Alice's predecessors: a trio of "shock rock" pioneers

It’s that time of year again. My favorite holiday is upon us, and no, it ain't Xmas or even my birthday. It is All Hallows’ Eve, when monsters are celebrated and people don odd costumes to let their interiors surface on the exterior, for a few hours at least. One of the people I’ve returned to again and again on Halloween episodes of the Funhouse is “shock rock” god Alice Cooper. Much as I love Alice, he was not the first to do what he did — he, of course, did it to perfection and with a band that was an absolute killer (album title ref, excuse the geekdom).

After Alice came KISS (four Alices, acknowledged as such at the time), solo Ozzy, Rob Zombie, King Diamond (boo), Marilyn Manson, and stageshow specialists GWAR and Rammstein. (The shock-rock category frequently lists punk acts, but if we’re doing to do that, I’d rather rhapsodize about the Cramps than talk about GG Allin). 

Before Alice, there were three gentlemen who pioneered “horror rock” while making some memorably catchy music. I’ll work my way backward and start with Arthur Brown, whose band The Crazy World of Arthur Brown delivered some wonderfully nightmarish theatrics. Thus, it makes sense to introduce him with the song “Nightmare,” as performed in the 1968 film The Committee. Dig that crazy headgear!

 

Brown’s Sixties stage show is preserved in this footage, which is punctuated by him being interviewed out of makeup:

 

Rare color footage of the group, intercut with animation by Gerald Scarfe (best known for Pink Floyd's "The Wall"):

 

 And, of course, the biggest discovery for any Alice Cooper fan is that Brown’s makeup foreshadowed the design that Alice eventually settled on. Here he and the band (who were only together for one LP) do a full-blown TV presentation of their biggest hit, “Fire”:

 

Arthur is thankfully still with us, but a musician who preceded him in the shock-rock biz has departed the scene. Screaming Lord Sutch, “the 3rd Earl of Harrow” (a completely made-up title) took a few notes from the last of our three shock-rock pioneers (including coming out of a coffin onstage), but he also began in a very good place, working for master-producer Joe Meek. Interestingly enough, he continually ran in Parliamentary elections, eventually founding his own political party, which he named the “Official Monster Raving Loony Party.”

He was never elected to office (although he did get a respectable amount of votes in various elections), but he definitely left an imprint on the pop-rock world with a series of horror-themed hits, including “All Black and Hairy”:

 

and “She’s Fallen in Love with a Monster Man”:

 

His biggest hit was a classic horror tune about one of England’s greatest contributions to the world of nightmares, “Jack the Ripper.” Here is a publicity film made for the song:

 

And a now-quaint but then-transgressive live performance of the song with his group, the Savages:

 

Screaming Lord Sutch sadly committed suicide at the age of 59 in 1999, but his inspiration, and the man who qualifies as the very FIRST shock-rocker, the inimitable Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, lived to be 71 and was hailed as a crazed god of performance-rock stagecraft. A Cleveland native, Hawkins served in the Air Force in WWII. He aspired to perform in the manner of his hero Paul Robeson, but one drunken night in a recording studio in 1956 gave him his biggest hit, the unforgettable “I Put a Spell on You” (see below). He started touring in the late Fifties with voodoo props and a bone in his nose, emerging from a coffin at the start of his show. 

He sang catchy, creepy ditties like “Little Demon” and, much later, kept his "monstrous" reputation by singing tunes like Tom Waits' “Whistlin’ Past the Graveyard” Screamin’ Jay was a “wildman,” as was proclaimed in a favorite scene from Jarmusch’s Stranger Than Paradise. He also had an incredibly powerful and evocative voice, as is evident in his rendition of the very non-horrific “I Love Paris.” And speaking of Paris, it is the city that Screamin’ Jay died in, in 2000, but also was home to one of his biggest fans, himself a hellraiser, Serge Gainsbourg. The two dueted only once, but it is an incredibly memorable collaboration, on Hawkins’ “Constipation Blues.” (It’s not much of a duet, Serge is actually too busy laughing.)

 

It is noted in Screamin’ Jay’s online bios that he sired many children (anywhere from 55 to 75 — then again, after the first 10, who’s counting?). The song that will forever be associated with him, and has been covered by every shock rocker from Arthur Brown to Marilyn Manson, is indeed “I Put a Spell on You.” 

Hawkins maintained that the song was intended to be sung as a tender ballad, but that he and the musicians got very drunk the night it was recorded and it came out the way it did. Here is amazing footage of Screamin’ Jay, bone in nose and voodoo props on display, performing it in his prime. If you just listen to the record it definitely registers as one of the great songs about romantic/sexual obsession. Performed this way, it’s undeniably “haunting”:

“Top American Humor Award” claimed by unfunny tall goof — and look at the names who were passed over

It’s interesting to see the Mark Twain Prize, which went to Will Ferrell last week, referred to as the “top American humor award” on various news websites, since, as I’ve written before, the Prize has absolutely no value by this point. Especially since the nominating committee has clearly decided that they’ve made a winning connection to Lorne Michaels and Broadway Video. Thus, they’ll keep giving the award to amiable but WILDLY unfunny middle-aged comic actors from the SNL stable, and keep passing over the oldtimers who are still with us and have contributed a major amount to American comedy, but who haven’t had bad multiplex vehicles in the past few years, so… well forget about them, will ya?

I actually can’t forget about ’em, because mainstream American comedy generally is as shitty as it is because the crap-mill run by Lorne Michaels keeps cranking out these amiable types who can act goofy (Will Ferrell) or do the snark really well (Tina Fey), and thus get the admiration of millions of morons with unadventurous senses of humor. There are older comedy “black belt” performers whose work is much funnier and more imaginative, and who definitely deserve to be honored with the *supposedly* most prestigious humor award in America.

Read my piece on the people who've been passed over here. And on behalf of American comedy fans, I hereby apologize to Sid, Mel, Woody, Phyllis, Dick, Mort, and on and on. As for humor writers descended from the late, great Mr. Clemens, well, the Mark Twain Prize says fuck alla yez.

