Employee Picks is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

I come before you bearing news of the Major Motion Picture that I wrote the screenplay for, The Sweet East, the Cannes debut of which I announced here back in April of 2023. Since premiering in the Quinzaine des cinéastes section of that festival the picture, directed by Sean Price Williams, has been making the international fest rounds. I’ve been dutifully following it to festivals in Australia, Serbia, Belgium, Spain, Poland, Slovenia, Germany, and the United States, where it opened, via Utopia, in a limited release in December, with brief engagements in Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Toronto, Canada, and an ongoing stand at IFC Center in New York City. I’d imagine that most everyone has had the opportunity to see the trailer by now, but on the odd chance you haven’t, well, here it is:

The Sweet East begins its wider North American rollout in January/February, in the course of which Mr. Williams and myself, both together and individually, will appear in various cities in the U.S. and Canada to tirelessly promote our beautiful work of art; listed below are forthcoming screenings with “talent” attached, which I will update when and if further dates are added. (Past dates will be italicized but remain for, y’know, posterity.) For a more extensive list of our ever-expanding bookings, with and without us present, as well as ticket-buying options, I recommend that the dedicated cinephile refer to the thesweeteast.com. You can also, of course, wait a couple of months and rent the movie on the Internet, but if at all possible I’d really recommend that you see it in a cinema. If we are spending a lot of time on the road, and not as much time as we should on updating our Substacks, it’s because we’d like as many people as possible to be able to watch the movie in a communal setting, as God intended movies to be watched, and as we are a low-budget operation working with a small distributor, we have to fight tooth-and-nail for every booking we get and generally go a lot harder in the paint than the big guys.

Anyhow, here’s where the parade is heading in the near future, and who will be at the screenings:

• January 4^th- 6^th - Alamo Drafthouse Bryant Street, Washington, D.C. (NP on the 4^th, SPW + NP on the 5^th and 6^th)

• January 10^th - Cinema Arts Center, Huntington, NY (SPW, NP, Talia and Mimi Ryder, Jack Irv)

• January 12^th - 13^th - Cinema du Parc, Montréal, QC (NP)

• January 17^th - Upstate Films, Rhinebeck, NY (SPW + NP)

• Jan 23^rd – The Plaza, Atlanta, GA (SPW + NP)

• January 26^th - 27^th - Landmark NuArt, Los Angeles, CA (SPW + Simon Rex, with guest moderator Simon Baker)

• February 2^nd  - Los Feliz 3, Los Angeles, CA (SPW + Simon Rex)

• February 6^th - Belcourt, Nashville, TN (NP)

• February 7^th - Speed Museum, Louisville, KY (NP)

• February 9^th – The Beacon, Seattle, WA (NP)

• February 12^th - The Woodward, Cincinnati, OH (NP)

• February 13^th - Gateway Film Center, Columbus, OH (NP)

• February 15^th - The Neon, Dayton, OH (NP)

• February 16^th - The Cleveland Cinematheque, Cleveland, OH (NP)

• February 17^th - Nightlight Cinema, Akron, OH (NP)

• February 18^th – The Cleveland Cinematheque, Cleveland, OH (NP)

We had a great afterparty in D.C. I made a flyer:

All of the Q & As have been a grand ol’ time thus far, and I would be remiss not to thank our many fine moderators: Adam Friedland, Chloë Sevigny, Michael M. Bilandic, and Dasha Nekrasova (in New York); Dapper Dan Midas and Eric Allen Hatch (in Baltimore); Kazik Radwanski (in Toronto); Trey Sheilds (in Philadelphia); Bruno Dequen (in Montréal); Poppy de Villeneuve (in Rhinebeck); Sean Baker and Eugene Kotlyarenko (in Los Angeles); Nathan Viner (in Louisville); Tommy Swenson and Charles Mudede (in Seattle); Peter Van Hyning (in Cincinnati); Jonathan McNeal (in Dayton); and Zachariah Durr (in Cleveland).

For international readers, the movie presently has theatrical distribution in place—to the best of my knowledge, at least—in France (by Potemkine); in Spain (by Caramel Films); in Italy (by I Wonder); in Japan (by New Select); in Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg (by Cherry Pickers); in Australia and New Zealand (by Static Vision); in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (by NonStop Entertainment); in the Baltic States, Russia, and the Commonwealth of Independent States (by A-One Films); in Portugal (by Leopardo Filmes); and in the Ukraine (by Traffic Films)… so if you live in any of those places, presumably you’ll be able to see The Sweet East sometime in 2024. (As international release dates come in, I’ll list them below.) Additionally, HBO Europe has the SVOD and pay television rights to the movie in Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Kosovo, Macedonia, Moldova, Montenegro, Poland, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, and Slovenia. So there’s that. There’s no U.S. streaming deal in place at present, but when the inevitable occurs, you will be the first to know.

In anticipation of our wider release we rolled out our official poster—as opposed to the placeholder we’d been using since Cannes—a couple of weeks ago; it reproduces a lovely original oil-on-board painting by our friend Kat Mukai, inspired by Emanuel Leutze’s 1851 Washington Crossing the Delware, and I’m exceedingly fond of it. There are a few copies of the poster signed by Sean and myself available at Posteritati, which you can get here, though if you’d prefer to have a copy without our chicken scratch on it, I’m sure those will be available soon enough.

Speaking of merch, there’s also a The Sweet East t-shirt designed by the redoubtable Nathan Gelgud, seen below, which you can snap up here. It’s my hope to get a post-screening “merch table” set-up going in the near future to hawk Bombasts and various other sundry items, though for them what wants to get issue #2 in the mail, you can do so here.

Sean, various cast members, and myself have been doing sporadic press since May, as one does in these situations, so if you’d care to listen to or read us blabbering about the movie, there are ample opportunities to do so, some of which I’ve compiled below:

• SPW with Gregg Goldstein, for Variety.

• SPW and NP with Jordan Cronk, for Filmmaker Magazine.

• SPW with Adam Nayman, for CinemaScope.

• SPW with Caleb Hammond, for The Film Stage.

• SPW with Robert Rubsam, for Hellgate NYC.

• SPW and NP on Extended Clip podcast.

• SPW and NP with Nic Rapold on The Last Thing I Saw podcast.

• SPW and NP with Alex Lei, for BmoreArt.

• SPW for Le Cinéma Club.

• NP with Lauren Collee, for Melbourne International Film Festival website.

• SPW, Talia Ryder, and Simon Rex with Allanah Elster, for the Columbia Spectator.

• SPW, NP, Talia Ryder, Simon Rex, and Earl Cave with Conor Truax, for In Review Online.

• NP with K. Austin Collins, for Reverse Shot.

• Talia Ryder with Jana Letonja for Numéro Netherlands.

• Talia Ryder with Naomi Fry, for The New Yorker.

• Talia Ryder with Hannah Jackson, for Vogue.

• Talia Ryder and Jeremy O. Harris, for Interview.

• SPW and NP with “Randy,” for Bleeding Edge.

• NP with Tess Pollok, for Animal Blood.

• NP with Nic Rapold, for Air Mail.

• SPW, NP, Talia Ryder, Simon Rex, and Earl Cave with Jack Schenker, for Hammer to Nail.

I should also note that superfan Nicky Otis Smith made the movie—and an interview with Sean and myself—the subject of the second issue of his ‘zine, The Servant, which you should still be able to snag a copy of at Baltimore’s Beyond Video. (The picture below is from the lobby of the Charm City’s Senator theater, where Sean famously saw Saving Private Ryan in 1998.)

There are various Q & A videos out there as well; it may be that I’ll compile them here at some point. Once the movie has made its rounds, I’ll also offer up some observations about its conception, its shooting, and its life in the world on the Substackeroo, but only at such time as everyone who wants to see it has had a chance to do so.

