground lms. In addiion, he teaches cltural theory,

phlosophy nd lm at the London Colege of Printing.

STVEN JAY SCHNEIDER is a PhD ndidate in Plosophy at Havard Universiy nd in Cinema

ilm and related genres in jounals such as Cin.cion, Pot Scrpt, Film & Philosophy, Hitchcock Annual, inema, jounal of Popular Film & Tevision, Paraoxa, Scope, Kinoye nd he Cenral Europe Rview. He is currenly co-editing two volumes, Dark Thoughs: Philosophic Rleions on Sudis at New York University's Tisch School of the rts. He has published widely on the horror

Cinemaic Horor (Srecrow Prss) and Unrstanding Film Genres (McGraw-Hill), as well as reserching is next book for Walllower Prss, The Cinema ofWes Craven: An Auteur on Elm Street.

DAID SCHWARTZ is he Chief Curator of Film at the merin Museum of the Mong Imge (New York), where he has progrmmed numeros avnt-arde m retrospecives nclung 'Fms that Tel Tme: A Ken Jacobs Rerospeive', 'Serene Intensiy: The Fms of Ernie Gehr' nd 'The t of ision: A Stan Brhge Rerospeive'. JACK STENSON is an merin lm-writer, prim collector and distributor living in Denmrk since 1993. He was a teacher atThe Europen Film Colege in Ebeltot, Demark from 1995 to 1998 nd hs just completed a book about Lrs von Trier, someing of a deprture from his specialities wich centre on Americn exploitation nd nderround cinema. TOY ILLMS received his PhD rom the Universiy of Manchester in 1974, nd is currently Profssor nd rea Head of Fm Sudies in the English Depatment of Souhern Illinois University at Crbondle. He is the co-editor of Vienam War Films (McFarland, 1994) and auhor o]ack Lonon: The Movies (Rejl, 1992), Heaths of Darkness: The Famiy in the Ameican Horor Film (Firleigh Dickinson University Prss, 1996), Lay Cohn: The adical Alegories ofan Inpenent Filmmakr (McFrlnd, 1997) and Suures ofDesire: Bitish Cinema, 1939-1955 (SY Press, 2000). His essays have appered in numerous anhologis and journals. He is currenly completing The Cinema ofGeorge A. Romero: Knight ofthe Living Dead for Walllower Press. NICK ZEDD, cpto-insurrectionry visiony, lmmaker, writer, actor, heors t and xenomorphic mgicin coined the term C ' inema ofTransgression' to identiY he nderground movement he sper­ headed in New York, ireting such movis s Police State, War s Mensual Eny and Thus Spake Zarathra. His autobiography, Totem ofthe Dprave, was published by 2.13.61 in 1996.

FORWORD

I.A.: I-WON'T-SUCK-THE-MAI NSTREAM ART

Lloyd Kaufmn

President ofTroma

Entetiment

hen I entered Yale in 1964

s

a Chinese Studies major,

I had expected to become a socil worker

who wold do good things lke teach people with hooks for hands how to inger pint. I didn't, of course, because I

got infected wih the moie bug. My roommates at Yale were co-chirs of the

Yle Fm Sociey nd it was beause of them that I ben watcing great mainstream movies by Hitchcock, Chaplin, Renoir, Fuler, Lng , Lubitch nd others. In my irst ilm, I slaughtered a pig in

Chad, fria, and it ws then I relised hat ofening people was what I yerned to do. By sliing a pig's throat nd watcing it shit and oik at he same time, I somehow expected to become renowned

in he minstrem just like my movie heros.

It is hiy yrs later. Michael Hez nd I are still expecting. We are n independent tm hat hs ried to hit a home un for he past thiry years. I'm not g o i ng to lie- I wo uld cum in my drawers

f a Troma lm ever becme a grand slam in movie history lke Hitchcock's Pycho. However, Troma

c = . D

� ""

0 c = . c •

A •

� •

is stllstanding on second base, waiting for one of our picrurs to it s into movie stardom, ming our nme just s recognisable as Hitchcock's: If you ask someone, "Weren't you sared to tke a shower ater you watched Pycho?" lmost everybody would understand your reference to Maion Crane getting slaughtered by he cross-dressing killer Norman Bates. s of now, if you ask someone,

"Weren't you sred to ride a bke ter watching The Toxic Avenger?" you might get a few people who

undersnd hat you're ting about the scene in which a young boy innocenly riing his bike ges his pre-pubescent cranium trned into kiddy-splat ter being crushed by the wheel of n automobile. Perhaps such n image is too grapic for 'he mainstream' to hanle. Holywood prefers to protect

humn innocence by endorsing movies such s Prey Woman, which shold have been subtitled: Girs

who suck will be in luck.

Troma hs never sucked the minstrem. ather, we have lirted with he establishment as

a high school nerd lirts wih the idea of being popular. One day, the nerd becomes friends with someone respected by he in-crowd and hinks that he just might be accepted. Troma makes a

movie clled The Toxic Avenger (in which a washroom nerd named Melvin is trnsformed into a radioactive defender of the wek and powerless).This in turn spawned the children's rtoon show,

The Toxic Crusaders, a whole lot of lunch boxes and other 'useul' merchandise for ids. Perhaps the

minstream will embrace us. The nerd starts going to parties. Troma visits Hollywood. However,

the nerd relises that in order to be popular, he would have to chnge who he is and leave all of his Melvin-like friends behind. ter all, the big shots don't accept the geeks.Troma relises it would have to ditch its underground roots nd get Toxie to suck he 'over-ground' snobs in order to be accepted by the mainstream. The nerd decides to stay n outcast and remin loyal to his riends, rather han maing a fool out of himself by attempting to sk out the hottest girl, boy or class pet in school. Troma is that nerd. (Some might say my red bow tie conirms that.) We stay in the underground and remin loyal to our roots. Yes, we've stroled into the mainstrem's phoney forest. Luckily, we listened to Hansel and Gretel and let a trail ofToxie crumbs long he way so we'd ind our way back home ... to a company which stabs movie chracters in their hermaphrodite groins (Teror Fimer) as opposed to he backs of their employees. We'll leave that to Hollywood.

For me, Troma is n exmple of nderground, micro-budget t that producs macro-violence­ vomit-tis-and-more-its. We have to sleep on the loor, eat cheese sandwichs three tims a day nd defeate in paper bags in order to mke our movies on a non-Hollywood budget. Is his a bad ng? No. In fact, being in the underground is liberaing. Not only dos this allow s to make the kinds of ilms we wnt ithout minsream interference, it lso llows Troma to disribute movie ater movie by ists who have something iferent to say- someing unique and out of he ordinary. If runing such a bsinss makes s pt of the ostracised underground, so be it. Thaks to the underground and he suppot nd artistic reedom provided nd encouraged therein, my areer s a lm director has been aberrntly proliic.

FIGURE 1 Filmnuking ull(krground sryl:: Llo�·J doing his rhing

One of my i nspirers, Andy Warho l , was abl e to retai n the to tal creative freedom affo rded to h i m as a member o f the undergro und, b u t a t t h e same rime he came

o

b e e mbraced by t h e mainstream

media and m i llions of people aro und the world. Troma has never been hugged by the mai nstrea m , but we still feel loved! Wh i l e

I w i l l never surrender my artistic freedom, I am always hopefu l that o n e day I

c = . D

�

wil wake to ind that millions of people have been able to see beyond he dismemberment in

andjulit or he de-fetusng in Teror Fimr or the head crushing-um-diarrhoea in Ciizn Toxie nd

cary me of the baleield of t on their shoulders ... a hero of the underground! One of the most rewarding aspecs of making movies in the undergrond is

t

c c = . c •

)

Tromeo

mowing hat loyl

ns genuinely amire you for the work you produce, not beause you're in one of

Taented Actors editions

Peopes 100 Most

and worshiped by trillions. One of our fans demonstrated his loylty on 11

September 2001. That was the day the World Trade Center's Twin Towers colapsed in New York Ciy. hen he obscene terrorism occurred, I became stranded in London. I didn't feel like swimming

•

across he Alntic Ocean to get back home, so I remined stuck n London with very lile money and

•

no place to sleep. Lucly, Troma fan Andrew McKay allowed me to stay in his fmily's house until I

»

ws able to lave England. (ndrew is the crator of he oicil UK Troma fan site,

ww.toxie.com.)

For eight days, he and his prens made me feel at home and became my riends. On he plne home, I hought to mysel, "You're a lucy guy, Lloyd. You cold have been gutted alive if Andrew were a psychotic fan. You cold have been on one of the plns that crshed into the World Trade Center. You cold have direcredA.l" We at Troma have suvived thiy yers in this underground t world dspite or history of getting blacklisted nd evicted on numerous ocasions beause we

do have

millions of such people

supporting us. It sucs hat we have to eat shit to survive nd hat we never get praised by he BBC, but it's worth it when people of ll ages suppot us at book signings and conventions. They also volunteer to do al sos of Troma-tic things for free. In fact, when we travel around the U.S. they feed

s,

house

s,

uck those of us who are not married, put on Toxie and Kabiman cosums and

ofer to wipe our sses ater we tke toxic urds. Our ns re he ones who inform nd inspire us to do those ings that mke Troma successl, like being he irst lm smdio to create

a

website, and

the irst suio to produce DVDs. Most importnt, they stand behind us when he mainstream tris to tr us down. Marcel Duchamp (the guy who hng a urinal on the wll in 1907, with whom I have been compred - well, maybe it ws the urinal to wich

I

was compared) stated that "to be an aist of

he uture, one must go underground." Perhaps I have suived s a ilm director for more hn

iy yars because Troma and I have been ahad of our contemporaries. Tis is because we have total reedom in nd control over our t. And it is bease Troma hs remained underground that I contnue to have is freedom. In fact, to be undergrond is amlly liberating because we

n

stay

tue to our t nd politis. And while the mainstream hs never honoured Troma or even considered me for an Aademy Award, what greater honour

n

I receive than being sked to write his foreword

for avier Mendk and Steven Jay Schneider's superlaive tome on underground m? One of the most diiclt spects of being an atist is to folow Shakespare's admonition: "To hine on sef be tue ... nd maybe hou won't bloweth thy brains out." We ll need inspiration and suppot to help us abide by is mim.

'' ,.;· .,

''t

t.

.�

> t.

-

RGURE 2 lrcrnarivc Oscars

For a company so associated with copulation, depravity and excess, ir comes as no surprise when I say rhar making an is very much like having sex. You can go (all) the Hollywood way, allowing the big shots to open you up, jerk you off and prod at your ideas, thereby raping your anisric vision. Or you can go the underground way - and masturbate your an. Only you know all of irs hot spots - the places that must be touched in order for it to come to life. The book you are about to read will help you to be brave and masturbate your artistic minds, weather you are ilmmakers, ilm fans or simply interested in peering into the bowels of cinema culture that goes on beneath Hollywood. In what follows, you will read weird tales of maverick male and female directors who have combined shock value with artistic vision, movie genres that have manipulated Hollywood codes for genuine impact as well as proiles of new independent ilmmakers determined to give the mainstream a

run for irs money. By giving exposure to the American underground, Xavier and Steven's book gives

us

the courage and wherewithal to band together, proud and erect, to make some an and continue

to rake that an back from the giant devil-worshipping international media conglomerates and give it back to the people. Lloyd Kaufman July 2002 (With thanks to Jamie Greco)

INTRODUCTIO N XPLOATIONS U N D ERGRO U N D: AMERI CAN FI LM (D)ENTU RES BENEATH T H E H O LLWOO D RADAR

Xavier Men: & Steven Jay Schneider

heher characterised by the artistic visions of Andy Wrhol or Hrry Smith, the art-house erotia of Radley Metzger, the carnivalesque excesses of]ohn Waters or Doris Wishman, or the nrrative

experimens of Buce Conner or Abel Ferrara, underground cinema mintins n impotnt p osiio n within Amerin ilm culture. Yet despite its multiple (and not necessrily compatible) denii ons

s

'cult' nd 'exploitation', 'alternative' nd 'independent', surprisingly little academic

consideration has been given to he modes of production, distribution, exhibition and audience recepion of he American cinematic underground. Eqully, lile research hs been undetaken to explin how the social, sexual, political nd aesthetic representations of such cinema diverge from

nd ofer alternatives to he traitional, lrgely consevative structres of he Hollywood machine. To

date only a few books nd edited collections have been produced wih criticlly explore ,

spes of he merin underground scene. Among thse re Parker Tyler's Underround Film

(1969), ]. Hoberman nd Jonathan Rosenbam's Midnight Movies (1983), ]. P. Telotte's edited

= = ­ D

volme, The Cult Film Epience: Byond All Reson (1991) and, most recently, Xavier Menk and

�

al signiint volumes in their on right, these works have restricted themselves to ase suies of

0 = = -

historical, economic and clral emergence within Amerin cinema.

Graeme Hrper's edited colection, Unruy Pesures: The Cult Film and its Citics (2000). hle

vrious cult and avnt-garde texts rather thn proviing sitable methodologis which examine their

Unrround .S.A.: Filmmaking Byond the Holywood Canon strivs to extend the merits of

=

such books, while more lly adressing nscent debates in tis still under-heorised area of ilm

n

culre. This volume seeks to examine he stylisic, generic and representational strateies hat have

�

emerged in the Amerian nderground from the 1940s to the present. hrough his examination,

• • •

Unerround .S.A. brings together leading ilm theorists, journalists, exhibitors nd irectors, as wel

as emerging scholrs in the ield. In a seris of specilly commissioned aticles, these writers situate the vrious nd iverse strns of Amerin underround cinema s a powel and subversive meium uncioning through a fragmentation of oici!normative modes of production and istribution. The book taks as is focus hose irectors, ilms nd genres pilly ismissed, belitled or (worst of all) ignored by established m culture. hat units the icles that folow is the belief that the Amerin undergrond is a vibrnt domain that deies he broad clssiications of mainstram cinema. In his respect, mny critis in his volume view the underground lm scene s a space where art-hose stnds sholder to sholder with spectacle-bsed atrociy, nd where experimentation is a reglar feature of exploitation. By colapsing mny of the standard dichotomis that continue to plague mainsream cinema, 'Underground U.S.A' remains a rem where maverick irectors, producers and production personnel re able to express obat forms of crativity, ranging from the artistic to the absurd. It

is his abiliy to trnsress presmed boundries between genre-based nd t-house products

that has mrked the reer of Abel Ferrra, whose work is discussed by Joan Hawkins. In her article 'No Worse hn You Were Before', Hawins examines he conlation of t-house nd grind-hose themes present in Ferrara's 1996

lm

The Adiion. Here, the tle of a philosophy graduate's

incorporation into vmpirism is used as a springbord to examine wider issues of evil, istentil

ngst and economic power wihin the contemporary urbn lndscape. For Hawkins, The Adicion

reprsens n exmple of 'theoreticl ictions' wich use generic foms to explore heoretical or phlosopil concens. The lm's conlation of high nd low mirrors the traitions of stabished guter poes such as WiliamS. Burroughs, whose concept of the 'Algebra ofNeed' is used by Hawkins to explore the images of adiction contained in he lm. Ferrra's concen wih collapsing intellect

i{to the instinctual is seen by he author as key to the understanding The Adicion. This explins

why the lm places its niversity loation in the hrt of a black ghetto as wel s sheding light on

its nsettling ending where the dispossssed and undad rise up to (iteraly) devour nowledge at a doctoral graduation celebration. With its unexpeted combination of high theory nd genre motifs as

wel s its se of disorient ating n-house m tecniques, The Adicion cosed and nd mnstrm

auiences.

However, it found a clt folloing wih underground

outraged critis

nd

'Indiewood'

auiencs hat lie beyond he Hollwood anon. ile Ferrr a used stok vampire Mezger combined ponography

motfs ·as a

nd avant-grde strategies wih stanling rsults. The director's work

s iscssed by Elena Garinkel n her article

'aley Mezger's Elegnt

Distinction and $xploitaion'. For the auhor, (whose ranks included Russ

Meyer,

prominence during the 1960s gheto of underground

nd

tillation and

fled atempt at social rlism,

Lewis

Gordon

whose crative input

she

and

Doris Wishman)

allowed hem

fre . In Garikel's view,

'n-house'. s

rousal: Taste, Ashetic

Mezger was one of a number of exploitation directors

Hershell

most proinent example of n ' xploitation elite'

between 'grind-house'

point of connection with n-house techniqus,

it

tO

that

cme to

esape the traditional

is Mezger's work that represents the

who attempted to erode the traditional bondaris

nots,

although

the diretor ben

is

reer with a

he incresingly turned to Erope (s boh a distributor nd lmaker)

to p rovide cosmopolitan polish and personnel to he traditionlly stilted genres ofmerin titllation. The end resuls of hese 1960s experimens included wors

The Lickeish Quartet,

ll of wich gained

Mezger he

such s Aly Cats, Therese and Isabelle nd

'chic' end of

he erotic

market s wel s he

reputation s a irector ih his on nique nd aypicl visul style . If Mezger's atempts to produce 'clss specialiy ms' rather

thn formulic xploitation works had n imp act on he stucure of his

picurs, hey also afected he depicions of male nd female sexualiy hat Gainkel discusss in the

latter patt ofher nicle. Here, she notes that Mezger was inovaive n combining the representations of lesbianism

that

poplated many sotcore producions of the era with i mages (or implications) of

homoseuliy that had been stablished by Amerin underground auteurs such as Kenneh Anger

nd ndy Warhol. It was this sion of he i stic and the erotic hat llowed Mezger to provide sensitive nd 'ashetic' images of lsbinism

in

wors such s Threse and Isabelle s well as bold,

stlng sme-sx enconters between he male chracters of his later ilm Score. ia hse strategis, Gaikel co ncluds hat Mezger's cinema ws able to advnce he imgery of alternative sexul

identiy within n underground format. heras many of the iters n s volume siuate coretive indusy

ycls (such

s

o

horror

work for severl

Undergrond

Holywood, Stephen . Bissete rgus

and nasy) have

laing

U.SA.

that mny

actully uclitated a st

rom

iretors. ile he reers of mmkers such

s n

oppositionl or

of is marinal forms and

independent

s

tO

msrm

Daid Cronenberg, David

Lnch nd Jon Waters re wel knon, lss wel documented are he prols of hose arier directors who used gere templats s a

pont of trnsition beween hese wins

In is ile 'Curtis Harrnton and he issss

a

Underrond

lost 'ltenative' auteur whose later

of he Amerin m industry.

Roos of the Moden Horror

horror s

Fm',

Bissete

(such s ho Sw Auntie Roo?, iler Bes,

nd hats the Mater ith Heen?) have been irly isissed as derivative comercil produtios. s Bissete reves,

Hrnton's roos

lay in he Wst Cost

Expemental m

circuit as iniiated by

= = . D

a "''

ltenative mmakers such nd personal

s) as wel

s s

Maya Deren (wih whom Hrington shred a nmber of profesional sharng silar sado-yisic concerns with he ks of Kenneth nger

and Gregory Markopolos. s Bissette xplains, a key ator wich has ibited an 'altenaive' re­ rang of Harington remis he fact that mny of

s innovaive rly shos were in produion

0 = = .

prior to he crrent deiions of Amerin underground m. s a rsult, such mmakers have been

=

popuist 'pll' n is work that deis such nrrow deiniions. s he author revls, the arly luence

n

of

»

of

• • •

wrongly clssied s eiher expeimenl (implg a non-nrraive focus) or avant-grde (with is disncly Europn conotations). Yet, in the se of Harrington, here remns a deite nrraive and

Er Allen Poe on he mmaker (even down to his dreting nd apping n a shot m version

The Fall fthe Hose of shr as a teenger) assred a gothic horror imension to Hainton's work.

Folog is conections wih fellow ndergrond igurs such s Keneth nger, Bssete also nots how Harrington repatedly sed supenal concens wih issues of psychosxul ma and mgs of nlation nd sexual mbiguiy. Bissete explors he rector's abiliy to transcend underrond nd Holywood deiions via a sudy of key Hrnton le he author's stated aim is

o

s such s Framnt ofSeeking and Night Tie.

redrss Hrington's coninued marnalised stats s 'a mn wihout

a cony', he lso provids a scnang oveiw of a uly 'forgoten' undergrond iure. In his contribution 'Special Efects in the Cuting Room', Tony Wlims arues for the reclassiication of 'uerrilla mmaker' arry Cohen's 1984 picure raher hn smply

n

Speal Eects s n nderground

independent production. More precisely, Wllims sees

Speial Eects

as

performing many of the self-relexive, counter-hegemonic nctions of the ms of Hitchcock. They cal attention to the fat that, when oiginlly released, Hitchcock's mois were oten viewed by critis nd audiences s distincly 'underground'. This stats was seen n he sense that hey chllenged nd subveted previling norms, boh technial nd thematic. ihout going so far s to rejet those fliar deiniions of underround cnema wich focus on abstrat and non-narrative avant-garde tecniqus, Wlliams proposs a more lible nderstning of nderround mmaking. his is one that maks room for independent nd raical productions such s Special Eets which employ/exploit

traitionl narraive srategies in order to critique and ll into quesion established gender rols, power relations and ideological struurs.

Special Eects

Snuf Flms'.

s

is lso discussed by Joel Black in 'Ral(ist) Horror: From xecuion Videos to

Black notes, he death ilm - especialy he so-clled 'snuf ilm', in which a iller

an/or his accomplice records he acual murder of a ictim on video- is surely he most extreme of underground genres. But s public desire for spectaculr displays of violence and supposedly 'real-life' drma continues to grow, even while he viual bn on displaying visual recordings of violent deah remins more or less in place, icionaised snuf has moved slowly but surely rom the nderground to the maintrem. Black identiis wo seemingly opposed cinematic strategis; 'de-aeshecicisation' and 'hper-aesheticisation', evident in reist horror lms rom low-budget indies such s

Ees nd Hny: Porait ofa Seial iler ll the

way to such commercil Hollywood fare

Special

s

BMM

and Fteen Minuts. Dspite their budgetay dfferences, thse ts have the sme end n view: to

'approach he theoretical limit of real horror rough their referencs to, and ocasionally their re­

enaments o, acual lmed recors of murder'.

There is a deinite sense in which Abrham Zapuder's mateur m footage of President Jon F. Kennedy's ssssination in Dalas, Txs on 22 November 1963 falls into the underground ategory of he 'dah a

m' s wel. In his ssay, 'A Report on Bruce Conner's Rpot, Mrtin F. Norden tks

close look at anoher, very iferent (nd distinctly non-amater) m made about hat atel day

in mein histoy.

Rpot- the mstework of experimental auteur and ssemblage rtist Bruce

Conner- cratively combins footage rom an abundance of sources, including newsreels, television

comercials, classic Holywood picures nd home ideos, to provide a brliant and istrbing montge of souns and mages. s Norden explains:

pot is perhaps the most oustning example of he many lms - ndergrond and oherise - that utlise he conrapuntal arrangement of imags nd sond to create socioloil statements n the form of irony, metaphors nd analogis. hat mks he

m

special is Conner's abiy to ntene images of fact and iion to such an extent that a nw

'rliy' tkes place.

hrough his insightl analysis, Norden reveals how Conner's 'higly personal mediation' on the Kenedy ssssinaion stans s n oriinl and instndy recognisable merging of underground and

avnt-arde mming pracics. The heme of pin and sufering is lso present in Jack Sargeant's sudy of the cinematic expermens of Andy Warhol. In his article 'Voyerism, Saism and Transgression- Screen Nots

nd Obsevaions on Andy Warhol's

Bow job and , A Man', he author critilly iscsss some of

he sado-sexual practics at play in a vriey of he Fatoy's output. For nstance, Sergeant considers he m orb id nd exploitative screen-testng mehos

to whichWarhol subjeted his models, actors nd

siters. is required hem to stay in he same position for severl hours at a time s well s requendy forcing he m to reval pl confessions about their pst sexual experiencs. le a criil consideration of he sexual moraity of one of the mein underground's most potent irs is cenrl to Sargant's qust, it lso revels the extent to wichWarhol ws not adverse to emploing the so-lled sensationl tais ssociated with exploitation cinema n order to get rsults. This increasing sion of he comercial and the complx is seen n the gradul alteraion ofWrhol's m syle hat

Srgnt nalyss. For he author, the syle ssociated ihWrhol's expermental period centred on he use oflong tks and stationry amera posiioning. However, is system ws gradully eroded by he develo pment of a system hat was incresingly nrrativised nd more coherent and commerciised n form. hs, to

soundtrack ws introduced to accompny the mage track, which itsef become ltered

nclude more complx forms of movement and positioning. It is such lterations hat he auhor

-·

= . ..

0 ­ =

�

-·

0 =

c

= ­ D

� ''

0 c = = •

exmins via ase sudies of @ms such s

Bow job nd L A Man before concluding that their sylisic

experimentation is coupled with a sexal exploitation similr to the more commercial sectors of Underground U.S.. Warhol's undergrond explorations lso provide a point of reference in Michael ]. Bowen's work on femle exploitation director Doris Wishmn, who passed away in the summer of 2002 just before this volume went to prss. In his arrile 'Doris Wishman Meets the Avnt-Garde', Bowen seeks to urher connect the underground spheres of arr-house nd titilation via their depictions of sexuliy s a zone of shock nd trnsgrssion. ile Bowen admits that accepted undergrond auteurs such s

n

Warhol frmed their sexual experimentations within a complex im form, these textual innovations

»

were mirrored by the 1 9 60s work of Wishman. lthough prmrly frmed

•

•

s n

exploitation igure,

Bowen makes a convincing argument for he @mmaker's work as an extension of avnt-garde practices. Not oly was Wishman a lone femle irector working in an aggressively mle-dominated grind-hose arena, but her work has aypically shited over to the 'legitimate' theoreicl circuit as the rsult of a number of high-proile retrospectivs and amps discussions. Bowen extens his nalysis of ishmn's avant-garde impeus by diviing his iscussion of her work into ree key stges. For Bowen, her early work in the 'nuie' cycle of the erly 1 9 60s displayed a similar apaciy for absurity nd sexul/stylistic deconstucion hat mrked the work of Wrhol and related @mmkers such as George Kuchar. This 'primitive' period of Wishman's development ws replaced by her work in the 'roughie' cycle, which ben n 1 9 64. For the author, this series of sex-and-sin crime fables remins the irector's most accomplished work, which he labels a 'poor mn's neo-realism.' Not only did Wishman's roughis lad to requent comparisons with art-house directors such s Jean-Luc Godard, hey lso ibited a simlar focs on complex ilm techniques and problematic and uly women. hile Bowen does concede that Wisman's t-hose impetus receded in her 1 970s output, he lis his to stucrurl and economic changes in the exploitation rena n which the irector was operating. It is a similar seris of connections beween exploitation nd experimental @mmaking that dominats Grret Chfin-Quiray's account of irector Melvin Van Peebles. In his aticle 'You Bled My Mother, You Bled My Father, But You Won't Bleed Me - The Underground Trio of Melvin Van Peebls', Chain-Quiray questions the extent to which Vn Peebles' output wihin he expicitly populist, 1 970s blxploitation circuit necessarily divorces his work from he avnt-grde arena. Not only does he director's work contain explicitly politicl nd counter-clturl hemes, but his nrraives of racil revolt and role chnge were lso complicated by an unconventionl ilm syle developed during his 'trining period' in Paris. For Chain-Quiray, these hematic and sylistic concens re evidenced in

The Stoy ofa Three-Day Pss, Vn Peebles' irst m s a irector.

Here, the

narrative focus on the faled romantic coupling beween a black Amerian solier and a French femle estabished the heme of failed interracil relations wihin a white colonil context hat the director would develop in subsequent wors. Equaly, with its emphsis on interuptive jump-cus, abrupt

freze rams, photo-montage inclsions and mltiple non-diegetic msic stats, is lm demonstrates he complex and apicl style that Van Peebls atempted to drag back into Holywood for his net

piure . Although Wateneon Man its into he patten of 'liberl' race dramas that Holywood

mrketed to boh black and white audiences .during the 1 960s, Vn Peebls subveted its formla by

rsising the stndrd resoluion of nterracial ntegration. Instead, the drector pshed the boundaris

of iverse ethnic extremism via an absurd comedy of role reversl in which a white male bigot wakes up one day to ind his skin has suddenly tuned black. In a seris of tragic/ comic enconters, he ilm reves how the protagonist's new-found blacnss isolats im from work colleaues, commnity nd ly before he is rebon as a coloured mlitant. According to Chfin-Quiray, Vn Peebles

complemented the m's theme of racil alienation by adding complex colour coding to

n

lready

n-Hollwood cnematic syle. The director's combination of poplist nd t-house trits reached its

loicl conclusion ih his most prominent feaure, Sweet Sweetbacks Bsssss Song, which Chfin­

Qiray iscusses at the dose of his aicle. The ilm, which ws iniilly mrked as a porn production

nd stributed s n exploitation lick (before being re-ramed s n t-movie) retains n avnt-garde ir, which for the author demonstrates the iretor's 'counter-hegemonic style'. le writers such as Chain-Quiray focus on the re-evluation of speciic undergrond igurs, BllOsgerby considers how the cycle of he biker movie provided a motif of rebeion and trnsgrssion

for both the experimental nd exploitation wings of Undergrond Amerin m . In 'Full Throtle on he Highway to Hel: Maverics, Machismo and Mayhem in the merin Biker Movie', Osgerby rus that the

biker movie came to embody the themes of 'undirected nger nd leashed pssion'

in a series of lms which lasted rom the 1950s ntil the 1 970s. For he auhor, the exploitaion

roos of this ycle an be traced to an appl to the rock'n'roll!teen auience market, who were given heir deiitive role model of rebelion with Marlon Brnda's

s

ti ng in The Wid One. The m

stablished the template of a 'nomadic biker gng' who violently undercut the consevative authority of 'Smlltown U.S.A.'. The lm's success was emulated by teen moie irms such as AlP as wel s

xp erimentl auteurs like Keneh Anger, whose Scopio ising accentuated the sado-msochism and

homo-eroticism mplied in Branda's persona. For Osgerby, these wors represented n early stage

of he biker movie that was iolently kick-strted in he latter prt of the 1960s wih the image of he Hels ngel as an anti-socil and counter-cultural icon. Alhogh it was primrily ihin the xploitaion traditions of the Amerian nderground where these igurs gined cinemaic exposre in nrraivs that privleged

'spe=cle over narrative, action over ntelect', the relase of Ey Rir, wih

is xperimental syle and pseudo-philosopil edge, iniated the biker moie as also attning a ider import. However, as Osgerby concludes, the lm (whose genuine status s bker movie remains

w

a contsted fat) very much marked the ycle's decline s new forms nd igres of Otherness begn to poplate the merin cinematic underground. hen it coms to Hrry Smith (1 923-9 1), generic or tisic labels of ny kind, in ny combination or conjunction, inevitably fal shot of apturing he man or his staggeringly diverse

= = ­ D

�0 =

=

= • n •

) •

and idiosncratic creative output. ter an eloquent introdution in which he follows P. Adms Simey in claiing that underground m 'dscribes what no longer is', Jonathan L. Crne looks at how Smith 'produced work that an be bst understood s a cptic tutoril rom a llen world'. In is article 'The Idel Cnema of Hrry Smith', Crane begns by making apprent the complete and uter novely of Sih's abstract, labour-intensive lm compositions. Thse eschew he consraints of narraive altogeher, nd oten (specilly in his

rl

y works) abndon the cmera isef in favour

of hnd-painted rawings on celuloid. He goes on to rgue inst any nderstanding of Smith s

n 'oppositional' ilmmaker whose works possess unambiguos ideological impot. Rather, Crane wans to chracterise Smith s a cinemaic 'idelist', albeit a sensuous one, who 'abjures any dret connecion beween the screen and the hings of he wold

.

. .

. Always chllenging us to reink the

foundaion upon which we make sense of imgs, Smih never abndons he hedonisic potential of the screen.' le Crne dls with n 'idealist' undergrond igure whose work is gaining poshumous reconition, Benjmn Hallin dels with a contempory lternative igure whose lorishing

reputation is premised on fr more nilistic output. In his rticle 'hat is the Nee-Underground nd hat Isn't?', Halign situates Harmony Korine's work (as scripwriter, actor nd irector) s a pessisic 'corrective' to the pseudo-underground tendencies ofered by contemporry Hollwood. s deined by recent produt such s

American Beauy, Hllign ses contemporary Holywood's

iaions with dysnccionality as trnsformng underground potenil into a fr less chllening ategory of lm. It is against this bacground that Korine has emerged s a potentilly subversive voice in altenative American cinema. Through works such s

Gummo nd julin onky-boy, Korine

revls is is to be multilayered visul experiences whose experimentl vlue s matched by their grotsque shock value. For Halign, it is he irector's use of such strategies that prevent his sy

ssmilaion into the contempory Hollwood version of 'underground'. If Korine's position mks im essentilly a 'foreigner' to the dominant merian scene, this in pat explins why his ms are so dominated by similrly 'outside' (i.e. Europn) inluences. Hllign xplors thse possible precursors to Korine's work via reference to the New Germn Cinema of he 1 970s, noting that directors such

s Wener Hezog remin a source of reference to the syle of ummo s wel s being irectly st in julien

onky-boy. For the author, both irectors present n enironment where contradiction nd

inconity ovewhem ny ive rowards unity and consensus. Both directors lso share a penchnt

for depictng stats of the insne and he llogical, wich ry as much narrative weight s any grnd gstures or dominating world-view. In he cse of Korine, this cinematic mismatch is seen

n a dichotomy beween content (which tpicaly explors he white trsh underbelly

of Amerian

culure) and form (where the iy of the cinematic image is reduced to chaos via the constant overloading ith difering mediums of visul representation) . Accoring to Hlligan, these feares

rslt in Korne's work being viewed

s

a nr nnteligible visual lge, one whose disrorions

and deiaions act s a corrective to Holywood's 'Nee-Undergrond' .

hers Halin holds up

Amrican Beauy

as an exmple of he consevative nare of the

neo-ndergrond, Annalee Neiz ofers an ltenative rading of his lm's importance in her rticle

'Undergrond America 1 999'. Here, Neiz fo uss on wo recent picurs, both of which she clims re 'ndergrond' , albeit in vey diferent senses of he term: he Holywood-produced Academy

Awrd-winer

Ameican Beauy

holng that Ameican

and he independent sleeper hit

The Bair Witch Project.

le

Beauy ofers a ly subversive vision of US socil life, Neiz rues that The

Bair Witch Projet efectively mss is political consevatism under the veneer of sylistic innovation. In her iew,

coms down

American Beauy, on

'wle . . . saturated wih typil Holywood lourishs . . . nevehelss

he side of "rs" .'