Aki Kaurismaki returns with "Le Havre" (review)

Regular viewers of the Funhouse TV series will be familiar with my long-standing admiration for the work of filmmaker Aki Kaurismaki. His latest feature (and second in French), Le Havre, which opens today in NYC, is a welcome blast of deadpan humor from the Finnish master of quiet, sardonic cinema.

For those unfamiliar with Kaurismaki’s work, there are a few tenets common to every film he’s made:
— deadpan humor that often ventures into openly dark comedy
— a sense of quiet that is uncommon in modern film. Kaurismaki’s working-class characters betray their sense of kinship through merely being in each other’s presence, and not talking about their troubles.
— said troubles can only be held at bay in three ways: smoking, drinking, and rock ’n’ roll
— a definite love for his characters, no matter how petty (or criminal) their behavior

Though Kaurismaki has always focused on the working class (dividing his work between quiet melodramas and the occasional Finnish “hick comedy” — rock on, Leningrad Cowboys!), he has begun to integrate contemporary social issues into his work. And thus we reach Le Havre. The film tells the story of a French shoeshine man (André Wilms) helping out an African boy (Blondin Miguel) who’s a refugee in the titular French town.

The plot certainly sounds schmaltzy, and Kaurismaki is quick to play with that aspect throughout the picture while thankfully never venturing into Spielbergian sentimentality. (The only filmmaker who has been working the same side of the street is the equally deadpan Beat Takeshi; I think here of his man-saddled-with-a-kid movie Kikujiro.)

Although the film has been likened, most likely because of its location, to the work of Marcel Carne, Jacques Becker, Rene Clair, and other French masters of poetic realism, Le Havre strikes me as Kaurismaki’s riff on Italian Neo-Realism. From our hero’s profession (Shoeshine) to his little-boy sidekick (The Bicycle Thief) to the decisive transformation from a Kaurismaki-styled “problem drama” into an outright fairy tale (Miracle in Milan), the specter of Neo-Realism permeates the proceedings — until, that is, Fifties melodrama begin to creep in. As our hero’s troubles multiply, Kaurismaki liberally layers on orchestral music that sounds as if it was lifted from a golden-age “melo,” thereby allowing him to both spoof the genre and indulge in it at the same time.

One of the joys of following Kaurismaki’s work as he creates his “small movies” (a compliment not an insult, per Godard) is seeing how he has maintained a very particular tone in his work from decade to decade (his first fiction feature, a modern adaptation of Crime and Punishment, was released in 1983). He achieves this tone with the aforementioned de-emphasis of dialogue, spare visuals (with many primary-colored interiors to offset the bleakness of the exteriors), and superb casting, drawn from a small ensemble of actors he’s been using for decades, and other performers who know how to “act Kaurismaki.”

Newcomer Miguel does a wonderful job as the African boy, while Wilms (whose face can best be described as “lived-in”) is terrific as our humble everyman hero. Several other performers steal the spotlight with their bits, but none more so than Kati Outinen (seen above with a photo of her frequent Kaurismaki costar, the late Matti Pelonpää), who had featured roles in a number of Kaurismaki’s films. She had the starring role in one of his biggest “arthouse hits,” The Match Factory Girl (1990), and was the female lead in one of my favorite AK creations, Drifting Clouds (1996) (click the link to see the film with English subtitles).

Outinen plays Wilms’ stoic wife (named Arletty, no doubt in tribute to the star of Children of Paradise), who is struck with a fatal malady but asks her doctor not to let her husband know. Since she is the one thing that Wilms truly loves (even more than smoking, drinking, and listening to rock ’n’ roll), she becomes the emotional core of the film, and her health-crisis plotline is the cornerstone of the melodramatic aspect (and the fairy-tale places it goes to — not for nothing has Kaurismaki written of his appreciation for Douglas Sirk).

Outinen’s presence is a delight — her low-key acting has grown subtler and more effective over the years — but she is not the only surprise to be found here. The versatile Jean-Pierre Darroussin (The Taste of Others, Same Old Song) has a plum role as a soft-hearted police detective, and the powerful and always unpredictable Jean-Pierre Leaud (who, besides being an icon in his own right, starred in Kaurismaki’s I Hired a Contract Killer back in 1990) plays the “villain” of the piece .


The last wonderful casting “find” is an older French rock star known as “Little Bob” (seen right, with Aki on the left), who plays himself and helps our hero out in his time of need with what the characters refer to here as one of those “trendy charity concerts” that are so popular these days. Kaurismaki loves pure rock ’n’ roll, and has done great work with Joe Strummer and, of course, The Leningrad Cowboys (all three of his cinematic forays with that band of pointy-shoed rockers are now available in a low-priced box set from Eclipse), so his reverent mythologizing of Little Bob here is nothing short of delightful.

For those who’ve been following Kaurismaki since the days of his “Proleteriat Trilogy” (also available from Eclipse/Criterion as a set), it should come as no surprise that he definitely loves his characters. His deadpan humor disguises a soft heart and an open mind, and Le Havre is perhaps his most humane and charming work since the Nineties.

Here is the trailer for the film:



Probably the best “101” for English-speaking folk who want to know more about Aki, this episode of the Jonathan Ross-hosted series For One Week Only presented a full tribute to him in 1990:



And as a closer, here’s a touching bit of quiet affection from his film Take Care of Your Scarf, Tatiana (1994), which has remained unreleased in the U.S. Kati Outinen and Matti Pelonpää are featured:

Deceased Artiste Charles Napier, and the 18th anniversary of the first Media Funhouse episode

The Manhattan cable show Media Funhouse went on the air 18 years ago this month, and so I thought it only right to upload the first-ever clip I showed on the program, especially because it featured an actor who left us just last week. First a note about the beginning of the show: in the first few weeks of the program I covered exploitation cinema ("auteurist" exploitation cinema) exclusively. A few weeks in, I was able to diversify the contents of the program when I did my first Deceased Artiste tributes (Fellini, Vincent Price, and Frank Zappa).

To “catch viewers’ attention,” I felt there was no better attraction than the work of Russ Meyer, and thus I presented what I consider the seminal clip from Russ’s work, a montage that is so compelling, so unrelenting, so brilliant, and yet so nuts that it can indoctrinate you instantly into the Meyer cult. And there was no better male lead in any of his films than Charles Napier, a square-jawed blond gent who often played villains, but whom Russ envisaged as a two-fisted hero in the wonderful Cherry, Harry & Raquel (1970) and as a psycho cop in the so-over-the-top-that-it-says-too-much-about-Russ’s-mindset Supervixens (1975), possibly my least-fave Meyer pic.