The reception to the film, from “the public” and from “the industry” both, has thus far been extremely gratifying. This is not to say that the reviews have been uniformly positive or that we’ve raked in Gotham nominations, but that the individuals and institutions who neither like nor respect the film, by an extraordinary coincidence, happen to be individuals and institutions that I neither like nor respect, and it gives me an almost erotic frisson to know that I have stolen 104 minutes out of their one and only lives. Of the good notices on the film—by which I mean “well-written,” not “positive,” though, by an even more dazzling coincidence, these two categories overlap completely—I have been most gratified by those of Fernando Ganzo in Cahiers du cinéma, Olivier Lamm in Libération, Zach Lewis in In Review Online, Brianna Zigler in Paste Magazine, Àngel Quintana in Caimán Cuadernos de Cine, Rory O’Connor in Film Stage, Jerod Ra’Del Hollyfield in The Pamphleteer, Sean Burns for WBUR, Christian Lorentzen and Matthew Gasda in their respective Substacks, and Catherine Bray in Variety, whose observation, in her Cannes write-up, that the film was “viewed less through the prism of what American might signify as a nation, than how America might feel as an experience,” gets at something that those who go scratching around the film in search of an allegory miss entirely. Similarly satisfying were the comments of the estimable Bob Kohler on the website Con los ojos abiertos, who discusses the film as—first and foremost—a ripping yarn, not a position paper. (Writes Kohler: “The story pulls on the leash the artist clings to, but the artist knows when to let go, trusting that the story will find the way to return home.”)

All said, getting the movie in front of people and touring it like Black Flag and getting to hear what folks think of it has been a gas, a source of pleasure in a calendar year otherwise chock-a-block with reasons to want to hang one’s self in a tool shed. (The subject of my last post here.) A particular highlight occurred last October when, as the previous eight Octobers, I headed to Ghent, Belgium to teach a Young Critics’ Workshop organized by my friend Bart Versteirt and attached to the city’s film festival—the difference this year being that a movie that I’d worked on was in the lineup, and I was joined in the last days of the workshop by Sean, Talia, and actor Earl Cave to intro our screenings, do Q & As, you know, “World tour, media whore, please the press in Belgium…”

Anyhow, another fine Flemish friend, Ruben Demasure, had asked Sean and myself if we’d be interested in doing a special Ghent edition of City Dudes, the “blindfolded” screening series—meaning nobody knows what’s playing before they get to the cinema—that we’ve done semi-regularly at the Roxy Cinema for almost two years now. As it happened, the first title we talked about screening when we started City Dudes was a Belgian film, 1974’s Vase de Noces, but the Cinematek in Brussels wasn’t loaning out prints of the film after their recent DCP restoration of it, and anyways we don’t have the budget to import even a DCP… But in the Kingdom of Belgium?

The movie, directed by Thierry Zéno, is about a young, mentally disturbed man living alone on a ramshackle farm in the dampest, muddiest, bleakest stretch of the Belgian countryside. The man, who speaks only in pre-verbal grunts, passes his days affixing doll’s heads onto confused pigeons, collecting plant life, and sexually interfering with the sow that is his bosom companion, and who subsequently gives birth to a litter of three piglets, the man’s apparent offspring. I don’t want to “spoil” the rest, but I will say that Vase de Noces contains a scene of an animal palpably grieving that is unlike anything I’ve seen in a film, and that its dirge-like climax contains a cyclical binge of coprophagia and vomiting that’s at once horrific and rather hilarious.

Zéno, also credited cinematographer, shot the film on black-and-white short ends snagged from an American army base, and co-wrote the scenario with Dominique Garny, who stars, and who would later co-direct another movie I adore, 1979’s Des Morts, with Zéno and Jean-Pol Ferbus, assistant director on Vase de Noces. M. Zéno had died in 2017, but Ruben managed to secure us his personal print of the film by getting in touch with his son and daughter in Brussels, who drove down for the screening, and were very sweet about the whole thing, seemingly touched that two disheveled Americans were so enthusiastic about their father’s work.

The print was gorgeous. There were, nevertheless, a fair number of walk-outs during the screening, which Sean and I could track from our place in the front row, because the seats at Studio Skoop—my favorite cinema in Ghent, seen above—are pretty noisy. I hope the people who stuck around got something out of the movie, because Zéno was a real-deal artist; Amos Vogel, author of Film as a Subversive Art, wrote of Zéno that “he probes, as all true subversives do, the outer reaches of human existence, the borderlands we dread yet must explore before we can finally feel the full measure of our human-ness.” This was in reference to Des Morts, but I fancy it applies just as well to his anguished portrait of zoophilia.

Anyways, a few minutes into the screening, after the first few squeaking seats, I leaned over to Sean and whispered “You know this is what we do everything for, right?” and he whispered back “I know.”

It has been, admittedly, some months since I last made an appearance at this particular podium. The delay I will, at least in part, blame on the ever-retreating date for the actual printing of the long-rumored Bombast #2, which has now swollen to a touch over 160 pages, and has at long last headed to the printers. This having been done, I can pick up where I left off without shame; hopefully the following torrent of verbiage will go some way towards making up for my absence. The promised link for paid Employee Picks subscribers to order said tome at a discount, as mentioned in Shareholder’s Report Pt.1, is at the bottom of the piece.

Read more

Those who’ve been lurking around here for a while may remember that in the depths of last winter, I issued a little wrap that summarized my year-in-review—output, media intake, and miscellaneous excuses for laggardness, grumblings, and boasts—while outlining some of my outsized ambitions for the year ahead. Well, guess what, folks? I’m here to do the exact same thing for the last 15 months or so, before 2022 gets too terribly far in the rear-view mirror—as we all know, the true cinephile’s calendar doesn’t turn over until Oscar’s Biggest Night has passed, and all that was best in film arts has been sagaciously and unerringly determined by the brain trust at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. More crucially, I wanted to hold off on posting this update until one particular project was officially announced… of which, more anon.

Let us begin with the most pressing matter at hand. The second issue of Bombast, the extremely periodic periodical that I debuted in 2021, published in collaboration with the infallible Casey Moore and Tommy Swenson of Seattle’s Beacon Cinema, is finally in the final stages of layout and, in fact, available for pre-order here. Do not, however, click that pre-order link if you are a paid subscriber in good standing to the Employee Picks Substack; a separate link for paid subscribers only will arrive with the second part of this screed, accessible to this elite group only, in about a week’s time; wait for that, and you will be able to order with a Special Discount TBD. For anyone, paid up or otherwise, who needs to play catch-up on this adventure in print publication, you can also cop Bombast #1 here.

The above should give you some sense of the contents. As with the first go-around, it’s still a hotchpotch of serious-minded film-related material, pawky gags, and “graphic arts”—mostly, but not exclusively, comics, hence the subtitle “The Journal of Film and Funnies.” The short pitch would run something like: “What if late ’70s Film Comment, but also Mad Magazine?”—though this doesn’t capture the full, awesome scope of the endeavor any more than Michael Mann’s famous “MTV cops” pitch encompasses the totality of what Miami Vice is.

Now, the last time I issued one of these missives, I cockily estimated that Bombast #2 would probably be ready in late March/early April of 2022. By way of explanation for the ever so slight delay of an entire calendar year, I will point out that the second edition snowballed into a much, much more ambitious undertaking than the first: about double the page count, in fact, with a far, far greater quantity of original commissioned art inside—about 60-odd pages, by my reckoning. In addition, rather than deciding to rely on “outside contributors,” I was involved in some aspect of very nearly every piece that appears in the finished product—writing the copy, scripting the comics, conducting the interviews, and so forth—and it turns out that takes a bit of time. This won’t be the last Bombast, but I’ve learned my lesson when it comes to writing checks with my mouth that my ass can’t cash, so let’s just say you’ll be the first to know when #3 is getting anywhere near to hitting the presses.

