Category Archives for “Camera Obscura” column by Paul Cullum

A tribute to Eagle Pennell by Paul Cullum (Arthur, 2002)

first published in Arthur No. 1 (October, 2002)

THE EAGLE HAS LANDED
By Paul Cullum

“Life has been your art. You have set yourself to music. Your days are your sonnets.”
—Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

Like punk legends, indie film pioneers are going to start dying off soon. And in a microcosm defined by perpetual youth, dissolution and decay don’t have much room to ramp up, making it harder to get used to the idea. I guess it’s never pretty.

Eagle Pennell was politely called a regional filmmaker by those unaccustomed to his kind, and like many in his native Texas, he had an outsized impression of his own identity that ultimately destroyed him. In 1978, when A-list Hollywood was made up of veterans of Roger Corman’s shoestring epics, and everyone else in America with dreams to burn now worked for Corman to replace them, the first inklings of what we now think of as independent film came courtesy of people who were too clueless or inept to follow that simple protocol. One of them was Eagle, whose shaggy dog buddy comedy The Whole Shootin’ Match pioneered that Austin-specific sort of epic underachieverdom that Slacker later turned into an anthropological treatise. But Eagle’s laconic dreamers, drunk as a lord and impossibly balanced on the thin line that separates ambition from nostalgia, were more than just literary conceits. They were Eagle in a nutshell. Like we used to say about him, the man belonged in the Alcohol of Fame; he put pop alcoholics like us to shame.

The Whole Shootin’ Match, based on an earlier 16mm short called Hell of a Note, starred Lou Perry (nee Perryman) and Sonny Carl Davis as a couple of perpetual fuck-ups trying to work as insulation blowers or something equally improbable, and retiring to the comfort of cold beers and fevered dreams once the going gets tough. (In Hell of a Note, they laid asphalt, until they were fired for not realizing you weren’t supposed to pee on it until it had cooled off.) This woozy testament to the comically disenfranchised, made for twenty grand in borrowed money, was also historically significant in that it was the film that Robert Redford was famously watching at the 1978 inauguration of the U.S. Film Festival in Park City, Utah when he had the epiphany that it was strays like this who could best benefit from such a festival, or something like his soon-established Sundance Institute.

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“The Gelded Age” by Paul Cullum (Arthur, 2005)

Originally published in Arthur No. 14 (January 2005)

The Gelded Age
A “Camera Obscura” column by Paul Cullum

CAMERA OBSCURA is a regular column examining the world and its lesser trafficked tributaries, recesses and psychic fallout through the filters of film, video and DVD.

***

Discussed herein:

Bill Hicks Live
(featuring One Night Stand, Relentless and Revelations)
(Rykodisc DVD)

Love All the People: Letters, Lyrics, Routines
By Bill Hicks
(Soft Skull Press)

Men of Crisis: The Harvey Wallinger Story
Directed by Woody Allen
(unreleased, 1972; available at UCLA Film Archives as part of a preserved PBS special, The Politics of Woody Allen)

* * *

“So that’s what this is about—a fucking robbery?”
—Bruce Willis in Die Hard

I know all the stages of Kuebler-Ross. I know that denial precedes anger, followed by bargaining, depression and acceptance. I know that conspiracy is a word applied by those in consensus to marginalize attempts to find solace in patterns.

But as I write this 100 hours after a collective pole-ax to the expectations of half this country and the whole world beyond, I’m wracked with the queasy suspicion that the bloodless coup dreaded by Sinclair Lewis in It Can’t Happen Here, Nathanael West in A Cool Million, George Orwell in 1984, Philip K. Dick in The Man in the High Castle or even John Milius in Red Dawn has happened on our watch, with our complicit ambivalence.

Already, blood is starting to seep through the hairline fractures in the body politic. Greg Palast estimates 110,000 spoiled votes in overwhelmingly Democratic precincts in Ohio, one of the last punch-card voting states, hobbled once again by hanging or pregnant chads. Heavily Hispanic areas of New Mexico, favored 2-to-1 for Kerry, are reporting a Bush landslide of as much as 68 percent. Exit polls in all the swing states are at variance with the final tally, in ways that uniformly favor the incumbent. Counties using Diebold’s optical scanners in Florida went overwhelmingly for Bush, regardless of party affiliation. In fact, Diebold and ES&S control 80 percent of the electronic voting machines in use, and their technical porousness and capacity for manipulation is legion; ES&S was established with crypto-right-wing Ahmanson family money, and the two brothers who founded it now sit atop both companies.

This doesn’t include the 155,000 provisional ballots in Ohio, which are overwhelmingly Democratic, since no one was challenging Republican voters, nor those driven away by all-day lines, bottle-necked by a lack of available voting machines. Reports are trickling in of door-to-door campaigns in black neighborhoods in Pennsylvania steering voters to the wrong polling stations, spreading disinformation, lying and intimidating. It’s only the 3 million-vote point spread which makes this seem inconceivable (1.5 million of it from Florida, province of the next Republican president). But this is Karl Rove in a nutshell: “The whole art of war consists in a well-reasoned and extremely circumspect defensive, followed by rapid and audacious attack.” (To quote him quoting Napoleon.) In time, we may recognize this as the most massive electoral fraud in the history of the republic. In a month, we may be calf-birthing deep into Constitutional crisis.

Which means that all the gushing liberal guilt you read—the thumb-sucking, head-holding, hand-wringing, soul-searching—is wrong. It’s working backwards from a conclusion, which is what journalism does. It’s re-legislating the ’60s. It is Rove’s bandwagon theory taken macro: In the final moments of a race, people fall in line behind the most likely winner. Two or three more elections like this, and rationalists will begin rethinking the Enlightenment.

Except that there may not be any more election—at least not ones that will matter. Because the House is controlled by Tom DeLay, who is on record as saying that “Democrats are irrelevant”—shut out of committee meetings, starved out of floor time, ignored and forgotten. Because Bill Frist controls the Senate—put there in the White House-engineered putsch that sidelined Trent Lott as a racist and reactionary. Already, they’re floating the idea of “streamlining” Senate procedure: Striking down the cloture rule, which mandates a two-thirds vote to end a filibuster, or bypassing the seniority “tradition” in naming committee chairmanships. What happened to Arlen Specter after he counseled against trying to get anti-abortion judges through the Senate Judiciary Committee is just the opening salvo in the battle they’re fighting now: Near right vs. far. And without the filibuster, you won’t see a Democrat on C-Span for the next four years.

Republicans are up two seats in the House because of redistricting in Texas, a move they will roll out to all 50 state legislatures—particularly Democratic strongholds with Republican governors, like New York or California. Legislative districts reshaped as fingerprint whorls means they won’t even have to steal elections anymore. Suddenly, aberrations in the political landscape that seemed inexplicable at the time—the California recall, Patriot Act II, Rehnquist’s mysterious illness—seem strategically prescient in retrospect. “Look who they wanted to run against,” says Deep Throat in All the President’s Men. Howard Dean taps the progressive youth motherlode, and he’s impaled on his own scream. Dan Rather turns his folksy paranoia on his co-Texan demagogues, and he’s sandbagged by a reliable source. Tom Daschle publishes a book telling how they make the sausage, and they hunt him down to the ends of the earth, like Stalin did Trotsky.

Rove, the bastard son of a Mormon bounder, has spent his entire 57 years wanting to be Mark Hanna, the strategic visionary who insured Republican Party rule (with the exception of Wilson during WWI) from 1898 to the Depression 30 years later. Barbara Bush, far more the genetic cauldron of her son than his pusillanimous father, is the only public figure I know of to call Roosevelt a traitor to his class. Repealing the ’60s is just warming up for this crowd: They want to dismantle the New Deal—privatize Medicare, Social Security and public education; shift the tax burden downward; loot the treasury; strip the common from the wealth. Think Pottersville with carcinogens and gated communities.

And just as the Pentagon screened The Battle of Algiers as a training film for tracking insurgents, someone has broken down 1984 as a how-to manual, a mere two decades late. This finally explains the war: Why they jettisoned contingency plans, failed to quell looting, laid off the Baathist army, left arms caches unattended, ostracized Sunni clerics. The goal is not to win the war or the peace. The goal is to perpetuate conflict, a misdirection to mask the great gravy train robbery here at home. Already, the election is off the front pages, replaced by Tallulah. Deep Throat said that too: “Follow the money.”

Conservative enforcer Grover Norquist, in typically gracious fashion, said of the Democrats as the new permanent minority: “Any farmer will tell you that certain animals run around and are unpleasant, but when they’re fixed then they are happy and sedate. They are contented and cheerful. They don’t go around peeing on the furniture and such.” (This is the man who gave us “Bipartisanship is date rape.”)