The Bair Witch Project,

in contrast, 'might be a hopeul sin

for a lagng independent lm scene, in hat it hs tuly been a word-of-mouth sensation, but is content is jst a rlly riveing update on the sme old horror movie fers about gender, Satan nd

url clure'. lhogh he focus of her essay is very fferent rom other contributors to this collecion, Sara Gwellian Jons is lso concened ih questioning nd ultimately problematising ny concepcion of he cinemaic nderround s standing in opposition tO mainstrm lmmaking praics. In 'Phntom Menace: iler Fns, Consumer Activism nd Digital Filmmakers', Jons issss the

exmple of eel-anmation rchivist Kevin Rubio's Cops-iluenced, igitlly-produced Star

Troops.

Wars spoof

he author's se study is used to buress her rument that 'he interplay beween "fns"

who produce ms, lm-producers who re "fans", he . . . domsic culural production between so­ lle d

"

n

derround" movemens and he so-lled mnsram is

. .

. fr more complx' han many

critis nd ilmmkers would admit. Jones therefore takes issue with contempory clrurl theory's

beief that 'fndom per se s he domain of disffeted and marinaised inividuals and groups who

savenge for cmbs n the outer rachs of commercial culure' . She ilustrats how, in he cse of Rubio, a fn 'rsponse' text ws strateicaly made and marketed so

s

tO apture Hollywood's

ateni on nd interest. le mny contributors to tis volme focus on 'altenaive' auters, icons or representaions,

Jack Stevenson considers the cucial isue of independent disribution and eibition sateis in his ticle 'Flm Co-ops: Old Soldiers From the Sxies StllStnding nst Holywood Commercialism' .

Here, S tevenson contexualises he current signs of underround aciviy (such as the independent nd

'queer'

fsivl scene)

against the 1 960s formation of m co-ops emering rom the New Amerian

Cinema Group. In their poleical nine-point mnifsto, he group (whose high-prole members included Emle De ntonio) rejected what hey saw as he 'polished' and essentially flse nare of Holywood ouput. Importantly, he isues of distribuion and exhibiion were cenrl faturs of he group's c in emaic ll to rms. It resulted n the 1 9 6 1 formaion of the New York Fmmakers Co-op, whose ms and iluence Stevenson outlines in detl. The formation of his body (and the other ssociated mericn and British orgaisations the author iscusses) rsulted n a crucial public xposure for hose movies deemed too non-narrative or nonsensil to rach minsream moie

=

= . D

� =

=

. = • ) •

» •

ho ss . The importnce of the co-ops n be msured by the act that underground notables such

as John Wate rs , Pal Mo rrissey nd Paul Btel were attracted to heir rks. The co-ops also gave crucil exposure to shot wors nd cine-experimentaions during a volatile period when he 1 6mm cmera unctioned as 'a weapon of provoation nd subvers io n'. Stevenson laments he loss of his vibrant scene in a contemporary lm culture that ins lm co-ops nable to economilly sustain hemselves, and in which the term ' n dep end ent production' is used mainly to inicate a Hollywood

y

un . The author's sentiments are ll he more mrked due to the sudden closure of one the

orgnisations nder review, soon ter his icle was submitted. While the 1 9 60s ws

a

perio d in which ilm co - o p s re-wrote the processes of indep en dent

exhibition, it was also the era in which maverick director Herschel! Gordon Lewis revolutionised underground American horror. In the inteview 'Gouts of Blood: The Coloul Unde rgroun d

Universe of Herschell Gordon Leis', the director recounts how he gined notoriey (and the label

of the 'Gofather of Gore') via a series of lurid and goy pro ductions such as Blood Fest, 2000

Maniacs and The Gore-Gore Girls. These ilms were infmos for their guesome scenes d epicting male exotic caterers and lethal county bumpkins eager to ispatch hose who stumble upon heir

activities. B eyond heir blood-red co nstructi on and obvious shock vlue, Lewis' ilms gained merit

for heir frenzied image tracks, surreal silent cinema inluences nd experimental soundtracks which he diretor frequently scored and peformed himsel. Through his long association with

explo itatio n p ro ducer David F. Fri edmn , Lewis s ought to construct a horror Hollywo o d outside

he control of established movie mo guls . This reslted in him n ti o ni ng

s

a pivo tal igure able

to work closely wih oher notable exp lo itaio n and independent ilmmakers of the era, as well b ein g a director whose inluence is still felt in contemporry movi e-m aki ng circles. In this exclusive inteview conducted in its entirety

for Unerround . S.A., Lewis tals to Xavier Mendik abo ut

his colo url cul t universe, the inluences on his ilm syle and strucure, nd current trends in

un dergro und horror cinema.

In the 1 9 8 5 issue of The Underround Film Bullein, eited by Nick Zedd (under the

p seud onym Orion Jeriko) - fo unding member and still-den izen of Manhattan's Lower East Side po s t-p unk ilm un dergro un d - here ap p eared the 'Cinema of Trnsgressi on Manifesto'. Its

declration began with the line, We who have violated he laws, commands nd duties of the avnt-garde; i.e. to bore, tranquilise nd obsate through a lke process dictated by practical convenience, stnd guilty s chrged.' This lclatingly provoative statement of purpose and passi on resulted in increased media coverage (and potential istribuion) for such New York

undergrond ilmmakers s Kembra Pfhler, B eth B, ichrd Kern and Zedd himself, as well as for sometime-ssociates Jon Moritsugo, Jeri Cain Rossi and others. In his 'Theory ofXenomo rp h o sis', Zedd ofers yet anoher rec onceptualis ati o n of he underground in terms of a

breakdown

(raher

than a constuction or mintenan ce) of neat and simple, i de ol ogilly motivated culturl oppositions. D eined as 'the process hrough which n egati o n of the fraudlent valus, ins tituti o ns ,

mores, nd taboos of consensus reliy is accomplished', xenomorphosis is a cinematiclly achieved 'neurologicl

re-engineering' whereby 'the life/death, win/lose, right/wrong dichotomy imposed by

he doinant hierrchy is revealed to the . . . mind s a flse equation. This false dichotomy is the method

by which social control is maintained.'

hen held up against the self-proclaimed underground and trnsgrssive cinema movemens of he late 1 970s

and 1 9 8 0s through to today, the avnt-grde-i.uenced Nw York Ciy underground

of he 1 960s n seem positively tame, piece, Vis io ns of New York:

hough no less personl or crative, by comparison. In his short

Fms From the 1 9 60s Underground', Daid Schwaz emphsiss he

istoril if not conceptul tuth of the very oppositions challenged by so mny of he contributors to tis

volume. It was by 'rejecting the factory-syle tiice of Hollywood ilms, whose worlds were

literlly Jacobs,

built rom scratch on empy sounstages', that underground mmakers of the period - Ken

Eie Gehr, ndy Wrhol, George nd Mke Kuchr, Jack Sih, et a. - 'found their realiy

n he world

personal,

rond hem. The ciy's blngs nd streets beme a vst impromptu stuio in which

idioncratic movis were made - movies as ecletic nd vried as the ciy iself. However,

in co ntrsti ng

he distinctive nd culturally-speciic New York ilm underground of he 1 9 60s wih

he contempory

independent im scene, Schwaz too may be read s ruing on behaf of a resh,

mor

e complx understning of underground cinema in the United States today. No colle ti o n

of writings devoted to the radicl nd heterogenous practices of merican

nde

rground imming wold be complete wihout some consideration of he improbable,

forgettable productions of John Waters on the one hand, nd Lloyd Kaufman's Troma Studios on

he oher. In the inal contribution to this volume, Xavier Mendik and Steven Jay Schneider

invstigate what

n

only be considered the 'ani-aethestic' sensibilities of both these underground

icons. 'A Tasteless rt: such

Waters, Troma nd the Pursuit of "Pure" Gross-Out' applis the lessons of

culturl theorists nd philosophers of at s Mihl Bakhtin, Noel Carroll and Willim Pal

to Waters'

most notorious 1 970s lms, notably Pink Famingos and Deperate Living,

s

well s to

Troma's shockingly successl Toxic Avenger series. Contrasting the constucion and presentation of d iss ti ng depictions in

these ilms with their tamer, more genericlly-situated Hollywood coun­

terprts, Mendk and Schneider suggest that 'the diference beween underground and mainstream cinematic

gross-out [may be] not jst a matter of degree but rather a mater of kind.' For Mendk

nd Schneider, the work of both directors proves distasteul beause irs draws on notions of the rnivalesque, is not

grotesque body that Bhin stuied in poplar activities and marginl forms. It

merely the fact that both Waters nd Kafman focus on an excess of physical abnormality

and ' gro ss- our'

boily acts that makes their work of interest. Rather, it is the fact that these unruly

imge s re presented in merin

narrative forms that parody the norms, ideals nd vlues associated with the

drem. This leads Mendik and Schneider to conclude that he grotesque works of such

irectors

eist as a 'pure' (rather han hybridised or qualiied) gross-out genre, one which bears n

essential

connection to the aesthetics and practices of underground ilmmaing.

= = . )

� ''

0 = = . = •

The ticles prsented in is book ths invstigate the phenomenon of Amerin underground cinema rom a vriey of p ersp ectives, s wel s incoporatng lmmakers' commentaries and ibiion strategies longside 'traditionl' aademic approaches. In tis rspect, Undrround .S.A.

represents pat of a larger exinaion of globl clt and poplr cinema currenly b eing undetken at he Cult Fm rchive at Universiy Colege Northampton, K, wich ll be pubished relarly

throgh the Agebook seies. Since its incepio n n 2000, he Cult Fm Archive has rap ily grown to become an stablished

resrch centre, as well s a venue wih n internaional reputation. From the outset, he rchive has

n

sought to devel op a critil nderstaning of clt, trsh and underground m and its audiencs for

)

boh academic and commercil projects. Tis is centrl to the Archive's belief that, wle trsh an be

• •

tken s erio usly, clt nd explo itation cinema reqirs a multipliciy of interpretations that combine 'traditional' aademic tho ught alongside an appreciation of prodution prati cs nd sub sequ ent intepretatio ns by difering fan nd ser groups. This plosophy of integrang acadeic ith cri ical -

and fan based approaches to cult and 'marginl' m forms

has proven a key feare in the rapi d nd

succssl groh of he rcive, to the extent hat it now enj oys imp ont lins with key academic and commercil im organisaions (b o th naionlly n d in ternationlly) . In tems of is commercial

is,

the rcive enjoys

a longstaning relatio nship ih the leading K television pro duio n com­

paies, includng OPI Media, (who currenly p ro duce Channel 5 's clt m series OutThre). The

rowing repuaio n of the Clt Fm Archive hs lso mnt that is staf have been

able to draw upon ,

xclsive inteiews wih key clt lmmakers. Thse have included Paul Verho even Nic Roeg, Brin zna, lex Cox, Lloyd amn, Jesus Frnco, Jean Rolin, Herschel Gordon Lewis and Takisi Miike, and trnscripions of tis work ll be avlable in uure volums of he Aftrimage seris.

From the outset,

he rcive's mission hs been to promote its

rsearch via a creible aadeic

pubisher, nd his is faclitated hro ugh the long-term association we have with Wlllower Prss

nd he Aftrimage series. Tis series reiterats he rchive's obj ective of integraing heoretical with critical and p ro duio n acconts of cult ilm and its audiences. Each edition of Afterimage il be

themed nd contn 1 2- 1 5 key aademic aticls alo ngside shoter citil accounts an d inteiews

ith clt lmmakers and exibitors.

Futher detls on uture eitions of the book seies are

rom both he e dito rs n d he p ubisher.

avalable

CHAPTER ONE

'NO WORSE THAN YOU WERE BEFO RE':

THEORY, ECONOY AN D POWER I N ABEL FERRA'S THE ADDICTION'

Jon Hawins

bel

Ferara occupies n unusul niche in the Amerin nderground. lthough the edge of is

work hs continully appled to dontown nderground audiences (he is someting of a hero at

Sn Frncisco's Roxy Thater, for example) he has also garnered more mnsream acceptance thn the other ndergrond mmkers to whom he is requenly compared in he alternative press (Nick Zedd, mos

Poe

t

a.) . For tis reson, his work - or at

lst its reception - higlighs many of

he tensions surronding he diving line beween avant-garde, nderground m nd he cnema derisively labeled 'iniewood' by downtown cinema fans.

The ddiion (1 995) ns s someng of an nterstng nomaly in Ferrra's oeure. A

vmpire m peppered ih references to NieSche, B eckett, the My

i

mssacre nd Burroghs,

he m seemed tlor-made to appeal to boh n ndergrond nd a mainstrem audience. But,

avier Menk poins out:

s

= = . D

a

..

Mainstream critical reaction to s Gavin Smith

[Sight and Soun]

reading of European philosophy.1

»

it dseved.

•

praised he complex nature of the lm's construction

Niesche frequenly lad to claims that it was boh pretentious and graly istilled is

hile the much tmer

•

was at bst xed. lhough writers such

and syle, he narrative's continual sit from scenes of excess 'necking' to narrations on

0 = = . = • )

The Adiction

Wof

(Mike Nichols, 1 9 94) was prised in the minstrem press for its

implicit critique of corpo rate downsizing and capitalist greed,

The Adiction's

explicit retooling of

vampirism as another exmple of Burroughs' junk pyramid did not elicit the critial commenty

The

m that should have cemented Ferrra's staus wih both mainstrem 'independent' nd

underground audiences, hen, had the reverse efect of solidiing his status as a primarily underground director. The very things that made

The Adicion a diiclt vieing experience for minstrm critis

endred it to underground audiences. s Tom Charity notes:

This is one ild, weird, wired movie, he ind hat rally shouldn't be seen before inight . . . . Shot in b/w, with an efetively mury jungle/uk/rap score, his is the vampire movie we've been waiting for: a reactionty urban-horror lick that truly has he ling pulse of he time. IDS and dg addiction re poins of reference, but hey're symptoms, not the ause . . . . Scay, unny, magniicenly risible, is could be the most pretentios B-movie ever - nd

I mean hat s a compliment.2 In this essay, I plan to discuss the signiicance of

The Adiion's

success as an underground

ilm and to analyse the way it retools vampirism as addiction, economy and power. s the sub title indicates, I am particularly interested in the way the ilm uses theoy to get its p oint across. B ecause of its 'narratio ns on Nietzsche' ,

The Addiction

b elo ngs to a growing b o dy of

underground work which I have describ ed elsewhere as 'theoretical ictions', the kind of iction in which 'theory b ecomes

n

intrinsic part of the "plot", a mover and shaker in the ictionl

universe created by the author' .3 It is he prominent position of heory in

The Adiction

which made reviewers on opposing

sides of he cultural divide label the ilm as 'pretentious' (a word hat took on both derisive and celebratory nuances, depening on the user's cultural point of reference) . It is he prominent p osition wiin the ilm of a heoretical discourse that intellectuals critiqued (for grealy dislling a reading of European phlosophy) which problematises some of the assumptions that academis tend to make about the culturl uses of heory itsel£ Like Charity, I hink this is 'one wild, weird, wired movie,' the vmpire movie underground auiences have been waiting for. I hope in this ticle to demonstrate why.

THE TROPE OF ADDICTION

The ilm begins with a philosophy lecture on the My Lai massacre - a series of atrociy slides with a voiceover explining when the attack occurred, what happened in that place and the na ture of

US national reaction to the horror. s Kathleen (Lili Taylor) nd her friend Jean (Edie Flco)

leave the lecture, they discuss he centrl morl problem which the My La i trial of Lt. Clley seems to illustrate. That is: how

n you

hold one man responsible for the crimes and guilt of an

entire nation, nd how do you separate what happened at My Lai from what happened during the rst of the Vietnm War? 'What do you want me to say?' Jean asks Kathleen. 'The system's not pefect.' s athleen leaves her friend, she encounters a woman dressed in an evening gown

('Casanova', played by Annabella Sciarra) , a rel vamp who drags her into a subway station and bites her neck

.

There is a certain grim logic in going from one kind of bloodlust (wr crimes) to another (vampirism) here. nd there is a way in which the hunger for blood- in all its manifestations - is

disurbingly igured in the ilm as addiction. Throughout the movie, Kathleen keeps returning to imges of atr o ci y

-

an exibition of Holocaust photographs, documentay footage of a massacre on

the evening news. In prt, this continual return serves to remind us of the ethil questions posed at the beginning of the lm. ho exactly is responsible for this constnt replay of inhumane violence nd butliy? To what extent are we ll complicit in a world system which seems to need blood as much

s

vmpires do? But, as he last question suggests, Kathleen's continul return to a ind of

'priml scene' of historic atrocity lso seves to link wr crimes - crimes ginst humanity - to a trope of p hysicl dependeny and sickness, vampirism. 'Our addiction is evil,' Katleen says at one p oint mning that our addiction is ,

to evil,

as well as being evil in nd of itself. 'The propensiy

for this evil lies in our weness before it, ' she continues. 'You reach a point where you are forced tO ace yo u r own needs and the fact that you

n't

terminate he situation settles on you wih ll

force.' If wr crims re inked to vampirism nd addiction, blood itself is continualy linked to junk. Tis is most clrly mnifst in Kaleen's emerging vmpiric 'hunger', her physilly

ll nd

s

blurred. aleen's irst neele sill n is

rm.

s

the need for

a

'x' mks

the lins between the substnces of blood and narcotis are continually

'x' is literaly that - a x. Wing down he sreet, she ses a jukie with a

She raws blood up into the syringe, nd once home shoos this blood-ug

x into her vein. Later, she initiates her graduate advisor into vampirism by seducing him irst with

us. Inviting

im

to her apatment, she isses him nd then isappears into the kitchen to x

'ris'. hat she bngs out, however, is a tray with two syringes, a candle and a spoon. 'Dependency is a wondel hing,' she tels materil.

In dlge me.'

m. 'It does more for the sol han any formlation of doctoral

It is oly later, ter he has succumbed to one potentially addictive substnce,

that she tks a bite out of his neck nd uns him into a vampire. And Peina (Christopher Walken),

FIGURE 3 .:a rhl::n gl'ls a

ix

in i f,!' /! dlia ion

the vampire 'guide' Kath l een encou nters in t h e street, co n t i n ually conlates the language of blood with that of drugs . He m i xes terms l i ke ' fasting' with 'shooting up' to describe his atte m p ts to control 'the h u n ger' , and pointedly asks Kath leen if she has read W i l l iam S . B urroughs' Naked Lunch.

repeated comngling of blood nd jnk, s wel s the direct reference to Naked Lunch,

The

inits he iewer to

'rad' vmpirism n The ddiion as yet noher xmple of Burroghs' 'Algebra of

Need'. In the Preface to

Brros

raws a piure ofwhat he terms he 'juk pid',

he trfic in heron - and here, blood - becomes the istlled model of he entire apitist

n which ytem.

Naked Lunch,

The ida is to 'hook' the consumer on a product hat s/he dos not initialy need, in he secure

nowlege that once hooked the buyer llrern for ever-incresng doses. B urro ghs rites: I

have

seen the exact mnner in which

top

(it

is no accident that

are lways fat nd he addict in the street is lways thin) right up to the

or tops since there are mny junk pyrmids feeding on he peoples of he world n d ll

bult on the bsic principles of monopoly: 1) Never give nhing away for noing; Never

2)

give more than you have to give (lways atch the buyer hungy nd lways mke

him wait) ; 3) lways take evething back if you possibly

n.

The Pusher lways gets it

llback. Th e addict needs more and more j uk to maintain a human form . . . buy of the Mokey.4

The nloy wich B urro ghs raws beween addiction, capitalism, evl and power in Naked Lunch is rn in

The Adiion s wel. Like mny US urbn universiies, the niversiy which Katleen nd

Jn atend is located in the ht of what we euphemisticlly ll the 'inner ciy' (the m ws shot

in nd round New York University's Wsngton Squre, before it was 'cleaned up') . n enclave of privilege,

it is surrounded by streets that stand - s Robert Siegle points out - 's one of the most

potent demys.ers

of he llusions in which most of s live' .5 The economy here is bsed, it seems, on

j. he irst ime we see atleen walk don the street, young men approach her, hoping she il buy, nd 'I wnt to get high, so high' plays on the sondtrack. It is in these mn strees hat Katleen is

fuse accosted nd then urned into a vampire, and it is to his neighbourhood - s wel s to the

Uiversity

itsef- that she continully reurns, looing for blood.

The geographic

construction of Ferrara's New York is a junk pyramid, then, with the higher­

-

hose who push knowledge and a certain ideoloy - living of the addicts in the

street. In cse

we do not get the economic/class point, Ferrara includs a doctoral dissetation

up 'pushers'

defence pry that plays student hordes

like some vampiric reworing of May 1 968, where the working clss nd

rise up to attack the power elite. ter successlly defending her doctoral thesis,

Kahleen invits

the faculty to a small gathering at her home. There, he loose colition of vmpire

students, stree t

people and one 're-formed' graduate advisor, stage a blood bath - as they gorge

themselves on professors and 'unrurned' students. The clss barriers beween the Universiy and the streets

brk down as soon s he underclss unmsks itself at Kathleen's pary, and begins

drawing blood.

» c c -

� -

the junk virs operates through iteen yers of

addiction. The pyrmid of junk, one level eating the level below junk h igher-ups

.. = )

0 =

= = . )

a "'

The subsequent vampire banquet is b oth a revolt nd a inal leveling of clss structure. 'The ace of "evil" ,' Brroughs writes, 'is he face of total need. '6 O ne of the isurbing thngs about this lm is is insistence that reducing everyone to he 'total need' level of the addict on he street is a necssy precursor to meaningl sociopolitil, economic change. s Peina darkly tels Kaleen, he irst step

0 =

toward inding out what we really are is to learn 'what Hunger is.'

.

THE WI LL TO POWER

= = •

) •

» •

If bloodljunk 'is the mold of monopoly and possssi on', s Brroughs asses in is lso - s llen Ginsberg tstied at the

Naked Lunch trial - 'a

Naked Lunch?

it

model for . . . addiion to power or

adiction to conroling oher people by havng power over hem.'8 In

The ddition,

Ferrara mks

is xpicit by substituing tropes of domnation for he raiionl vampiric trope of seduction. 'It maks no dfference what I do, wheher I raw blood or not,' Kaleen is s she gets ready for a vamp-date with her thesis adisor. 'It's the violence of my wll t hers.' The fascistic natre of vmpirism is hmmered home arly n he

m wih

he pointed use of a sond bridge. In a key

scene shorly ter she has been bitten, Kaleen gos to an exhibit of Holoaust photoraphs at the Uiversiy Msen with her riend Jen. A speech by Hider plays in the background.

In he net shot,

Kathleen is slnped on the Boor of her aprtment - in a posture we have come to ssociate with her vmpric sicness. We stll hr Hider's voice, echoing now, it seems,

n her had. In the next shot, she

is on the street, looking for blood. While vmpirism is cinemailly inked to

a

Nieschen

'll to power', he vampiric atack

isef is gured as eistenial drma. Most vmpiic encounters in

The Adiion begin with a pointed

invoaion of indiidul rsponsibiliy. 'Look at me nd tel me to go away,' the vmpire tels he iim. 'Don't ask, tell me.' nd when he victim - overcome and ranaised by he violence of he nexpeted aack -

ss the vmpire

to lave her (usually her) alone, he vmpire is quick to assign

blame. hat he hel were you thiing?' aleen asks n antropology student. 'Why din't you tel me to get lost lke you relly mant it?' When Kaleen hersef is irst bitten by Csanova, she is lled a 'ucng coward' and 'colaborator'. The qustion of who bers responsiblity for he vampiric atack mirrors the ehical qustiom surrounding he prosecution of lt. Caley, raised in the opening scens of the ilm. Oly here it is not he entire nation that snds culpable for war crims, but he victim hersef- he 'ucking coward' , thf 'colaborator' - who is somehow responsible for her own ictimisation. The fact that so many of hsf vicims re women and hat they re seemingly punished for being too polite, too nice, too pssive, oly ads to he discomfort that mny viewers experience watcing a movie which

-

n he words oJ

]. Hoberman - 'nsists on blming the victim.'9 Fhermore, here re the recurring shots of atrocity photos within the ilm iself- shots of h( My i mssacre, he Holoaust, Bosnia - which oly seve to ncrese the ethial staks of raisin�

he responsibiliy quesion at ll. re

these vitims, too, rsponsible for what happened to hem? Were

hey too nice, too passive in he face of Ameri/Germn/ Serb ggression? In he face of such horric butliy, does it even mke sense to sk who is responsible, who holds the moral high grond? Yet he n he

m

m consistently dos invite

-

s

to sk he question. he ongoing plosophil quarrel

raised repatedly by fferent characters - is the old qurrel beween determinism nd

xistentilism, he old dlemma govering the ind of lt we choose to embrace. re we evl beause of he evl we do, or do we do evil beause we are, in he lst nlsis, evil? In the iverse of the m,

he costnt presence of evl is he oly issue on wich llWestern philosophers seem to agree. Before

biting Jen, for example, aleen pointedly ses an impossible philosophical task: 'Prove there's no el nd you

n

go.'

hat made so mny critis and reviewers uncomfotable about watching is im, hen, is precisely what ws

supposed to

make them feel uncomfotable.

The ddiion

mons what Avital

Ronel hs lled a 'narcoanlysis' of sociey, that is, a mode of anlysis in which 'substnce abuse' and 'addition' name 'he sucre hat is phlosopicaly nd metaphysiclly at the basis of our culture.'10

'Adiion,' Ronel its, 'hs eveing to do with he bad conscience of our era. ' 1 1 To get the point of F erra s lm, one need oly add 'vampirism' to 'addition' in the above quote. '

THE STATUS OF THEORY

s most critis note, theory nd theoretil discourse are a heavy prsence in the lm. This is usualy creited to he fact that aleen is a philosophy graduate student and hat much of the

ilm is set

in aademe . hat is interesting, however, is that aleen does not relly stat speaing theoryspk

ntl ater she has been bitten. hen she iscusses Lt. Clly's se wih her riend nd felow graduate

sudent, Jn, in the opening sequencs of he movie, she formulates qustions using much the same lngge hat ny savy watcher of he sx o 'clock news might se:

The whole couny, hey were ll gulty. How

n

you single out one man? How did he

get over here? ho put the gun in his hand? They say he was guilty of lling women and babies. How many b ombs were ropped that id the exact sme thing?

Once bitten, however, her manner of speaking begins to chnge. hen she uns into Jen arer her long abs ence from school, Jan ass if he inirmary gave her 'something to tke'. 'Meicine's just an

xtended

metap h or for omnipotence,' athleen nwers. 'They gave me antibiotis.' In fact, in this

lm he emergen ce of heoryspek becomes anoher sign that someone is 'rning'; lke loss of appetite

and aversion to sight, it s a sign that the vmpire vius is at work.

Lke any sicness or physical addiction, the vampire vis plunges athleen into an awareness

of he absolute materialiy of the body. Soon arer she hs been biten, she has to lave a philosophy

c = . )

a '

) c = . c •

) •

� •

lecure on determinism and sh to the bathroom, where she vomis blood. ter she is relsed rom the inirmary she begins to qustion the isdom of doing a dissertation on phlosophers who 're ll lirs'. 'Let them rot with ancer,' she tels Jen, 'and we'l see what hey have to say about ree

will.' The emergence of theoryspeak, then, seems to coincide with n awreness of moliy, of the absolute materiaity of ife. This is perhaps odd in a lm that is also so resolutely nd unabshely metaphysial. But it forshadows one of the important distintions hat the m insiss on ming beween 'aademic' philosophy nd he theoryspk of ral ife. There re wo textual canons which are iven to Kaleen in the corse of the lm. The irst is, of

corse, the reaing list for her phlosophy seminar: Sue's Being and Nothinness, Heidegger's Being

and Time, Hsser!, Kierkegard's Sickness Unto Death, Niezsche's ill to Power. The list always ges

a laugh rom the audience, since the tids seem to play ike double entenres - a urther indiation of the ways in which vampirism is ategorilly linked to xistential despair ('sickness unto death')

s

the key sickness-metaphor of the time. This anon is not much use to Kaleen, however, s she tries to manage liing-ith-vmpirism. So, she is in prety bad shape when she mees Peina, who tries to teah her how to control he hunger. Katleen's encounter with Peina is one of he cucil episodes of the lm and centrl to their interaction is the act that Peina operates accoring to a nonil logic of substitution nd contamination. That is, Peina provids both n altenative anon and a deconsuive means for reang the old one. 'Have you read Naked Lunch?' Peina ss Kaleen early n their enconter.

'Burroughs perfectly describs what it's like to go ithout a x.' ater he tels her again: 'Read the

books. Stre, Becket. Who do you thik they're talking about? You ink they're works of iction? "I felt he wind of the wings of maness" - Baudelaire.' He lso cits Nietsche. You ik Niesche

nders:ood something? Mankind has striven to xist beyond good and evil rom the beginning. You now what hey fond? Me.' is is the vmpire who wll later drin Kathleen dry in order to teach her about pin and revl her true nature. ith the exception of Sarue nd Niesche, who appear on Kaleen's phlosophy seminr syllabus, the wors in Peina's anon are ssociated ih iteraure; ll the ts he mentions re wors that have been privileged by those who 'do' heory - risteva, Cixous, Derrida, Ronel. Here, hey emerge not oly s key texts for ahleen's survival ('Who do you hik they're tang about? You hik they're wors of icion?'), but s key ts for 'rading' philosophy. It is ater her enconter wih

Peina that Katleen begins serious work on her dissetation, which seeks to reposition the phlosopher hi/herself in he text. 'Phlosophy is propnda,' she tels her dissetation committee: There is lways the attempt to iluence the object. The rel question is what is the philosopher's impact on other egos . . . . Essence is reveled through pris. The plosopher's wors, his ideas, is actions nnot be separated from his value, his ming. That's what it's ll about, isn't it? Our impact on other egos.

aleen's dissenation comes down, then, on the side of eistentilism ('essence is revealed rogh pris'), which she insists on reaing hrough a vmpiro-heoretical lens ('phlosophy is '

propnda ) . More imponanly, however, he fact hat she writes the dissenation ater her encounter wih Peina

-

n

encounter wich marks her pil niiation nto theory nd into lrning the

nare of he hunger - reclls he

ik beween dugs (adiction) and riting hat Derrida sees n he

phanakon. Cenaily the writing pours out of her at this point, as she tris to del with 'a metaphysicl brden nd a istory' wich, Derrida tels us, 'we must never stop questionng' . 1 2 s even his

sketchy ouline il show, Ferrra dos not supply he viewer with a neat theoreil

pacge, a loi l rument leading to one inal conclsion. Given he oten contradirory discursive heoretil reisters invoked dring he course of the ilm, it is esy to see why acadeis disliked what

hy saw s a reduive reading of Europn philosophy and heory. nd just as y to see why people with no he oreil background at llmight ind he m 'pretentious' or conusing. But he very split wich the lm posits - the split beween aademic philosophy nd a kind of savvy streetise heory (where the rl teachers emerge from the shadows)

-

s

relected in the reception the ilm received

rom nderground, s opposed to academic, audiences. In facr, n

The Adiion's posiive reception s

nderground ilm problematises some of he assumpions hat academis tend to make about the

culural ss of heoy itse£ A qick glance at altenative clure productions and publications

he

(Bomb, CTheoy, nd

Framewors Online pimental Filmmakers istsev, for xmple) reveals hat mny of h e

istinctions academis rouinely make beween academic discourse (pilrly heoretical iscourse)

nd 'lay' is course are problematic. People outside he aademy read theoy and hey se it s an intinsic pt of heir work - they do not always read it he same way academis do, and hey cenily use it dfferenly, but he received wisdom that oly academis

n

undersnd theoretical lnguage

or conceps simp ly is not rue. To tke one xample, here are strong connections beween poststructuralist theoy and tecno/

eleronic music. DJ Spooy - n rin-merin spin master whose rel name is Paul Mller - has done igs wih Baudrillrd, for xample, nd tas about DJing as a mode of deconsrucion. One of he Germn labels hat reglarly records American DJs is caled

Mille Patea; it was speciilly

nmed ter he fmous work by Deleze and Guari - and one of its best seling complation CDs

is a memo rim for Glles Deleze. 1 3 Win he xperimentl work of late wentieth-century lture here is a whole clrl formation hat deals with theory n ways that men we are ulmately going to have to redeine what we

ll heoy - what conts as heoy. There are a lot of works - literry, tistic, musical

nd cinematic/ideo - hat I

m

beinnng to cll 'heoretil an'. It is he audience for pnicularly

is ind of nderround heoretil clture which responded so positively to Ferrara's lm - who laghed o ut loud at the nnist aadeic pretencs of coraitions disrbing at ll.

