Punctured (William E Jones) // Jackie Vernon’s Slideshow Routine

One single cut in Bug (2006) starkly signals the relentless negativity which characterises the most powerful of William Friedkin’s films - part of an unending series of destructive calculations which seek in vain to resolve chaotic, violent situations.

It does so in a simple, but striking manner:

Day, an establishing shot of the motel in which the action takes place. The camera is still. There is barely any movement within the frame.
Cut.
The camera remains in position but it is now night, the motel decoratively neonlit. The composition of the image, too, remains almost identical to the previous shot.

This moment occurs immediately following the love scene between Peter and Agnes and explicitly announces a turn in the story that will propel the growing hysteria. As Agnes becomes increasingly intimate with Peter, she will become more sympathetic to his paranoid worldview. From this point on, the palpable unease which the character has brought into Agnes’s life will develop into a frenzy, transforming the environment in which we are immersed.

In addition to this basic narrative function, the cut suggests an inversion of the original image; a rupture of the onscreen reality and a passage into a distinctly different metaphysical terrain. Not only is the story progressing, but the conditions of everything that we are seeing have altered, affected in a flickering instant. Things seem to retain their steady course initially, but a deep shift has occurred in the substance of the film. Or is this only imagined?

Avoiding the explicit use of a negative photographic image that Murnau put to haunting use in Nosferatu (1922), Friedkin here manages to achieve a similar result, without departing from the conventions of cinematography. Friedkin is continually maintaining the semblance of realistic images, drawing on the lessons from his formative years making documentary films. But the more one looks into these films, the more instability, confusion and illusion is apparent everywhere - emanating from this sensed negative zone which ceaselessly threatens identity and manageable everyday reality with disorder.

WR: Mysteries of the Organism (Dušan Makavejev, 1971) 

This text was originally submitted for publication in Little White Lies, as part of an ongoing series of profiles relating to cinema.

In April last year cinema lost its longtime champion of the underground and avant-garde, Amos Vogel, who died aged 91. Far from being an obscure, outsider figure Vogel was a vocal and active programmer, writer and archivist who nurtured a beloved film society in New York, Cinema 16, which began in 1947, and was the co-founder of the New York Film Festival.

Vogel’s influence, however, has spread far beyond this locale, in particular through his 1974 book Film as a Subversive Art, a bible for countless cinephiles eager to venture into the rebellious, fantastical and morbid terrains of global film history. In London recently, an all-night film event celebrated Vogel by showing a handful of films explored in the text. But another blow has been dealt: the book is currently out of print, following a reprint in 2005.

Presented in concise chapters, covering developments in underground cinema in response to changing cultures and politics across the world, throughout the twentieth century – up until the mid-1970s when it was first published – Vogel’s book also contains a great number of capsule reviews. It is to film what the Nurse With Wound list is to experimental music – an inspiring starting point from which to venture towards little-known, marvellous and maddening examples of the art form. With pages focusing on the innovative uses of editing, narrative, language, political content, and all manner of taboo subject matter the book is a testament to film’s potential – not simply as a source of short-term entertainment. The study even encompasses scientific films, propaganda films and anonymous works, which were also included in the Cinema 16 programmes organised by Vogel alongside his wife Marcia and Jack Goelman.

The book describes films that are almost impossible to see today, even in this age of cloud accessibility. Mickey Mouse in Vietnam (1969), a one-minute animation made by Lee Savage – in which the iconic Disney hero journeys off to fight for his country, only to be shot and killed immediately upon arrival – cannot be streamed on YouTube. Searching for For Example (1971), Arakawa and Madeline Gins’ feature film about a young boy lost and deranged in the Bowery slums of New York yields almost no information about the film and the only picture that seems to exist of this film online is the same one found in Vogel’s book.

Winter Soldier (The Winterfilm Collective, 1972) 

You’d be hard pressed to find film books that more imaginatively arrange their contents in order to repeatedly reassert the scope, intensity and magic that characterises the medium. Images from The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1919) and Nagisa Oshima’s Death by Hanging (1968) sit side by side; Milton Moses Ginsberg’s harrowing psychological examination Coming Apart (1969) is reviewed alongside Barbarella (1968); from Chaplin to Viennese Actionism; Jimmy Stewart’s vertigo and a bodily dissection from a film by Stan Brakhage are juxtaposed.

