Anna's Blog

The Progressive Nature of American Romance

2011-12-16T12:15:00.000-08:00

Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers performing a symbolic courtship dance

In analyzing the lyrics of some three hundred jazz standards in my repertoire, I noticed that certain key words were present in nearly all of the songs, and that every song had at least a few of these words.

I came up with 62 words that repeat in many of the songs. Some are mystical or religious (Heaven, Divine, Prayer, Magic, Spell, Dream, Memory, Forever, Light, Shine, Glow), some relate to seasons, time, or elements in nature (Moon, Star, Sky, Night, Evening, Sun, Spring, Summer, Birds, Trees, Sea, Rainbow, Mist), some to feelings of romantic or sexual desire or pleasure (Love, Heart, Flame, Fire, Burn, Heat, Kiss, Touch, Hold, Thrill, Near, Close, Care, Smile, Laugh, Happy), some are about body parts (Eyes, Arms, Lips), some are about the romantic ritual itself as played out in courtship (Song, Music, Tune, Melody, Romance, Dance), and some are about the painful side of love or love that’s failed (Blue, Cry, Tears, Rain, Storm, Clouds, Grey, Wind, Winter, Shadow, Lonely, Sad, Sigh).

A keyword analysis of some of the standards goes like this:

ALL THE THINGS YOU ARE: heart, love, touching, kiss, springtime, lonely, winter, evening, song, glow, lights, star, happy, arms, hold, divine

ALL OR NOTHING AT ALL: love, heart, cry, lips, close, smile, kiss, eyes, touch, hand, heart, spell

BEGIN THE BEGUINE: music, night, memory, stars, shore, tune, heart, love, forever, divine, clouds, fire, heaven

OLD DEVIL MOON: eyes, moon, skies, romance, stars, night, light, flying, magic, cry, laugh, love

WHEN SUNNY GETS BLUE: sunny, blue, eyes, grey, cloudy, rain, love, sigh, sadness, wind, trees, laugh, smile, sad, memories, dream, kiss, lonely, hold, near

These words are repeated in each song much as certain words are repeated in religious litanies. Indeed, if we think of how much these songs were played over and over again in every nightclub, on the radio, on millions of pianos, on jukeboxes, etc., and how much they were a part of every American’s consciousness for decades, then we can almost see these words as being part of an American religion, the religion of pop culture to be sure, but also the religion of ROMANCE.

It was not only the songs of this period, but the films, that concentrated on the quasi-religious catharsis of love and romance. In a noir film I saw recently, a young man expresses his distaste for love and romance: “I don’t need romance. I get it at a movie every weekend.” Of course, the young man doesn’t know what he’s missing, until a clever girl catches hold of him and teaches him that he can’t live without her. The films and the songs of this period performed an important social role, which was to teach men to sublimate their lustful urges into romantic ones, and to desire the good girl over the cheap hussy that would have been his first choice before he was properly socialized. Every plot would go something like this, and the young man’s quote in the movie cements this fact, as his comment suggests that every movie he would see would be about romance. Romance, therefore, was for everyone, and not just for girls and women, who make up nearly its entire demographic now. Romance was seen as a dance between two people, intricately choreographed, and the sublime goal of all people. The musical comedy above all encompassed this collective dream of romance in a symbolic dance or shared aria.

In our ultra-sophisticated era, however, we are too smart to have romance shoved down our throats. The sexual revolution taught us that sex detached from love was not only good, but perhaps better than sex attached to romance, with all of its burdens and the responsibility of loving another person. Feminism taught us that women should not be adored and put on a pedestal, but should be treated exactly like men in order to get the same respect and benefits. Various movements in the ‘60s taught us that the squeaky clean narratives from the ‘50s were false and oppressive, and so on. In its search for a deeper truth in the ‘60s, America turned to Europe and Japan, and intellectuals ate up the darker and less idealistic cinema of Bergman, Tarkovksy, Fellini, Kurosawa, Bunuel, Godard, Antonioni, Rohmer, Pasolini, etc. In a sense, America was “growing up.”

The genius of Bergman's angst-ridden cinema caused Americans to question their naive belief systems (THE MAGICIAN, 1958)

But there is a danger, in our devotion to modern American sophistication, in minimizing the achievements of American popular culture in its heyday, which were considerable. What America created, to be sure, was a fantasy, but it was a healthy fantasy. In Noel Coward’s short stories he was endlessly making fun of the gosh-oh-gee frankness and childishness of Americans, but he was nonetheless deeply charmed. His tongue-and-cheek song, “I Like America” includes the lyrics: “I like America! Its simplicity, and its passion for publicity, and come what may, I shall return someday to the good old U.S. A.!” Coward grieved the disappearance of the decadent, complex English Edwardian theater culture that he had grown to love. But he also had grudging admiration for the “simplicity” of American culture. That Americans took this simplicity and healthiness to epic proportions is a great part of their achievement in the arts of the first half of the century. But it’s only in retrospect that perhaps we can truly see this.

In his controversial book “The Foundations of Psychohistory,” Lloyd DeMause suggests that great changes in history have been due to changes in childrearing. For instance, the mode of childrearing in the West he calls the Infanticidal Mode stretches from antiquity to around 400 A.D. He submits evidence to show that Greeks and Romans killed many of their own children, a practice he argues must have had deep consequences for the emotional health of living children, causing superstitious personalities prone to magical thinking. With Christianity came a ban for the first time on killing children, and thus began the Abandoning Mode, in which most infants were raised by wet nurses, abandoned at monasteries, or otherwise raised outside of the household to apprentice or to work for other families. This mode, he states, produced the autistic temperament of the middle ages. After that came the Ambivalent Mode, in which children were both idealized and feared, but in which empathy with one’s children was not yet possible, creating the melancholic personalities of the Renaissance; and then the Intrusive Mode of the eighteenth century, in which children were severely beaten into submission, but in which parental projection had eased sufficiently to make possible the Enlightenment. The fifth mode, beginning in the nineteenth century and encompassing much of the twentieth, was the Socializing Mode, in which the process of raising a child became less a process of conquering its will than of training and socializing it. In this mode, parents for the first time began considering the needs of the child as separate from their own without massive projection. DeMause argues that America itself is the product of mothers from more advanced childrearing modes (he argues that England was 200 years ahead of the rest of Europe in its childrearing practices), and that America’s astonishing move to free itself from England and develop a democratic society was the result of those more advanced English mothers migrating to a concentrated area and rearing children who were less fearful of their parents, thus less violent and more independent, and better able to envision a democratic society than those reared in earlier modes.

DeMause states (and I abridge heavily):

“In several hundred studies published by myself and my associates in The Journal of Psychohistory, we have provided extensive evidence that the history of childhood has been a nightmare from which we have only recently begun to awaken. The further back in history one goes--and the further away from the West one gets--the more massive the neglect and cruelty one finds and the more likely children are to have been killed, rejected, beaten, terrorized and sexually abused by their caretakers.

Historically, the routine use of children as poison containers to prevent adults from feeling overwhelmed by their anxieties has also been universal. Examples from the history of childhood regularly reveal children are expected to "absorb" the bad feelings of their caretakers. Newborn infants, in particular, were perfect poison containers because they were so "unpolluted."

Children were particularly useful as poison containers when adults felt anxious about recent or impending success. Success stirs up superego retaliation, and the sacrifice of children to appease the gods--that is, the punitive parents--was an extremely widespread guilt-reducing device. Most early states practiced child sacrifice.

The evolution of childhood from incest to love and from abuse to empathy has been a slow, uneven path, but one whose progressive direction is, I think, unmistakable. This evolution of parent-child relations is, I contend, an independent source of historical change, lying in the ability of successive generations of parents to live through their own childhood traumas a second time and work through their anxieties in a slightly better manner this second time around. If the parent--the mother, for most of history--is given even the most minimal support by society, the evolution of childhood progresses, new variations in historical personality are formed, and history begins to move in new, innovative directions.”

If DeMause’s historical examples and the conclusions he draws from them are sound, then the breezy light, happy culture America created may have been a product of a departure from fear and morbidity as much as a fall from European sophistication. The narratives of early talking cinema continually replay the glee of America’s struggle for freedom in narratives of young people becoming independent from their parents, finding romance, and starting a life of their own. Romance is a key concept here because it’s a progression from an earlier mode, in which children were thought of as possessions of the parents (and wives as possessions of husbands). In the new socializing mode romance was at last possible, as children for the first time became separate human beings who had autonomy from their parents. Children born into the socializing mode could idealize the other as a love object, and not try to control the other through fear or be ruled by him or her. Thus, love in the modern sense as a partnership between equals, or romance, became possible. (The Romantic Movement in the arts also began in the eighteenth century, just as the Intrusive Mode was giving way to the Socializing Mode).

Romance as an equal partnership in "His Girl Friday"

Thus I see the classical Hollywood film with its all-enveloping dream of romance as a great progression from a time when men owned women and children. In the romance, women were seen not as property, but as equal to, or even better than men. So whereas the classical Hollywood narrative may have been guilty of an agenda to socialize men to be good husbands, it was progressive in the sense of furthering the basic elements of the American Dream. All of those healthy kids in musicals who put on a show in the barn or on Broadway had parents who loved them enough to learn to support them and give them their autonomy through the course of the narrative. It was a war of generations and not of gender, with youth, sex, jazz, and the American Dream winning out over stuffiness, snobbery, and class consciousness. These musical comedies were made up of men and women sharing something together, united in their efforts to create a new, freer, more fluid and more democratic society.

Those movies also represented an ideal of romantic partnership that I suspect was not often found in everyday life, except in the most progressive of families. Yet seeing these families and couples interact was surely important for the psychological health of many children and adults. In a reality in which parents still mostly massively projected onto their children (many families at any given time have not reached the most advanced mode of their time, and many are several modes behind), one could learn from these healthy young people in love how to interact lovingly with another person. Men could learn how to respect women, women could learn to trust men, children could see what reasonable parents looked like, and we could all learn to model ourselves after these ideal human beings who became like religious idols in the galaxy of stars that populated millions of private dreams.

Audiences screeched with glee as Joan Crawford was toppled from her throne by Faye Dunaway's grotesque caricature of her in MOMMIE DEAREST

And whereas the habit of men putting women on pedestals can surely be an annoying one as far as modern women are concerned, I would suggest that it’s better than some of the alternatives. When we progressed as a culture beyond needing stars as religious idols or substitute parental figures, the female glamor queen was toppled off her throne. Great stars from Hollywood’s glamor age were ridiculed and parodied by the media and by gays in drag shows. Judy Garland became a mess, Mae West and Joan Crawford grotesqueries, Marlene Dietrich a narcissistic joke. Somehow the images we retain of those stars is of how they looked at the moment when they were toppling. The fantasy became the toppling itself, and the glamor queens became Marie Antoinettes sacrificed for the revolution. With its ever-voracious need for independence, America had severed its ties to its new idols and oppressors, the movie stars, and had declared itself independent from the oppressive Hollywood dream machine.

Yet when the female glamor idol disappeared, what replaced her? In a media world mostly dominated by males, we got the truth, that is, the truth of the male imaginary of the female. The primal fear and desire of the mother, and perhaps also the sublimated anger at the battering father, came out in endless movies that depicted sexual violence and ambivalence towards women. The schizophrenic splitting of personalities of those raised in ambivalent childrearing modes came out in a deep Madonna-whore split. Female characters in films largely became male projections of female evil, softened by the fluffy, depersonalized dolls of pinups and pornography. Many of the great art films examined the male anguish of the failure of mother to be the perfect breast, and of the never-ending search for the ideal female. But without idealized female figures to dream about, those femmes fatales with hearts of gold that merged mother and whore together into a cohesive whole, man’s fears and fantasies became raw and unmoored.

Porn movies replaced the concept of woman as wife and partner with woman as terrorized sex slave

Tarkovsky’s film THE SACRIFICE deals with such themes. Whatever the political or symbolic content of the film, the emotional content is man’s terror in the absence of the nurturing breast. The protagonist is married to a hysterical, childish woman who is reprimanded more than once by others for not being able to take care of her family properly. Although much younger than him and attractive, she is clearly not adequate to meet her aging husband’s growing emotional needs, especially as she doesn’t love him. As the end of the world approaches via nuclear holocaust, and ominous television broadcasts and blasts overhead signal eminent doom, the husband prays to God that he will sacrifice everything - his family, his home, and his young son - to have the world go back to the way it was before the war. A friend tells him that to save the world he must sleep with one of his servants, a maid who happens to be a witch. In short, this woman’s offering of the symbolic breast, of sex, and of perfect love (she listens in a state of grace as he relates a long story of trying fruitlessly to please his mother), saves the world (at least symbolically). The metaphor of the elusive breast as savior is further entrenched by a Da Vinci painting of a Madonna and Child that figures prominently in the film. At one point, the protagonist and his friend stare at the painting in terror. The friend says, quaking with fear, “I have always been terrified of Leonardo!”

The maid/ witch as projection screen of the protagonist's desires in THE SACRIFICE

Tarkovsky’s film presents in emotional terms the narrative that has mostly replaced the earlier narrative of a couple starting a life together, and it glaringly excludes one part of the earlier equation – the female. The female exists for the male no longer as a partner in romance, but as a projection of his most primal fears. And in his existential search for himself, he discards the female and her promise of a home and domestic comfort in search of his wilder self, which naturally excludes her. The artistic movements of the ‘60s were largely about breaking free of tradition, but they were also about breaking free of the clutches of the female and the family.

Several films, however, have told the woman’s side of the story. One such film is Chantal Akerman’s JEANNE DIELMAN, which one can see as being the mirror image of THE SACRIFICE in some ways, covering the same emotional issues from a woman’s point of view. Jeanne Dielman is a housewife raising a teenage son alone, who secretly prostitutes herself every afternoon in her bourgeois flat to pay the bills. The men who come to see her may well be the husband in THE SACRIFICE– men looking for a woman to project their deepest fantasies onto in the cathartic act of sex. Her son also massively projects onto her, constantly sexualizing her with his probing questions about her sex life. But to Jeanne Dielman, there is no fantasy in her service to her clients or to her son. There is nothing in fact except drudgery. When the men leave, she bathes and scrubs the tub, airs out the bedroom, puts on the potatoes, etc. She gets nothing out of the equation except a few dollars, and this money is not even for her, but for her son. In the end, she kills one of her customers and thus ruins her life, being already dead inside a long time before.

Jeanne Dielman lives in anxiety as a projection screen for men

In America’s repetition of its initial cutting of the umbilical cord that tied it to England, it continues to destroy tradition and to seek new ground. But I would argue that the severing of the fantasy of romance was in some ways a step back in culture, a return to more primitive emotional states in which woman can’t be imagined by man except as an object of fantasy or terror. What the first-wave feminists didn’t realize was that the idealizing of woman was the best that men could do. Love for a man is his form of civilization, and without it he can truly be a brute. At a time when songs were continually chanting in his ears the words: “Dreams, summer, tears, sad, wind, love, heart, night, starry, light, crying, sighing” (Willow Weep for Me), a man was responding to a more advanced part of himself, a part that could deeply love.

American popular culture produced some great works of art from that dream of romance and equality, achieving its highest form in my view in musical comedy. Cinephiles have long looked down on American light entertainment as frivolous. And yet the very thing that many people sneer at in those musicals and screwball comedies, their lightness, is perhaps their greatest achievement. This lightness I believe comes from the collective American Dream of freedom, which became infectious and which every individual, regardless of race or gender, could share in. Yet there was just enough friction in the fight for independence from one’s parents to make the struggle seem palpable and real, and to make it mean something.

The American musical: cornball propaganda or a unique American achievement?

In the massive cultural revolutions of the ‘60s, we fought for more freedom – from our parents, from social indoctrination, from censorship, from class struggle, from gender and race oppression, and basically from having any constraints whatever on our personalities. And while we thought that these new freedoms would make us perfectly happy, they somehow didn’t. We were now children running around with no parents, because we’d banished them. We were suddenly solely responsible for our own rage and despair, and we suddenly had no masters to learn from and to struggle with. Therefore, in our fight for freedom, we inadvertently orphaned ourselves. And the parents of the ‘60s and ‘70s, believing this new total independence to be the ultimate good, in turn orphaned their own children. So psychohistory went backwards to the abandoning mode, especially in the most bohemian families. At the same time, the studio system itself broke down, destroyed by actors who wanted independence from the oppressive studio fathers, and the era of classical Hollywood, with its collective dream of divine romance, tragically ended.

The Love Witch

2011-08-11T12:07:00.000-07:00

My familiar Brutus with some pertinent reading material

Several people recently have asked about my new film, so I thought I would say a few words about it without giving too much away.

The film is called THE LOVE WITCH, and it is about a modern-day woman who uses witchcraft as a way of getting love into her life. It contains several dominant themes: one is the prevalence of alternative religions in modern society to satisfy cravings for deeper meanings in a confusing world; another is the sexual power of the female, which is emphasized in witchcraft as something which does not diminish the female but makes her greater (as opposed to much of post-feminist theory that insists that men and women are not only equal but “the same” – witchcraft emphasizes equality in male-female polarity); and the third theme is a treatment and discussion, almost a treatise at times, on romantic love.

An altar I made from magical specifications given by Crowley

The top of the altar with some ritual items

Whereas my last film VIVA was about sex and was therefore a comedy, THE LOVE WITCH is about love and is thus a tragedy. People have often remarked that VIVA was characterized by excessive laughter. The laughter was a mask that people donned to disguise more complex feelings arising from the pressures of sudden sexual freedom, but above all it was a way of signaling, as drama masks do, that in spite of any inner complexity, we are looking at a comedy. Eisenstein once said that if you want the audience to be beside itself, then everything on the screen has to be beside itself. I’m inclined to agree with him. Therefore, my idea in making VIVA was that, because it was a comedy, everyone on the screen should be beside themselves with laughter.

Painting of Baphomet done for the film by the talented Barry Morse

In THE LOVE WITCH, by contrast, everyone is always in tears. This is to signal that the film is essentially a tragedy. It’s a tragedy because of the nature of romantic love, where male and female interests are often at odds, especially at a time where the sexes are more or less social equals. The protagonist, Elaine, discovers that the easy way to true love lies in using female arts and free sex to unlock the key to men’s “love potential.” But she finds that the men she ensnares in this way tend to suffer in fits of tears and agony due to the violence of their emotions, which they sometimes don’t survive. Then she meets her match in a man that is her equal in strength, a man who can’t be destroyed by love because he is resistant to love. Hence, there is tragedy on both sides.

The film is highly metaphorical, almost allegorical, and is an attempt to create the feeling onscreen of heartbreak. In a sense, it’s the mirror image of VIVA. In VIVA, women suffer as men have access to their deepest fantasies, in an actual historical phenomenon known as the sexual revolution. In THE LOVE WITCH, men suffer as women figure out how to get what they want – undying romantic love and commitment to the grave. The film abounds with symbols of romantic love, such as the mythical unicorn, and with female environments, such as a mock renaissance/ medieval wedding, a cloying all-female tea room where ladies chat about men, love, and Prince Charming, and a retro burlesque club where neo-burlesque dancers talk about female empowerment.

Some pagan medieval costumes in progress

In addition to being a tragedy, it’s also a horror movie. I think of it as a horror movie designed to scare men, in the sense that men are the victims and they are not empowered. But it will especially scare men in that it contains scenes of women talking together obsessively about love, in rarefied female environments. I think of lace curtains and doilies and tea accessories, for example, as scaring men. So whereas in VIVA many of the scenarios were designed to be funny for men but scary for women (some women and girls actually cry in grief at the end, as I did while cutting the ending together), THE LOVE WITCH is designed to be funny for women, but scary for men (although the ending is specifically designed to be heartbreaking for women).

Terrifying tea set I bought for the movie!

Set design for tea room in THE LOVE WITCH

The scariness for men also resides in their fear of witches, which are a metaphor for all women. In constructing this film I was interested in two things: how a witch thinks about herself, and also how a witch is thought of by others. A witch, to men, symbolizes Circe, the Siren, the femme fatale, Eve, Medea, the temptress, a thing of pure evil designed to suck out men’s souls. All of this of course is a fear of female sexuality.

Maxine and Alex Sanders' coven in action in the '60s

Much of the interesting witch material I could find comes from the ‘60s and ‘70s, as the witch was revived during the sexual revolution as a symbol of female sexual freedom. There was a lot of prurient curiosity at the time about naked witches and their rites and orgies. Pulp novels and softcore films used the witch as a figure more than at any time before or since, as people at that time became curious about a woman’s insides, and what the extent and quality of her sexual experience might be. I’ve taken this fantasy of the sexy naked witch from the pulp novels and movies of that time and used it liberally in the film, taking fragments from different sources and weaving them together with my own experiences to create a perplexing mix of images and ideas.

Sexy pulp magazine witch

But I also mix up this view of sexually devouring witches with the thing that has traditionally been every witch’s real specialty – love. Witches are famous for procuring love philters and potions, and for predicting the outcomes of love with cards and oracles. All over the internet are sites offering love spells and potions for sale, catering to heartbroken women who pour out their sorrows on thousands of forums, seeking revenge for men who didn’t love them properly. A self-help book I read on broken relationships gave this advice to women: “Don’t push him away by loving him too much.” It claimed that women are creators of beauty and that they give and love more than men, and that men are intimidated by this unasked-for pouring out of love. There is a tinge of fear lurking in this male-written bit of advice, a sense that the man writing it had had his own negative experiences with all-consuming female love, and was trying to do a good deed in the world by explaining the problem gently to women.