The Adiion and did not nd its heoreticl

= = ­ D

a

..

0 = = = • ) •

» •

REDEMPTION OR THE SEVENTH CI RCLE The end of The Adicion is notoriosly hard to read. It does not folow he formlaic folore patern that Carol Clover ascribes to most contemporay horror; that is, it does not seem to restore order. 14

Or rather, it restores order, but it is diicult to say exacly what kind of order is being restored. In he words of one reviewer:

ter the grnd guignol hilarity of a faculty party/bloodfeast, Ferrara has the guts to go for he juglr. The inal scenes of

The Adiction are

religious in the most unforgiving sense

of the word; once gain, Ferrara writes as a sol doomed to redemp rion. 1 5

Followng the bloodfest, Kathleen i s sick from overeating. Sumbling down he street, smered ih blood, she is taken to a nearby Caholic hospitl by a good Samritan. O nce admited to a room, she sks the nrse to let her ie. hen the nurse assures her that nobody is going to let her die, Katleen asks her caregiver to open the blinds nd let in the snlight. So fr, so good. This is clssic vampire movie fare, where we expect to see the vmpire go up in a pff of smoke (as Christopher Lee does at the end of Terence Fisher's 1 9 5 8 lm,

Dracua) .

Horor of

E soon s he nurse leaves, however, and Katleen begins to pant and moan, the room

suddenly darkens as he blinds quicly close. There is a cloud of smoke ll right, b ut it is coming rom Csnova's cigarette. The Seventh Circle, hh?' she asks Kathleen. 'Dante dscribed it perfely. Bleedng rees waiting for Judgement Day, when we

n

It's not hat y.' Casanova leavs Katleen's room;

a

all hng ourselves rom our own branches.

fw minutes later a priest enters.

The credis

revel that this is Father Robert Castle, who lso provides the voiceover nrration for he My i sequence which opens the ilm. Faher Cstle hers Katleen's confession (her acknowledgement of guilt and requst for forgiveness) . Sholy thereter we see Kathleen's grave. A womn, ressed in lightly coloured slacks and blouse, her hir nealy pulled away rom her face, is stnding in front of the grave. It is Kaleen. She puts a Bower on he gravsite. In voiceover nrration, she says 'to face what we are in the end, we stand before the light nd or true nature is revealed. S elf revelation is nnilation of sel£' She leaves the churchyrd nd the screen gos black. The credits roll. On one level, this seems to be a nod to Brian De Palma's

Caie (1 976) , whose shock gravside

ending established the patern for mny horror movies to come. Oly here, the Finl Girl who suvives

the school pay-turned-bloo dbath is not the ltruistic go od girl who encouraged her bofriend to rake the school's dowdy scapegoat to the prom. Rather, it is a reconstruted and rsurrected vampire who appers to have inally learned, in Peina's words, to control the hunger, blend in and 'svive on a little'. On nother level, however, this scene is, as Peter Keough maintins, 'religious in he most unforgiving sense of the word.' Katleen's ssertion that 'self-revelation is annilation of self' seems

a

re p u diation of the argu mcnrs she made d u r i n g h e r dissertation defense: 'That's what i t' s all abour,

isn ' r i t ) O r im pact o n other egos, ' Here, bv way of contrast, she seems to be moving toward the kind of C h ristian mysticism espoused bv Simone We i \ - a woman so dedicated to tear in g down h e r ego that she l i te ral ly starved

c = . )

a

..

0 c = . c • ) •

� •

to death. 'If the "I" is he oly ting we truly on,' Weil wrote, 'we must destroy it. Use the "I" to tear don the

"I" .'16 s

if this were not aready cousing enough, the music wich plays on the

sondtrack dring this sequence is an inmental piece, 'Eine Sylvsternacht' (a New Year's Eve Night), beautilly played by Joshua Bell nd composed by the 'beyond good nd el' phlosopher himse, Friedrich Niesche.

If he ending s pepleing, it is appropriate. One of he major stylistic aspects of The Adicion

is irs rompe l'oeil visuls, in wich perspective - both histoil/empirical nd ehical - is repately clled into question. From the erliest shots in wich we watch Kaleen watcing, we are constanly chalenged to

ik about

perspeive, co wonder whose point of view we re occupng and! or what

exaly it is we are seeing. This emergs most pointely in conusing or trompe l'oeil shos, the irst of

which occurs sholy before Katleen encounters Csnova. s Kathleen waks down Bleecker Street,

the screen gos black. Then we get what rst apprs to be a wipe, moving let to right. But there is a unny 'hook' at he bottom of the screen, he edge of a builing, indiating that his is not a ipe, but a lateral tracking shot (right to let) . Someone is coing from the shadows of a bulding, but who? Not Casanova, whom we see in long shot. Not Kaleen. his nd of Eye of God, point-of-view shot recrs severl tims dring the corse of the lm, helping to visully establish a mysil/religious feel to he whole movie. In addition, what appar iniially co be unaibuted ssociational shors/edits invite comprisons beween vmpirism and rel brutlity. This happens most frequently in the shots which show atrocity phorographs. hen atleen gos home ih the anhropology student, for example, we see the women cross he street together. Then we get a shot of mutilated boies. It takes a while before we rlise hat is is news coverge of Bosnia wich ahleen, blood stil smeared on her ips, is watching on teleision - not a slaughter which she herself arried out. Ferrara lso repeatedly challenges traditional expectaions of space. The scene during which Kaleen is working on her dissertation unravels s a lateral racking journey through space and time. But here Kathleen seems to be literlly butting heas with hersel, s she apprs rame let (facing right) in one shot and rme right (facing let) in he shot immediately folowing. Finlly, Peina's lot is an impossibly ehereal space. At once tiny apatment nd avenous lot, it chnges shape nd imension, depending on he raming of each shot (there is a curious shot in which wors apper on a wll beind Katleen, a shot which somehow simltneously invokes n

t

gllery, church nd

street raii) . It is lso notable hat it is hard to tell where exactly in the city Peina's lot is located; 'someplace dark', he tels Kaleen. The fact that we re not continualy exclng at hese jmps and ss, s we ight during a Godrd

m,

is a untion of both he way we watch horror nd of Ferrara's geius for apparnt

conniy. But it is a mistake to rad the cousng nare of the lm's end s somehow dff rnt rom

what me before. If is lm is about nng, it is about the fat that - as Peina tels aleen - we are nong, we know noin; nong, that is, except the fr of our on deah.

It is intersting that the inl 'word' of the movie - he song that plys on the soundtrack s the credis roll - tks s back to the openng sequencs of the m (My i nd our responsiblity to nd for

he world) . 'Eine Sylvstenacht' segus into a rap song about black-on-black violence, nd the

m ens ih he vampire rerin 'forever ·is a long time'. CONCLUSION

'Evey

age embras the vmpire it needs,' the book jacket copy for Nina Auerbah's Our Vampirs,

Ouselvs prolims.17 This appis not only to ags, but lso to subclurs itin ach age. For wle it is ue hat

The Adiion had 'the ing pulse' of is me, as Tom Chariy rote, it is lso ue that

it id not nd poplaiy among a mrm independent or horror niche market. Instad it drew is audience rom the underground, rom a subculre of iewers who were not put of by is peciar

g-heoy blend, or obuse voabulary, or pointed socio-economic comentay. nd wile it did

not cement Ferara's reputation ith a mainstram 'ndie' crowd, it did extend is fn base in he nderrond ise£

The ddiion is n alt.m Goth lover's deiht, nd so parons (prriculrly women)

who had not been arated to

Ferrra's erier work fond m through s 'vmpire tle told Ferrara

syle'.IS he im that should have cemented Ferrra's satus wih both mainstrem independent nd nderrond audiencs,

then, had he reverse efect ofsolidiing his staus as a primarily underground

rector. But it lso expnded his fan bse ithin the ndergrond, extending it beyond he audience for s like nd

Bd Lieutenant ( 1 992) to the audience for ms like Naja (Michael Amereyda, 1 9 94)

he ever-populr Night ofthe Living Dead (George A. Romero, 1 968) . Is visully arrsting syle

nd 'ld weird wired' mot

story conirmed Ferrra's reputation s 'one of contemporary merin cinema's

hllenging nd consistenly inovative underground directors'.19 Finlly, is 'nrrations on

Niesche' helped to situate Ferrra ihin a lrger downtown tistic tradiion ('theoretil ictions') hat ws lready trading healy on theory. For ll these resons, it hs emerged htoy of contempory undergrond US

s

a key txt n the

cinema. It is also, s I hope I have shon, a spetaclar m.

s Peina might say, 'See it. Read the books.'

Specil haks to Chris Dms, Nicy Evns, Skip Hawkins, avier Menk, Steven Scneider and he sudens in my graduate horror seminar (C592) .

I

• •

c

I • •

CHAPTER 2

RADLY M ETZGER'S 'ELEGANT AROUSAL': TASTE, ESTHETIC DISTI N CTIO N AN D SXPLOITATION Elena Gainkel

Irena:

here've you been?

Lesley:

here've I been? round the world in eighty ways, hat's where.

The Aly Cats ( 1 9 66)

It is now a commonplace to view he 1 9 60s

s

mrked by he pubic sphere's sauration wih

sxual representations. These were representations hat had up until that ime only circulated win underground, marginl viewing spaces. The debats which coalesced around tis putatively pornographic visibiliy were concerned

s

muh ih questions of tste and he xceedingly blurred

boundries beween art and obscenity s wih the p ossible responss of an untrained 'low-brow' public to he producs of savvy sexul entrepreneurs nd 'smut pedlers'. One such place where the shit from undergrond to 'above ground' occurred was in he geres and cycles of the sexploitation ilm. Independent mmakers such as Russ Meyer, Herschell Gordon Leis, Doris Wisman, Michael

nd Robeta Findlay, Andy Mllign nd mny ohers produced proitable ycles of nudies, roughies nd nies to apitise on he inabiy of

he courts to empirilly deine nd legislate aginst

obscenity. 1

Marked by their low budgets, oppositionl stance towrs Hollywood, mateur (f not 'mpoverished') ashetics nd 'crude' transcriptions of dystopian sexual fntasy, simlated violence

nd sot-core sex, sxploitation lms proide a shadow history to the cltural and socil events of he rblent 1 9 60s.

s 'he apitlist impulse seized upon sexual dsire as

n

unmet need that he

markeplace cold il' ,2 sexploitation ilms deployed a rhetoric of eroic consumption made prevalent in he public sphere of he 1 9 60s. The im work of Radley Metzger plays a signiint role in the histoy of his independent mode of p ro ducion his is bease it mediates beween he high clture status of the foreign .

t

he rough-hewn, low-clt material of he sexploitation fature. Mezger's work an be seen in

m and terms

of

is attempts to dissociate from irs sxploiraion neighbours hrough a p rocss of c l url isrnrion, mapping he move from underground to aboveground along n axis of sexual, and cinephile, taste. Shot in Europe ih Europan actors on lavish and 'cltured' loations, Mezger's cinema of he

1 960s attempted to school is public n he erotic pedagogy of continental life. Brining 'art-hose' legitimay to the economic and narrative degradations of the Amerin sxploiacion lm industry were ms such as

The Diy Girs ( 1 9 64) , The Aly Cas ( 1 9 6) , Canen

Bay (1 967), Threse and Isabele ( 1 9 67) , Camille 2000 ( 1 9 69), The Lickesh Quatet ( 1 970) and Score (1 972). ih these wors, he director inroduced a component of market segmentation into

he ild of erotic consumption. Mezger's talent s a 'creative istributor' facilitated the impoting

of Europn lms ih seually sugestive content - ilms such as he ifmously auto-eroic , A

Woman (1 96), as wel as The Fouth Sx ( 1 96 1 ) , The Twilight Girs ( 1 9 5 6) , Sxus ( 1 9 64), The

Fightned Woman ( 1 9 68) nd The Libine ( 1 9 69) - to Amerian heatrs. HITORY, INDUSTRY, RECEPTIO N

Mezger b egn his reer i n ilms a s an editor, with a brief stint as a ilm censor, cutting out ofensive footage from

Jnus Films,

a

Bitr Rice ( 1 948) for KO. He moved on to editing and mking trailers at

major distributor of European art cinema. Europen ilms had garnered a substntial

audience in merian cities in the late 1 940s and early 1 950s in the emergent exhibition context of he r-house theatre.3 ter making he relatively unsuccessl ilm Dark

Odyssy ( 1 959), about

Greek immigrnts in New York City, Metzger decided to start a distribution compny with Janus

co-worker Ava Leighton, which they nmed Audubon Films. The 1 960s begn wih the buying of

US righs to risque European lms, repackaging them - via dubbing, liberl editing and sensational ad mpigns - before distributing hem in art-houses in urban nd suburban locles. The Dnish

,A

Woman

( 1 9 66) , directed by Mac hlberg, concening he unsatisied nd auto-erotic dsire of

c = . )

� c c =

. c • ) •

) •

a young woman played by Essy Persson, ws he most successl nd notorios of these impo ts. It ws credited with expanding he contexts in which erotic ilms co l d be screened in the United States, prior to Vilgot Sjoman's controversial Audubon at-porn hybrid aesthetic,

I am Curious Yellow} (1 969). Exemply

sex-violence ilms nd conventional ilms'.4 This breaking of barri ers ne at sot-core lms

n

of he

L A Woman was seen to 'brek down the distinction b eween a

pri ce,

s

Metzger's

be understood s setting he scene for he emergent circumstnces of hard-core

'porno-chic' in the early

1 970s

by vlidating, for audiences, he eh ib i ti o n of sexual content in

more conventionl heatres. In he id- to late

1 960s,

when he avlabiliy of Europan produt dried up due to more

strngent censorsip codes estabished in Erope, Mezger, wle stll importing lms, sited gr and began ming his own fars in

xtra

vgant continentl setings such as

mans

ions, sls nd

sish Eropean aptmens, ih st nd crews culed rom other Europn producions. Renowned cnematographer Hans Jura worked with Mezger on a number of lms, including nd

The Aly Cats,

Therese and Isabele

giing the lms a glossy asthetic which utilised processes s ltrascope and

3

strip Tecnicolor. s he deade proressed, Mezger's budgets grew larger, rom ive to sx iure sums. s a res lt,

s faures took up the lorid and moden excesses of 1 9 60s fshion via set dsin

nd costume to impat a polished and strlined look to his ilmic locaions nd is chracters' -

upp er clss lfesyls. Mny of he ms were adapted rom novels, short stories nd plays, ac co rding to Mezger a compensaio n for is lack of slls s

a

stoteler.5

Score, lmed in 1 972, ws the bridge

beween Metzger's sot-core and hrd-core product, he latter directed under the pseudonm of Heny Paris. M ezger's studied cinephilia, grnered rom yrs of his editing work, ilm viwing and chilhood

bouts in the smmer air conditioning of Nw York City movie heatres, fond an apt object in the aeshetic nd editorial constuction ofis ilms. The logic of he cut, a mrk of the censors clssiiation nd j udgement s wel

s

of he mniplation of low, movement nd econoies of visual desire,

dened the cinema of Mezger in boh his authored and 'curated' projects. Mezger imsef claimed, in llegince with the mrketing angle, 'I'm never going to make a shot hat I couldn't use n he .'

traler. nd I ik hat le gives the scens n intrinsic movement 6 Tis sylistic and conceptual nthsis of the commodity stas of the cinema ih its new culral vlue s t, not only xempliies the ethos of the sexploitation

m, but also spks to the

picular predicament of he merin cinema at the crossroads of the grnted ree speech protetion by he

1 952 Miracle

1960s. Speciially, one

se, and apable of enlightenm ent, yet sll

bound to he ravails of he ree mrket.7 The ilm railer, he lyn hpin of he sexploitaion industry's appals to is au di en ce nd mode of address, held he key to he s

xp

erience of sexualy explicit s,

one of condensaion. Vmcent Cnby noted that 'ehibitors of hse lm nd hat the trlers

advertising their coming attracions are s eagerly awaited as he fature ilms. On one Monday night, a Mahan sx-iolence hose devoted no fewer hn

20

inuts to its trlers for ure ilms.'8

We n look at one of Mezger's on trlers to see heir efectiveness in condensing a cnematic xperience nd promising plsurs head. In the traler for -

The Aly Cats, Mezger's ediing syle

resed n the Camille 2000 triler - stacks a seris of quickly-cut freeze rmes rom he ilm n a

snchronised crscendo, a movement wich · is rrested by the intuing low of the moving image. Ts stop

nd stat method, in which sexual scenarios re aloued nd rchived s cinephlic

momens o r screen memoris of araic female sexuliy, slle d and put in motion, reveals all of

he narraive nd spectaculr trajectories of he m itsef. The condensation of sexul acion, nd he condensation of the aion of the ilm into a commoiy form, itself enacts a cerin nemonic uncion at he sme ime that it provides promise of a uture ahead of it, of fooge that wil exceed

what hs been shon. The inle, wich zooms in stggered fshion on man character Lesie's (Anne hur) ace nd parted mouth, with moning voiceover, seems to presage he facil isplacemens of -

the hrd core genre that would soon folow. Signaling a kind of completion in the aural acqisiion of femle orsm, the double play on 'COMING!' nd 'COMING ATRACTIONS' performs a teul j oke on he strure of he traler isef and the temporl sucure of viewer desire. Mezger's succss n

hs be ply atributed to his crative and skilll workings of the t-eroia hybid in

llrens of m production, promotion and istribution.

The ls s on of he economic success of independens such s Mezger nd the lesser-budgeted sxploitaion mavericks was not lost on the major Hollywood suios. In an atempt to lleviate is

economic slump, Hollywood began to compete wih sexploitation fears, t-house lms, foreign impos, nderround nd experimental lms nd independent lms for a share of the commercially lucrative rena in seul suggsivenss.9 By the latter pt of the 1 9 60s, Meger ws complaining of

the nger Holywood's poaching strateies posed to his busnss, as he asked, 'How n we compete

wih Elabeh Taylor's ialogue in Virinia Woofor unraped stars in mny big-budget ilms with our unfir strles?'10 Positing diference and distnce rom he rabble of sxploitaion in he

spiraional trajectory towrs a more middle-clss auience did not necssrly lleviate the zzier distinctions beween

Camile, Camen, Therese et a. nd the majors.

At a point when sexualised narraivs and Hollywood features ih 'maure' hemes seemed to blur he lnes beween 'smut' divined by commiy stndards and 'ilm art', Mezger's 'high clss'

produtions introduced isinion in her upper clss pediree nd representations of the sex lives of the deadent bourgeoisie. The relationship between classicaion of 'rt lms' and sex ilms hs a detailed

histoy/ 1 nd Mezger's p i rs took advantge of the sippages, misrecogniions and

ovelaps beween the nd-house nd he t-house to mimise audience attendance. In the early 1960s, for example, the debate over the lssiiation of ilms s 'adlt' or designated for 'adls oly' met wih constenation rom consevativs such s Man Quigley, the editor of the Motion Picre

Herald,12 nd wih exsperation on the part of t-hose proprietors such s Walter Reade.B This ws b e ase 'adlt ms' included lms that rnged rom forein impors, mature famly meloms produced by Holywood, nderground nd avnt-grde work nd sexploitaion re. Mezger's ms

= = ­

D

a

..

intevened to re-inscribe the battle over adlt sexualiy and is fantasmatic dangers along the lins of tste cltures nd edied publis. By positing a classed ierarchy beween his own features and the sexploitation market, Mezger's ilms made a clim for the 'verage' audience nd purportedly delected the more 'purient' viewer who was out to see lesh regardless of the iner points of story, sentiment and

c = = -

ambience. Mezger preferred not to term his picures 'exploitation ilms' but raher 'clss specialiy

=

. . . he conceived of his audience as consisting of "sophistiated married couples in the mid-30s"

)

rather than of ageing insurance slsmen with their inger poised behind their suitcases.'15 These

»

intentional modes of address to a particularly classed audience produced a speclative, if not

•

•

•

ilms', 14 or 'class sex', and tried to 'appeal to he sophisticated ilmgoer, not to the skinlick audience

successul, libi of a midlebrow spectator who wants, presumably, to be educated and ediied more than entertined or roused. It is evident hat Mezger's ilm work enaged wih and produced a unique iscourse of taste round the consmption of seual images. Looking at he historical reception contexts and he directorial and marketing strategies of Mezger, I wnt to ask how sexuality and sexual taste ges classed in the ilms he both directed and re-directed, through isribution, for n Americn auience. hat re the speciic ashetic and ideoloicl strategis deployed to create this art-erotic/sot-core hybrid, and what are its characteristis and efecs? s Mark Jancoich notes: [] he study of pornography . . . requirs

s

to acknowledge that sexual tstes re not just

gendered but lso classed and that, s Bourdieu argues in relation to the aesthetic disposition more generally, sexul tsts are not only amongst he most 'classiing' of social iferences, but also have 'he privilege of appearing the most natural'. 16

The rhetoric of taste is deployed in Mezger's 1 960s ilms on numerous levels, on he level of asthetis, decor, sexul content nd performnce, nd in he ims' marketing nd distribution.

'MID DLEBROW PORNOGAP' AND SXUAL TASTES

Agnes: I like you beause you're always . .

.

redy. The Aly Cats

The istoricl and aeshetic compiation of Mezger's ouput, which in he 1 970s expnded rom sot-core nto hrd-core pornographic product, is an nteresting test se for understaning the economilly destabilised lm market of he 1 9 60s. It also clariis he debates over obsceniy, clssiicaion, tste nd aesthetic judgement hat gined prominence at he time. 1 968 saw the emergence of the A ratings system and the inal sloging of of he spectre of he arne and

obsolete Production Code Administration, which had reglated the visibility of licentious subject

-

mater in Hollywood lms since he early 1 93 0sY Mrgot Hento, writing in 1 969, pointed to one element of the saration of he markeplace

ih sexul imagey:

-

There is amost no one let in town who is not an expert on sex, going rom ilm to heatre to

newsstand to bookstore - talking nd writing about what he hs seen. Everyone knows

which thearicl coupling was real and which ws simlated. Everyone tells us how sexually hlhy he is nd how non-erotic he performnce, the performer, the book. The

Nw

York Reviw of Sex advertises in thse pages. Screw and Pesure, wo of the other raunchy

comercial ofshoos of he old love-rug-revolution press, re read for

n

by people I

now. One turns the pages of these papers, sees a naked girl whose les are sprad, and says

very Yelow Book - hat bad teeh she hs!' We are apprendy developing a new genre of

middle-class ponography: one which stimlates no one at ll. 18

Henrofs ironic reading of he contemporary scene is concerned with the ways in wich the seeming nderground hs lost its sense of trnsression and taboo. In the hns of a middlebrow, midle­

clss auience for whom aesthetic distancing, j st short of b oredom, is the hermeneutic strategy tout cout for re a in g sexul representations, sex is evacuated of is secret thrlls . Her wit, in the inal line,

proclis nll nd void he experience of sensul shocs and ffective inscriptions on the viewer's body. This is

n

experience diluted and denigrated by the light of day and he cods of propriety,

nowledge and tste that rle midlebrow consumption. No one n acknowledge their own rousl,

a nction

of a border policing and regulated sxuliy which distinguishes middle-clss boily

rsponse rom the excesses of the lower-class lower body. In the context of over-stimlation, arosal is rnsfomed into boredom.

In n attempt to mke arousl 'elegnt', Metzger's ilms

n

b e seen

s

prr of tis brnch of a

midle-clss ponography, a iche mrket expanded to include less the maligned ll mle 'raincoat

briade' - envisioned s the true audience of sexploitation - but more he newly targeted 'date crowd'. A reiwer, scepticl of their aeshetic innovaion, commented that:

Mezger's lms llow midle-class people who have been conditioned to abhor pornography but who secredy crave it, to indlge their eroic fantasis with the irm conviction hat what hey

re itnssing on screen is somehow more

'serious', more 'upliting', han he crudely

made quicies designed for the proles.19 Cony to the work of Meyer, his competitor at he tme, to whom Mezger ws oten compared, Mezger's lms reuted he more overt appeal to he low clrurl sensibilitis of he 'cold-beer nd

1

. .. 11 1 -

= = ­ )

a '

0 = = -

grease-burger gng'.20 heras Meyer reveled n the inept physiliy of

s spectator nd the

booishness of a stereoypil underclss, Mezger promoted n spirational project, both in terms of genre nd narrative, clssing his ms in terms of the ready available and upper-idlebrow tenes of the art-hose patron.

s

Pierre Bourieu nots, tsts mnifest and jusiy themselves in he negation of the tsts

of oher groups, and are consituted as much trough istste nd disgst s hrough a positive identiication. s he writs:

= •

)

[A]version to diferent lfstyles is perhaps one of he strongest barriers beween he clsses

•

. . . he most intolerable hing for hose who regard hemselvs s the possessors of legitmate

� •

culure is he sacrleious reniting of tastes which taste dicates shll be seprated.21

Continualy described in terms of his sylistic elegnce, istocray, sophistiation, distinction nd reinement, Mezger remrked in an inteview that:

We idn't stat out to be elegnt. I ws taught in colege that the reason comeies are about rich people is beause you sholdn't have to worry about how hey mke a iving . . . if you want people at leisure, hey have to have resorcs.22

Lifestyle, paticlrly sexual ifestyle, deined by a utopian notion of sexual liberation becomes he landscape upon which Metzger uites the pilrly apposite ields of youh clure and bourgeois iving. Mezger's s embraced he counter-clturl ache of the image of the 'winging sxties' nd sexul xperimentation, of which his py scenes are he umost apotheosis. These included images of women jumping lly clohed into iming pools with men, a prison-hemed bourgeois ory replete wih jal cell nd a nightclub where a strip poker gme leads to a female player's removl of her undewear in ll iw of the club crowd. Yet Mezger managed to cloak such tatil screen debauchery in he patina of rspetabity, atempting to unravel sexul practice rom is morlising and pahologising vstments. In Mezger's ilms, nrrativs of erotic ennui and sxual istenilism piggyback on the shionable pop-pychologised rhetoric of social mlaise nd youthl disinvestment. In

The Lickish Qatet, the isafecion of a ly is disupted by heir pursuit of a circus performer,

played by Slvna Venurelli, whom they re convinced strred in a stag ilm hey have just screened.

Her spetrl appearnce and isappearnce spurs psychological rediscovery on he pt of he faher, moher nd her son. In

Threse and Isabelle, Therse

(Essy Persson) returns to the site of her irst love,

a lesbin romance, at a now deaing and abndoned school for girls,

n wich her present experience

of the space mixes luidly ith the recolection of her morous entnglements ith the elusive Isabelle (nna Gael) . The erotic listlessnss of Mezger's femle protagoniss is tinged with memoy and melncholy - Mrguerite Gautier (Dniele Gaubert) , the relenlss playgil of

Camille 2000,

s

FIGURE 5 .\hking ponography m i d d l e class in

/lJ(' Lickcrl Quartl'f

haunted hy her mysterious i l l ness, which in deadly co m b i nation with her debauchery, prompts her demise at the end of the i l m . M o n ique (Reine Ro man) wistfu lly p i n es fo r the i cy Laurence, who we reahse is actually Nadia, in the e n d o f The Dirty Girs. And Les l i e i n The A lley Cats, o n the heels o f her rejection by her lovers and iance, conside rs suicide off the balcony o f a chur c h , o n l y to be deterred by the lesbian artist I rena (Sabrina Koch ) . These scenarios i n termi ngle t h e prototypi cal gest u re o f refusa l , spo rted by youth cultures with the literary pretens ions of alienation and psych ic torment . The l i terary sou rces o f many o f M etzge r's wo rks - from Dumas to Merimee, from Le D u c to contempora ry theatre - autho rised the sexual l i berties taken on screen . I t also veiled them i n the i m p ulse o f a modernised and utopic desire, a sens i b i l i ty that necessitates a co n tempo rary yet aloof viewpo i n t o n the world and h i s torical events. The preference for fanrasy, chosen over the depredations o f material n ecess i ty, gave M e tzger's i l ms the structure o f fables, erotic melod ramas set aga i n s t the e m i n e n t y e t denied con texts o f 1 960s s o c i a l change. Metzger's work therefore d raws attention to the h i s toricity o f taste and i ts relation to sexual pleasure. If an understand i n g o f taste i s always recko n i n g with ways i t can negotiate and trai n the

body, in the Kantian p roject o f distanciati o n , abstraction and aestheticisat i o n , t h e location o f eroticism i n t h e a c t of co nsumption h a s no b e t t e r m o d e l than sexploitation i l m and pornography. Russell Lynes, whose book The Tastemakers ( 1 9 5 4) i n troduced the lexicon o f ' h ighhrow, lowbrow and

I

c = . D

a

..

middlebrow' to he merin public, revens to gendered nd sexualised nalogies to lment the loss of plesre in the pursuit of tste for tste's ske witin the post-wr leisure economy. He writes, 'a great mny people enjoy having tste, but too few of them enjoy he hings they have taste about. Or to put it another way, they are lke a mn hat takes pleasure in his excellent tste in women but tks no plasure at ll in

a woman.'3 Tis point,

about abstraction of plsure from its objet, takes on

0 c = .

noher meaning in the context of 1 9 60s public sexul clture. Sexul taste is coded into he stucre

c

inisiblity. Mezger's lms, s anefacs of a middlebrow trajectory, atempt to have it boh ways, in

)

ring plesure in the aesheticisation nd abstraction of seul pleasure itself, in an erotic releiviy.

• •

) •

of consumption, and it appears the most irreutable of processs nd preferences, aspiring to is on

SLE, GESTURE, DECOR: CONSUMING SX

Mezger's ims contributed t o what Margot Hentof identiied s the inundation and overxposure of sexualiy in he public sphere, coded in he same principles of access, but stil embedded in the logic of the 'tease'.

s Thoms Waugh notes,

'The tse, n erotic ennciation orchestrated like a tantlising

power game, ws still the characteistic erotic rhetoric of 60s public clure, the sexul revolution nowithstlding.'24 Mezger's cinema is

ll of what would become generic sot-core astheic mofs

which generated and reined the an of he tse in is nrrative and

mise-en-scn: focus on decorative

objects such as sclptures, glss boles, urnitre and irrors, and creative atention to of-screen space. Ir is in he aeshetis nd sntx of Mezger's ilms hat we

n

see the aniculation of the parado�

of n-hose erotia. This is a place where the tese is held in tension beween he ediiation nd abstraction accorded to an nd the materiality of rousl nd an emboied spectator. Likening

;

ilms to the equivalent of foreplay, the representation of sexual aS nd physil plesure is met ib he challenge of attempting to create a metaphor of plesure into an aesthetic experience, bewee. eibition and concelment. These wors move against the realist ontological unction atributed tc ponoraphy s he limit of he reprsentable.

s

Fredric Jmson climed, 'he visual is essenill}

ponographic, wich is to say that it hs its end in rapt, inlss, fscination.'25 However, Meger'l imges rrest he motion towrds representational tuthulness of he sexed body in favour ol presenting sex s aestheilly mediated or dematerilising. Many exmples of his tendeny n seen in the txts, in which he desire, rosal and plsure.

be

mse-en-scene serves to mke mnifest a psychic unction or process 01

In cenin ms, actual physil objects wiin the set tke on the role oflenses rough which he sex act

n

be seen. In

Canen Baby,

coloured glss bottles on a ledge become he telscopng ilteJ

to he imaging of sex between Carmen (Uta Levka) and her lover. The camera slowly pns along

he

lenth of their reclined boies hrough the mediating tints and mldly distorted perspetives of he botles' organic contours.

A similr

device is used in

Camille 2000 to

serialise and ragment the seJ

beween Marguerite and Armand Duvl (Nino Cstelnuovo) in her uturistic, al white, mirrored boudoir. Sx on a lear plastic bed is seen only relected through the seris of verticl irrors which

encirle Marguerite's bed, s he cmera pans across slowly and the image the iewer ses is broken up nto a repetition of rames within the frame.