Napier’s obits explored how the Kentucky native had a number of jobs before he finally settled on acting as his vocation: among other things, he was a high school art teacher, a parking lot attendant, a typist, a truck driver, and (my favorite) a photographer for a trucking magazine.

He was a familiar face on TV, who appeared in Mannix, Kojak, The Rockford Files, Starsky and Hutch, Dallas, and The Incredible Hulk — to which he contributed some of the Hulk’s growls! One of his most memorable TV roles was as a “space hippie” in the Star Trek episode “The Way To Eden.” In recent years, he continued to appear not only in mainstream and “DVD premiere” movies, but also worked as a voice talent for cartoons like Squidbillies and The Critic.

Though he is best known by the general public for his supporting roles in Rambo: First Blood Part 2 and The Blues Brothers, he was indeed beloved by film buffs for his roles in four Russ Meyer movies, and his being a kind of “good luck charm” supporting performer in the films of Jonathan Demme (a casual look over his filmography reveals at least eight Demme films he had prominent small roles in, including such hits as Silence of the Lambs and Philadelphia).

While the obit in Variety noted he played a general in four different films, it’s as a sheriff that I’ll always remember him. And speaking of that, below is the clip I spoke about, the scene from the end of Cherry, Harry & Raquel that will convert any neophyte filmgoer into a fan of Russ Meyer. The montage begins in earnest at 1:54 with the great line, "Now all of this didn't really have to happen...."

It’s a power-packed montage that includes virtually every scene in the film (including the odd “thematic” ones in which Uschi Digard is seen symbolically acting out the plot in a desert setting). My high school film teacher maintained that Meyer was the most Eisensteinian of modern filmmakers, and this was undoubtedly true — what he achieves here with his editing and characteristically overwrought narration is to nearly create an “altered state” for the viewer.

He also demonstrates his debt to Eisenstein in the lead-up to the killer montage, in which he intercuts a rather pedestrian showdown between Napier and the actor playing “Apache” with a rather pedestrian lesbian scene, thus creating something exciting out of two rather non-exciting scenes of people clearly pretending to do stuff. Meyer’s world was a ripe and lurid one, and he had no better alter ego than the tough (but oddly friendly-looking) Napier. Please enjoy the scene below — I know you will.


RIP CN/RM

The coolest old men in the world (2): Chris Marker

While the first and second generations of “Old Master” filmmakers are now gone, we still have a few of the most important members of cinema’s third generation with us. That includes filmmakers from the French New Wave: Resnais is 89, Varda and Rivette are 83, and Uncle Jean (aka JLG) is a mere kid of 80 years old.

Now that Eric Rohmer has left us, the status of “oldest New Waver” has passed to a filmmaker who for me surpasses all superlatives, Chris Marker. Marker turned 90 in June, and you’d never know it, for two reasons: he and Rivette have been the “forgotten” men of the New Wave in the U.S., never achieving great notoriety over here (and thus free to just keep making great movies). Also, Marker continues to behave not like a nonagenarian, but like a kid fresh out of film school who is intoxicated by creating images and toying with the new technologies that surface on a near-weekly basis.

I have saluted Marker a few times on the Funhouse TV show and still heartily urge those who are unfamiliar with his work to first check out his short film masterwork La Jetée:



I have also posted updates on this blog concerning which of his film and video projects have shown up on the Net. My entry from 2008 has links to a bunch of Marker’s video-art clips that are still active; the 2009 entry finds a few broken links (most notably the only head-on footage I’ve ever seen of Marker behind the camera shooting something, and Les Astronautes, the sci-fi short he made with Walerian Borowczyk, which is now available here!). The link to his 2006 feature Chats Perchés (2004), the original un-narrated French version of his Case of the Grinning Cat, is surprisingly still active.

I wrote those entries when Marker’s work was impossible to find on DVD in the U.S., and he had no Web presence. Happily, that situation has changed in the time since, thanks to a number of his best recent-vintage works becoming available from Icarus Films, and Marker himself creating an official website with six projects (two of them massive!) available for free. He also appears to be sanctioning the very thorough website/blog chrismarker.org that keeps track of his activity.

Four of the six works on Marker’s Gorgomancy site are my focus here, as I belatedly celebrate the gent’s 90th birthday. The other two films available on the site are Marker’s portraits of his friends Yves Montand and Simone Signoret — and beware trying to go through the main door at gorgomancy.com, which produces only an “under construction” screen. Click the links I have provided to the site, which are working fine.
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The first major item on Gorgomancy is Immemory, his colossal CD-Rom, which has been in print twice in the U.S., but both editions were only viewable with a certain build of the Apple “octopus.” To watch the copy I bought (and I am a Mac user), I had to sit for a few hours in an office I worked in that had outdated iMacs with OS9 (since my home computer was too new to view it); the later edition of the disc is for the platform after the one I have.

Marker has solved all these problems by making the copious contents of the disc available online for free. Yes, the text is in French, and while the text is very important to understanding why he grouped the images the way he did, and what personal significance they have for him, Immemory is first and foremost a celebration of the possibilities of the image, and as such can be appreciated whether you comprendre la langue or not.

Immemory is constructed as a museum of Marker’s photos — he’s been working as a photographer since the Fifties, but obviously his fascination with images began a lot earlier than that (here he dates it to the movies he saw as a child in the Twenties and Thirties, including Dracula with Lugosi and Wings). The categories in Immemory include poetry, war, photos, cinema, voyages, and the most important one, memory. Here Marker returns to one of his favorite themes, exploring Proust’s “madeleine” and linking it to Kim Novaks’s Madeleine in Hitchcock’s Vertigo (his favorite film, and one he ably dissects in part of Sans Soleil).

Marker’s “museum” offers a deeper examination of the themes that distinguish his La Jetée (1962) and his brilliant, more complex works about politics, the media, and the power of imagery (Grin Without a Cat, The Last Bolshevik, Case of the Grinning Cat). One viewing tip (which is present on Gorgomancy, but is, of course, in French): when you want to move forward, run your cursor over the middle right-hand side of the screen to find a right arrow. If you want to go back to the menu, run your cursor over the middle-bottom of the screen to discover a down arrow.