The other Big Project of 2022 that is poised to bear fruit in ’23, the major motion picture The Sweet East, has been averred to in a couple of public forums over the preceding months—in a paragraph from an August GQ cover story on actor Jacob Elordi as well as in a recent appearance by Simon Rex on the hit The Adam Friedland Show—but is now, at long last, a matter of official record. The Sweet East, whose forthcoming premiere in the Quinzaine des cinéastes section of the 2023 Cannes Film Festival was announced today, began its life as an original screenplay that I began writing in February of 2017, with the idea that my friend the noted American cinematographer Sean Price Williams would direct and photograph it—which indeed is what happened after a few years of fumbling around and half-assedly trying to drum up interest in the project. In addition to Messieurs Elordi and Rex, it features the talents of Talia Ryder, Jeremy O. Harris, Rish Shah, Ayo Edebiri, Andy Milonakis, Earl Cave, and Gibby Haynes of the Butthole Surfers, as well as those of several young up-and-comers whose work I anticipate the world soon coming to admire as much as I do. I was knocking around on its set for pieces of the last two years trying to make myself useful and, barring unforeseen catastrophe, I hope that it will be seen by audiences beyond the Croisette before the year is out, at which point I will perhaps write a little more about its genesis and production. I hope you will enjoy it and, barring that, at the very least watch it; I am as pleased with how it turned out as I have been with any other venture I’ve been involved with, and I’d like to keep writing the sort of films that interest me as well as writing about them, if they’ll let me.

For whatever it may be worth, immediately below is a picture of a “poster” for the film that I drew as an assignment at the Oxbelly screenwriting and directing lab in Messinia, Greece, headed by the brilliant Athina Rachel Tsangari, which I attended with Sean in 2019. Perhaps it will help you glean something of what’s in store. A couple of paragraphs up you can clap your eyes on the first and presently only official still from the film, showing the two faces of the mysterious Ms. Ryder.

Other than issuing occasional scribblings on the bathroom wall that is this Substack, I’ve continued my day-to-day work for Metrograph, which involves ordering for the bookstore (in actual fact basically kept running by my colleague Matt Folden), writing reams of copy, and commissioning for (and contributing to) the Metrograph Journal, on which I collaborate with far more competent colleagues: webmaster Ted Gerike, all-around utility player Gabriel Jandali-Appel, and editor Annabel Brady-Brown. (Ms. Brady-Brown, of Fireflies Press, has also of late been lending her keen eye to my Employee Picks effusions; if they have reached a level of borderline coherency, this is entirely thanks to her.) As I did with the last one of these, I’d like to draw your attention to a few pieces by our fine pool of contributors that I believe particularly worthy of consideration—though I should add that we generally try to hold to a certain standard in what we publish, and I don’t think you can go too far astray clicking your way through the archives. I would recommend the reader to the following, arranged alphabetically by author surname:

• Michael M. Bilandic in conversation with Abel Ferrara and Oliver Stone.

• Ela Bittencourt in conversation with Flora Gomes.

• Giovanni Marchini Camia in conversation with Apichatpong Weerasethakul.

• Rebecca Harkins-Cross in conversation with Lucretia Martel.

• Brandon Harris on the late, Cincinnati-shot DTV “geezer teasers” of Bruce Willis and Del Lord’s 1927 Topsy and Eva.

• A.E. Hunt on Christopher St. John’s 1972 Top of the Heap.

• Colleen Kelsey on the screen style of Catherine Deneuve.

• Gabe Klinger in conversation with Joe Dante.

• Phuong Le on Sylvia Kristel’s performance in Just Jaeken’s 1974 Emmanuelle.

• Chloe Lizotte in conversation with Helena Wittmann.

• Beatrice Loayza on the screen presence of Jean-Louis Trintignant.

• Alexandra Molotkow on the screen presence of Joe Pesci.

• Chrystel Oloukoi on Sarah Maldorer’s 1972 Sambizanga.

• Rebecca Panovka in conversation with Whit Stillman.

• Adam Piron on Jamaa Fanaka’s 1974 Emma Mae.

• Nicolas Rapold’s oral history of the DuArt processing lab.

• Simon Reynolds on Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s 2001 Millennium Mambo.

• Anna Shechtman on Catherine Breillat’s 1988 36 Fillette.

• Natasha Stagg on the films of Yvonne Rainer.

• R. Emmet Sweeney on Johnny To and Ching Siu-tung’s 1993 The Heroic Trio and in conversation with Ken Jacobs.

• Neil Young on Jan Nemec’s 1964 Diamonds of the Night.

• Dennis Zhou in conversation with Jia Zhangke.

As for my own contributions to the Journal since the last of these roundups, they’re as follows:

• In conversation with James Gray on 2022’s Armageddon Time.

• In conversation with Jerzy Skolimowski and Ewa Piaskowska on 2022’s EO.

• In conversation (briefly!) with Sean Price Williams and Ed Lachman.

• On the films of Robert Siodmak (expanded from a piece originally published in Little White Lies).

• On Curtis Hanson’s 2002 8 Mile.

• On Paul Flaherty’s 1994 Clifford.

• On Edward Yang’s 1994 A Confucian Confusion.

• On John M. Stahl’s 1932 Back Street.

• On Claudio Guerín and Juan Antonio Bardem’s 1973 La campana del infierno (The Bell from Hell).

• On Kim Ki-young’s 1960 The Housemaid.

The penultimate item in that list was connected to a Metrograph screening of La campana del infierno which played as part of a series of Spanish “Fantaterror” titles curated by yours truly; you can learn more about the series here, in a short segment featuring my friend Dr. Pervert, the host of Dr. Pervert’s Cinema Dungeon, which airs Tuesdays at 11:15pm on 19 WXIP in Middletown, Ohio. I can also be heard discussing Guerín and Bardem’s film here, on SLEAZOIDS, a podcast hosted—with great poise and acumen—by Josh Lewis and Jamie Miller.

The remainder of my film programming activity was focused on City Dudes, a monthly “blindfolded” screening series that I began hosting at the Roxy Cinema New York on 6^th Ave. with my co-curator, the abovementioned Sean Price Williams, in February of last year, and plan to continue hosting on something like a monthly basis until we’re shown the door. The premise of the series, for those who have not enjoyed the privilege of being present for this cinematic sacrament, is that no one other than Mr. Williams and myself will be forewarned of the title being shown until the moment when the lights are ready to go down. Without lifting the air of mystery, I can announce that some of the titles that may have been shown might have been:

• Feb. 19^th: Police Python 357 (Alain Corneau, 1976)

• March 26^th: Spike of Bensonhurst (Paul Morrissey, 1988)

• April 23^rd: Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii (Adrian Maben, 1972)

• May 27^th: Unstrap Me (George Kuchar, 1968)

• June 25^th: So Fine (Andrew Bergman, 1981)

• July 23^rd: Addio fratello crudele (Giuseppe Patroni Griffi, 1971)

• August 27^th: Faust (F.W. Murnau, 1926) (with live accompaniment by Steve Gunn)

• September 24^th: One P.M. (D.A. Pennebaker, 1972)

• October 30^th: L’Ange (Patrick Bokanowski, 1982)

• November 19^th: Dice Rules (Jay Dubin, 1991)

• January 21^st- In the Spirit (Sandra Seacat, 1990)

• March 4^th- Jekyll & Hyde… Together Again (Jerry Belson, 1982)

The next installment of City Dudes, for those who celebrate (and are in the New York City area), will be on Saturday, April 29^th. That same night, by wild coincidence, Dogleg, the first feature by Los Angeles-based director Al Warren, will be having its third and final NYC screening. (You can see the official poster below.) I mention this because I happen to play a role in Al’s fine film, shot in the summer of 2021, and can be seen in it showing my vast range as a performer by embodying the role of a film critic named “Nick.” Should you be in NYC or LA, or should Dogleg come to a theater or streaming service near you, I encourage you to give it a gander. (I would be remiss not to mention also my 30-second appearance as a handsy film director in Sophia Peer’s television pilot Who’s Annie, which I am told is garnering festival laurels the world over.)  