Welcome to the Gelded Age.

Laff Riot

“You have a sense of humor. I’m in favor of jokes. They have a political value. They are a release for the cowardly and the impotent.”
—Graham Greene, The Comedians

The Gilded Age—the first one—was coined by Mark Twain and incubated the likes of Will Rogers, muckraking, Yellow Journalism and the Progressive Movement to begin with. Laughing in the maw of disconsolate fear is an American institution, albeit a lonely one. Lenny Bruce comes to mind, delivered to the cool respite of bathroom tile. Mort Sahl, finally barking himself inside-out. Garry Trudeau, whose Tanner ’88 (currently revived and updated on the Sundance Channel) has much improved with time, and whose script Zoo Plane, on the Washington press corps, is once again relevant. You won’t find them on stamps, and a quarter-century of Saturday Night Live’s loutish corporate apologia would indicate otherwise, but there are comedy heroes and martyrs out there. And at the top of the list is Bill Hicks.

Raised a strict fundamentalist in Houston and then Austin, Texas, Hicks was the architect of the angry liberal persona eventually inherited by Dennis Leary, Dennis Miller (briefly), Bill Maher and, most notably, Chris Rock. (“It’s weird, those are the guys I really miss,” Rock told me once in an interview, remembering their days together at Catch a Rising Star in New York.) Until his death in 1992 of pancreatic cancer, Hicks remained resolutely apoplectic over flag-wavers, Bible-thumpers, ad weasels, marketeers, television, government malfeasance and the first Gulf War (“There never was a war. A war is where two armies are fighting.”). This DVD collects his half-hour standup from HBO’s One-Night Stand, his breakout 1991 performance at the Montreal Comedy Festival (Relentless) and Revelations, his crowning performance at London’s Dominion Theater, plus an excellent Channel 4 documentary titled It’s Just a Ride. In addition, Soft Skull Press has published Love All the People, a collection of interviews, performance transcripts (many of them available as bootlegs), the John Lahr New Yorker profile which chronicled his expulsion from the David Letterman show (and Hicks’s 31-page cri de coeur to Lahr detailing the specifics) and Lahr’s extended foreword. They’re both great. Buy them. Tell others.

Here’s Hicks on the value of drugs, and how he closed his Montreal show:

“How about a positive LSD story, just once. That would be newsworthy, don’t you think? ‘Today, a young man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration, that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively; there is no such thing as death, life is only a dream and we are the imagination of ourselves. Here’s Tom with the weather.”

Another rarefied example of political humor is the little-seen Men of Crisis: The Harvey Wallinger Story, written and directed by Woody Allen, Hicks’s acknowledged main influence. A parody of the CBS series Men of Crisis (as well as possibly the 1972 Richard Leacock Cuban Missile Crisis documentary Crisis), this half-hour short, shot in 1972 in four days for WNET in New York, mixes the documentary format of Take the Money and Run with the newsreel gags of Zelig to profile a Nixon advisor—a Kissinger wolf by way of John Dean nebbish—given to goofy rationalizations (“We decided to bomb Laos for a very strategic reason—we were not happy with the way it was spelled.”). Louise Lasser is on hand as his first wife, as is a painfully fresh-faced Diane Keaton to ridicule his sexual prowess. In the wraparound WNET studio interview, broadcast under the ironic title The Politics of Woody Allen, Allen rejects the mantle of activist comic. “My personal feelings don’t enter into this, they’re so hostile,” he says. But that’s not to say he is without valid political instincts:

“The good cartoons,” he says, “are where mice beat the hell out of cats. I like that.”

* * *

DVDs/videos courtesy of Cinefile, the official video store of Arthur. Contact Cinefile at (310) 312-8836 or http://www.cinefilevideo.com.

“The Concrete Wilderness” by Paul Cullum (Arthur, 2004)

Originally published in Arthur No. 13 (November 2004)

The Concrete Wilderness
A “Camera Obscura” column by Paul Cullum

CAMERA OBSCURA is a regular column examining the world and its lesser trafficked tributaries, recesses and psychic fallout through the filters of film, video and DVD.

* * *
Discussed herein:

Medium Cool (1969)
Directed by Haskell Wexler
(Paramount Home Video)

Look Out, Haskell, It’s Real (2001)
Directed by Paul Cronin
(www.thestickingplace.com)

Tell Them Who You Are (2004)
Directed by Mark Wexler
(currently awaiting distribution)

Soldiers Pay (2004)
Directed by David O. Russell, Tricia Regan and Juan Carlos Zaldivar
(DVD extra with Uncovered: The War on Iraq, directed by Robert Greenwald, available through http://www.cinemalibrestudio.com).

* * *

“This is a potential throw of the dice that could bring the media on our heads and cut the Democratic Party in half; my view is that we would have by far the larger half.” —Speechwriter Pat Buchanan in an internal 1972 White House memo advocating confrontation as policy

In these last dark days before November, as we count down to occupation or deliverance, rage or terror, the mind reclaimed or compulsory reeducation from the soles of the feet up, one film lights our way clear. In 1968, John Wayne directed The Green Berets, which famously ends on the beach at Da Nang with the sun setting in the east—a special effect of such audacity that it rivals the scripted ways we’ve choreographed combat ever since. Superman could sooner circle the earth and turn back time.

But that’s not the film I’m thinking of. I am thinking of its polar opposite.

In 1968, Haskell Wexler took his reputation as A-list cinematographer, respected documentarian, verité pathfinder, his Oscar for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and his good-faith line of credit at the studios and rolled them all on one admitted act of madness. Hired to direct a film version of the novel The Concrete Wilderness by the inmates running the institution at Paramount—Peter Bart, Robert Evans and Charlie Bluhdorn—Wexler wrote a script, drew up a budget, hired a cast and then, without telling anybody, junked it all to make the movie he wanted. So instead of a young boy cultivating pigeons in Central Park, we have Robert Forster playing a news cameraman oblivious to his role in the news around him, documenting the pigeons drawn to Lincoln Park in Chicago in August, 1968—the ones who would justify the police state being advocated inside the Democratic Convention hall to clamp down the era. In the process, Wexler managed to capture the one battle royale at the crest of the culture war on 35mm film. With the Clinton brain trust (Carville, Begala) now steering Kerry to port, highlighting the war hero-turned-agitator, and with the Reagan brain trust (Peggy Noonan, Michael Deaver, possibly Lyn Nofziger) reportedly guiding Bush to starboard, with its “Swift Boat Veterans” and “Hanoi Jane” alarmism, that war is still being fought today.

What paralyzes film as a medium of topicality is that it is automatically at least three years past its sell-by date by the time you see it—the time it takes a script to gestate and gel, executives to deliberate, actors to commit, the big trucks to roll, months of editorial synthesis and the media to be alerted. You’d have to look to Soderbergh and Erin Brockovich or Traffic, or before that David O. Russell’s still underrated Three Kings, nominally about the first Gulf War, to find studio directors willing to engage the topical issues of the day. If conflict is the crux of character, and the world today stoked with conflict to burn, no wonder so many four-wheel-drive studio vehicles wind up rusted and abandoned, axle-deep in mud.

Medium Cool remains the one narrative feature which proves the exception: Conceived in January during the Tet Offensive, it was constantly deflecting off the times throughout production. As such, it marks a kind of travelogue of the ‘60s: Lyndon Johnson declined the nomination in March, throwing the August convention into free-for-all. Martin Luther King is shot in April, the ghettoes burn and Forster and soundman Peter Bonerz (later of The Bob Newhart Show) are sent to “Resurrection City,” the tent city on the Washington Mall housing the remnants of King’s Poor People’s March, or to debrief black activists in their Chicago apartment. Campaign workers are interviewed outside Kennedy headquarters; when Robert Kennedy is assassinated a month later, the film recreates the interior of the Ambassador Hotel kitchen where he was shot (off the line, “So it’s on to Chicago, and let’s win there”) and sends its fake news crew to the actual funeral. We get probably the first discussion of the Kennedy assassination (the first one) in a Hollywood film, and certainly the first mention of the dangers of artificial sweeteners.