Thanks to the momentum generated by Vogel’s work from the 1940s onwards, the true history of film images may become clearer, to a greater number of people. All the underground screenings, the trading of rare and suppressed films – some giving the viewer a mighty shock, some difficult to watch, but always necessary – and the continual flowering of writing about film, about every aspect of film culture and the history of the eras in which films have been made, will carry on. It is in this spirit that previous Wide Angle columns devoted to artists such as Khavn De La Cruz and Johanna Vaude exist.

The influence is clear to see in the curatorial activities of some of the finest DVD labels around, over the past several years. In the UK alone, Second Run have released Daisies (1966) and The Red and the White (1967), Mr Bongo have licensed Antonio Das Mortes (1969) and Eureka! Entertainment has issued Pasolini’s Pigsty (1969), among others, as part of its Masters of Cinema collection – films which were for many years only accessible, at least to English speaking audiences, irregularly, at festivals, retrospectives and private screenings. As Werner Herzog wrote in a letter to the Film Society of Lincoln Center, on hearing the news of Vogel’s death: “I am still not capable — or rather unwilling — to understand the fact that Amos passed away, because a man like him cannot be dead. His traces are everywhere.” An encouraging turnaround, since Cinema 16 promotional flyers offered ‘Films You Cannot See Elsewhere’.

Yet the communal aspect of film viewing is so central to Vogel’s achievements, inviting people to return to see more, and to meet new people in the interests of a richer film culture and community life. This spirit of socio-political engagement with cinema as its focal point is of course evident in the thriving internet film culture, but would be more fittingly reflected in a larger number of local cineclubs.

Even Dwarfs Started Small (Werner Herzog, 1970) 

Film as a Subversive Art will no doubt be read by each generation of fearless film fans, who wish to more thoroughly understand the history of cinema. It is lamentable that the book is currently languishing out of print. It deserves to be left in the bedside drawer of each hotel room. Still, it will be passed from one cinephile to the next, loaned, copied, scanned, linked and circulated continually in keeping with the brute necessities of maintaining a neglected cultural history.

A documentary about Amos Vogel’s life in film, which shares the book’s title, can be viewed for free online and there are a wealth of essays and documents relating to Vogel’s involvement in cinema at the website of the film’s director Paul Cronin.

On my first, brief trip to Tokyo in 2008 visits to Disk Union involved a search for any and all Koji Wakamatsu films that I could find to take home. Though my primary interest at the time was in hunting for all manner of weird, wonderful and hard-to-find records, I was also developing a fascination with Japanese cinema of the 1960s and ‘70s. Wakamatsu’s blazing, subversive films had caught my attention; they were relatively difficult to come by in the UK and imports were too costly – not a great deal has changed there. However, I knew I would be working in the dark to a great extent, due to the tendency of Japanese DVDs to be not too user-friendly for film fans unable to speak or read Japanese.

In fact, I didn’t turn up too many – or was it that they were a little expensive there too? Non-subtitled copies of The Embryo Hunts in Secret (1966) and A Womb to Let (1968) were confirmed through romaji lettering on their packaging, but the identity of one film remained a mystery for a long time after my visit. Its lurid green and orange sleeve showed a young man looking over his shoulder, a cigarette casually dangling from his mouth. It appeared to be a gangster tale, set in a murky underground of sex film production, but how would it compare with Wakamatsu’s other films? I wasn’t even certain that it was a film directed by Wakamatsu.

Japanese websites, Google translate, or even the kindness of other cinephiles were not the type of resources I would instinctively gravitate towards back then – the first two still don’t get me very far, the third is invaluable – and so the film remained unidentified for many months.

Luckily 2008 also saw the publication of Jasper Sharp’s invaluable Behind the Pink Curtain, which I managed to pick up at some point the following year. I was delighted not only to get a further opportunity to read up about Wakamatsu and his screenwriter and fellow director Masao Adachi, thanks to Sharp’s thorough research and unflinching eye, but also to find a full-page, black-and-white near-reproduction of the unidentified DVD sleeve with a revelatory caption that told me that the film was Atsushi Yamatoya’s Dutch Wife of the Wastelands (1967). What a title! Applying my rudimentary knowledge of the katakana retrospectively, I took another look at the graphic and could indeed make out the reference to an inflatable sex doll, or ‘dutch wife’.

The film is a highly stylized, low-budget thriller, with a smattering of shoot-outs, sex, underworld provocation and peculiar liberties taken with time and space. Not to mention the baffling but unforgettable dreamlike moment where a woman’s caressed skin cracks, revealing her to be a plaster model, her face no longer human but that of a doll. Or the late scene in a brothel where it appears all of the women available to clients are akin to mannequins. From what I can surmise, a hitman is hired to find a kidnapped woman and is drawn into a seedy criminal network which tests his sanity and his sexual desire to its desperate, paranoid breaking point. No material on the web has helped any further in fleshing out the storyline and the few brief write-ups that can easily be located place an emphasis on the film’s puzzling narrative and visual components.

