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Cronenberg curates Warhol

‘He created his own universe and became its star’

Director David Cronenberg explains the debt he owes to Andy Warhol’s bizarre and chillingly prophetic work

David Cronenberg
Monday September 11, 2006
The Guardian

EMPIRE IS THE CLASSIC. It was outrageous—yet somehow it worked. An eight-hour shot of the Empire State Building, it was high concept, not in the Hollywood sense, but the art sense. It’s got potency, resonance. Andy even said the Empire State Building was a star. It’s so New York, which was the centre of the artistic universe at the time, the 1960s. That’s why I decided to begin the Andy Warhol show I am curating with Empire.

I can’t recall when I first saw a Warhol. I feel as though he was always in my consciousness. I started making films at the same time he did, and the New York underground scene is what influenced me—and that was Andy. He didn’t think you needed access to anything to do what he was doing—just grab a camera, do your own thing, and it’ll work.

Preparing this exhibition, I was initially planning to ignore the films. It seemed too obvious to bring a film-maker in and for him to choose the films. But I didn’t have to dig deep to realise it would be a major oversight. Andy started the silk screens, the film-making and the Death and Disaster series at the same time. Everything influenced everything.

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Not I by Samuel Beckett

A TV screening in 1970s of this mouth muttering in darkness was my first introduction to Beckett‘s work and a very memorable and disturbing introduction it was. It made no sense at the time since I had no cultural context in which to place it, it felt like being plugged directly into some kind of fever dream. The brilliance of Beckett’s work is reinforced by the way the repetitions and evasions of this piece often came to mind during fevers of my own, those moments when you’re ill and trying to sleep and the brain is caught in a recursive loop from which there seems to be no escape. Beckett at his best succeeds in fixing these twilight states in a way that few other writers achieve so it’s good to be able to see this again. The version at Ubuweb is the BBC rescreening from 1990 that included an introduction by Billie Whitelaw.

Not I (1973)
149.6 mb (avi), 15’06”
Starring and Introduced by Billie Whitelaw

Not I takes place in a pitch black space illuminated only by a single beam of light. This light illuminates an actress’s mouth. The mouth utters a monologue of fragmented, jumbled sentences which gradually coelesces into a narrative about a woman who has suffered an unpleasant experience. The title comes from the character’s repeated insistence that the events she describes did not happen to her.

The stage directions also call for a character called ‘the Auditor’ who wears a black robe and can be dimly seen at the back of the stage, occasionally raising its hands in a gesture of impatience. When Beckett came to be involved in staging the play, he found that he was unable to place the Auditor in a stage position that pleased him, and consequently allowed the character to be omitted from those productions. However, he did not decide to cut the character from the published script, and whether or not the character is used in production seems to be at the discretion of individual producers. As he wrote to two American directors in 1986: “He is very difficult to stage (light–position) and may well be of more harm than good. For me the play needs him but I can do without him. I have never seen him function effectively.”

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• Film by Samuel Beckett

Inland Empire

David Lynch’s new film receives a screening at the Venice Film Festival this week where the director will also receive a lifetime achievement award. Lynch has been working on Inland Empire for about two years and the result sounds like it’s going to as personal and idiosyncratic as his best works. Time to start getting excited, in other words. The New York Film Festival will also be screening the film and indieWire had this to say about it:

A Polish woman looks, intently, into someone or something … an actress (Laura Dern) is warned that her new movie is cursed … a rabbit-headed family perform sit-com actions on a stage set as if engaged in a solemn ritual … Such are just a few of the elements and recurrent motifs of The Inland Empire (sic), a mesmerizing surge through countless looking glasses that lands us on the far side of the land of nightmares. Lynch’s first foray into high-definition video is just as visually stunning as his work in 35mm, but the long gestation period of his new film (he shot on and off over two years, and wrote as he went) has allowed him to give his own uniquely epic form to many of his primary concerns: the exploitation of young women, the mutability of identity, the omnivorousness of Hollywood.

Justin Theroux, who played film director Adam Kesher in Mulholland Drive, will also star. He discusses working with Lynch in a recent interview here.

Update: David Lynch given lifetime award.

Sans Soleil

Chris Marker might be considered the Borges of cinema if that designation didn’t seem limiting, with its implication that literature is superior to cinema, that filmmakers only receive true qualification as artists through comparison to more venerable creators, and so on. Marker, then, is Marker, although who Marker is remains obscure, as this article notes:

Some say his father was an American soldier, others that he (Marker) was a paratrooper in the Second World War. Still others, that he comes to us from an alien planet. Or the future. Throughout his career, he has rarely been interviewed, and even more rarely photographed. It is said that he responds to requests for his photograph with a picture of a cat – his favorite animal.

The possibility that he comes from the future is a compelling conceit when his most famous work, La Jetée, is a very subtle film about time travel (later remade with a huge budget and no subtlety at all by Terry Gilliam as Twelve Monkeys). JG Ballard and others have enthused about La Jetée for years but my favourite Marker film remains Sans Soleil, a meditation on time, memory, travel and culture, blending documentary images with a semi-fictional (?) voice-over narrative that resists easy summary. In this respect it parallels some of Borges’ essays or “ficciones”; like many of Borges’ best works it manages to be both personal and universal, drawing connections which seem obvious until you realise that no one has pointed them out in quite that way before. An equally fascinating companion to Sans Soleil is Marker’s CD-ROM, Immemory, a Mac-only release that’s already out-of-date in software terms (and since Classic stopped working on my Mac even I can’t use it for the time being).

