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Friday, February 23, 2007

The Digital Underground: 2/23/07

Kenneth Anger, arguably the most famous experimental filmmaker in America, finally has a collection of his shorts available on DVD through Fantomas Films. The five dialogue-free short films collected on this first installment are light on narrative, instead focusing on the subconscious power of images. And the images they capture are as difficult to describe as they are to forget.

The first film on the set, Anger's earliest surviving film, is Fireworks (1947), a crude, 16 minute short that Anger says was inspired by a nightmare. It deals explicitly with homosexuality and with what most sources strangely refer to as sado-masochism," but I interpret as gay-bashing, which must have been an even greater fear for gay men in 1947 than it is today. Either way, the violence is intense and graphic, and its impact suffers little from the cheap effects.

After the raw violence of Fireworks, the rest of these films settle into a heightened sense of Hollywood glamor and beauty. Although these films don't have the explicitly gay imagery of Fireworks, they present a very specifically gay aesthetic, a distillation of glamor into fetishistic images. The opening sequence of Puce Moment (1949), where a series of increasingly fabulous fabrics are jiggled before the camera, is pure fetish porn for lovers of high fashion, but it's also an undiluted dose of potent beauty. Similarly, Anger doesn't seem to view the fountains in Eauxd'Artifice (1953) as spurting phallic symbols, but as objects of beauty, and as his camera focuses on the dance of the sparkling water, it works as a pure piece of moving photography.

My favorite of these shorts is Rabbit's Moon (1970), a dreamy piece set in an artificial forest that resembles a stage production of A Midsummer Night's Dream and scored to doo-wop songs like "There's a Moon Out Tonight." The shimmery, silver lighting gives it the look of some childhood dream you can't quite remember.

The centerpiece of the disk is The Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954), a 30-minute pageant of occult imagery inspired by Anger's fascination with Aleister Crowley. Consisting of Anger's friends and associates dressed up as mythological figures, the film displays a psychedelic beauty that would have seemed unremarkable in the late 60's, but must have been startling in 1954. Again, there are fetishistic shots of jewelry and exotic fabrics, and the brilliant photography resembles that of the Powell and Pressburger technicolor extravaganzas (although even they never managed to get Deborah Kerr or Moira Shearer's hair to show up with the fiery intensity of Marjorie Cameron's here).

Anger provides a commentary for each film. He's not the most talkative commentator, and for the most part just identifies actors and locations, but that's for the best, as these imagist films are well-suited to individual interpretation. There are also demonstrations of the restoration work done, and some deleted scenes from Rabbit's Moon. The disc comes with a 48-page booklet featuring an introduction by Martin Scorsese, and the Crowley-inspired packaging is quite beautiful. Watching these films for the first time, I was astonished by how much of Anger's style seems familiar from being co-opted by later directors. The way certain scenes of Pink Flamingos are scored to pop music, the overwhelming multiple-exposure images of the ballet in The Elephant Man, the clawing zombie hands in Night of the Living Dead, all seem to have originated from the mind of Anger. I've never heard him list Anger as an influence, but it seems obvious to me that David Bowie must have seen these films before creating his Ziggy Stardust persona. If that character wasn't based on the striking vision of Marjorie Cameron in Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome, then Todd Haynes' version of Bowie in The Velvet Goldmine certainly was.

These films, of course, were made at a time when explicit homosexuality could never have appeared in a Hollywood movie. Gay themes were pushed to the far fringes of all art forms, and an experimental, independent filmmaker like Anger would be the only type of person who could include these themes in his films. When you hear religious conservatives talk about the good old days, this is what they mean. They seem to believe this situation created less gay people, but I believe it just created more weird people. How many young homosexuals would have grown up to be conservative businesspeople and homemakers if they had been able to find conservative gay role models? Instead, they found Kenneth Anger, William S. Burroughs and The Velvet Underground, and never looked back.

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Labels: DVD Reviews, Kenneth Anger, The Digital Underground

Continue reading The Digital Underground: 2/23/07

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Friday, January 26, 2007

The Digital Underground: 1/26/07

Welcome to The Digital Underground! This new column will document those DVD's that are not released by the major studios, the iconoclastic independent films and esoteric cultural ephemera that exist on the edge of the DVD market, never finding it's way onto the shelves of Best Buy, but remaining an enticing temptation for the hungry eye. The DVD market is incredibly wide these days, what with the low cost of producing the product (hell, I burn them on my computer for a few bucks), yet what is visible to the major retailers and press is only a tiny slice, like the visible spectrum of light. So consider this column your peak into the subterranean world.