Representing the nner experience of primarily female sexual pleasure is also organised hrough

s inteface wih he decor and decorative objects. In The Diy Girs, Monique's lesbian sexual

longings re temporarily satisied by a bout of masturbaion with her own releion in he mirror, in

wich her image is redupliated in he frme and she appers to be kissing her own likeness. In The

Aly Cats, Mezger rames Leslie's face during n orl sex encounter ith Christin (Hrld Baerow)

by a rror st which she has her back. s she is being stimulated, a montage of shos of her point

of iw of he rococo ceiling and her bar rg which has been blndfolded are rapidly eited together. s sie nears orsm, her head shaking back nd foh in close-up, the celing, replete with culicue

detls nd lt angels, begins to spin, altenating more rapily with the bear's had, and on cue wih

he non diegetic sound of he lm's score and her moaning. Another heterosexual sex scene in -

The

Aly Cas, between Logan (Chrie Hichman) and Agnes (rin Field), uses a deliberate and distorted blury focus, a mode of dematerialisation, to signy sexual pleasure. The physical gesurs and facial

rsponss of ns, astride Logan, appear fogged, s if the lens is smudged or out of focs, thereby ueing he spectator to the relationship beween perceptual clariy and physical relese, the paralel

beween he coporealiy of sex and he recession of he image into a literalised 'bodylessness.' This perfors n indexical move despite itself - attempting to llegorise and conlate he pleasure of sex

ih he implse to watch, rom ouside oneself.

A comprable scene in

Camile 2000 focuses exclusively on Marguerite's face, in the background,

nd a vse of camelis, in the foreground. s Armand performs oral sex on her - implied of-screen

- Mruerite's moans punctuate an alternating focus of the mera, from her face to he camellias. The screen s split into wo ields,

s

he lowers nd Marguerite's expression get zy nd hen come

into sharp view, in ime with her accelerating orasm. The temporaliy of plesure is coded, through sl

clriy and rhythm, to represent he unrepresentable female citoral orgsm, cloaked in he

xcesss of a lavish

mse-en-scene nd he organic associations of the ighly arranged lora.

Thse mpls, a choice fw among many, dramatise he trajectory towars abstraction which

oient Mezger's s to a discorse of taste. Atributable to Meger's signaure syle, it s sye itsefthat is

beng eroicised. Such scens are hemselvs sily abstractable rom the s they re in. Thy emphsise

he tent to wih s s are rady-made for a cinephile sensibiity, consucted of rhyicaly adept

mens wich operate, lke the ambulatoy and weving route of fantsy, ndependenly and oten moored rom their nrrative content, capable of being re-arranged by he viwer. Such is the guiding trope of

of dsire,

s

The Lickesh Quatt,

which depens on the misrecognitions

the metacinemaic lm screen, on which are screened stag ilms - thus becoming he

meiaing site for the operations of fantasy. The back of he screen, set up in the living room, becoms

c = ­ �

a t

0 c = = •

) •

» •

36 FIGURE 6 T h e cluttered erotic frame:

Cnmi/e 2000

the physical and psychic space of traversal (by the camera and the viewer) , mobilising the distance between a husband, his wife and his stepson through an erotic character who seems to emerge from the screen, from the stag ilm, to rearrange their fantasies and their memories. Metzger commented on the idea for the ilm: It came from Dark Odyssy days. Whenever we screened che picture the ilm looked diferent for different audiences. I didn't understand this, there's nothing more permanent than ilm. Once its developed, it cannot change. And yet depending on the audiences, the ilm would actually change. The actor's timing would change, the performances would change. Depending on who was in the theaue at the time . . . . And I wanted to kind of get that across,

when we have a piece of ilm chat is never the same, irs different every rime you run it. 2 6

The mutability of the ilm image resembles the mutability and plasticity of sexual fantasy. Again we can see the imponance of the cut, of che editorial signature, in Metzger's ilms, as it allows for the camp reappropriation of images and scenes, gestures and dialogue, the standard of curarion and the instrument of classiication.

TATE ND (SUAL) PREFERENCE

The

mp vlue of Mezger's ms emerges rom their launtng of socil change, and prticularly

femle sexul liberation, s trnsformations in the consumpion and economy of lifestyle. Tste, as Bor.ieu remins us, is emblematic of what one hs nd who one is in relation to the classiications of ohers and how one is classiied by others.27 That a 'modenised' female sexulity beme avalable for consmption by heterosexul men in the burgeoning sex indusry of the 1 9 60s is anoher

comonplace of clural istory. We n see his hitoricist cliche rnscribed into a scene in The Ally

Cas, s Cristian rites 'GAT!' on Leslie's naked back while she sleeps, ssssing her previos

night's seual performance nd mifesing clssiiation s body graiti. The body becomes a veicle, a prop

like the decor itself, a material which requires evaluation, and hrough this evluation it an

be istnced

of s n

own

rom is physicaity into style. It is also a mrk of Christin's appetite, n inscription

sexual taste, which hs been sated by Leslie. The 'GAT!' on Lesie's back sevs as

mpeuos move signiYing Chrisin's deiant ad persona s wel

s

a mode of adrss to the

auience, a complicity to appreciate nd consume Leslie, nd the lm isel, s a pre, fansmatic suace.

he emergence and availablity of particular sexual preferences - such as lesbianism and bisexualiy

-

coded

s

consumer preferences, comes as a unique efect of the relationship beween

apitlism nd sel identitis as hey were mully constituted in the 1 960s. For Mezger, his

ofeng up of alternative sxualities witin is lic nrrativs - rom the lsbiism of Threse and

Isabele, The Aly Cats nd The Diry Girs, to the bisexuaiy exhibited in The Lickerish Quatet and Score, becomes the premise for n asthetic 'elevation' rather than degradaion of is ims. Here, such mgs

re iltered trough his pariculr style and mse-en-scene. What Mezger's lms lack in

compison to his more 'crude' sexploitaion competitors is n attribution or designation of pahology

to is sexually nd emotionlly voracios characters. In the 1960s, sploication ilms capitised on lesbiism as a sfe way to present sul content

ihout the ncrinations ssociated ith llrontal mle nuiy. sbian sex beme a legal loophole, nd s Keneh Turn and Stephen Zito aiiy n he lsbin scens

lm about sexploitation, 'there is a grat dl more picit

thn n the heterosexul ons, bease it s much sier to fake sex beween

wo women thn beween a womn and a mn'.28 Dspite the spios ssmptions n heir naloy

beween sel isibiy nd simulated sex, ther loic mkes dr how lsbin sxuaiy beme a staple of adlt m product, a token bencmrk n the 'progrss' of sexual iberlism.

heres gay male sexual clres became accssible in part rough the avnt-grde lm work of he Nw York underround, in the liks of Kenneth Anger, Jack Smith nd Andy Warhol, images oflsbian sexuaity had a more mrginl istence s n accessoy or indulgence of heterosexul mle anty. Jnet Staiger nd ohers have credited the visibiliy of non-traitional sexualiy in the avant­ grde

s of the erly 1 9 60s ith opening up a space for the later lourising of the sot-core and

= = . D

�

hard-core ilm mrket.29 Metzger's poplriy me on the heels of the wning of the New York underground in the mid- to late 1 960s. Indeed, it is interesting to perioise the decining yrs of the nderground, as well s the flling fortunes of the foreign @m, in relation to the econoic boom yers of sexploitation, 1 966-70.

Therese and Isabele

becme he irst sustained exploration of lesbin romnce, adapted rom

La Bdtarde.

0 = = .

Violete LeDuc's 1 9 64 memoir,

=

in its non-paholoial portrait of lesbian sexuality. Couched wihin he t-house erotica mould,

)

lesbianism beme a consumable nd astheticised experience, heavy on sentiment, nd sexul

•

•

) •

One of the most 'sensitive' of Mezger's potrayals nd

subsequently one which shows a minimum of bre lesh,

Therese and Isabelle was

a lndmrk @n

experimentation was positioned from a classed space of exploration and safety. Lesbianism ws a stge pssed through, a reutable yet pevasive melancholia haunting he now presumably stright and adult Therse. Literay voiceovers and he struture of memory wich frmes he nrrative, in Therese's adult reun to the site of adolescent sex, bufer the impact of a @m entirely devoted to lesbianism. Lesbian relationships work in many of Metzger's features, both his own nd in the Audubon imports, as a structure of 'diversiication' of the sexul commodiy. Women, unmoored rom traditionl marrige nd work, cold be pictured in he extremiy of heir autonomy. In

The Ally Cas,

the ist and socilite Irena meiats beween Lslie nd her philndering iance Logan, ltimately through a seduction, delivering the emotionaly harrowed Lslie back into her iance's arms. And in

The Diry Girs, lesbianism, the surprise ending which reveals that the prostitute Moique's afection

rests with a womn, is more sub tly meiated by an Amerin john who

hs just had a sexual enconter

wih Moique. A shower scene in which the lesbian lovers are reunited is intercut with an image of he john reminiscing about Monique as he sits on he

rin, with a recurring male voiceover questioning,

'ho is a diry girl?' The john becomes the auhenticated spectator, the voyeur who hauns the unraveled 'mystey' ofMonique's nner life. These ilms depict alternative sexulities as a reinement of sexul taste nd a 'sign of he times,' as wel s a gesture of pedgoy, in which sex is treated ithout gult. Paticipang and fowaring he trend of 'bisexual chic' in his ilms, Mezger's Score was one of he few @ms to present sme-sex scenarios beween boh men and women. Indeed, the @m's male-male scens cased a considerable stir in its initil relese, s the sraight male audience for sexploitaion ws considered too squemish to sit through gay

sex.30 Score's

status as a

m

which bridges the sot-core nd hard-core stges

of Mezger's work is substntiated by the eistence of both hard and sot versions of the @m, censorship and regional distribution necessitated diferent sells.

s

s a rsult, a cucil ive inutes of

hard-core footge ws pared down, xcised or reinserted in a number of the prints of he m . String gay porn icon Cal Culver,

Score featured a seduction

of one mrried couple by anoher older, more

experienced one, as husbns and wives pir up with each other in a play of erotic education, he learned iniiating he nive into sexual knowledge. Score's inovation came at the waning days of the sexploitation genre, as hard-core pornography, enjoying idespread p ublic ehibiion, had b en to

\

eclipse he now dated novely of the sot-core sexploitation tase. Mezger went on to diret a number of higly p oplar hrd-core pon feaures such

Barbara Broadcst (1 977) nd

s

The Pivate Atnoons ofPamea Mann ( 1 975),

The Opening ofMisy Beethovn (1 975), nd acceded to auteur status in

he acquisiion of his lms by he Museum of Modern n. CONCLUSION H ang o p e rated

on the csp of he underground and in pursuit of legitimacy nd larger audiences,

Meger's ms of the 1 9 60s represent an expnsion of the sphere of acceptable consumption in

a period of re straiing pubic taste. 'Sexul liberaion' is llegoised hrough a Continentl nd -

iytle lsewhere of lsh homes and boies pliable to the plasticity of ntasy. In assessing Mezger's work n he present, one is struck by is apacity for mp reading

s

well

s

its aratic txres,

s

he iversio n s of he tease re reirected onto oher sufaces - decor, objects, bodies. The sot-core preiment in he conditions of its production - the prohibition of he xplicit sexual act - requires

strateis of ss ociati o n to lik it back to hat act. The paradox beween he aeshetic sensibiliy, for a person who has tste, or is looing for taste, is always contravened by the ways in which abstration, n s

Mezger's mse-en-sene, lads back to pleasure. The sot-core preicment is tuned nto

n

asset,

syle becoms a mode of culral capitl, jstiing sex whle re-eroticising it through mediation,

releion nd atmospheris. If Mezger's ilms 'date' in he present, hey are coded s arcives of the lucuatng m erin

m indsty, as he very hybidity wich he pioneered is today a mrk of is place wihin lm histoy, addrssed to

n

audience classed by heir sexul tsts for 'sopistiated' erotia. By pang attention

to he sot-core work of Mezger in the 1 9 60s and early 1 970s, we

n

begin to see how erotic ms

were leitised and begn to circulate amongst a wider audience, nd what he impact of such a

move up rom the underground cold and did ield within its own historicl moment.

(

CHAPTER 3 CURTIS HARRI N GTON AN D TH E U N D ERGRO U N D ROOTS O F THE M O D ERN H O RROR FI LM Stephen R. Bissette

In the yrs 1 927-28, ater irecting a smll number of lms

,

n Sizelnd

Frnce nd

he

Uited

Stats, Robet Florey interrupted his Hollywood areer as a gg riter, publicist nd ssistant rector to ret a qutet of non-narraive, xprssionstic shot ms. The most fmos of thse remns

The Lo and Death of 3413 - A Holywood Era (1 928) ,

Vorapich for he prncly sum of $96.

wich Florey made ih

Slavko

s eprssioisic shot aght the fny of mny of Florey's

Hollwood ssociats; Charie Chapn msef arrnged for the

m

to play on Broadway, openg

it to ider venus. 1 Is succss evenlly arated the attention of Paramount Stuios, lancg Florey's mainsrm iretoil areer. is included

s

aboted pre-prodution work on Universal's

Frankein ( 1 93 1 ) , befo re heing genre clssis ike Murrs in the Rue Morue (1 932) and The Bet

with Five Fings (1 942) .

Thiy years later, a young Clifornian underground lmmker named Curtis Harrington made

he more ficlt move rom he Amerin avnt-garde cinema to directing feaurs in Holywood. Lke Florey before him and Daid Cronenberg, John Waters, David Lynch and E. Elis Merhige rer, Hrrinton's f>recation with dark fntasy inspired im to use the horror genre as a generic brige ro minstrm ilmmaking. ter completing a tol of nine underground shot ms from 1 942 to

1955, Hrington made his feaure directoril debut with he atmospheric Night Tie (irst shown

s n

independent/underground efort in 1 9 6 1 , opening wider in 1 963) . Hrrington continued

ireing featre lms for over weny years, mining is istincive vein of sylish sspense and horror n ny nd llvenues that presented xploitation crcit

Ruy (1 977))

themselvs. His work encompssed the drive-in and grnd-house

(Queen ofBlood (1965) , ho Slew Auntie Roo? (1971) , The Kiling Kind (1973) ,

nd medium-budget projects with major suios (Universl Picres' Games ( 1 9 67) ,

Uited tists' hats the Mater with Helen? ( 1 971)), along with a brood of made-for-television

fars (HowAwolAboutAl.n (1 970), The Cat Creature (1 973) , The Dead Don 't Die (1 974) , Kilr

Bees ( 1 974) nd Devil Dog: The Hound ofHell (1 978)).

Hrrington also directed numerous television episods for poplr progrmms lke Bareta

(1975), Charlies Anges (1 977-78), ynsy ( 1 9 83) nd The Colys ( 1 9 8 6) . Some of his television

output in is era were gere eforts, including Lucan ( 1 977) and the inal episode of Logan s Run

(1977) . These credits xtended to self-contined entries for nthology programmes like Taes of the

Unpeted ('A Hnd for Sonny Blue', 1 976) , Darroom ('Makeup', 1 9 8 1) and The Twilight Zone

('Voices in

the h', 1 9 8 6) .

Thus, Hrngton ws one of the few tue underground immkers t o actively engge ih minstrm

meia venues, savouring the ocsionlly ich oppotunitis to rther explore his own

pilr visiony nd thematic obsssions nd interess for a much broader audience. s such, .

Hrngton is one of the gere's ue pioneers, a statre that hs not, as yet, been properly anowledged. hers he 'ndergrond to maistrm' areers of Cronenberg, Wates nd Lynch re considered s

eqully vil components n ther richly personl oeures, Hrngton hs not yet received such critial auenion. To date, no one hs considered s epermentl s s il, oric nd ntegrated elements ofs more comerial.irectoial ision nd reer. HORROR UNDERGROU N D?

Pt of he iiculy with assssing he link beween Harrinton's underground and commercil works

remins he presumed clturl nd critil gap beween the nrrative and non-nrraive

cinem. Specially, the avant-grde and underground movemens of he wentieh cenry in

ll

heir permutations, rom the Surrealists to he recent 'Cinema of Transgression' - have cut the horror genre awy rom some of is most viral roos. Genre scholrs re forced to acknowledge Robet Weine's The Cabifet of Dr. Caligai ( 1 9 1 9) nd Daid Lynch's Erserhead (1 977) s wo

= = . )

q0

= = . = • n

•

» •

landmark crossovers beween the schools of underground experimental and mainstream horror. But between these lndmarks lay mny seminl works: Dimitri Kirsnov's Menilmontant ( 1 924) opens

ih a horriic xe mrder hat anticipates the very editing techniqus Alfred Hitchcock wielded ih such perfeion for

murder in Psycho ( 1 960) . Lis Buiuel and Salvador Di's Un Chien

Anaou (1 929) was the irst graphic, cold-blooded, calculated 'Auience Assalt', nd

s

such he

forefather of ll modern horror lms. Eqlly, Maya Deren's nderround masterpiece Meshes ofthe

Atnoon (1 943) n be seen s the true 'midfe' to a whole series oflater horror 'trance' ilms. These

have included John Parker's Dmenia (aka Daughter ofHoror, 1953/55/57) , Herk Harvey's Canival

ofSous ( 1 962), Romn Polansi's Rpusion ( 1 965) and The Tenant (1 976), s well as Adrian Lne's

jacob s Ldr(1990) nd E. is Merhige's Begoten ( 1 9 9 1 ) .

We have been denied - and dening - the llbradth and deph o f h e horror genre's cinematic

legacy, conceing to the aiicial wals beween perceived modes of intent, expression, production, marketing, distribution and exhibition. These diferences are crucil to he tists and central to he very identitis of the vrious avant-rde and nderground movemens, wherein the ms are personl works of t, not industry-driven products designed for commercial exploitation. But it is necssy for m scholrs and historins to consider the enirety of cinema s a cohesive, commuiative medim, and the vital unction of genre s lange in that medium. Wiin the cinema and ny given genre, it is the cross-polination of ides, content, approachs, imags, kinetis and emotionl texturs between permable 'wals' (deined, most oten, by venues of xhibition, distibution nd the respective industy issues) that must be sudied nd assessed. Much of is process n be traced hrough populr culture's voracios appetite for the 'new', prompng n interminable nniblisation of richer resourcs from ouside he minstream. Thus,

elemens of Harrington's Queen ofBood, Lnch's Ersrhead and To be Hooper's The Txs Chainsaw

Mssare ( 1 974) are digested and regurgitated into the mainstrm via the exmple of, say, iley Scot's Alien (1 979) . On a wider scale, the visionary personal cinema of prior generations has been

distlled into either he meditative calm of the computer 'screensaver' or he renetic kinetis of he music video form. This process is ongoing and organic, in its way. The process is particlarly compelling when embodied in an individual ist's career. The exchanges beween these perceived, permeable 'walls' are particulrly revealing when an individual artist is actively, intimately nd consciously involved ith hat ongoing osmosis, as ws Florey, Hrrington, Cronenberg, Waters and Lynch. Harrington is aruably the genre director whose deseved prominence remains most compromised by the unforgivable critical and scholarly reusl to mesh underground nd mainstream cinema into a coherent weave. The hlf-a-century criticl

'blind spot' beween Caligari and Erserhead remains sadly unilluminated, casting a shadow over

the very period in which the young Curis Harrington worked. Though the context is diferent,

mos Vogel's statement that 'the crucil importnce of such ilmmakers s Sidney Peterson, he hitney Brothers . . . Maya Deren, Curis Harrington, nd James Broughton remain unknown or

nnalysed trivia in the ideological development of he new generation' is as true today as it was in the 1 9 60s. 2

s

n

be aributed in prt to the relative inaccessibiliy of Hrrington's undergrond work.

Accrate dscriptions of Harington's exp�rimental ms are iiclt to ind. Except for ready access to

is 1 949 m-rd f, I only have he memory of seeing Frament ofSeeking ( 1 946) in he erly

1970s to work ih. Indeed, he sketchy snopsis in some of he b ooks nd atalogus cited herein conlict ih my vieings of

On the Edge nd

my memories of Fament

of Seeking.

Neveheless,

the efon must be made to contise this cucial body of creaive work wihin its genre and the iretor's subs equent mainstrem feature productions. PERI M ENTATI O N AND XCESS

Hrrinto n emerged rom the West Coast experimentl ilm renaissnce which begn wih Maya

Deren and lexnder Hmid's semnal Meshes of the Atnoon (a m properly revered by the

nderground, but still n unsung clssic of the fntastic cinema) and continued for a litle more than a decade.

In Meshes ofthe Atnoon, D eren herself played he troubled dremer, haunted in nd ab out

her on home by a faceless igre, a key, a knife nd her own doppelgnger. Though inspired by he surrelist lmkers before her, Deren's precisely lclated structure of he wing drm hat plngs into nightmre ws a revelation.

In At Land ( 1 94) ,

D eren played n almost elemental being

who emergs from he sea, crawling over suf, sand nd a bnquet table to lirt with a gme of chss nd hen folow one of is spiled play pieces over he rocs, back into he water.

Deren ws a potent ire in he undergrond cinema movement, indelibly shaping is lnguage nd potenil. Harrington subsequenly struck up a relationsip ith Deren: 'henever she'd come

to Los ngels, I'd throw a litle pay for her nd provide bongo

rs so hat she could dnce. Maya

loved to dance.'3 Indeed, D eren was the irst to make dance movement the absolute exprssive focus of her ilms. A

Sdy in Choreoraphyor Camra ( 1 945) , Meditaion on ioence ( 1 948) nd her inal

m, The Vey Eye ofNight ( 1 958), esablished a fresh cinemaic voabulry for others to follow.

Voably of noher ind ws problematic; throughout the 1 940s and 1 95 0s, the term

'

nderro nd

lm' did not even exist (he moniker was not coined until 1 9 5 9 , nd at hat tme it

had a much more specic meaning thn it has in he

ile n d scope of is book) .

D eren's wors, lke

hose of her felow lmakers - incluing Hrrington - were referred to as 'experimental ms', a lmy label implying amateurism, which at lest signiied such ms' drng nature nd distnction

rom minstrm Holywood fare. The European term 'avnt-garde lm' was also adopted, but he wors of Deren and her peers were disincively mericn.

Meshes ofthe Atnoon nd At Land had

been shot in Los Angeles before Deren's move to New York Ciy. It was there in he Ciy of Angels

hat Harrinton and is friends Kenneh Anger nd Gregoy Mrkopoulos began to create their own

sylised,

personl 1 6n wo rs hat were centrl to

the experimental lm renissance.

c = . �

i

..

0 c = .

Harrington, Anger and Mrkopoulos were a nique triniy in the history of avant-grde cinema, heir clhood fascination ih he atiice of Holywood's manufaUred opulence and he medium

�g into hree distinctive, tistic voices. Harrinton notes his formative readings

of cinema ss

of L. Frak Baum and Egr lln Poe - 'I ws very much into he iminative icion when I ws a

mere todler'4 - nd he irst horror lm Hrrington reclls seeing ws Edgr mer's The Back Cat (1 934), hough Hrrinton saw it during a later re-relese.5 At he age of 14, Harrington made his irst

Smm shot ilm, The Fall ofthe House of shr ( 1 942) , playing he dual roles of Poe's doomed siblings,

c

Roderick nd Madeline Usher, himsel; thus, the gender issues so central to Harrington's work were

n

Renscence (1 944) . Haington later stuied at the Universiy of Southern California

•

•

� •

mnfest rom he begining. Ushr was folowed by two other Smm efos, Crescendo ( 1 942) and

m school

wich, at hat time, did not incoporate 'the idea of relly maing student lms, though it had been done at pons in he histoy of he USC cnema school . . . [s] a stndrd part of the curriculum.'6

f Harrington souns prodigios, consider is simlrly ired companions. Anger clims to have appared in Holywood faures since he was a baby (boasting Mx Reinhrdt nd Wiliam Dieterle's

delirious adaptation of Shakspre's A Misummer Nights Dream (1 935) among is chlhood

credits) . He begn mang ilms at age nine, his mbitious rly ims incluing Prisonr of Mars (1 942, shot wih miniatures) and The Nest (1 943) , a tle of ncest. Mrkopoulos shot is on Sm

lms n Toledo, Oio, beinning at ge 12 (incluing a version of Dickens' The Chisms Caro�, and enrolled at USC in 1 945, where he met nd reportedly lived 'across the hall'7 rom Hrrinton, on

whose Frament ofSeeking he later worked as a camera assistnt. s Sheldon Renan notes, 'll hree

had made ms s children. ll hree made works hat were obviously very personal. ll three made

works that were lmost cofssions.'8 These drelke 'confessions' were implicit and expicit expressions of male love and sexuliy, boh narcissistic and homoeroic. Hrrington's potendy manifsted, feal images of female sexuiy nd matrirchy mrked hematic obsssions which would remain essenial to is later mainstrm

narratives. here Anger's literally explosive Fireworks (1 947) overdy emboied he homoerotic tensions in a sadomasochistic baing, evisceration nd implied rape - cminatng in he titlr image

of a salor's penis s a sprking Romn ndle - Hrrington and Mrkopolos favoured less explicit

xpressions of heir shared themes. Harrington's irst 1 6m lm ws Framnt ofSeeking (oriinlly entided Symbol ofDecadence (1 946, approx. 1 5 min.)) , suggested by he mth of Nrcissus. A youh (Hrrinton at age 1 7) urgendy seeks the object of his on desire; he tension builds with his serch,

culminating in his embracing a young womn who is revled to be a femle version of himsef, before dissolving into a grinning skeleton with a blonde ig.

Nevehelss, Fragment ofSeeking nd Fireworks were companion piecs, hough they were not

consciously dsigned as such. 'They were villy simultneosly made, within a monh or wo [of ach oher] ,' Harrngton later noted. 'We really were embrking on similar projects at the same time.

. . . But I don't think there's nyhing sensationl about [Frament ofSeekinJ ; it deals with adolescent

nrcssism. But Kenneh nger's ilm ws more expicit in its sexulity, nd was very isturbing to peo ple.'9

ovet homosual content of Framnt of Seeing and he specially grssive imagery of

The

Firwors wllsll qite aboo at the ime of ther produion; Firewors n pilr later beame a re ofscregs ofhomoerotic 't' s orgsed by the ay rban subclre of he 1 950s nd rly 1 960s.

1947 sreeng for 'he rme e a rme of os Angels aristic inteligensia at that me,'

Relng a

Hrto n rels:

\

'I'l never forget it, it ws n raoriny experience . . . when the screening ws over,

not a sngle person wold even pk to us, they were so shoked by hse wo s. Thse people were ly shocked . . . . he irony is wiin one yr of this incident, Kenneth let for Frnce nd of course ll nndy hled by Jn There

Cotau s being he young geius of mming in the world.'10

is her rony in the fact that Harrington nd Markopoulos were rguably closer in

spirit to Cocteau. Anger (his nme accurately conjuring the abrasive power of mny of his ms) initilly embraced

the 'shock cinema' tactis of Buiuel and Dali's Un Chin Analou. Applying he

phntsmagoric voabulary

of Cocteau's own The Bood ofa Poet (Le Sang d'un Poet, 1 93 0) to their

cinema, Hrrington and Markopoulos created consciously myhic evoaions of atmosphere and rad, wih urther liked

their ls wih Deren's ntstique poeics. However, Markopolos was

cinemailly nd inetilly closer to nger, proposing 'a new narrative form hrough he sion of

he clssic montge tecnique with a more absract system . . . [hat] involved he use of shot lm prss whi h evoke thought-images', 1 1 whle Harrington chose a more accessible, linear approach to is rlke

shos.

Hrrington' s next 1 6mm efort ws Picnic ( 1 948, 22 min.) , reportely � satiric but nonehelss personal work, wile On the Edge ( 1 949, 6 min.) - Harrington's personl favourite of his erly ilms

- ws n

ids. A

auhenic Freudin nightmare. Here, seething

deposits stm and bubble benath he

dour, iddle-aged man wanders a dsolate lanscape and arrives at what appars to be an

abandoned dock is, kning,

or shipyrd. He is drawn to an older woman sitting in a rocing chair beneath he

the bll of yarn at her feet turing slowly in a glss jar. She is oblivious to him, but he

seems mysteriously over is sholder,

bound to her. The man bols, now atached to her by a length of her yarn slung

nd runs away. He plngs into the mma-like substnce seen under the opeing

ids, he lenh of yarn protruding rom he mage is

r

bubbling mss the only evidence of his passing. The inal

of the dispassionate matron rewinding her yarn.

The ssinaion (1 952, relsed n 1 953, 8 min.), Hrrington's irst colour work, ws a matured

reinement

in London, he tle

of Edgar llan Poe's source material, shot in Venice. Dangeros Hoses (1 952) , lmed Wll

an ovet retrn to the mythologicl rlm. Specilly, it ws a reinterpretation of

of Odysses (speciicaly, is episode ith Circe nd subsequent trip to Hades) . Hrrington

describes it i

'the only so-caled "xperimental" short that I made out of wllrather hn inspiration',

becase he ll atracted to the romantic, nuts in length,

bombed-out, post-war ruins of St. Jon's Wood. 12 At 1 8-20

Dangros Houses s he longest of Harrington's shorts, but was deemed 'a lifeless

) c

�

-·

n

­ ) ., .,

-·

=

a 0 =

= = ­ )

a

..

e = = = •

n •

� •

anefact' by irs mker and never distributed. The Womwood Star ( 1 9 5 5) ws also in colour, focusing on the mystil paintings of Cmeron (Prsons), who later appeared in Harrington's debut feature s

'The Womn in Black'. She is st here s an alluring igure that appers to sideshow mermaid Mora

(Linda Lawson) and seems to beckon her back to he sa (she lso appred in nger's Inauuration of

the Plesure Dom} ( 5)). The Womwood Star repotely ofered a portrit of 'painter Cmeron nd

�

her work . . . achievig n alchemicl transmutation.'13 Given the rich use of colour in Harrinton's

later nrrative works,

us inal underground efot is of paicular interest.

MONSTROUS MUSI NGS, MONSTROUS WOM E N

hat is sring, even rom blurred memois nd dscriptions, re he shors' isual and thematic nicipaions of Harrnton's later nrraive wors, wih heir femme fatales, smothering maircs nd

ienated, anrognos 'heros'. he wn mle las of Frament ofSeeking nd On the Edge nd her tormented psychorams of narcissism, roubled sxual identiy nd mother-xaion clarly delinate

he toured persona John Savage potrays in The iling ind (1 973). Dominnt femle power is central to al Hrington's works, ith men trapped in or consmed by their orbit of hat power.

The lead mle chracters in nearly ll of Harrington's featurs are pssive, almost hapless igures. Indeed, these depictions reveal a pantheon of male victms (the spacesip crew which provide sustennce for the aien n Queen ofBlood; James Caan and Don Stroud in Games; nhony Perins

in How AwolAbout Ai; Savge in The iling in) . hen not victims, Harrington's mals re,

at best, kept 'drones'. This is literaly manifest s such n iler Bees, wih a qunet of drons led by Craig Stevens tening to every need of their 'queen bee' Gloria Swnson, and young Edward lben

accepting he role of 'head drone' once s incee Kate Jackson mystially ssumes Swanson's central

matrirchal role. s Tim Lus hs sserted, even Vyage to the Prehstorc Pant ( 1 966) 'is surprisingly consistent with themes lrady evident wih Harrington's rier ilms . . . iven] irs emphasis on one cosmonaut's obsessive raction to he sond of an nseen femle's siren song.'14 However, Harrinton's creative panicipation on his 'patch job' for producer Roger Cormn ws miniml, dubbing and directing miniml aditional footge for an Americn version of he Russin science

iction m Paneta Bua (Panet ofStoms, 1 9 5 9) under he pseudonym 'John Sebastian'.

In fact, Hrrington let the Russian ilm essentilly intact. The irector's similar, but far

more

extensive nd inventive, revision of nother Soviet science icion ilm, Mechte Navrechu (A Dream

Comes Tue, 1 9 63), yielded nother monstrous female iure: the scinating Queen of Blood. The

m strs the Slaic atress Florence Marley s

n

lling, green-sinned lien who transixes her

exclusively mle victims with a hypnoic stre, driking heir blood and secreing her throbbing gs in he hold of the ship. ny displays of mle power prove to be eiher llusory anllo r ultmately sef-destructive (Cn

in Games; Savage n The illing in), wih the exception of his surogate 'Hnsel' (Mrk Lester)

in

ho Slw Auntie Roo?

(aka

The Gingerbread Hose, 1 971)

lile creaive control over: the pulp hero (George Hamlton) of

parirch (ihrd Crenna) of Devil Dog:

and hose works Harrinton had

The Dead Don t Die,

the put-upon

The Hound ofHell- boh made-for-television movies - and

the vengel mle spirit n Ruby (1 977) . Though Hrrinton pracilly disowns he risible Devil Dog,

it too echos he gender tensions at the hear of is best work. Namely, the satanic cult which sired he tilr menace is led by Mtine Bswick, and he irst manifstation of its malignant inluence

over Crenna's ife Yvete Mimiex) is drmatised by the sudden, 'ncharacteristic' awakening of her sxl appetite. It is interesting to note hat most made-for-television movies of the period releted patriarchl unease wih the growing feminist movement ih suprisingly vivid scenrios in

llgenrs; )evil Dog, The Cat Creaure and especilly illr Bees snugly it this mould, iminatively.