Thousands of websites cater to women's insatiable desire for love

Love, in much of literature, is almost presented as a woman’s form of violence, with female characters doing anything, no matter how horrible, for love. This is perhaps because love has almost always been seen as a woman’s domain, while sex has been seen as a man’s domain. My thesis in the film is that men fear love because they fear losing control of themselves and being eaten alive, especially by a female that they deeply desire. But they also fear love itself, as a thing that causes women to grasp onto them for life with a terrifying clutch and to develop even more terrifying passions, as the witch Medea did when she killed her own children after being spurned in love by Jason. Men fear the witch because she is never a passive object of desire. She hunts for what she wants, and takes it.

Elaine's spell book in THE LOVE WITCH

This movie has been very difficult to research for, since so much of the material on witches out there is pure trash, and there is no such thing as a witch genre in movies that has any sort of cohesiveness in style or ideas, especially in anything of quality. It was also interesting to note how relatively few movies there are about witches compared to other horror figures, such as vampires. The most inspiring actual witch movies were LA STREGA IN AMORE (a great film from a story by Carlos Fuentes), SEASON OF THE WITCH (Romero), MEDEA (Pasolini), LEGEND OF THE WITCHES (a documentary featuring Alex Sanders’s coven), Anger’s INAUGURATION OF THE PLEASURE DOME, HORROR HOTEL (a film that’s haunted me ever since I first saw it on television as a child), THE WICKER MAN, DAY OF WRATH (Dreyer) and BABA YAGA, starring Carol Baker.

Elizabeth Taylor looking witchy in a graveyard in SECRET CEREMONY

Other films that have been inspiring are SECRET CEREMONY (Losey), which features Elizabeth Taylor and Mia Farrow as mother-daughter sorts of witches, anything by Bergman (all of Bergman’s films are about witches in a way, especially PERSONA and THE SEVENTH SEAL, and all are treatises on love and male-female disparity), other European art movies (especially from the ‘60s and ‘70s), trash sexy films such as MANTIS IN LACE and EXPOSED, which are all about the power of female sexuality, and other films featuring sex symbols with a certain type of studied allure. I’ve also been inspired by vintage fetish magazines and photos of naked witch rites. But what ties all of this material together, whatever the genre, is that it all sees a woman not just as a smaller, weaker man, but as a special creature with her own qualities. In other words, it looks at women and it SEES them, not as units of pre-determined political meaning, but as human beings with social pressures and idiosyncrasies. I am especially interested in what happens when a woman can’t take the pressure of being a woman, when it drives her slightly insane. Polanski’s REPULSION was a great inspiration in this way, and also Akerman’s JEANNE DIELMAN.

Catherine Deneuve driven insane by being a woman in REPULSION

While writing the script I did a ton of reading on witchcraft, from pulp novels to medieval treatises and books on demonology, to works by Gerald Gardner, Janet and Stewart Farrar, Sybil Leek, Colin Wilson, Montague Summers, Margaret Murray and Amber K., to Crowley and LaVey, to websites and internet histories, and I have developed my own views about what it all means. The history of witchcraft is itself a sort of madness, a history of fear, wrongful persecution of difference, and glimpses of terrifying practices that are always quickly suppressed when they surface. The actual history of magic and paganism is a small part of the total literature, but I have found this part to be the most interesting, as I’ve tried to write the character from the inside, without judgment or irony. I’ve discovered that there are elements of witchcraft that can be very beautiful, and also that there is real darkness in the world, and places I wished I had not gone into. After all of the research, being a witch has had all of the stereotypes removed from it and seems like a viable and attractive option, especially for those who are different and have never fit in. It seems to attract fringe types, both good and bad, so it’s also an interesting environment in which to examine sociological and ethical questions.

One of my witch lore bookshelves, with potion bottles

One of the more interesting finds was right on my bookshelf. A few months into the research, I suddenly remembered dimly that I had a copy of a very rare edition of Crowley’s “Magick Without Tears” (at left in photo above) that I had borrowed from my father many years ago but never read. Opening it, I found an inscription to my father from Curtis Harrington, who was in the Los Angeles circle of witches back in the day. I asked my father about this, and apparently he used to hang out with Curtis and a bunch of other witches, including Kenneth Anger, in Samson DeBrier’s house in Hollywood (where INAUGURATION OF THE PLEASURE DOME was filmed). This was when my father was a young actor, before be became an artist, and he was brought there by other actors he knew, including Elaine May, as it was a hangout for Hollywood actors at the time. I’ve heard many other such stories since. It seems that practically everyone you talk to (at least here in Los Angeles) is either a witch, or knows witches and has stories.

Inscription by Curtis Harrington In MAGICK WITHOUT TEARS

I looked up the edition of the Crowley I have, and I found that there were only 100 copies made, and that there’s a copy for sale at an online bookshop for $2,000. It’s a crude mimeographed printing of a manuscript typed on a typewriter, which makes it seem quite personal, and I consider its discovery to be a magical coincidence. Crowley was definitely a serious occultist in some ways, even a visionary, but in other ways a dilettantish prankster and possibly even a dangerous sociopath. Recently I went to an event where Kenneth Anger gave a talk on Crowley, but he was very cagey and evasive about the whole thing. He showed a film he had made existing solely of shots of Crowley’s paintings set to music. The paintings were wonderful, and so was the film. Both Crowley and Anger were definitely trying to capture real “magick,” through ceremony, study, the social, and artwork. There is a lot of darkness there, but also much to be inspired by. Anger’s own films capture a supernatural feeling that is quite uncanny. I myself feel that the best magic is created through artwork, which is also a metaphor I’m trying to create in my film. (I also tend to think of films themselves as magical objects).

Handmade Persian wool hooked rug hooked over months of evenings

I’ve finished all of the set and costume design for the film and made some set pieces for it, including a large Persian wool rug that took me MONTHS to hook (which you can see here with my familiar sitting on it), and a very beautiful magical altar inscribed with magical signs. I’m also creating wands, renaissance costumes, spell books, etc. I always make something very time-consuming with my hands for each film, in order to develop a personal relationship to the objects. I’m finding that this film tends to have objects and motifs that repeat over and over again. So while VIVA featured liquor and cigarettes in every scene, along with many negligées, it seems that this film features ROBES and CANDLES in almost every scene. I’m not sure how this happened, but it seems there is a connection somehow with ritual robes and robes that bourgeois people hang around the house in, and also between interior decorating candles and altar candles. There’s also a lot of coffee and tea and wine and cake and special dishes and goblets for all of the food and drink, and lots of jewels and rocks and gemstones and things made from wood and symbols from the tarot (pentacles, wands, cups, swords). I’m trying to get the objects to create a mix of the earthy and the magical, which is what witches represent to me. The film will also feature many symbols of romantic love, which also cross over into witch and fairy symbolism, such as aromatic herbs and wildflowers, roses, ethereal maidens, and MAGICAL UNICORNS.

Some jewels I've collected for the film

THE CRIMSON KIMONO, and Musings about Race

2011-01-24T18:02:00.000-08:00

In Sam Fuller’s THE CRIMSON KIMONO (1959), James Shigeta plays a detective who is investigating the murder of a burlesque dancer at a downtown Los Angeles strip club in the 1950s. The dancer, a blonde bombshell named Sugar Torch whose smile is a grimace during her brief and awkward dance number that opens the film, seems to barely conceal a hostile desperation underneath her trappings that are only meant to please (frozen smile, exaggerated lipstick and lashes, long blonde wig, heels, stockings, lingerie, voluptuous body, etc.) The brevity and oddness of her dance also precludes the audience from actually gaining any pleasure or titillation from her performance. The raucous laughter from the unseen men in the club only punches up the pathos of her position. So that, moments, later, when she exits the stage and drops her smile, which turns instantly into the exhausted scowl of a depressed clown, we know already that she is a tragic figure. And when moments after that she is shot at in her dressing room by a disguised assailant, and eventually killed by another shot as she runs out into the blaring traffic of the big bad city in her underwear and heels, we almost feel that her death has been inevitable from the start. Add to this a wild, pounding jazz soundtrack, and a tracking shot over the opening credits that shows the glory and neon sin of downtown Los Angeles in the ‘50s, and you get Sam Fuller at his operatic best.

Sugar Torch hams it up onstage

But what is most extraordinary about this film, in my opinion, is how it treats race identity. The film opens with the quintessential blonde all-American girl, the pinup fantasy of every red-blooded American male. But our expectations of enjoying her charms throughout the picture are thwarted as she is killed almost instantly as the picture begins. Then, audiences who think they are familiar with the city of Los Angeles through countless films depicting its geography and denizens may be surprised to find that it has a side they may not be aware of - a Japanese American side.

For the same downtown Los Angeles that is the home of the burlesque theater where Sugar torch met her fatal end contains Little Tokyo, its own little city with a rich cultural heritage. Here, Shinto and Buddhist temples and noodle factories abound, and Japanese priests and Nissei Week dancers wear traditional kimono and obi. But the young Japanese Americans are stylishly dressed in Western clothing, have slangy American accents, and are as brassy and outspoken as any white movie actor. Yet it’s not the inclusion of such cultural color that makes this film so unique; it’s the fact that the hero of the film himself is a Japanese American, and that his identity ends up being the main focus of the picture.

Kojaku interviews a witness in Little Tokyo

James Shigeta, whom film audiences will remember fondly as the handsome lead in FLOWER DRUM SONG, plays Detective Joe Kojaku, who is putting a great deal of energy into solving the Sugar Torch case, as he is looking to be promoted to a sergeant, like his best friend and former war buddy Sgt. Bancroft, played by handsome blonde actor Glenn Corbett in his film debut. (Corbett, incidentally, modeled for “physique” magazines in the 1950s). The key piece of evidence in the case is a painting of Sugar in a crimson kimono, which was part of a specialty Japanese-themed act which lead the dancer to collaborate with various characters in Little Tokyo shortly before her murder.

Opening credits, showing the painting of Sugar in the crimson kimono

After various forays into the underbelly of Japanese American life in downtown Los Angeles (which Kojaku is intimately familiar with as a Japanese American himself), the two detectives locate their key witness, the artist who painted the picture, an attractive gamine named Christine with a far-away look, whom they both fall in love with. Initially starting up a shallow sexual flirtation with Bancroft, the girl eventually falls deeply in love with Kojaku, setting up a tense rivalry between the two men.

Joe and Christine connect soul to soul

Always an original director, Fuller drops the murder mystery genre at this point and risks a serious lull in the pace of the film to suddenly introduce a subplot involving race issues. Most obviously, we are made of aware of how highly unusual it is for us to see the white girl falling for the Japanese guy, especially when there is nothing ostensibly “wrong” with the white guy (who is charming, successful, good-looking, and a nice guy). But Kojaku and the girl share something – one may call it “otherness -” due partly to their outsider positions as a female and a non-white male, but also to the fact that they are both artists of a sort (she paints, he plays the piano).

Bancroft appeals to Christine's shallower instincts

Bancroft, meanwhile, is so confident of his ability to get the girl that he is already boasting of marriage plans, without even having asked her how she feels about it. So when Kojaku tells Bancroft about his and Christine’s love for one another, Bancroft is understandably shocked at her choice. And when Kojaku sees this look of shock and thwarted entitlement on his friend’s face, he seems to suddenly detect on Bancroft’s face the whole ugly truth of racism. Christine also interprets Kojaku’s reticence in declaring his feelings for her to his insecurities as a Japanese man, overlooking the obvious fact that anyone would clearly be conflicted about stealing their best friend’s girl.

Subjected to the awkward reactions of his best friend and the girl he loves, Kojaku suddenly realizes, for the first time in his life, that he is divided from white Americans not by his own choice, but because of their own extreme awareness of his “difference.” He is suddenly made aware that every interaction he has with white people has these undertones, although he has never noticed them before. He feels uneasy and displaced, neither Japanese nor American, and becomes paranoid that he may be secretly shunned and condescended to by all white people. His jaunty and debonair attitude turns into a twisted hatred for white people, and in his anger he nearly kills his friend Bancroft in a Nissei Week Kendo (Japanese fencing) tournament.

Little Tokyo Kendo Tournament

By the end of the film, due to an almost unbelievable show of good sportsmanship from Bancroft who assures him that racism had nothing to do with his awkward reaction, order is restored and Kojaku gets the girl. And although the story of this film would tell us that all of it was in Kojaku’s head and that really no racism ever existed (“You saw what you wanted to see,”) we of course know better. Kojaku shows us what it’s like to be torn between two different cultures, and to be comfortable in neither. And he also shows us that no matter what he does to try to become an integrated person, he will never fully be accepted either as American or as Japanese.

Sugar Torch, burlesque "freak"

Sugar's killer: a jealous rival

Fuller has always been fascinated by fringe types or “freaks” in his films, especially strippers, criminals, perverts, and the mentally ill. Sugar Torch herself is killed for this otherness, as we discover in the end that she was shot by a female rival who was jealous that her boyfriend was spending time with Sugar, helping her with the Japanese details of her act. Sneaking into the burlesque theater disguised as a man, she could not bear to see Sugar’s beauty which she felt she could not compete with, and shot her in a fit of jealous rage. Sugar’s “freakishness” as she performs an exaggerated masquerade of feminine desirability contains a parallel to Kojaku’s freakishness as a Japanese American. As exotics, they are potentially hated and feared, colonized and fetishized, admired and envied. Fuller’s skill is in removing the veil that separates us from the exotic other. In Fuller’s films, we are lured in with a promise of base voyeuristic enjoyment, but instead are forced to identify with and see ourselves in the other. And eventually there is no separation between self and other, the normal and the abnormal.

Moreover, Fuller’s decision to cast an Asian American person in a lead role in a “regular” film is so highly unusual that it makes me think about how rarely we ever see this in films. In the history of Hollywood, people of color have generally been excluded from films which are not specifically race-related, at least in major or especially glamorous roles. One notable exception is the 1961 Rodgers & Hammerstein musical FLOWER DRUM SONG (also starring James Shigeta), now considered by many to be an embarrassment. The show was relaunched recently and rewritten to be more politically correct, but more or less still flopped.

FLOWER DRUM SONG, as I see it, is a form of Asian vaudeville. It works with stereotypes to create comedy and social satire, and has very talented Asian comedians doing shtick about being Chinese American, in much the same way as Jewish vaudevillians do shtick about being Jewish. In one extraordinary burlesque number, saucy, sexy Chinese American girls do drag as Irish, German, Dutch, French, and English girls. Wow! That number alone is worth the whole show. It’s the only instance I can recall where I’ve seen Asian girls impersonating white girls. It’s an extremely subversive moment politically, as well as being quite funny, and yet I think it’s such content that makes many people uncomfortable about the show. (By contrast, most people are fine with Yul Brynner’s mugging in THE KING AND I as an ignorant Siamese king who must be taught how to be civilized by a prissy English missionary school teacher, and people also love the quirky natives who provide exotic color in SOUTH PACIFIC).

So what can really be offensive about FLOWER DRUM SONG? Surely not that it contains stereotypes. Stereotypes, after all, are the basis of all broad stage comedy. If Jack Soo as a loutish playboy or Nancy Kwan as a shameless golddigger embarrass us as caricatures, then Dean Martin and Marilyn Monroe should embarrass us equally in similar roles. Are they then offended that Asians are getting all the good roles? Or that Asian women are sexualized? How is this different than any other '50s or '60s musical? The sex appeal of female entertainers has long been a major draw of musical comedy. I’m suspicious when people think of FLOWER DRUM SONG as an inferior show, for in my view it has a stellar cast, book, and score. The only thing that distinguishes it from similar musicals of the time is that it features an all-Asian cast, which leads me to believe that many people who claim that it’s racist simply are uncomfortable seeing Asians on the screen.

Kwan and showgirls give the Chinatown audience their money's worth

The problem with so much race-related material is that it IS race-related. In other words, people of color are supposed to behave like people of color. They are supposed to be marginalized, downtrodden, and have a chip on their shoulder about race discrimination. Ideally, they should come from some sort of ghetto, and be denied access to things that white people have, such as education, opportunities, wealth, and glamour. Predominantly white, privileged film festival audiences enjoy nothing more than to see non-white, third world, and poverty-stricken people struggling and barely getting by. Regardless of the quality of merit of such films (which is often excellent), it seems that more glamorous and upbeat treatments of people of color should also be accepted by such audiences. (Another example of a film that makes many uncomfortable is CARMEN JONES, a reworking of Bizet’s “Carmen” by Oscar Hammerstein in an African-American setting. I have heard one person actually call this extraordinary film, with a breathtaking score, dazzling Technicolor, a talented cast, and direction by Otto Preminger, ”disgusting.”) But why should people of color NOT have scores written for them by the likes of George and Ira Gershwin (PORGY AND BESS) and Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein? Should they remain instead in the ghetto of race, only writing for themselves and each other, and focusing only on the problems of race? Are they duty-bound to only play "themselves," as if one can truly know what a self is, and as if such a thing is more knowable in the other than in the normative (white) individual? Are they to be denied the rich heritage of American and European cultural history, although that may be the only culture they know?

Dorothy Dandrige sexes it up as Carmen

One thing about musicals is that they are forms of entertainment that involve artifice and masks. The privilege of donning the mask in American theater and film has historically usually been reserved for white people, which is why musicals portraying people of color may pose a special discomfort for white people, as if their territory were being impinged upon. (White actors have enjoyed great success playing caricatures of blacks and Asians on the stage and screen since the dawn of American theater, until quite recently). Also, musicals often use broad stereotypes, which may seem racist to those who would wish to see every portrayal of a person of color be suitably complex. But if, in a broad cultural sense, people of color were seen as being as dimensional as white people, then it would make perfect sense in FLOWER DRUM SONG for Chinese girls to do white drag as a form of fun, or for Joe Kojaku to “play white,” and not even realize he’s different until he sees himself through the other’s gaze.

Ruby Keeler does Chinese drag as Shanghai Lil

That’s the extraordinary thing about being “other,” whether it’s about race, gender, sexual orientation, or anything else: you often only know you’re different because you’re told, both in personal interactions and by the cultural images and narratives you consume. But to be an Asian American or an African American or any other person of color in America is to be first of all an AMERICAN, which entitles one to the rights and privileges of all Americans. And in entertainment, that includes the right to perform or write any character, white or non-white, savory or unsavory, strange or normal, colorful or boring, glamorous or plain, rich or poor, obnoxious or polite, mentally ill or sane, sexy or prim, erudite or illiterate, clueless or brilliant, together or a mess, tasteful or garish, obscene or decorous, a caricature or a complex character, as one chooses, whether it’s good for you and your political demographic or not. And that right in my opinion extends to all people who feel or are treated as cultural others, including women and gays. Entertainment, after all, has a value outside of politics, and includes an element of play and artifice. So while Nancy Kwan’s materialistic sexpot and James Shigeta’s regular Joe may be opposite types, they are both outside of the ghetto of race in which the roles people play are strictly limited to their value as political tools.

Nancy Kwan does Chinese drag as Suzie Wong

Kim Novak at the Egyptian Theatre

2010-08-03T21:43:00.000-07:00

Kim Novak: publicity still, and still from The Legend of Lylah Clare

Kim Novak made an appearance last weekend at the Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood to present a mini-retrospective of her films. After a presentation of the 1958 Richard Quine film Bell Book and Candle, she appeared dressed casually in jeans and a blazer. Although she played down her dazzling beauty, which had diminished slightly with age, she was unable to hide her light. She is still, and will always be, a great STAR.

She was so charismatic and personable that hearing her speak was like sharing an intimate moment with her one on one. And although she was careful not to say anything directly negative about anyone, she painted a picture of classic Hollywood that was cruel and difficult. Novak, who had always wanted to be a painter and accidentally fell into an acting career, became a star and sex symbol overnight with her role in the 1954 noir film Pushover, in which she played a version of Barbra Stanwyck’s character in Double Indemnity, paired (not coincidentally, I think) with Fred MacMurray. Although the film suffers from a weak script, Novak’s astonishing beauty, smoldering sex appeal, catlike grace, and vulnerability did not go unnoticed, and audiences clamored for more.

It’s this last quality, her vulnerability, that was the cause of both her success and her troubles in Hollywood. Signed to a contract with Columbia pictures as a rival to Fox’s Marilyn Monroe, she wanted not just to work, but to be accepted and loved. This is something she would never receive, although she worked hard, made lots of money for the studios, and even personally baked trays of fudge for Columbia’s legendarily irascible studio head, Harry Cohn. Cohn would not thank her for these gifts, but was sure to telephone Novak every time the reviews came in and to read her all of the bad ones. She was so traumatized by these phone calls that she recalled, “One time someone was holding a cigarette too close to my arm and was burning me while he was reading me those reviews - I still have the scar on my arm - but I didn’t feel it, because the pain of what I was hearing was so much greater.”

Kom Novak and William Holden in Picnic

After working hard on a role and feeling she had really captured the essence of a character, Novak would become confused about the negative reactions to her work. It got to the point where she felt so constricted that she was afraid to do anything. And yet she claimed that when Cohn died, the entire studio fell apart. In spite of Cohn’s hardness, he had known how to make good pictures, and when he was gone, she said, “no one knew what to do.” They started giving her idiotic scripts: “Gidget goes the beach - roles I was too old for,” and she left the studio soon after that, doing only an occasional picture here and there.

