John Menick

David Cronenberg, A Dangerous Method, due for release in late 2011 (Viggo Mortensen as Sigmund Freud)

A new short essay on Sigmund Freud’s overlooked career as a feature film actor.

On her new blog, videomaker Shelly Silver posted a great letter from filmmaker Hollis Frampton to Cherie Doyle, then curator at the Macalester College. It reminded me of another letter Mr. Frampton wrote, this time to Donald Richie, former film curator at the MoMA. The letter to Richie is one of my favorite pieces of artist correspondence. The executive summary: Frampton points out that everyone at the MoMA will get paid for the planned Frampton retrospective, except, of course, Frampton. The one-sentence condensation does it no justice, however. Read it. It’s brilliant.

The following short piece was written as part of the screening series “Goddammed Films” at Petra gallery, February 6, 2010. Follow the link for screening times and films. The series is part of SITAC happening this week in Mexico City.

A guerrilla raid on the nature of reality. That’s how the director billed it. Whose reality, and the whether the mission was a success, I don’t know. I haven’t seen Maidstone, Norman Mailer’s 1970 film. For enthusiasts of artistic infamy, the film is a fetish. It has screened a few times recently in New York, and I could say I never got around to buying the tickets because other plans intervened. But I’m probably not being honest with myself. I didn’t see it because I didn’t want to. To see it would be to ruin it. I read about Maidstone and had described to me the film’s hipster pretensions, the on-set sexual domination, the broken jaw, the narrative incoherence, the casting for the brothel, the dropped acid, smoked weed, botched leftism, the improvised idiocy. In short, I knew its infamy, and infamy survives best when hidden from view.

The origin of that infamy is, of course, Norman Mailer. But this isn’t about him. I’m interested in what has surfaced into the public consciousness about this film. After Maidstone enjoyed a short and successful run at the Whitney Museum in 1971, Mailer tried to rent a more public theater to show his deformed creation to the general public. They stayed away. The film disappeared. Decades later Maidstone resurfaced on the Internet as a dozen dirty fragments. Most of those fragments have also disappeared, but one remained: the concluding scene, where Rip Torn, stoned and crazed, tries to kill Mailer with a hammer. And with this clip somehow the film took on a second life. Like Mauss says in his study of magic, in the practice of black magic, the part becomes the whole, helps us know and overcome it. A lock of hair becomes the person. Lizard eyes become blindness. And for most of us, this scene, for better or worse, becomes Maidstone.

But what are we watching? Are Mailer and Torn pretending to kill each other? Or is this something worse? Is this the near-snuff video it purports to be? Let’s agree with the common reconstruction: the scene was planned as an fictional assassination attempt on Mailer’s character, Kingsley, but Rip Torn went the extra measure. He really hit Mailer with the hammer when he was supposed to only fake it. I want to kill your character, Kingsley, not you, Mailer, Torn says. The assassin Torn enters from the edge and takes the author out in one blow. Torn took Mailer at his word: a guerrilla raid on the nature of reality. It’s the actor, Torn, who understood the tactics needed to do so. Torn was the filmmaker, and most likely Torn was the true madman.

One last point: the film was shot like a cinéma vérité documentary. Pennebaker and Leacock and others provided all of reality’s tropes: handheld cameras, quick zooms, fitful focus, unstable framing. But that’s not what this footage gives us. It presents another reality, something the filmmakers couldn’t have understood. It shows us a moment in a culture that took a turn for the worse – the sad machismo, the cosmic pretensions, the grim willingness to kill – qualities as foreign to contemporary counterculture as a Victorian drama. The filmmakers wanted a siege on reality, but time has done it for us. Give a film enough time and the fiction falls away, and all that’s left is an unexpected and troubling reality.

I have a new interview with Melvin Moti published on Art in America’s website. From the intro:

As film slips into obsolescence, it has increasingly found a home in the visual arts. By ‘film’ I don’t mean the general culture, but the actual thing: 8 through 70 millimeters, that slow, expensive medium wound in tight magazines and processed overnight. Since the early European avant-garde, artists have made obscure shorts seen mostly by enthusiasts and historians, but once HD made its game-changing appearance, more and more artists have paradoxically turned to celluloid. In many cases the choice is aesthetic: except 4K digital cameras, film still offers a more detailed image and a color spectrum unmatched by zeros-and-ones. But the decision is ideological as well.

Scott Kirsner — columnist, blogger and author of Inventing the Movies — speaking to the folks at Google. I’ve been meaning to read Inventing the Movies for a couple of weeks now. It’s one of the few books I know of tracing the technological advancements in the movie industry. More accurately, it looks at Hollywood’s frequent inability to understand those advancements. Kirsner, in both the talk and the book, gleefully points out that most technological advancements were resisted by the industry: first sound, then color, VCRs, digital editing, and now digital projection and online video. It’s worth a look.