I can’t think of another filmmaker who could’ve created such a huge, fascinating odyssey for his fans. Take the trip here.
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“Ouvroir” is a half-hour film that Marker made using the online virtual “world” Second Life. Here his cat cartoon alter-ego (and real life feline friend) Guillaume-en-Egypte leads us through a gallery of some of the works not found in Immemory. Thus, in this informal video, you journey through a virtual “museum” that includes parts of his photography exhibit Staring Back, excerpts from his “Silent Movie” and “Hollow Men” installations, and some of his “Xplugs” (photo collages).

This video doesn’t have the depth or overwhelming brilliance of Immemory, but “Ouvroir” is definitely fun for those who already know Marker’s work (and the intertitles are in English).
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Stopover in Dubai is a chillingly straightforward piece, with intertitles in English, that Marker made in 2010. It depicts the execution of a Hamas commander (himself a killer) in a Dubai hotel exclusively through security-camera footage. The piece plays like a thriller without the thrills, as Marker’s opening titles explain the killing and tell us that within 24 hours of the murder, the culprits’ identities were known (according to what I’ve read, none were ever caught). This is most likely because every motion they made was caught on camera (read: they were being observed, without being studied).

Marker’s use of the phrases “the victim,” “the surveillance team,” and “the execution team” lets us know that everything we’re watching is predetermined in a way. As has been stated by insightful political pundits (in this “post-9/11 world”), just because we can see the criminal’s every move doesn’t mean the crime will be prevented (in fact it rarely if ever is). No one watches the recordings made with these cameras until AFTER the crime has been perpetuated and the killers have gotten away. So much for the “deadly accuracy” of Big Brother….
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Immemory is definitely the “must-see” item on Gorgomancy, but the biggest discovery on the site for Marker fans is the unreleased-in-the-U.S. TV miniseries The Owl’s Legacy. The 13-part series is Marker’s exploration of ancient Greece’s influence on modern society and is present on his site in the original French version.

The series was produced, however, with an English-language variant, and that version can now be seen online, thanks to the terrific Seventh Art blog. The blogger has made all 13 episodes available, with the only caveat being that the last ten minutes of the last episode are missing — not as big a problem as it sounds, since the show’s episodes function independently, and you can catch up to the missing segment on Gorgomancy (yes, in French only, but hey, it’s all free).

The Owl’s Legacy is an unusual Marker production in that it seems fairly “normal” for his work — meaning less whimsical editing and many more talking heads. Perhaps the linearity of the series was due to the involvement of a corporate financial backer (the Onassis Foundation), or maybe it was a case of Marker waiting to underscore the points made by his talking heads.

In any case, the series is still terrific and finds brilliant minds discussing political, social, and cultural concepts — something that can rarely (if ever) be found on American TV. Marker conceived of the show as a “symposium” that would address big ideas an episode at a time: democracy, nostalgia, language, music, mythology, and tragedy, among others.

One of the most interesting things about the show is the open acknowledgment that while the Greeks did indeed create civilization as we know it, they also failed at honoring all of their citizens (discussed in the “Misogyny, or the Snares of Desire” episode, and a discussion of slavery), and the government eventually failed and died out.

The series blends the thoughts of Greek, French, British, American, and Japanese experts on Greek culture. The only instantly recognizable names are Elia Kazan (now he and Marker do indeed make a very odd couple), Theo Angelopoulos, and Vassilis Vassilikos (who wrote the novel Z, which was adapted by Marker's friend Costa-Gavras).

Since the episodes stand on their own, I will merely recommend two of them for those who are interested but are not sure if they want to make the time commitment. Episode 6, “Mathematics, or the Empire Counts Back,” discusses math and its connection to poetry, logic, and the eating habits of animals. (If there is any animal that fascinates Marker more than the cat, it has to be the owl).

The math episode is the single most entertaining entry in the series, but the single most important scene for movie buffs and Marker fans alike is the conclusion to episode 9, where Marker finds the modern corollary to “Plato’s Cave” is a movie theater. Seated in his “Cave,” among others, are actresses Arielle Dombasle, the late and wonderful Juliet Bierto, and Catherine Belkhodja, Marker’s real-life partner for a time and the mother of actress and filmmaker Isild Le Besco. The film? Well, why not his friend Alain's seminal work on memory, Hiroshima, Mon Amour.

Certain topics are Marker’s métier, and none more so than cinema — here he asserts that the movie theater as Cave (not, mind you, watching a movie on a TV, computer, laptop, phone, or iPod, you solo viewers!) has the power “to negate the Cave, disarm the Gorgon, to tie itself to the thread of human creation and, finally, to create its own myths.” Bravo.



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Other online morceaux d’Marker can be found on his Flickr photostream and his YouTube channel under the name “Kosinki” (not Kosinski). His latest short videos are thus going straight onto the Internet and the offerings run a wide range, beginning with charming (yet slightly strange) cute-animal stuff, like his cat Guillaume-en-Egypte in cartoon form and household-pet hijinks punctuated by his most succinct self-description, “Chris Marker, the best-known author of unknown movies”!

While he has turned back to his original love, photography, on the streets (and in the Metro) of Paris, he has also busied himself creating photo-montages about important international events like Obama’s election, the Egyptian revolution, the riots in London, and even the British royal wedding. As I wrote this blog entry, a new video (with a great image of Uncle Jean) appeared that leads you in one direction, and then (much like the martial art of aikido) sends you flying in another.

The two most creative uploads are his “Pictures from an Exhibition” (utilizing his “Xplugs”):



And a montage of his Metro photos, showing both his admiration for (and adoration of) women, and his keen eye for human expression:


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As one digs further down into Marker’s work, one is staggered by the imagination, profundity, and wit he has put in his films and videos, and yet he has never acquired an “arthouse” reputation in the U.S. This is primarily because of the layered quality to most of his works — and, of course, the sheer absence of curiosity in most Americans. He will most likely get his just due over here when he has left us. In the meantime, thanks to Gorgomancy and the DVDs, we now have the chance to discover his work while he is still among us, still crafting beautiful imagery and sublime commentary on a regular basis.