Much of this context is to be found in a fine companion piece inexplicably left off the DVD—Paul Cronin’s Look Out Haskell, It’s Real: The Making of ‘Medium Cool’, a 55-minute documentary currently screening on the Sundance Channel. Cronin has contributed to books on Cassavetes and Herzog and made films on Alexander Mackendrick, the director of The Sweet Smell of Success, and Amos Vogel, founder of New York’s Cinema 16. Here, a cavalcade of ’60s action figures sit for interviews—Studs Terkel (listed in Medium Cool’s credits as “Our Man in Chicago”), SDS activist-turned-author Todd Gitlin, Chicago 7 lawyer Leonard Weinglass—or are visible in outtakes: Allen Ginsberg wanders through the frame in Lincoln Park; Jesse Jackson stands atop a car in D.C., fist raised.

Buried beneath Medium Cool’s breakneck speed and ruthless experimentalism are any number of lean-to set pieces that could have been—and sometimes were—movies in themselves Buried beneath Medium Cool’s breakneck speed and ruthless experimentalism are any number of lean-to set pieces that could have been—and sometimes were—movies in themselves (last-minute floor passes to the convention hall were arranged by Warren Beatty, and similar shots found their way into The Parallax View; a subplot of a TV station forwarding demonstration footage to the police and FBI is basically the dramatic engine of Under Fire, relocated to El Salvador).

But it was the Chicago riots that earn the film its purple heart. In the face of Mayor Daley’s mandate to police to “Clear the fuckers out of the city,” and armed with hipster recon from producer Jonathan Haze (Seymour in the original Little Shop of Horrors), who was partying with the future Chicago 7 every night, Wexler put his first-time actress, Verna Bloom (Dean Wormer’s wife in Animal House), literally in harm’s way—in a manner that makes Herzog seem restrained. At the very moment that Russian tanks were rolling through Prague, we can experience U.S. armored personnel carriers and Jeeps mounted with fully-loaded 50-caliber machine guns subjugating the Windy City and hippies in football helmets piling up park benches, medics at the ready. Chants of “Pigs eat shit” and “Pigs are whores” are intercut with a cop clubbing a protester, shouting, “You stinking commie!” (giving a whole new cluster of meanings to Carl Sandburg’s “hog butcher of the world”). And through it all snakes Bloom in a bright yellow dress, as incongruous in her surroundings as the little girl in red in the otherwise black-and-white Schindler’s List. In the aftermath, we see the carnage in real time, while a disembodied woman’s voice wails on the soundtrack, “You motherfuckers!” Among the victims are Wexler himself, his eyes being flushed out with water, debilitated by a tear gas canister fired point blank at the camera.

Yet for all its celebrated verité, the film is awash in Godard. A poster of Belmondo from Breathless hangs over Forster’s fireplace; the bookended car crashes are airlifted straight out of Weekend; and the final shot is Wexler himself, who turns the camera on the audience—the tracking shot that closes Contempt, superimposed over the old Paramount newsreels—to a chant of “The whole world is watching.” Forster’s character is named John Cassolaris as a concession to John Cassavetes, who was originally slated to play the part under his own name, and Bloom’s character can be glimpsed in the opening cocktail party scene, an hour before she is introduced (she precedes the line “beaten to death by a mob”). And a death is foretold on the radio minutes before it occurs.

This extends to the line that gives the documentary its title—“Look out, Haskell—it’s real!”—which appears before the CS canister goes off in their face. It was, by Wexler’s own admission, added in post-production, since war zone conditions prevented them from shooting synch sound. And the speaker of that line? Haskell’s son Mark Wexler, who has just directed a reportedly irascible portrait of his father called Tell Them Who You Are, in the fashion of Aiyana Elliott’s The Ballad of Ramblin’ Jack, so new that it has only shown twice at the Toronto Film Festival (where Roger Ebert raved about it). This is the Haskell Wexler who was fired from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and The Conversation, who famously clashed with Michael Moore on Canadian Bacon and who risked industry condemnation by interviewing the Weathermen in Underground, which was subpoenaed by the FBI, and following Jane Fonda to North Vietnam to shoot Introduction to the Enemy (he also joined her for both Coming Home and Klute, for which he won his second Oscar). Can’t wait to see it.

* * *

And where are the cinematic rabblerousers of our own day? Well, on the verge of releasing I Heart Huckabee’s, his first film in five years, Three Kings director David O. Russell has taken the occasion of Warner’s planned re-release of his 1999 film to make a half-hour documentary on Iraq, The Sequel.

Soldiers Pay (declarative, not possessive), co-directed with Tricia Regan and Juan Carlos Zaldivar, catches up with Three Kings bit players, real-life Kelly’s Heroes, armchair Ottomans and fruit-salad generals who somehow got sucked into Operation Desert Nam. Between the water-rationed Marines describing Haliburton mercenaries who pull down $300K, or supply sergeants out “requisitioning” computers to play videogames on, we get the occasional 1,000-word picture, like a khaki-clad warrior squatting next to graffiti that reads: “Ha Ha—Our God’s Better Than Your God.”

When Warner’s caved to political pressure and scrapped the whole thing, microdistributor Cinema Libre stepped in and offered to piggyback the featurette onto Part 3 of Robert Greenwald’s Anti-Bush Tetralogy, Uncovered: The War in Iraq (Unprecedented and Outfoxed are on DVD; next up is Unconstitutional, on the Patriot Act). Meanwhile, as a land bridge linking the two (films and wars), consider this scene from a New York Times profile that ran September 12, 1999, two years before you know what:

“After listening to Mr. Bush’s remarks to the Hollywood crowd, Mr. Russell decided to tell him that Three Kings would be coming out just before the primaries and did not reflect favorably on his father’s leadership in the Gulf War. ‘You could see this look of uncomprehending concern and panic wash over his face,’ Mr. Russell recalls. Mr. Bush again seemed to be studying Mr. Russell’s clothes. ‘And then he immediately snapped into Presidential mode, and said, ‘Well, am I going to have to go finish the job?’”

* * *

DVDs/videos courtesy of Cinefile, the official video store of Arthur. Contact Cinefile at (310) 312-8836 or http://www.cinefilevideo.com.

“Rove Elephant” by Paul Cullum (Arthur, 2004)

Originally published in Arthur No. 12 (September 2004)

Rove Elephant
A “Camera Obscura” column by Paul Cullum

CAMERA OBSCURA is a regular column examining the world and its lesser trafficked tributaries, recesses and psychic fallout through the filters of film, video and DVD.

* * *

BUSH’S BRAIN
Directed by Michael Paradies Shoob and Joseph Mealey

“The whole art of war consists of a well-reasoned and extremely circumspect defense, followed by rapid and audacious attack.” — Napoleon

“Controversy? … What controversy?”

Such is the tagline in ads for Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11, his excoriation of the Bush imperial presidency—devised in guilt and darkest rancor, nutrient-fed at Cannes and currently growing geometrically on the steroid hash of raw media frenzy. Although it’s not widely remembered, Moore may have tipped not one, but two national elections now with his last-minute full-court antics. His very public support of third-party candidate Ralph Nader had a decisive effect in 2000, regardless of how he parses it now. But back in 1998, three weeks before the mid-term elections, Moore sent out a series of mass e-mailings on his frustration over the impeachment proceedings, and urging angry young disenfranchised liberals to hold their nose and vote Democrat. That was the election that unseated Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America foot soldiers, and a woozy punditocracy attributed it to a last-minute appearance by Clinton on Black Entertainment Television, which supposedly energized his latent black base. But everybody I know saw those e-mails; they managed, like they say in Network, to articulate the popular rage:

“Yes, most of the Democrats suck,” read Michael Moore Newsletter #11 from TVNatFans@aol.com on October 8, 1998 at 21:44:47 EDT. “I rarely vote for the sorry, wishy-washy losers. But this election is not about how I feel about them—it’s about us using them to whack the right wing for good. Imagine if the Democrats are voted in by overwhelming numbers (when all the pundits are predicting a Republican landslide). The message would be loud and clear to all these new Democrats—the American public wants the agenda of the Christian right removed from the halls of our United States Congress!”

This led, in a straight line, to Moore’s career as author, propagandist, gadfly, jester, freedom fighter and hero to the French. And power to him. Except now it looks like he may be sucking up all the oxygen in the room. Because another political documentary which could be of crucial benefit to an undecided electorate—more than Control Room, the Al-Jazeera doc; more than The Hunting of the President, about open season on Clinton—is apparently not slipstreaming into theaters behind him, but is instead perilously close to going unreleased in time for November’s election.