This site presents a critical reading of Sans Soleil as a rather disjointed web experience. And you can read the text of the film here. Needless to say, none of these are very satisfying at all without the accompaniment of Marker’s images.

The Invasion of Thunderbolt Pagoda II

Long, Strange Trip for a Hypnotic Film

By James Gaddy
August 27, 2006
The New York Times

IT TOOK 38 years, but Ira Cohen’s cult film, The Invasion of Thunderbolt Pagoda, which was first screened in 1968 at the high point of the psychedelic hippie head rush, is now commercially available. Given the close calls, the long absences and his chaotic archival system, Mr. Cohen, 71, is a little surprised himself.

“It didn’t really involve patience,” he said in his apartment on West 106th Street in Manhattan, surrounded by books stacked waist high. “It was just reality.”

In 1961 Mr. Cohen built a room in his New York loft lined with large panels of Mylar plastic, a sort of bendable mirror that causes images to crackle and swirl in hypnotic, sometimes beautiful patterns. After a few years experimenting with the technique in photographs, he invited his friends from the downtown scene—like Beverly Grant, Vali Myers and Tony Conrad—to make a film.

The finished product sets languid images of opium smokers (in fantastic makeup and costumes) against a droning, chanting, tabla-beating soundtrack by Angus MacLise, the original drummer of the Velvet Underground. Xavier Garcia Bardon, film curator at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, said the film is an important artifact of the era.

“It’s like going on an ecstatic journey to another planet, full of magical beings, animals and plants,” he said. “It’s a hallucinatory, almost trance-inducing experience.”

Mr. Cohen left New York in 1969, shortly after the film’s first screening, for art- and drug-filled travels in India, Ethiopia and Nepal. He roamed through the 1970s and 80s. While he was away, the film’s legend grew, even as the original few copies slowly disappeared.

Mr. Cohen said he dropped off the original print at DuArt Film Laboratories before he left; the staff reached him in Kathmandu in 1978, asking for $300 in storage fees. He asked the lab to send the print to the Museum of Modern Art, but the museum has no record of receiving it.

“If you have money, you can store it any way you want,” he said ruefully. “But for some people, $280, $300 changes the way things turn out.”

It wasn’t until a compilation of Mr. MacLise’s music came out in 1999, 20 years after his death, that interest in distributing the film began. Jay Babcock, editor of the underground magazine Arthur, and Will Swofford, a composer who was then studying at Wesleyan University, independently tracked Mr. Cohen down.

Mr. Babcock said he was curious to see how Mr. Cohen’s early Mylar photographs would look like in a film. “I had dreamed for years what it would look like,” Mr. Babcock said. He began pressing for distribution rights.

Meanwhile Mr. Swofford had persuaded Mr. Cohen, whose health has been failing (he’s had two strokes in the last year), to let him operate as an archivist and agent. Mr. Swofford eventually found 40 cans of unused outtakes in a green trunk, buried beneath books, papers, slides and assorted creative runoff.

“No one had touched the film for 25 years,” Mr. Swofford said.

Because the original version lasts only 22 minutes, he began beefing>up the content for the DVD age. Mr. Cohen wanted to use part of the found film, an eight-minute section in which he is buried in mud, as a prelude; Mr. Swofford used the nearly four hours of outtakes to fashion Brain Damage, a 30-minute coda. The DVD also features a slide show of Mr. Cohen’s photographs, audio recitations of his poetry and two alternate soundtracks to the film.

One of these versions was by the band Acid Mothers Temple, which had recorded a live soundtrack to the film at the music festival Kill Your Timid Notion, in Dundee, Scotland, in 2003.

“I had no idea what a DVD could be,” Mr. Cohen said. “I would have just put the film on there.”

The film was released last month, the result of a collaboration between Bastet, Arthur magazine’s music and video label, and Saturnalia, Mr. Swofford’s label, with distribution limited to the magazine’s Web site and a few independent music retailers. Thanks to labor donated by both parties, the initial 1,000-copy print run cost about $8,000.

But $8,000 is still a lot of money for a magazine like Arthur, a break-even labor-of-love venture. “It’s shameful, with the hundreds of millions of dollars spent on movies every year in Hollywood, it’s left to a penniless publication to put this out,” Mr. Babcock said.

Yet he remains optimistic. The film received positive reviews when screened at the 2006 Whitney Biennial. Next month Mr. Bardon will hold a screening with live music in Brussels, and Tony Conrad, now a professor in the department of media studies at the University of Buffalo, will screen the film in Atlanta.

Mr. Babcock is already making plans to release Mr. Cohen’s two other films if Arthur can recoup the investment on this one. “We hope this is just the beginning,” he says.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Invasion of Thunderbolt Pagoda