NOTE: Thanks to Zach for passing on the initial link to Gorgomancy and this tribute to Marker by his friend Agnes Varda, which features the few clear images of him that we have to date. (He's avoided being in public view for five decades now.)

"Memories Are Made of This": Deceased Artiste Rosel Zech

Rosel Zech, who died a few weeks back at the age of 69, had a solid theatrical career and was a well-known TV actress in Germany, but will forever be known by film buffs outside Germany for playing the lead in Veronica Voss (1982), the second in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s “BRD Trilogy” (in the scheme of the trilogy it was second, but it was shot and released third).

Zech entered the theater in the early Sixties and continued to work steadily in plays until her death. She was mentored by the noted director Peter Zadel (who has a small role in Veronica Voss) and was best known in the last decade for her role as a nun in the German TV show For Heaven’s Sake. She had an extremely full career without Fassbinder, but her fateful meeting with him occurred when she appeared in A Tenderness of Wolves (1973; directed by Ulli Lommel, written by Kurt Raab, and produced by RWF).

He cast her in a supporting part in Lola (1981), and then gave her the starring role in Veronica Voss. He made one movie (Querelle) after that, and then died at the age of 37, leaving a body of work that will be enjoyed and analyzed for a long time to come. I talked to Ms. Zech for the briefest time at the 1997 MOMA Fassbinder gala performance, asking her to sign a book on RWF that contained pictures of all of his stars. I have a very strong and fond memory of where she sat in the first row because, by decision rather than by assignment, she and the other two “BRD” women sat in a row: Zech ("Veronica Voss"), Barbara Sukowa ("Lola"), and Hanna Schygulla ("Maria Braun").

All three women were riveted by a documentary that was shown at the gala, featuring a lengthy interview with RWF. The mood was strange but charming, since the three women seemed like schoolgirls, chuckling and whispering to each other while RWF was onscreen. Throughout that evening, I couldn’t stop thinking about how odd the seating had turned out to be, since for me (and a good deal of the male members of the audience, including a German diplomat who spoke at the event and talked about how important Ms. Schygulla had been to his youth), they were the “poster girls” for Fassbinder’s cinema.

The only sad note was that another MAJOR star of RWF’s work, the immensely talented Margit Carstensen (who was “Petra von Kant”!), was sitting across the aisle on her own, not in the schoolgirl circle of adoring Rainer fans. It was a strange and unforgettable evening….

Zech’s other notable U.S. arthouse release was Salmonberries (1991) by Percy Adlon. The film plays like a variant on his Bagdad Café, but is best known for the fact that it features the acting debut of k.d. lang (who does a quick and bizarre nude sequence) and featured her vocals on the soundtrack. I couldn’t find Zech featured in the trailer or promotional clips on YT, but she is present in this fan-made music-video (that doesn’t use a lang tune).

The last time I saw Zech onscreen was in Juliane Lorenz’s documentary Life, Love & Celluloid (1998). The docu includes a sort of fictional subplot in which a Fassbinder fan contacts MOMA and gets Zech’s address. He then flies to Germany and dances with her. The set-up for the situation is definitely odd — would a museum ever pass on an actress’s private contact information? — but the dance sequence is touching.

Zech’s website remains online and has been updated to include links to the nicest obits (the site is in German, and is mostly an online “portfolio”/resume of her work), but the ONLY way I can finish off this D.A. tribute is to embed Zech’s most memorable moment, her Dietrich-esque rendition of “Memories Are Made of This” from Veronica Voss.

The song was of course a No. 1 hit in America in 1956 for Dean Martin and was written by his backup singers, a trio called “the Easy Riders.” The song was also a massive hit in Germany, selling 8 million copies for singer Freddy Quinn as “Heimweh” (Homesickness).

Fassbinder chose to have Zech sing the Dean Martin original, though, in this indelible sequence that is Voss’s fantasy of the perfect “farewell” (the character is a drug-addicted, washed-up movie star that RWF modeled on the real-life actress Sybille Schmitz). It’s an incredibly good sequence with which to say farewell to her.

The coolest old men in the world (1): Leonard Cohen

Leonard Cohen turned 77 years old this week. In celebration, it was announced that a CD box set is planned of all of his albums to date — with much previously released live material, but no rare studio tracks, none of the poetry readings from radio and onstage appearances, and none of the many songs he’s sung or spoken on tribute albums (and the poems recited for the Philip Glass Book of Longing song cycle).

So a birthday is celebrated with a CD box set. The truth is that Leonard’s entire discography (like that of all major musicians) is available online with a few magic clicks, but one can easily go beyond and beneath the 11 studio albums — seven or eight of which are immaculate, and the other three are pretty good as well. The joy of a sporadic recording artist like Leonard is that, in comparison to a more prolific singer-songwriter (say… Dylan), you’re left with a small, sublime body of work, instead of a canon that contains very many crappy albums in between the masterworks.

In celebration of Leonard’s remaining with us for another year, I wanted to present ten clips that represent my favorite aspects of Cohen’s work. In terms of aging, though, I should note that I thoroughly agree with the eternally sublime free-form radio DJ Vin Scelsa, who has maintained for the last few years that Cohen is the very model of growing old gracefully — he’s stylish, smart, and (something Dylan never has done, and never would do) knows well how to mock and deflate himself.

Although he is now a senior (as was shown unfortunately by the too-tight-close-ups in Lian Lunson’s docu I’m Your Man, where he wound up looking like Georgie Jessel), Leonard is the height of sophistication (as the wildly overpriced shirts and bags being sold on his last tour said, “It’s all about the hat… Leonard Cohen”). He’s also a supremely talented artist whose written works I hope will last as long as his recorded ones. But now on to the clips!

Like most movie buffs, my introduction to Cohen’s music (which was never played on the top 40-ish radio stations I listened to as a kid — “Suzanne” by Judy Collins excepted) was the soundtrack to McCabe and Mrs. Miller. Robert Altman — who remains for me the best modern American filmmaker, all naysayers be damned — used three songs from Leonard’s debut album Songs of Leonard Cohen in beautiful ways in the film.