Bush’s Brain, co-directed by Michael Paradies Shoob and Joseph Mealey, presents in horrifying, clarifying detail the sinister ministrations of advisor-without-portfolio Karl Rove, who occupies the post position on George W. Bush’s speed-dial, and who his enemies liken to no less than a co-president of the United States. Politics as policy, the Big Lie, junkyard dog attack ads, means justifying ends, operating out beyond the event horizon—all are part and parcel of what the film calls “the mark of Rove.” Based on the book Bush’s Brain: How Karl Rove Made George W. Bush Presidential by reporters James C. Moore and Wayne Slater, the film features a who’s who of talking heads—Molly Ivins, Joe Wilson, Sen. Max Cleland—even Bill Clinton from a 2000 California recall photo op—in charting Rove’s rise and rise from the Texas of Ann Richards and Jim Hightower to one that is remorselessly Republican. And while the two-decade-old extranea of Texas electoral politics may seem of limited interest to a country with bigger problems on its plate right about now, it is said that Washington, D.C. is run by just three individuals—George Bush, Karl Rove and House Majority Leader Tom “The Hammer” DeLay—each of them angry Texans with a taste for wetwork. This shows where they come from. As with the Moore film, there may not be much new in the telling, but as we’ve just learned all over again from the Hallmark cards coming out of Abu Ghraib, one picture really is worth 1,000 words.

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“The Rules of the Game” by Paul Cullum (Arthur, 2004)

Originally published in Arthur No. 11 (July 2004)

The Rules of the Game
A “Camera Obscura” column by Paul Cullum

CAMERA OBSCURA is a regular column examining the world and its lesser trafficked tributaries, recesses and psychic fallout through the filters of film, video and DVD.

* * *

DVDs/videos discussed here:
The Kingdom of Credibility Trilogy:
o The Humiliated (De Ydmygede) (1998), directed by Jesper Jargil
o The Exhibited (De Udstillede) (2000), directed by Jesper Jargil
o The Purified (De Lutrede) (2002), directed by Jesper Jargil
[Contact the filmmaker at Jesper Jargil Films, jesper.jargil@mail.dk, Fax: +45 3314 2655; PAL tapes only available]
o The Five Obstructions (2004), directed by Jørgen Leth and Lars von Trier (currently in general release)
o Tranceformer: A Portrait of Lars von Trier (1997), directed by Stig Björkman (available on the Criterion DVD release of von Trier’s The Element of Crime)

* * *

“In the rain forest of the Cameroon in West Central Africa lives a floor-dwelling ant known as Megaloponera foetens, or more commonly, the stink ant. On occasion, one of these ants while looking for food is infected by inhaling a microscopic spore from a fungus of the genus Tomentella. After being inhaled, the spore seats in the ant’s tiny brain and begins to grow, causing changes in the ant’s patterns of behavior. The ant appears troubled and confused; for the first time in its life, it leaves the forest floor and begins to climb. Completely spent and having reached a prescribed height, the ant impales the plant with its mandibles. The fungus continues to consume first the nerve cells and finally all the soft tissue that remains of the ant. After approximately two weeks, a spike appears from what had been the head of the ant. This spike is about an inch and a half in length and has a bright orange tip, heavy with spores, which rain down onto the rain forest floor for other unsuspecting ants to inhale.” —The Museum of Jurassic Technology

Were he not already so ubiquitous, this might seem like the season of Lars von Trier. Dogville, the first part of his “USA Trilogy” (to be differentiated from his “Europa Trilogy”—The Element of Crime, Epidemic and Europa/Zentropa; and his “Golden Heart Trilogy”—Breaking the Waves, The Idiots and Dancer in the Dark) appeared earlier this year to begin the excoriation of the American character by European cinema, a process just put to decisive referendum by the awarding of Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 the Palme d’Or at Cannes. Stephen King’s The Kingdom Hospital, an adaptation of The Kingdom I and II, von Trier’s successive miniseries on Danish television, appeared as a much-touted ABC series and suffered mightily by comparison. And The Five Obstructions, co-directed by von Trier and his mentor Jørgen Leth, equal parts documentary, experiment and intervention, currently scuttles its way around the arthouse circuit.

The latter presents von Trier at his comical best. Resembling Fassbinder refashioned as a Muppet (Fassy Bear?), he is at once imperious and cuddly, using his private empire to force Leth, his former film instructor at the Danish Film Institute, into repeatedly remaking The Perfect Human, the film von Trier rates closest to perfect. “This little gem,” as he calls it, is a 12-minute 1967 black-and-white short that marries an insouciant formal abandon to a faux anthropological take on upscale hipsters, in the manner of Peter Sellers’ The Running Jumping & Standing Still Film (which handed Richard Lester his directing style on a platter) or, more pointedly, title designer Saul Bass’s Why Man Creates. Leth is the one who famously introduced “the rules of the game” into von Trier’s way of thinking, the intense penchant for order which, as we know from Tranceformer, a 1997 documentary by Stig Björkman, implicitly appealed to this son of radical academics who was raised free of restraints of any kind. (Tranceformer also informs us that at age 12, “Lars Trier” was the child star of Clandestine Summer, a winsome Swedish-Danish TV series, and that he added the “von” in film school—as in “Erich von Stroheim,” Teutonic tyrant and classical sadist—in much the same way Francis Ford Coppola appended his signature to exchange the quotidian for the epic.) The Five Obstructions is justified as homage and a form of therapy, von Trier’s magnanimous gesture to force his mentor out of his “provocative perverse perfection.” Yet it ultimately borders on autobiography, as von Trier judges and rejects not only his patriarch, but his own aesthetic foundations, subjecting them to outsize pressures as if to test their structural worthiness—like Steven Soderbergh did in interviewing his mentor, Richard Lester, in Getting Away With It.

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“The Outsiders” by Paul Cullum (Arthur, 2004)

Originally published in Arthur No. 10 (May 2004)

The Outsiders
A “Camera Obscura” column by Paul Cullum

CAMERA OBSCURA is a regular column examining the world and its lesser trafficked tributaries, recesses and psychic fallout through the filters of film, video and DVD.

* * *

Works discussed in this column:
Nashville (1975), directed by Robert Altman, written by Joan Tewkesbury (Paramount Home Video)
Tanner ’88 (1988), directed by Robert Altman, written by Garry Trudeau (HBO Home Video)
Tanner “Fireside Chats” (2004), (The Sundance Channel)
Secret Honor (1984), directed by Robert Altman, written by Donald Freed and Arthur Stone (Vestron Video)
The Nashville Chronicles, by Jan Stuart (Limelight Editions; http://www.limelighteditions.com)

* * *

“Listen, you fuckers, you screwheads. Here is a man who would not take it anymore. A man who stood up against the scum, the cunts, the dogs, the filth, the shit. Here is a man who stood up.”
—Travis Bickle, Taxi Driver

“New rule: You can’t be an outsider if you’re already president.”
—Bill Maher

Was it Richard Nixon who invented the outsider in American politics? Nixon, the festering Quaker, who so resented the Kennedys, the liberal Harvard elite, the charismatic cabal of ineluctable privilege, that he made his presidency an armed encampment, and codified his enemies into the world’s most exclusive guest list?

Before him, the century’s presidents were patricians and gentleman intellectuals, academics and company men, generals and crooks and tentacled leviathans rising from the Senate. Aprés Nixon and his designated stand-in Ford, we got Carter, the peanut farmer-nuclear physicist; Reagan, the rancher-statesman, and his stand-in Bush; Clinton, the wonk-lothario-honorary black president; and now Bush Redux, the Jim-Bowie-at-the-Alamo president. Trailing behind them was a comical retinue of apron-clad inepts and third-party spoilers—H. Ross Perot, the Weenie King from Preston Sturges’ Palm Beach Story; Ralph Nader, the stooping Jimmy Stewart from Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. Their only thing in common was that they were somehow outside the institutional cesspit of D.C. power–“in,” but no longer “of.”

Nixon was certainly the unsung inspiration for ’70s cinema, the flailing windmill against which the disaffected tilted. It’s not just that the ’70s were the ’60s on film, the natural bridle of adolescence against authority. The decade is a bell-shaped descent converging on the vortex of Watergate and Nixon’s flight from power in 1974. A Shakespearean figure who screened Patton repeatedly the weekend before he ordered the bombing of Cambodia, Nixon was the role model for Michael Corleone in the Godfather Trilogy, the dissembling mayor in Jaws and the Emperor in Star Wars, and the literal heavy of Hearts and Minds, Medium Cool, Shampoo (staged on the day of his reelection) and All the President’s Men. His tenure directly inspired the agitprop of M*A*S*H, Catch-22, Coming Home and Apocalypse Now; the political paranoia of Taxi Driver, The Parallax View, Three Days of the Condor and Marathon Man; and the institutional corruption of Serpico, Chinatown, The Conversation, Sugarland Express, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Night Moves and Network. But no more political allegory survives the decade than Robert Altman’s Nashville—conceived during the Watergate hearings, filmed during Nixon’s resignation and released in time for the Bicentennial.