That, dear reader, is most of what I have been busying myself with. What I have not been busying myself with, on the other hand, is pretty much any of the commissioned freelance work that used to pay my bills. Outside the auspices of this here Substack, Bombast, and Metrograph, my writing for the period under discussion amounts to a grand total of two pieces for 4Columns, on Film at Lincoln Center’s Mike Leigh retrospective and Semiotext(e)’s English-language translation of the first volume of Serge Daney’s The Cinema House & the World, covering his output from 1962 to 1981.

As for my commentary track side hustle, that’s more or less a thing of the past, though a track I recorded with Glenn Kenny for the Arrow Video release of Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) did finally surface this year, giving the illusion of continued prolificity. Those aching for the sight of me gabbling into a camera in my living room can also see me holding court on the subject of actor Dan Duryea in PowerHouse/Indicator’s Universal Noir #1 box set, which contains George Sherman’s 1948 Duryea vehicle Larceny. I also, rumor has it, appeared on an episode of the Shudder streaming service series Cursed Films to discuss the 1980 film Cannibal Holocaust and the career of its late, lamented auteur, Ruggero Deodato.

All in all, it’s a respectable haul, though I have to admit that a lot of things that I’d have liked to get done in the last twelvemonth just didn’t: the much-ballyhooed Eustache book has made paltry progress, other stated schemes to produce printed matter have languished, and I’ll freely confess I’ve let the weeds grow a bit around here—something I’m going to do my level best to address going forward. Part of this can be chalked up to simple reach-exceeding-grasp stuff, part of it probably accountable to creeping existential dread connected to the undeniable fact that culture is undeniably in the last few swirls of its trip down the toilet—but that’s a discussion for the next part of this missive. Let us accentuate the positive first.

This year-end I continued my cherished tradition of contributing to no outside lists, “Best of 2022” or otherwise. Individual opinion interests me more than aggregated ones do, and as such I don’t see the value of adding another body to another dogpile of consensus; it’s nice that Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) has been coronated as the Greatest Film of All Time by Sight & Sound voters, I suppose, but I don’t see that doing Chantal Akerman much good.

What I’ve instead done, as in my last Shareholder’s Report, is lump together the new-to-me films encountered between approximately January 27^th of ’22 and the time of this piece’s publication—including but very far from limited to films that premiered in that period—that I thought displayed some points of interest. Here they are:

Alison’s Birthday (Ian Coughlin, 1981); L’ami de mon ami (Éric Rohmer, 1987); Anatmoie de l’enfer (Catherine Breillat, 2004); Armageddon Time (James Gray, 2022); Aspen (Frederick Wiseman, 1991); Avatar: The Way of Water (James Cameron, 2022); Barnförbjudet (Marie-Louise Ekman, 1979); Belfast, Maine (Frederick Wiseman, 1999); Die Berührte (Helma Sanders-Brahms, 1981); Black and White (James Toback, 1999); Champions (Bobby Farrelly, 2023); Clerks III (Kevin Smith, 2022); Crazy Thunder Road (Gakuryū Ishii, 1980); Daisy Miller (Peter Bogdanovich, 1974); Dangerously Close (Albert Pyun, 1986); Dark Age (Arch Nicholson, 1987); Death Powder (Shigeru Izumiya, 1986); Deep Water (Adrian Lyne, 2022); De humani corporis fabrica (Verena Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor, 2022); Un delitto poco commune (Ruggero Deodato, 1988); Docteur Jekyll et les femmes (Walerian Borowczyk, 1981); Das deutsche Kettensägenmassaker (Christoph Schlingensief, 1990); Don’s Plum (R.D. Robb, 2001); Executioners (Johnny To/Ching Siu-tung, 1993); Eyes of Fire (Avery Crounse, 1983); Fair Game (Mario Andreacchio, 1986); The Four Musketeers (Richard Lester, 1974); Forty Deuce (Paul Morrissey, 1982); For Love of the Game (Sam Raimi, 1999); Funny Pages (Owen Kline, 2022); Galaxy (Masao Adachi, 1967); Giuseppe Makes a Movie (Adam Rifkin, 2014); Happy-Go-Lucky (Mike Leigh; 2008); Health (Robert Altman, 1980); Heartbreak Ridge (Clint Eastwood, 1986); The Hidden (Jack Sholder, 1987); Home in Indiana (Henry Hathaway, 1944); The Housemaid (Kim Ki-young, 1960); Human Flowers of Flesh (Helena Wittmann, 2022); In the Court of the Crimson King: King Crimson at 50 (Toby Amies, 2022); Inn of the Damned (Terry Bourke, 1975); The Insect Woman (Kim Ki-young, 1972); Iodo (Kim Ki-young, 1977); Die Insel der blutigen Plantage (Kurt Raab/Peter Kern, 1983); Knock at the Cabin (M. Night Shyamalan, 2023); Lady Stay Dead (Terry Bourke, 1981); The Lightship (Jerzy Skolimowski, 1985); Long Weekend (Colin Eggleston, 1978); La Madrigeura (Carlos Saura, 1970); Malice (Harold Becker, 1993); The Man from Hong Kong (Brian Trenchard-Smith, 1975); Mark of the Renegade (Hugo Fregonese, 1951); The Munsters (Rob Zombie, 2022); My Six Convicts (Hugo Fregonese, 1952); Les naufragés de la D17 (Luc Moullet, 2002); Nazareno Cruz y el lobo (Leonardo Favio, 1975); Never Talk to Strangers (Peter Hall, 1995); Nienormalni (Jacek Bławut, 1990); The Night, the Prowler (Jim Sharman, 1978); Noose (Edmond T. Gréville, 1948); Of Unknown Origin (George P. Cosmatos, 1983); Orphan: First Kill (William Brent Bell, 2022); Out of It (Paul Williams, 1969); El pantano de los cuervos (Manuel Caño, 1974); Patrick (Richard Franklin, 1978); Pepi, Luci, Bom y otras chicas del montón (Pedro Almodóvar, 1980); The Plumber (Peter Weir, 1979); Poisson d’avril (Nobuhiko Ôbayashi, 1986); Private Practices: The Story of a Sex Surrogate (Kirby Dick, 1986); Razorback (Russell Mulcahy, 1984); Samurai Wolf (Hideo Gosha, 1966); La semana del asesino (Eloy de la Iglesia, 1972); Shattered (Wolfgang Petersen, 1991); She Hate Me (Spike Lee, 2004); Slattery’s Hurricane (André De Toth, 1949); Snapshot (Simon Wincer, 1979); Songs for Drella (Ed Lachman, 1990); Spring in a Small Town (Fei Mu, 1948); Stone (Sandy Harbutt, 1974); Summerfield (Ken Hannam, 1977); Summer of Secrets (Jim Sharman, 1976); Swordsman of All Swordsmen (Joseph Kuo, 1968); Tam Tam (Adolfo Arrieta, 1976); The Three Musketeers (Richard Lester, 1973); Una vela para el diablo (Eugenio Martin, 1973); Vengeance of the Phoenix Sisters (Chen Hung-min, 1968); Venom: Let There Be Carnage (Andy Serkis, 2021); Violent Streets (Hideo Gosha, 1974); Die Wiebchen (Zbyněk Brynych, 1970); The Witch Who Came from the Sea (Matt Cimber, 1976); Working Girls (Dorothy Arzner, 1931)