Ms. Novak was so moved at the sight of the packed audience at the Egyptian Theatre giving her a standing ovation, that she asked someone to get her camera. She said to us, “Do that again,” and gestured for all of us to stand up again and clap so she could take a picture of us. She seemed not to know that she was loved and appreciated in her work in Hollywood until that moment. She seemed astonished that anyone thought her work had been any good at all. She said “no one ever told me I was doing well. No one ever said, ‘good job.’” She had tears in her eyes. The entire audience was speechless and dumbfounded that a great Hollywood star could have so little sense of her contributions to motion picture history. She confessed, “I never felt like I belonged, but I never knew if it was real or if it was due to my insecurities.” She looked out at us. “Do you know what that’s like, when you aren’t sure if you’re being persecuted or if it’s just you?” Everyone shouted, “Yes!” The audience was totally won over. We would have done anything for her at that moment.

Kim Novak dances in Pal Joey

She recalled feeling as though Hollywood was an enormous sorority that she was somehow excluded from, and speculated that it might have been partly because she was one of the only two female stars at Columbia (along with Rita Hayworth), while a studio like MGM would have dozens of stars that all knew each other. So at the big parties, she would not know anyone. (It seemed never to occur to her that the women might be catty to her out of sheer envy. She was, after all, one of the biggest sex symbols in Hollywood). But while gossip columns pitted the two Columbia stars against each other as bitter rivals, according to Novak, Rita Hayworth was “very, very sweet, just a wonderful person.”

Kim Novak with Frank Sinatra in Pal Joey

Frank Sinatra was a different story. Novak said that he was “like two different people” in Man With a Golden Arm and in Pal Joey. She excused his macho and unpleasant behavior in Pal Joey by saying “he was getting into the role.” She recounted her frustration with Sinatra when he refused to show up for dance rehearsals for Pal Joey. So she and Hayworth worked on the choreography with Hermes Pan with Sinatra absent. It was a very complicated dance involving having the women slide down poles and do all sorts of difficult things. When Sinatra finally came in days later, he requested that most of the dance be cut: “I’ll do this, I won’t do that, I’ll do this, I won’t do that,” etc. Novak recalled, “It wasn’t so bad for me - I was just starting out. But I felt sorry for Rita Hayworth, because she was a big star, and she had to work so hard learning this difficult dance, for nothing.”

Kim Novak in Jimmy Stewart's arms in Vertigo

Her memories of James Stewart were fonder. She recalls that the shot of the two of them cuddling together in Bell Book and Candle with their bare feet touching one another was so pleasant that they just sat there in that position during the whole lunch break without moving. “They asked if we wanted lunch brought to us, but we said no. We didn’t want to do eat. We just wanted to sit there and have that moment. It wasn’t even sexual or sensual anything - it just felt so good to be with him like that.” She said of the transition from Vertigo to Bell Book and Candle, “It was such an easy transition. I got to go from being in Jimmy Stewart’s arms in one picture to being in Jimmy Stewart’s arms in another picture. I miss that man so much.” She was also fond of her other co-star in Bell Book and Candle, the Siamese cat (or, rather 19 Siamese cats) playing her witches' familiar Pyewacket. Always an animal lover, she had seen a production of the play in New York, and had gotten herself her own Siamese cat and named it Pyewacket before ever moving to Hollywood.

Kim Novak with some of her feline co-stars in Bell Book and Candle

Another thing she enjoyed was wearing the gowns of one of the most popular designers of the 1950s, Jean Louis. She loved the way he would design not just for the look of the clothes, but for their movement. They enabled a character to move and do things that the scene required. She recalled loving to work with Louis, just to stand there with a bolt of fabric and create the character together. She also remembers helping him to costume other actresses. He was surprised at her willingness to hold fabric while he draped it over Judy Holiday. But she enjoyed the fabric itself, the way it felt, working with it. Here we see traces of the woman who wanted to work with her hands and be an artist. Now, at 77, she’s realizing that dream. She lives on a ranch in Oregon with her beloved veterinarian husband of 34 years - “we have such a wonderful life together - I’m so lucky” - and paints. Of her career in Hollywood, she’s not so positive. The overall feeling one gets is that she sees it as having been some sort of jail sentence, a time of being judged and punished and tormented, of working hard and not having that work being acknowledged or respected.

Kim Novak in a Jean Louis gown in Bell Book and Candle

Listening to Kim Novak, the pitfalls of beauty present themselves clearly and painfully. Others noticed her extraordinary beauty (she was discovered at a studio party), and catapulted her to fame, derailing her art career. (Gregory Peck, similarly, was studying to be an architect when he was discovered for his masculine beauty). But with beauty-based fame comes a built-in derision. Novak, like many other pretty actors and actresses, longed to escape the stigma that comes from being “merely” a pretty face. Like Marilyn Monroe and Tony Curtis, she felt happiest when she was allowed to do “serious” pictures. (Although Curtis’ deeply researched role as a serial killer in the 1970s nearly destroyed his mind). Novak’s most cherished Hollywood memory was her role in the Paddy Chayefsky-penned Middle of the Night, in which she played an insecure secretary having an affair with her aged boss. Chayefsky’s work was associated with New York, the theater, and “real” acting, and she felt that it was a real opportunity to get to work with one of his scripts. In retrospect, this looks like an inferior picture when compared with Vertigo or Bell Book and Candle, but in the context of contemporary Hollywood snobbism, those more popular and entertaining vehicles were looked down on by some as Hollywood “fluff," and partly ruined Novak's experience of them. What Novak may not have realized was that her suffering at the hands of those critics was part of a long-established tradition involving Hollywood’s own embarrassment at what it does best: entertaining audiences.

Hollywood has had an inferiority complex about its worth ever since film’s undignified origins in carnivals and peepshows. This sense of shame goes back, indeed, to America’s sense of its intellectual inferiority to Europe, starting from the population of America’s first colonies. And yet the most fresh and original work to come out of America has been the work that breaks from tradition and creates a new voice. This voice has been varied and wild, and the energy generated from all of those disparate voices and talents from all social classes and walks of life is what characterized classic Hollywood and made it great. Children of poor immigrants or vaudeville performers (Josef von Sternberg, Busby Berkeley, Jerry Lewis) could become great directors in the Hollywood system, and performers who came up from vaudeville and burlesque (The Marx Brothers, Mae West, Fred Astaire, Joan Crawford), could become top box office attractions and Hollywood royalty. This offended the sensibilities of certain intellectuals and critics who wanted entertainers to come from the "legit" stage, which implied breeding and education.

Still from Busby Berkeley's Footlight Parade

Americans have often been shocked at the ability of the French to see the artistry in the most abject of Jerry Lewis’ gags, but then again, France is proud of comedy, which has a venerable tradition there. Musical comedy, one of classic Hollywood’s greatest contributions to film history, is still given short shrift on critics’ lists of favorites, and directors who are “too entertaining” such as Hitchcock are often seen as being problematic in the history of film. The mistake that American critics make is to want to define excellence in moral terms rather than aesthetic ones. Therefore, a musical or a comedy is never going to be valued as much as a picture which purports to teach us something about our plight as human beings.

And yet Hollywood's more pleasurable concoctions teach us much about our dreams and desires. Looking back at a film such as Bell Book and Candle now, the sensual and aesthetic qualities of this picture creates its own set of meanings, of which the beauty of Kim Novak is an integral part. She is that rare type of actress who can create a surface air of impenetrable mystery, but who is fragile and human enough to make us want to protect and get deeply inside of her all at the same time. Like Marilyn Monroe, Lana Turner, Liz Taylor, and Brigitte Bardot, the tension we feel is between the image she creates for us, and the feeling of how she suffers under the pressure of that image. It’s a quality that can’t be generated through will, but that must come from the actress’s own humanity hidden under the mantle of glamour, makeup, and dialogue. She must have that perfect blend of narcissism and unselfconsciousness that is the mark of a true sex symbol.

Kim Novak casts a spell on Jimmy Stewart and on us

Novak possessed that quality effortlessly, and it made her a star overnight. In films such as the Richard Quine-directed Strangers When We Meet and in Hitchcock's Vertigo, her aching vulnerability and need for love are so palpable that we can almost touch them. Yet like many other sex symbols, Novak disliked the mask. Unlike performers such as Mae West and Gypsy Rose Lee, who embraced glamour and used it to play with their images, Novak felt that she wanted to go beyond the surface, to show something that was not a construction. Many actors feel uncomfortable when they realize that their identity for the public is a creation of dialogue writers, costume and lighting designers, hairdressers, and makeup artists. Perhaps they want to “be the real me,” or perhaps they have been seduced by the American moral values that position the “natural” above the “artificial.” And yet the mask, like a magical talisman, is what creates a star. Novak reluctantly donned the mask, but she must have known that the power of her image lay in the tension between her authentic self and the allure of her feminine mystique that was created by the studios. She learned to work with that image, but she never became consumed by it or let it define her as a person. The emotions of the fans in that theater were emotions created not by Ms. Novak alone, but by the studio system of hundreds of workers creating a collective dream of desire.

Kim Novak glamour shoot with Richard Avedon

Ms. Novak came to us in blue jeans and without a glamorous hairdo. She didn’t know that we would be disappointed to hear that she got more pleasure out of her painting than in performing for us. We had fallen in love with her, and she was in effect jilting us for another lover. But she can be forgiven for this, because she returned our love. She let us know that we had made her happy, and she told us her most intimate fears and feelings. She was letting us see Kim Novak the person, and not Kim Novak the star, and we were utterly disarmed. She still knows how to charm and captivate us, and to make us her slaves. She’s still the great Kim Novak.

Kim Novak in Vertigo

For an overview of Kim Novak's work and career, see Jonathan Rosenbaum's article, "Kim Novak as Midwestern Independent."

Kierkegaard Part I: Innocence and Spirit

2010-06-21T21:02:00.000-07:00

Venus emerges from the sea and is represented in an attitude of repose, or in an attitude which reduces the expression of the face to the unessential. On the other hand, if Apollo is to be represented, it would not do to let him sleep, any more than in Jupiter this would be appropriate. This would distract from the beauty of Apollo, and it would make Jupiter ridiculous. -Soren Kierkegaard, “The Concept of Dread”

Giorgone's "Sleeping Venus"

Looking through Kierkegaard’s THE CONCEPT OF DREAD, I found some interesting ideas. He says that INNOCENCE IS IGNORANCE, and that ignorance produces DREAD. He also states that WOMAN HAS MORE DREAD, being that she is MORE SENSUOUS than man. Says S.K: “Noting the fact that [beauty] is her ideal aspect is precisely the proof that she is more sensuous than man.” He adds,” where beauty claims the right to rule it brings about a synthesis from which spirit is excluded.” (By spirit he means a sort of thoughtfulness, humanity, individuality, mental development which separates man from the beasts). He then cites the example of Venus, saying that she is more beautiful sleeping than waking, because “the sleeping state is precisely the expression for absence of spirit. Hence it comes that the more spiritual and developed an individuality is, the less beautiful is such a person in sleep...The impression now must be of a totality which has no history. Therefore silence is not only woman’s highest wisdom, but also her highest beauty.”

Kierkegaard’ statement that INNOCENCE IS IGNORANCE makes me think of women’s attachment to their own innocence, and men’s attachment to female innocence. The stigma of the experienced woman, or the woman with a past, is great in culture to this very day. But what is interesting is that this ignorance in Kierkegaard’s language is not confined to sexual matters, but to knowledge as whole. This seems somehow allied with the male need to keep women erotic - that is, ignorant, silent, without spirit. So what is really taboo is for women to have thoughts (especially in conjunction with the sexual).

Kierkegaard’s statements, which today seem quaintly sexist in a 19^th century sort of way, are not really as outdated as they may seem, especially as we have not escaped such concepts (at least as an emotional undercurrent) as much as we might think we have. I think of the exasperation of second-wave feminists, who were fed up with men’s inability to combine spirit with beauty, and so decided to take away their beauty so men could see the spirit, the individuality, of the woman. This strategy, of course, failed, because it failed to take into consideration the fact that the erotic drive is not going to go away, no matter how inconvenient it is. The problem leaped out at me when I was reading Kierkegaard’s statements, that women feeling “objectified” has to do not with their displeasure in being regarded as visual objects of pleasure, but in the gaze being emptied of all other meaning besides this, or of its insistence upon taking away what Kierkegaard would call “spirit.” Since she experiences herself as having spirit, she cannot experience pleasure in a man’s pleasure of her as a spiritless being except in role-playing or masochism. I read in a recent study that women instinctively fall silent when a man’s gaze falls upon them, I think because in some part of themselves they know, as Kierkegaard stated, that their silence and lack of spirit is what will make them liked and desirable at such a moment (even if they don’t know the man and don’t really care what he thinks of them).

That women live with such glances and their effects on a daily basis is a fact, and that an unruffled, spiritless countenance is what a man wants is no mystery. We have only to peruse the pages of men’s magazines to know what sort of expression and affect men respond to, that the face which seems emptied of thought is the most desirable. In rare instances when women have combined spirit with sexuality in performance, reactions have been mixed. Mae West claims to have single-handedly brought on the Hays Code with her predatory sexuality, and Angie Dickinson’s effortless sexuality combined with street-smart cop toughness and feminine compassion in POLICE WOMAN caused many negative reactions (some from misguided feminists, who regarded ANY display of sexuality in a woman as a sort of victimhood or going over to the enemy’s camp. Apparently, Dickinson’s character was “toned down” after the first season, and never again had the punch of the first few episodes). Reviewing that series recently, I was astonished by the way her character “Pepper” was allowed to have it all. Pepper bows to no one, and does not have to pretend to be a guy to be a good cop. In fact, she preys on men’s stupidity, on their assumptions that she is a dumb broad, to trap them time and again, showing genuine compassion at times, and precisely calculated and savage violence at other times. But there is never any doubt as to her femininity - she is all woman. (Compare this to later female cop shows, such as CHARLIE’S ANGELS, in which the intelligence comes from an invisible man who transmits intelligence to the “angels” as a voice, or CAGNEY & LACEY, in which the women veer precariously between self-deprecating weepy female talk and having to act like guys to get respect. The writing on that show, as in many shows today, seems calculated to placate spectators who might be intimidated by strong, sexy, feminine women, or who are embarrassed by the feminine as a lower form of identity). Pepper Anderson, unlike her imitators in later shows, was not less than the other cops because of being a woman - she was MORE.

Pepper Anderson: Beauty and Spirit Combined

On this note, a few years ago I was watching a miss Universe contest in which Miss Italy was a runner-up for the crown, and was asked what she had to say about people who disparage beauty contests. She smiled with effortless sex appeal and said in a thick Italian accent: “Now we can be totally woman!” What she meant of course is that women today can have it all, or that being admired for your beauty does not diminish you as a person, but the judges’ faces fell and I sensed that they were unanimously embarrassed by her statement, and found its sentiment backward and ignorant. I could just hear them saying under their breaths, "Poor stupid girl!" Miss India, who won the crown, conveyed little sexuality, was androgynous in manner, and spoke passionately and with perfect diction about world peace, and I feel that it was this more than anything else that made the judges rule in her favor. If so, the judges made a mistake, which was to overvalue spirit out of a sense of guilt at judging women for their beauty, but it was a beauty contest in fact, and not a spirit contest (nor in fact an English language contest).

But the reason I bring it up is that this is just another example of how a feminine woman who enjoys being a feminine woman is looked on as some sort of an idiot. Which of course lowers all things feminine to a level beneath that of things that are masculine, a real problem in general for female identity. This contempt for the feminine comes from a sensibility that agrees with Kierkegaard that beauty lacks spirit, and therefore, is inferior and even immoral. (Glamour today is seen as similarly immoral, as is anything visually pleasurable, and thus outside of spirit. But I wonder whether in a world of fifty years ago in which men and women both wore beautiful clothes whenever possible, and the air was fragranced with a thousand blooms in corsages and buttonholes, and decorated with every shade of flower rustling in silk gowns on undulating bodies, and enchanted by the romantic nuances of dance orchestras and singers, spirit was excluded more completely than it is today)?

Betty Grable enchanting and undulating in "Moon Over Miami"

Having made a study of female sexuality in culture, I’ve found that the combination of female spirit with female desire has been a greatly feared thing in all times and in all contexts. It’s behind many characterizations of the “witch” (in fact, one of the main aspects of the witch in culture and history is that she contains sexual agency, which makes her greatly feared). Mainstream depictions of female sexuality usually feature whiny, self-deprecating women who are desperate for a man, ostensibly to deflect jealousy from the female audience who have nothing to fear from these ultra-ordinary gals. (This is also part of the recent more general Cult of the Mediocre, an epidemic which is by definition anti-sexy). But it’s the same problem as before: the women may have spirit, but the erotic is gone. It’s as if the writers of these shows cannot imagine any more than Kierkegaard could that women can have spirit and Eros together. But for women to be the equals of men, they need to have the same rights. And not being able to enjoy your beauty or sexuality for fear of displeasing others is very much a lack of rights. Did feminism destroy those rights, or was it men who were afraid of women having too much power? When we laugh at femmes fatales from the ‘40s on the screen, what are we really laughing at? Do we really think that Eros belongs only to men, and that a sexy woman is always a man’s pawn and doormat? Where is female agency located? Why is it a threat to so many? Or does it merely make a woman unsexy to have desire so that it ruins it for men?

Tura Satana, One Confident Sexy Mama

One thing that fascinates me about the culture of the sexual revolution of the ‘60s and ‘70s is that it was a time when female sexuality was explored with a magnifying glass. Erotic literature and movies could not help but involve the personalities of the women involved, if for no other reason than that there were actresses with personalities who were playing the roles (such as Tura Satana, whose confidence and screen presence were sometimes mistaken for parallel feminist qualities in Russ Meyer). Also, to vary the plots of thousands of sex pulp novels, female desire and motivation were often thrown in for variety. (Not to mention the efforts of serious writers and directors who were genuinely interested in female sexuality). There are things the sexual revolution accomplished that were good for women: it took away the dread and guilt from FEMALE sexuality, at least for a time, and to some extent the double standard that required men to be experienced and women innocent. Sexual liberty being sold as a basic human right created a rich and varied cultural discussion involving people from many walks of life and included many points of view, before all roads began to eventually lead to a generic porn industry with little or no cultural value, that generated almost no discussion and was made for one purpose only.

Today, partly because of the embarrassment of that history, we are in a deadlock regarding gender and sexuality. Our strategy has been to take away ALL sexuality, and to pretend that there is no such thing as a man or a woman, there is only a person (a “spirit,” a bodiless ether floating in space). But for many, especially those who enjoy beauty, pleasure, or the erotic, this solution is an ill fit. I can see why women would want to do away with gender difference, especially in light of how much they stand to lose in playing a man’s game (to be beauty and silence without spirit), but there is much to be gained in facing the game and trying to take some pleasure from it, if we can indeed decide what our pleasure consists in. As a woman, I want to have it all, like Angie Dickinson. I personally like the idea of being, like that greatly misunderstood Italian beauty contestant, “Totally Woman.”

Angie Dickinson, Totally Woman

Strippers, Narcissists, and Clowns

2009-12-28T18:25:00.000-08:00

James Stewart in "The Greatest Show on Earth"

Recently I've become aware of a sexy video that someone I know has made of herself. It consists of a series of photos that are frankly sexual in nature, seemingly created for one purpose: to attract sexual attention from men. They are all lingerie photos, except for a couple of nude photos that show what you could show in a lotion ad (hands over breasts, body position hiding crotch). Facial expressions are either confrontational or generically sexy, and some are almost like fashion magazine shots, featuring various floppy hats or boots, with a suitably vacant facial expression. Comments on the videos are mostly of a salacious nature, and the model seems to welcome the responses cheerfully, and to try to deflect them with an "oh my, you're a naughty boy," or an "aw, thanks, you're sweet!" sort of spirit. The model in question is married with children, and has taken on a pseudonym.

Seeing this video has made me confront some of my own issues, and it's been tough. My first response is disgust: "How could she put herself out there like that?" My second response is envy: "But I have to admit that she looks pretty hot." My third response is fear: "What if people think I'm doing something like that with my work?" The questions and go on and on: "Why is she catering to those men and encouraging sexist remarks from them? Am I also catering to men when I show myself in a sexual way in a movie? If she looks hotter than me, does that make her work of higher value, in terms of how a (male) viewer ascribes value to a work? If that's the case, does her single-afternoon photo shoot potentially erase my four years of work on a film? Do other women look at me and see what I see when I look at this video and hate me for it? Do men see me that way, and judge me only on my hotness or lack thereof?"