In honor of the election year, Altman’s six-hour miniseries Tanner ’88, originally made for HBO with Doonesbury satirist Garry Trudeau during the 1988 election, is currently being rebroadcast on the Sundance Channel, complete with recently-filmed one-minute “Fireside Chats” with the original cast to accompany each episode (which hopefully will show up on the rumored Criterion DVD due this fall). But Nashville, available in widescreen format with plenty of extras from Paramount Home Video, is where the director first explored the nexus of politics and celebrity. Altman’s putative masterpiece is contractually the story of the country music capital of America, although like Taxi Driver, it is revealed in its final moments to be a pathography of political assassination. In Jan Stuart’s The Nashville Chronicles (Limelight Editions Books), an artfully researched volume of behind-the-scenes anecdotes and historical context, Altman calls the film his “Grand Motel.”

Coming off of Thieves Like Us in Northern Mississippi, Altman sent writer Joan Tewkesbury to nearby Nashville to sop up the city and keep a rigorous journal. Working from instinct, Tewkesbury charted two dozen characters on a grid and compiled a 175-page script, which despite numerous memorable lines (Ned Beatty’s Delbert, the local fixer, tells Michael Murphy’s John Triplette, the oil-slick California advance man, “Well, I admire your optimism, I was just wondering if it was regional.”), Altman tossed in the air, hoping through improvisation to hew closer to an America they all felt was about to redline.

“It was set up like a rug,” remembers Tewkesbury, “like you were weaving a rug. And when he told the actors to throw away the script and forget the dialogue, there were actors who did every stitch of dialogue as it had been written, and then there were others who had this magnificent other stuff. What you find out is that the words are nice and dialogue is great in plays and on television, but what these kinds of films really are about is tone and behavior. And so the words, in a funny way, are like clues. But you cast for behavior and cast for tone, or against it, to bring it to life.” (Tewkesbury is currently a consulting producer on CBS’s The Guardian, which is doing some interesting stuff under the radar.)

The finished film follows Tewkesbury’s script scene for scene, beat for beat, and she constantly worked with the actors to keep their improvs on point. Altman, who had hired real Vietnam draft dodgers living in Vancouver to populate the mining camp in McCabe and Mrs. Miller, and who would use ex-addict Synanon members as casino gamblers in California Split, packed real country-music fans into every frame, and added session players like fiddle phenomenon Vassar Clements for, in Tewkesbury’s elegant phrase, “unencumbered authenticity.” And politics, which hung like an ominous cloudbank, seemed to infuse everything. Tewkesbury patterned Triplette after John Dean and other Watergate witnesses, which Murphy expanded to include a college acquaintance who became a ratfucker, one of Nixon’s dirty tricks team. Music City patriarch Haven Hamilton (initially written for Robert Duvall), based on country-music titans like Hank Snow, Conway Twitty and Tex Ritter, was played by Henry Gibson based on Henry Kissinger, for the power, and Bob Hope, for the longevity. It was Gibson who, wounded in the final assassination scene, improvised the line “We’re not Dallas.” (Murphy starred in Tanner ’88, and both actors showed up in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia as an Altman homage.)

Looking for a way to unify the film’s emerging politics, Altman added third-party candidate Hal Phillip Walker, whose radical platform is voiced via a loudspeaker mounted atop a campaign van that segues between scenes. To handle the rhetoric, narration and logistics of the campaign, Altman approached Thomas Hal Phillips, a novelist who had been invaluable on Thieves Like Us as the head of the Mississippi Film Commission, and whose family was heavily involved in state politics. Phillips identified himself as an FDR Democrat, but had run his brother Rubel’s campaign for governor of in 1963, which virtually invented the Mississippi Republican Party. Once on set, his family’s political connections proved invaluable: He pulled strings so the British Chaplin could get her work visa, got permission to close down Interstate 65 to film the opening traffic jam and recruited extras for the political smoker and striptease (and confirmed that such things occurred when cast and crew were horrified by the reaction). With Denver political operative Ron Hecht, acting on Altman’s instructions to “invade my movie,” he set up an actual campaign office and strategy in the midst of the primary election for Tennessee governor.

With a voice like warm syrup, in the manner Shelby Foote or David McCulloch (the Ken Burns/Seabiscuit guy), Phillips recorded his voiceover in a single 18-minute speech–which, in some sort of karmic transfer, is the exact length of the missing portion of the Watergate tapes. Full of folksy palliatives and Old Testament constructions like “It is the very nature of government to strain at a gnat and swallow a camel,” his declarations were considered extremely prescient when Jimmy Carter mounted a similar down-home populism to win the Presidency a year later. Consequently, many interpreted it at the time as Altman’s cynical jab at soft-headed demagoguery. Yet, viewed three decades later, in once again newly politicized times, Walker’s platform seems to push Howard Dean or Dennis Kucinich-style progressivism toward a new militancy, in a way that is less modest proposal than common sense. His call to ban lawyers from Congress may be a legislative stretch. (“A lawyer is trained for two things and two things only: To clarify, that’s one; and to confuse, that’s the other. He does whichever is to his client’s advantage. You ever ask a lawyer the time of day? He told you how to make a watch, didn’t he?… Congress is composed of 535 individuals; 288 are lawyers.”) And replacing the National Anthem with Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land” might border on the comical. But taxing the churches’ “vast holdings of land and corporate investments” or abolishing the Electoral College is long overdue.

Those parts of the speech excised or indecipherable in the film itself, but included in the full text available in Tewkesbury’s published script, make the point all the more:

“With proper leadership and effort, we can wipe out crime as surely as this country wiped out polio or smallpox… Today in America, with its unmatched resources, it is exceedingly ridiculous, a total absurdity, that any citizen with any ailment, mental or physical, should go medically unattended… Can it possibly make sense to regiment farms and farmers when people are ill-fed, if not downright hungry?… To tax the salaries of people on poverty-level incomes, then turn around and give back in food stamps twice the amount of the tax?… Every community needs special programs for the mentally ill, the aged, the retarded, the handicapped. To fall short in these areas is to bring disgrace on all our houses.”

Tracked down at his rural home in Corinth, Mississippi, Phillips, now 80, claims he was totally sincere.

“I more or less believe what I wrote,” he says. “I don’t know where they got that, because I had my whole heart in it. It was different, but we were running a different race. The things that I believe in, a Republican or a Democrat could both say them. Carter hadn’t come on the scene yet, but that was what I was thinking of. And I really took it seriously, that any candidate that would come out and say some of those things would get a lot of attention.”

At Altman’s behest, Phillips revived the Walker character once more in 1987’s O.C, and Stiggs, but by then he had slipped into parody, more Wally George-style Orange County wrestler-Republican than aging idealist. Walker just published his first novel in two decades, Red Midnight, and claims he’s a Hillary Clinton supporter in 2008.

And Altman and Nixon’s paths crossed once more, in Secret Honor, a one-man play starring Philip Baker Hall as a paranoid, suicidal Richard Nixon with raccoon eyes and Eddie Munster hair who looks like Robert Blake in Lost Highway. Nixon’s “secret” is that he faked the Watergate tapes “to lead Congress to the tip of the wrong iceberg,” hiding the fact that his superiors planned to keep him in the White House for eight more years and the war going indefinitely, ensuring a steady flow of heroin to the Mob and kickbacks of U.S. aid from Saigon into CREEP, the Committee to Re-Elect the President.

These days, they just give the money back in tax cuts and cut out the middleman.

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DVDs/videos courtesy of Cinefile, the official video store of Arthur. Contact Cinefile at (310) 312-8836 or http://www.cinefilevideo.com.

“The Golden Notebooks” by Paul Cullum (Arthur, 2004)

Originally published in Arthur No. 8 (Jan. 2004)

The Golden Notebooks
A “Camera Obscura” column by Paul Cullum

CAMERA OBSCURA is a regular column examining the world and its lesser trafficked tributaries, recesses and psychic fallout through the filters of film, video and DVD.

DVDs/videos discussed in this column:
The Work of Director Spike Jonze (Palm)
The Work of Director Chris Cunningham (Palm)
The Work of Director Michel Gondry (Palm)
Schizopolis, directed by Steven Soderbergh (Criterion)
K Street, directed by Steven Soderbergh (HBO, not available on DVD/video)

* * *

“There is no need for you to leave the house. Stay at your table and listen. Don’t even listen, just wait. Don’t even wait, be completely quiet and alone. The world will offer itself to you to be unmasked; it can’t do otherwise; in raptures it will writhe before you.” —Franz Kafka

“One day I found a big book buried deep in the ground. I opened it, but all the pages were blank. Then to my surprise, it started writing itself….” —Bjork, “Bachelorette”

K Street is getting really good.

