TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/051391/0513420.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 6.8 KB | 147 lines

                                                                                CINEMA, Page 69

A Happy Birthday for The Kids of Kane


From somewhere beyond the fringe of Hollywood, four cult classics
emerge, trashing tired formulas and challenging the way we see
movies

By RICHARD CORLISS


    Fifty years ago last week, Hollywood was the home of the
avant garde. RKO released an experimental film made by a
25-year-old novice who didn't know the rules, didn't care when
his studio elders said, "You can't do that!" Outrageous,
iconoclastic, with warning shadows and baroque camera angles,
Citizen Kane told future moviemakers that anything was possible.
If you were Orson Welles.

    Alas, a career full of lost skirmishes with the moguls
proved that even Welles couldn't shake Hollywood free of its
romantic realism. It held then; it holds today. Except that now
the old glamour has atrophied into formula: boy's adventures and
ghost stories and lady-in-distress thrillers. When was the last
time a Hollywood picture moved anyone to exclaim, "Well, I've
never seen that before!"? Perhaps surprise is not on the menu
of today's moviegoers. They want reassurance, domestic fairy
tales come true, not the astonishment that Jean Cocteau demanded
of art.

    So all hail the American fringies, those young filmmakers
who make something different out of next to nothing. These fine
artists must also be slick salesmen. They scrounge for five,
six, seven years to get funding -- because it's harder to raise
money for a $90,000 no-star feature than it is for a $90
million Schwarzenepic -- and then scrape at the doors of
independent distributors. They should win an Irving Thalberg
award just for persistence.

    But you shouldn't go to a movie just because a director
tried hard. There are plenty of independent films whose
ambitions point only toward conventional story telling. It
happens that there are four new movies aiming higher, farther,
stranger. And they won't be mistaken for Home Alone or even The
Long Walk Home. Call them off-Hollywood movies, because they
have sworn off Hollywood.

    With POISON, Todd Haynes has people swearing at him -- the
right people, if you're looking for notoriety. Donald Wildmon,
head of the right-wing American Family Association, has
condemned Haynes' film for its "porno scenes of homosexuals."
And the Advocate, a gay biweekly, has reported that the campaign
against Poison was stoked by White House chief of staff John
Sununu in hopes of embarrassing John Frohnmayer, chairman of the
National Endowment for the Arts, which helped fund the film.

    Haynes dines on controversy. His previous picture was the
rough, wickedly funny Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, a
sort of Valley of the Dolls (but with real dolls) that was
suppressed by the Carpenter family. Poison is a more somber
affair. The shock comes not from any graphic sex, for there is
none, but from the pristine virtuosity of Haynes' craft. In
three interlocking stories inspired by Jean Genet, this
homoerotic Intolerance details the toxicity of prejudice, fear
and disease, as played out in a tumid hothouse of forbidden
sexual longing. A scientist who turns leprous when he drinks a
sex potion; a prisoner who finds brief orgasmic release, and
pays for it; a child who kills his abusive father -- all are
outcasts, poison to society. Only the child escapes, jumping
from a window and soaring into his idea of heaven: oblivion.

    Anonymity would be death to the heavenly creatures on
parade in PARIS IS BURNING, Jennie Livingston's thrilling
documentary. They are the gentlemen of the Harlem drag balls.
They wear frocks to die for; they vogue on the floor like
Madonna dancers. A few have passed beyond show biz. A frail
baby-voiced blond named Venus Xtravaganza says, "I wanna be a
rich, pampered white woman," as she curls up in a tacky bedroom
furnished only by her dreams.

    Livingston could have settled for the ethnographic camp of
the ball contests: a gay Pumping Iron, drenched in primping
irony. Instead she found eloquent people with a fine sense of
their flair and vulnerability. Paris Is Burning is a bijou hit
in New York City and will be elsewhere, as audiences realize
that the voguers are camera-worthy not because of their
flamboyance but because of their home-truth humanity. As one of
them says, "You've left a mark on the world if you just get
through it."

    Nobody will get through BEGOTTEN without being marked. In
this nightmare classic by Edmund Elias Merhige, a godlike thing
dies giving birth to a womanly thing, who gives birth to a
quivering messiah thing; then the local villager things ravage
and bury them, and the earth renews itself on their corpses. It
is as if a druidical cult had re-enacted, for real, three Bible
stories -- creation, the Nativity and Jesus' torture and death
on Golgotha -- and some demented genius were there to film it.
No names, no dialogue, no compromises, no exit. No apologies
either, for Begotten is a spectacular one-of-a-kind (you
wouldn't want there to be two), filmed in speckled chiaroscuro
so that each image is a seductive mystery, a Rorschach test for
the adventurous eye.

    In WATER AND POWER, Pat O'Neill takes us even deeper into
post-narrative. His is an abstract film in a rush -- a universe
of images in 57 hurtling minutes. He can't wait for the moon to
rise; with time-lapse photography he Frisbees it into the sky.
He tells the history of Western expansion in one minute, with
subtitles and sound effects. And he isn't satisfied with man or
nature. Flames of neon lick the clouds; an electric fan helps
cool the desert.

    The subject is familiar from Chinatown: Los Angeles has
its water piped in from afar; the archetypal modern city is
built on the theft of age-old resources. Godfrey Reggio's
Koyaanisqatsi (1983) had the same doomsday message dressed in
high-tech style. That movie was serious fun, but O'Neill's is
bolder, more disciplined. Every shot has a lure and a meaning;
the film's shapely silhouette is easy to trace. Gorgeous and
zippy, Water and Power is an intoxicant without a hangover.

    None of these films are Citizen Kane -- what is? -- but
they come close to the spirit and intent of that eternally
young masterpiece. They treat film technique as a living
language; they taunt, dazzle, delight. Best of all, they seem
ready to spawn a receptive audience. On a spring afternoon in
Manhattan, hundreds of smart-setters crowd the lobbies of the
Film Forum and the Angelika, downtown temples of alternative
film. Poison and Paris Is Burning are sold out hours in advance.
The atmosphere is festive, with the feeling that something good
might happen inside. The movies, all movies, could use a
transfusion of hope.