Those looking for patterns in my viewing can find some—lots of Australians; a healthy contingent of Spaniards; not a lot of films from prior to 1960 or after 2000. Some of these patterns were driven by professional undertakings; most were just things I happened to see. Along with the promise of a lifetime of still more undiscovered masterpieces still awaiting me, a great deal of what has continued to give me hope for The Future of Cinema was cinemas, the physical spaces, themselves. And while I wish nothing but the best for the ailing multiplex chains and august repertory/arthouse institutions, I am ever more certain that the humble microcinema and DIY spaces powered by amateur enthusiasm are going to be crucial to the cultivation of a flourishing film culture. My 2022 was roughly bracketed by two highly revivifying screenings at such spaces—a screening of Claire Denis’s 1990 S’en fout la mort at Paris’s since-shuttered La Cléf Revival, which I wrote about here back in January, and a group projection-performance/solstice celebration arranged by Bradley Eros at Light Industry’s excellent new space on Stagg St.—and when I look at the work being done by labor-of-love organizations like the Chicago Film Society, Washington, D.C.’s Suns Cinema, Baltimore’s Beyond Video, Paris’s RE:VOIR, and many, many others I could name of similar ilk, I can almost convince myself that cinema can hold out against the continual onslaught on the arts by Silicon Valley creeps and censorious killjoys of all stripes.

But, once again, we’re keeping things posi here! And so, in further keeping with what is becoming a time-honored annual tradition in these year-in-review jawns, I’ve also lashed together various other highlights of my media intake over the time elapsed since the last one. All of the below are things that, in the recent past, provided me with some degree of pleasure or elucidation or, at any rate, memorable irritation:

Izumi Suzuki’s Terminal Boredom: Stories (Verso); Henry Füssli at the Musée Jacquemart-André; Gérard Lattier: Le voyage en peinture (Les Editions du Chassel); Massimo Mattioli’s Squeak the Mouse (Fantagraphics); Walter Sickert at the Petit Palais; L’Album Pornographique de Michel Simon (La Manufacture de Livres); Dream Dance: The Art of Ed Emshwiller (Anthology Editions); John Giorno’s Great Demon Kings (Farrar, Straus and Giroux); David Nichols’s The Go-Betweens (Verse Chorus Press); Gary Indiana’s Fire Season: Selected Essays 1984-2021 (Seven Stories Press); Nick Zedd’s Totem of the Depraved (Pig Roast Publishing); Matthew Goody’s Needles & Plastic: Flying Nun Records, 1981-1988 (Third Man Books); Akira Ishikawa & Count Buffaloes’ Uganda (Dawn of Rock) (Mr. Bongo); Monday Night Books at Light Industry; Elliott Chaze’s Black Wings Has My Angel (NYRB); Floris Vanhoof at Le Non_Jazz, Café Paris; Kandja Kouyaté et l’Ensemble Instrumental du Mali’s La Grande Vedette Malienne (?); Marillon TK; Duncan Hannah’s 20^th Century Boy: Notebooks of the Seventies (Knopf); Martin Parr: Early Works (RRB Photobooks); Cheri Knight’s American Rituals (Freedom to Spend); Clinton Walker’s Stranded: The Secret History of Australian Independent Music, 1977-1991 (The Visible Spectrum); The Northern Boys’ “Party Time”; John Hawkes’s The Lime Twig, The Blood Oranges (both New Directions), and Sweet William: A Memoir of Old Horse (Penguin); DWOSKINO: The Gaze of Stephen Dwoskin (LUX); BobOnTheHour Twitter (@BobOnTheHour); Dean Tavoularis, edited by Jordan Mintzer (Synecdoche); Daisuke Ichiba’s Heartbreak Regeneration (Hollow Press); Roll N Roaster; Daney’s The Cinema House & the World (Semiotext(e)); Tolerance’s Anonym (Vanity Records); J.G. Ballard’s The Drought (Liveright); Nick Zedd tribute in Tompkins Square Park; Sylvia Kristel: From Emmanuelle to Chabrol (Cult Epics); the squirming theater kids at the Nightmare NYC haunted house; Norman Pettingill: Backwoods Humorist (Fantagraphics); Johnny Depp’s post-cancellation outfits; Jasper Jubenvill’s Dynamite Diva: One-Eyed Wild Ride (Strangers Publishing); Midwest Modern Twitter (@JoshLipnick); Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre’s Movie Theaters (Prestel); the Try Guys extramarital sex “scandal”; Marcel Storr (Les Éditions Phébus); “Gamer Trump”; Andrew Leavold’s The Search for Weng Weng (The LedaTape Organisation); Old Throat’s s/t cassingle; Pier Paolo Pasolini: Writing on Burning Paper (Fireflies Press); Takehisa Kosugi’s Catch-Wave (Superior Viaduct); Gustave-Adolphe Mossa: Niciensis Pinxit (Éditions Gilletta); Angii Anargiri feast in Tholarai, Amorgos; John Capouya’s Gorgeous George: The Outrageous Bad-Boy Wrestler Who Created American Pop Culture (Harper); Bernd and Hilla Becher at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; The Dr. Ikkaku Ochi Collection: Medical Photographs from Japan Around 1900 (Scalo Verlag Ac); L.G. Mair, Jr.’s Selected Rhythm Tracks 1988-1994 (chOOn!!); Julian Cope’s Japrocksampler: How the Post-War Japanese Blew Their Minds on Rock ’n’ Roll (Bloomsbury); Alexander Robotnick’s Ce n’est q’un début (Medical Records); Walerian Borowczyk’s Anatomy of the Devil (Rotland Press); Heratius’s Gwendolyne/Les Boniments (Staubgold); Quentin Tarantino’s Cinema Speculation (Harper); Zero Kama’s The Secret Eye of L A Y L A H (Nekrophile Rekords); Excavate!: The Wonderful and Frightening World of the Fall (Faber & Faber), edited by Tessa Norton and Bob Stanley; Clint Eastwood Official Twitter rivalries; Cédric Grand Guillot’s and Guillaume Le Disez’s The Cult Films of Brigitte Lahaie (Pulse Video); dinner at Sota Atsumi’s Maison; Paul Fonoroff’s Chinese Movie Magazines: From Charlie Chaplin to Chairman Mao (University of California Press); Lady June’s Linguistic Leprosy (Market Square Records); Hans-Peter Feldmann: 272 Pages (Fundacio Antoni Tapies), edited by Helena Tatay…

I could go on, but you get the point: a veritable banquet of enthusiasms! Isn’t it just wonderful that people do and make so many wonderful and interesting and beautiful things that you can enjoy? And presumably will continue to do so!—this even as the social rewards for wrecking things now threaten to surpass those for building them, and when any cultural product that isn’t the result of a process of corporate oversight that strips it of any possibility of risk-taking in form or content is pushed to the extreme margins where only an ever-shrinking cadre of eccentrics will know where to look for it, or even know that there’s anything else out there to look for…? But I’m not going to spoil the love-in; I’ll pick up where I left off next week.

If you’ve enjoyed this piece, please consider becoming a paid subscriber to Employee Picks, as that’s the only means I have to receive remuneration for researching and writing it.