Betty Hutton paper dolls

Another question came up as well: "Why do I love looking at vintage pinups, neo-burlesque shows, and certain vintage sex movies, but have so much of a problem with this?" I think it's because what I love is glamour and dress-up, and the fantasies evoked in her video are so mainstream and trashy. It's the female image without a self behind it, in the mode of all contemporary generic sex imagery. The feminine side of me gets excited by gowns, makeup, beautifully done hair, etc. But without elements of glamour, artistic distance, or individuality in a woman's photograph, there is nothing to "turn me on." When I am presented by a starkly sexual image of a woman without that requisite distance, the sole purpose of which is to make a guy's dick hard, I am like most women in that I feel ambivalent. But men of course are different. I once earnestly asked a gay male friend of mine, when we were walking through a video store and stopped at the gay porn section, why all the covers looked the same, and why there wasn't any experimentation with stories or decor. He patiently explained to me that this wasn't about art, it was about getting aroused. All of that paraphernalia, such as sets and costumes and a story you have to follow, gets in the way of simple male arousal. (Of course, how stupid of me)!

Gay Porn DVD cover

The sheer power of male lust can obliterate art in that sense, as art becomes supremely unimportant when men are faced with a beautiful available nude. And if only male lust counts when judging works where females are on display, then the aims of art (especially feminist art) can seem useless and naive. I think that this element of male desire as expressed in pornography causes fear in many people, as if it could destroy civilization itself. And I think some of that fear is founded, especially if it obliterates cultural aesthetics. The person who alerted me about the video's existence asked me, "How does this relate to what you're doing?" I had to insist, "I'm making art, and this is just a girl selling herself on the web," but he didn't seem thoroughly convinced. I was disturbed that he would compare my artwork, which is so carefully contextualized, with simple internet pornography. And the comparison haunted me because I have heard echoes of it everywhere since I first put VIVA out. It's not that I think what my friend is doing is wrong; it's just that this is the only area of culture or expression where distinctions between disparate things can be obliterated in this way, due to peoples' highly subjective and emotional responses to female imagery. The attitude of most people in culture, and this includes both feminists and porn consumers, is that a woman's sexualized image means one thing, or that its meaning is always prescribed by others.

Crack Whore Barbie

And yet to escape outside definitions of what one's own image means is one of the goals of feminist practice. In my attempts to create my own image, I've found a lot of pleasure and meaning in the "masquerade," in which I can make myself into anything I want, including a "sexy woman." The mask is there to alleviate the anxiety that would present itself if I would feel that I simply "was" a sexy woman, for that would mean that my meaning as an object in the world had been prescribed by others, and could only be oppressive. I would argue that very few women feel like "women" in the loaded sense generally applied to that term. Joan Riviere, in her essay "Womanliness as Masquerade," went as far as to call the type of otherwise heterosexual woman who dons a mask of femininity to appease male aggression a "homosexual woman."

Marlene Dietrich in "Blonde Venus"

Many feminists seem to accept male to female drag and female to male drag, but female to female drag makes them almost uniformly uncomfortable, as if it's somehow a sign that a woman is trapped in her image. But they ignore the possibilities of self-transformation in the female masquerade, and the fact that girls and women have always been aesthetically interested in costume as a form of pleasure. Self-adornment has been most elaborate in the most civilized societies, such as in seventeenth and eighteenth century French court life, in which aristocrats wore powdered wigs and highly symbolic accessories in order to perform a daily theatrical construction of self. The little girl, likewise, can create a private world of pleasure for herself outside of the world of male aggression, full of fairy princess dresses, pretty mommies, tiaras, ponies with pink manes that can be brushed all day, and ceremonies with miniature tea parties full of genteel conversation.

My Little Pony

As these little girls mature into women, glamour and dress-up may continue to form part of their identity separate from the male. But now they have a new problem to deal with, which is being an adult woman whose image is in danger of being seized by the male as material for his own fantasy life. And this is where dress-up and glamour become ruined for many women. For many contemporary women, pleasing a man is tantamount to becoming a doormat, a whore, a loser, a masochist, someone's bitch, or a Stepford Wife. This anxiety of being swallowed up by the male makes many women hate themselves as women and hate other sexy women, denying their own pleasure in themselves out of fear of losing their autonomy. But there are other women who like to play with their images as women, attempting to define themselves in terms of their own pleasure without losing themselves in a man's expectations of them.

Sally Rand, fan dancer

One type of woman who played with her image in this way was the burlesque stripper, who existed roughly between the early 1920s and the late 1960s. These women took off clothing for men, but always left something on. They teased and played with the audience, often burlesquing sex and drawing on old vaudeville routines, and they controlled the pace and dynamics of their performances. They would titillate the men by flashing a breast, or taking off a bra to reveal pasties a moment before the lights went out, or flinging their panties off while concealed behind a velvet curtain. The art was as much about concealment as it was about revealing anything, and the woman's power over the men and her teasing of them was the main spectacle.

Kay Booth in the Ziegfield Follies

Burlesque performers had elaborate wardrobes consisting of elegant gowns and accessories, frills and laces, lingerie, stockings, parasols, hats, and gloves, and these adornments were a big part of the pleasure for both the performer and her audience, which was often gender mixed. Men and women alike could be entranced by frills and laces and perfumes, as this was part of the world of female pleasure that was a naughty and delicious secret to men, just as a female's anatomy was. But this feminine world collapsed with the advent of the sexual revolution, in which audiences demanded spectacles that were ever more graphic, and left less and less to the imagination.

My interest in the phenomenon of the burlesque stripper, and in the shift from the glamorous to the abject, has led me to write a feature script about carnival strippers circa 1960, based on the pulp novel CARNIVAL HONEY (although I'm going to shoot THE LOVE WITCH first). The plot concerns this transition from burlesque performance to artless stripping, in which the girls feel pressured to strip all the way nude, in response to financial pressures and changing mores and expectations. In doing research for Carnival Honey, I read some interviews with strippers from Susan Meiselas' documentary photography book Carnival Strippers (1976). In the book, Meiselas photographs carnival girlie shows in black and white, showing the girls, staff and audience in their casual moments as well as in the shows, and the book is full of quotes from the various people involved in that world. Meiselas even tried stripping herself once, to see how it felt and to develop solidarity with the girls. You can see from the photographs that it was a rough world, in which the men were rowdy and crude, the girls were mostly unskilled and poor, and girls let men touch them (including performing oral sex on them) for extra tips. Most of the girls also prostituted themselves to make ends meet.

Still from "Carnival Strippers"

One theme emerged again and again in the interviews, which was the split between a woman's desires when she went into stripping, and the men's desires who consumed the shows. Many girls said to themselves: "What's wrong with it? I don't have a problem dancing in the nude, and if people want to pay to see me, well, all the better!" The woman who started stripping felt in control, self-possessed, was a working woman. Many strippers were addicted to the raw play of power, in which they had a chance every night to tease and torture men, fantasizing about every man out there who lusted after them but couldn't have them. But the men wanted power and control over the girls too, to humiliate them and make them feel like low whores.

All of the strippers whose interviews I read were crushed by the work on some level, even if in some ways they were made stronger by it. But since male violence and misogyny were part of what drove the machine of male desire which paid for these girls to live, the girls adjusted to the abuse and even cultivated it, thinking they were in control of it, but often losing themselves and their self-esteem in the process. Being treated like scum, they eventually believed it was true, and their fantasies of themselves as beautiful queens performing in a show dissolved before the men's drunken laughter, insults, and disrespectful touching.

Still from "Carnival Strippers"

I understand something about this dynamic, because I worked for a time as a drink hostess at a Japanese bar in Honolulu when I was nineteen. I did it out of need, because I was unable to find any other kind of work. All I had to do was talk to the men and be their waitress, and I would get commissions on any drinks they would buy me. I got a little chip for every drink they bought, and at the end of the night I would cash in my chips. Some of the drinks were just tea, but some were watered down white wine. The only way you could make any significant money was with wine, so we pushed for that, and I got drunk every night. Still having to waitress, I'd be stumbling around, forgetting orders, and dropping things. But as getting drunk was part of my job, no one could object. They loved to see you get drunk, that's why they'd spend on the wine. They also loved to shock you with stories about their lurid sexual exploits, and to insult you. Every night something just shitty enough would be said to me that I'd go into the bathroom and cry my heart out. Then I'd fix my makeup and go back out again.

It was a game of musical tables, as we were taught to never let men know that we were working more than one table at a time. So you'd get up to go flirt with men at another table, and you'd have to excuse yourself by saying that you had a food order or had to go to the bathroom. But everyone knew what was going on. It was dark and the booths faced away from each other in such as way so that you could keep your cover pretty well. One liability was customers breaking the rules by touching. Of course if they did that you didn't have to sit with them, but once the hands had performed their violations into intimate areas it was too late, and you had the visceral memory of old men's hands on you to deal with in nightmares and involuntary flashbacks. Another liability was the jealousy of the other girls. If you were good at what you did you would get lots of clients, and then the venom and claws would start to come out. There was no such thing as female solidarity, and often I found girls gossiping meanly about me, whispering and then falling silent when I'd come by.

Jane Russell in "The Revolt of Mamie Stover"

I was the youngest and most popular girl and the bar (mostly because I learned Japanese so I could work both the American and the Japanese tables), so the Mama-san and Papa-san would take me out after hours to cruise the late-night bars and advertise: "This is Koharu-san (my Japanese name). Come see her at Club Subaru." And they'd hand the guy a business card. The first night I worked there, it was a slow night and I had a table with three guys who spent the whole night trying to coerce me into going home with them for money. This happened a lot, but the first time it was a like a little death. Having to be nice and obsequious to men who are treating you like a whore is not an easy thing to do, and it's not as if you feel better about yourself once you've gotten the hang of it.

Marlene Dietrich in "The Blue Angel"

One strategy I had was to think of myself as a performer, and to look at the whole thing as a movie role, in which I was not really there. I'd fantasize that I was like Jane Russell in "The Revolt of Mamie Stover," or Marlene Dietrich in "The Blue Angel," or like a woman in a pre-code movie. That worked for a time, but then it became more and more difficult to do. When I started out, I was like those strippers who are all hopes and strength. But by the time I left, I had serious trauma. And I wasn't sleeping with them, touching them, letting them touch me, or showing myself to them. All I would do is talk to them, sing for them, and occasionally dance with them. And yet I was unable to maintain a glamorous and powerful self-image in the face of the dominance those men exerted over me, and eventually I became depressed and defeated. To this day, I still can't bear the taste of white wine.

My experiences at that bar expressed different sides of a woman's dilemma who performs a sexualized role in life or in work: when does the performance stop being for me, and become a service being performed only for the men? Where is the self or identity behind it? Who is benefiting from this performance? Where is my own desire located? Where is the line crossed, in which my feeling of power turns into abject despair? Although it's a taboo subject in many circles, female desire exists, and some of it is narcissistic, masochistic, extravagant, and perverse, just as male sexuality is. It's also part of female identity, and to ignore it, as I've stated before, is to ignore large parts of what make up an individual female consciousness. And I would suggest that denying women pleasure in their femininity is as bad as coercing femininity from them. The burlesque performer of yesteryear knew how to express herself as a woman without sinking into being a "mere" male fantasy, and that was a lot of her power. Whereas most models and strippers today offer up fantasies that have been recycled over and over again and are never new or personal, the talented burlesque dancer was a real performer, who used artifice to enchant, and wit and humor to send up sex even as she flashed her breasts.

Gypsy Rose Lee, "the literary stripper"

Rachel Shteir in her book "Striptease: The Untold History of the Girlie Show," compares these strippers to Samuel Beckett's clowns, who consciously combined pathos and humor to fascinate audiences. Men were surprised and pleased to find a real human being with a sense of humor under the frills, gowns, bras, pasties, and net pants, and it made sex less taboo and women less intimidating to them. Gypsy Rose Lee's mother would paint teardrops on her daughter's cheeks to conjure up pathos while her daughter spun stories about herself as a "literary stripper," and many other strippers also played on the split between themselves as sex goddesses, and ordinary girls just earning a living. Jean Cocteau, quoted in Shteir's book, wrote about burlesque dancers in New York: "One star holds the audience quickly spellbound, another works them into a fever. One...freezes the public in a terrible ice-block, another sets light to the tinder, another hurls arrows and daggers. Each has her own line of genius."

It was a time when an artificial feminine presence was adored rather than ridiculed, and it was BETTER FOR WOMEN.

POSTSCRIPT:

Writing a few months later: While I tend to be personally enchanted by yesteryear and its trappings more than the present, I should mention that contemporary naked women without a "mask" interest me in representation too, as long as I can see the woman's agency at work. Of course the question of where a woman's agency begins and ends is a complicated one, and one that I want to explore more and more in my work.

All the Sins of Sodom

2009-12-16T11:57:00.000-08:00

Still from "All the Sins of Sodom"

"All the Sins of Sodom" is a striking feature by Joe Sarno that displays to the full extent his skills in high-key black and white lighting, effective mise en scène, and casting and directing actors. The series of models parading in and out of fashion photographer Henning's life and bedroom (in a not so subtle reference to the film BLOW UP), offers the perfect opportunity for a cinematic and erotic exploration of the ideal male fantasy, which is total artistic and sexual command of a stable of beautiful and willing women. The nymph who enters his life, occupies his spare room, and slowly turns his ideal setup upside down is yet another component to this fantasy, at at least for the viewer, as it allows for girl on girl scenes in which the models are further dominated sexually, and in which there is more sexual variety and kinkiness at play. Sarno's use of the female face captures the erotic more fully than many films which are fully graphic, and the psychological components of sexual desire are both varied and realistic.

Indeed, viewing the film made me understand fully what it would be like to be a male with the desire to sexually dominate a series of women, as it presents such a fantasy outside of moral concerns or even social concerns, but purely as a giddy lifestyle of pleasure from which no escape would ever be desired. Oddly enough, this also gives the women, who are otherwise so individual and so uniquely beautiful, an interchangeability that can be chilling to the heart of a romantic. There is a Sadean dimension to the pleasure that erases the importance of the women, even as they are made full subjects in terms of their equal and complicit engagement in the acts which they crave.

The man always remains intact and individual, insofar as he is the only male on screen in a sea of women, and because he is a complete person and an artist in his own right, liking sex but not needing it to complete and define him. The women, on the other hand, have no identity separate from what sex gives them (their inside dimension) or what their appearance offers to the screen and to his camera (their outside dimension). They are eaten up by both cameras and by the male gaze, in such a voracious way that there is nothing left to hide, and in this feat lies Sarno's skill as a director, that he can lay this vulnerability bare and get these actresses to go to places that you normally don't see women go in movies.

Therefore, the goal of the photographer in this film (to capture something in women that is fully erotic, fully female in the darkest sense), is met successfully by the protagonist's camera, and also by Sarno's camera. Even as the photographer in the film complains that he can't capture on film the expression that his lover has when she is transported by pleasure, Sarno's camera shows us this expression, and tells us at the same time that we are watching something extraordinary.

The big, dirty secret in many 1960s sex films and pulp novels is that many women enjoy sex, and that they have sexual desires and fantasies of their own. Although this is a fact that must have been playing out in bedrooms everywhere for all of human history, it could not, for most of human history, be discussed in society, in literature, or in film. Good writers have always wanted to bring out truth in experience, especially in times when psychological realism is in vogue, as it was post World War II, and this is one part of life that must have seemed to the more serious writers to be frustratingly missing in accounts of natural experience.

One finds a quality in much of this sex literature and film from the 1960s of curtains being ripped off houses and inhibitions ripped off psyches to reveal what's really going on inside of peoples' lives and minds. Sarno was a specialist in this, revealing ordinary people with strong sexual urges and fantasy lives that are frankly expressed, suffering from the restrictions that society places on behavior and expression. What's most striking about this time period is, it's a tiny window of time in which the male and the female unite against society at large in order to rally for sexual freedom. And thus, curiously, it's one of the few times we find the battle of the sexes as expressed in culture actually diminished or put on the back burner.

In contrast to the underground sex movies of the 1960s, mainstream romantic comedies of the time focused, as they do today, on a simple conflict between the male and the female: he wants to get laid, she wants a ring. Even if she agrees to sex, it's never what she's really after - the body of the male, the ecstasy and rapture of being enfolded in his arms, an addiction to his lovemaking. She wants basically to civilize him and tame his desires, and the utopian goal thus achieved is smiled on by the audience, who is relieved to find the demon of sexual desire quelled and replaced by an abstract and flowery romance, and a life in which the disorderly and disruptive facts of sex are politely ignored.

In the film "Pillow Talk" this concept is explained by Rock Hudson, who compares a single man to a tree standing tall and proud in the forest. Once he gets married, that tree's branches are cut off and the tree is chopped up into wood which is used to make a baby crib, a patch for the roof, an extra wing on the house, dinner napkins, etc. The anxiety and even anguish of a male who is subjected to this type of emasculation by his wife was the subject of many postwar comedies and cartoons by humorists such as James Thurber. The wife was seen as the enemy, and the battle was bloody. Men who had fought overseas and had lived dangerous lives, facing death every day and visiting exotic brothels, were not the nice boys they used to be before they left home, and thus the comforting hearth was often seen more as a prison than a haven.

James Thurber cartoon depicting male anxiety of the home

In this atmosphere, a lot of grim novels and plays came out about the human condition, especially regarding the hardships of life. Neo-realism would change the way movies were looked at forever, and the painful, unglamorous truths of life became increasingly more accepted and interesting to casual viewers. Just like the more "serious" writers, pulp novelists and sex filmmakers attempted to earnestly explain things from the male point of view. So instead of films in which women civilize men, we have films in which men teach women how to be sexually wild. Often, the female is grateful to have her carnal side unleashed; at other times, she is upset and can't accept it. But the gamut of female types of experience was explored, in a society in which female desire has never been a topic of interest for most of the population before or since.

Feminists, when confronted with this material, often reject it as material in which women are objectified, male desire is crudely and sometimes violently expressed, and the woman is diminished by being overly sexualized for the male. While all of this is of course partly true, there are other aspects which can be liberating. For one thing, you have a rare moment in which males are honest about their desire, not confining it to the locker room or bar, but expressing it openly, and trying to communicate to women what they truly feel. This in itself should be welcomed by women, who often find themselves involved with quiet and irritable men who shut them out and refuse to speak to them about their feelings, afraid of the consequences. Men today have closed up, and their sexual fantasies and cultural outlets are off-limits to girls and women, as they form real or imaginary exclusive men's clubs, and express themselves culturally in darker and more misogynistic ways.

Also, you have a genre in which different types of female desire can be expressed and examined. In films such as "All the Sins of Sodom," sexual desire is equated with something dark, sinister, from the devil, but contemporary viewers will see something different. While the photographer is trying to capture "evil" on the face of his model, when he finally captures it all we see is female desire, female abandonment, female ecstasy. He is showing adults something quite natural that they experience in their own bedrooms, and with his characterization of it pointing out the hypocrisy of the censors. The male imaginary, so repressed in the 1950s, thus finally expresses itself openly, and when we see it we realize that it's not that bad.

In looking at those films today that were once thought of as so smutty, you see levels of humanity and egalitarianism that are absent from the most innocuous mainstream romantic comedies today. In their honesty, those films express truths about men and women that have since been buried under fear of censure. The over-politicization of both male and female roles in movies today makes it impossible for a thing like female desire to come into play, as women must be lawyers and jocks and politicians in order to satisfy some status quo. And yet by taking away women's sexuality, they are taking away large chunks of a woman's identity. Sexploitation movies may have limited women's options by insisting they be sexual creatures; but most contemporary movies limit women's freedom by insisting they have no sexuality at all. Even a film such as "The Notorious Bettie Page" refuses to acknowledge a sexual dimension to Bettie's posing, showing Bettie shocked to discover that men are turned on by her posing, and leaving out any psychology related to her work other than a naive and feather-brained insistence that nudity is natural because God created us that way. Views of female sexuality as taboo are thus entrenched, and an opportunity is missed to go into why a woman chooses that line of work, what she gets out of it, and what it means to her.

Mae West publicity still

Female sexuality has long been an "evil" in the eyes of society and of censors at large. Mae West bragged that she was singlehandedly responsible for the enforcement of the Hays Production Code, due to her frank expressions of predatory sexuality. Gypsy Rose Lee also threatened censors with her witty stripteases, which suggested that a woman can be many things at once: stripper, novelist, playwright, society woman, good girl, bad girl, wit and wag, etc. Censors were much less threatened by passive female sexuality, as exemplified by the tableaux that were accepted in revue shows, in which female nudity was okay as long as the girls remained completely motionless like statues. However, in the films of Hollywood's Golden Age, females were able to be sexualized onscreen through glamour, costume and flirting without being threatening (due to the plots always punishing aggressive females), and so ironically they could be more complete women than actresses in films can be today.

Gypsy Rose Lee publicity still

Sarno, by making female desire and its unveiling the subject of his movie, was doing something transgressive at a time in which such expression was the most taboo thing for audiences. While he was clearly not a feminist, the side-effect of his obsession for the female is that we get to see different parts of her that she often doesn't show to the world. This has been the goal of many of the great male fiction writers and filmmakers from Flaubert to Bergman, and in Sarno's case it deserves another look, rather than being tossed into the trash heap of bad sex movies. Far from being a simple male fantasy about available women, it's a realistic examination into sexual excess, sadism, masochism, ambivalence, desire, and pleasure that is rare in the history of cinema.

New Independent Films

2009-11-30T12:54:00.000-08:00

Above: Cyd Charisse from "Party Girl"

I recently returned from the Torino Film Festival, a festival which I adore for its dedication to art cinema, where I was engaged as a juror. As my job was to watch competition films, I saw more new films in a week than I normally do in a year, and so I got an instant impression of the themes and styles of new independent work. I must add that my innocence in this regard is much like a time traveler who has recently found themselves in the twenty-first century, as I've spent so much time studying classic films that my viewing of newer independent work has been somewhat lacking.