Yamatoya’s inventive direction is clear, particularly at moments where violent physical gestures and camera movements are simultaneously executed, in a mirroring fashion, across opposing axes of space. Technical and performance elements are here knitted together intensely, in bursts of energy, and there is a heightened sense that the action is unfolding in a turbulent zone. In one shot, the camera is turned in such a way that a simple climb up a flight of stairs becomes a gravity-troubling stride across the screen.

The use of recurring images of a telephone and a clock, or watch face, build tension and confusion, playing unfathomable games with temporality and psychology, suggesting an essentially closed, nightmarish system. The concluding scene serves as a striking expansion upon the first, in which the identities of two different hired guns might well be confused. These desert scenes, where the services of the hitmen are secured and their gun skills demonstrated have a distinct point of focus: a lone tree. It initially serves as the site of a target shooting test before the protagonist Sho is dispatched to rescue the kidnapped woman, and it is felled by his expert aim. When the second man is hired at the end of the film, no doubt summoned to try his chances at attempting to finish what Sho started, he is faced with a tall, solid tree now robust to any gunfire.

So who was Atsushi Yamatoya? The same basic credits can be found readily, the most famous being Yamatoya’s screenwriting credit for Seijun Suzuki’s Branded to Kill (1967), to which Dutch Wife of the Wastelands has already been likened elsewhere. Then some scant references to other directorial efforts and a raft of screenwriter listings for pink films and anime, from Chusei Sone’s Naked Rashomon (1972) to Lupin the Third: The Mystery of Mamo (1978) up until his death in 1993. The collaborations with Wakamatsu and Suzuki were enough to encourage me to learn whatever else I could, and also to relish the opportunity of tracing a path through less familiar terrains of Japanese film and television history than a typical, auteurist study would dictate. Still, the films that Yamatoya directed were those I was intrigued to see above all.

I eventually managed to get hold of a copy his 1966 feature, Season of Betrayal (1966). Again, there were no subtitles to clarify what was being seen, in a non-anamorphic format, transferred from a slightly worn VHS.

Of course, not the way to see any film. I suppose each of us has our limits when it comes to our willingness to look at a film that has been subject to amateur copying, shoddy transfer, or degrading rips; but these ‘wretched of the screen’, as Hito Steyerl has described them, are part of contemporary film culture, in the way that nth-generation VHS copies of recordings from television circulated around the world in the years before the internet. Plus, the film itself seems to depend upon the reproduction and spread of a controversial image.

As with Dutch Wife of the Wastelands, I am still in the dark as to the plot particulars of Season of Betrayal. I have yet to find any summary information in English about the latter.

With a dramatic weight given to the dangerous power of the photographic image, Yamatoya’s first directed film focuses on a photographer returning from war with a disturbing image of military brutality, which is the subject of press and public attention. The picture shows a soldier stabbing a captured young man. It later transpires that the protagonist himself was responsible for the death of another photographer during his service, and the moment of this killing was captured by the victim. Resorting to severing the dead photographer’s arm in order to retrieve the camera from the victim’s clutch, he then fatally shoots another young soldier (seen on the film poster) for fear of being found out.

Back home the photographer is harassed by shady individuals who know the truth about what happened in the field, and his girlfriend becomes involved in the blackmail ring of grim psychosexual torment that develops. Taunted by the gift of a prosthetic arm, a scene in which the photographer is seen arousing his girlfriend by fondling her breasts with the fake limb makes for a curious link with Dutch Wife of the Wastelands.

The film demonstrates a truly self-reflexive style – its political and historical reference points would of course be better understood if a subtitled version were available for study. The dominant photographic image at the centre of the story is used as a neat structuring element throughout the film, undergoing transformations of size and recontextualisation – from the opening shot of two men carrying a large-scale reproduction of it through the street, to a sinister reminder propped against the wall at the photographer’s home, before finally growing to take over the the entirety of one of the walls of his bedroom – in order to drive the narrative in which the protagonist’s intensifying sense of guilt and turbulent emotions begin to manifest themselves through an increasingly aggressive, sexually controlling relationship with his partner. Here too, spatial disorientation is created at times, through upside-down shots and spotlighting.