The mlicious male energy in

Ruy -

he later most

the resless spirit of a murdered gangster (Sal Vecchio)

' - is ireted at nd through female characters, notably manifsting (via possession) in the autistic

daghter Qnet Bldwin)

to lsh out at her mother, anoher monstrous matriarch (Piper aurie) . The

esing mayhem satisies a dnmic comon to Hrrington's work. Thus, he climactic spectacle

of a young womn dstroying a monstrous mother echoes similr eruptions in

Queen of Bood (in

wich he so le femle astronaut accidentlly ills he haemophilic alien Florence Marley wih a mere scratch) and '

Who Sew Aunie Roo? (Chloe Frank's srrogate 'Gretel' lso survives her encounter wih '

surrogate ith Sheley Winters) , though it is more tpicl for the matrirchy to 'devour' (Smone Signoret/Katherine Ross in

with Hen?,

Games,

Shelley Winters/Debbie Reynolds in

Gloria Swanson/Kate Jackson in

mmy-cat-womn to sreds in

Killer Bees and even

The Cat Creaure) .

is

own

Whats the Mater

the pack of felnes which tear he

The lis beween Harrinton's undergrond short ilms nd other notable genre wors ouside of Hrrington's subsequent featres re also apparent. The derivations from Hollywoo d nd Germanic femme fale rchetps seem obvious, and it is tempting to suggest

Frament ofSeekings

submnl shot of Harrington's female surrogate over skeletl remains s a prophetic inversion of he double-exposure of Normn (Anthony Perkins) nd Mrs Bates' faces at he close of Pycho, 1 3

yers later. A common source for this imgery may lay

(1882), in wih he centrl igure is a sated,

n Leon Frederic's paining 'Sudio Interior'

bearded male, propping a skeleton in is lap rendered

sggesively feminne via the str-patened dress it wrs. Boh Harrington and Hitchcock were connoisseurs of ine

t,

nd he association ih Frederic's painting is evoative. More contemporary

echos n be found in Lynh's own experimentl shot tone and substance by

The Grandmother (1 973), nticipated in both

Frament ofSeeking and pticulrly On the Edge.

once rsponded to, hopelly fowarding a video copy of reting n episode of Lnch's television series

On the Edge

Twin Peaks ( 1 990-9 1 ) .

It is a kinship Hrrington

to Lynch wih the aim of

Before his seue into nrrative cinema - s a n ssistant producer to Jerry Wald at 2 0 h Century Fox

- Hrrinton played The Cabinet ofDr. Caigarts

Cre the Somnambulist in the second at

c = ­ D

a 1

of Kenneh Anger's grniose underground epic

Inauuraion ofthe sure Dome.

'The inspiratio n

for what I did me out of a pary,' Harrington recalled, 'a "come s your own nightmre" pay or someing. I decided hat my nightmre wold be a scene from

The Cabinet ofDr. Caligai, nd

Kenneth ws so taken ith that [it beame] a part of his concept for he m, nd he included me in

0 c = ­

that guise.' 15

c

and into a dark wll embellished wih Egpian cas, and on into a rke rlm of sk and light

)

(wich,

•

•

» •

In white gaunt makeup and clad in black tighs, Harrinton's Cesare strus zombie-like through one of the m's most imprssive tableaux. He is seen wandering pst a row of gittering nls

face) . I

1

the revised version, nger embellishs wih a superimposed sketch of Aleister Crowly's

�e snctum wiin, Cesare pours an exir for he gathered mil beings, nd he m

dissolvs into a non-liner nd progressively denser and renzied hllucinogenic experience. This ascinating iconic conjugation of Germn xpressionism, he West Coast Amerian experimentl m

movement and the horror genre cons mmats one of the richest periods of American cinema ih a consciosly alchemical intensiy.

ATER THE U N DERGROUND Hrrinton's nderground wors were erraticlly distributed a t best, b ut they were seen. Maya Deren, ever he ht of he movement, co-fonded he irst of many ilmmakers' co-operative newors n the 1 940s, programming theatril showings of their own works through New York's Proincetown

irst

Playhose, mos Vogel's 'Cinema 1 6' and ohers. In 1957, Hrrngton's lms found heir

disributor in the Creative Film Sociey, founded by felow West Coast ilmmker Robet Pike when

he was

unable to ind a distributor for his own work; 16 most of them remained available from

he

CFS nd Auio Brndon well into the 1 970s. The American underground cinema ws introduced to Europe at the 1 9 5 8 Brussels World's Fair, folowed sholy therter by New merian Cinema Group reprsentative David Stone's prsentation of 'ity-four independent productions to the 1 961 Festival of Two Worlds i n Spoleto, ltaly.'17 This w s a retrospective that included the wors of Mrkopoulos nd a prnt of Harrington's jst-completed irst feature,

Night ie. Shorly thereter,

Markopolos 'publicly issociated himself rom the term "underground"'; 1 8 even s vol acolts nd advocates of the movement begn to isassociate rom Hrrnton's works. Hrrington scripted nd irected

Night Tide,

Night Tide and subsequent

raisng he necssary ning himself, much

s

he

had before, hough on a grnder scale. Harrington expnded upon his on npublished shot stoy 'The Secrets of he Sa' nd drew is tile rom Poe's poem 'nnabelle Lee', and he is not idly bosting when he notes hat 'it has had an stoishing life for a lile $50,000 movie.'19 elements of he underground (e.g. Deren's celebrated

At Lan)

Night Tde synthesised

and the popular (hrough Jacqus Tourneur's

The Cat Peope ( 1 942)). The lm tells he tale of a forlorn silor (Dennis Hopper) who lls

I

1

for Mora (Linda Lawson), n allurng young woman who appears in a beach side-show s a memaid -

nd beieves she

is, in fact, a siren, responsible for the drowning deahs of her preious suitors. The

smilritis to Touneur's doomed shapshiter Irene (Simone Simon) are obvious - including the

leeng prsence of n enimatic older womn ro suggst the troubled herone may indeed be liked

1 to n ancient hybrid race. However, At Lands elementl (played by Deren) is also a inred spirit. I

, Emerging rom he ocean to engage in a procession of drealike encounters, she elipticaly vanished ,

into he snd dunes, an eerie predecessor to Hrrington's haunted Mora.

The fact that Harrington's undergrond shos were nown among the Holywood scene aided

immsrably n inncing nd casting the production. Harrington notes that Dennis Hopper had seen nd amired the underground lms, and s a reslt ws eger to star in Night Tie. Eqully, co­

str

Luna A-ders similrly cited how Harrinton's reputation as 'a irector of what we sed to ll atracted her s 'a rebelious young Hollwood actress wnting to be creative in what I felt cimate of stiing conformiy'. 20 Roger Corman rranged for the lm's istribution via Fm

"t" ilms' ws a

Group, iing in post-producion unding and deferrls whle ensuring wider public exposure thn ny of Hrrinton's previous work had n Film

enjoyed.

Culture no. 21 (1 960), ciic Prker Tyler's icle 'Two Down nd One to Go?' disissed

boh Hngton nd Markopoulos' work, speciclly relecting he underground movement's isdain for

Hington's st into independent thatril nrrative fatures. ]onas Mes, the evngeil ilage Voice

ciic for he nderround cnema, passionately rose to Hrrnton's nd Markopoulos' defence. In Film

Culure, Mes cited Night Tie as one of the ms 'wich, n one way or nother . . . have contributed to

he roh of he new cinema, nd . . . shold be mentioned in any svey of s ind.'21

Note hat both hese ticles predated Night ie's subsequent istribution into exploitation's

venues, primrly s a second-feature for Batle Byond the Sun (I 962), nother of Corman's patchwork dubbed-Russin science iction ms incoporating new footage (this time shot by a yong Francis

Ford Coppola). Many seemed suspicios of Night Tie's ovet genre trappings, despite its idelity to

Hrrington's personl vision nd previous work. he minstream 'grind-house' and drive-in venues

Night Tie ws consigned to, and is ssociaion with Sun,

s

exploitative an efort s Batle Byond the

oly uther alienated nderground ilm purists and ghettoised Harrington's brekhrough

fare. Thus, he irst 'bale lines' were drawn between subcltural perceptions of underground and xploitation lms - a istinction his colection of ssays blurs nd explors, fory yers later.

Some icionados remined stadst n their interest n, nd defence o, Hrrinton's work. Trough

inteiews conducted by Meas, Markopoulos himsef defended Hrrinton's work. 'Sometimes, ro gh sheer accident, I do come upon a vey mportnt comercial work,' Mrkopolos comented n Mes' . . .

14 Aprl l 966 ilage Voice coln. 'I am tiing of Crtis Hrrington's [Queen] ofBoo.

It is xcelent, nd scnating, that Cis Harrington ws able to put so much of his own work into

he science [iction] motion piure. There mst have been rapport beween the producer nd imse£ nd I

do know rom pesonal experience [Serni!, 1 955-60] how filt s is.'2

[

= = ­ D

�

0 = = = •

) •

» •

Hrrnton did indeed nurture his bond wih Queen of Bood producer George Edwards, nd

togeher they ved a nique niche in he post-modern Holywood Gothic that thrived for a tme in

he 1 960s nd 1 970s. Saly, Hrrington's fortunes dwindled under oher producers; both Whats the

Matter with Helen? nd Ruby sufered rom extensive re-eits by their respetive producers, hough

Ruby went on to become Hrrington's strongest box-oice it. The illing ind sffered n abotive

release theatriclly and on video, and has become almost impossible to see today, though it remins

perhaps he strongest of Hrrington's fatures. Television censorship ther tuncated Hrrington's

best work, including made-for-television features like The Dead Don 't Di; the most compeing of Hrrington's television lms, iller Bees, remains in sndiation, but ic (long with The Cat Creaure)

hs never been released on video in ny form. Producer Steve az ther tmpered with he television

version of Ruy (creited, ter the inal credis, co 'ln Smihee') , rendering it almost incoherent;

� Harrington irecte� his last fature, Mata Hari, in 1 9 84, nd s frequent television series work dried up shorly hereAer. He ws unable to moblise inancing for his plnned feature Cranium

fortunately, his su equenly becme he prmry cut avalable on video.

in he 1 9 9 0s, hough his friendship with Jmes Whale led to his acting as an unoicial consltnt

for Bill Condon's Gos and Moters (1 998). At he ge of 72, Hrrington retrned to his personl

lmming roots to remke The Fal of the Hose of sher (2000, 36 min.) s he stated, his ws 'simply to mke a lm, just lke I made he shot ls at the beginning of my reer.'23 Once gin,

Harrington played Roderick Usher. Today, Hrrington's nderground work is long out of circulation and nearly forgotten - he nderground movement disowne: him in the wake of his commercil fatures, just as the mainstrm critis' vehement rejeion of he underground shorn Hrrington rom his own creative roos. Hrrington remains a 'man without a country', an importnt genre irector who hs rarely enjoyed the critil atenion nd acclaim he long go arned. Lke Edgar lmer, Ricardo Freda and Mio Bava, Hrrington crated imaginative, visualy rich, even lavish, masterworks of he genre ihn he prmeters of oten ridiclosly tight budgets and schedles, a skll he had reined wih s underground efos. The renewed avilabiliy of Hrrington's ndergr:nd ilms is ssentil to the recovey of his identity as a ilmmaker, nd his historic identity s n innovator. Attemps in the late 1 98 0s to relse Harrington's shot ilms throgh Mystic Fire Video sadly evaporated. The majority of his featurs have been relsed on video (though oten in substandard trnsfers rom dubious labels) nd a few have appeared on DD . However, they re stll nfairly dismissed s being overly derivative of Psycho and Whatever Happened to Baby jane? ( 1 9 62) rather hn he vitl culmination of his own formative,

thematic obsessions wich - s these 1 940s xperimental lms prove - predated heir minstrem 'archepes' by over a decade.

CHAPTER 4

'SPECAL EFFECTS' I N THE CUTI N G ROOM Tony Willims

The ms

of Lary Cohen have long been n interesting anomaly in merin cinema. Cohen hs

made picturs on budges which would clmate. He hs

also operated in a manner very kin to the techniques of undergrond cinema by the

ways he innces s hat

be entirely impossible in today's mega-milion buck industril

nd shoos his ilms. s n independent commercil director, he dscribes is role

of a 'guerrila' lmmaker.' Cohen and severl of his colaborators use is term to describe

he iretor's particlr mehod of mking ilms, one oten involving minuscle budgets nd a pe of risk-ting

not fond in mainstrem cinema today. lhough Cohen's style ffers rom most

xmpls of Holywood mainstream and independent cinema, his very mods operandi and synthetic iRections

of moifs tken from diverse sourcs parllel certain pratices ssociated wih merin

nderround

lmmaing.

c = . D

a

..

Any ase narure

for deining Cohen's work in relatio n to he cinematic un dergro und must co nsi der the

of he dominant iscourses s rro n ding the sul deiniions of ind ep en dent cinema. Gener­

lly, s in the work ofheeler Winston D xo n , 2 these involve conceps hat historiclly deine meri­ can experimentl cnema s rising from the development of an avnt-grde tradition emergi ng rom New York and/or Clfo rnia in he 1 9 60s. More oren thn not, his movement is ssociated wih

0 c = .

key names such s ndy Warhol, Jack Smih, Ron

c

as

•

) •

) •

oten forms

n

ice, and severl ohers. lso, the thatricl venue

i nluen til role in c oncep io ns o f undergro u nd cinema by deining relevnt examp ls

those having had premiers at he New York Undergrond Flm Festivl or various indep endent

cmps locaions. Most pop lr deinitions of underground m usully encompss hose wors which schew narraive

in order to operate in a totally avnt-grde manner wich ll preseve boh

formal puriy nd radicl intentions from containation by he do minant ideoloy. However, hese deinitions tend to be too rigid in terms of understaning how cinematic move­ mens operate in p s mutually

iclar luid

xlsiv�, I

ways. lhough narrative nd in depen dent

ilms tend to be rearded

is is n ot oten the case in cetain relms of cnematic p ratice. For exmp le,

Soviet in depen dent /lms

such s Lev Kulshov's The Eraordinay Advenures ofMr. West in the

Land ofthe Boshevis ( 1 924)

engaged in

a satire of boh Hollywood cinema and Western ideologil

misconceptions of a new sociey by merging comedy techn iques , circus acrobatics, avnt-rde aing

syls nd documeny sho s wiin lso,

a higly heterogeneous formla.

the ndy Warhol Fatoy ims oten engaged in interrogating the nature of Holwood

fo rmls, using them for heir on mode of satire. his ws particularly he ase ith those ls directed

by Pal M o rrissey. Although Morrissey ltered Wrhol's avnt-grde practices into more

stuctured directions, thereby incurring Dyln 's

the wrath of purists (silar to those who criicised Bob

use of eleric insmens in he late 1 960s,

s

well as Mils Davis' jazz explorations in he

sme decade) , Wrhol-produced lms such s Heat ( 1 972) , Andy Warhols Frankenstein ( 1 974) nd

Andy Warhols Dracua (1 974)

did not entirely

use of Hollywo od formls. F o r

depart rom their subversively satirical, underrond

mple, Heat was a reworing of Billy Wlder's Sunset Bouvard

x

( 1 9 5 1 ) starting Factoy lmni Joe D'Alndro in he William Holden role and Sylvia Mles Gloria Swanson. (B oh Miles nd Morrissey had

Cowboy (1 969) ,

transform

wich also

s

appeared seprately n Jon Sclesinger's Midnight

featured spects of New York undergro nd life.) Not oly did the m

Wilder's original into another 'Day in the life of]oe the Hustler', as in Flesh ( 1 9 68) nd

Trsh (1 970) , but it ended with

the hero escaping

his p redecessor's fate by not lling into a Hol­

lywood wimming p o ol ater a rejected lover irs a gun at hm. We must lso remember that Wlder had attempted his own version of an ' undergro nd', non-Hollywood mode of discourse in he orii­

nal cut of Sunset Boulevard, where Joe Gllis' dead body engaged n voiceover conversation with oher occupans n

of he morgue. Preview reactions led to the elimination of this scene.

undergro n d lm may operate in an essentilly lid manner and does not necessarily involve

the jettiso ning of eiher nrrative or inluential minstream ilms for referentil puposes. Certn

mpls may, however, update nd interrogate the premises of he original mstertext in a mnner

wich, lhough not abandoning nrrative, cn resemble cetain practices of nderground cinema by ading new ilections both stylistilly and hematiclly.

HITCH COCK AN D COHEN: A COUPLE OF RADICALS

My point concerning he ilms above is not to argue for demolishing the sul convenient classiica­

tions concerning the nare of underround cinema. h is rather to rgue for a more lible inter­ pretaion which recognises occurrences of his phenomena in cosidered.

rs

where it wold not otheise be

Ts is speciilly so wih respect to wo ilms Cohen shot in New York during 1 984:

Pet Strangers and Special Eets. Althogh fomlly nrrativs, they rework cinematic conventions n vey muh he sme mnner s he best exmples of underground inema. Fuhermore, not only

id Cohen shoot hese understood

� l

s on he ns of low budges comon to is ype of cinema, he lso

heir s eciic kinship. Speing of shooing both lms back-to-back wih the sme crew,

he remrked on h former's se of 'll ns of New York people who'd worked in nderground

/

movies,' people wh were not 'even in the Screen Arors Gild.' Cohen enjoyed woring with Eric Bogosin, Zoe Tmerlis and ohers on Special Eets, describing them s 'llhighly ofbat people who

ived in strange basemens, had no money, but were higly talented.'3 On Peect Srangers, Cohen worked wih Anne Crlisle, whose oly previous role involved playing boh mle and female chr­ aters in

Liquid Sy (1983),

c

ire ted

by Esten

Eropen altenaive lmmaker Slava Tuskermn.

lhogh Peect Sranges is an accomplished work in its on right, Speial Eets is rlly the more '

n derro n d'

Special

of the two.

Eets is

particulrly signiicnt in terms of its use of self-relexive techniques usually

ssociated exclusively with underground cinema.

It continues Cohen's interrogation and extension

of motifs contained wihin he ilms of Alfred Hitchcock, but hey are here mediated wihin the mode of the former's cherished 'guerrila cinema'. D espite its narrative structure, Special Eects c ontins

several self-relexive elements characteristic not only of Hitchcock's cinema, but also

Hitch's fscination wih those erlier avnt-garde moments in European cinema such as Germn xpressionism and Soviet montage which he oten incorporated into his own ilms. Alhough Hitchcock later becme identiied with he Hollywood studio system, he ws also inluenced by the 'underground' lms of his day which were irst screened at the London Flm So ciety from

1 925

onwrs. lhough mny of these lms later beme clssiied as 't Cinema' , at the time of heir original exhibition they were considered dngerously subversive wors, especilly hose belonging to Soiet Cinema hat received heir only public screenings at Workers' Film S o cieties boh in Britin and merica. Fuhermore, both Hitchcock and Dougls Sirk subtly attempted to inlect heir Holywood narratives wih non-mainstream cinematic exp rssionistic lourishes in their later reers ithin the sudio system.

c = ­ )

a

..

Since underground cinema is oten associated with radical movements interrogating he stats

quo, Special Eicts ofers n interesting example of how a narrative im may provide he viewer

wih oppositional strategies oten exclusively associated with independent cinema. For example,

during the heyday of Screen theory in the 1 970s, the avnt-grde ws thought to be the only slva­

tion for viewers seeking to escape from a supposely oppressive form of gendered visul plesure

0 c = -

associated wih a paticulr rigid deinition of narrative cinema. However, this strategy soon

c

nature of visul spectatorship, as well as the later trnslations of then-unnown Russian narrative

)

theorist Mikhil Bhtin.

•

•

» •

became redundnt wih the emergence of a diverse number of theories associated with the luid

Although, to her creit, Laura Mlvey noticed

n

'unesy gze' nd 'disorientating voyeurism'

in the Hitchcock ims she singled out for criticism, her iluentil 1 975 essay led to a rllying ll for an oppositional avant-garde non-nrrative cinema (wich, supposedly, would lead viewers in radil directions) that went unnwered.4 Furhermore, as critics such as D. N. Rodowick have

since revealed, his riginl essay is higly rigid nd reductive in narure.5 Speial Eits, however, is

� piculrly instructite in shoing how a low-budget underground ilm using a nrrative stucture

n

interrogate the negative efects of he mle gze nd, at he same time, deliver a form of visual plesure

that is not compromised by he dominant ideology.

It is also possible to rue that Specal Eits provides a speciic reply to the third formulation

of Mulvey's theoy in terms of its radical use of narrative interrogation. Whereas in 'Visul Pleasure'

Mulvey championed the avnt-garde, her second follow-up essay (entided 'Changes') saw possibili­ ties within a Bakhtinin crnivlesque narrative strategy.6 May not n independent cinematic

se

of narrative space contin a potentially transgressive Bhtinian conlict involving visual technique, self-conscious practics nd humour, one that leas to a prticular cinematic plesure as chllenging

to the audience s the pointing igure of the jester in the climax of Blackmail (1 929) ? One might question wheher a prticulr inlection of the Hitchcock text belongs in ny deinition of under­

ground cinema. B ut if Warhol's Factory could appropriate and rework Sunset Boulevard in Heat,

then Cohen hs every right to do the same thing in Speial Eits. Futhermore, both counter­

cinema and the underground are at their b est operaing inst a dominnt nrrative nd provid­

ing alternative counterpoints. This may not necessrily be formal; it can lso be both narratively thematic nd oppositionl. s Slly Poter's Thriller (1 979) demonstrated, a Hitchcock text may be

used in many counter-cinematic ways. The sme is true for productions belonging to that now-lost era of creative British television, s seen in the later works of Dennis Potter and Atemis 81 ( 1 9 8 1 ) .

Directed b y Alastair Reid from a teleplay b y David Rudin, the latter merged allusive references to Hitchcock ilms within a generic framework indebted to British television productions such as the

Quatemss series ( 1 9 53-57) and A For Andromeda ( 1 9 6 1) , while chllenging viewers to respond

actively in a inl�r resembling practices ssociated with avant-grde techniques by the very nature of its allsive narrative structure.

SELF·REFLIVlY lN 'SPECl.l EFFECTS'

Special Eects is bsed upon a screenplay written at the same time Cohen attempted to interst Hitch­ cock in recting Dadys

Gone A Huning ( 1 9 69),

bsed on another Cohen script. Universl Sudio

poitics succeeded in hwating this mbition, and the project ended up in he lss creative hans of

Mrk Robson. lready isillusioned by he way his West Cost television projecs usully ended up on he smllscreen, Cohen hen decided to control his work by irecting it whenever possible. This led to

s irst lm, Bone ( 1 972) , wich he shot in a manner resembling n independent, underground lm.

The oriinl tide of Special Eects was 'The Cutting Room', self-releively speciying cetain parallels

beween lm editing nd violence. Cohen's later involvement in the world of New York independent coema inaly led to he lming of this project. a

Special Eects engages

in a self-relexive cinematic examination of the murderous gze within

narrative plot prtly indebted to

Vetigo

( 1 9 5 8 ) . But it also evinces Cohen's fascination with the

oppressive nature of patrirchal, family-deined identity. These were themes lready present in his rly teleplays,\uch s the 1 9 63

Arest at Trial episode

'My Name is Mrtin Burnham', and the

Jnuay 1 965 o ening episode of Branded (entitled 'Survival') , s well

�\

ilm nd television.

Special Eects also

s

his later scripts for boh

contains several humoro us moments, not j ust Hitchcock­

inluenced, but prt of Cohen's strategy whereby comedic moments oten disrupt coherent opera­ tions of traditional narrative cinema. This strategy can be o bseved in many Cohen ilms, incluing

such successul and not-so successul instances s Its Alive Ill· Island ofthe Alive ( 1 9 8 6) and

Stpmother ( 1 989) . Specal Ees

icked

opens with a scene which ncnnily foreshadows Bil and Monia's esapades in

he hite Hose. A scnily clad woman poses hf-naked in the Oval O ice, providing a pariclar form ofisul pleasure before leering male photographers. It takes a moment to relise that he scene is not 'relistic', but a sudio recreation of the now-infamous Clinton 'Orl Oice' set up for voyeristic

pposes. Abandoned Oie husband Keefe Waterman (Brad ijn) arrives to ind his erring blonde

fe My Jn (Zoe Tamerlis) positioned upon a revolving dias. s this opening sequence shows, apprncs n be boh deceptive nd devstating. Mary Jean has not oly abandoned her traitionl

subordinate role s Oklahoma houseife, but (to Keene's isst) hs taken on a new identity s 'ora Wilcox' in order to begin relising her drems of fame and fortune in New Yor. Fuher­ more, he opening shot tracks Anrea by performing a 360-degree cmera movement. Tis not oly

lsto ind he dominaing cinematic mechanisms used to depict the complex romntic gonies of

Vigo and Brian

De Palma's

Obsession

the femle body s seen in Hitchcock's

( 1 976) , but also the patrirchl system's exploitaive use of

Notoious ( 1 946)

and

Noth y Nothwest ( 1 9 5 9 ) .

Here it is

woh remembering hat although Hitchcock's techniques have over time become appropriated s Hol·ood 'culturl apital', they were originlly regrded as he equivlent of roday's underground mmking techniques in the consevative world of B ritish cinema, which reacted adversely gainst

= = L D

� .

c =

=

the iniltration of European techniques such as Germn expressionism and Soviet montage into her productions. The same problems ffected the work of Powell nd Prssburger.

Returning to her sley apartment, Keefe forcs Andrea to watch a I 6n lm of heir 3 1 -

month-old son. hile Andrea objects that the child will no longer recognise her, Keefe cllously replies that as an actress she

n

esily play he mother's role (a line that wil foreshadow the ilm's

climactic airpot scene) . A blurrng of identities occurs early on, s Keefe acts like a dominating director mking his lead actress watch a cinematic example of he pat he wishes her to perform.

L = •

Andrea also engages n her own form of fntsy role-playing by lying to Keefe that wice-busted

A

Hollwood director Chris Neville (Eric Bogosin) wants her for his new ilm. She mnages to

»

escape from her husband nd arrive at Nevile's apartment. ter auditioning for a diferent type of

•

•

role, she becomes outrged when she discovers him ilming their lovemking. By verbally humliat­ ing Neville's sexual nd creative powers, she provokes her own deah at his hands under he eye of a amera conceled behind a mirror. Flsely accused of her murder, Keefe inds himself bailed out

\

of jail by Neville, who wishes to use him in a 1 6mm re-creation of Andrea's life nd death. This will obviously b a picture made under underground ilmmaing conditions, to be blown up into

y

35mm for genera elese. Nevlle 's circllstances not oly echo the plight of directors who have experienced Bops within the mainstream ilm indusry nd who ish to keep woring in the low-buget independent ield, but also nticipats he contemporary prediment facing once major talens today. During 200 1 , some British newspapers reported he plight of television and ilm irector Ken Russel; now eled rom both industries, he continues maing ilms on ideo in his rge with the aim of istributing he nished product on the Intenet. Under thse circumstancs, boundaries beween mainsream and nderground tlents as wel as divisions beween nrrative and

-

garde tecniqus become vey

blurred - a contemporary phenomenon Cohen's Special Eects superbly forshadows.

Supposedly irm boundaries beween the 'law' and exploitation lso become blurred in a mnner

evong Hitchcock motfs in works s diverse s Ey Virtue ( 1 927) , Champane (1 928), Notorios

(1 946), nd Vetigo. Detective-Lieutennt Plip Delroy (Kevin O'Connor) , the oicer who rrsted

Keefe, becoms so fscinated by cinematic techniqus that Nevlle appoints m s tecnil advisor on is ilm. Such a blurng of boundris lso echos he high degree of contemporry nvolvement

of New York police on television productions such s Law and Orer, Law and Order: Speial Vicims

Unit, N .P.D. Blue, Third Watch and I 00 Cnre Sreet. s one critic remarked in a recent New York

Times article, 'So many New York badges glisten in the lighs of the meras these days, it might

behoove the police brss to ik about recruiting rom the drma schools.'7

Failing to ind a suitable actress, Keefe accidentally discovers looklike Elaine Bernstein (also played by Tamerlis) whom Neville trnsforms into the dead Mary Jen/Andrea in a manner resem­

bling the techniques Scotty Gmes Stewart) uses on Judy (Kim Novak) in Verigo. ter losing

footage of Andrea's deah, Nevlle decides to recreate the originl murder according to he impro-

visation techniques of underground cinema. But he rewrites the screenplay so that Kee supposedly lls Elaine, ith Nevile kiling him in urn. ter relising hat Neville intends tO make him 'The

Wrong Mn', Keefe escapes from the police nd removes ll the uses from Neville's aprtment to frstrate

his plans. Engaging in a struggle wih Nevile, Keefe throws him into his indoor pool

long ih a studio

light which electrocutes him - a punisment he would have received before he

days oflethl injection. Elaine unnowingly becomes Keefe's accomplice by plugging he uses back in,

n

act which leads to Neville's electrocution. She hus becomes the underground equivalent of

Hitchcock's 'gulty womn'. Special Eects concludes in an ironic mnner, with Delroy before the media

nn

ounci ng his intenion to complete Neville's uninished lm while Keefe lies home to

Olhoma wih Elaine, whom he now renames Mary Jean.

Speial Eects might appear tO be a mere derivation of Veigo were it not for he fact hat he

source is incidentl to a plot centered upon identiiaion and the cinematic machine. These elements not oly

occur wiin Hitchcock's British and Amerin periods, but also wiin various works of

ndergrond cinema. Special Eects lso emphsiss the self-relexive componens contained wiin he low-budget world of independent cinema much more radicaly han ny of Cohen's previous or

subsequent films. In addition, he dislocation of Holywood cohesive nrrative stuctrs echoes he

hllenging na�e of his screenplay for Bone, which ws writen at he same time s Speial Eects.8

The latter m us�s the Veigo references more radiclly hn dos De Palma's Obsession; alhough boh utilise Hitch

lock's recogition of he oppressive naure ofgender roles, Cohen's reatment brings

is issue to the forefront by formlly employing underground cinematic techniques. ltimately, he

Vigo nrraive becoms s marginal to the construion of Speial Eects s he scene showing Mary

J/nra's . dead body in a

r

parked in he abandoned Coney Islnd winter lndscape. Lke

Marion Crne Gnet Leigh) durng her drive to Clifonia in Pycho (1 960), Anrea's eyes are wide nd

strng, he oly movement being the sish of the windscreen wipers urning back nd forh.

May Jn's jouney to New York ends in butal violence. She is the victim of a power relationship n which wo impotent mals atempt to dominate her. (DIS)HONEST BE APRU DER

f the hemes of Special Eects were not extraorinary enogh, Cohen's picular manner of cinematic treament is lso exemplary insor s it blurs numerous boundaries. This blurring nvolves sound s

wel s ision. The opening of Speial Eects resembles that of Hitchcock's second sound ilm, juno

and the Paycock ( 1 929) , in that it contains voices against a black bacground before the isuals acu­

lly begin. lhouh such practice beme commonplace in he later sound era, Cohen rstores this 'isuptive' opening ro he very rail avant-garde intentions employed by Hitchcock in his rly

sound produions. hile Hitchcock emphasiss he monologue of Barry Fizgerald's Orator at the

begining of juno, Cohen employs a ialogue beween he unseen iurs of Nevlle and repoters

c = ­ )

� ''

0 c = . c •

) •

» •

ter his iring rom a mlti-miion dolar production. Dismissing accusations of wsting mony, Nevile rspons that his movis make milions of dolrs in video rentls - a common situation for mny irectors who never gin theatrical release today - in a distribution system which unctions s n ltenative mns of seeing diferent tpes of @ns (depending of course on the location) . s a special efecs director, Nevile acclaims 'honest Abe Zapruder' as his mentor in a manner

acknowledging trnsgressions of real-lfe boundaris beween fantasy nd reiy. lthough Zap ruder shot the only footge of he Kennedy assssination on n 8mm mera, qustions of documenty reality oten clsh with issues of interpretation, as ilms such s Oliver Stone's ]FK ( 1 9 9 1 ) revel.

Despite being a 'real-lfe' documentary shot like a famly home movie, the Zapuder footage is open co

s mny intepretations s the bst exampls of avnt-grde and ndergrond cinema. Nevlle actully dismisss Anra's belief in the reliy of the news footge documentation of Lee Havey Oswld's death, vieing it instead s make-believe.

The originl tile of Speial Eects - 'The Cuting Room' - emphsises ediing, a procss which

denotes not oly the mnipulation of reliy, but also murder, s demonstrated n such classic

examples s Bateshp Pot mkin's (1925) Odssa Steps Massacre nd the shower scene in Pycho.

In Special Ees, Neile embois Wliam Rotman's deiniion of Hitchcock's 'murderous

1

gze' by committing m der wring editing glovs and attempting another with editing scissors.9

(Signiiantly, Jef Costey o [lain Delon] in Jean-Pierre Melvile's 1 9 67 Le Samoura" wrs editing

gloves s ptt of his murderos profession.) Neile's fscination wih he Kennedy and Oswld assassinations also reinforces he connecion beween the real-lfe world of documentry and violent fntsies revealed by Hitchcock in he opening scens of The Lodger (1 927) nd Backmail (1 929).

The subversive blurring of boundaris beween realiy and imination is thus present not only in the more miliar xmples of ndergrond cinema, but also in he work of Hitchcock nd Cohen. Nevile inhabits an apttment decorated with rose imgery, he rose fascinating m bease it combins opposing emblems of beauy nd violence. Ross also have thons hat n injre. During is ssault on Andrea, Nelle scratches her back ith thorns. lso, at various points in the @m, rose thorns prick he ingers of boh Nevile nd Keefe. Thse oppositional reams of bauy and deah complement intertiing ssociations of sexualiy and violence occurring throughout Special Eects.