When the trailer for Rob Zombie’s PG-rated Netflix movie The Munsters, with its cheap, garishly lit, seemingly motion-smoothed images, blew through social media last fall, it left a trail of aghast comments in its wake. As it did so, I found myself thinking back to the memorable description a friend had offered some years back of Zombie’s 2007 Halloween…

Read more

The headlines—or at least my Twitter timeline, which I assume is what most people mean when they refer to “the headlines”—having recently been dominated by the deaths of Queen Elizabeth II and Jean-Luc Godard, I might have overlooked the theatrical release of Kevin Smith’s Clerks III entirely, but on a whim on Tuesday before last I checked the showtimes…

Read more

If you spend a lot of time in dingy Irish watering holes frequented by retired mail carriers, and I know I do, you’ve probably seen one of those signs behind the bar that says “No Talking Politics,” or something to that effect—necessitated, presumably, because people can get awful hot under the collar when politics come up, especially if they’ve had a few. (You’ll often find FOX News playing on the television in these same joints, but that’s neither here nor there.) I’ve never seen a similar edict posted that forbids talking about movies; they can cause tiffs, too, of course, but when I think back on the more acrimonious ones I’ve been a part of or privy to, it seems to me that they usually focus on politics rather than aesthetics, stemming from a conviction that one’s affinity for whatever work is presently up for debate isn’t just evidence of a lack of taste but an actual affront, proof of the offending party’s alignment with the forces of authority and oppression, with the exact identity of those forces being contingent on one’s political leanings, i.e. the U.S. Military-Industrial Complex or Disney Groomers.

When dealing with the high overhead art of cinema, you simply can’t peel aesthetics clean of politics; the social and economic systems in which movies are made impacts what movies are made, and how they’re made. These are, to some degree at least, quantifiable factors in what makes a movie, and they shouldn’t be ignored—but neither should those irreducible aspects of living cinema when it’s ready to appear before an audience, the things a movie can express that are beyond ideology and utility, at least as readily understood. I’ve considered this irreducibility central to the medium’s attraction—its “magic,” if I can be permitted the cliché—but it doesn’t sit so easy with an age given to efficiency and keyword tags, encouraged by a discourse that winnows the onrush of immediate experience that occurs when encountering an artwork down to a handful of freeze-dried descriptors, almost invariably limited to matters of content, which presumably will allow the consumer to decide if the work in question has a strong likelihood of rubbing them the wrong way. This tendency to concise judgment and definitions can also be seen in an ongoing project to locate films and filmmakers on the ideological spectrum, as exemplified by the below piece of online detritus.

This kind of filing system is presumably useful for anyone who’s looking to avoid anything potentially offensive—that is, anything that originates from a perspective that worrisomely varies too much from their own—but it only tells you so much about what it is, exactly, that artists of whatever political stripe are up to. (The ones worth paying attention to, at least.) Firstly, there’s significant slippage in these definitions according to time and place. The Italian communist of the World War II years differed from the Italian communist of 1968, a transformation that Pier Paolo Pasolini would bemoan to the end of his life, and both would likely be a little confused by the contemporary American DSA. And can we imagine a 19th century “conservative” like Benjamin Disraeli see anything of himself in a figure like Donald Trump?

Setting these matters aside, artists tend to be rather tricky to pin down, because if they’re possessed of the powers of observation, imagination, and sensitivity necessary for the job, these will routinely overflow the boundaries of their avowed ideology—and even their ideologies can seem a bit perplexing and tending to vacillation to those who value coherency, constancy, and ironclad commitment to a Sacred Cause above all else. These last-named qualities are widely considered desirous of politicians and activists, and so it’s understandable that those who view activism as art’s principal goal should also consider them desirous of artists, along with a doctrinaire adherence to a chosen set of beliefs and a coherent, unambiguous expression of them.

Those of us who think of art as something else—say, a way to ponder insoluble questions and to explore the world and the people in it in all of their paradoxes—tend not to get too bent out of shape when the people who make it are erratic weirdos, cranks, and contrarians, or when they don’t stay securely slotted in the same place on the ideological pegboard. After his trip to Stalin’s Soviet Union, avowed man of the left and fellow traveler André Gide renounced communism in his 1936 Retour de L’U.R.S.S.; Cecil B. DeMille, a figure who would become synonymous with Hollywood at its most reactionary and right-wing, expressed no such reservations after his trip there in 1931; in fact, according to cultural historian Thomas Doherty, “DeMille looked to the Soviet Union as a lodestar, expressing his sympathy with the Bolshevik experiment and his opinion that capitalism was doomed.” I don’t mention these facts to claim DeMille as a leftist or Gide a crypto-conservative, only as two of many instances of artists’ tendency not to stay in place on any political spectrum.   

There’s no U.S.S.R. to visit any more, though word of this fact apparently hasn’t reached Paul Morrissey, as fascinating a subject for study as any when considering the case of the “conservative” artist. In a 2020 interview with Sam Weisberg published in Bright Lights Film Journal, Morrissey offered up the following chestnut: “American culture has been run by the Soviet Union for the past sixty, seventy years, and it gets worse and worse and worse. It has nothing to do with Christianity anymore, that’s for sure. The Catholics have lost control of people. It’s a very sad world we live in, and I think the only adequate stories in movies and plays are the humorist ones about how awful the world is, especially the United States. They want the toilet, they want the garbage, they want the drugs, they want to have sex around the clock with their kids, and that’s the world.”

A lot to chew on there. And then how to square the above with Maurice Yacowar’s report on the director’s sentiments about Mother Russia in The Films of Paul Morrissey, in which Yacowar notes that “[Morrissey] appreciates the Soviets for suppressing liberalism, rock and roll, and other modish fatuousness. In 1993 he can draw scant comfort from seeing Western libertinism sweep across Eastern Europe under the flag of McFreedom”?1 Or, complicating matters still further, to understand how either of these seemingly contradictory positions might inform the film of Morrissey’s that explicitly deals with an encounter between eastern communism and western democracy, Madame Wang’s (1981), in which a young East German, Lutz (Patrick Schoene), a KGB agent posing as a defector looking to connect with subversive elements in the United States, shacks up with a collection of scroungers and prostitutes squatting in the ruins of the Doric-style Long Beach Masonic Temple, who take advantage of the stranger’s tendency towards stoic silence to relentlessly blather at him. And then what to make of Joe Dallesandro’s hunky handyman in Blood for Dracula (1974), a loveless lout who screws his employer’s daughters under a rude stencil of a hammer-and-sickle on the stone wall of his servant’s quarters and specializes in menacing Marxist pillow talk, but ultimately seems more interested in rising to the level of the aristocracy than banishing aristocracy, per se? The character is ostensibly the movie’s hero, dealing an agonizing death to Udo Kier’s Count Dracula and delivering the film’s closing lines—“He lives off other people. He’s no good to anyone. He never was”—but Kier’s anemic, enfeebled, altogether pathetic Count is no figure of sinister aristocratic glamor, and there’s something distinctly bittersweet about the triumph of this beefcake prole gigolo, whose ambition is to batten himself on his hosts in his own callous and calloused way.      

Like his communist Puritan abroad visiting a decaying and decadent America or Kier’s out-of-time Romanian nobleman mixing with the Italian peasantry, self-described right-winger Morrissey has always been an anomalous figure in the company he keeps, most famously as the proverbial sore thumb sticking out in Andy Warhol’s Factory. Born in 1938 in Manhattan, raised in Yonkers, and educated for sixteen years in Catholic schools, in his youth the Irish-American Morrissey witnessed the ultimate triumph of Celtic papists in America with John F. Kennedy’s ascent to the presidency in 1960. (Irish-American as well were that year’s Democratic house speaker, John McCormack, and Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield.)

