Multiple Maniacs (John Waters, 1970)

 

A classic Dreamland production that somehow had managed to pass me by, Multiple Maniacs may just be Waters’ true masterpiece. Unlike Pink Flamingos or Female Trouble, where Divine’s characters are driven by perhaps overly-cartoonish grandiose ambitions of infamy and depravity, Maniacs‘ incarnation of Lady Divine has her pettiness and hyperbole balance one another out to the point that her motivations seem typically, dare I say, reasonable?

Early enough in Waters’ career for his influences still to shine through, the spectator is able – encouraged, even, to pick up on references to Jack Smith, Buñuel, Pasolini; the cinematography’s roaming imperfections, in relation to sporadic yet vital use of post-production overhead narration allows the aesthetic to range from genuine vérité to a semi-neorealist Flaming Creatures. Consequently perhaps, although Multiple Maniacs clearly intends to shock, disturb and disgust, its portrayal of sexuality borders at times on the legitimately erotic.

Coming closest therefore to addressing the Dreamlanders’ actual desires, it is unsurprising that Maniacs effectively represents their actual principles, too, before they become refracted into different characters in later films. At the heart of Multiple Maniacs‘ philosophy is the celebration of family, however alternative it may be, and, accordingly, that the greatest sin of all is betrayal. Pink Flamingos addresses the same issues of protection of an alternative family structure, but the threatening forces are external tribalist animosity. Polyester recognises the internal threat of betrayal, but within a bourgeois heteronormative nuclear family. Multiple Maniacs‘ power stems in many ways from its reflection on the need for unity within queer social relations, to such an extent that its prolonged jump-cut sequence between Divine and Mink’s “rosary job” and Jesus, first feeding the “5000,” and then being given the kiss of death by Judas, and his inevitable crucifixion, cannot be interpreted purely as simple sacrilege. Instead, this is Waters himself engaging with the parabolic.

Considering the motley crew of reprobates involved in this and practically all productions of Waters’, Multiple Maniacs is the perfect love letter to what was to come.

 

⭐⭐⭐⭐1/2

The Act of Seeing With One’s Own Eyes (Stan Brakhage, 1971)

Though I’m unsure how many times I have seen this film at this point, I’m somewhat embarrassed to admit this was the first time I had realised the meaning behind the title: that “autopsy” (derived from the ancient Greek autos meaning “self” and optos meaning “seen,”) can in fact be translated to “The Act of Seeing With One’s Own Eyes.” This information massively contextualises the content: rather than the film providing us with a typically unseen vision – corpses – in a manner one might describe, for example, Mothlight as doing, Act of Seeing instead places the kino eye within the morgue as locus of the revelatory event of autopsy. The reality of the film itself merely provides an entrance to a very literal unveiling. Stripped away is skin, fat, muscle, organic matter and what is left is… hard to say. But impossible not to see… and that, in a nutshell, is Brakhage’s game.

Such discomfort that I endure during Act of Seeing is not on account of gore; rather, much like sea-sickness, which is the visceral response to cognitive dissonance between perceptions of balance and vision, the nausea arises from the cognitive dissonance between the loss of these human bodies living, experiential subjectivity, and the addition of their objective potential as containers of mystery. Perhaps most disturbing is seeing the removal of faces, peeled away like a mask, revealing largely un-individual skull. The barrage of graphic imagery inducing a certain nigh-intoxicated effect, I mused, stoner-like, about the etymological meaning of “person” – mask. I recalled Alan Watts’ discourse on “who am I?” in which he discussed the ways in which one may not know oneself, in the same way one may not taste one’s own tongue or indeed see one’s own eyes with one’s own eyes, without the use of a mirror. How interesting that what we use to identify one another, read one another, be attracted to one another, is that about ourselves we are unable to see unaided…

I could go on but, as an act of mercy, I shan’t.