Altman had gotten hooked on the album when he was in Canada shooting the long-out-of-print psychodrama That Cold Day in the Park with Sandy Dennis. Here is the officially released Warner Bros trailer for the film, available on the DVD. I have very fond memories, though, of a different trailer that I used to see at the old Thalia theater on the Upper West Side that concluded with a voiceover intoning the film’s tagline: “McCabe and Mrs. Miller — Name your poison” (one of the best taglines ever, especially when you’ve seen the film):



Here is a well-distributed documentary about Leonard before he went into music full-time, and was a noted Canadian poet and novelist. The film, Ladies and Gentlemen, Mr. Leonard Cohen (1965) is enlightening, in that Cohen is about 30 years old at the time of filming, but still has a strikingly adolescent goofiness about him. He is assured when reciting his poetry or reading fragments from his first novel The Favorite Game, but otherwise he’s affecting the pose of the “unpretentious artist type” in this portrait, done while he was back visiting his homeland (he lived on the Greek island of Hydra for a few years in the Sixties).

The National Film Board of Canada has placed the whole film on YouTube, but there’s a clearer version of it on their website:



I wasn’t sure what kind of gigs he had in NYC while he was better known as an author than as a singer-songwriter. Well, here is audio from one, at the 92nd St. YMHA. He reads two poems and sings a rather jagged acoustic version of “The Stranger Song,” made famous in McCabe…:



Another bit of verbal wonderment, Leonard reading “How to speak poetry”:



I recently read both of Cohen’s novels, The Favorite Game and Beautiful Losers. They are incredibly evocative, well-written books (I wish he had written more) that have elements that link them to both the “black humor” movement of the Sixties and the Beat poets’ fuel-driven remodeling of fiction. It’s an absolute delight to read fiction written by a poet, as the sense of language is always immersive and oddly playful (as was the case with my utter fave Richard Brautigan). Cohen had his own voice as a writer, a very strong one, and you can hear it in this fragment he reads from Beautiful Losers:



I will avoid any links to Leonard’s original, or any cover versions, of “Hallelujah,” as that song has been done and redone to distraction in recent years — he himself noted in an interview that there should possibly be an embargo on the song for a while (especially, I guess, after it appeared in Shrek).

Instead, I will offer you one of his most pointed comments on politics, in a spoken rendition he did for the United States of Poetry project. “Democracy is coming/to the U.S.A.” indeed. But will it ever get here? (We’ll have to settle for the military-obsessed republic/oligarchy we have in the meantime.)



Leonard jokingly titled the album he did that was produced by Phil Spector (who, yes, pulled a gun on him!) Death of a Ladies Man. He has a major reputation avec les femmes, and can only offer the rest of us an object lesson in how to behave. Here he is performing his perfect poem “A Thousand Kisses Deep”:



A beautiful YouTube discovery, Leonard hanging out in a documentary about an old friend from Montreal, the troubled writer Philip Tétrault. The film is another Film Board of Canada production, made by Philip’s brother Pierre, called This Beggar’s Description (2006). Hanging out with Leonard on a park bench is every fan’s dream, and here it is:



I had to opt for just one or two songs to link to, and I will go first for a well-known one, but one that I think is just absolutely perfect lyrically and melodically. (I also love this seriously “unplugged” rendition by Concrete Blonde’s Johnette Napolitano .)



I will end on the song that Leonard himself has pointed to as one that he’s particularly proud of, called “Anthem.” First, some odd live variants that have surfaced on YT, then the best one I found:
—live at the Beacon in NYC, where Leonard lists all the anti-depressants he’s taken, and then says he turned to “a study of the religions and philosophies, but — cheerfulness kept breaking through…”;

—the second-oddest booking he’s ever had (the first was what looked to be a water-park, as seen on a YT vid from a few years back), at Caesar’s Palace in La Vegas, where he comments on the oddness of him being there; and

—in Israel, where he did a benefit for The Parents Circle, a joint Israeli-Palestinian organization (after several interested folks asked him not to play in Israel because of the Israelis' treatment of the Palestinians in Gaza).

Those are the most interesting, but badly video’d versions; here he is, back in his homeland (in Vancouver), in an uncommonly steady and good-sounding fan-vid, wherein he responds to a British critic who says he “is a boring old drone and should go the fuck back to Canada” (he’s cool with the old drone part — again, just imagine Dylan ever being that personable with an audience….). Then, on to the song, which contains the sublime chorus “There is a crack in everything/that’s where the light gets in…”



The talent and humanity are there in spades, but yes, Leonard, it is all about the hat….

A short lesson in filmmaking from George Kuchar

To follow up on my last post, I thought I would offer up two pages from the way-out-of-print autobiography by the Kuchar brothers, Reflections from a Cinematic Cesspool (1997). I realized that my Deceased Artiste tribute didn’t mention George’s facility for language — his notes for the Kuchar screenings were always wonderfully, wildly written, in a kind of hyperventilating sleazy paperback prose that was a joy to read.

Thus, I offer only two pages from this OOP classic (if the copyright holders, whoever they be, wish them removed from the Net, all they need to do is contact me — it will be done). In the meantime, I picked these two pages because they are the close of a particularly useful chapter wherein George offers his rules for filmmaking. The passage I wanted to share starts with the italicized text on the first page.

He was both a lurid writer (”You will be beneath contempt and can therefore work unimpeded in the lower depths while the self-inflated egos of Eros and Ektachrome drift above the surface of mortal existence, dangling their poisonous tentacles in your direction.”) and one who taught well and simply (“Learn what wires go where and why!”). So take a lesson from a master on how to craft your own “gossamer garbage.” (Stating the obvious, instruction-wise: Click the image to enlarge it, save it, and then zoom in to read with whatever image viewer you use.)

Color Him Lurid: Deceased Artiste George Kuchar

George Kuchar never, ever sold out. In fact, like any good and true underground filmmaker (and George and his twin brother Mike were making narrative 8mm movies before that term ever existed), George wouldn’t’ve known how to sell out, even if he’d been offered the additional dough. His films and videos were homemade productions from the first to the last, and they had more identity, authenticity, emotion, thought, and, yes, pure insanity, than anything the major studios would ever, and will ever, put out.