Much to the relief of many New Yorkers, the Mayor’s Office of Film, Theater, and Broadcasting decided to scrap its proposal to revise the city’s photography and permit laws. Inundated with stories from artists, journalists, amateur shutterbugs, concerned citizens, bloggers, libertarians, bird watchers, filmmakers, and regular folks, someone made a decent call downtown and backed off one of the most absurd proposals concerning public space in recent memory.

However, I have to say that I’m not confident that this will blip off our radar any time soon. The city is only proposing to redraft a new law, not back away from it entirely. It may be typical politics: test the waters with something outrageous, and scale back until people get tired of fighting or the city gets what it wanted in the first place. My feeling is that the NYPD just wants another excuse to search citizens, and there are plenty of ways to help facilitate that project. A watered-down version of the proposed legislation might do just fine.

Also of note: the above Times article mentions bird watcher D. Bruce Yolton and his website Urban Hawks. As I learned a couple of weeks ago from one of my commenters, in recent years birders all over the city have been unfairly targeted by police. Perhaps not unhappily, it’s been an unintended benefit of the legislation that so many people are learning about the rich and extremely vital NYC bird-watching community.

And then there’s also that awesome video.

Since I was a teenager, I’ve been more than slightly obsessed with John Carpenter’s The Thing. I’ve probably seen the film a dozen times or more. I’ve read, and highly recommend, the Anne Billson’s BFI study. I’ve defended it to fellow film buffs as one of the best films of the 1980s, period. I even worked at a place called The Thing, gleeful noting on a daily basis the secret connection between my employer and my not-so-guilty pleasure. But this goes way beyond any kind of fandom I’ve ever seen. Way beyond.

For more Thing insanity please see outpost31.com.

Like most artists in New York, I find the proposed photography permit laws outrageous and more than slightly creepy. Similar laws already in existence for film are not entirely bad, offering benefits for filmmakers far beyond their means. However, the existing film laws are meant to encourage filmmakers, poor and rich, to make their movies here in New York by giving them perks in exchange for meeting very minimal insurance needs. (Contrary to popular belief, million-dollar insurance only costs around a thousand dollars. Even on a low-budget film shoot this is within reach.) However, expanding these permit laws to include any two people with any kind of camera would do the opposite of the existing cinema laws. It would make anyone afraid to take out a camera, let alone come to New York to shoot a photo essay.

Seven years ago, I had an experience that might illustrate just how these laws would be used and misused. In 2000, I was awarded a small commission in a competition to build a new work for the Socrates Sculpture Park in Long Island City, Queens. My project was about Roosevelt Island, the northern tip of which is visible from Socrates. Without going into details, I had to take a number of 8×10 photographs of Queens from the coast of Roosevelt Island. I hired a friend of mine who had a full 8×10 set up, including a medium-sized tripod and a box or two for the camera and its accessories. In total, the two of us could move the entire kit on foot. Our plan was to spend a day on Roosevelt Island shooting and then go home. We were to shoot the view of Socrates, the Cosco next store to the park, the KeySpan power plant, and several lots further south.

Our shoot lasted literally five minutes. After spending that much time setting up, a police car rolled up and an officer emerged asked us what we were doing. We explained. He thought for a moment and asked me to get in the car. My friend stayed behind to pack up and joined us ten minutes later at the RI police HQ.

I don’t remember if the officer was NYPD, state police, private security, or some strange hybrid RI security. It’s a crucial detail, one that has a lot to do with what followed. As I understand it, Roosevelt Island is owned by the city and leased to the state, meaning that different things are run by one of the two entities. For example, the library is NYPL. The area code is 212. However, as I came to find out, the photography permit laws were those of the state.

I was brought to the officer’s boss, who asked me what I was doing. I explained again. He said I needed a permit. I said I don’t need a permit to shoot photographs in New York City. He said you do in New York State, and this island is run by the state. I asked how much it would be. He thought. After a moment of silence, he estimated one would cost about a thousand dollars an hour.

The conversation didn’t go much farther. I asked him where he got the number from and he told me some Mel Gibson movie had recently shot on the island, and that’s about how much they were charged, but he wasn’t sure. (I think the movie was Conspiracy Theory. Didn’t see it.) Trying to reintroduce reason into the discussion I mentioned that Socrates was a local non-profit and that the permit would eat up my entire measly budget in a few hours. He didn’t seem to care. I asked if I could come back without a tripod and just shoot with a handheld medium-format camera. He claimed it didn’t matter, and if I did come back with any format camera without a permit I would be arrested. I asked why I couldn’t take photos without a tripod, yet anyone else could. He claimed it was because I was a professional. I asked for a definition. The conversation circled again.

After a few more rounds, my friend and I left, and over the next three weeks, the park faxed back and forth with RI authorities. I think the amount was lowered, but it was still high enough to devour my entire budget in a day. As a result of this, the project was deeply delayed and eventually did not happen because it could never open on time and budget.