That Brakhage is able to elicit just as much wistful navel-gazing as he is pure revulsion is highly impressive, but perhaps also to be expected from his mastery of camerawork. Act of Seeing performs a certain phenomenological Cubism: flattening, thus relativising, the relief of subjectivity by stripping away the outside world, as so too is stripped away the flesh of the bodies, vision once again becomes an act of holism, just as it did in Dog Star Man. When the body of a larger woman is wheeled in near the end, green, the whiteness of the fat revealed as her chest is sliced open giving the effect of mattress foam more than anything as shocking as body tissue, it becomes ever unclear through the juxtaposing montage with other corpses of hues white, brown and grey, if the green-ness of this body was an effect of decomposition, or a trick of the light. The universal eyeball of the kino eye makes no valuation. Not this time. The final conflict between the lyrical hand and the Bazinian objectif in this film ends, I believe, in the latter’s favour. Though these corpses may no longer possess the subjectivity of the anima of their former living hosts, the gaze in the Act of Seeing feels considerably more akin to that expressed by Todd McGowan than by Laura Mulvey: this is no controlling gaze. Neither Brakhage’s eye, the camera’s eye, nor our eye has anymore say in what happens to these bodies than the bodies themselves; all we can do is see them, or turn and look away.

 

*****

Cat’s Cradle (Stan Brakhage, 1959)

The thing about works of “lyrical film,” such as Brakhage’s is that the artist’s ideology can be understood in many ways to permeate the film to an extent often far surpassing the majority of mainstream cinema’s most recognisable auteurs. Cat’s Cradle is by no means an exception to this rule. Brakhage was, without a doubt, one of the most formally and aesthetically accomplished key figures in the world of artist’s film throughout the entire latter half of the 20th Century and, goodness knows, when his striving to open the door to a cornucopia of visual experiences, as far removed from ideology as cinematically possibly was successful, it was really successful. However, there are also nigh-countless examples of him almost bizarrely making use of archetypal signifiers that act in total accord with the standard symbolic order. Thus, Brakhage may earnestly believe that Cat’s Cradle is an example of “sexual witchcraft involving two couples and a ‘medium’ cat,” but what appears before us is two women, doing womanly duties, and two men lounging around, smoking. The only things missing are a couple of martinis and pairs of slippers.

Thus, although Carolee Schneemann does specifically point toWindow Water Baby Moving as the film against which her ownFuses can be said to fight back, it would seem highly remiss not to mention Cat’s Cradle, not least of all because it involves Stan, Jane, Carolee, James and Kitch the Cat – the latter 3 all having starring roles in Fuses. Window Water Baby Moving assuredly is problematic in taking a film of Jane giving birth and successfully making it all about Stan, it is Cat’s Cradle that so clearly assigns men and women traditional, hetero-patriarchal roles, with which Carolee and James look particularly uncomfortable.

The formal elements of the film, from the red glow to the rapid, chaotic juxtapositions and visual dialogue from gaze to gaze is as beautiful as it is impressive – enough to gain it 3 stars in my estimation – but, with regard to the “sexual witchcraft” remit, it ultimately fails.

***

 

Dog Star Man (Stan Brakhage, 1961-1964)

 

Multi-layered in both content and form, the panoply of holistic vision which Dog Star Man presents makes the magnum opus of this stage in Brakhage’s career a pretty clearly intentional candidate for the lyrical film’s equivalent of the Great American Novel. Wholly representative of the Brakhage family’s participation in the Back-to-the-Land movement, Dog Star Man seems to meditate on in the interconnectedness of all things, from – appropriately enough – dogs, to stars, to men. Gratifyingly, the technical brilliance of Dog Star Man‘s post-production is considerably more self-acknowledged than in, for instance,Window Water Baby Moving or The Act of Seeing With One’s Own Eyes, in which descriptions tend to include phrases such as, “completely unedited, except for ____ and ____ and ____,” thus the deftness with which juxtaposition becomes comparison, which in turn becomes abstraction carries weighty meaning in line with some of the more compelling aspects of New Age woo: namely, the similarity between such things as the appearance of galaxies and, appropriately, the human eye.

Dog Star Man ventures on a journey of sight that includes the spectacular cosmos and details, actions and events of the human anatomy, external and internal, beautiful and shocking. The miracle of birth and the flow of blood through capillaries share space with stars and the trees of the Colorado mountains. However, predictably, at the centre of it all does seem to be Brakhage himself, journeying through said trees, up said mountains, felling for firewood. As with any (proto-)hippie-esque piece of artwork, man’s interaction with nature is one of ambiguity, Brakhage himself describing the act as “man felling the tree of the world.” However, sensitive as Brakhage may on occasion consider himself, he is frankly a bit too much of a patriarchal caveman not to tip the balance in his favour: he with his axe and his dog, trudging through the snow, was always going to end up looking more majestic than ecocidal and why wouldn’t it? It’s his visual poetry, and I’m sure he left considerably less of a carbon footprint on this planet than the most of us.