A mysterious photo in Yacowar’s book shows a young, bespectacled Morrissey lingering deep in the background of a snapshot of Kennedy and retinue, and Morrissey makes frequent appearances in 16mm footage taken by Jonas Mekas at the Montauk compound, Eothen, that Morrissey shared with Warhol, during the summer of 1972 when Jacqueline Kennedy, children Caroline and John Jr., and sister Princess Radziwill were guests. Was Morrissey’s story typical of a gradual Hibernian defection from Democratic Tammany Hall to a GOP redefined by Irish-American Catholic commentator William F. Buckley, progenitor to the rubicund Mick talking heads who once dominated FOX News, Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity? In truth, Morrissey isn’t exactly typical of anything. In a 1971 interview with Rolling Stone, he speaks highly of Franklin Roosevelt, sympathetically of J.F.K. and Teddy Kennedy, and viciously of Nixon and his “junk Republican party,” while offering as an aside that “people must really forget that the democratic system is a really dreary thing.” When asked to offer an alternative, he responds “Why not give royalty a chance? I think there is a great need for it, a great lust for it.”

Morrissey’s time in the Camelot of King Warhol began in 1965, when the two men were introduced by poet and Factory courtier Gerald Malanga. After passing through the established Factory hazing ritual of sweeping up the floors at 33 Union Square West, Morrissey, who’d been making his own avant-garde shorts and running them at a storefront cinema in the East Village that he briefly occupied, began to advise on the artist’s moviemaking endeavors, eventually taking over Warhol’s business affairs as well. In short order Morrissey was supervising almost every technical aspect of the Factory’s films, his first solo director credit on 1968’s Warhol-produced Flesh—though Morrissey, whose later interviews reflect some bitterness over the fact that his reputation will forever be overshadowed by that of his credited co-director on Chelsea Girls (1966), maintains that he’d been doing all of the heavy lifting on the Factory movies well before this. The odd-couple aspect of the partnership between the openly gay, amphetamine-popping, largely apolitical Warhol and the apparently chaste, anti-drug, conservative Morrissey has been much commented on; in spite of this, their professional relationship continued through two more films constituting “The Paul Morrissey Trilogy” with Flesh—1970’s Trash and 1972’s Heat—as well as 1971’s Women in Revolt and 1972’s L’Amour, and Warhol lent his imprimatur (if nothing else) to Morrissey’s two Udo Kier vehicles of 1974, Flesh for Frankenstein and Blood for Dracula.

This might be regarded as a marriage of convenience, of the sort that abound in the history of cinema where one party has access to considerable means and another to the ways, leading to strange unions that make actual affinities between money and talent difficult to ascertain. What is one to make of filmmakers who urge the preservation of the “big screen” theatrical experience while financing projects with money provided by streaming giants like Netflix who pose a clear and present danger to that experience? Was the real Jean Renoir the fellow traveler who made La vie est à nous (1936) and La Marseillaise (1938) in cahoots with the Parti communiste français, or the man who decamped to Italy in 1939 at the invitation of Vittorio Mussolini, son of Benito, and who played footsie with Il Duce’s regime long enough to begin a film of Giacomo Puccini’s Tosca there two years later under the dubious cover of Franco-Italian diplomacy? Everyone has their reasons, of course, and looking for movies made with “clean” money is a fool’s errand, but I suppose we all have our measures for when ends no longer can be said to justify the means, whether it’s dining with dictators, seasteading with Silicon Valley robber barons, or “jumping on a call” with Amazon.

Whatever the circumstances of the arrangement between Morrissey and Warhol, the former was an enterprising young man in a hurry to establish himself in the cinema, and the latter, ten years his senior, was well on his way as an art star and impresario. Warhol offered Morrissey a name; Morrissey offered Warhol, hardly averse to making money, a business savvy and technical proficiency that could potentially bring broader audiences to Factory films. (And, indeed, Chelsea Girls was an underground hit.) Morrissey was also rangy and svelte and pretty good-looking in a severe, imperious, and unobtainable way, and that probably didn’t hurt his chances on the Factory floor.

One might reasonably conclude, if indeed this partnership was a simple business transaction, that the reason the films that Morrissey made during his decade-long association with Warhol were filled with drug users, hustlers, homosexuals, transgendered performers, frontal nudity, and explicit sex is that these were the kinds of people and things that Warhol was interested in, and that it could be assumed the audience for an “Andy Warhol” movie would be interested in as well. Once this professional association had come to an end, however, Morrissey didn’t get to work on a remake of Leo McCarey’s Going My Way (1944) or some such wholesome, uplifting fare, but continued to make movies about people on the fringes of society: the rag-and-bone vendors of Madame Wang’s, the Times Square hustlers of Forty Deuce (1982), and the drug dealing outfits of Mixed Blood (1984) and Spike of Bensonhurst (1988)—Brazilian and Puerto Rican in the former film, Puerto Rican and Italian in the latter. The outliers in his post-Warhol period are two period pieces, 1978’s The Hound of the Baskervilles and 1985’s Beethoven’s Nephew, which might be taken as attempts to get out of the gutter, but Morrissey has called the former “the only film I’m connected with that I don’t think was very good,” and the latter is much harsher in its depiction of Ludwig van than Morrissey’s treatment of his various bands of social outcasts ever was, and neither exactly suggest a desired high road not taken due to his having been pigeonholed as a director of guttersnipes and grotesques.

Here we arrive at another facet of the Morrissey Paradox. In photographs taken of him as a younger man, Morrissey appears almost invariably disapproving, frowning, sometimes scowling. I’ve found one picture of him at a party with Warhol, Veronica Lake, and Candy Darling in 1971 (seen above) in which he seems possibly to be cracking a grin, but his head is turned in such a way as to make this difficult to say with certitude. Morrissey in interviews is often jaw-droppingly caustic: cold, imperious, absolutist, and damning in the opinions he issues on the various degenerate aspects of modern life, including rock n’ roll music. (He was, it should be noted, the original manager of the Velvet Underground, whose drummer, Maureen Tucker, would become another notable Factory-affiliated conservative.) Of his conception of Trash—originally titled “Drug Trash”—Morrissey said: “The basic idea is that drug people are trash. There’s no difference between a person using drugs and a piece of refuse.”

This statement wouldn’t seem to leave a great deal of room for interpretation, and from this you might conclude that Morrissey is in the business of producing fire-and-brimstone screen sermons, but the films themselves are as open and casual as that statement is pat, and moreover funny, charming, and palpably brimming with affection and respect for the performers that appear in them—the only subjects, aside from himself and the pre-Second Vatican Council Roman Catholic church, which the director never fails to speak glowingly of—and for the individuals that they’re portraying, even though both categories include quite a number of the sort of people of whom one might expect a traditionalist like Morrissey to feel compelled to express his dripping disapproval of.

To hear Morrissey tell things, however, it isn’t the film director’s job to express too much of anything, rather to find performers of suitable interest, provide them a slender scenario and the outline of a character as a platform, and encourage them in improvisations—the director effectively decreasing so the performer can increase. In a 1972 New York Times profile, published as Morrissey was finally beginning to emerge from Warhol’s shadow, Morrissey says: “Andy and I really try not to direct a film at all. We both feel the stars should be the center of the film.” The same profile notes some of the ways in which Morrissey’s improv-heavy films were distinct from Warhol’s; namely, in that they “had a plot and he’d edit verbiage from characters who wouldn't stop talking. He would also move the camera around for different set ups.” This was a break with Warhol’s earlier pure primitivism which encouraged even Warhol to, beginning with a pan in an unused Edie Sedgwick scene in 1965’s Space, chance the occasional camera movement, something that certain admirers of the purity of the pre-Morrissey Factory films have never ceased to curse the on-the-make interloper for.