There was another interesting detail. Somewhere in this entirely absurd process I heard that the authorities were concerned I was photographing the KeySpan power plant. I don’t remember if that was part of my initial conversation with RI security or part of Socrates’ fax and phone sessions. At any rate, why exactly terrorists would use a conspicuous 8×10 set-up in full view of the public to photograph a building they want to blow up is beyond me.

At the time, the law seemed real enough. Being a little older and more experienced with obtaining permissions, I wonder whether or not we had more legal options. I don’t believe the RI office had it in for me or for Socrates. I think the officer thought he was being an honest broker. He just couldn’t differentiate between different kinds of film and photo crews. Like the proposed law for New York City, two people with a camera were enough to need warrant a permit. (Although his argument quickly changed into one professional with a camera was enough.)

The proposed photography regulations fit perfectly within a trend that started during the Giuliani administration and continue through Bloomberg: give police new powers to fine or even arrest New Yorkers for actions that were not previously illegal (smoking) or were technically so but were never enforced (jaywalking). Jaywalking is perhaps the most relevant here, because, as many New Yorkers might remember, in the late 1990s the NYPD would suddenly decide to enforce a particular violation for a short period of time, ticket and arrest dozens in a few nights, and then lay off. It will be no different with the proposed photography laws. Most of the time the laws will probably go unenforced. But given any suspicion, need for a quota, or malicious intent on the part of the police, and here come the fines and arrests.

If you are concerned about the new laws you can write the Mayor’s Office of Film, Theatre & Broadcasting. Although, one has to wonder whether quashing the proposal will even matter, since, as the Gothamist points out, police are still seizing cameras without any good reason.

The horror film has a direct line to our political unconscious. Unlike good-intentioned, well-made democratic political films like Z or The Battle of Algiers, horror films play, not to our public rationality, but our private fears. Political films in a capitalistic democracy are based on rational argumentation, but the horror film is fueled by terror, a kind of cinematic authoritarianism. Put differently, a democratic political film diagrams how things happen, who did what when and with what consequences, a horror film is an explosion of that diagram, it is a film without consequences, without reason. This probably explains why so many horror films, specifically in the zombie genre, are based on the breakdown of democratic political structures. In this way, horror is not about the loss of democracy, of private property, of the autonomous self — it stages and embodies that very loss.

Recently, Eli Roth’s Hostel 2 sent film critics into convulsions like no horror film has done in some time. Most interestingly, almost all critics who gave a poor review to the film have also questioned the sanity of its director. The claims are breathtaking. Roth has been called “toxic,” a “saboteur,” and, weirdly, a “pussy.” That last macho charge comes from Nathan Lee at the Village Voice, probably the most outraged and outrageous review of the group. “Anyone can string a naked woman up by the ankles and slit her throat,” Lee claims. Or really, Mr. Lee? Please explain. Perhaps it should be assumed Lee means this in cinematic terms, but his unconscious ambiguity says more about the effects of the film than Lee is willing to admit. Although reviews like Lee’s and Laura Kern‘s in the Times seem outraged at Roth’s terrifying violence, if you read them closely they are really claiming the film was not terrifying enough. In Lee’s misogynistic lingo: the violence was “neutered.” It’s as if, in order to put Roth and his sexist authoritarian tortures in their places, reviewers wish to show Roth not only how to be a better horror director, but how to be a better torturer.

This confusion between director, audience, character, and actor has been staged before, first by Pasolini’s Salò, and later in Haneke’s Funny Games. I’ve written about the first film elsewhere, but it should probably be mentioned that what separates Roth’s intentions from Pasolini’s is that the Italian director wished to make a film that was inconsumable, something that would purposefully fail at the box office. Pasolini’s film was about the horror of capitalism, and he made it by staging another of capitalism’s horrors: not the erosion of democracy, which may be capitalism’s secret fantasy, but the immolation of the marketplace itself.

Pasolini’s anti-market ethos went well beyond the easy infamy of the horror director. His position was based on political commitment, something that Roth obviously lacks, despite some statements on Fox News concerning US state violence. Reviewers were apparently aware of the need for infamy in marketing mainstream horror, and worried aloud that the bad reviews might help Roth at the box office. It didn’t work. The Times recently reported that horror films are in a slump, even those on which reviewers heaped praise. Whether the box office reflects much of anything is arguable, but one has to smile when Virginia Tech is mentioned as a possible reason for such a slump. Here is another more ludicrous, but much more interesting possibility: on June 8, the day Hostel 2 opened, the news broke that proof had been produced that Romanian and Polish prisons had been used as torture chambers for the CIA. Perhaps it wasn’t that people thought Hostel‘s Eastern European torture chambers were “neutered,” but, better yet, they found them redundant.