Ater Nevile's inteview segment in which he acclaims the dath-conveing 8m Zapruder home

movie footge, Special Eets opens (as iscussed above) wih a low-angle shot ofAndrea posing before male viewers n the sley Oval Oice set. hen Keefe butlly assalts he organiser who attempts

to stop him from pursuing nrea, n elarated voyeur immediately gets over his disappointment in losing 'girly shots' by avily photographing Keefe's vim. Later, when Neville @ms a bedroom scene beween Keefe nd Elaine (the latter now ast in nrea's ictionl role), he coxes the puish hsband into coupling s he remembers his earier violent bedroom assault upon Andrea. In one striing scene, Cohen ilms Neille rom a igh angle s he sually walks over the photos of hunreds of wlling actrsses eager to auition for the role of a murdered womn. Oblivious to (or

unrng about) her deah, even ndrea's own agent sens Nevlle a stil! The imagery here superbly llstrats cetain deadly psychoanaltic mechanisms contined within he cinemaic medium, mechisms which pral�l the sadistic nature of the irector's murderos gze wih the msochistic

submissivenss of wllng victims eager to lend their bodies to passive reproduction on he screen. Siniintly, this scene lso depicts the world of cinema s n t of dangeros ideological llusion apping mals nd femals wihin dadly, power-dominated roles. It is a revelation usully deined as

beloning to the nti-mainstrem movement of non-nrrative underround cinema. But here we ind is deice employed within a narrative ilm.

The nequl naure of power relationsips beween mals nd femles occurs at diferent points

hro ughout Special Eects.

hen Keefe chses Andra out of the 'Oval Oice' , he irst encounters

a looklike who plays upon his ntasy. Keefe's former reity of his Olahoma wife nd mother of

s cild is n ilusion, since May Jn has now become Anra. The loolike propositions Keefe: 'My nme is Mary Jean. I

n

be whatever you wnt me to be.' Keefe ngrly replies, 'You're not

My Jn. You're not my wife!', to which he woman signiinly responds, 'Are you sure?' Later,

whle Keefe complsively gzes at he 1 6m image of heir yong son, nrea exprsses lienation. Fstrated by is puritnicl nature, she rejects he role of wife and mother. Unlike Margaret (Peggy

shcrot) in Hitchcock's The 33 Stps ( 1 935), ndrea has mnged to escape to the city but oly inds

\

isllsionment, sexul exploitation nd deah there. Keefe's aggressive atitude parllels that of croter

Jon Qohn LaJie) in the rlier lm. But Keefe inds his tue shadow self in director Chris Neville, who llcarry

he violent implications wiin his possssive gaze to their logical conclusions.

Lke other oppressive Hitchcock igurs, such as Milie (Mrgaret Leighton) and the pre-repen­ tnt

Chrls Adare (Michael Wlng) in

The Man Who Knew Too Much (1 9 5 5) ,

Uner Capicon ( 1 948) ,

Scoty in

Vigo and Lil

Ben McKena Games Stewt) in (Diane Baker) in

Mamie ( 1 9 4)

,

Keefe's possessivenss nd denil of Andrea's real personality drives her into the bed of a man she aully islikes. She complains to Nevile about her husbnd, 'He wnted me to be May Jen, not

nrea.' The climax of Speial Eects hs Elaine exhibiting reluctance about playing her next role s

long-lost mother when she travels to Olhoma ih Keefe. hile she spes of Keefe's son - 'I

wonder f he'l recognise me. It's been so long' - he amera zooms

in to Keefe's dominating gze

s

he replis: 'Don't worry about it. You look jst lke your picure.' The scene ens with Elaine rlis­ ing he r new enrapment under another director who

noher dngerously o pp ressive role,

ll groom and irect his contracted actress for

one hat ess iin he sme pariarl ystem her predeces­

so r atempted to lee from in vin.

Nelle and Keefe appr as domnating mals in

Speial Eets.

B ut hey re both role-players

whose eveyday peformancs concl deep insecuriis. Keefe has lost Mary Jen whle Nevlle hs l ost

wo maj o r ms. Boh characters rsot to violence to compensate for heir loss of power. Keefe lso becoms insecre when Neville ss m as imsef in the moie Andrea, rected by Nelle. In

one

hmoros scene in a nightclub, Nevlle isss Keefe briely and ndermines he Olahoma hsband's

= = ­ D

�

gendered secriy. s scene also reiforces the line a ti driver uters wle diving Keefe to Nevlle's apment. Perhaps recognising he hidden sxual ambivalence ithin his violent pssenger, he tice unsuccesslly attempts to interest

m

in visiting a trnvestite br: 'You n't tel them rom he

genne ttile.' Tis ine also echos hose spoken by Andra's looklke severl scens earlier. Anrea too engags in several masquerades. Discarding the role of Oklahoma wife nd moher

= = -

Mty Jen, she poses in he recreated Oval Oice as a Prsidentil Plamate, passes herself of to

=

on Nevile's ms and plays her lst role s nwlling copse. Additionlly, Keefe's light to Neville's

•

) •

� •

Keefe s a successl acrss, pretends to be a New York University student tying tO write a paper apatment duplicates hat of Andra's on he previos day. Neville lso shoots boh pners on m, his mera recording Anrea's deah s well s Keefe's arrest. s for Eline, she cofsss to havng severl personalities, none of which she acualy lkes. She engges in Slvation Army work, feminist activities and taching new mahs in Harlem in very much he supeicial mnner of Melanie Dn­

iels (Tippie Hedren) in The Birs (1 963), naly becoming a voyeristic object for both Neville nd Keefe. Lke Hedren's eponymous Marnie, Elaine is a victim of 'feigning and falsehood', 10 seeing in masquerade an escape rom her personl ilemma.

Lke Sir John (Herbert Mrshal) n Murr ( 1 930), Neville intends to direct is on project

and nearly succeeds in accompishing his aim. s with Hitchcock's theatrical performers, he plays directly to the amera. Before klling blacmaling laboratoy technician Gusin (ichard Greene),

Nevlle decides against sng a nife. He sps to he camera: 'No, it's been done.' Fining a pair of editing gloves, he puts them on nd strangles Gusin with cellloid. Nevile concluds by praisng

l

�

his own performance to the au ence, 'Now that's resh!' At one point Elaine remarks to Nevlle: 'You don't do things. You rehearse th m,' complementing an earlier line - 'You don't talk to people. You

do routines' - when hy are it a rstarnt overlooking a theater advertising A Chors Line. ter murdering Andrea, Neville xlaims 'That's a take,' before the screen displays Nevlle's imgined

credit, 'Andrea. A Fm by Cris Nevlle'. Cohen's technique here nd elsewhere bres up established tehniqus of narrative diegsis. ter Keefe accidentlly destroys Neville's footage of Anrea's murder, mistkenly believing it

to

be is famly home movie, Nevlle envisags another scenaio. This one is mediated on he cnema screen in script aptions hat describe Elne's murder nd Nevlle 's accidenl ling of Keefe as he supposed murderer. Throghout Cohen's lm, eveyone becomes hooked witin a cinemaic scenario they re powerless to prevent. Ignoring Keefe's morl objections during a sx scene, Elaine respons, 'I don't re. I'm hooked nd so re you.'

Speial Eets concludes ironicaly, wih the uhappy couple ling away to Olahoma ter he

airline attendant informs hem hat the light hs 'a complimentay luncheon nd a moie'. This line not oly satiricaly relecs Hitchcock's frequent associations beween food and violence, but lso compliments he shot reveling Andrea's dead body, one wich shows a sign prominently isplaing 'Golden Fried Chicken'. Anoher parllel can be found in he 'Cold Meat' advertisement Richrd

Hnnay (Robert Donat) sees in he newspaper nnouncing nnabela's (Lucie Mnnheim) murder n

he croter's coge in The 39 Stps, s wel s the many sl ssociaions beween food nd violence occuring n Hitchcock's

Fry (1 972) . s

he plane lies away, the credis 'A Phip Delroy Film'

appr, before he 'rel' im creits roll.

s a director Neville may be

a master manipulator, but he never lacks for wlling victims. Top

crnl layer Wiesenthal (Steven Pudez), whom Nevlle ires to reprsent Keefe, is oten mistaken for imous media-conscious McCathy attoney Roy Con. He helps Nevlle becase he wishs a moie to be made of is ife one day. Nevile seduces not oly ndra and Elaine, but also Keefe and

Lt. Dlroy. Deroy in fact becoms fscinated by the movie business, ignoring s patner's plas to reun r

to their normal work, nd eventully becoming Nevile's ssociate producer (with his own

nd ree advetisin). In the penultmate scene of Speial Eects, D elroy informs nes reporters

- mong whom is Cohen in n uncharacteitic Hitchcock-like meo apperance - that he intends to complete Nevlle's picture mself. Ulke Detecive Frank Webber Qohn Londgen) in

Backmail,

who avily views Scotland Yrd movies such s 'Fingerprints' to see if he director gets the facs wrong, Dlroy believes that is 'sll and insight nd knowledge of poice procedurs'

llmke for 'one hell

of a pire'.

CONCLUSI O N

Speial Eects uses many of the self-relexive techniques

ssociated ith underground cinema t o

l in her 1985 'Changes' essay. lt�b ugh her originl 'Visual Pleasure and Nrrative Cinema' mni­

enge i n a dilogical re-woring f the Hitchcock mstertext in t h e manner suggested by Mulvey

festo chmpioned the supposed radicl claims of independent cinema, her subsequent revisions revealed a number of blind spots in her premises. For example, a narrative ilm may employ tech­ niqus associated with the supposedly alternative wold of underground cinema. Furthermore,

Mlvey's original argument lost sight of the fact that directors such as Hitchcock lso employed cetin techniques within their ilms which were once ssociated with the contemporary version of the underground.

Special Eects is

a low-budget ilm interrogating narrative mechnisms in very

much the spirit of underground cinema. Neville explains his methodology (and the ilm's title)

to D elroy in the following manner, also deining Cohen's principle of underground ilmmaking: '

People ssume that special efects means taking models, miniatures, tricking them up, maing

hem look real. I'm ting reality nd making it look like make-believe. That's a special efect too.'

In vey much the sme spirit as Hitchcock's explorations, Cohen's lm interrogats the mecha­ nisms of narrative cinema, breking down supposedly rigid boundaries beween he mainstrem nd underrond wolds. It examines he supposely istinct relms of iction, fact, fntasy, documentary, news repoting, sex nd politis, revling hem all s belongng to a system needing interrogation and

c = . D

�

eventul rejeion. s Keefe nd Eline ly away towards n undisclosed marital uture s bleak s hat

facing Frank and lice (nny Ondra) in he climx of Backmail, wo director's creits appear, 'A

Larry Cohen Production' foloing 'A Philip Delroy Film'. These credis contrst a reality nd iction both of which have been revealed as deadly ilusions.

Special Eets is a chllenging m . Consciously emploing fferent syles and cechniqus, it sug­

0 c = .

gess one possible avenue for achieing Mulvey's idea of a 'trnsformative pocential' 1 1 within areas of

c

ncompromised by the very nare of he exploration achieved by its is director. It is n interesting

n

and maverick xperiment n nderground ilmming that desevs more acclaim.

• •

» •

poplr clure, one that combines a sef-aware textual pleasure wihin a narrative format that remins

This is a revised version of a paper originally presented at he 'ter Hitchcock' Panel at the Mrch

1995 Society for Cinema Stuies Conference in New York.

)

CHAPTER 5

RAL(IST)

HORROR: FRO M XECUTIO N VI D EOS

TO SNUFF FI LMS Joel Black

)

If it is rel, I'd be a fool to admit it. If it isn't real, I'd be a fool to ait it. lln Shacleton, about his ilm Snuf1 You

cold ke the best expert today on moviemaing and he wouldn't be able to tell if it's

rl or not. The only thing is if you nd he victim. Israeli investigative journalist Yoram Svoray on snfflms2 HE SHOCK OF THE (U N) RAL

ihout a

doubt the most extreme form of underground cinema is he death lm. Up to now, non­

ictionl fo otge of executions, assassinations nd ritual sacriice of the sot featured in he Mono

c = . D

� ,

0 c = . c •

Cane and Faces ofDeath seris have enjoyed a imited,

cult following. Yet here re growing signs that

this form s giing more widespread public acceptance, and is emerging rom the underground to appar in more mainstrm forms of entenainment. The principal reason why 'real life' death lms have tradiionlly been an underround subgere is bease of the vinul ban on isual records of death, nd specialy violent death. s a

the moies have found it not only necssary but proitable to adopt a variety of conventions

deah were

s

kely to be encontered s their simulaions. It ws not President Wlim McKinley's

)

)

the

•

for

simlating loss of life. This ws not lways the se. In the erly years of cinema, scens of acul

1 9 0 1 assassination, ater ll, that Thomas Edison's stuio re-enacted on ilm, b ut

•

rslt,

aual execuion that same yr

a

recorng of

of is ller, the narchist Leon Czolgosz. With its depiction of

he condemned mn approaching the eletric chir, being strapped down, bindfolded nd inlly electrocuted wle staring directly into the mera, Edison's

Execution of Colgosz with Panorama of

Aubun Pson elicited a voyeuristic response in the viewer rather than surprise at a time when cinema

ws a 'meim of shock and excitement and stimlation'.3 s such 'spectacle lms' evolved from a documentry record of atal events into a form of icionl entennment, simlations of violence increasingly beme the norm wle actul recorings of violent deah tended to be marginalised, n efect going underground. lhough today executions have become a irly routine occurrence in contemporary Amerin society, they are seled of from public iew and re no longer the spectacles hey once were, saising either he masses' demand for justice or heir appetite for iolence. (The lst lel public execution took place in the United States in 1 937.) Now the public must urn to movis, television and video

j

gmes for their dose of realistic - s opposed to rl - iolence. Such simlaions thrive principally in the genre of horror cinema: rst, in sylised nd exprssionistic monster lms rom to

Franknstein (1 1 3 1),

Nofrau (1 922)

n d later i n incresingly relistic reprsentations o f seril llers and oher

ouwardly norma/sociopahs that are oten bsed on acual indiiduls. Unable, and supposely unilling, to see he

real ting, Amerin spetators have tuned to hrilers and horror movies for he

next 'bet' ting - relistic simlations of murderous violence that aford many the luxury of seeing and xperiencing what they profss to abhor. Recently it seemed that the real-life death of convicted Olahoma Ciy bomber Timothy McVeigh in June 200 1 might become the most watched Amerian execution in well over a hf­ century. Yet lthough McVeigh himself wnted his death broadcast nationlly, the conty's irst dosed-circuit teleision broadast of a federl death sentence ws seen (besides by he actul witnesss in Terre Haute, Indina) by n audience of oly

232

suivors nd mly members of victims who

gathered to watch the event at a secure site in Olahoma Ciy. nd despite lst-inute efos of lawyers in n unrelated death penly se to llow McVeigh's execuion to be videotaped in order to show that the death penalty violates he Eighth Amendment's ban on cruel nd unsual punisment, no isual docment of the execution was made since federl reglations prohibit such recorings.

s

it urned out, inesss of the dath by lethal inje tio n of the unrepentnt McVeigh reponed no

idence of pin or sffering on his pt, and licle satisfaction on heirs. 'It ws almost like the Devil ws nside him

looking at us,' said one obsever who had lost n uncle in the blasr.4 Glaring up at the

mera suspended rom the ceiling at he moment of his dah, McVeigh was both he str nd the irector of his own

underground ilm. To the 'grieving people' watcng him die he ws 'more [a]

mip lator . .. hn n ofering to hem.'5

The unsuccessl efors by McVeigh to have his execution broadcst on nationl television, nd by he atorneys who sought to have is execution videotaped, were essentilly an attempt to bring back he pracice of pubic execution n he age of electronic mss media. It was n attempt to

show he rel ing raher hn a simlaion. In efect, an underground genre of visul reiy would

have suddely erupted into the mainsrrem of cinematic illusion, exposing the latter as such in the procss.

Even if such executions were made visible to mss audiences, however, this ltimate form of

Rliy V is

bound to be s conrived and artiicial as any of he other so-lled 'realiy shows' that

have saurated the ir-waves in recent years (lhough this could change s such ratings-driven shows connue to 'to psh the envelope farther and fher in order to mke them interesting . . . even if

someng terri ble happens, even f someone ges killed') .6 s Wendy Lesser hs foreseen, televised

'wold give s a flse xpeience, a substitute experience, whle lading s to imagine we

exeuions

had had a rel one . . . . Watching on television s or govenment eliminated someone in a prison dah chmber would seem like jst another form of reality progrming.' The principl reson in

sser's view

that such actul killings wold seem so flse is because, like most deahs on television

(or, for hat mater, in the movies) , hey re 'almost always expected'. Lacking the element of surprise,

a lly-nticipated event like McVeigh's execution hs vinually none of he shock value that could enable nti-dath penly advoates to rue hat executions are a cuel and unusul punishment. Nor,

for that matter,

would live broadcss of executions have the shock value we (pradoiclly) look for

in horro r movies, s

n Lesser's

wih,

}

exmpl s of]ack Ruby's shooting o f Lee Hvey Owald or the Chllenger space shule

plosion? If we

I

nd hat we ocasionlly experience on live teleision when death is least expected,

nnot ind the shock of 'rlity' in live broadss or videotaps of actul executions in

even if they could be shown, he p ub lic display of inlicted death would strip it of is actul

horror nd

neutralise it into a 'flse expeience', where then is such visul horror to be found? Once

gn, it seems, we must turn rom underground visul recors of actual deaths to commercial media itions. By xploiting elements of suspense, sprise and spectacle, the icional violence depicted on televsion nd viwers hn

specially in the movies may elicit, as Lesser suggests, a greater sensation of horror

underground visual recorings of rel-life violence.

Yet what f he sensational ashetic elemens of suspense, sprise and speale iionl

in

n mnsrm

ms were to be incorporated in episods of rl-fe violence? Would tis not produce the

lmate ' horror efect'?

It s not sprisng, then, that a number of comercil mmakers have adopted

.. D » -

-·

�

-

0 .. ..

0 ..

c = ­ D

a t

0 c = ­ c •

) •

» •

he sratey of incoporang what seems to be auhenic dah-lm footge within their inematic iions. Steven Jay Scneider hs noted s convenion n lms like

Winss (1994)

Urban Legns: Final Cut (2000), which begn

nd

Speial Eects ( 1 9 84), Mute

by rst presening some obiosly

fke 'horror movie' material and then sitcing to a supposely rl 'snff mode. 8 Here I would ike to pursue is obsevaion, nd to ofer my own samplng of fature the envelope of what Cnthia Freelnd

s hat se tis tecnique to push

ls 'rlist horror' .9 The lms I have in nd atempt - eiher

trough apprenly de-astheticising techniqus or houh he opposite use of

yper-aethicsing

stratis - to approach he heoreil limit of real horror rough heir referencs to, and ocsionlly her re-enatmens o, acul lmed records of murder. Through heir ncorporation of amateish,

homemade snuf sequencs, this subgenre of ultra-rlist horror ms revls he concept of rist horror s

n undergrond

wel s in mnstrm ictional ms to be a relative, aestheic notion - at once

n

omoroic impossibliy and a cnematic and clral necssiy.

USING SNUFF TO MAKE HORROR RAL

We may begin by briely considering the ilm hat hs occasioned perhaps he most debate concening the concept of realist horror: Jon McNaughton's

Heny: Porait of a Srial Killer (1 990).

This

commercial movie, which has spawned is own cult following, is loosely bsed on the acl seril ller Hery Lee Lus, but s more a ictional nrraive than a documentry prsentation. hile vrios explanations have been ofered s to why the lm is so isturbing - becase of its 'attitude of neutraliy toward Henry', 10 because Henry 'deies external exegesis' nd 'never coms ro an ethical reckoning

t

ith his on savgery' 1 1 - the movie is specilly problematic because it prsens murderos violence in a way that se�

both rel and staged. The most isconcerting and frequently discussed scene in

his ilm is a seq ence in which Henry (Michael Rooker) and his patner O tis (Tom Towles) view

�

suburban famly that they have recorded on a stolen mcorder. In his sequence,

s

they happen, but atewrs s we ind ourselvs watching the taped footage of he

their slaughter o

which hs been caled 'the srist home-movie footage ever to make it to the big screen', 12 viewers see the llings not

slaughter. s Freeland nots, what makes the mcorder sequence so disturbing beyond the brutaliy of is content is he viewers' discovery that

we are watching this footage longside he kilers . . . . P oint of view and rel time are wrenched in a disconcerting way, with contradictory efects. On he one hand, the scene distnces viewers and makes the murders seem less awul. The efect is s if we were just watching something on V. The people in the fmily re already dead, depersonalized, not individuls. On he other hnd, the mateur amera lso makes the murders seem more real: things happen nexpectely, everyhing seems unplnned and awward. The view­ point is not stndrd, and he murders are not clenly centered for our obsevationY

In Freelnd' s view, it is he combination of our identiication with the llers in the act of reieing he ideo of their deed

nd the 'grainy, tilted . . . amateur' appernce of that home video

hat 'mks th e murders seem more real'. The viewer hs he unnny xperience of watching a snuf

m - a visul record of a m"rder lmed (nd viewed) by the ller or his or her accompices. (Smal wonder,

s

David Kerekes nd David Slater note, hat in some eited versions of Hny,

sen mks it dear

'n edit

much earlier on that Otis and Henry are watchng a re-run of the murder on their

telesion sec. There seems to be some comfot in establishing hat it is he two protagonists who were watng a snuf im nd not

s,

he public.') 14 Only at the end of the snff-ilm-within-the-ilm is

it made cler that Henry and Oris re in fact the principal viewers. It is their emoioless,

aektos

ration to he video that provides such a stark contrst ro what is presumably our horriied reacion

at watcng the idenicl footage. nd he horror we experience is he reslt of the griny realism of the snfftap e nd he editing of he frame lm, which bring about a temporary suspension of isbelief whereby we mo menrly forget we re watching a ictionl movie. For jst a moment we

ik we

re witnssing n actul snffm: he horror we experience seems rom our capaciy - in contrast to Heny nd Oris - to empahise with he terror of he apprenly real victims. lthough it is certainly possible to consider 'chis snuf movie within a movie to be John M cNaughton ' s self-relexive commentary on the lurid nature of his own movie', 15 the snuf sequence is irst and fo remost a means of giving a heightened sense of reality to the ilm whole. Ye t for all its vaunted realism, the i ctio nal snuf sequence in

Heny hardly seems

s

a

true to

ife if we compare i t with fo otage of an actual sexually abused and terrorised victim in he ho urs

nd m o m en ts before she is killed. Even in the brief, h e avily edited foo tage of Leonrd Lake and Charles Ng's treatment of their victims shown in the 2 0 0 0 A&E documentary

The Calonia

Kiling Field, the inert, passive state of he actual bound women contrasts sharply with the thrashing

nd

1

screaming of the ictional b ound woman in McNaughton's ilm. It would seem

hat clims ab out

he actres s playing

e realist horror of Heny re undercut by comparing the theatri l hysteria of e part of the female victim in Henry nd O tis' video wih the frozen terror of

the actual victims i} Lake and Ng's tapes .

s Irene Brunn of the San Francisco P olice D epatment

comments: 'You hear about movies, and yo u read about b ooks and sadistic things that some people do to others, but [when] you view it un exp e cte dly it is j ust a total sho ck - somehing

I

never wnt t o see again . ' 1 6

THE RUY OF SNUFF FILMS Since 1 975, atemps to reproduce prpotely non-ictionl recorings of murder in icionl lms

have rised a host of intrigng leal, moral, socil, but so aesheic issues steing rom he face chat snffs lad a pradoxil - indeed viual - eistence. These issues were irst memorably rised by he snuf sequence tacked onto the unrelased

1 971 rgentine movie Saughter. The ive-minute

.. D » -

-·

n

..

-

0 .. ..

0 ..

c = . D

a

..

) c = .

m-ihn-a-m ppotedly shows a irector ming n obviously staged scene in which a pregnnt womn is lled. Aroused by the scene, the irector proceeds to have sex on he set ih a produion assistant-whom he ltmately (nd seemingly acully) ismembers and isembowels whle the mers are sll roing. Relased n

1 975 ith the title Snu, the movie was marketed as - nd apprenly

beieved by many to be - n al snfflm. The producer, lln Shackleton, capitaised on mors hat such

s were being made n and xpoted rom South Ameria, and hat at least one suh m

had been made in he

US; namely, a recoring of the Tate/LaBinca murders supposedly med by

s 'amly'. Despite the inept reslt of tacking n apparently ral snffsequence

c

Charles Manson nd

)

onto a tacy eploitation lm about a lt of young women folowng a Manson-like lader nmed

• •

» •

Satn, Shackleton n efect briged the gap between rlist horror and real horror. He acieved efect not oly by resoing to a more rapic depiion of violence than hat shon in

s

Saughter, but

by deliberately sing his violence before the mera, hereby reposiioning the viewer s mmaker (as a surrogate for the irector-ned-ller) and impliating the iewer

n the violence.

The movie Snuf inaugurated a spate of underground cult ilms, and eventualy severl mainstrem Holywood producs (for example: John Hezfeld's

Hacore (1 979), BM ( 1 999)

nd, most recently,

15 Minutes (2001)), in which apprenly rel snuf recorings re incorporated nto

icional ims. s Julin Peley remarks, 'the notion of the "snff' movie was [soon] working is way into actual cinematic narratives, pically in the form of apparently "documentary" episods inseted into he icionl story.'17 The technique of folloing an obviously staged murder wih a snff sequence is a way of mking he snuf sequence seem

ll the

has obseved, everyone watching hse lms 'knows that

more realisic. nd even i, s Schneider

vn the "real" murr saked iiona)' - a

phenomenon he calls he 'aesthetic lemma' in snuf lms18 - viewers of lms like

ofa Seial iler may be led rogh a lll suspension

Heny: Porait

of disbeief to be momentarly troubled

nd

tantalised by the possiblity hat they are winssing he visual record of an atual murder. Viewers

n

even become i and have he what hey

j� riented to the point that they

n

no longer be cetain of ontological istincions,

UY roubing sensation of what it is like to watch snffepite their nowledge hat

r' seeing is

not - nd indeed nnot be - real. Not only do ictional horror s in he

tradiion of Snuffincorporate staged snuf sequencs to mke themselves appear shocingly rel, but hese ictional ms also

ive realiy to snuf ms.

In making se of snffsequencs to rouse terror

in viewers and to produce the horror efet, horror ms and hrllers also play on people's suspicions that n undergrond subclure exiss in which snffilms re made and marketed. It is one thing to note that the snffsequences in most hrilers and horror ilms are not so grapic that viewers mistke them for he rl thing. But the aiiciaity of hese sequences, ll of which

n

be traced back to the hokey history of the movie Snu, hs led skepical ciis to latly deny he istence of such ms, and to dismiss snffas a mo den myth. Ths Perley calls snffmovies 'entirely

mil',

and repately refers to 'the subborn absence of any real evidence' of such ms.19 The

problem ith such

n

assetion is that it fals to istinish beween snffms pr se and snuf 's

a

comercil commodiy', a concept that Kerekes nd S later (in a line cited by P eley) ll fscinaing, '

but llo il. '20 ile he istence of a comercil ndergrond market in snfflms is open to question,

there is no doubt that sxully sadistic llers o mke visual records of their deeds. B sids

he Chrles Ng/ eo nard ke tapes I have already cited, here is the se of Melvin Henry Ignatow, who

in 1 988 forced his girlriend Mary nn Shore to photograph him sexully abusing nd toring

is incee

Brenda Schaefer, who died during the ordl of cloroform inhlation. s former US

Ato ney Scot Cox described the more hn 1 00 photographs that evenmaly were found: 'They're just usome. It's ke looing at a snffm. At the begiing you

n

tell she's mortiied nd she's

being o rde re d to isrobe and so forth. nd then it depicts her being sexully ssaulted.'21 Perhaps the most notorious recent murder se involving video recordings is that of the Canadin

couple Pal Bernardo nd Karla Homoka. Technilly he videoapes hey made of heir victims lslie Mhfrand risten French were not snuf lms beause, s in the photos of Schaefer's ordel, '

hey o ly recorded he sxul abuse leaing up to the girls daths nd not the kllings themselves - and n the se of Mhfy, her dismemberment. In his respect, the content of he ral-life Benardo

tapes nves he mcorder sequence in he ictional fature Heny: Porait ofa

Serial Kille: whers

he later sequence shows Henry nd Otis slaughtering a subrbn fmily but breaks of when Otis begins co molest the corpse of his femle victim, the Benardo taps depict his s exual degradation

nd i olatio n of his victims, but breks of before the acml kilings.

s

might be expeted, stged

depictio ns of murderous violence are acceptable in minstrm mois while expli citly seual scenes

re taboo. (Sxul scenes re acceptable as long s it is cler hat, like mrder scens, they re simlated nd not real.) For a

rel-life sexual saist lke Bernardo, in contrast, the object is to preseve a visual

record of s xul violence; recorded docmentaion of mrderous violence remins taboo. The absence of ny visul record of the murders became n

a key issue in Benrdo's 1 995 trial,

wich Benardo and Homolka ach accused the oher of doing he acmal ling. (Benrdo

mainined that he murders of boh Mhffey and French were carried out by Homoa in his absence.) However, he prior deah of Homoa's yonger sister Tmmy Lyn appers to have been

�

nadvetenly rec rded, since the anasthetised girl xpired at some point during her abuse. hile it n

be rued that this ws not a snuf ilm bease Tammy Lyn ws unconscios during the ilming,

/

nd bease he deah ws

accidental and not intentionl, such techniliies only seve to pont up

he absurities entled in idenng and categorising snuf s: f the acmal dah of the victim mst be shown nd he vicim mst be conscious, hen the various taps made by Benardo nd

Homolka meet only some of he reqirements of the snuf lm, and none of them satisied ll the reqremens

.

Fr rom supporting he iew that snff ilms do not ist beause no one wold be foolish ,

enough to record evidence of the crime of murder (Kerekes and Slater for example, claim that 'siy

side,

.

it is unkely that . .

any igure

. . . would alow themselves to be lmed committing

he at of murder'),2 the Bernrdo taps lend credibiliy to the view that such lms o ist. Ater

= = ­ >

�

c = = = •

) •

» •

ll, the reson MahaY and French were kiled in the irst place was to eliminate them as witnsses of heir own molestation; in efect hey were kiled to keep them rom reving what the taps themselvs reveled. (Indeed, ater Tammy Lyn's inadvetent dath while she was unconscious, there was litle to keep Benrdo and Homoka's crims from escalating to intentional illings of conscios victims.) So even if he tapes did not record the irls' actual deaths, they recorded the sexual violence to which they w�re subjected that culminated in their deaths. Eventualy the tapes were used s evidence hat Benardo had not only idnapped nd raped but also killed Leslie MhaY and Kristen French. In efect, he taps recorded the reson

iled.

- nd indeed were themselves the reason - why he girls were

We know in any se how impotant it is for the sadisic ller to keep a visual record of is

sexul violence that may clminate in murder; indeed, this vsual record s itsef the reson why the

viim mst die. hen the photographs that May nn Shore admitted taing of Melvin Ignatow

touring Brenda Schaefer cold not be found, FBI proler Roy Hzelwood urged police to continue

their serch, claiming that Ignatow would not have destroyed them. 'That was his record,' Hzelwood mintined. 'That ws is trophy. That was the most important part of the entire crime that was stll let tO be xmined.'23 If no one seems to have seen snffilms it is not because they do not exist, but eiher beause they nnot be found or they nnot be shown. The only people who get to see snuf ilms (besides the people who make them) are law enforcement oicers, prosecutors and he defendans' lawyers. At Bernrdo's trial, the infmous sex tapes were stricly brred rom the general public. Only 69 people, most of hem prosecutors, were authorised to see them. hen tue-crime author Stephen Wilims ofered a detailed description of the taped scenes in his bstselling 1 9 9 6 book Invsible Darkness,

he ws charged wih wo couns of disobeying the judge's order resiting their ieing. Wllis

denied seeing the tapes, saying he had got almost ll the details from material avilable to the publi, but he reused to say where he had come by the rest - n ofence for which he risked prosecution in Cnada.24

)

" hile i1ll1 rs mnaged to gam unauh onsed access to the mcnmmanng vi" d eotapes, e h prosecutors who bere authorised to see the tapes had at rst been prevented from doing so bease ·

·

·

·

·

·

Bernrdo's atorney Kenneth D. Murray concled them for 1 6 months. (During this time, Homoa cut a del wih the prosecutors and was chrged only with manslaughter bease she had reed to testiY gainst her former hsbnd. Simlarly, in Ignatow's cse the photographs which is irliend cofessed she had taken of m toturing his incee were not found until ater his acquital. Unable to stnd trial for murder under double indemnity laws, Inatow cold only be given a ive-yr sentence for perjury.) In 1 997, professional misconduct complains were issued ginst Murray, who was charged with becoming 'the tool or dupe of his unscupulous client'. In the case inst hm, he Ontrio couts and the Law Society of Upper Canada had to decide whether to 'interpret he videotaps s commuications from Bernardo or,

s

one lawyer said, the crme itself.25

Given the temptation on the parr of defence lawyers to conceal grapic evidence of their clients' cms, and the ight securiy surrounding (and, at least in Canada, the heavy penalties awaiting auhors nd jornaists who disclose) such evidence once it is sezed by the police nd impounded by he cous, it is no wonder that snuf ilms seem to some a purely mythic phenomenon. On he one hnd, such ms lad an elusive, phantom existence that canot be veriied; on the other hnd, supposing that they

o

exist, they depict a rlity so horriic that it nnot be shown except

n cnematic simulations like those in

Snuf nd Hny.