To begin with, let me say that although the films seemed very disparate on the surface, what was most striking was the similarities between many of the films. If I were to catalogue what seems to be the aim of many of the films, it would seem to be to capture a certain sense of virtuousness through a means of storytelling that leaves out the ordinary parts of stories, and leaves in the parts that are in between. This is in an attempt, I gather, to surprise us by calling our attention to the truth in the minutae of everyday reality.

Indeed, in most of the films, this search for the "truth," coming directly from neo-realist tradition, seemed like a primary concern. Truth in acting is equated with creating unglamorous and inarticulate characters; truth in lighting is achieved by trying to light as little as possible; truth in storytelling is telling the non-dramatic bits of a story; truth in editing is trying not to edit at all, as this pollutes the purity of events as they happen in real time; truth in camerawork is the hand-held camera, without the intervention of storyboards, tripods and cranes; truth in writing is to tell as little as possible, so as not to trample on the viewer's own impressions. Also, incoherence often seemed to be aimed at, I suppose in order to reflect directly the incoherence of experience, and the impossibility of getting at meaning. As well as direct meaning, symbolism seemed to be an element that was avoided (when symbolism, artifice, and self-dramatization were used as devices, they were frowned upon).

The other thing I noticed was that direct pleasure was avoided most of the time, and in its place was the indirect pleasure of self-denial or self-immolation, and the sado-masochistic pleasure in the starkness or ugliness itself. So in the end, this cinema was more striking in terms of what it rejected than in terms of what it embraced: rejection of artifice and all overt devices, rejection of overt pleasure, rejection of meaning. What I was often left with was a cleverness in the filmmaker's ability to seem invisible as a stylist or creator of meaning. So it's a cinema of negation, of what's left when content, form, and desire are taken away.

Looking at all of the films, and at one Nicholas Ray film I caught in between other screenings, which approached cinema from exactly the opposite direction, I felt a pang of grief. I'm so fascinated by older forms of cinema, in which all possibilities were...well, possible. I have literally been told that it's "impossible" to do cinema in a pre-World war II Style, and the reasons why have been explained to me: "because of the way consciousness has been fragmented...because old ways of thinking about identity have been exploded." In Deleuze's books Cinema I and Cinema II, he talks about the postwar shift in cinema, in which the history of cinema can almost be divided into two halves. Deleuze speaks about an older cinema of movement and a newer cinema of time. Neo-realism is discussed, as well as the French new wave, and these forms have remained entrenched in art cinema forever since, seeking new ways to produce glimmers of meaning outside of narrative conventions, always in search of the new. And yet avant-garde practice, up until now, has rejected the previous generation's truth in favor of its own truth, often looking back to much older forms to do so. The newer cinema is almost beyond reproach, as one is seen as a philistine if one questions it, whereas anything else of a more sensuous or direct nature is instantly mistrusted.

Looking at the Nicholas Ray film, "Party Girl," through the eyes of contemporary festival audiences used to this new cinema, I couldn't help but thinking that the Ray film would seem ludicrous, and just WRONG, to them. Full of artificial pleasures, in the form of sets lit with three-point classical lighting, rear-projection in moving cars, the smashingly beautiful and almost otherworldly Cyd Charisse, characters in general that are more glamorous, daring, or attractive than we are, fantastic musical numbers, colorful gangsters, very carefully scripted dialogue and camera work, heavy-handed symbolism, all the dramatic bits left in and everything else left out, a sweeping musical score highlighting the drama, fantastic costumes color-coordinated with the sets, and a strong moral ending.

While I deeply enjoy "serious" art cinema, I am also a hopeless decadent. I refuse to reject entertaining material on the grounds that it's unimportant artistically. I have come around to the other side of art, in which I can find momentous meaning in the choreography of Cyd Charisse's overwhelmingly erotic dance, in much the same way that Apollinaire found more meaning in the lace panties of music hall dancers than in the greatest works of art in museums.

Si J'Etais Blanche!

2009-07-30T11:20:00.000-07:00

I just got a new Josephine Baker CD, and I've become obsessed in particular with a song called "Si J'Etais Blanche!" (If I Were White!) that I've transcribed with what I believe are the CORRECT lyrics, or "paroles" (other versions online are a little off), and translated below. It's a fabulous song, and one that I'd be interested in performing in the right setting.

I've always loved Josephine Baker, and French music hall and early jazz shows in general, but listening to her again is revelatory. I hear in her voice, in the orchestrations and playing, and in the general ambiance, the feeling of Paris in the '20s and '30s, of the excitement of the transition between vaudeville and jazz styles, and the playfulness of the entertainment. It's all so sexy, so coded, so full of joie de vivre, and represents all types of new cultural transgressions.

Josephine Baker in particular is able to represent these transgressions, being a black performer who was at once feverishly admired and thought of as singularly "other." She both embraced and rejected stereotypes of herself as a fabulous exotic in the "tumulte noir" which gripped Paris in the '20s, in which Parisians became entranced by all things African and African American. Picasso and Matisse were doing artwork inspired by African sculpture, blacks and whites alike performed in blackface in revues to appreciative audiences, and the bored and decadent white world became suddenly alive to a new frontier of expression, casting off traditional European forms in the pursuit of something more natural and spontaneous.

Josephine Baker represented the sexualized and totally charming female who could bridge black and white cultures, with her ability to both sing like a bird in a quintessentially French style, and to dance with extraordinary expression and agility, in a mix of jazz baby and "native" styles. She was a completely invented creature, with her dark skin and shimmering satin gowns, native Haitian costumes, or black tie and tails, representing nature and culture, American and European, male and female, and even human and animal, with her performing as a bird in a cage, or being constantly compared to a beautiful panther.

The music hall and cabaret were places where transgressive ideas about gender could be expressed - there were many female and male cross-dressers who sang witty and bawdy songs - and also for race-bending. Even the most racist whites in America and Europe could not deny the force of jazz, and of the black performers who burst onto the entertainment scene with so much force and talent that they could not be ignored. But whereas in America the shows were segregated and being black was thought of as a misfortune, in Paris Josephine Baker became a woman to be frankly admired. Her image was everywhere, even promoted through products such as skin-darkening lotion and hair pomade with her picture on them, so that the women of Paris could emulate her.

While Josephine Baker performed in blackface like other black and white performers, she embraced the African stereotype with her own brand of irony, reclaiming it for herself, and also one-upped everyone when she performed "Si J'Etais Blanche!" in white-face and a blonde wig. This song was a challenge to her projected image as an "exotic," and showed that she could create her image as she pleased, like any great white performer.

Although the lyrics speak about a wistful desire to be white, they also proclaim the superiority of having dark skin, and of not having to go out in the sun like Europeans in order to attain a beautiful color. The reason in the end for wanting to be white is so "that I will please you more," and not from any inner sense of inferiority. So it is really a protest against racism, and a plea to have herself be considered on the same level a a white woman.

The lyrics, song, and translation follow:

SI J’ÉTAIS BLANCHE

(Bobby Falk / Leo Lelièvre / Henri Varna)
1932

Je voudrais être blanche
Pour moi quel bonheur
Si mes seins et mes hanches
Changent de couleur

Les Parisiens à Juan-les-Pins
Se faisaient droit
Au soleil d’exposer
Leur amour un peu noir

Moi pour être blanche
J’allais me roulant
Parmi les avalanches
En haut du Mont Blanc

Ce stratagème
Donne un petit rigole
J’avais l’air dans la crème
D’un petit pruneau

Étant petite avec chagrin
J’admirais dans les magasins
La teinte pâle de poupées blanches

J’aurais voulu leur ressembler
Et je disais à l’air accablé
Me croyant toute seule brune au monde

Au soleil c’est par l’extérieur
Que l’on se dore
Moi c’est la flamme de mon cœur
Qui me colore

Faut-il que je sois blanche
Pour vous plaire mieux

Listen to song:

IF I WERE WHITE

I’d love to be white
What a joy for me
If my breasts and my thighs
Changed color suddenly

The Parisians at Juan-Les Pins
Can have their fun
Exposing loves already blackened
To the sun

To make myself white
I went to the Alps
And rolled in the snow there
But it didn’t help

I was no closer
To my little dream
I merely looked like a prune
In a dish of cream

When I was a girl I sadly admired
All the dolls I saw in stores
With skin so pale and white, unlike my own

I would have liked to look like them
And I said with a defeated air
I felt like the only brown girl in the world

It’s in the sun that others
Get a healthy glow
But for me, it’s the flame of my heart
That colors me so

I must be white so I will please you more!

I've always been fascinated with early jazz examples where race is highlighted, because the worst thing about being on an "other" race is your invisibility culturally. And since the '30s is my favorite cultural and aesthetic era, I'm always excited by images, for instance, of sexy non-white females such as Lena Horne in Cabin in the Sky, or Anna Mae Wong in Shanghai Express. Strangely enough, I even like it when white women play sexualized "orientals," such as Ruby Keeler playing the Chinese courtesan Shanghai Lil in Footlight Parade, because the depiction represents a white fantasy or longing to be like the other.

I suppose the interest in performers such as Josephine Baker came directly from the interest in American jazz culture, and by the same token the interest in Anna Mae Wong and other Chinese things in the '30s came from art-deco, which has may Chinese motifs. There is a Noel Coward song that interests me called "Half-Caste Woman," all about a half-Asian woman in a "shimmering gown." One of the lines is "Half-caste woman, what are your slanting eyes waiting and hoping to see?"

I remember watching Vaginal Davis perform with the Velvet Hammer a few years ago in blackface doing a vaudeville number, and I will never forget the power of that performance. There was such a sense of reclaiming the minstrel show for himself as a vehicle for expression, and there was so much anger, humor, and energy in the show that very powerful feelings were stirred up. I imagine some of the early blackface jazz shows to have been like this, with both blacks and whites trying to sort out stereotypes and differences through entertainment, love, hate, and discomfort. They are too often seen much too simply as direct attempts at defining the other in a racist way, but it's much more complicated than that.

I've included here a link to a number Josephine Baker did in Princesse Tam-Tam, that shows the Parisians' simultaneous fascination, envy, and revulsion for a totally "natural" and spontaneous creature, that offends their sense of propriety, but that they can't peel their eyes away from. Far from being a race-related transgression, Baker's transgression in this scene is totally sex-related: she is simply too frankly sexual for high-society Paris to deal with. And of course, as everyone knows, in the movies anyway, sex appeal is a very GOOD thing! Of course her spontaneity does come partly form being "natural," but this was after all the first sexual revolution in America and Europe, the sexual revolution of the roaring '20s.

I'm shocked to realize that I haven't write a blog in long, but in the meantime I've finished my feature script for THE LOVE WITCH, and I'm designing the production now through sketches. I'm also planning on shooting a short film or two on Super 8mm or 16mm, just to get myself back into production in a gentle way. I'll write more about all of this soon!

Hardly Working

2008-03-29T09:02:00.000-07:00

I just saw the Jerry Lewis movie “Hardly Working.” I must saw, I was completely floored. I was instantly reminded of Chaplin’s “Limelight.” Some would say this is an outrageous comparison, but I don’t think so. They are both films wherein great aging clowns take a bitter and poignant look at themselves, and at their lives spent as clowns in the midst of a changing audience and landscape.

Lewis’ film is an abject fantasy about what would happen if he could no longer be a clown. Here is a middle-aged man who has spent his whole life as a clown, and realizes he has no other skills, there is nothing else he can do. So he takes a bunch of odd jobs where he enacts the clown role by default, hilariously causing havoc and chaos everywhere he goes.

But the genius in the film comes from its “serious” parts. The way he cries when he finds out that he lost his job as a clown, his depression when humiliated by his brother-in-law or mean bosses, etc. There is a strange spirit of defiant anger that runs throughout, from the grotesque depictions of people in the world and their banality and small-mindedness, to Lewis’ occasional bouts of defiance towards authority figures. It’s all about how humiliating and absurd it is to live in the world and have a job, and about all the little moments that make life unbearable.

In this world of unspeakable awkwardness and grotesqueness, women and girls are his allies, and boys and men his enemies. Women and girls laugh at his jokes, seek to help him, find him endearing, and want to grow up to be like him, whereas men and boys find him to be a pathetic loser and try to oust him at every turn. From the young son of the woman he’s dating (“You’re happy to see HIM??”) to his sister’s husband, to his many bosses, males are out to get him, threatened by his affinity with women and animals and jealous of his ability to evade the rules.

When he finally quits his job at the post office (it’s the only job he can hold; as one of the character states, “no one loses a civil service job unless he wants to”), it’s because he has been asked to “take care of” some rabbits that have ended up in the post office, ostensibly by destroying them. The film thus begins with an act in which his partner is a kitten, and ends with him rescuing rabbits.

In one strange scene in the film, he suddenly stops being klutzy and does everything right when he is being watched by a superintendant. Before this he could not touch anything without making it fall over, now he is perfectly in command of himself. There are more “serious” moments, such as when he is gracious and adult when evaluating the performance of his boss. The tables have now turned. Instead of being the lowest scum of the earth, kicked around by everybody, he is now his own boss. And he proves it by delivering the mail dressed as a clown, freeing the rabbits, and quitting his job.

The film ends with him going back to being a clown, and his journey into the abject world of random jobs remains as a dream, a nightmare. It’s as if his perfect performance at his job at the post office was a way of suddenly saying, “All right, the farce is over now. I’m really a professional clown, I’m Jerry Lewis, I’m a physical comedian with full control over my faculties, see, I can do this job if I want to.” It’s like that moment in the dream where you are just about to wake up, or that moment when the actor takes off his makeup and reveals himself to the audience as his true self. But in this case he is taking off one kind of makeup—the clown he’s playing in the film, which is a “non-clown” who’s a regular person—and putting on another kind of makeup, his “literal” clown makeup, in which he can finally be himself—Jerry Lewis!

So we have to wonder: who is Jerry Lewis? Is it the actor-writer-director Jerry Lewis we are looking at, or are we simply watching a character in a movie? We see both at once, and that’s the genius of the movie. It’s an actor watching himself, watching his whole career and also watching the end of a career. As in the move “Limelight,” the wrenching sadness we feel is in knowing the history of his earlier work, and how the ugliness of the world he is depicting is a world in which he can no longer thrive, as a clown from another era who is losing his audience to newer tastes, younger entertainers.

Some of the sight gags in the movie are brilliant and get quite surreal, as in one where he delivers mail to a Goodyear blimp and ends up taking the blimp for a ride, and another where a housewife offers him a beer and the Clydesdale-drawn Budweiser truck drives by and tosses him a six-pack. But in spite of its rampant silliness, the movie is strangely subversive and sad, and is Jerry Lewis’ comic and reflective tribute to his own brilliant career.

Travelogue—Some Film Festivals this Year

2007-12-19T17:10:00.000-08:00

Travelogue—Some Film Festivals this Year

Stockholm, Gijon, Torino
Jared and I just returned from a European tour which consisted of Stockholm, Gijon (Spain), and Torino. Quite extraordinary all around. Highlights were meeting Tinto Brass in Torino and talking shop (we may share a distributor, and I told him about how my life was changed by seeing Caligula as a child), the Asturian cider house (and actually everything about Spain and the Spanish), the Italian hyper-intellectual audiences (and of course the food), and the serious (Bergman-fed) Swedes and their formal dinners. We met a lot of interesting and charming people on this trip, including filmmakers, press, sexologists, and cinephiles.

Gijon and Torino honored me with retrospectives, and I was followed around by photographers, who took glamour shots all over, including some in a vintage Mercedes (see below). The Gijon catalogue stated (and I quoted to a shocked audience on opening night), that whereas the character is Peeping Tom used his camera as an aggressive phallus, Anna Biller uses her camera like a "playful, extroverted clit.” {more}

On this tour I found that I am capturing more women. Women in Italy especially loved the movie. I think it’s partly because in Italy there is not a stigma attached to the idea of a glamorous woman. Italy still attaches a spiritual and maternal significance to women's beauty, from the Madonnas in the churches to Sophia Loren and Claudia Cardinale. But older intellectual men in beautiful suits were also nodding appreciatively when I spoke about gender, and everyone clapped when I said that I don’t think strong women should be like men. The Italian audience was the most educated and intellectual audience I’ve ever played to. I bought a number of erotic comic books and “Diabolik” pulps there, which I will write about the next time.

In Sweden we ate at a restaurant that was in a 17th century mansion. The lead actress of “Fanny and Alexander” was there, along with Paul Schrader, a lot of other directors, some writers, and some Swedish dignitaries. We ate herring, reindeer, etc. It was all very formal and old-fashioned. We also went to an ice bar, where you had to be fitted with a special parka before entering in order to not perish of cold. At my screening, the audience was very sad. They were almost pleading with me, “But does it have to be that way for Barbi?” The women especially seemed distressed. Later, the programmer told me that Swedish audiences are sad “because of Bergman.”

Spain was fabulous in every way. The filmmakers, festival people, and press were always in a great mood, ready to drink, play, and talk excitedly in all languages (I spoke mostly French). We ate dinner at 11:00 and were out at nightclubs until 4:00 or 5:00. They were taking pictures like crazy, and I was treated like the movie queen of the festival, which was fun. I am finding that they like to treat people like celebrities in Europe. After all, for all they know I could be quite famous in America! It's the opposite of Los Angeles, where even the biggest celebrities are treated like regular people. Someone in Sweden actually chased after Jared as he was getting into a car to get his autograph!

Moscow
In the summer we showed VIVA in competition at the Moscow Film Festival, which was quite an honor. Moscow is a place where the people are very real, very fierce, very smart, and speak their minds freely. It is a transitional culture, full of generational and aesthetic clashes, and with a large class and economic gap. The women were the best dressed I have seen in any city. They all wear makeup, do their hair, and wear sexy, fitted dresses, skirts, heels, and stockings. The food is fresh, exotic, organic, exciting. Restaurants are the privilege of the rich and of foreigners. The mix of Soviet, capitalist, and antique architecture is breathtaking and surreal. And of course, there’s the famous subway, with its monumental art treasures, bronze statues, art nouveau lighting, and large expanses of marble.

We created a near riot in Moscow with VIVA, which some hailed as a Fellini-like masterpiece, and which one newspaper claimed was a disgrace to the festival and to the nation itself. I think some people there were missing the irony, especially as they never had a sexual revolution. But some people, especially young people, were filled with joy at the the colors and the sexiness of it. (They do love color in Russia)! They do everything big in Moscow: the longest red carpet I have ever seen, lavish parties, all like something out of a 60s movie about rich people. They took thousands of pictures of us, but I don’t have a single one! And we were offered distribution by a Russian distributor (more news on that later).

One day we took a tour of the film studio there, Mosfilm, where all the great Russian classics were shot. We went in a bus with a group of people and saw some wonderful props, costumes, headdresses, sketches, stills, soundstages, automobiles, etc. At the end of it all we were led out to a wooded area where there was music playing and they were roasting a pig and a lamb on spits, and served us lots of salads, wine, etc. It was quite fabulous.

We've also been to Melbourne and Montreal this year, which were both great. The Fantasia Festival in Montreal lead to Canadian distribution, and we will open in various cities in Canada February with different burlesque troupes, including Skin TIght Outta Sight, which will be quite something! In addition, we are opening in Antwerp this month, and I will present VIVA at Brown University and at the George Eastman House in April of next year. See the screenings page for more information.

Melodrama

2007-10-06T21:03:00.000-07:00

Almost all movies nowadays are about men and their tasks. Some movies are about women and romance, but those movies tend not to be complex or honest, and they very often leave out the question of the female as a sexual creature with her own primal needs. She is just like a man, only sappier and less in control of her feelings. She is often mediocre and scared, and she needs a man to “fill” her in the worst way. She is not a creature of power and creativity.

If one were to make a study of great moments in film that were satisfying to women, one would have to look no further than the 1940s or 1950s melodrama. This form reached its zenith around 1960, then quickly withered away after that. These movies form a complex picture of women’s psychological needs and fears, and cover such preoccupations as aging, beauty, motherhood, betrayed love, dangerous love, money and sex, women who will do anything for a man, women gone bad for men, women used by men for profit, women who are bad seeds, nymphomaniacs, adultery, shame; basically, all of the most basic emotional concerns of women.

Some of the most interesting from my point of view are those that pose philosophic questions about aging or beauty, such as Mr. Skeffington, A Woman’s Face, Torch Song, Sunset Boulevard, Female on the Beach; those that are about a woman’s ability to be destroyed by wanting love, such as Madame X, Vertigo, Duel in the Sun, Letter to an Unknown Woman, Leave Her to Heaven, The Red Shoes; those that are about woman’s own destructive or otherwise transformative sexual power, such as The Strange Woman, Double Indemnity, Niagara, Gilda, The Killing, The Birds; those that have to do with a woman’s lot in life, such as Aventurera, Madame Bovary, Mildred Pierce, The Hard Way, The Postman Always Rings Twice; and comedies that paint a positive picture of the power of female sexuality, such as all musicals and “comic blonde” farces.