The half-hour HBO series, which just completed its initial 10-episode run, features a real James Carville and Mary Matalin at a fake D.C. lobbying firm on the real K Street inside the Beltway, with fake characters, real cameos and real events driving the plot. Working from sketched outlines by screenwriter Henry Bean, whose The Believer is the most politically provocative film in recent memory, each episode is directed, shot and edited by Steven Soderbergh five days before airtime in furious run-and-gun fashion, literally buzzing on instinct and the exquisite threat of failure.

When Soderbergh directed Schizopolis, his $250,000, quasi-incomprehensible, bilingual absurdist farce, virtually everyone was mystified. He rigorously defended the film at the time, citing the need for raw experimentation to reenergize his filmmaking. And with the effervescent Out of Sight, the almost Cubist The Limey and Oscars for Traffic and Erin Brockovich following it up, it’s hard to argue with him. More recently, the dismally received Full Frontal was, in retrospect, merely a working template for the callous immediacy, oblique editing and telegraphed detail of K Street, now much improved from the watertight op-ed pieces of its earliest installments.

The freedom to experiment and fail has been bred out of American movies—or, rather, reversed: filmmakers are free to experiment only after they fail, on their own time and their own dime. Studio fare has become largely critic-proof precisely by courting diminishing expectations, just so it can rise incrementally above them.

Which is one of the incidental pleasures of viewing the collected short works of music-video mainstays Spike Jonze, Chris Cunningham and Michel Gondry, being released simultaneously on DVD through the Directors Label, an imprint at Chris Blackwell’s Palm Pictures. (Blackwell, whose Island Records brought reggae to an unwitting world, remains the consummate billionaire-fan—financing short-film magazine RES and the touring RESfest, or releasing the 10-hour Cremaster cycle.) Working from a shared lexicon, with often the same bands (Daft Punk, Chemical Brothers, Bjork), Gondry in France and Jonze as part of the crew at Satellite, the vanguard subsidiary of Propaganda, are credited with reviving the moribund music video form in the early ’90s. And the British Cunningham, with a pedigree that includes heading up the FX crew for David Fincher’s Alien 3 at 19 and doing animatronic design for Kubrick’s abortive A.I., is arguably the most famous filmmaker under 30 who hasn’t yet directed his own feature.

Viewed together, these compilations of music videos, short films, commercials and documentaries—each with a 52-page booklet of interviews, photos and drawings—all demonstrate a surprisingly coherent style, whose permutations may well play out over dozens of features. It’s easy to spot the world view of Jonze’s Being John Malkovich or Adaptation in Daft Punk’s “Da Funk,” in which a guileless innocent with a giant dog’s head and full leg cast hobbles his way around a Taxi Driver Manhattan, or the seeds of Michel Gondry’s Human Nature in the fairy-tale forest imagery of “Human Behavior” and his five other Bjork videos. (All three features are written by Charlie Kaufman, as is Gondry’s upcoming The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.) And it’s fun to speculate how Jonze’s formal goofs might have informed Harold and the Purple Crayon or his upcoming Where the Wild Things Are, or how Gondry’s ambulatory cartoons might have presaged his Green Hornet, from a script by Robocop’s Ed Neumeier. Cunningham’s long-gestating Neuromancer, in particular, written with author William Gibson, which the Matrix trilogy is only the latest to desecrate the memory of, might have been an extrapolation of any number of his dread-filled universes on display—from the Manhattan where a crack addict’s limbs shatter like porcelain in Leftfield’s “Afrika Shox,” to the creepy Osaka Home for Mentally Disturbed Children in Squarepusher’s “Come on My Selector,” to the 2001-inflected assembly line in Bjork’s icy, autoerotic “All Is Full of Love.” Cumulatively, each seems like an accidental narrative, strangely driven by autobiography.

The Spike Jonze DVD, like its creator, is affable, garrulous, slightly ADD perhaps, but enthusiastic and generous to a fault. The former Adam Spiegel took his professional name from Spike Jones, the 1940s satirical big-band leader whose most famous hit was “Der Fuehrer’s Face,” to accommodate an already pronounced trickster ethic that would one day dream up Jackass. In addition to documentaries on Houston bullriders and Fatlip, formerly of the Pharcyde (who deserves a standing part in any future Spike Jonze film), there are 16 videos included (of the 40-plus he has directed). These are invariably conceptual one-offs (the Pharcyde rap backwards in “Drop”; Christopher Walken dances and flies in Fatboy Slim’s “Weapon of Choice”; kids play Biggie and Puffy in “Sky’s the Limit”) or outright jokes (M.C. 900-Foot Jesus mails himself home in a box in “If I Only Had a Brain”; the Beastie Boys mix cop-show cliches in “Sabotage”).

This is the side of him apparent in Fatboy Slim’s “Praise You,” where “B-boy choreographer” Richard Koufay (actually Jonze himself) and the fictional Torrance Community Dance Troupe descend on the Mann Bruin Theater in Westwood for a live performance of stupefying execution—a conceit taken all the way to a performance at the MTV Music Awards (dutifully chronicled in a third half-hour documentary, where emcee Chris Rock can be heard saying, “Fatboy Slim? Looks more like White Boy Retarded.”) Along the way, we discover that’s Axl Rose getting off the bus as the guy runs by on fire in Wax’s “California”; that the dancing mailbox in Bjork’s “It’s Oh So Quiet” (the inspiration for Lars von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark) is the voice of Ernie on Sesame Street; and that Anson Williams (Potsie on Happy Days) refused to appear in Weezer’s “Buddy Holly” video (which places the band inside a composited episode) until David Geffen wrote him a personal letter.

Cunningham’s DVD is darker, colder and vastly more cerebral—the mimetic equivalent of Goya’s famous title “The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters” (depicting a collapsed poet beset by bat-winged cormorants). Like J.G. Ballard, Cunningham returns repeatedly to images of council flats, industrial landscapes, eroticized technology and human anatomy, particularly its numerous pathologies. Originally trained as a painter and sculptor, he worked for several years as an illustrator for Britain’s 2000 A.D. comics before specializing in prosthetics and then robotics–in his words, “the evolution from flesh to machine.”

But it’s his two videos for Aphex Twin, aka Richard D. James, that are his masterworks. “Come to Daddy,” against an onslaught of harsh industrial drones and urban collapse, uses ghostly video images and gangs of angry children, all of them with James’ bearded face superimposed, to sustain a deep irrational fear—tapping into the same disturbing imagery as Don’t Look Now or Cronenberg’s The Brood, or the same sudden terror that David Lynch used to access so effortlessly. Following up with “Windowlicker,” his stated effort “to make a more commercial video for Aphex,” he opens on a strident parody of hip-hop stereotypes, rolling in a low-slung convertible on the freeways of downtown L.A., where two players are well into the launch trajectory of an incessant monologue that employs, by my count, 47 “niggas,” 21 “motherfuckers,” 11 “bitches” and 21 free-floating “fucks”—it starts out, “I hope we find some motherfuckin’ bitches, nigga, man, I’m horny as a motherfucker, nigga—you know what I’m sayin’, nigga?” and progresses accordingly. Four minutes and 22 seconds into the video, everything screeches to a halt as a ridiculously long stretch limo displaces them in frame and disgorges Aphex Twin, who performs a crotch-grabbing, pirouetting dance with parasol—ZZ Top meets Michael Jackson—leaving the gentlemen and their two prospective consorts to stare in wide-eyed wonder. (Also intriguing is a teaser for Rubber Johnny, a powerless figure with a giant head in a wheelchair, described by Variety as “a live-action underground comic about a guy who lives with a mean dog.”)

By contrast, everything in Gondry’s endlessly inventive body of work can be summed up in the title of the 80-minute documentary he prepared especially for the DVD: I Have Always Been 12. Combining the technical and conceptual, he fashions a row of dancers into a live-action video effect in the Chemical Brothers’ “Let Forever Be,” somehow forces the industrial imagery from the window of a commuter train into the rhythms of their “Star Guitar,” creates a split-screen symmetrical Moebius strip of continuous action in Cibo Matto’s “Sugar Water,” replicates the White Stripes in Legos in “I’m in Love with a Girl” and then makes them into stop-action human time-trails in “The Hardest Button to Button.” A born inventor (his grandfather, Constant Martin, invented one of the earliest synthesizers, the Clavioline, which can be heard on the Beatles’ “Baby, You’re a Rich Man”), he is constantly shown attaching wires to Bjork’s fingers to create a keyboard-triggered Spirograph or scratching into the groove of a record and yelling, then playing back his own voice. (Bjork is clearly the unsung hero here, having discovered Gondry, championed the others early on and introduced them all to each other. At their L.A. premiere at the Egyptian Theater, Bjork was the guest deejay.)