The parenthetical sections Prelude and Part IV are, to my mind, simultaneously the film’s most kaleidoscopic and strongest points, with the middle sections focusing on his mountain-climbing and his baby the least engaging, simply for being the most standard bits of filmmaking. The direct engagement with the celluloid itself, most particularly through the method of scratching patterns into it, is a beautiful precursor to the painting films of his last 15 years. Dog Star Man is wonderful in its ability to express so much of Brakhage the man – both the poetic genius and the patriarchal jerk, and both somehow come across with flair and charm in this essential milestone of the American avant-garde.

 

*****

Desistfilm (Stan Brakhage, 1954)

 

An engaging if rough-round-the-edges look at sociality and sexuality in group settings, Desistfilm certainly feels like one of Brakhage’s more “acted” films and, holding the place as one of his very few sound films, makes distinctly impressive use of sonic/visual juxtaposition with a great, noisy soundtrack that sits somewhere between free jazz and the first wave of industrial artists like Nurse With Wound – all the more impressive, 5 years before Ornette Coleman’s The Shape of Jazz to Come. Overall, Desistfilm is a slight, yet compelling, preferable alternative to the ever-overrated (albeit funnier) Pull My Daisy.

 

***1/2

Star Spangled to Death (Ken Jacobs, 1957-2004)

Between its anarchic genderfuckery in the form of Jack Smith, its sociopolitical cynicism and its extended, barbed, and wholly sardonic use of found-footage from throughout Hollywood’s history, Star Spangled to Death may potentially warrant the bizarre honour of being the American Underground’s radical response to Myra Breckinridge. However, and I say this without a hint of sarcasm, compared to the tragically disorganised and honestly quite dull 94 minutes of fairly uneventful camp posturing, Star Spangled‘s 7 hours genuinely fly by.

Building on the avant-garde’s propensity for creating film analysis in the form of film itself, Star Spangled exploits 20th Century Hollywood and TV broadcasting’s dominance over the Western world to, in turn, critique that world itself. By focusing itself multiple times on, but by no means limiting itself to, milestone figures of cinema’s development Al Jolson and Mickey Mouse (and the indisputable influence of blackface minstrelsy over both), it allows the intersectional ideologies of Capitalism and racism flowing through the film industry to be revealed in clearer terms than even Comolli and Narboni might have achieved.

Throughout the film, text appears, sometimes for only one or two frames, often challenging the assertions of documented figures such as Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, and it invites us to become Laura Mulvey’s partially-dreaded “possessive spectator” – disrupting and restarting the film as many or as few times as we care to read Jacob’s comments – in so doing, we engage in some of the same techniques as him.

However, Star Spangled exists not solely as a found-footage documentary, nor as an essay film, rather as the synthetical product of these two dialectics which, in turn, results in what may only be described as “fiction” – Jacobs and fellow artist friends playing “characters” such as Jack Smith’s “The Spirit Not of Life But of Living.” As is the case with Jacob’s Little Stabs at Happiness, there are wistful, tragicomic references to the fallings-out Jacobs experienced with Smith and co. before the end of the film’s production. Star Spangled of course, is all the more poignant for its gestation period outliving not only Smith’s firm friendship with Jacobs, but also Smith, himself, who died of complications related to AIDS the lion’s share of 15 years before the film’s completion. In the final chapter reaches a level of deep profundity when it references Smith’s apparent inability to shake off the internalised queerphobia instilled by a hardline Christian education, believing himself deserving of his fate, followed rapidly by footage of the anti-Gulf War 2 protests in New York, in which Jacobs believed he had encountered Smith’s ghost, in the guise of a similar-looking young protester, leading chants and drum circles.

Star Spangled to Death is a blisteringly angry, bitingly funny, but most of all desperately vital masterpiece of American Underground cinema, documentary and anti-kyriarchal self-expression.

 

*****