The powerhouses of women’s cinema—Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, Barbara Stanwyk, Ida Lupino, Olivia de Haviland, Jennifer Jones, Lana Turner, Ava Gardner, Rita Hayworth, Marilyn Monroe, Kim Novak, Irene Dunne, Vivienne Leigh, Myrna Loy, Marlene Dietrich, Gene Tierney, Hedy Lamarr, Gloria Grahame, Lauren Bacall, Jean Simmons, and a whole host of others too numerous to name—were required to play a double standard in all of their roles which was first of all intended to be powerfully sexy, and second, virtuous. Any painted lady, however crass, was required to have a heart of gold if she was to survive the narrative. Actresses had replaced the holy virgin in Hollywood’s new pantheon of cinema gods and goddesses, and they needed to have that touch of the wholesome to drive men mad with desire and also to produce strong identification in women. The result was a cinema world populated by impossibly sexy, beautiful, well-dressed, glamorous, and internally virtuous women, with dulcet voices, the posture and movements of a dancer, and always with the right thing to say.

How I long for those glamorous screen sirens today, looming in shimmering nitrate silver or Technicolor in hand-beaded gowns. I also long for their problems, for the way in which those problems are rooted in social reality, and for the seemingly universal concern that people had for their problems. Their sexuality was of a powerful and seething nature, and they were always fascinating. The screenwriters, directors, producers, the whole Hollywood machine, knew how to maximize a woman’s luring power to the utmost, so much so that if nudity were added to it, it would have been an unbearable cocktail. One only has to try to imagine Duel in the Sun with a nude Jennifer Jones to understand what I mean by that.

The Erotic Witch

2007-09-08T17:30:00.000-07:00

I’ve been doing more research on witchcraft lately. The most interesting book has been The World of the Witches, by Julio Caro Baroja. He traces the figure of the witch from classical times to the present. What is interesting is, he says that the rationalist approach, which states that all witchcraft is nonsense and doesn’t exist except in the mind, is “going a bit too far.”

Some of the fascinating ideas in this book include the fact that witchcraft is about REBELLION and the SHADOW SIDE OF THINGS, and that the sympathy or harmony which exists between like things and the antipathy between unlike things is what constitutes MAGIC. Also, magic is connected to DESIRE AND WILL, and a magician can only attack the IRRATIONAL part of an individual.

Other ideas in the book:

LOVE, for the witch, is a consuming passion.

Magic is an answer to the DESPAIR men and women feel at living in a world beyond their control.

There is always an element of SHAM and FRUSTRATED DESIRE that underlies magic.

EROTIC APPETITES pave the way for magical processes.

Witchcraft is one of the most ANTOSICIAL ACTIVITIES.

The devil gets hold of people, and makes them TIRED OF LIFE, or TEMPTS THEM, or CORRUPTS THEM.

The witch elicits reactions of both TERROR and MOCKERY in people.

Another book I read was What you always Wanted To Know About Sex in Witchcraft, *but were afraid to ask, written by Hastur. With a black and white porn photo on every page, the book attempts to describe the reality of sex practices in covens, between sex magic partners, and throughout history. The book contains very little information, and is mostly an attempt to titillate the novice reader and sexual voyeur. (The photo above is the tamest photo I could find from this book).

I also read Anton Lavey’s book The Compleat Witch: Or, What to do when Virtue Fails, which is a treatise on how women can use their innate witchy powers to snare a man. It’s mostly a case of special pleading for classic sex appeal, as he urges women to throw away their pantyhose in favor of stockings, and to wear three-inch spike heels and dresses that look like the drawings of women in cartoons in men’s magazines. He even extols the virtues of slightly stained undergarments, which are supposed to conjure up the lure of the forbidden.

Much of the book is about trying to appear as the opposite type of the man you are trying to seduce, and he compares people to numbers on a clock with dominant types on the top of the clock, submissive on the bottom, thinking types on the right and feeling types on the left. The logic here is very thin, but the book is amusing as a piece of history. It seems that in the early 70s there were simply too many witches, so the book was written to help certain witches to elevate themselves above others, which in this case amounts to pure and simple desirability and seductive power.

It seems that many of the books written to help witches are about helping females to increase their desirability, and that this concept has been around for a long time. The Greek witches were mostly match-makers and makers of perfumes, aphrodisiacs, cosmetics and love potions, and many medieval witches were prostitutes. One of the main functions of witches throughout history has been to assist in love matches for others, and to secure the men they personally desired for themselves. There has always been an erotic element to the witch, mixed with an element of fear.

The renewed interest in the 60s and 70s with witch novels and movies I think can be attributed to a new interest in uncovering everything female. This meant her body, her soul, her desires, her primal powers, her anatomy. Because of a sudden and meteoric loosening of censorship laws, the female became territory to be openly explored, and men lost no time doing exactly this. There was also a renewal of interest in all things pagan and non-western, and a desire to go back to earlier social structures, which included matriarchy and goddess worship. But with the rise of pornography and its relegation to a specialty underground audience, this interest in woman as a special creature died on a cultural level and was never revived. But you can still see it very strongly in texts and films from that period.

“Black magic” is and always has been about the erotic, and about the primal fear of women. This concept of witchcraft and magic is now seen as hopelessly archaic, as modern witches make sweet-smelling potions out of olive oil, anise, nutmeg, and cinnamon, and try to make everyone feel good about themselves with hippy-dippy self-help spells. Its value as a religion notwithstanding, there is always, as Baroja noted, a tragic element attached to these gestures, the desperate attempt to find a solution to the dreariness of living and frustrated desire through the use of magic and spells.

This is the element about witches and witchcraft that I find most interesting: the way that it becomes a last resort when reality fails to provide the necessary hope, and when simple delusions no longer work. The subject as material for a film is difficult, but if treated properly it can be a powerful examination of social ritual and desire.

Witchcraft

2007-08-06T19:37:00.000-07:00

On the way to Moscow I read a really interesting book called “Witchcraft,” by Pennethorne Hughes. It was quite inspiring, in that it laid out the history of witchcraft as a religion that was a bastardized form of older pagan religions. I realized after reading it that much of the landscape of The Wicker Man with Christopher Lee must have been taken from this sort of history. In that film, and in this book, it was suggested that in certain isolated pockets in Europe--in Britain especially-- Christianity had never quite penetrated, and there lurked odd folkways and traditions.

It was suggested that in certain places the folkways persisted. The practitioners of these older customs were either simple serfs and country people who continued practicing an older, classical/pagan religion, or neo-Paleolithic peoples around the British isles and in parts of Europe, who were driven back into their caves and forests by medieval invaders. This is apparently where the legends about brownies, fairies, sprites, and leprechauns come from. Fairies were essentially witches, and practiced the same religion. The religion was not a devil-worshipping one, but a pagan one, and much of it was about fertility rites, moon cults, knowledge of medicinal herbs, and spells and sacrifices to make things grow or prosper.

Eventually there were many new converts to this “religion” throughout the middle ages. Conversion was especially popular with women, cynics of Christianity, rebels, intellectuals, heretics, people who wanted free access to sex, etc. Eventually elements of devil-worshipping emerged as the new witchcraft became a parody of Christianity, and that’s when we start having instances of the converts kissing the devil’s ass, signing contracts in blood, mocking Christian rituals, and going to Sabbaths. Somehow reading about the types of people who gravitated towards witchcraft in the middle ages reminded me of the kinds of people practice witchcraft and spells nowadays, or in the hippie culture of the 1960’s.

I was struck by that hippie element when I was reading this witchcraft book and watching The Wicker Man, and it made sense to me why films and books about witches were so popular in the 1960’s. First there is that sense of nature and getting back to basics, then there is the whole woman-power thing, then there is the hippie-dippy new-age spells and magic culture. Somehow the image of Victorian fairies sitting on toadstools and Donovan with his pipe in The Pied Piper blend together in my mind, as well as women selling sachet packets at the Renaissance Faire, shops full of incense and mystic crystals, fantasy art, unicorns, rainbows, gypsy and gothic fashion, massage oils, tattoos, tarot, and everything else associated with the anguished Western person’s desire to break out, or the woman’s desire to become a powerful and sexually desired goddess.

Of course the objects and culture associated with witchcraft and fairies today is quite flaky and in bad taste, which I realize with some horror I am starting to quite enjoy. New-age culture, which I have always detested, has been growing on me lately in quite a natural way. While I was in Melbourne recently, I was squealing over all of these horrible shops containing bad pseudo-Victorian fairy art, giant Carnelian silver rings, driftwood hat-racks, and foil-stamped shiny unicorn boxes. I even bought a “fairy mirror,” and a sort of magical “fairy pendant,” and Jared bought “wizard jewelry.” There is something quite new about it for me, as it’s an area I’ve never gone into, although for many others it must seem quite clichéd. Suddenly I have fresh eyes for new-age and sentimental treasures which I would have scoffed at a month ago. And I am also inspired by fairy-unicorn environments which hold primal girl power, such as the images in Junko Mizuno's drawings.

These objects, though, are informing a narrative, as much as the flowered couch prints and vinyl faux-marble ice buckets informed the narrative of Viva. I’m starting to imagine Jared as a screen wizard in an open robe, with his new wizard jewelry, a thoroughly decadent theater or circus manager who is really the devil (much like Roman in Rosemary’s Baby, or the devil in The Virgin Witch). I think my interest in witches started originally with fairy tales, which I really love, but when I think about making a film about it, it gets quickly perverted into all of these other depressing and all too realistic characters and objects, which is how I see life after all. It’s the realism intruding always, the compromise and the shattering of the mythic replaced by the everyday.

A scene which keeps sticking with me is one in which a naked witch smears herself from her toes to her head with magical ointment, then lays down and has a drug trip which turns into a scary and erotic dream. The ointment that witches used was apparently hallucinogenic, and often caused dreams where they thought they were flying, hence the flying on a broomstick legend. I thought there could be this really erotic scene, with a beautiful black-haired naked witch covered in ointment, writhing around and dreaming wishfully about what would happen at the sabbath.

Esther Williams

2007-07-12T18:36:00.000-07:00

I’ve come to be an Esther Williams fan by stages, and it wasn’t until recently that she completely won me over. Strangely enough, when I had the epiphany about her it was in Moscow last week, when I saw “Easy to Love” as part of a series the Moscow Film Festival was having on American Musicals. Naughty me, to go to Moscow and see an American film, but with the jet lag and the stress and the long plane trip, all I wanted was a little mindless amusement, and a few Busby Berkeley water ballet numbers seemed just the ticket to forgetting my troubles.

Perhaps it was partly the delirium of seeing the film as “exotic,” through the eyes of the Russians, that made me realized what a strange and intricate art form the American musical indeed is, and it made me see the whole thing as an elaborate art piece instead of the popular entertainment it was originally intended to be.

In this striking Technicolor gem, Esther Williams goes back and forth between three men. She is aggressive, athletic, and healthy, with no coyness about her: you might almost say she is brazen, but she retains her full femininity and manages to be sexy and yielding at the same time. She is in love with Van Johnson, her workaholic boss that has to be trained to see her charms and be interested in sex, and is courted by her swimming partner, a male tan bodybuilder who is pictured almost exclusively in ridiculous little swimming briefs, and an overly charming nightclub crooner, played by Tony Martin.

Although the script indulges in many innuendos about Esther and her charms, and the camera lingers on her in one skimpy costume after another, including close-ups of stockings, underwear, etc., we somehow get the feeling that the film is about beefcake rather than cheesecake. She deflects the camera’s lurid gaze with her cheerful vitality and good nature, and focuses the audience’s attention instead on her own appetites, which are purely the appetites of the all-American girl, and on her own gaze and manhunt. Of course, this part of the plot is intentionally played for comic effect, but Esther is the girl to pull it off.

There is less water ballet in this film than usual, and more water skiing. Esther is shown to be resolutely strong and athletic, and the film seems to fetishize her ability to do and be anything, much in the way that “A Star is Born” fetishized Judy Garland. And, like Judy, she is given the ultimate vaudeville honor: she gets to perform in CLOWN DRAG. This number tests Berkeley’s outrageous talent for pushing the boundaries of taste almost too far.

Reminiscent of the deleted cornfield scene in “The Wizard of Oz, which utilized Bolger’s rubbery skills to the maximum in gravity-defying feats of movement, Berkeley combines Williams’ natural talents with absurd and impossible flights. In water-proof clown white with red rubber nose and curly wig, she bounces onto lilypads, does somersaults in the air, is chased by a fake alligator with snapping jaws, and seems to fly as well as swim. At the end of the scene, in a stroke of genius, she has a serious talk with her massive-shouldered fiancé (John Bromfield) in his tiny shorts, still in her grotesque makeup. In her tenderest scene, she rejects this man not as a woman, not even as a person—but as a scary, wet clown.

In ensuing scenes, we see Tony Martin become subtly feminized as he woos a roomful of elderly ladies with his relentless crooning (almost every song in the film is sung by him alone!), Van Johnson eating supper alone like an old maid, and the bodybuilder guy always in his little shorts, always more undressed and more ridiculous than anyone else onscreen. The sense of the men as objects of Williams’ desire is enhanced by her polymorphous flitting from one to the other, and by her sunny resiliency regarding love, fate, and the male flavor of the evening.

Esther Williams is a lady the in the best sense, who personifies strength and health in gender construction. Her pleasure in her craft and in being alive is apparent, and when she mugs, swims, dances, makes love, dresses and undresses, and clowns for the camera, she does not appear to be in the service of male needs or commands, but only of her own desires. She is an unabashedly female 1950’s type, strong and feminine, maternal and tomboyish, and totally without self-deprecation, that I very much miss in culture and in women today. In my next film I plan to feature women like this, women who have hips and brains and know how to use them, but that are before the time when we had to fear them and apologize for their power.

Circus Sex Witch

2007-05-31T10:18:00.000-07:00

I've been reading some very strange pulp novles about witchcraft, for research on my new script. The strangest one was "For the Witch, a Stone," by Salambo Forest, 1971. It's sort of a porn novel with sex scenes described in disturbingly vivid detail, where a woman tries LSD and it unlocks her innate supernatural powers. She can now materialize and dematerialize at will, and see into the thoughts of humans and animals (such as segulls on the beach). It's really a flaky, terrible sort of book, but it was so odd that it affected me quite a bit. A lot of new-agey stuff about ESP, psychic powers, etc. And the sex scenes are really awful. There's so much description of balls: "hard cool balls slapping softly," or "the loose plushness of his balls." Graphic and real in a 70's sort of way. Tells it like it is.

Another one, written ten years earlier so much more demure, is called "Love Cult," Jan Hudson, 1961. It's about a so-called witch's coven in Los Angeles, and a hard-boiled guy with an occult bookstore who gets it on with the beautiful dames involved. This guy ends up exposing witchcraft as a hoax, only effective because it preys on the victim's mind. It's got great expositional dialogue that sounds very noir, and you can really imagine some of those noir actors in the roles, or even Ava Gardner, Alexis Smith, etc. This period is more interesting to me right now, the early 60's, for its restraint and the seething sexuality underneath things.

Yesterday I looked all over for notes I'd written for a circus horror witch film. All I could remember is there were some trapeze artists in it, some murders, a castle, and a black cat named Patch. I didn't find the notes, so I'm going to start again from scratch. If there are murders in the circus, they should be committed by a woman. It would be sort of a remake of "Berserk," (Italian title "Blood Circus," see images in this post), but I would have to put thematic elements in to make it more than just an exploitation shocker. She could be some kind of a witch. She could kill with her eyes, with potions, she could make animals crazy. The same scenario would work with in a carnival, set in cheap carnival trailers, tents, diners, and motel rooms.

When I look over these plots I know they're going to sound so stupid to people, that they won't take them seriously. But I have such a penchant for the absurd, the tacky, and for certain kinds of shocking bad taste. Maybe it's because my parents had such good taste, and bad taste seems sort of taboo to me. My mom made all of these beautiful clothes for her store, and even great shirts for my dad. There was never any polyester, no food from a can, no carpets, no pop culture, no elevator music. It's as if I grew up in a terrarium where only beautiful things were allowed, and it's made me isolated from the middle American landscape. I'm trying to get all of that back--the roots of tacky that were withheld from me in childhood.

What's frustrating is that when I try to do bad taste, it comes out as good taste. I try to design hideous sets, and they come out like Technicolor dream worlds and fairybook rooms. It's the good taste underneath, transforming Roger Corman into Ptushko. Much of it comes from the dark and irrational side of myself, but I'm always striving to make my films less arty and more popular. I'm coming to the popular by degrees, and I'll be interested in seeing at what point the artiness vanishes so that only the popular remains. Not that I want to sweep the insanity away completely, just to contain it more, put it more into external things like plot.

I'm a bit afraid to do horror, as I think whatever I would do would come out too scary even for me. But I'm fascinated to try.

Myra Breckenridge

2007-04-04T21:21:00.000-07:00

I just saw Myra Breckenridge. From everything I've heard I thought I'd hate it, but I actually really loved it. It made me realize that I'm an extremely campy person. I've been protesting my campiness lately, because so many people see Viva as "merely" camp, but Viva doesn't hold a candle to Myra in the camp category. I think it's a lucky thing I didn't see it while filming Viva...I might have been tempted to put a little of it in, and that really would have made things a mess!

As it is, there were certain parts of Myra that reminded me of parts of Viva. The reason I finally saw it in the first place is because my friend Elena mentioned it, and come to think of it, she may have been doing so in relation to the part of Viva where I fetishize Rick's back muscles when he takes off his shirt in front of the fire during a lovemaking scene. I'm not quite Raquel Welch, whipping the men into submission, but it was a bit like that on the set, with me as director ordering these men to be amorous with me. The role reversal really did feel great. But I have some even better footage in reserve, of Bridget and I trying to take his pants down...

Then again, I really loved the campy gay men in Myra. And I loved the gay sensibility at the root of the old Hollywood fantasies. I think my deepest fantasies are the same as those of a gay man in 1970. Marlene Dietrich singing "The Man's in the Navy," the FABULOUS Mae West with her musical numbers, the hats and clothes and hairdos, Carmen Miranda, Shirley Temple, Alice Faye, The Heiress, the stars on Hollywood Blvd. with a close-up on Ann Miller's star, the vapid pretty girls with giant eyelashes, the glitz and glamor and cowboy motifs, the songs, the white suits and riding outfits! It's just how I think about film. An outfit, a detached glamor or old movie fantasy creates a scene, an image. I'm trying SO hard to repress this way of thinking in order to make a taut drama! But seeing this movie makes me think it might be hopeless! It brings out all of my worst instincts!

Then again, I think Myra is actually quite original, beautiful looking, and also subversive content-wise, or I wouldn't like it, no matter how many hairdos, decors, and old Hollywood references. My boyfriend always says I have the personality of an older gay man. I'm starting to realize that it may be true...!

My Fantasies as a Filmmaker

2007-03-03T10:27:00.000-08:00

When I first started making narrative films, I came up with the goal of trying to create a cinema of visual pleasure for women. I had to go deeply into my fantasies, and explore what was sensual and exciting for me on the screen. What were my most primal film fantasies, and where did they come from? Were the images I adored from films degrading to women, or was that notion a cultural stereotype?

I gave myself carte blanche to explore my fantasies as they really were, and to see if I could create a new kind of cinema that wasn't based on older, entrenched models. I didn't worry about what the fantasies were too much. I decided just to use them and see where it led.

I found myself watching movies avidly, and picking up common threads in the ones that excited me. Certain perfomers--Mae West, Marlene Dietrich, Jennifer Jones, Joan Crawford, Catherine Deneuve, Liz Taylor--were especially thrilling. Backstage stories with musical numbers played to my deepest fantasies, especially if the musical numbers were surreal and works of art in themselves (Busby Berkeley, Von Sternberg).

I loved costume dramas, anything gay nineties, Belle Epoque, or Egyptian. Movies about people of color were really exciting, like Carmen Jones, Green Pastures, or the films of Oscar Michaux, or Japanese, Indian and Mexican cinema. And I loved fairy tale movies.

Putting all of this together, I started to realize that to fully enjoy a movie I needed first of all a strong and beautiful woman to identify with, secondly great art direction and costumes to satisfy a general aesthetic sense and also to support the character's glamor, and thirdly a story that was a satisfying framework for the character and her psychology. This could be a fairy tale, a pre-code movie, a rags to riches, royalty, or stage-life story. And I liked seeing different races, different kinds of faces on the screen.

I set out to literally enact these fantasies on the screen, and did it with several shorts. While most people loved the shorts, some people found them to be opaque. As it's never my intention to be opaque or inaccessible, I listened to some of the comments I got, and tried to accomodate the audience in terms of what they said they needed.

For instance, I had made this incubus movie without any sex or nudity in it, and this lead to people asking for something more racy, some nudity, something more extreme, something sharper, more violent. I had never considered putting any of this in the movie, as it was styled after The Harvey Girls, Horror of Dracula, Johnny Guitar, movies that would never contain those elements. But I realized that a lot of the people watching it didn't know those old movies.

So I set out ot make a more "modern" movie, from a time people know and can relate to, and I hit upon the sexploitation movies from the 60's and 70's. This clicked into place because I discovered a "woman's" director from this genre, Radley Metzger, who made "classy" movies where the women were strong, beautiful, glamorous, the sets and costumes were fabulous, the stories were taken from literature and were women's stories. Thus, VIVA was conceived.