Gondry’s images seem mostly rooted in a pre-adolescent scatology and the fear of sex: The disc includes animations about farting and a short film where David Cross plays a life-size, papier-mache turd. (Even the name of his former band, Oui Oui, is a homophone for urination.) And according to his mother, four times a week between the ages of five and nine, Michel had the same nightmare, where the letter I enters the letter U. As George Carlin once said about the train going into the tunnel at the end of North by Northwest, “You don’t have to be Fellini to figure that one out.” In fact, much of Gondry’s raw material appears undigested from his dreams. Actively ridiculing Freud (even as his work resembles an open case study), he attributes a survival function to dreaming: Natural selection has carried it through half a billion years to release deep forgotten emotion at night, which re-bonds monogamous mates every morning, thus preserving the structure of the family across the millennia.

Dave Grohl, whose Foo Fighters video for “Everlong” features a couple’s dueling dreams, recounts how Gondry justified the giant prosthetic hands he was forced to wear by admitting he was once plagued by similar nightmares.

“It was insane and ridiculous and inane,” says Grohl in the documentary, “and it didn’t seem like it made any sense. But then after he explained it to me, I thought… Maybe every one of his videos is some crazy nightmare or phobia or something inside of him that he’s afraid to tell anybody else, and he just makes videos or puts it into film. It’s a head trip.”

In raptures it will writhe before you.

A second trilogy of discs from Mark Romanek (One-Hour Photo), Jonathan Glazer (Sexy Beast) and Sanji (Propaganda) is reportedly in the works.

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DVDs/videos courtesy of Cinefile, the official video store of Arthur. Contact Cinefile at (310) 312-8836 or http://www.cinefilevideo.com.

“Blacks Off Earth Now!” by Paul Cullum (Arthur, 2003)

Originally published in Arthur No. 7 (Nov. 2003)

Blacks Off Earth Now!
A “Camera Obscura” column by Paul Cullum

CAMERA OBSCURA is a regular column examining the world and its lesser trafficked tributaries, recesses and psychic fallout through the filters of film, video and DVD.

* * *

“A rat done bit my sister Nell with Whitey on the moon.
Her face and arms began to swell and Whitey’s on the moon.
I can’t pay no doctor bills, but Whitey’s on the moon.
Ten years from now I’ll be paying still, while Whitey’s on the moon.”
—Gil Scott-Heron

When William S. Burroughs completed his paranoid masterwork Naked Lunch in 1959, not even his closest friends—Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso; born cheerleaders all, and no slouches in intuiting the teleology of social control—would have labeled it out-and-out prophecy. And yet a mere half-century later, we’re confronted with a totalitarian state that insatiably advances its influence and exports its dissatisfaction; a quisling media reduced to advocating these imperial ambitions; religious zealots as the new carnival barkers; a police apparatus bent on self-perpetuation; universal surveillance; lawless outlands designated as zones of amoral commerce; and addiction masked as consumer need. Not to mention a far-right party (which Burroughs labeled the “Liquefactionists”) dedicated to liquidating everyone but themselves.

Visionaries, it would seem, often turn out in retrospect to be mere stenographers who have become somehow temporally misfiled.

The same may well prove true of free jazz pioneer and denizen of Saturn Sun Ra, whose legendary 1974 cult film Space Is the Place has just been lovingly restored by Plexifilm in a special 30th anniversary edition. This chronicle of interplanetary black colonization, NASA conspiracy and an epic Manichean poker match for the fate of the world-kind of a quasi-documentary Buckaroo Banzai filmed in the middle of proto-revolutionary, Cointelpro Oakland-contains 20 minutes of newly restored footage (mostly interracial sex scenes), interviews with the director and producer (middle-aged white men) and home movies of Sun Ra and his Intergalactic Myth-Science Solar Arkestra goofing and playing in front of the Pyramids in Luxor, Egypt in 1972 (at roughly the same time that Kenneth Anger, equally besotted with Egyptian imagery, was shooting scenes for Lucifer Rising with Donald Cammell and Marianne Faithfull at the same location).

In 1971, Sun Ra and his band had traveled west from Philadelphia at the invitation of Bobby Seale of the Black Panther Party to Oakland, California, where they lived in a Panther house and Sun Ra taught at Berkeley. By 1974, amid increasing factionalism, no less than Eldridge Cleaver had kicked them out, and they were headed back to “the City of Brotherly Shove.” But not before producer Jim Newman and director John Coney lured him into a prospective half-hour concert for the local PBS affiliate, which somehow mutated into one of the oddest documents ever committed to celluloid.

The film opens amid a welter of space jazz, on what looks like a yellow Sony Playstation controller drifting through space-actually Sun Ra’s spaceship, captured in pre-digital blue-screen on 16mm film. As the mothership lands on a lush tropical planet (in reality Golden Gate Park), Sun Ra and his entourage stroll through an enchanted garden the equal of the fantasy sequences in Heavenly Creatures-with floating bubbles and hovering trilobites topped with red orbs encased in glass and exotic flowers bearing fruit of orange hands and wine glasses. Draped in flowing robes and an Egyptian headdress topped with a large sun dial, Sun Ra (who wrote all his own dialogue) proclaims, “We’ll set up a colony for black people here-see what they can do on a planet all their own, without any white people there… Another place in the universe, up under different stars.” Then as he conjectures relocating them via “isotope teleportation,” “transmolecularization” or simply teleporting the entire planet through music, we see Sun Ra suddenly spinning clockwise away from us into deepest space, like the lifeless Gary Lockwood, Jr. in 2001. All this before the opening credits.

Suddenly it’s 1943, in a Chicago nightclub, where a local gangster (the Overseer, played as a kind of satanic pimp by Ray Johnson, one of the bank robbers in Dirty Harry) demands that Sun Ra-then a piano player known as Sonny Ray-be ejected for his discordant style. Sonny’s jazz arpeggios quickly escalate into overpowering chord inversions, as glass shatters, smoke billows from the piano, the dancers are blown out of their tops and the crowd riots and stampedes toward the exits. Just as quickly, Sun Ra and the Overseer are faced off against each other across a red velvet table in the middle of a vast desert, where they compete in an arcane card game using a modified ghetto-fabulous Tarot deck (featuring Cadillac Eldorados and nude sirens) for the fate of the earth.

From there, Sun Ra wanders through contemporary Oakland as the contest plays out-convincing the locals he’s a galactic emissary, opening a storefront “Outer Space Employment agency,” and generally using music to cure the addicted, raise the drunken, reform the exploitive and search out the enlightened.

“Are there any whiteys up there?” asks a skeptical youth at a neighborhood rec hall.

“They’re walking up there now,” says Sun Ra, with his implacable hipster academic delivery. “They take frequent trips to the moon. But I notice none of you have been invited.”

Meanwhile, two field agents from NASA (including Morgan Upton from comedy troupe the Committee) sit in cramped, smoke-filled rooms hunched over reel-to-reel tape recorders, combing through his every word for some sign of conspiracy. After an attempted tryst with a couple of the Overseer’s call girls-where, pointedly, they can’t get it up-the NASA gumshoes kidnap Ra and hold him hostage in an abandoned warehouse. “Come on, Ra,” one of them says, “how do you convert your harmonic progressions to energy? There’s a black space program, isn’t there?” As a specialized form of torture, they leave him trussed up and trapped in headphones that play an endless brass band rendition of “Dixie.” But Ra escapes, the chosen are beamed out of their settings as economically and decisively as the luckless beauties in Mars Needs Women and all are led aboard the spacecraft, in what seems very much a template for the last scene in Close Encounters of the Third Kind three years later. (In fact, the five-tone melody used for alien contact was lifted from the intervals in Sun Ra’s “Lights on a Satellite,” recorded in 1960. “Did you ever see Star Wars?” he once asked an interviewer. “It was very accurate.”) As Sun Ra’s spaceship seeks the new black world, the earth supernovas behind him.

Threaded throughout the narrative are live performances of the Arkestra, which were actually filmed at a soundstage on the Embarcadero owned by the Mitchell Brothers, who were just then in pre-production on their breakthrough feature Behind the Green Door. In fact, the two projects shared production costs, a platform built for the band was used to mount a sex contraption in the porn film, and Space Is the Place cast member Johnnie Keys appears as one of two black studs who pleasure Marilyn Chambers using an elaborate pulley system in the latter.