George died this week at the age of 69, and his death greatly saddened both those who knew him personally and those like myself who felt they knew him well from hours spent viewing his voluminous “diary” videos. I had one cordial encounter in person with the gentleman, at a gallery exhibit of his work last year, and, in response to my pitch for an interview for the Funhouse TV show, he not only wrote an extremely polite e-mail a day or two later, explaining he had no spare time during a short trip to NYC, but also left an equally polite and friendly voicemail saying he’d be back this way soon and we’d talk then, and “look me up if you ever get to Frisco — I’m in the book!”

George’s politeness surprised me, but it shouldn’t have. After I interviewed his brother Mike, I got the nicest single note I’ve ever received from a Funhouse guest. Meeting them confirmed that both brothers' films and videos were indeed 100% genuine. Given their friendliness, the newcomer might've thought that the brothers — yes, they are twins and have the same speaking voice, and fucking awesome Nu Yawk accent — are naïve, silly dreamers who just happened to acquire a reputation because their 8mm and 16mm films were liked by the right people at the right time.

Actually, after watching even a few of the brothers’ joint and solo works, one can easily see that while the gentlemen are extremely polite, they also knew exactly what they were after onscreen. I’ve been told of how George videotaped you while you videotaped him — much like I get the sense that Mike is constantly conjuring visions in his head as he’s talking to you (during our interview, his eyes were often closed when he was intent on making a point).

As young men, both brothers developed into addictive “imagists” (my phrase, not theirs) for whom everything they saw and experienced was grist for the mill; thus, the very personal nature of what they were doing. Sure, George’s projects with his students at the San Francisco Art Institute are completely “out there” (that’s an expression whose time has come and gone), and seem on first glance to be just fun filmmaking games for his classes.

However, those films and videos, while not being near his video diaries and his solo 16mm and mini-DV work in terms of brilliance, still have their moments, as can be seen in the video “Butterball.” The video can’t be embedded on this blog because, in the 2000s, George was still doing what he did with Mike back in the late Fifties and early Sixties — using “found music” for his soundtracks (read: breaking out CDs from his own collection or that of a friend). Included here are different versions of the old song “My Love Has Two Faces,” and instrumental versions of a song by the Police and what I *think* is “Can You Feel The Love Tonight?”

To salute George I want to move backwards in this post through the films of his that are online; those unfamiliar with George’s work should jump right down to the two modern classics linked to at the bottom, or check out the commercially available documentary It Came From Kuchar, made by one of George’s former students, Jennifer Kroot.

Since, for the most part, both brothers’ films and videos (Mike has made dozens and dozens; George easily made a few hundred in total) aren’t available anywhere online or on DVD, the documentary serves as a good “101” for those who want to be exposed to the wonderful world of Kuchar.



In terms of official releases of Kuchar pics, there have been only two in the 35 years that home-entertainment media have existed: the British VHS of four shorts by George called Color Me Lurid (the contents of which can be found in various places on the Net), and the DVD of three 16mm shorts by Mike entitled Sins of the Fleshopoids, which also keeps surfacing on YT.

New Yorkers have been very lucky, in that the chief curator of the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, David Schwartz, is an unabashed admirer of underground cinema and has programmed entire festivals of it (my first major dose of George and Mike’s work was ingested out at the MMI).

Also, the city’s most important repertory theater, the Anthology Film Archives, has presented new and vintage works by the Kuchars every few months, allowing NYC residents to be introduced to their work, as well as that of nearly every significant filmmaker from the silent era on, at the lowest prices in Manhattan (!). The AFA is the only NYC theater brave enough to show the uncut and still surprisingly shocking Thundercrack! (above), scripted by and starring George, since the heyday of rep back in the Seventies and Eighties.

The reasons that the Kuchars’ work hasn’t surfaced on DVD are many: lack of “consumer interest” (read: mainstream appeal for idiots); music clearance rights (particularly important for the early, jointly made 8mm films that are awash in cuts from old singles and LPs); and, perhaps most importantly, an evident lack of interest from the brothers themselves.

Let’s face it, to be an independent filmmaker these days requires an inordinate amount of self-promotion and the selling of one’s work, something the Kuchars have never done (to their own credit). One of the most notable fan/students of the Kuchar brothers’ work, John Waters, has turned himself into a very familiar brand, both as a filmmaker and as a media celebrity, lecturer/standup, and talk show guest. I was in fact introduced to the Kuchars’ style of filmmaking through my discovery of the wonderful early Waters features. Waters admirably is always very forthright about crediting the brothers for influencing his work — although (grumble!) his list of important indie filmmakers in Cecil B. Demented included such non-Kucharian, non-Kenneth Angered, folks as Otto Preminger and Spike Lee!

The thing that the Kuchars gave to Waters, Rosa von Praunheim, Guy Maddin, and a very LONG list of other micro-budgeted filmmakers, was a blissful sense of kitsch and camp that melded the melodrama of mainstream Hollywood with the “otherness” of low-budget sci-fi and thriller movies. What first strikes you upon watching the Kuchars' movies and videos is the insanely bright and eye-catching color schemes they used (drawn from both Technicolor melodramas and the comic books they read as kids).

In the last twenty years, as they both have edited their mini-DV productions using digital effects, they have duplicated that color scheme in an even trippier fashion. Some might see this as a “sell-out” of one kind or another, but the brothers’ works have still been made with nearly non-existent budgets (even the videos made for George’s classes were done on a very thin shoestring), and the effects that they’ve used are in fact from earlier generations of computer-editing programs (as well as completely offline digital editing boards) and, most importantly, are being used by older men with the same kind of joy and inventiveness with which they used 8mm back in the late Fifties.

Before I discuss the clips that are online, let me add one aspect: the fact that both gentlemen have resided in San Francisco now for years (George moved there in the mid-1970s), but retained their spectacular NYC accents. Born and raised in the Bronx, they have been celebrated all over the world, but when they talk, the cityspeak pours out of their mouths. I loved hearing Mike rhapsodize about the movies the brothers loved when they were young, and I never tire of George musing on literally everything and anything in his video diaries.

I myself don’t really care about the weather one way or the other (unless I’m caught without an umbrella). Listening to George go on and on about storms and natural catastrophes, as well as the “men in black” and Bigfoot and other paranormal phenomena, was riveting, though. Samples of George talking at length about his pictures can be found here and here.