But although VIVA comes from a woman's fantasy life, some men really love to be let into that world, where they get to learn about how a woman thinks, what she wants. It's sexy for them. If you read sex books from the 60's, for example, you will see that half of them go deeply into female psychology: will she strip or won't she? What are her fears and fantasies? Because at that time, it was sexy for the male to get into a woman's mind as well as her body, especially if she was "that kind of girl." This was in contrast to their wives, who used sex as a bargaining tool for marriage. They wanted a girl to be in love with sex, to think about it as much as they did. So, in order to to create the fantasy for the male, you had to have it there in the female as well. How times have changed! So in a weird way, having VIVA be about my fantasies makes it also about a male fantasy from another time.

I've had some new ideas lately though that don't come so specifically from cinema as from Japanese comic books. (All from a woman's perspective, and containing all the necessary elements of fantasy and glamour). That's a new source of inspiration for me, and makes me realize that the fantasies don't have to come from movies, they just have to be spectacle-oriented and "girly."

Rotterdam Film Festival

2007-02-09T16:39:00.000-08:00

The Rotterdam Film Festival is quite an event. I just returned from a whirlwind trip there, where VIVA was having its official WORLD PREMIERE. Six of us went, and it's a trip no one will ever forget.
When we arrived a car took us straight to the Doelen, the festival center. It's this giant building with escalators with three main floors, and a full bar on each floor and a cafe on the bottom floor. It also contains three large theaters. On all three main floors at all times of the day and night people are snacking, drinking, smoking, and talking about film. It's very chic, very stylish and very international. I was told by the press desk on arrival that I had many requests for interviews the next day. We went to our hotel briefly to check in, then back to the Doelen for "director's drinks," a little dinner, and an industry party.
The party took place in another building, "Engels," which was very 60's space age, and looked like something out of VIVA. Endless white rooms with colored lights and little tables, bars in every room, white cube couches, mod decorations. Hundreds of people, room after room of mod hip industry people and film directors. Wall to wall style, wall to wall alcohol and Euro music. A giant dance floor with a band playing techno, samba, etc.
I had good attention from press there. I appeared on both festival talk shows, was the film tip of the day, and was on the cover of the festival newspaper, The Daily Tiger. People seemed inspired by my character in the movie, and wanted to photograph me that way. It was so Euro-sexy! They kept posing me with whiskey and cognac and cigarettes. For the cover shoot they took me to a seedy bar and out me in a slip. For the late night talk show, they asked me about pubic hair, played my naughtiest film clips, and had me sing a jazz song. The talk show organizers had come up to me that day in the Doelen, and asked, "Do you want to sing a song?" So I thought, "Why not?" I sang Lullaby of Birdland, and the crowd seemed to love it. Very silly, as it had nothing to do with the film, but I guess they wanted to create whatever fun they could on their talk show. That would never happen at a fim festival in the U.S.!

There was a photo shoot for a Russian magazine on a platform with colored lights, where hundreds of people poured out of a theater while we were shooting, and they all took out their cameras and started snapping. And an "art" shoot with a Belgian photographer for his book, where I was posed in twisted positions smoking a cigarette, told to look vacant, and invited to pose nude for future shoots.

Needless to say, there was no time to watch films, which was quite a shame. The one day I hopped over to Amsterdam I was immediately bombarded with more interview requests, and had to furiously write down answers on the train back and type them during my last screening, barely making it for the Q and A.
My premiere was screened late at night and the crowd was laughing uproariously for about an hour. Then the vibe got very strange, as they realized it was not just comedy and it got too weird for them. They staggered out from the theater like, as my boyfriend Robert puts it, "mice that have been hit over the head." The second two screenings went very well, with a cult-type response. From those screenings we got some invitations to festivals, Melbourne most significantly, and some invitations to send screeners. And we met some very exciting people.
The closing party was like the other party, room after room of people, hundreds upon hundreds, having a great time. They really know how to have a good time in the Netherlands! The interactions seemed honest and real, the energy was high, and the focus was always on culture, its shifts, changes, trends. It was never about industry really, never about money, but always about film, even when sales agents were involved. What a refreshing festival.

Bigger Than Life

2007-01-05T16:50:00.000-08:00

I saw a movie last night called Bigger Than Life. This has to be one of the most riveting experiences I've ever had in a movie theater! They were showing it at the Aero Theater in Santa Monica, and Jared and I rushed over with the highest expectations (after all, it's James Mason and Nicholas Ray), and we were NOT disappointed.

First of all, the color: so much steel blue. SO much blue. Blue like nightmares, blue like depression, blue like the shadow side of things. Color by Deluxe. Very deluxe. The screen was SO WIDE. And very soft, very flattering. Film grain is so gorgeous. None of this rubbery liquidy LCD image, no pixels. Only grain. The titles pop out practically in 3-D. They are on TOP of the image, floating in front. You never get that from digital titles. So, it took me the whole movie just to get used to the sensuousness of it. Entralled by the sheer physicality of it, like the embraces of a lover. So pulled in before anything happened. That happens sometimes with Cinemasope, with dye-imbibed prints. If you're in the mood, it can really carry you away.

But there's more. There's James Mason. What else is there to say? James Mason. Period. Every emotion is so pronounced. Fear, rage, pleasure, pain, haughtiness, megalomania, meekness, despair, ambition, insanity. It's all unbearably clear, so exact. Such an impeccable performance. It really takes your breath away. You are concerned for him from the very first moment you see him. There's something underneath--some sort of pain. What is it? It seems like mental anguish, then it turns out it's physical anguish. He holds his stomach and doubles over in pain. But we can't help but feel that his pain comes from inside. He's too nice a man. He holds things inside. He's a schoolteacher who takes on an extra job as a taxicab dispatcher, but doesn't tell his wife (Barbara Rush), because he doesn't want to worry her. He also hasn't told her about his pains.

One night after bridge party he holds his stomach, and collapses in agony on the floor. It turns out he has a rare disease, which will prove fatal unless he goes on cortisone medication for the rest of his life. After he goes on the cortisone, he changes radically. From a meek man who was lenient with his students, kind and loving to his wife and son, humble to a fault, he becomes agressive, exacting, brutal, critical, vain, ambitious, abusive.

When he comes home from the hospital he goes on a manic shopping spree. Then there is a great scene where he asks his wife to boil kettle after kettle of water for him to take a bath. While waiting for his bath he stares in the mirror, makes an ascot out of a hand towel, lights a cigarette, and admires the image of himself smoking in his bathrobe. When his wife comes in and he imperiously demands another kettle, she loses her temper and slams the cabinet lid closed, shattering the glass. He looks at his fractured reflection in the shattered mirror. She apologizes, and he embraces her with a fierce and terrifying passion.

He furtively takes more pills than he's supposed to, lies to get a refill, then impersonates a doctor to get more pills. As he takes higher and higher dosages, things get worse. He tortures his wife and son beyond belief, and when they finally realize the extent of the danger it's almost too late.

The character's cruelty comes out only with the drug, but it must have been there latently all along. He is frustrated at his petty suburban life, but it can't come out directly. It comes out instead in the form of a rare illness, and then in his abuse of the drugs. He is an intellectual trapped in a small town. This is not merely a fairy tale about a drug gone awry, it's a way of sneering at the values of a society that's too small to hold a man of great stature and intelligence, a man who is BIGGER THAN LIFE.

Nicholas Ray is a great storyteller. His style is mythic, but restrained enough to mirror the inner strain of the character. Very gripping. Never lets up for a second. Barbara Rush is beautiful, empathetic. Great close-ups. James Mason was wearing that weird male makeup they used back then, Male Tan #5 or whatever, it's very orange and looks great on screen next to Barbara Rush's cool ivory tones. She is great as the wife who is married to a monster but loves him all the same. What woman can't identify with that? Very inspiring for my next movie, which will deal extensively with psycho male-female relationships.

WHIRLPOOL

2006-12-23T21:05:00.000-08:00

I saw this incredible movie recently, called WHIRLPOOL, directed by Otto Preminger. This is a remarkable movie in many ways. The main character is a beautiful wife (Gene Tierney) who has a problem with stealing, even though she is married to a psychoanalyst (Richard Conte) who makes a comfortable amount of money. In an effort to hide her problem, she becomes mixed up with a creepy quack psychoanalyst (Jose Ferrer), who hypnotizes her and frames her for a murder.

The movie has incredible atmosphere. Gene Tierney is radiant, otherwordly, and almost unbearably beautiful. She has a perfect sculptural head, the quintessential 1940's female head. Jose Ferrer is elegant, slimy, despicable, weak, desperate, charming, horrifying, by turns. He is in the hospital, barely able to move, for a good part of the movie, and delivers his lines through a haze of painkillers with his eyes unable to focus. But from this position he is able to convey myriads and shades of character and meaning that can chill yor spine. Brilliant.

Gene Tierney is genius at portraying women who have psychological disorders of varying intensity, made all the more acute by her alarming beauty. It's very moving to see her struggle with trying to be the perfect wife and to hide her secret, while all the time it is destroying her life and those around her.

I am always fascinated by movies about women who have mental disorders. The simple explanation offered is never really convincing. In WHIRLPOOL, the wife is a kleptomaniac because her father never let her buy anything when she was a girl, and she's transferred this pathology onto her husband. In LEAVE HER TO HEAVEN, the explanation for the character's insane destructive possessiveness is, "Ellen loves too much." In THE LOCKET, a locket given to her as a little girl was taken away, and this accounts for her insanity.

But what seems implied is always that the woman cannot be contained by her society. She loves too much, wants too much, desires too much. She is therefore "woman too much," and this destroys her, destroys life. I was reading some Northrop Frye the other day, and this character--the siren, the harlot, the nymphomaniac, the witch, the all-consuming female--is the prime figure in demonic literary symbolism. The animal most associated with the demonic in literature is the ape, and the natural symbol is water in a turbulent form. The spiral, or WHIRLPOOL, is another important symbol.

What's interesting is, I had no idea that I was taking all of my images from classic literary demonic symbolism. I'd been planning to use all of these images in my next film for a while now: a man in an ape suit, a harlot or witch, and troubled waters. And when I saw WHIRLPOOL, I was very struck by that title. The Whirlpool is also the demonic spiral, as in the opening credits of VERTIGO; it's the Wheel of Fortune, with all that implies about fate, and the worlds of fortune tellers and mystics; and it's the raging waters of Charybdis, that sucks people down without hope. It's life down the drain, it's life being drained away. It's the essence of the demonic, and it's always great material for a drama.

Warped Woman

2006-11-25T19:35:00.000-08:00

I read this book by Orrie Hitt the other day, "Warped Woman." It's pretty strange. It's about this writer of dime store novels, who is trying to convince his society girlfriend that his writing is noble, because it's about real people and their problems and perversions. He's writing a book about a peeping tom, and she thinks it's a sick subject that should be censored, while he explains that he's benefiting society by exposing a type of psychology that's in their midst.

In the meantime, he has all of these women. Every woman he comes across is a potential sex partner, and he can't be with them without assessing their physical charms and going over in his mind how it was, or would be like, in bed with them. This includes a 40-ish drunk of a floozy landlady, a young blonde waitress with impossible proportions, (40-20-36), his black-haired ivory-skinned girlfriend with almost equally impossibly proportions but even better legs than the blonde, and his beautiful redheaded agent who sleeps with all of her writers and uses business to force them into bed. Out of all of these girls, the one that's considered "warped" is his girlfriend, who won't put out for him. She is an unreasonable, misguided creature, railing against kissing in the cinema, and trying to keep movies of that sort out of the local theaters. They argue incessantly over issues of censorship, where he patiently tries to explain her wrongheadedness to her, but she won't listen.

This all culminates in her burning his books in a mad witchhunt, along with some girlie magazines and other smutty literature, and publicizing the event widely through her newspaper that her rich daddy bought for her. He is proclaimed the most undesirable citizen of the town, and his career is nearly ruined. She is a terrifying harpy spitting out rage, but at the same time still trying to bend him to her will, to get him to marry her, to control his mind, to stop him from writing the things he wants to write, which he equates with truth and humanity, and to get him to write boring small-town drivel.

In the end, she is attacked by the real-life peeping tom of the town, the person that he was basing his book on. He had repeatedly tried to warn her about it and protect her, but she insisted that no such type of person could possibly live in their town, and that his writing was only the product of his sick mind. He arrives just in time to save her, and she is filled with gratitude. She now admits that his writing does a service to society, and she is even in awe of him and his importance. Near the very end of the book we find out why the book is called "warped woman": she tells him that she was caught masturbating in front of her window when the peeping tom discovered her. It's also strongly suggested that she's a lesbian. There's quite a bit of discourse about lesbians in the book, as it's a subject he claims to have extensively studied and written about, not out of prurient interest, but as a social study. Lesbianism is spoken about as a social problem that can be solved by a good family doctor and understanding parents.

There is a statement at the back of the book by the writer, who claims in a kind of emotional rage that he is revealing the types of people who have tried to censor his writing in the past, and their evil motives.

The most striking image in the book is when the peeping tom character has just come back from witnessing a fire, which turns him on even more than peeping into windows. This could become a new obsession for him, setting fires. But what he sees in the flame is the writer's raven-haired girlfriend, her head on a white pillow surrounded by black smoke, and the color red (blood). It's a terrifying image. Another scary moment is when the writer and his girlfriend are fighting at night on the lawn, and she screams at him that he will burn in hell. It's all very violent. It's as if the writer, Orrie Hitt, hated some woman so much for wanting to censor him that he wished death, murder, decapitation, burning, and witchcraft on her.

At the same time, he is defined by all of the women he knows. The writer even claims in the book that if you show him the woman a man sleeps with, he can tell you about that man's soul. So, his soul is defined by all of these women. He is nothing without them. He only exists because of them. That's why he's so hateful towards this one woman, because she has too much power over him. She has become the scary controlling mommy who won't let the boy be himself. He wants the yielding permissive mommies, who are only women by definition of how much they can please him. And the controlling mommy is the wife, any wife really, who tries to tame her man for the sake of civilzation, but ends up crippling him instead.

I know this is the early 1960's, but I wonder how much gender roles and primal emotions have really changed. It's interesting to have it laid out raw and honest like this, instead of buried and coming out all passive-aggressive. It makes me understand men better. I think men have gotten more sneaky since then. They won't admit to needing those things from women anymore, that's how they get out of being controlled by them. But if women could understand their raw emotions better, from books such as these, it might be easier for us get some of that control back, in the form of pretending to fulfill their most secret desires. Does this scare you, men??

The Viva Pressbook

2006-11-10T12:28:00.000-08:00

I've just made these great pressbooks that I'm really excited about. I was applying to some European festivals that requested a pressbook and I thought "What is a pressbook?" Usually festivals ask for a press kit, which is just some xeroxes and stills in a folder. So I looked it up and found people selling all of these vintage pressbooks on Ebay from the 60's and 70's. Apparently a pressbook was a glossy printed booklet with anywhere from 2 to 16 pages or so, usually scaled like a newspaper at about 11" x 17", that distributors would send to theater managers to help promote the films. They no longer make them, except in Europe, and the ones they make now are totally different from the vintage ones (the ones now are more like catalogues, very thick, and are only made for very big movies).

I instantly decided that I wanted to make a pressbook like those vintage ones, and although they had great covers, I couldn't get a sense of how they were put together without seeing them in person. I ordered a few, but I was itching to see one right away. I brought it up to my friend Jared and he said he'd just bought a pressbook for the Herschell Gordon Lewis film A Taste of Blood. So we rushed over to his house to get it, and I was completely awestruck by how incredible it looked. The scale was breathtaking, and there was a very stylish design, with only black, white, and orange on the outside, and black and white on the inside. The orange was applied to the black and white photos to look like blood or violence, and the photos on the back were all hacked up in weird shapes, perfect for a horror movie. The inside contained information about the film, such as cast and crew and synopsis, and also ads to be clipped out and sent to newspapers, and different posters that could be ordered. It was gorgeous.

I instantly started to design my pressbook in a similar style, (also incorporating the pressbook cover design for Andy Milligan's The Filthy FIve, which coincidentally I happened to see that evening in a book I was reading), and the result, I have to say, is quite extraordinary. What is amazing is that because of the scale, (12" x 17"), the full-color front and back function as movie posters, and then all the movie information can be placed inside. It's so much less clunky than a folder with stuff inside, and it also can act like a sort of flyer. It's very retro looking, so right away you feel transported back to another time, which is what VIVA does as a movie, so it's perfect.

In the meantime I bought a group of sexploitation pressbooks from the 60's and 70's, and it's obvious how the quality level drops off dramatically after about 1972. They get smaller, are printed on cheaper paper, have less color, and are less remarkable all in all. (Shortly after that they disappeared alltogether). And the ones for sale are mostly for exploitation movies, the kind VIVA was modeled after. It feels very authentic to have the same sort of ad campaign used by the Herschell Gordon Lewis set! This should generate some publicity! Also, I've put clips on the Viva page and the Cast page, and on Youtube. So now it's all public, for better or for worse...

Torture Dungeon

2006-10-29T19:09:00.000-08:00

Last night I watched TORTURE DUNGEON, a film by Andy Milligan. I was in a weird mood because I had just finished reading THE GHASTLY ONE, a book all about Andy Milligan's life and work. I had never seen a Milligan film, but the book was very intense and made me extremely curious and excited, and full of apprehension.

Basically there were all of these people prancing around in medieval costumes, trying their best to deliver bad dialogue in believable and intriguing tones, with more or less success. There was a pleasant mix of actors and non-actors, and of campiness and seriousness. But it was all rather solemn, seemingly an attempt at creating CINEMA. The soundtrack was well-timed with the action, and had a grandeur and sadness reminiscent of IVAN THE TERRIBLE. The performances were earnest, sometimes even sweet and moving. There were really fabulous costumes, great hennins and emblems, and great dressing for interiors and use of exteriors. All in all, it had a real atmosphere, created for pennies, while it is not easy to create an atmosphere on any budget.

Some of my favorite scenes included the heroine, an innocent lass whom we first see romping nude in the pond and woods with her lover. She has an atypical figure for a nude actress, with small breasts and a very large rear, but her shape is pleasingly plump and her face very pretty, almost like a young Susan Hayward. She has an innocence you don't often see in nude actresses which is very refreshing, and which seems quite intentional. The actors all had great faces, were very cinematic, wore their clothes well. The camera movement was exciting, and the shots and editing effective.

You could instantly see that Milligan had been inspired by watching old movies. The scene that includes the torture dungeon itself is right out of a 1930's black and white horror film...I can't remember which one...where a mad scientist has a horrifying chamber of grotesqueries, medical experiments. In order to deflect away from cheap visuals there is moody lighting and a camera swinging around so you can't see anything too well, but it all works.

The thing I noticed about this Milligan movie is that is that takes itself very seriously. It's not trying to be schlock, it's trying to be good. When I see that it's very weird, because it's what I do. I've never quite seen anyone do what I do before; that is, try to make a period masterpiece with no money and no help. It reminds me a lot of my Super 8mm stuff, where I made everything out of nothing, just hobbled it all together.

The other thing Andy and I both do is use film as a kind of gestalt therapy, to purge emotional demons. Hardly anyone else ever does that either. And using nudity prudishly. Another unusual combination. He's more a sadist and I'm a masochist, but the impulses are basically the same. I'll have to see more of his films to see if the connection is as strong as I think, because it may be more so in this medieval one, but I have a feeling the empathy goes pretty deep. I guess we're just a couple of prancing dressmaking set decorating old movie buff drama queen feverish flesh peddling weirdos out of hell. Oh, well!

Film within a Film (A Brief Sketch)

2006-10-26T22:25:00.000-07:00

In the movie Peeping Tom there is this incredibly beautiful camera that the main character carries around. I asked around and found out that it's a Bell and Howell Filmo, a heavy industrial 16mm portable camera that makes a sound like a coffee grinder. It's the kind that was used a lot for newsreels back in the day.

Seeing that great camera gave me the idea to do a film within a film. There would be a director filming his movie on an Eyemo, the 35mm version of the Filmo. It would be sort of a sequel to VIVA, (my boyfriend calls it "Viva Deux," which sounds dreadful), shot somewhere in southern Europe, possibly on the Riviera or in Greece.

Anyway, I had this dream where John Klemantaski, who plays the British sleaze theater director in VIVA, and Jared Sanford, who plays the alcoholic husband sleaze in VIVA, and I were all staying in the same beach house somewhere on the Riviera. We were all wearing these dresses or tunics made out of the same colorful striped terrycloth. Mine was one-shoulder and so short in back that my bare rear end was totally exposed as I walked around, but I didn't mind at all. And we were all hugging and kissing effussively like disgusting Hollywood actors, so pleased to be shooting a new picture together.

So I was thinking I'd put John's character, Arthur, in the new film as the director of a comedy in Europe. But he's totally neurotic, and he insists that all the acting be method. So the girls (Bridget and me) have to join the police force in order to play cops in his movie, and some crazy mix-ups happen, including our involvement in a real murder.

Some images I have so far are a man in a gorilla suit on a motorboat (See my post "Cinema on LSD"), girls running in tight beige police uniforms with corsets underneath, a blah love scene on an ocean raft, speeding down the road in Ferraris, and scenes at the wharf with the director trying to capture his crane shots, inspired by How to Murder Your Wife.