"Though she knew even less about radios than about Southern Californians, there were to both outward patterns a hieroglyphic sense of concealed meaning, an intent to communicate."

- Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49

Other Cinema Digital (OCD) is a distribution label set up by Noel Lawrence and Craig Baldwin as an outgrowth of Other Cinema, an underground cinematheque they host in San Francisco. The titles available from OCD range from a documentary on the Rainbow Man/John 3:16 guy to the 60's avant garde piece Sins of the Fleshapoids. Most recently, they've released Tribulation 99, a "pseudo-pseudo-documentary" directed by Craig Baldwin himself, which documents a secret history of alien influence from within the hollow earth on the political climate of the late 20th century. This bizarre shadow history is brought to life using found film clips, mostly from horror and sci fi B-movies, edited together at eyeball-shredding speed, often overlapping each other and producing a strange cognitive dissonance in the mind of the audience. Through a narrator and title cards, we are told that Castro was a robot, and that the communist governments of Central America are all puppets of snake-men from the planet Quetzalcoatl, while the images we are being shown are vaguely recognizable from years of soaking up bad sci fi. As the notes in the accompanying booklet read, "You're presented with a barrage of incredibly complex pieces of information...which are obviously fabrications. But you don't have enough time to think about them or refute them." Barrage is certainly the right word. Tribulation's audiovisual assault may be one of the best examples of cinema-as-drug out there.

When Noel Lawrence sent me a DVD of Tribulation, he threw in a home-burned disc of a film that he claimed was a big influence on Baldwin, a 1965 film consisting mostly of found footage (most notably from The Man With The Golden Arm), arranged to tell a secret history of the Chicago mafia and their role in influencing American politics in the 50's and 60's, including the Kennedy assassination and the Bay of Pigs. Most notable of the assertions made is that the mob had gotten Sinatra hooked on heroin in order to use him as a mouthpiece to negotiate with the Kennedys.

When asked about the origin of this film, Lawrence launches into a 45-minute dissertation on the auteur, one J.X. Williams, a small-time producer of stag loops throughout the 50's and 60's whose work had gotten him deeply involved with the mob. Fleeing to Europe to escape the long arm of the law (an unlikely story involving late-night porn shoots and escaped circus animals, which there is not space to relate here), he ended up as projectionist at a Dutch theater, where he began assembling odds and ends of film to tell the story of the secret history of the 50's and 60's.

Peepshow isn't the audiovisual barrage that Tribulation 99 is, but feels more like a traditional documentary soaked in sleazy noir atmosphere, like the film Ken Burns would make on the downhill slope of a booze-n-hookers binge. Williams narrates, with his story illustrated by clips from old films noir, stag loops, crime photos, and Sinatra's battle with the needle. But both films present a radical idea, not just in these images (it seems no coincidence that Craig Baldwin went on to direct a documentary on aural repurposers Negativland), but in suggesting that cinematic images embedded in our collective subconscious contain secret meanings, a code to figure out how the world works.

Peepshow is, for now, unavailable on DVD--Lawrence says that J.X. Williams remains a prickly individual to deal with, and has preferred to keep the film out of the public eye--but Lawrence has hosted screenings for it around the country, introducing them with discussions of Williams' life and work, and he is currently putting together a documentary, The Big Footnote, on Williams. The one Williams film that has been released is a fragment of The Virgin Sacrifice on Experiments in Terror, a compilation of avant garde shorts that uses horror imagery. The lack of commercial success of the Experiments disc still puzzles Lawrence. "I thought, at least these people who will just watch any awful, garbage slasher movie would be excited to see people doing something new with horror. Instead they were angry that they had watched it!"

This underground aesthetic, an opting out of prescribed popular culture, is an integral part of the OCD philosophy. Even So Wrong They're Right, a documentary about collectors of 8-track tapes, which I assumed would be little more than a campy bit of ironic gen-X nostalgia, ends up making a case for rejecting the dictated demands of consumerism. And Baldwin's other found footage film, Spectres of the Spectrum, is a "science-fiction allegory about 'electromagnetic autonomy' in opposition to the hegemony of the culture-management industry."