And what are we left with then, from George’s prodigious output and groundbreaking work with NO goddamned budgets? A sense that anything is indeed possible on film and video, and the fact that the man possessed a very sharp, funny, and ridiculous sense of humor. George and Mike belong on any short list of great underground filmmakers — a Mount Rushmore containing Anger, Deren, Brakhage, Mekas, Jacobs, Markopoulos, Snow, and oh yeah, I guess that Warhol guy and his crew.

What distinguished them from their colleagues was that their movies were always so much fun to watch. The images were just as radical and jarring as those found in the work of the other pioneers, but their sense of humor— and brilliant ability to craft an alternate world out of household objects found in NYC and San Francisco apartments — was always a constant.

Watching a multiplex movie may give you that Spielbergian emotional “tug” or a quick laugh at a fart joke (and yes, in the Sixties the Kuchar brothers were the ones who delivered the very first bad-taste moments onscreen, inspiring young Waters). But the Kuchars’ movies and videos convince you that it can all be done with no budget, and done very beautifully at that.

*******
Moving backward in time through George’s work, I’ll first mention that you can watch one of the films made with his SF Art Institute students here. It is called “Dynasty of Depravity” — has it taken me this long to mention what an unmitigated delight the titles of the Kuchar movies are? When you start out with “I Was a Teenage Rumpot,” it’s hard get better, but they did, on an annual basis.

George also used to diarize his meetings with people he thought were interesting. Examples of that kind of video can be found here and also here (the latter starring Christopher Coppola in the home of his brother Nicholas Cage).

These are only recommended for those who’ve seen George’s best works, but if you need an idea of what that type of production looks like, here is a very joyful micro-budgeted (toys, Egyptian gods, Santa, and dinosaurs!) music video for a song by Andy Ditzler celebrating the winter solstice, directed by George (much like Kenneth Anger, the Kuchars were unintentionally designing “music videos” in their work from the very beginning):



The Kuchars had a beloved dog that figured heavily in their films when a pet was needed (he is the pooch taking a very scary crap in Mike’s The Craven Sluck; see below). George did a filmic ode to the dog with his The Mongreloid in 1978:



As noted above, George was obsessed by extreme weather and would travel to a small city in Oklahoma on an annual basis to record their rainy season. One of his “weather diaries” can be found on the Ubuweb site (they of the seemingly bottomless bandwidth — how DO they do it, and how can *I* do it?). For a nice impressionistic view of his obsession with weather, go no further than this pretty and strange piece called Wild Night in El Reno from 1977:



Certainly the strangest item from George that can be found online is I, An Actress (1977). Intended as a demo reel for an aspiring young actress, instead it becomes a chance to watch George coach her in how to overact for the camera (he was a master at assuming the melodramatic “mood” and stealing a scene). I’m assuming she never submitted it as her “reel” at auditions:



One of the Kuchar features I’ve never seen but would love to is The Devil’s Cleavage from 1975. Some generous poster has put up a party scene from the film. It demonstrates George’s facility with “found music,” especially odd items like a track from the late and "incredibly strange" Mrs. Miller:



The strangest-ever film that George was involved in was one he didn’t direct. Thundercrack! was directed by his friend and protégé Curt McDowell in 1975, and it is still a surprisingly “shocking” movie for many viewers, in that its mega-melodramatic action stops every so often for a graphic sexual interlude (guy/girl, girl/girl, guy/guy).

George wrote the wonderfully overwrought dialogue (it really provides a great lesson in how to mock the melodramatic dialogue found in old Hollywood films, and even in contemporary television dramas), and stars as the circus trainer of a gorilla who is getting far too close to his charge. A helpful YT poster has attempted to upload most of the movie’s non-sex sequences (which is more than half the film), but I’m tellin’ ya, it’s a far weirder picture with those scenes intact:



Although George produced video diaries on a regular basis in the last three decades, he rarely talked about his personal relationships on-camera; thus, there not many direct references to his being gay in the films and videos.

His film Pagan Rhapsody (1970) contains a gay seduction scene, though, and the wonderful inclusion of the Zombies’ “Care of Cell 44” on the soundtrack (go to 14:45; the film is already wonderful, but the Zombies tune, one of their best, BRIGHTENS the pic incredibly). The interesting thing about the way that George and Mike used pop music was that they used *snippets* of songs, rather than playing the whole thing, as with Kenneth Anger or John Waters. As a result you have that snippet bouncing around your head for days, and can’t forget the images attached to it:



Speaking of Mike, here’s one of his 16mm features, The Craven Sluck (1967). George gives a great performance as a seducer who lures away the married Floraine Connors:



George beautifully established his filmmaking style in the mid-Sixties, as did Mike — definitely a function of their splitting up as collaborators and each embarking on his own directorial path. Eclipse of the Sun Virgin (1967) is pure, undiluted George K: torrid melodrama, Catholic guilt, wonderfully over-the-top performances by Kuchar family friends, gay longing, amazing apartment-dweller kitsch, and sublime use of “found music” [RECOMMENDED]:



I close out with one of George’s first solo 16mm features, the utterly, utterly sublime Hold Me While I’m Naked (1966). There is too much I could write about this film, but suffice it to say it’s brilliant on several levels:
—as a record of a filmmaker salvaging a project that went into the crapper (his lead actress bailed during filming);
—as a beautiful combination of the overwrought and the touching in George’s work;
—as a wonderful bird’s-eye-view of apartment life in the NYC in the Sixties;
—as the film that in my mind has the series of cuts (go to 7:40!) that inspired the opening of the credit sequence in Scorsese’s Mean Streets. (Scorsese’s Film Foundation has restored the early 8mms made by George and Mike.) George may not have seemed in his diary videos like the kind of guy who could rock out, but check out his use of rock music in his films, and, I’m telling you, you’re seeing the blueprint for how it was used by those who followed. I could watch that Four Seasons moment in Hold Me… over and over again. And have. [HEAVILY RECOMMENDED]:



You should see as many of George’s movies and videos as you can, but his mid-Sixties work, particularly Hold Me… explains why, in fourteen quick and crazy minutes, he will never be forgotten.