There is an interesting overlap with the way that Michelangelo Antonioni foregrounded the photographic image in Blow-Up (1966), released in the same year. I hope I will be forgiven any serious errors of interpretation at this point. I cannot be sure whether the central photograph was taken by the protagonist or whether it was discovered in the roll of film belonging to the man he murdered. Here, Blow-Up seems to be a fitting point of reference for my own experience of trying to piece together what happened. Even so, its distinct ferocity makes Season of Betrayal a compelling film, even while I remain largely in the dark. I seem to have exhausted the English-language information that can be gleaned from the web.

Under the frequently favoured title of ‘Inflatable Sex Doll of the Wastelands’ or ‘Dutch Wife of the Desert’, Dutch Wife of the Wastelands has been screened outside of Japan in recent years. It was shown in New York recently and at a previous edition of the Udine Far East Film Festival, in 2011. These are admirable curatorial undertakings, in the best interests of expanding our knowledge of Japanese cinema in the West. Still, a triple bill to include Season of  Betrayal (or as my copy is labelled: ‘Season of Treason’) and Yamatoya’s equally praised, but similarly little known, Trap of Lust (which I haven’t seen) would make for an exciting retrospective screening programme. And so that the works might gain recognition further afield, a DVD boxset with a range of subtitle options would be an excellent, though unlikely, prospect.

Yamatoya seems to be a figure worthy of more critical focus, firstly in order to build upon his association with Branded to Kill and subsequent contributions to a number of popular anime. Of course, the films need to be more widely seen in order for this to happen. From what I’ve experienced of his work, he was a talented figure in an era of filmmaking in Japan that is gaining more interest with each passing year, through special screenings and DVD releases. Perhaps he is somewhat easy to overlook due to his shifting position within an industry often perceived as churning out indistinguishable, generic entertainment. Clearly Yamatoya is recognised to some extent in Japan, as evidenced by a 1994 monograph, the cover of which appears to show storyboard sketches for Dutch Wife of the Wastelands and the availability of a DVD boxset containing several collaborations with Mamoru Watanabe. Still, the Uplink release which I bought in 2008 is now out of print and there has been no DVD release of Season of Betrayal. I would be grateful to hear from anybody who is familiar with Yamatoya’s diverse work history and with the films that he directed in particular.

Cruising (1980)

Norman Mailer’s widely reviled feature film Tough Guys Don’t Dance (1987) is particularly striking for the textural variety, peculiar intonation and dynamism of the performers’ voices. The filmmaker himself described the murder mystery, based on his book of the same name, as a “subtle horror”. The vocal histrionics and grostesquerie certainly create some macabre effects, but many of the performances are not-too-subtly exaggerated into the realm of the comical.

Strong, threatening, deadly voices; screams and manic laughs – male and female – all interact in this strange and hilarious film. At its centre is the more quietly spoken, yet plainspeaking, writer Tim Madden, played by Ryan O’Neal, who awakes from an alcohol induced blackout fearing he may have been involved in a murder.

The film is haunted by the voices of the dead, whose pitched-down, mulitracked whispers can be heard in the audio mix from the first premonitory moment when Tim guillotines the polaroid photo of his brash, brutal wife Patty Lareine at the neck.

There are plenty of blunt expletives – ‘bullshit’, ‘fuck’, ‘motherfuckers’ – and Mailer’s quotable, slangy verbal attacks. They blaze across the soundtrack because of the tough, grating and gravelly voices in which they are delivered. Tim’s father Dougy mutters stoic life lessons in a whisky soaked rumble and Jessica Pond’s caustic cackle curses the film’s final image; they sit at either end of a rich spectrum of vocal sound, while the unemotive monotone of bar owner Merwyn Finney creates an unnerving centre, as he bears the chilling news of a Pond’s disappearance.

Then there’s the aggressive southern US slice of Big Stoop’s church sermon – given the morning after Tim and his girlfriend Madeleine try wife swapping with Stoop and his partner (and Tim’s future wife) Patty Lareine – and Patty Lareine’s own masculine interrogations and harsh greetings.

A notorious scene finds Madden reading a revealing letter describing his wife’s betrayal, in response to which he repeatedly exclaims ‘Oh God! Oh Man!’, his distress quickly emptied of sincerity, to leave a hollow automatism as the camera pans wildly.