Fairy Tales and Women's Pictures

2006-10-23T20:53:00.000-07:00

I've realized that the stories that move me the most usually are a twist on the Cinderella story: a young girl that is terribly abused by an adult female, and who has to make her own way until she is saved somehow. So many of the fairy tales revolve around this theme. We also have Peau d'Ane, or Donkeyskin, in which a young princess flees from her home disguised in a donkeyskin to avoid the amorous advances of her father, and is ridiculed and snubbed by villagers who are disgusted with her rancid smell inside of the foul animal skin. Then there is Mother Trude, where an overly curious girl goes into the forest and sees what she shouldn't through the witch's window, and the witch throws her on the fire and warms herself to the new blaze. And of course there is Snow White, where the stepmother is competitive with the beautiful daughter, and hates her and plots her death.

I wonder why these stories are so unpopular now, except among children. They're so universal. There used to be so many fairy tale movies, movies about girls and women. In the 30's EVERYONE watched Shirley Temple movies. They were very sophisticated entertainment, with great writers, directors, performers, songs, choreography, stories. They were the cream of the crop, the finest Hollywood had to offer.

The other day The Little Princess with Shirley Temple was on, and it was so moving, I was sobbing by the end of it. Literally, tears pouring down my face. Where it really gets me is when she is having a perfect little birthday party at the boarding school, and news comes that her father has been killed in action. He hasn't paid the bill at the school, and apparently she is left penniless, so the evil headmistress takes away all her presents and sends her up to her room, where she is promptly informed of her father's death, stripped of all her fine possessions, and put to hard labor as a scullery maid. It all comes out all right in the end, but watching it is too much.

The Shirley Temple movies are remarkable in that she usually gets herself out of her tight spots, rather than relying on a handsome prince (or, her case, a dashing daddy), to get her out of it. The daddy figures often do help, but it is always her own resourcefulness that pulls her through in the end.

In the 30's and 40's there were so many great women's pictures. One that I saw recently for the first time that really did a number on me is The Locket, with Larraine Day, Brian Aherne, Robert Mitchum. One of the most haunting films I've ever seen. A woman has mental problems, and it all stems from her childhood. She was the daughter of the maid in a rich household, and was friends with the little rich daughter of the house. The rich daughter has a birthday party and gets a beautiful gold locket, which she gives to the maid's daughter as a gift. But the rich girl's mother takes it away, explaining that it's a family heirloom. The maid's daughter had a tremendous sense of loss, and can't get over the fact that she was given something so special and was not allowed to keep it. In the meantime, the locket is missing, and the rich lady of the house accuses the maid's daughter of stealing it. There is a horrifying scene where she is sort of throttling the girl and screaming at her for lying, but then it's found by the maid. The rich lady doesn't believe it, and thinks the maid is covering up for her daughter. They are discharged from the household.

Years later, the maid's daughter grows into a charming young lady, and gets married. But it's subsequently revealed that she is a kleptomaniac with serious mental problems, and she proceeds to bring death and destruction to everyone around her because of her problem. The flashback to her childhood comes about halfway through the movie, when we are starting to realize that she is not normal. All of her problems stem from this one incident with the locket. There's more and it gets worse, but I don't want to give away the whole plot.

Another great woman's picture is Aventurera, a Mexican melodrama from the 40's about a girl who is led into a life of prostitution, because of being kidnapped by an evil woman who sells her into slavery. I also enjoyed The Revolt of Mamie Stover with Jane Russell, about a woman who is a drink hostess and entertainer at a Honolulu nightclub, where she works for a hard-as-nails Agnes Moorhead, who keeps her stable of girls in line like prisoners.

And there is Waterloo Bridge, where Vivienne Leigh is a dancer who is abused by a sadistic ballet mistress and is discharged for meeting with her lover. Then, because it's the war and there are no jobs, she and her girlfriend are forced into prostitution. She thinks her lover Robert Taylor is dead, but then it turns out he is alive, and her life is ruined now and they can never be together. And there is Madame X, where Lana Turner, a girl of humble origins, weds a wealthy politician, John Forsythe, who is always away on business. In her loneliness she has an affair with Ricardo Montalban, and when she tries to end it there is an accident and he falls down the stairs to his death. To avoid scandal her mother in law forces her to disappear forever and leave her little boy, which breaks her heart. She becomes a worthless alcoholic, her life ruined, her only wish to see her little boy again.

Great films. Modern fairy tales. For some reason there were no more fairy tales after about the 60's. There was a resurgence of fairy tales and fables in the 60's and early 70's, and then nothing. I recently saw The Pied Piper, starring Donovan. Wonderful fairy tale, very magical. It was the 60's, so it was also very cynical. But interesting and great. It's time to bring these types of movies back.

Cinema on LSD

2006-10-20T20:08:00.000-07:00

Up until now I've always made "comedies," and I'm thinking of venturing next into drama. But the lure of the comic form still looms large. I had some thoughts about what a comedy is that I wanted to jot down before I move totally into drama and forget what I was thinking.

When I first became interested in comedy as a form is when I was reading about "modes" in Northrop Frye's brilliant book Anatomy of Criticism. He states simply that in a comedy the hero is integrated into his society, and that in a tragedy he is isolated from his society. The classic integration is often through marriage, but it could be a misfit that gets accepted, or any number of kinds of integration. Having it put this way really excited me, because I could see all sorts of ways to enact this fantasy of integration, which is basically a wish-fulfillment fantasy, and at the same time tap into levels of irony and complexity that would make my stories completely unique.

This has worked for me up until now, but I am starting to fear that if I have to make a movie in a conventional way-- that is, delegating tasks to others, and within a reasonable time limit-- I can't afford to make a comedy. The reason comedy is more expensive is that if you want to keep people laughing, you have to surprise and delight them at regular intervals. This is difficult if not impossible to do with dialogue alone, no matter how funny the writing or how good the actors. You have to surprise them by any possible means--by changing the locations, the sets, the colors, the characters, keeping things moving visually as well as in the storyline.

The key in comedy is movement. The silent film geniuses Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin knew this. Elaborate sight gags and stunts are one way to achieve movement, action scenes are another, and changing the locations often is another. So I've been thinking: the best way to keep things moving, and therefore comic, is to combine all types of movement together. Have the camera moving, the actors moving--on motorboats, trains, airplanes, running, waterskiing, racing, on horseback, etc.--have the story moving, the sets changing, the story shifting, new surprises all the time. It's like those fairy tales where there's one room that opens into another, and another, and another, to infinity. Then when there's a locked room and you can't enter, that's tragedy. That's Pandora's Box, Bluebeard's Castle, sin, death, destruction. That's why low-budget movies almost always feel so abject. You are locked in these little rooms, these little spaces, and you can't get out. That's not comedy. That's horror. You need lots of sets for comedy.

The other thing that works in comedy is recognition. If you recognize someone's plight as something you've experienced yourself, then you laugh. If it doesn't seem real to you, you don't laugh. So comedy has to be very psychologically real. The actors have to be very good to pull it off, and it takes a lot of rehearsals. Also, incongruity works. And traditional gags seem to work, if the audience recognizes them as such. A classic example of this is, a man in a gorilla suit mugging for the camera. Everyone knows he's a man in a gorilla suit, but we've become accustomed to the gag, so we laugh.

My idea of comedy is to make every single thing in the frame create recognition, without distracting from the story. That's why I like to do period stuff. The next time I do a comedy I want to collect all of these movie clichés, things that we experience only in movies, and stick them together. So we have the gorilla suit...the Victorian beauty galloping across the English moors...the long sea journey...the couple on the motorboat falling in love as the shore recedes behind them...the trapeze act without a net...a film within in a film...etc. So, anyone who's seen classic movies will recognize everything that happens. A patchwork of different movies thrown together, in a mad kaleidoscope of movie history. Cinema on LSD.

Formula for Making Low-Budget Movies

2006-10-17T21:20:00.000-07:00

Last night I promised to reveal the secrets of making a successful low-budget movie. The movies I have based it on are all from the 1930's through the 1960's, because those are primarily the movies I watch. But this formula would work for movies made at any time.

Basically, there is a main character who is either a psychopathic murderer, a nymphomaniac, or a witch. The victim has a certain sympathy and even psychic connection to the killer, who is often a young good-looking person who appears to be normal. The attractiveness of the psychotic character draws all suspicion away from them until it is too late and there have been some grisly deaths. If the victim is a female, usually there is some older woman who is oppressing her, and who is her enemy. She has to deal with this tribulation as well as with the menace of the killer. She is hated because of her innocence, but in the end it is her innocence that saves her.

The audience has a sense of the dread of the situation far in advance of the characters, which creates a great deal of terror and suspense. The sense of impending doom is often enhanced with fog, deep shadows, stark interiors. There are few sets, but the sets that exist are very atmospheric. Usually these films can get by with 2 or 3 interiors and 2 exteriors, as long as they are very good ones. Typical settings include a castle interior, a motel interior, a nightclub or bar, a store or other place of business, a diner or restaurant, a manor, a library or study, an underground coven, an apartment building, a churchyard, the lonely highway, the main street of a town, the moors, the deserted beach, or the forest.

Good examples of the form include Psycho, Repulsion, Night Must Fall, Peeping Tom, Phantom Lady (psycho killers), and Horror Hotel, The Virgin Witch, Day of Wrath (witches).

When the character is a nymphomaniac or an otherwise sexually aggressive woman, havoc and destruction are wreaked from the moment she makes contact with a forbidden male who is either above her station, or not her husband. Examples include The Birds, Vertigo, Butterfield 8, Suburban Roulette, Niagara, In This Our Life, Gone to Earth, Strange Woman, Beyond the Forest, and countless other noir films. Although some of these were made with large studio budgets, the story elements are simple and don't require the fancy trappings you would need for, say, a comedy.

The reason you can get by with very low budgets, especially with the killer/witch types, is because the sense of horror and doom distract the audience away from the visuals, and keep them focusing on the psychology. The limited number of sets actually works for these films, because it increases the feeling of being trapped and not being able to escape. Also, you can get away with a lot of symbolic camera work, in which a close-up is often more effective than showing a whole set.

A variation on the witch theme is the wicked stepmother theme, as in Snow White and Cinderella, and many other fairy tales. Snow White is actually a classic example of the witch story. A variation on the psycho killer theme is the young man so tortured by ambition that he destroys himself and everything he touches, as in Nightmare Alley, The Man with the X-Ray Eyes, or Treasure of the Sierra Madre.

The psycho killer/witch may be replaced with a vampire or other monster, but this is much harder to pull off without resorting to clichés, and tends to be more expensive, mainly because more spectacular visuals are needed in order to keep it interesting. But with a little ingenuity it can work very well too. And a really good combination is the insatiably ambitious man combined with the monster, as in Frankenstein and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

I really love making comedies, but if I am to continue in film and not kill myself with the design and brutal budgets, I have to go with this thriller/ horror formula. It actually sounds very exciting. But already I'm jumping ahead of myself, and imagining horses on the moors before thinking of my plot. While coming up with the thriller formula I got some more ideas about the comedy/ action form as well. More on that next time.

Carnival Honey

2006-10-16T21:22:00.000-07:00

The greatest source of inspiration so far for my next film has been the novel CARNIVAL HONEY. It's a pulp novel from 1961 written by Orrie Hitt. I've gone on to read other pulp novels from the time, but this is the one that really does it for me. For one thing, it takes place in a carnival. And it's very cinematic, very film noir. But there's this incredible restraint in the writing. Because you never see the carnival itself. You are taken into the trailers, a diner, a house in the country, but not not the carnival itself. It's almost as if this was a movie script and they didn't have the money to show you the carnival. That's how it feels-- like a budget contraint. It's that cinematic. You can see and feel all the sets, you can see the actors, the set dressing. You feel like you are watching a movie, and you enjoy being in the cramped, claustrophobic trailers with their stark lighting and umade beds with satin sheets.

And the sex is very interesting, because they had to make it spiritual in order to pass the censors. So it almost becomes feminized. It's about the total experience, man and woman, union, desire, sensuality. It's not about a male point of view. Also, because so many of these books were churned out so quickly, and the writers had to vary the plots and characters, you have a lot of it told from a woman's point of view. It switches back and forth, but in this book stays longer on the women, on their thoughts and fantasies. A lot of what everyone talks about is women and their options. There's this argument that goes back and forth: should the carnival girls strip all the way, or not? On the one hand it's illegal and they could be shut down, on the other the carnival needs the extra cash it brings in. And everyone in the carnival is concerned for the good of the whole, because if the carnival doesn't make money, they could all be out of jobs. Then there are the girls themselves, their futures, whether or not they should do it from a personal point of view. Everyone seems concerned about this, the reputations and well-being of the girls.

The men are big and brutal and handsome, and a little scary. I thought of Robert Ryan, Jack Palance. The women are like Gloria Graham, Virginia Mayo, Diana Dors, Marie Windsor. Everyone is struggling along, eveyone is in the same racket. You work for a living. You do what you can to get by. Sure, you can go wrong along the way. A lot of the girls go wrong by getting raped or otherwise deflowered as teenagers. The men have no college education, never got a break. It's all very gritty and realistic.

Everyone loves sex. A woman who loves sex is not threatening, is not masculinized or judged. The more she enjoys sex, the more she is a total woman. She gives the gift of her body, and this gift is sacred. There are homosexuals in these books too, and they are equally human, equally dimensional. Their desire is fleshed out the same as everyone else's, from the inside.

It's so different than anything today. It's so basic. It's about human beings, with their desires, faults, and weaknesses. It's stunningly unspectacular. Nothing is embellished. It's a world of realities, of hard facts. Nowadays stories are all trying to be so wacky. But this is so plain. It's about plain men and women. But somehow you know they are a little more handsome, more virile, more busty, with riper thighs, moister lips, a squarer jaw, more sexual, than you and me. And that's why it's so cinematic. You are seduced by seeing the stars in their more intimate moments. And the brilliance of it is, the author paints the stars so you feel you know them, so you feel almost as if you are watching a great noir film. And the restraint in the writing is a lot of what makes it possible to visualize it so clearly.

CARNIVAL HONEY also seems cinematic for me because it fits within a formula I've come up with for creating great cinema with limited time and a limited budget. I analyzed all the really effective low-budget films, and I found they all have the same story elements and production details. More on that next time.

42nd Street Smut Theaters and Today

2006-10-12T21:50:00.000-07:00

I'm in a really weird mood from reading this Andy Milligan book (The Ghastly One). For one thing, the author describes the sexploitation movie racket on 42nd Street in New York in the 60's and 70's. All those smutty theaters, all of that sex product being ground out for pennies. Andy Milligan would make these films for like $10,000, and do everything himself, the way I do. He would use a horrible actor just to get to use his house for free, and cast him as a deaf-mute. Or he would set people on fire because presumably he didn't have the budget to fake it. And they'd be screaming, burning, and he'd keep on filming. Then after torturing the actors and doing everything for nothing, ingenioously, he'd get screwed by the distributors, who would pay him off, maybe $3,000 for a picture, and then they'd be too cheap to give him a pass to his own screening.

The point of all this is, reading this made me realize that basically nothing in the low-budget film world has changed. People are scrambling for a buck however they can get it, and they're turning out product as cheaply as they can so they can make a dollar. It's not about art-- never was. I don't know why I never thought of that before. But it all makes sense: the terrible dreadful movies they turn out. And why? They've got a market for "youth" movies, the way they used to have one for sex movies. So they make these stupid road movies, movies about dopey guys, music about kids doing whatever, with no production values and rotten acting, but they have a niche audience so they SELL.

So I finally see after all these years that spending so much effort trying to make a great movie doesn't necessarily make it easier to sell. But maybe my film is SO WEIRD that it will sell anyway.

I was looking at these vintage pressbooks on ebay last night, and I bought a few. They are so amazing. I bought a Pete Walker one, a Hammer one with Horror of Dracula and Curse of Frankenstein, Cleopatra, a lot of sexploitation pressbooks including Metzger's Little Mother. Priceless! I'm going to use them to inspire my own pressbook. Nobody will have as cool a pressbook as mine if I use these as a model! And a friend sent me this amazing book cover from the '50's, MADBALL, to inspire me for the carnival movie. I must buy it and read it at once!

Thoughts on the Viva Premiere

2006-10-11T09:34:00.000-07:00

My film VIVA premiered the other night, at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. This was a gala Hollywood affair, with the grand sweeping staircase leading up to the stage flanked by giant Oscars. Tosh Berman gave a genius introduction, totally impromptu, which floored the audience, as he made up stories about my S & M director's practices, and how I seduced him with a martini, a negligée, and five strange girls. He told them that everything in VIVA was real, and that it would change their lives forever.

The audience was vocal, and eruptions of laughter came from all sides, in stereo, throughout the entire film. Afterwards, I couldn't get to the food table or the bar, as I was assaulted by people telling me how talented I am, how the color was perfect, how the acting was impeccable, how great my sets are, etc. As the shining faces of strangers loomed into mine, emphatically pouring out the compliments, I kept thinking: I know the costumes and sets are good...I know the acting is good...I know the film is funny...but what else?

In the next couple of days, I tried to figure out why I was feeling disappointed. I'd been influenced lately by a book I've been reading on Andy Milligan (The Ghastly One by Jimmy McDonough), trashy gay horror exploitation director from the 60's and 70's, and the strange insane world he inhabited. He would shock and torment his audiences, make them sick. It's not that I actually wanted to shock people with VIVA, just that I wanted to affect them with the story, and not just the obvious humor and visuals. I wanted them to respond to the nudity, the orgy, the demonic laughter, the rapes, the sublime sex and race car scenes, the nightmarish world of self-absorbed men with their lion pendants, the overall excessiveness.

A couple of responses, it's true, were different. One person at the screening said they were really glad for actor Jared Sanford's raucous laughter, because it relieved the tension. Then when I got home there were a few emails. One guy couldn't sleep, and woke up at 4:45 AM to write about his fevered responses. Another guy said he was laughing madly throughout, but also admitted that it was nervous laughter, in response to the tension and the uncomfortable situations. One more person said he always thought I should make a real horror movie, and now I have. Another person said that if she didn't know me, she would think it was made by someone in and out of insane asylums.

I never know what my next picture is going to be until I get a general audience response from the one I've just finished, and now lots of ideas are swirling around in my brain. I think I'm going to move into straight drama next time, less stylized, tighter story, more direct about the themes. Audiences are masochists and they're brutal, nothing is too strong for them. I see that now. I have a carnival story sort of sketched out, and I have some ideas about its structure, characters and plot that can't fail. More on that next time.

Some comments after the screening:

I thought it was marvelous. It had "that Biller touch"--a wonderful blend of the sumptuous and the preposterous. I especially envy anyone who stumbles across it by accident. As with all my favorite films, VIVA offers and alternate reality that I would gladly inhabit--the complete antithesis of pretty much everything else on the marketplace these days. --Marshall

I really enjoyed Viva. The take off of the 70's style acting came across so amusingly. Your attention to all the details of the film is what made it really work. The music and your animation were terrific. I haven't laughed so much at a film for some time. --Robert

Wow, that was... AMAZING! EPIC! not since POLYESTER have I seen a director transform THAT much from project to project! --Dave

The movie is extremely well done--interesting as well as enlightening!--I guess I missed something in the 70's ha! --Betty

It's a hell of an achievement and one that will force people to take you very seriously as a filmmaker. Obviously, lots of feedback. I'd say THE universal theme was "I have never seen a film like that. Ever!" --John

"Viva" to me is fantasy. But it is a fantasy of someone who lives like those characters in the movie. The social group that I was raised in, were dealing with another sort of crisis... hard drugs, death, etc. The first time I ever saw 'Playboy' was in my Grandfather's house. I have seen hardcore porn in my family's household - but the Playboy thing is really for a particular type of 'man' and that 'man'' wasn't part of my teenage or child world. Saying that I think 'Viva' is a really great film. What makes it great is...basically you! It is your point of view or your attitude that makes that social history interesting. The Orgy scene is incredible. The pacing and shots are awesome. It's really intense. --Tosh

I had to write to tell you how much I enjoyed Viva! I brought two of my girlfriends out with me and we all were so excited and amazed. I love the look and feel, I love all of the authentic touches, the wigs, the clothes, the sets-my god! the sets!! One of my favorite scenes is when Rick drops the pack of cigarettes in front of the race car so that there can be a sweet beauty shot of him as he kneels to pick them up. I am so excited and invigorated by this movie! Absolutely spot on. --Sonya

I had no expectations except that you'd amuse and provoke me at the same time. In that regard, this is clearly your best work ever. It not only entertains but also subverts from within, which is my definition of high art. The audience reaction was never universal but always consistently "into" it. you know? Your work produces (at least in me) a strange, uneasy tension. I actually laughed so much I hope I didn't embarrass you. My friend mentioned it to me afterwards. "You sure did laugh." I said, "It's to lessen the tension." And I went on to espouse how without the laughter, the painful truths of your work make it hard for me to watch. It's too painful and difficult and soul-challenging not to work on what you want, imho. in other words, since the process of making films is so difficult, why challenge yourself to only be mediocre? --Dave

The shots of the hors d'oeuvres were so funny! I was married to a professor at the time, and we had parties EXACTLY like that...except, we weren't nude! And it was VERY funny. I was laughing the whole time. And there was a guy behind me that was laughing his head off! --Joyce

I think the fellow that introduced the movie was right, my life won't be the same after seeing VIVA! --Gary