Snuf ms present us ih a paradoxical

sinlriy in cnema: a glimpse of ultimate realiy shorn of any and all specil efecs, nd yet a subgenre whose own elusivenss mks it seem the stuf of myth - he ultimate special efect.

PASSING SNUFF OFF AS FICTIO N

The mhic status o f snuf ilms has spurred underground and, increasingly, mainstrem ilmmakers to inc o rporate simlated snuf scenes in their movies, employing ll manner of specil efects -

prosheses, mera angles, et cetera - to produce the illusion of reality. Sometimes, however,

hse movies about snuf ilms deal with the opposite problem: a chracter who produces a snuf

ilm tries to ind a way to exhibit and distribute it by making it seem fke. Thus in Larry Cohen's

Speial Eets, im director Chris Neville (Eric Bogosian)

inadvertently kills a girl on camera, and

hen decides to use the footage of the actual murder in a ictional feature that will appear 'totally real'. In he course of the ilm, however, Nevile sitches from his original goal of making his movie

's rel, s totlly real as I special efect too

n

. '26

n

get it' , to 'taing reality and mking it look make-believe. That's a

even more striing exmple of he same ploy to pss actual snuf ilms of as fake horror

cinema is Doug Ulrich's

Screen Kill ( 1 9 97), which concens a goth-rock musician named lis who

invits a horror ilm enthusiast named Doug to mke a slasher movie ith m . Doug soon discovers,

however, that is partner

s is arually ming snffs, and that he, Doug, hs been ming

ls n the act of lling victims who also thought until he last moment that thy were merely

playng a role. THus Ulrich exploits the familiar formula used in numerous other ilms such as

(198), Body

Dibe

FX

( 1 9 84), Mute Winess and The End oJioence (1 9 97) , in which a charater in the

bsinss of mOOng horror movies suddely inds that he or she is involved in a real-life horror show.

s it ns out, alis is not content merely to make snuf ilms; he s determined to mrket them comercialy, nd has come up with a plan to do it. 'I now a way of setting up a distributor,' he tells Dog, who nnot believe he is serious nd who worris that 'We'l have the ucking FBI ll over us for mking snuf movies!' is then cmly explains his plan:

You see, that's the thing. We don't put it out as a snuf movie. Snuf movis show one long tke of someone getting kiled, which makes it obious that it's the real thing. Now what we

. D »

-·

�

-

= 0 . .

0 .

n

c = . D

�

do is we

n

insert dfferent cur-aways with the actul ll, which wil give the auience

the ilusion that they're watchng a very realistic specil efect.

The snuf ilmmaker Rlis simply plans to employ the opposite technique of realist horror ilms

Screen Kil itself (which the acto r playing Ralis, l

c c = .

such s

c

ilmmaker Ralis inserts ictionl ' cut-aways' in the actual snuf sequence, thereby mking the rel

n

murder scene seem ictional. ter ll, an obvious giveaway that a snuf ilm is not authentic re

• •

) •

realist horror incorporates

Darago, happens to co-direct) . heres

seemingly 'documentary' episodes of violence as (real) footge wihin

he main (ictionl) ilm, thereby adding authenticiy to the ictional production, the real-horror

he cut-aways and the multiple camera set-ups nd editing they entail. murder sequence in the ilm

(s

Perley po ints out, the

Snufseemed fake precisely because of the presence of such cur-aways:

'the "murder" is ilmed in classicl "H ollywo od" style, complete with alternating po int-of-view shots nd so on, which would have meant that the unfotunate "victim" would have had to have remined in place throughout the course of the

absence of such

is documenting

n

various

mera

set-upsl') 27

In contrst,

it

is precisely

cut-aways and 'visual angles' that mkes a snuf sequence in a ilm look like

it

actual murder. By inseting cur-aways into the sequence shots of his murders,

the snuf ilmmaker Rlis in

Screen Kill simultaneously solves

b oth the problem of how to mke

staged movie violence seem real, nd the problem of how to make his snuf ilms available to

a

mss audience. Tis cray ming of documenty nd icional footage to crate an indeteminate, vul mrder scene is of course nothing new. Citing the 'huge vogue' of Gultiero Jacopetti's

Cane seris of documentry lms in the

Monk

1 9 60s, the British novelist J. G. Balard hs noted how hey

'cunningly xed genine lm of arocities, religious clts, and "B elieve-it-or-not" exmpls of hmn

oddiy with relly fked footge'. Yet, s Bllard points

out, it is not jst thse cult shockumentries

hat play havoc wih rlity and icion, but the genre of the war newsreel, most of which 'are faked to some extent, sully med on manoeuvrs'. 28 Nowhere is this consion of the real and the fke

)

more eident than in Ruggero Deodato's

Cannibal Hoocaust (1 979),

in which actual newsreel

llitary death squad at work is included s a m wiin the m . Fr from reinforcng he istinco n beween iction and realiy, the inclusion of this rchival material thoroghly blurs

footage of a

any such distnction becase the ictional deahs

n

the

m are presented s being more rl hn

the docmentry footge of actual llings, the latter of which re ismissed by charaters within he lm

s

'fake' .29 Yet whle he fet of incorporating documeny footge in ictional lms may be to

subvert he isinction beween iction nd reliy, he pupose of this ploy is pilly to mke he ictionl rme stoy seem more convincing nd real, even if - s in

braning acUal documentary footage s ake.

Cannibal Hoocaust - this ms

Once snuf ms began mng their way into commercil cinema, irst as clt ims nd s

later

minsream movies, a paradoxical situation arose. Audiences enter a theatre to see a horror movie

"' ) »

-·

A

..

-

IGURE 7 Fiction as death i l m : Cannibal Holoaust

or thriller with the express understanding that they will witness graphic spectacles and simulacra of death, but

that real death itself can never be shown. But is this really so? Oliver Stone's graphic use

of the Zapruder ilm in ]FK ( 1 99 1 ) is, in fact, an instance of a type of snuf ilm being introduced - at once surreptitiously and lagrantly - into a mainstream Hollywood movie. Technically, of course, the Zapruder footage is not a snuf ilm because it was inadvertently ilmed by a bystander at a

public event who was not in any way involved in the murder. Yet its form is typical of snuf

ilms. As described by Pasolini, it is the 'most typical' of sequence shots: 'the spectator-cameraman . . . did nor choose any visual angles; he simply ilmed from where he was, framing what his eye saw - better than the lens. 'lo Yet when Stone introduces the Zapruder footage as a ilm-within-his-ilm in the courtroom

scene in ]FK to give his movie added credibility, he does not present it simply as the

straightfoward

documentary footage that it is. Instead, S tone works his own artistic fakery on the

footage Ken

so that it begins to take on a unreal or surreal ictional qualiry of its own. 'In Stone's }FK, as

Morrison observes, the

Kennedy head shot is lifted out of the Zapruder ilm and exploited by techniques of

close-up, replay, and optical enhancements. Moreover, it is strategically held until the end of the courtroom scene to maximize its impact in an entertainment medium. In this way, frames 3 1 3 and 3 1 4 are placed within a Hollywood homicide technique.31

= = ­ D

�

0 = = = •

) •

» •

Here we have he inverse efect s that in the underground clt m Snu. hereas the snff

sequence tacked on at the end of that lm ws a staged sequence that was made to seem rel, Stone

incorporats footage ofn actl murder in his ilm in a way hat makes it seem unreal and staged, much in the manner hat lis presented his snffilms in Sreen Kill or that Deodato introduced rcivl execution footage in Cannibal Hoocast. By adding cut-aways, close-ups and optial enhancemens,

Stone transforms Zapuder's minimalist sequence shot into a polyvalent atfat in which any and ll interpretations nd conspiray theories are equally tenable. Throuh its incorporation of Zapuder's

lmed record of a real murder, Stone's ]FK is acually more grapilly violent and horringly rel

han his 1 994 lm Naural Bon Kilers, despite ll of the controversy sprked by he later lm's

simlated violence.

SNUFF ND SURVEILNCE

It is worrh noting, inally, how public space hs chnged altogether since 1 9 63, paticularly ih respect to the deploment of suvellance mers in most major public placs. These days, when

amers are eveywhere, n ssassination attempt in broad dayliht in an open public place lke Deley Pla, Dllas (site of he Kennedy shootin) is lkely to be docmented by an array of mers, both mnned and unmnned. In fact, isual records of mrder today are less lkely to be made by the ller himself thn by suveilance cameras that happen to record - and in some ases even incite

- a violent acr. Ths, in 'techno-tist' Natalie Jeremijenko's piece 'Suicide Box' ( 1 9 9 6) , a motion­ detection video system progrmme d to apture veicl motion ws set up for a hundred days by he Golden Gate Bridge in Sn Francisco. The amera 'watched' the struure constanly nd recorded people leap ing to their daths, some of whom may have been impeled to jump by he presence of he camera. s justiication for her apparatus, J eremijenko claimed it generated 'information about a tragic social phenomenon that is othewise not seen'. J eremijeko hs since been woring on a proj ect caled 'Bng-Bang', which she describes as 'a set of low-power automated video amera triggered by amunition ire. henever there's n explosive event, it colets wo secons of video. They're being deployed in places where one would nticipate ammnition ativity: East Timor, Kosovo, L..'32

A se

n

�

b made that such automated docmentaries that colate art, snuf and suvellnce

J

reprsent on direction that underground ilms may be heaing in the uure. In efet, there hs been a new igh-tech wist in the relation beween snuf nd suveilance since he 1 970s and 1 98 0s when, s Jlian Perley hs described, the British police's qust for a 'chmeril snfflm' led hem to lanch a 'svelln ce mpaign of horror and clt lm enhusists, as well s

individuals ih sado-msochistic procivitis. In efect, he police ended up making he very ilms hey were looking for.'33 ith he prolferation of suvellnce cameras today, from satelits in outer space, to stoplighs at bsy trfic intersections, to he motion- and sound-sensitive video-meras of techno-tists, it is only to be expected that he authorities wil once again create the very snuf ilms

hey clim to be looing for - a parnoiac possibliy explored by Wim Wenders in his m

The End

ofionce.4 Even if mmkers heed the ll of critis to renounce ictional violence in ther picures,

hey llhave little efect on reducing violent crime in rl life. This is becase the ilmkers who

have he gratest interest n and closst relaion· to actul violence are not movie directors or producers, but he 'ndercover' secret police and securiy agencis hat have appropriated the most advnced lm-recorng technology for 'secriy' Isveillnce purposes. In a postmoden yber-society lke our n,

he ndergrond is no longer 'under ground', and 'realist horror' lms re being superseded by

isl records of real horror whose rity, however, may go entirely urecognised.

"" D » -

-·

n

..

-

0 "" "" 0 ""

CHAPTER 6

A REPORT ON BRUCE CON N ER'S 'REPORT' Mtin F. Norden

Hailed as one of his generation's most inluentil atists, Bruce Conner neveheless hs been a raher elsive ire in the world of merin nderground lm. Overshadowed by such peers as ndy Warhol, Stan Brahge, Kenneh Anger and Maya Deren, Conner has shunned he spoight for

�

deads, prqerring instad ro let is work n a wide range of media - printmaing, drawing, sculpure, collage, pho oraphy and lm - spek for itsel£ Happily, a major retrospective tided 2000 BC:

The

Buce Conn Stoy Partii, launched by Minneapolis' Walker t Center in 1 999, inlly gave him he

J

attention he so ricly deserved (even if here was no 'PrrI' - a picl Connerin wist). Tis essay buls on he momentum generated by 2000 BCby focusing on the deining achievement of Conner's reer s n nderground lmmker: Rep ot ( 1 9 64-67) , his igly personal meitation on he John F.

Kennedy ssassination. By providing a close teual reading of Rpot nd inding is place wiin is historil and culurl contxt, I hope to show hat Conner captured and critiqued he complxitis of he time in a powel nd ui quely lmic way.

ARLY HISTORY AN D EMERGING SLE

r .

Bon in McPherson, Kanss in 1 933 and raised in Wicita, about sixty miles away, Conner began ing 'outside he box' at a very young age. His earliest teachers admired is imaginative rtistic

expressions, but by the time he had rached the ird or fouh grade, a deadening conformity had

llbut enveloped his school nd thratened to iiate the youtul artist's emergent talents.1 Chaing inst he consevative values that permeated the merican Midwest during World War Two and he poswr years, Conner found himself a so cial outcast for much of is pre-adolescence and young adulthood. 'hen

I was in Wichita,

if you were even interested in poery, clssical music, at, you

were lled a queer, a commie, or just a j erk,' he told inteviewer P eter Boswe2 ter desultory stnts s n t sudent at the Universities of Wichita, Nebraska, and Colorado, Conner decided on a new

course of action; ustrated by he generl conformist spirit of the tmes and the escalatng rhetoric of

he Cold Wr, he moved to San Francisco in 1 957 in the hope of liing up with peers who shred is views on at nd politis.

It proved a momentous decision, for Conner almost immeiately became ssociated ith hat ciy's celebrated art and literary scene, a renissance dominated by such avant-garde iures as Law­ rence Felingheti, Robert Duncan, Jack Kerouac and lle n Ginsberg. Conner's atistic career quickly arated serious attention, with his eriest successes tking he form of ntriate sculpurl ssem­ blages consising of 'found' items such s biycle parts, broken toys nd women's undergarments. hen he brnched out into mmaing in 1 9 5 8 (beinning ih he singlarly tiled

A Movie) ,

Coner discovered hat his idas about ssemblage could cross media lines with relative ese. He had stabished he conceptual foundation for a decidedly diferent kind of m.

FILMIC FRAGMENTATI ON

Coner hs proven t o have fw eqls when i t coms to cratng ms that intenionally dsroy the llsion ofraliy comonly fond in mrm movis. s signare syle, developed over a peiod of about foy yrs,

s n tension of is sculpl teciqus; he combins 'fond' or 'discovered' rmens of oher

people's s (somems ih s on onal fooage ixed in, somems not) to crate nw inemaic eniis. he jtaposiions crated in hse compilaion s are requently unexpeted nd sng, oren

b In he p��ces of reworking fo otge rom such items s toons, television commercils, old

lag to what nic Carl Bez hs clled 'a combinaion of grm satire nd morbid irony' . 3

Holwood �ovis and newsreels, Conner hs gone out of his way to include recognisable emotive or

ssociative conceps, which he then isolates rom any former rames of reference. hen these concepts re

eited together as a montage and exibited on the screen in is trademark rapid fasion, a new

surl relationship emerges nd ofers many interesting efects.

s Brian

O'D oherty hs pointed

out, hese re-eited imags oren engage the spectator's maination in an unusual nd provoaive

= )

)

) c

= = ) .

= = . D

� ,

mnner; hey 'send he mind p inwheel ing out of he movie on a tangent wile the next sequence is lso demnding atention - a vey new nd of split-level efect he way Coner does it.'4 In addiion to lterng the vlues of his found imagery, Conner hs sed such unsul materil s

Aademy leader (he '1 0-9-8-7 . . . ' hat begins evey m b ut s sully for he projecionist's beneit oly)

nd sequences of soid black or solid white rms n wich he screen apprs to go blk. He has lso

0 = = .

requenly employed he procss of 'looping' (i.e. rep eatin) he sme shos nl they seem more m

=

(f you prdon the pun) for what it is: a meium, not riy. We, he audience, are consntly remnded

•

) •

» •

hn riy. By ncorporaing ll of thse special images nd tecniqus, Conner efecively exposs m

hat we re watcing a movie: a reprsentation of riy, rather hn a indow on it. Under Co nner s '

sl eding, the vios items and devices are uniied in purposel and concentrated efons. A PRODUCTION HISTO RY OF 'REPORT'

Rpot is an o utstanding example of s general approach, but ironiclly Conner, who hrew hmself into he project wiin days of Kennedy's death, orignlly wnted he lm to be n xtended piece

of fairly straighfoward reponage. At the time of the assassination, Conner happened to be liing in

Brookline, Massachsetts - JFK's bithplace - nd intended to mke a documentay about the impact of the ssass inatio n on he p r esid entil hometown. ' I lived seven blocks rom where he was born,'

he

sid. 'I decided hen hat I would dediate myself to recording what had happened nd what would happen in Brooine beause he ws going to be buried here nd I would live here for the next wo

or hree yrs to work on hat ilm nd make a pilgrimage to the grave very day with my mera

and show what had happened.'5 The Kennedy fmly decided to bury JFK in Arlinton Nationl Cemetery instead of Bro oline, however, fo rcing he ilmmker to change his plns.

Conner received an exp ementl-ilm grant rom the Ford Fondaion n 1 9 64 and, reconceiing

is ilm, decided to use pn of the Ford money to acquire the righs to assassination-related television imgery. He had to rethnk

Rpot yet ain, though, ater the newors reused to cooperate. s he

told nteviewer Raben Hller:

I

I went to CBS nd NBC nd tried to get footge out o f he day h e ws shot, and hey didn't

wnt to give aning to me. They wnted to have a scip t irst (his was he materil rom

he fourunutes ter he ws lled) . They were very up-tight nd prnoiac. They wnted a

s crip t and they kept shovng me from oice to oice untl I inlly iured out they just idn't

wnt to have me sing the m, or seeing it, or having nything to do ih it. . . . So, I ended up mng Rpot [by] getting ps of lms that were avlable to the public, a yar later.6

hat reslted ws no lss than eight diferent versions of Rpot, which, in Conner's words,

me

out 'one ater he oher. I would ke a print nd then I wold take he footage and hnge it and I

wold let go

mke another print.' Confessing that he ws 'obsssed' with the project nd did not wnt to

for fear that Kennedy would tuly be 'dead' for him once he inished, the lmmaker produced

the eiht isposing

Repos from 1 964 untl 1 9 67, eventully settling on the eighth version s his inl nd of the oher copies. For Coner, completing the lm meant inlly coming to terms with

Kenedy's

death: 'When Repot ws inished then he was dead, so it took wo and a half yers for me

to anowledge that he ws he inl version hbid he

dead.'7

of Rp ot, wich bult on the others nd uns 13 minutes, emerged as a strnge

of Conner's creaive implss; the ilm ws nd is paly a documentary, but it lso folows

lad of his earlier lms by relying heavily on re-eited xcerps from newsreels, old Holywood

mois nd television ads to provide poignnt commentary on he JFK ssssination nd US society in

It is a docmentry with a iference, as Roy Hss nd Norman Silverstein obseved shotly . ter he m's release:

generl.

Docmenrarists always engage in such mniplation (i.e. jtaposition), but Conner here creats a new ind of documentary by means of rapid cutting nd crosscuing, non nchrono s

sound, disupted ime order, repeated segments of action, and reversed

motion. he ssssination of President Kennedy is, to be sure, 'reported', hrough authentic footge of he motorcade and a tape of the radio coverage of those conused events. However, Conner entirely reshapes is material to bring out is essence.8 Coner hs he rold

rejected surrealism s a label for his work - 'I don't think I'm a srrlist; I'm a realist,'

Mrk Caywood in a 2000 inteview 9 - but nevetheless Rpot is somewhat of a surrelistic

docmenty n that it yet oten jumbles

deals pilly wih acl newsreel footage and radio comentry of the event

the chronological order and relative synchrony of thse items in a drelike fashion.

In act, he im on irst viewing may apper to have been put together raher sully; Conner not oly racrs the me footge

order wih apprent randonss but lso intersperss with the JFK motorcade

a wide variety of concepts which seem to have noing to do with he ssassination at ll.

On her xamination, however, we ind that mny of thse supposely unrelated concepts either become

instantly nalogous to the ssassinaion or seve as ironic statemens on merin society

ding the erly

1 9 60s.

\

A CLOSER LOO K

I

Rpot wstes litle

time getting to the actual moment of JFK's murder. he ilm's irst sequence

beins ih a medium top

shot of President nd Mrs Kennedy tken by a newsreel mera s their open­

lmosine psses through Dals' Dealey Pla. Mrs Kennedy is he nerest of the wo to the

mera, nd her face is irectly ngled at it. She smiles and waves s the camera folows the limousine.

r .. = )

D

)

e = = D

..

= = ­ D

� '

She pialy blocks President Kennedy from our iew nr the end of the shot s a rsult of the move­ mens of both the

r

and the amera, but we

n

clearly see him bush is forehead - a smple gesre

that soon taks on a foreboding quliy in Conner's hands. At his point, he soundtrack coms alive with ambient motorcade noise and he voice of a raio

0 = = -

reponer commenting on the presidentil visit. Tis shot of the Kennedys is repeated ('looped') sverl

=

hat 'there has been a shooting'.

•

) •

» •

tims and the of-screen reponer says, 'It appers s if something s happened in the motorade route.' A moment later, ter Conner hs reversed he shot in mirror-image fshion, the reponer nots

This combination of sond and imge is he irst of Rpots mny abrupt and contraditoy jxtaposiions; we see pre-assssination imags but hear post-ssssination commentry. Rpot ivs s precios itle time to process this aurl-visual colit, however, since it then gos of in an

enirely

unnicipated irection. Though he soundtrack continues to provide he radio coverage of hose consed moments mmeiately folowing the shooing, Conner replaced the newsreel imagey wih severl minuts' woh of 'licker' footage - footage consisting entrely of rmes of pure black

nd

pure wite, ltenating at a sroboscopic rate to crate, in Boswel's words, 'a rhymic sequence hat evoks the dying Prsident's sip

from consciousnss. During this sequence, the entire room in which

he lm is being projected becomes a lickering black-and-white environment.'10 It is a stunning seg­ ment, wih its intentionl ambiiy inving a vriety of rsponses. s Crl Bez has suggsted:

The section of 'blank' footage occrs . . . jst ater 'someting hs happened' to he motorcade and during the chaotic and foggy moments wich folowed. In oher words, s the 'live' action vnished into a vel of unknowable disorder, the visul material kewise blanks out. The newsster's wors 'something hs happened' hen ke on mltiple implications.

s he lshing greys

persist upon the screen, people in

the audience actully bein to wonder if 'somehing hs happened', not only to the President, but to the m itse£ 1 1

The lickering slows and stops ater a few minutes, rendering the screen opaque. The radio commen­ ty, whih up to tis p oint hs covered he unfolding events at Dley Pla and Prkland Hospitl, witches to the T:s School Book D epositoy and the blnkness of the screen is replaced by a looped

�icer holding Lee Hrvey Oswld's rile alot. The commentary retuns to the hospitl,

mage of i

and we re sH ?n the looped image of Mrs Kennedy unable ro open he locked door of the mblnce

)

hat holds he body of her husband. Rpot repeats the earlier newsreel footage of Prsident and Mrs Kennedy n their limousine jst moments before the shooting, nd the accompnying soundtrack consists of vrious eyewimss accounts of he ssssination. In yet noher nnticipated stratey, Coner then insened snippes of Aademy leader to ofer a seeingly enless repetition of a contdon in one-second increments hat

bins ih he nmber 1 0 and ens at 3. Though the leader's general image - a frme-illng circle at has b oh a horizontal and a vetical line ntersecting it - vey much

resembles the crosshar patrern

ofa rile's scope, it unctions maily s a clock ticing away the secons of the Prsident's life; indeed, he oicil death announcement on the soundtrack occurs during the Academy-leader sequence. Thouh Coner hs been ismissive of is irst setion of Rpot - 'There's no rel m there,'12 he sggested - it powelly aprures the rmoil and ncetainy of the momens imediately fol­ loing he ssssination. s efectiveness depends haly, though, on he auience's prior knowledge of he events of hat day n Dlls. For exmple, we see JFK repeatedly bsh his forehad rough the loopng efet nd, as we her the assassinaion commentary, we bein to wonder f Conner had access ,

o

preiously unscreened footage

nd llally show the moment ofJF's death rom a perspective

oher hn he one we know lltoo well: the one represented in he famous mateur lm shot at Dealey Pla by Zapruder.

(He does, ally, but not in a traditionl sense.) Smlarly, Conner looped a shot

of he prsidentil mousine s it approachs he camera, an efet that causs he veicle to appear to snap back ter it moves foward a litle. The limo dos make progrss but oly slowly nd in a igly rmented way. By looping the shot numerous imes but allong it to rn a lirle bit longer each ime (hereby

enabling the veicle to move fowrd but gradualy nd illy), Conner gave form to he

auience's

dsperate, nd utle, ish to pllthe Prsident back rom impending doom.

Dspite is secion's igly provocative qulities, it is he second section that trly demonstrats Conner's

ituosiy s an image manipulator. It abounds wih pns and ironic and satiric statements,

wih Coner created by eiting a diverse range of appropriated images - some lss than a second n lenh - to

he banaliies of the pre-assssination raio commentary. In oher words, Conner cut

he isul mgs,

wo ld k

many ofwhich would be meningless ouside of the context of Rp ot, so hat hey

up closely with certin phrses uttered by the announcer on the soundtrack. Indeed, he

major ionis

of

Rp ot arise from the jxtaposition of he announcer's pre-ssassination remars

(which have n innocently positive tone, since he is obviously unaware of what is to happen) wih he hrsh visual realities

of he events surrounding the assassination - such s he moment when Jack

Ruby shoo ts Owald, a television mage hat was sred into the Amerian public's colective memoy - nd vrious

ouside concepts. Wih the awreness hat the annoncer's runnng commentary repro­

below is about such items as President and Mrs Kennedy's arrivl at Love Field, the crowds who showed up tO greet he couple, the weaher at Dalls, nd the securiy precauions tken for the duced

prsidentil

Adio

visit, here is a parial list of Rpots contrapuntl puns, ofered in no prticular order:

\

' . . . r Force J er

Vsual

\. '

A title hat reads 'END PART 1'; 'Jets'

.

' . . . plars held igh . . .

breakfst cerel commercil '

Mrhing pickers

c = . D

� a

' . . . the doors ly

open . . . '

cracker being broken ' . . . a split-second

imed operation . . . '

Ts School Book Depository

' . . . a b right sun, the weather coln't

Ato mic bomb 'mshrooms'

be better . . . '

c

President nd his First Lady . . . '

A

' . . . Just to be sure you ind

•

» •

A bll gores a matador

' . . . nohng let to chnce . . . '

c = . •

Refrigerator doors opening; close-up of a 'Ry-risp'

' . . . to wimss the

rrivl of the

JFK's isson plled by horses Jack

Ruby shoos Lee Hvey Owld

yourself in the proper locaion, we'll give it

to you once gain . . . '

' . . . Mrs Kennedy hs jst been

Bouquet of roses

presented wih a bouquet of bautil

presidentil limousine; the word 'TAGED'

red roses . . . '

is superimposed

' . . . when the Prsident stops moving,

Prsident's lag-raped csket

that's when we

on the loor of the empry

become concerned . . . '

' . . . the President's steak [nner] . . . '

A scene from a bllight

fro m All tiet on the Westn

' . . . tight securiy . . . '

I battle scene

' . . . chldren tng to get over he

I s ol i ers machine-nned whle

fence . . . '

to cross

' . . . so [he

Kennedys] n make

their way downt on . . . '

' . . . unmetl-grey limousine . . . ' ' . . . if here's any ' . . . one

trouble . . . '

of those impromptu

moments for wich he President

Front

brbed wire (from All Quiet)

rying

JFK's horse-drawn cisson moing hrogh Washington D C Oswald's rile held lot Womn holding box

of 'S.O.S.' pads

JF's horse-drawn caisson moves rom he Capitol

hs become nown . . . ' Some of the puns are m ere parodies and plays on words; others, however, are more resonant and give

d\Conner's attitudes nd opinions on the assassination nd US society in generl. For example, war�\weaponry nd destuction, nd merica's fascination with hem, collectively form

in i catio ns

key m o tif in Rep ort. The ilm is absolutely loaded with such images, with many but by no means ap p ering

a

all

in ie puns noted above. Among the more prominent are World Wr One bacle scens

from the lassic 1 9 3 0 Holywood movie A// Quiet on the Westen Front, atomic bomb 'mshrooms', a buller penetrating a light

bulb in extreme slow motion, armed policemen nd, perhaps most con­

spicuously, the l o op ed (nd thereby

forcelly transformed) image of n oicer ho l din g O wald's

rile

high above his head. According to critic David Mosen, he ilm relects a major American

c

) ) ) 0 = = )

In Conner's eyes society thrivs on violence, destuction, nd deah no matter how hard we y to hide it ith immaclately clean oices, the worsip of modern science, or the creation

of ins tnt mayrs. From the bllight arena to the nuclar arena we clmor for the spectacle

of dstuction. The crucial link in Report is that JFK wih is great PT 1 09 was just as much

''

a pt of the dstruction gme as anyone else. Losing is a big pt of playing games.13

In adition to the puns,

many of which seem to b e transmitted at an almost subliminl rate,

Repots

second secion conins at least one xtended ironic statement: a 'mad doctor' sequence. Conner lited the scens for his sequence from he

1 935 Holywo od lm Bie ofrankenstein, in which Dr Henry

Fkenstein (played by the British actor Colin Clive) attempts to instll life into his latest charnel­ house cration. The shots that Conner inseted into

Rpot show the doctor throwing the switch that

activats his eletril life-giving appratuses. Signicnly, Conner id not include ny footage that shows he monster actualy coming to ife. Conner intercut stil shos of JFK' s casket ling in state ih thse 'mad dotor' scenes. n imp ortant piece of commentay during tis sequence is 'hen the Prsident stops moving, that's when we become concerned' . Moments before the sequence begins, we

see he brief lash of a to on star wih the word

'ISH' on it.

This lst item conceivably represents a strong wish on the pt of the auience to ind a way to

inslllife back into

the late President; however, the only 'solution' that Conner ofers his audience

n

is rlike movie is the stereopial mad doctor routine. Dr Frkenstein's electriing attempts

1

r ''

preoccup ation :

at nducng ife into a corpse have become cliched ater

ll these

pot, wold be nny, yet he ilm forces its auience to

un

yrs and, out of he contet of

to he mad dotor's techniqus as its

oly hope. Conner shows this dsire to be utile, s he did earlier wih he attempt to hold back the prsidenil limousine throgh the looping process. Severl anloies emerge from the melange of imges ofered by

Rpot.

Surprisingly, Conner

dls ih the obvious Kennedy-Lincoln comprison only briely. (He references Abrhm Lincoln in just wo scenes: one of the Lincoln Memorial, and the other of a house with a large sign in front

of it reaing 'House here Lincoln D ied' .) The strongest nlogy within the m prsents itsef in a

raher nsual form:

a bllight.

The blight sequence, a maj or pt of Rports second setion, intriguingly matchs the JFK

ssssination o�flevels. B o th events re preceded by scenes of huge cheering crowds. B o th

the bllight nd the motorcade are havily stage-mnged events, schedled and planned out wel in advance. There is the pomp of a parade in each. B o th the matador nd Kennedy obviously appreciate the jublant cheers rom the respective crowds that have turned out to see them (Conner reinforced is noio n by inseting a shot of he matador grinning broaly and sruting before the crowd, whle

c = . D

the radio commentry at hat point, referrng to Kennedy, contains he line, 'He is wking and sh­

i

moments ater it has gored the matador, which compres with Owald's murder sholy ater he sss­

0 c = .

ng hands') . Violence eups against the min iure in ach of he otheise very controled produc­ tions (i.e. he bul goring the matador, the Prsident's ssassination). Finlly, the bll is lled jst sination. Though the extended nlogy ultimately breks down (lke the motorade spectators, he blight audience expected a show hat irted ih violence, and JFK cetainly did not taunt Owld the way he matador goaded the bll) , the blight sequence is the most visualy apparent comprison

)

with he ssassination in Rpot.

»

to another anlogy: President Kenedy s a 'pacged commodity'. Such instances include a brief

c •

•

•

Satered hroughout he m re rments of television commercials, and hey colectively lad

segment rom a 'Jets' brefast cereal comercil coupled ih he nnoncer's descripion of]FK's arrival via ir Force Jet 1, nd a shot of a refrigerator's doors magiclly opening (while a syishly coifed nd dressed suburbn hosewife reacs in deight) combined ih a ther dscription

of

Kennedy's rrivl, ' . . . the doors By open . . . '. This concept of he President s commodiy is strongly

reinforced n the inl scene of Report, when a womn whom we have gimpsed throughout the movie

presses a button on a cash register-ke machine. The mera zooms in for a close-up of he macine nd revels that he buton reads 'SELL'. This concluing imge, combined wih he raio repoter's inl observation hat the JFK motorade

s

n

route to 'he Trade Mat', suggests hat, rom he

media's perspeive, he Prsident ws a commodity to be sold to their audiences lke anything else.