Director Coney, in the accompanying interview included on the DVD, claims the film was “an homage to cheesy science-fiction films of the ’50s and ’60s” like Rocketship X-M (1950) and Cat Women of the Moon (1953). Traces of Jodorowsky’s Holy Mountain, LeRoi Jones’ (later Amiri Baraka’s) play The Black Mass and Black Muslim theology can be detected-notably the concept of the Mothership, in which Black Scientists were to return to earth to mark the end of the 25,000-year reign of the white mongrel race, and which was in turn appropriated wholesale by George Clinton and Parliament/Funkadelic. Clinton name-checks Sun Ra in the liner notes to the 1974 LP Standin’ on the Verge of Getting’ It On; other noted acolytes include Pink Floyd, the MC5, the Grateful Dead and, perhaps oddest, Bobby Beausoleil—star of Kenneth Anger’s Invocation of My Demon Brother, inspiration (through his nickname, Cupid) for Arthur Lee’s band Love and confederate of Charles Manson (and convicted murderer)—who toured California throughout the mid-’60s in a copycat group called the Orkustra.

The Overseer can be one of the Celestial Overseers from The Urantia Book—inspiration to Stockhausen, Elvis and Gene Roddenberry in his creation of Star Trek, which Sun Ra reportedly was reading from daily. The robed, hooded, mirror-faced being accompanying him in the opening scene seems taken from Maya Deren’s Meshes of an Afternoon, shot in 1946 but unavailable until much later (although with the extent of Sun Ra’s readings in arcane and secret texts, who knows?). Or the cosmology could just as likely have come from outer space itself. Biographer John Szwed, author of the exhaustive Space Is the Place: The Lives and Times of Sun Ra, puts him, in his East Village days, in the same company as Moondog and Joe Gould—legendary eccentrics who walked the streets to the delight of an uncomprehending public. One of Sun Ra’s favorite stories, commemorated in the song “Advice for Medics,” was that when he played a mental hospital in Chicago in the ’50s, a woman reputed not to have moved or spoken for years walked slowly to the piano and screamed at him, “Do you call that music?”

Sun Ra rarely slept, lived on vitamins, fruits and food supplements, and ardently believed he had been abducted by aliens at an early age, through a process he termed “transmolecularization.” He considered music a physical, celestial force capable of transforming governments, enlightening races, curing disease (Norman Mailer once claimed a Sun Ra performance cured his cold) and, yes, propelling spaceships, for which he and his band were merely the collective antennae. Gibberish? Pseudo-science? Mumbo-jumbo? Exactly what they said of Burroughs and his Mayan scholarship, South American miracle drugs and language-as-a-virus theories around the time Space Is the Place was first gestating. And yet, just this week, no less than NASA has detected a pressure wave traveling through space from a black hole in the Perseus Galaxy Cluster 250 million light years away—a sound wave 57 octaves below middle C on the piano, with a frequency of once every 10 billion years. According to scientists, it is a B-flat.

“It is possible,” says Andy Fabian of the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge, England, “that other galactic clusters are singing in other tones.”

Nothing to do now but wait.

DVDs/videos courtesy of Cinefile, the official video store of Arthur. Contact Cinefile at (310) 312-8836 or http://www.cinefilevideo.com.

“This Is the Way the World Ends (Or, Don’t Say I Didn’t Try Dystopia)” by Paul Cullum (Arthur, 2003)

Originally published in Arthur No. 6 (Sept. 2003)

This Is the Way the World Ends (Or, Don’t Say I Didn’t Try Dystopia)
A “Camera Obscura” column by Paul Cullum

CAMERA OBSCURA is a regular column examining the world and its lesser trafficked tributaries, recesses and psychic fallout through the filters of film, video and DVD.

DVDs/videos discussed in this column:
o The Dead Zone (1983)—directed by David Cronenberg, written by Jeffrey Boam; based on the novel by Stephen King (Paramount Home Video)
o Starship Troopers (1997)—directed by Paul Verhoeven, written by Ed Neumeier; based on the novel by Robert Heinlein (Columbia/TriStar Home Video, Special Edition)
o The Handmaid’s Tale (1990)—directed by Volker Schlondorff, written by Harold Pinter; based on the novel by Margaret Atwood (MGM/UA Home Video)
o Death and the Maiden (1994)—directed by Roman Polanski, written by Rafael Yglesias; based on the play by Ariel Dorfman (New Line Home Video)
o The Designated Mourner (1997)—directed by David Hare, written by Wallace Shawn; based on his play (Image Entertainment)
o The Revolution Will Not Be Televised (2002)—directed by Kim Bartley & Donnacha O’Briain (Power Pictures; VHS available for $29.99, please specify NTSC or PAL)
o Afghan Massacre: The Convoy of Death (2003)—directed by Jamie Doran (Atlantic Celtic Films; VHS available for £19.99/approx. $32.00 from http://www.acftv.net, please specify NTSC or PAL)

* * *

“I only want to say this once: If America insists on flirting with a fascist future, I shall give them one.” —Paul Verhoeven (director of Starship Troopers)

“By the time they came for me because of my liberal views, it was too late—there was no one left to speak up.”

That’s Pastor Neimoller, German Christian cleric, famously lamenting the blind eye he turned toward Communists, Jews and union leaders during their respective Nazi roundups. Words like “Nazi” and “fascist” are loaded ones these days—packed with C-4 and strung with tripwires, to dissuade the hapless malcontent from trampling across them too casually. But a mere 36 months in the life of the republic has turned us into a nation of screenwriters, imagining more and more implausible reversals of expectations in our long march to the third-act twist: stage-managed coronations, Wall Street intifadas, Zionist cabals, prophylactic invasions, the treason of superpatriots. The one thing it teaches you, living here in the heart of Hollywood (as if such a thing exists), is speculative reality: All things are true until they’re not. Best to follow these branches out to their logical ends, lest we be caught unawares.

And so, in curious times such as these, I do what I’ve always done: Turn to the movies. Here are five moments from five films—bleak dystopian visions of an American future, courtesy of a Canadian, a Dutchman, a German, a Pole and a Brit—which these days I find playing over and over in my head. Plus two new documentaries which might explain why. We often find our convictions in popular film, and probably the courage to live by them. If the artists of the age see fit to issue such auguries—field jeremiads from the antennae of the race—then we ignore them at our peril.

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“YOU AND WHOSE ARMY?: Is George W. Bush Addicted to Cocaine?” by Paul Cullum (Arthur, 2003)

Originally published in Arthur No. 5 (July 2003)

YOU AND WHOSE ARMY?: Is George W. Bush Addicted to Cocaine?
A “Camera Obscura” column by Paul Cullum

CAMERA OBSCURA is a regular column examining the world and its lesser trafficked tributaries, recesses and psychic fallout through the filters of film, video and DVD.

DVDs/videos discussed in this column:
o Horns and Halos, directed by Suki Hawley and Michael Galinsky
o Journeys with George, directed by Alexandra Pelosi
o Uncle Saddam, directed by Joel Soler
o What I’ve Learned About U.S. Foreign Policy: The War Against the Third World, compiled by Frank Dorrel
o Unprecedented: The 2000 Presidential Election, directed by Richard Ray PÈrez and Joan Sekler

“If George W. Bush has not used cocaine, he ought to say it. If he has, he ought to say it and then say how he overcame it.” —Sen. Orrin Hatch (R.-Utah)

Is George W. Bush a pederast? Neo-fascist? Born-again zealot? Serial rapist? The question itself brooks no compromise; to raise it is tantamount to treason. The exact incidence and degree of oral-genital stimulation tolerated by a standing president may be suitable for the Congressional Record, but try suggesting we have a Crackhead-in-Chief, and see how far it gets you.

Yet given our president’s globally mystifying behavior of the past two months, no less than the paragons of the Fourth Estate have at least flirted with the concept in polite company. Following Bush’s televised press conference on March 7t, Maureen Dowd in the New York Times labeled him “the Xanax Cowboy” and observed that, “Determined not to be petulant, he seemed tranquilized.” Tom Shales in the Washington Post put a finer point on it: “It hardly seems out of order to speculate that, given the particularly heavy burden of being president in this new age of terrorism … the president may have been ever so slightly medicated.” Another New York Times editorial, by Paul Krugman, compares Bush’s pre-war behavior to that of Captain Queeg in The Caine Mutiny, famously fondling marbles and paranoidly raging about missing strawberries.

That national leaders can be addicted to drugs may be less an aberration than the historical norm.

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