Patty’s second suitor, Wardley Meeks III handles his wife’s conniving divorce case with a bassy directness before his involvement and betrayal in a cocaine deal sees him drift into despair and confusion, and his booming voice rises to a childlike wonder. Acting Chief of Police Alvin Luther Regency, however, manipulates with a composed, hushed authority – the most calmly spoken and sinister character. Regency’s power and composure, however, dissolve as his insanity overtakes him, and he is finally seen confined to a bed, injured and infantile, moaning insults at his wife Madeleine through his drooping mouth – ‘you’ve got no woooooomb!’

These future ghosts of Helltown create a bizarre and sometimes unsettling sonic environment that contrasts with the peaceful, seafront idyll of the Provincetown exteriors photographed by John Bailey and the orchestral theme by Angelo Badalamenti. Grimly funny, mournful and long misappreciated, Tough Guys Don’t Dance is an odd audiovisual delight.

William Friedkin’s second feature film as director – and his first of several theatrical adaptations – The Birthday Party (1968) reflects a number of the themes and stylistic approaches that permeate the filmmaker’s body of work, even his most recent films. A close look at the Blind Man’s Buff scene alone reveals the roots of some of the most powerful elements of Friedkin’s later work.

Even isolating this party scene and comparing it superficially to the finale of the director’s latest thriller, Killer Joe (2012), there is an obvious similarity in the domestic arrangement despite their distinct literary sources. Each presents an uncomfortable and threatening scenario: the intrusion into a private home of a mysterious stranger (or two), whose behaviour is unpredictable, suggesting a potential for violence.

This recurring narrative setup can be found across Friedkin’s work. From the quiet, considerate army deserter in Bug (2006), to the frightful forces of evil in The Exorcist (1973) and Rampage (1987), these presences disturb the peace and quiet of home. The manner and etiquette shown by Goldberg, Peter Evans and Joe Cooper are all the more unnerving, as the unfolding drama leads us to expect a destructive action.

The Blind Man’s Buff scene demonstrates Friedkin’s marvellous ability to achieve dramatic effects through the use of various sonic textures. There is the snare crack as Stanley tramples on his birthday gift, whispers and cries in the dark as the screen goes lights-out black and the soundtrack is distorted, filling the parlour game with tension and dread. The dynamic use of sound here presages the innovative foleying and audio mixes in The Exorcist and Cruising (1980), and the shattering screams and cracks mark the first of countless exclamatory noises, from tyres screeching in The French Connection (1971) to sudden, unexpected fatal gunshots in To Live and Die in LA (1985).

Friedkin’s skill in continually reinvigorating the space and look of a single room, through his directorial decisions to shoot it from a variety of angles, change lenses, alter the lighting and other aspects of production design, as well as shifting performers around, is already clear here. There is a striking throughline which runs from this scene, through the exorcism ritual in his most famous film, to the luminous transformation of the motel room in Bug and the violent climax of Killer Joe.

Stanley’s true identity and the business of the visitors in The Birthday Party are uncertain. There is an obvious personal confusion that arises within Stanley as he is confronted by his landlord’s guests, and the nature of his relationship with these men and with the woman who provides him with bed and board are never fully revealed. Questions about past actions, sexuality, and intentions are left to hang heavy in the air over the scene – just as they are in most of Friedkin’s films, from The Boys in the Band (1970) and To Live and Die in LA, to Jade (1995) and Bug.

There is a characteristic instability surrounding the identity of the individual within all of Friedkin’s best works and this even connects such seemingly disparate examples as The Night They Raided Minsky’s (1968) and Sorcerer (1977). Many of these films foreground this theme through narratives that place the protagonist in a situation where they must live incognito or on the edges of society (Sorcerer, Bug, The Hunted (2003)), or compel them to shift their persona to live or work (The Night They Raided Minsky’s, The French Connection, Cruising, To Live and Die in LA). In a more extreme case, Regan is the victim of a complete somatic and psychological takeover in The Exorcist.

Added to this is an ambiguity surrounding morality, as the supposed agents of good and evil are dissolved into uncertainty with everyone capable of acts of kindness and brutality. This is Friedkin’s own stated ongoing interest and it is reflected in the groping hands of each blindfolded player in the Blind Man’s Buff game, unable to see clearly, desperate for a sense of orientation.

And the realities that are imagined by Friedkin’s characters are forced upon others, through pleading and harassment, whether it be one cop telling his partner what the score is, a doctor urging Chris MacNeil to accept his diagnosis, or Peter Evans mapping out the sinister mechanics of the military-industrial complex. In an unsettling instant during the game in The Birthday Party, Stanley’s glasses are viciously snapped in half by McCann. We cannot be certain what is really happening, and characters are no longer the people they appeared to be at first.