Conner's decision to jtapose patenly commercial images gainst those of JFK was qite conscious on his prt. In the weeks and monhs folowing the shooting, he beame incrsingly upset by he rampant commercilisaion of the Kennedy myh. He ws disrbed by what he saw s 'll he grotesque nd sacrlegious nd immoral tings that were done' nd he hpocritil aituds that gided them. 'The excuse ws that it ws respet for he dad nd is memory nd stu,' he lmented. 'Jack Kennedy bks, nd

ll

sots of memorablia and nonsense documentaries

nd

gooey posters.'14 Felow ndergrond lmmker Stn Brhage stated latly that 'he exploitaion of President Kennedy's deah' ws Conner's primry concern in Report,15 and Conner could not agree

more: When I strted, the big problem was hat I had to show what had happened: the poitaion of

the man s eath [emphasis in original text] . That's what I had to show. That's what I wnted to show

nd I had to show it becase nobody else ws. There was tons of oher iformation coing throh the media - but this ex�as the most obvios thing to me.'16

A centrl irony of Rport, nd one clrly not lost on Conner, is hat he im could be seen

s a

contribuion to the glut of Kennedy-nspired pop-ulture aifacts that he so detested. 'The problem n

ming he lm ws hat in order for me to do he m I would also have to go through the sme

processes hat those people were sing to exploit Kennedy,' he noted.17 Unlike 'those people', how­ ever, Conner crated a relexive work, one hat criiques he society rsponsible for the very imags he used to create it.

n

fat, Conner painted such a bleak picture of US society in is ohewise

m

biuo us and open-ended ilm that he invites

s

to take a considerably darker view of the 'JFK s

' commoiy' concept. Conner could be seen as ntimating hat he assssination ws brought about by a conspiray

may have n is

against he President, raher hn by he efos of a lone unmn. A group of inluentials

decided to get rid o, or 'sell', the President, as one wold do ih stock holings. Tken

ight, Rpo!s inal scene becomes he most horriYing one in he enire lm; he decision to

murder he

nation's chief xecutive is now rm ed in ters of a bsiness transaction.

r . = ) D

) 0 = = D

.

FINL THOUGHTS

pot is p erhaps he most oustning exmple of he mny lms, ndergro nd nd oherwise, hat uise

he

co

ntrapntl rrngement of imags nd sounds to create sociologicl statemens in he

form of irony, metaphors and nalogis. hat makes he m special is Conner's ab iliy to intewine mges of fact

and iction to such an extent that a new 'reliy' tks place. Conner shows hat he

mgs re jst that:

images. One might arue rom a Bzinin stn dpo int hat he imags ofJFK re

ontoloilly bound

to he 'rel' JFK, but ultimately th ey re lickengs of light and shadow, lbeit

ons havily invested wih p rio r associaions

and hs

ripe for artistic mipulation. Bruce Jenins

put it wel when he wrote:

In Coner's

world of heros and vilns, distinctions between he rl nd he ictionl

become inextriably

m

...

erged . Cognint hat he cinema (nd television) is lready once­

removed rom reiy, Coner is able to endow his icons, whether histori l or imaginry, ih he sme force nd he sme substance. . . . The complex ideorapic language he forgs rom bis

and

p ieces of reliy nd icion forms he basis for

a

[rep rsentatio n] about our

meia-bond culure hat neither iction nor repotage alone n render sficien!y.18 In so doing,

Coner hs bent the culture bak upon itself in a highly compeling nd hought-provok­

ng way. Though he reslts have proven quite nseling for some viewers, 19 Rpot, lke any excep­ ionl work

of c, has enab led others to

perhaps m ore

see n

spect of their world n a totlly unexpected way and,

importantly, prompted hem to question it.

CHAPTER 7

VOYEU RISM, SADISM AN D TRANSGRESSI O N : SCREEN N OTES AN D O BSERVATIONS ON WARH O'S 'B LOW J O B' AN D '1, A MAN'

Jack Sargent

UNDERGROUND/OVERGROUND: WAYS I NTO WARHOL

The l s of ndy Wrhol are possibly some of the best known yet paradoxically the lest viewed of undergr-vies. The bk of the

is remain lrgely unseen, rarely broadast on television, nd

only he last hree tiles have been oicilly relesed on video. Only he most famous ones - notably

My Husler ( 1 9 65), Chesea Girs ( 1 9 66)

nd

Lonesome Cowboys ( 1 9 68) - are ehibited at cnems or

glleries wih nying approaching relarity.

Wrhol's areer as a ilmmaker has traitionally been divided into four stgs by lm historins such

s

Sheldon Renan and ichard Dyer. 1 The irst-p eriod lms, such as

Haircut ( 1 963) , Eat (1 963) , Blow job ( 1 963), Couch ( 1 9 64)

nd

ss ( 1 963), Sep ( 1 963) ,

Empire ( 1 9 64) ,

were produced

beween 1963 nd 1 9 64. Thse ilms re characterised by the se of a sinulr long take, shot rom a stationy

m

era ngle, and their emphsis is on the celluloid's plsticity s much s the subject

mater prs ent ed .

Wrhol's second period, rougly runing rom 1 9 64 to 1 9 65, was produced largely with the ssistance of Ronld Tavel (who would go on to form the Theater of the stll se the

iiculos) . These movies

xed mera perspective but introduce sound as n element of the diegetic cinematic

xperience, wih Tavel feeding lins to, or engging with, the 'ast' from b ehind he amera. These

ms include Harot ( 1 9 64) , Suicide ( 1 965), Horse ( 1 965) and The 14-Year-Od-Girl (a Hedy, the

Shoplr,

aka The Most Beauiol Women In The Wol,

- rom 1 965 to 1 9 66 - relies on qusi-verite scenarios #2 (1 965)

nd My Hsler.

1 966) . Warhol's third period of lmmking

writen by Chuck Wein, nd includes Beauy

Boh Renan and Dyer have suggested that Warhol's fourth p eriod is characterised by his se of

xpanded

cnema, beginning with he double projection feature Chesea Girs, whi ch opened in New

York in he Autun of 1 966. However, he irst-period lms were lso screened in xpanded cinema scenarios s early as Janury 1 966, nd such mltiple projections formed pat of Wrhol's 'Up Tight' evens at

he Cinematheque on 4 1 " Sueet, several months before the shooting nd cinematic relese

of Chesea Girs (see below) . Fuher, given that he previous periods re deined by he collaborators involved, his distinction beween he hird- nd foh-period ilms seems somewhat flse. I would therefore suggest that

Wrhol's last period of m production, for the sake of discussion, is better described s beginning in

1967 ih ilms such s , A Man ( 1 9 67) , Bike Boy ( 1 9 67) nd Lonesome Cowboys, nd reaches its apex

ih clt ms such s Heat ( 1 9 72) . In these ilms, the nrrative emphasis gins greater importance.

Eqully, this inl period ses a more widspread focus on he concept of the superstr, the

Factory's own version of the Holywoo d str system and a reater use of colour im stock The last of hse fouth-wave ilms were the most amous of Wrhol's output -

Fesh

( 1 9 68),

Trsh

( 1 970) and

Heat - nd were produced in collaboration with Pal Morrissey, a protege/colaborator who irected

ll hree pictures (nd who, it has been suggested, lso directed most of the Wrhol movis post1967).2 Thse inl few productions are better dscribed

s

ms and Flesh, Trsh and Heat have been released on video. IdentiYng for broadly temporal stges ithin

minight movis than as underround

Wrhol's cinema represents

n

approach bsed

prely on a move from avant-garde ilm hrogh to a more immediately recognisable mode of narrative ci nema. However, it wold b e just as viable to sggst that Wrhol's ls lso progrssed

�s in which they were presented to n audience. Thus, wle

hro gh a series of stags bsed

rly productions were screened at he Factory or at nderround cinema unctions at venus such as he Fmmakers Co-op, some ms were also prsented Tight'

n multiple screenings s a backrop to the 'Up

events. Here, screenings were merely one prt of a lrger ffir hat included pulsating musi c

nd performnce/ dance displays.

I

..

­ c -

FIGURE 8

Tr�tsh goes respectable: N ico and Gerard Malanga in Cb!s.•a Girls

Later ilms d i ffered aga i n merely because they were screened at m o re ' respectable' c i nemas, begi n n i n g with Chelsea Girls, wh i c h , after a brief and very s uccessful run downtow n , moved to the midtown Cinema Ren dezvous on West

5 7'h

S treer. Th i s m ove upcown garnered a New York imes

review that condemned Warhol fo r scree n i n g h i s movies beyon d the co n i nes of G reenwich Village . Warhol's realisation that audiences wanted to see t h i s work was the i rst clear step towards his making more com m e rcially viable ilms and a move away fro m the supposedly d i ficult early movies. I n POPism, Warhol acknowledges that by December o f the fol l owi n g year, 'We began to t h i n k mainly about ideas fo r feature-length movies that regular theatres would want to show. ' 1

IT I S ALL ABOUT I MAGE, ABOUT SURFACE, WATCHING

I guess I can ' t put o ff talking about i t any l o n ger.

Okay, let's get i t over with. Wednesday. The b i ggest nightmare came true . . . . I'd been signing America books fo r a n hour or so when this girl in line h a nded m e hers to sign and then she did - did what she did. The Diary can write i tself here.

[She plled ndy's wig of nd threw it over he blcony to a male who rn out of the store ih it. . .]4

For a few minuts, Wrhol's worst fear beme acualised. Already the victim of xceptional nd butal

iolence, havng been shot nd nrly klled by SCUM manifestO author Valerie Solnis, Wrhol ws nderstndably upset. But is is not the fer of n assassination attempt; rather,

n 1 9 85, Warhol s

upset hat the suface hs cracked. And, perhaps more han anything else, Wrhol ws interested in

he craion nd deconsuction of spectacle. The Empire State Bulding is the supreme icon of New York City, of Deco architectre, of

coleive memoris of cinematic experience; who

n

forget Kong's inl conrontaion wih he ir

Force wlst hnging from the bling's spire? The Empire State Blding ws - s Wrhol wold later no te - the irst of his superstars:

Suddely B sid, 'There's yor irst Superstr.'

ho? Inrid?' 'The Empire State Bilng.' We had just tuned onto 34h Street.s

Possibly he most notorious of Wrhol's obsevation movies,

Empire consists of eight hours of m

of he Empire State Builing - an icon of modenity celebrated as pure spetacle. This reprsents he cnemaic eqivlent to Wrhol's pintings nd screen prints of tins of Cmpbell's Soup or of Brllo Boxs. The commonplace rendered as

t

beause of the way Warhol perceived it, reproduced it and

demnded the iewer engage with it.

But if Empire was the most infamous of these ilms, it is only b ecause it exists in the popular

imgination as the supreme trial of patience. Like the excesses of modern art it becomes in the mind of the audience a conceptual j oke - do you need to watch ll of the ilm tO have seen it, or is a

course,

csul ive-minute section of Empire

s

goo d

s

viewing the whole movie? It should, of

be noted that Warhol did not stand and ilm the whole movie; ssistants and friends ll

sup evised he shoot (including poet, writer, ilmmker, underground legend and independent

m prothelyser J ons Mekas) . But this is only one aspect of pop iconography. Playing wih our

� e totems of o�r culture, recognising them as signiiers for mo dern life, Empire is about the respo � of the audience as much the icon itself. It raises the question of collected impression"

s

how we look at t and the world around us. Like he variations in the silk-screening process leading to luctuations and nuances in colour and tone, each individual frame in Empire is slightly diferent in tone, in texture,

s

the light chnges. One asp ect of Warhol's 1 9 60s work is

he recurring theme of rep etition and non-identical repetition, that is, the rep etition of the same

hing only diferenly.

�

"'' ­ e

-

c = . D

�

..

PEOPLE WATCH ING

But Warhol ws lso concerned with people. The stars of his potrits (Elvis P resley, Elizabeth Taylor,

Marilyn Monroe, et cetera) found their echoes in the various p ers o nalit ies hat made -

heir way to Warhol's studio. Thus, hose who cne to the silver p ain te d Factory would oten

0 c = .

from personlities such

c

and

A

( 1 9 64) . The entire series is best known to contemporry audiences under the collective title Screen

•

•

» •

be

asked to sit for a screen test. Three minutes of 1 6mm ilm captu ring the faces of eveybo dy s

Lou Reed or llen G i nsberg, through to the aces of young hustlers

aspiring models. Some of thse tests were collated into groupings that became the basis for

ilms such as The Thiteen Most Beautul Boys ( 1 9 6-65) and The Thirteen Most Beautul Women

Tests ( 1 964-66) .

s for ndy, I wondered if he really liked people, or did he j s t like being fscinated by

p eopl e ? 6 In hese unremiingly sadisic ilms, individuls un dergo the gueling s creen test ordel in

whatever way they choose. lmost inevitably the in dividul s try and look cool, but posing for ree minutes invriably becomes impossible nd the p roj ected veneer of imge b egins to colap s e almost

immediately. In some css the subjecs begi n to crack, smiling nevously and glan cing from side to s i de ,

s

f srching for help rom behind he cold, unblinking eye of the F actory's mera. Oly he

most self-assured inividual n remain focused enough to cary of their image for the lengh of n

uneited shoot. Warhol's ascination with spectacle is thus concerned not merely wih he cration of the icon, manifested by

he subj es of the screen tests as cool and composed, but lso in he simultneo us

deconstruction of he icon. hen their image collapses nd the person underneah emerges in minute

a

-

lickers of iety, hen he sef designed spectacle colapses and new form of spectacle emergs. Ts is

not the emergence of n essence, but a manifstation of immanence. Nothing is revled; certily

\bjecc remains under ersure. The brief isplays of nevousnss - quickly hidd new posi or a drg on a cigrete (the i e cinematic signiier of cool) he

any truth of the

behind a

en

-

ult mat

enables

subject to re-nerse hemselvs n the spectacle, hereby allowng the viewer co at ch a glimpse of

�

he constuted na ure of the sp ectacle of the public self.

The Warhol screen test muse rnk

s

one of the harshest initiation ceremonies yet devised.

The s ubj ects hope to ap pe ar su i table to jo i n the Factory crowd and even Warhol's inner clique. ,

hether or not this clique act ually eisted is lrgely uni mp ortan t those individuls il med

si tting in front of he clattering camera, be they queer street hustlers or welthy up town socialites

,

colle ctively believed that there was someth i ng unique in the Warhol en tou rge that should be aspired to. )

GUE 9 Cinematic sadism' The screen tests of Andy Warhol

Like a

medieval inquisition, we proclaimed them rests of the soul and we rated everybody. A

lor of people

failed. We could all see they didn't have any soul. . . . Bur what appealed most

of all to us - the Factory devotees, a group I quickly became a parr of - was the game, the of trapping the ego in a little I S-minute cage for scrutiny . . . . Of course, the person

cruelty

who loved watching these ilms the most - and did so over and over, while the rest of us ran to

Other

the other end of the Factov - was Warhol.7 ilms made by Warhol betray a similar scopophilia, in which the pleasure of looking at

somebody's glee when

emergent discomfort is equally apparent. Thus Screen Test

#2

( 1 965) betrays a sadistic

actress Mario Montez, whilst being interviewed by Ronald Tavel, is harangued until she

breaks down

and reveals to her inquisitor that she is actually male. In his account of screening The

14- Year-Od-Girl in POPism, Warhol reveals a similar event: 'When he [Montez] saw that I'd zoomed in and

gotten a close-up of his arm with all the thick, dark masculine hair and veins showing, he got

very upse t

and hurt. '"

While Mary Woronov's autobiography recounts that her role in vanous Warhol movtes including

what is probably his most famous work, Chelsea Girs - consisted of exorcising her demons,

= = ­ D

�

he irector and writer encoraged her to give

ll vent

to her dark side regrlss of the efes.

Indeed, f oher members of he st became agitated or upset hen so much the beter. lhogh

to

accse Wrhol of misony wold be too simplistic and crss, it is neverheless pertinent to obseve hat competition beween he females in the ilm is brutal .

,

0 = = -

were lways faning ater his favour, nd at times he did toy wih them. And one of he

=

many ways hat he'd toy ih hem is hse girls wold ight over whether they were going

n

to be in a movie, or not

The Factoy ws like a court, the old cot of ing Louis or someting like that - and people

•

•

)

n a movie, and wheher they were a superstr or nor, and wheher

hey were sitting nxt to him or not. And the queens who lso were there, would thrive on a

•

bit of ighing amongst he girls.9

A

girl lways looked more beautil and ragile when she ws ab out to have a nevous

breakdown. 1 0

Wrhol's interst in cuely and S &M may not have necessarily relected his own personal tsts. Thse were merely spects of is surroundings - both spaial nd temporl - that uscinated im, just as he was scinated with the rug nd sex habis of those who entered his zone. However,

he

distance he enjoyed rom the evens around him suggess a certain coldnss hat in part must be seen as sadistic:

I stll re about people but it wold be so much easier not to are . . . it's too hrd to re . . . .

.

I don't want to get too involved in other people's lives . I don't wnt to get too close . . . I don't like to touch ings . . . hat's why my work is so istant rom mysel£ 1 1

It ws nor for noing hat he ws referred to as Drela

� \

- surreptitiosly (and lss so) by many mongst live vicariously through

s

-

a

usion of Dracla and Cinderella

amphetamine-uelled entourge. He wnted

to

e experiences of those he lmed, p eople who peformed their personliis

nd paraded their dysnct ons for his lens and limately for his voyeuristic plsure. SX AND SILKSCREEN SUICIDES

Between -

1 962 nd 1 968 Wrhol created a series of shocking sikscreen prins - 'The Disster Seris'

replete with imags of gangsters, B ellevue Hospitl, electric chairs, race riots, r crshs, suicids

nd newspaper headlines heralding numerous apolptic evens. Even the artist's most enduring image, that of Marln Monroe, must be seen as belonging to this series. She ws, ater ll, he wold's most famous sicide, and it ws his act that inspired the series of Monroe screen prints. Thse

powel imgs b etray a fscination ith vrious manifestations of violence: rom the results of he

isly r crashes, through to he violence about to be realised in he brightly (electriclly) coloured eleric chirs.

These skscreen prints revel something that is b oth universl and forbidden: death. Death emerges in the images as both an actualised event (realised in the prints of a plummeing rom a bldin) and

s

r

crsh or of a body

n iconographical representation (for example, in a newspaper

haline or a currently empy electric chair) . This engagement with the taboo, and with showing he forbidden, is lso present within Wrhol's

ms of he sme period. Most obviously it apprs n his reprsentations of ll manifstations of sualiy nd, to a lesser extent, drugs (see, for example,

Couch, Blow job, Chesea Girs, My Hter,

Bike Boy) . Warhol was obsssed ih obsering the haos of he urban wold rond hm. The excesses

of is friens,

ssociates and the nmeros people who made the Factoy their home, ws a source of ·

detached fascination evens such

s

for Warhol in he same way that sociey's momentary excsses - manifested in

riots, violent deah and strdom - were a sorce of interest. In his work, he forbidden

nd he idden re xposed and dissected under he tist/ilmmaker's gze, just as his arlier works (c.

1961-63) had engaged ith an examination of he banal commonplace manifested hrough objecs­

s-icons such s

the

s

mges of consumerism,

of Cmpbell's soup or Coke botls. But Warhol's

t -

wheher depiing

capitalism or xecution - ws never xpressly politicl, the dissection neither

ofe ring, nor even so much as suggsting,

n

analysis of the mechaisms of power inherent witin the

eleric hir or a drug del or a sex act. Instead, the dissection is abo ut fascination (be it Warhol's, the meia's, society's or, more commonly,

I do n' t relly feel

me, I'm

llthree) nd the nature of he reproduced imge itself.

ll hese people with me every day at the Fatoy are just hanging around

more hanging around them.12

In Bww job, one of Warhol's rliest movies, a young mn wih a greasy quif receivs he infmous

±

blow job for n ,simated 45 minutes. Shot so hat only the man's head is visible, he orl sex occurs

of-mera. The

n lens back against a wll. The scratched celluloid is silent, nohing but projector

hm. The youn mn, face in partial shadow, loos don. His head rolls back, presmably adjsting

s pose so

s

to_. aclitate orl copulation. He loos down; again his head rolls bac. At one point his

mouh moves. The

im burns to white. Next reel.

Leader. More of he same. Head lolls. Eyes lutter.

At he close of the lm he protgoist lights a cigarette. End. Wrhol shot tis

1 6m m im in 1 963 . According to POPsm, the ilm ws cast wih 'a good­

looing kid who happened to

be hanging around he factoy hat day. '13 He received a steady stream

of blow jobs rom the 'ive diferent boys [that] wold come in and keep blowing him ntil he ame.'14

Bwwjob premiered in 1 9 64 and ws screened at varios performances by the Velvet Underground.

The im emphasises he act of oral coplation, but s the projected image focuss entirely on he head

c = . D

a

of the youh on he receiving end, the gender of those giving the blow job is conceled.

Wrhol's

statement hat those iving head to he b oy were mle is irrelevnt: to audiencs watching the im, he youh could be blon by anybody. The point of the movie is to pay itness to the estasy on

The naue of

Blow job

is ambiuos. Do we watch it s avnt-grde text, documenty

Blow Job may be seen s

0 c = .

raher han employing the traditional conventions of he documenary form he lm is a

c

hmn. Lke al of Wrhol's early productions, some members of the auience are forced to

underground t m? Repeated vieings suggest that

a documenty,

or

but

liminl

wonder to end, or

n

if the lm is an endurance tst: should hey watch he whole pictre from beginning

� •

shold they engage in noher activiy smltaneously and view it s someing resembling

•

he

man's face - not to the image of his penis ejaclatng.

..

•

l

movng

wallpaper?

Bowjob works as a neo-documentary wich folows he procss of giving/receiving head rough

45 minutes of sucking, and ulinates (he auience is led to presume) in an of-screen ejaclation nd (somewhat ironic) post-coital cigarete. Yet at he sme time,

Bow job may be viewed s n ani­

documenty, since the audience dos not 'learn' nhing. The audience is not given any speciic information. (Tis rises the question, does hat mater? Is that a unction of documentaries

nway?)

Instead hey experience their own spectral appelation. Watcing he lickering imags of a blow job, shold they be aroused? Appalled? B ored? hilst the ilm unctions s a voyeurisic glimpse of a sxl exchnge, Wrhol also emphsiss suace, and engags literlly with the textue of the celluloid - he scratches, the lickers nd the play of shadow and ight wihin the imge re all cucialy mpornt to him. There is no eding bease Wrhol wnts he audience to see eveing - every inh s

cellloid, every rme. The non-identil repetiion of the projected imge is what scinates s

of

much

the act that is trnspiring on screen. Tis is a m about ilm s much s it is a ilm about orl sex

or New York queer cultre. Warhol wns the viewer to see the action bur he also wans the viewe r to engage with he medium s he or she is watching it. Stylistically diferent from

Bow job

is Wrhol's

, A Man,

which was produced

s a

collaboration with the lmmaker Paul Morrissey. , A Man - which takes its title from the erotic \ oman (1 966) , which was playing in New York at the sme time the Warhol/Morrissey movie , A ilm ws prt duced - locates is action in a series of encounters b eween a hustler-stud (Tom

and sx wo

Bker)

en (Ivy Nicholson, Ingrid S uperstar, Vlerie S olanis, Cynhia May, Bettina Coin,

Ultra Violet nd Nico) . In

, A Man, he static mera nd single-tke shos that ictated the asthetic of the rly

s is replaced by a greater variey of mera angles. (However, he m is stil remarkably slow by contemporary standrds, nd the introduction of in-amera eiting creates ocsionally

sjoined

moments, loops of repetition and lshes of apparently random images.) Moreover, the slence chracterised

Bow job

is replaced ith a diegetic soundrrack.

, A Man

is less ilm-s-t,

hat

ilm-s­

instllation or m-s-backdrop s it is smple, very loose narrative cinema. This is in direct contrst

o Wrhol's

previous lms, which were engged predominanly wih the act of watching (even

Chesea

Girs emphsised the experience of watching he double-projection imags more than the experience of listening to the dilogue). Lke

Bow job, , A Man

retins an air of authenticity, s the audience

in qustion actully trnspiring. But while

Bow job

phenomenologil experience played before the cmera,

n

imgine he evens

recors evens as docmentary evidence, s

, A Man presents a series of sexul encounters

ih which he st engage s a form of naurlistic melodrama. Each encounter is puncuated ih a

rmbling conversation on topis that range rom illing cockroaches to asrologicl smbols to

lsbinism nd so on. These conversations echo the rambling enggements presented in Wrhol's preious cinematic colaborations, bur wihout the cmp ferocity of Tavel's dialogue or the dry irony ofWein's scripts. The 'acting' that occurs in he lm is less about taing on a role than it is about puting speciic people {Factoy regulars, superstars, wannabe superstars) together and alowing their personalities to emerge nd engage with one anoher. Like the earliest Wrhol lms,

, A Man also eists s

phenomenologil evidence, in this ase of the meetings beween he vrios individuals wihin he

m. here , A Man difers from Wrhol's erlier works is in is emphsis on he star personas of

he people involved rather thn on he activiies in wich hey engage. In rlier ilms he activity of srdom nd he potential collapse of image (s

sr persons re maintained throughout.

lhough more narrative hn

n Screen Tests) was emphsised, wilst in , A Man the

Bow job, , A Man still mintains

a degree of engagement with

he plasticiy of m . In is editing, the curs create momentary lashes of imags, nd the audio track

cacs

nd spis like a sadist's whip. These efects continully remind he auience hat they are

watching a m and so are engaged in a mutully complicit voyeristic expeience ith the director

nd p roducer.

Throughout ll of his movies, Warhol and his numerous colaborators atempted to engge

ih he noion of cinema rom a uniquely personal perspective. One of Warhol's main interess -

most clerly envisioned in he rliest productions - is the at of voyeurism, in how

J

n

audience

enges ith he pro ss of watching lm. This nterest is still apprent in his later works, he central fference being he

JfY

in wich the audience is seduced via the procss of narrative.

Lke he Disste} seies, lms such s

boh

Blow job nd , A Man,

despite their sylistic diferences,

seek to iluminate he 'obscene' nd forbidden, rming hat which society excludes despite

he fact it is actully he everyday. Warhol is showing the audience something hat is

traiionally

conceled beause to see hat which is hidden fascinates, nd to see somehing completely, to succmb to a visual seducion, is ltimately what fascinats Wrhol, nd what seducs he audience of he

Wrholin cinema.

CHAPTER 8

YO U B LED Y MOTHER, YOU B LED Y FATH ER, BUT YOU

WO N'T B LEED M E': THE U N D ERG RO U N D TRIO OF MELVI N VAN PEEBLES

Garrett Chfin -Quiray

Only as a group do the irst three 'underground' feaure ilms of Melvin Vn Peebles ully express

�

his atistic develo nem and independence from conventional movieming. By focusing on

Stoy of a Three�ay Pss ( 1 968) , Watemeon Man ( 1 970)

and

The

Sweet Sweetbacks Baadsssss Song

( 1 97 1 ) ther' opportunity to consider his contribution to ilm history and ssess his culturl

importance. Indeed this frame supports the idea of him being a ilmmaking pioneer by allowing an examination of he counter-hegemonic tendencies in his work along wih exploring his relationship to blaxploitation cinema.

BACK BACKGROU N DS AN D FRENCH PURSUITS

Born on

21 Augst 1 932, Melvin Vn Peebls attended Township High School in he Chigo

suburb of Phoenx, Ilinois, where he graduated in 1 949. Trnsferring to O hio Wsleyan Universiy

rter

one yer at West irginia State College, he graduated n 1 953 with a Bachelor ofrts in English

before elising in he US ir Force.

)

ter stting a famly nd ending is military reer, he spent time in Meico where he dabbled s

a pinter before moing to Sn Frncisco nd employment as a able

r

operator. Following he

le ofhis r he produced a few short lms to gain a foothold in Hollywood, including Three Pickup

Mmor Hrick (1 957) and Sunight ( 1 957), lthough an agent repotely told him,

'If you

n

tap

dnce, I ight ind you some work. But that's about ll. '1

Sho ng up is disappointment and capitalising on he GI Bll, he moved is amily to Hollnd where he enroled at the Universiy of msterdam to study astronomy. While here he divorced his

e, joined a theatre troupe and stated acing. To make ens

meet he worked s a street performer

nd depended on his lady riends for suppot and a place to live. Heny nglois, founder of he Cinematheque Franise, eventually saw is shot ilms nd

inited Vn Peebles to he noves A

Pris where he spent the net nine years singing, dancing, acting nd riting

Bearor the FB, The Chinamen f the J4'h Diit, The Tue Amercan, The Pay in

Harm nd La Pnnission.

He lso produced he Frncophone short lm

begn seeing eny into he French feature-lm mrker.

hen he

lerned he cold adapt one of his novels into lm ih

Cinq cent balles ( 1 9 63)

a

$70,000

and

grant from he

French Cinema Centre f he could ind a producer with matching unds, he panered with OPEA, a

prodution team consisting of Michel Zemer, Guy Pefond nd Cristin Shivat, nd adapted

La

Pmssion for the screen. The resuling feaure was shot in sx weeks for a cost of $200,000 and ws �ven he new itle

The Stoy ofa Three-Day Pss.2 The m depics he story of an army man named

Tner (Hry Bird) who receivs a promoion and a ree-day pass. hle on leave he visits a

Prisin dub and mees a woman named Miriam couple explore he

(Nicole Berger). During heir weekend together the

counyside and cofront the compleitis of their romantic idels long with he

bis ofpeople around them.

Once spared by a group of his army cohors who report what hey see to

heir Captin (Hl Brav) , Trner is demoted and conined to barracks where he remains disconnected

y

rom is lost love as he ilm en

Following the nrrativ-pattern of a trgic love stoy,

rom

The Stoy of a Three-Day Pss

deprts

generic convention by centring itself on a black man. This diference is emphsised in the

rly remrs of Turner's Captain, who explains that a three-day pass is being ofered to him

beause he is 'obedient, cheerul and frightened', 'a good Negro' , towards whom the Captain feels a protective connection. Delivered in direct address as Tuner demurs in crosscut reaction shots, the Captain's remars speak to Tuner's status as n army cog in collusion with the white-dominated merin racial hierarchy. The sequence also demonstrates his relative position at the bottom of

hat hierrchy. Once relesed rom tis orderly and patenlistic world, Turner roms rough the strees of

Pis wring

=

his sunglasss with a sense of freedom in the mera's depicion of his libey and

-

< -·

=

= =

C D D r D n

c = . D

�

youth. mong his experiences he sees a puppet show about slavery and civilisation's development hat emphsises his role in France s an rian-descended merian soldier upholding United Naions peace treaties cira 1 967. hen he later enters he nightclub where he meets Miriam, Trner is positioned as he lone

0 c = .

black igure among the lily-wite dncers and club-goers who surround him. He is repeately reused

c

skin, asing Tuner to storm ofsaying, 'I'm not a nigger. I'm a person.'

•

a dncing partner untl he inally ss Miriam, ith whom he shares n immediate smpatico. Dspite heir initil atraction, however, other club-goers josde hem long wih remrs on he colour of is

)

Forced to explain how he is under constant attack rom racialy weighted words lke 'black' nd

»

'igger', Miriam is shocked for having been ignorant of such signiiers but is quickly forgiven bease

•

•

of their French context. s Vn Peebles would later comment, 'I had to keep ings simple. It ws intended for a French public, and they would never nderstnd he ine poins of white-negro bis in is county [the United States) .'3 Speaing at the same point within the ilm, Trner sks, 'how n

nyone thik hat 'black' is a compiment?' thereby developing one of the ilm's more remarkable

depars rom nrrative moviemking. ith an alternaion beween diegetic nd non-diegetic msic and occsional reliance on

reze

rames, Vn Peebls inses a pair of rm stats into the nraveing romance, one from each of is lead chracters' point-of-view. The irst concens a plantation-lke wold where Mirim is set upon and ravished by Turner

s

a black slave. The second exists in a tribl environment where Mirim is

sacriced to a black mob and smboliclly raped. Inserted in paralel to the ilm's action, neiher of these wo powel fntasis exacly describs the lovers' siuation, lhough it is clr theirs is not a purely innocent love story. The sequences also provides a glimpse of Van Peebles' se of folklore, racil stereotpe and istoril mh to eliven his stoy and develop layers of mening aside from he bsic aesthetic achievemens of his cratsmanship. Another powel, thogh less fancl, llustration of clshing racil identitis in he lm is the scene where Tuner and Mirim bump into three of his felow soliers rom the my bse.

�n lurking beneath their afir riss to the sace like a jack-in-the-box being

Worlssly, the ten

sprng. Very qicdy Miriam's easy acceptance of their afetion is demonstrated s being ignornt

of unstated social cods concening racial segregation. J usc s quicly, Turner's inabiliy to accept is

attraction to Miriam shows the ingrained efect of his ssimlation into racist Amerian instiutions nd atitudes. hen Trner's Captain inaly demotes him in nother direct addrss sequence, his words express the urgeny of seprating he black nd white races. More remarkable sil is the way is reprimand ks the form of a war allegory when he says: I don't see why, just because you were on a three-day pss, you thought that you could go urther thn the normal wo-day weekend travelling distance from the bse. hat wold

you do on the battleield? I'm very disappointed in you nd you have to larn, to lern a lsson, al of you. Now f the only way you n lern is by the rod, then it wll be by the rod.

I m also restricting you to your barracks until urther notice. ih jmp

u n