Yacowar describes Morrissey’s aesthetic as “noninterventionist” when discussing the unscripted films he produced during his Warhol years, unusual in the freedoms that they provided their performers to create their characters in deluges of dizzy verbiage—another of Morrissey’s many contradictions being that this man who freely and frequently voices his belief in the necessity of restraint in any civilized society is among the most indulgent and uncontrolling of filmmakers. But while Morrissey’s later films still display a rare sense of spontaneity, by the time of his mid-‘70s horror movie diptych he was no longer relying on wholly on improvisation, even as he remained unusually open to input from his performers. (Vittorio De Sica, who plays a pompous nobleman in The Blood of Dracula, wrote his own florid speeches for the film, and the scene in which Dracula’s valet is drawn into in a tavern game gamble by a wily peasant was the invention of the actor playing the peasant, one Roman Polanski.)

If Morrissey’s Warhol-era films don’t necessarily feel like the product of a conservative filmmaker, one could sensibly argue that they aren’t, entirely—that instead they’re communal works, which belong as much to stars like Holly Woodlawn, Jackie Curtis, Darling, and Dallesandro. But can the same be said of Morrissey’s later, scripted works? An instructive example is Spike of Bensonhurst, Morrissey’s last completed fiction feature until 2010’s News from Nowhere, released in some overseas markets with the inane title Mafia Kid.

Morrissey, who can often be found vociferously and repeatedly insisting that he isn’t a political filmmaker, calls Spike his “most political film of all with its blatant acknowledgement of the need for some kind of control, even gangster control, placed on life.” The film is set largely in the respectively Italian-American and Puerto Rican enclaves of Bensonhurst and Red Hook, though most of the film’s actual locations are in North Brooklyn, including Williamsburg’s Fortunato Brothers Italian bakery, the then-laying-in-ruins McCarren Park pool, and a brief glimpse of row houses on Devoe St. (The palatial home occupied in the movie by Ernest Borgnine’s neighborhood mob capo, Cacetti, can be found a little further afield, on Albemarle Rd. in Ditmas Park.) Spike Fumo, played with cocky charisma by a pre-television celebrity Sasha Mitchell, is a club fighter born and raised in Bensonhurst, where he earns a little extra scratch collecting for a numbers racket run by Cacetti. Tired of flopping in fixed fights and aspiring to something more than the fate of his father—the old man is in prison upstate, having taken a rap for Cacetti—Spike tries to worm his way into the capo’s family by impregnating his boss’s daughter, Angel (Maria Pitillo), in a purely transactional bit of lovemaking. Instead he finds himself exiled from Bensonhurst, moving into Red Hook with a fellow pug, Bandanna (Rick Aviles), and his mother and sister (Antonia Rey and Talisa Soto). Seeing addicts and dealers going about their business in full sight of the police, Spike takes it on himself to play Hercules in the Augean Stables and clean up the streets, at the same time creating a mess of his own when he knocks up his buddy’s sister, Soto’s India, still running after Angel all the while. Cacetti’s perturbation turns to rage when he finds Spike passed out next to his wife in his matrimonial bed, and subsequently orders his henchmen to permanently end the kid’s dreams of ring glory by taking a meat tenderizer to his right hand.

The image of a boxer being violently robbed of his meal ticket thusly isn’t original to Spike. I suspect that Morrissey might have been inspired by the ending of Robert Wise’s The Set-Up (1949), in which banged-up prize fighter Bill “Stoker” Thompson (Robert Ryan), having refused to throw a fight on syndicate orders, is punished by having his mitt mashed into jelly with a brick. When Thompson’s worried wife Audrey Totter, who’s been begging him to walk away from the Sweet Science, finds her brutalized husband in the streets, he gasps “I won tonight,” to which she responds “Yes, you won tonight… We both won tonight.” (It stands to reason that she’s happy in the knowledge that she’s nursed her now-retired husband through his last concussion, though this always struck me as an odd thing to say to a man who’s just been beaten insensate and crippled.)

Spike’s ruination will lead to a sort of redemption, as well, though Morrissey’s film ends on a far more plangent, ambiguous note than Wise’s pat conclusion. An ellipsis of uncertain length follows the hand-smashing, after which we pick up with Cacetti making the rounds of his dominion, stopping into a vinyl siding-clad triple-decker hand-in-hand with his grandson—and who should he be going to visit but India, Spike, and their two young children. Spike now wears the uniform of a beat cop; the gig, we learn, was lined up for him by Cacetti. Lashing out against his destiny no longer, back where he belongs in Bensonhurst, Spike has settled into his place in the social order of the neighborhood as husband, father, and workaday breadwinner. The film closes with a wordless exchange of glances between the now-chastened Spike and India, following a bit of casual racism from Cacetti, commenting on the new baby’s color. Spike seems now to have lost his old braggadocio and fight, and there’s a sadness in seeing him reined in, because that cocksure, yappy kid was charming in a boneheaded way—but he also has a new calm, and in our last glance of him, looking into India’s eyes, his expression might be described as a kind of rueful contentment.

From Dallesandro’s stake-driver to the eponymous Spike, Morrissey’s films show a deep ambivalence towards social climbers, depicted as sowers of discord and violence. (Yet another irony, as several of the Factory cohort recall Morrissey as being set apart by a hustle and work ethic that were unusual in that crowd.) Morrissey’s comments leave little doubt that he views the blunting of Spike, his comeuppance and submission, as a necessary part of maturation, and we might very well call this a conservative proposition. But one of the handful of filmmakers of whom Morrissey speaks with open admiration is John Ford—and like Ford, describing the tensions that exist between the individual and the community, Morrissey doesn’t turn a blind eye to the shortcomings of the community.

Spike, who’s quick to condemn the rampant drug use he finds in blighted Red Hook and tout the superiority of the civilization in orderly Bensonhurst, never seems to make a connection between the misery and squalor he sees on the streets of the Puerto Rican neighborhood and the drug-dealing operation that Cacetti and company oversee back home. If the Cosa Nostra do manage to impose a certain degree of admirable order over a few blocks of Brooklyn, they’re still implicated in a broader pattern of graft and corruption: Cacetti, gesturing to a framed portrait of Mario Cuomo, informs Spike that he dutifully contributes money to “the liberal politicians—all that garbage,” and later he’ll be seen at a Bar Mitzvah glad-handing with a coke-sniffing, soft-on-crime congresswoman who, in her elaborate millinery, appears to be definitely intended as a caricature of Bella Abzug. The clannishness that keeps the neighborhood together has a very ugly side, visible when Bandanna and some friends are found strolling through Bensonhurst one night and are rushed en masse for the crime of being Puerto Rican in an Italian neighborhood. (A year after Spike’s release, Yusef Hawkins, a black teenager from East New York, would be murdered by a white mob in Bensonhurst; the same year, another Spike presented his Do the Right Thing, a film not irrelevant to the matters at hand.) There is nothing idealized in Morrissey’s depiction of Bensonhurst, but it’s where Spike’s home and heritage are, and that, Morrissey seems to say, is about the best you can hope for in a world that’s gone swirling down the shitter.    

The words “garbage” and “toilet” are staples of any Morrissey interview, and central to the Morrissey worldview. The poet Bill Berkson’s posthumously published Since When: A Memoir in Pieces offers a pertinent thumbnail sketch of Morrissey at the end of the ‘60s: “An expression Jim (Carroll) picked up on, Paul Morrissey’s way of saying ‘Whaat ga-arbage’—became multipurpose at some point. Jim particularly loved and perfectly mimicked the bright disdain with which Morrissey intoned this phrase and used it often and appropriately. He had that stunning, mad Irish American Catholic mixture of skeptical knowingness and ceremonial awe. The only book I remember him giving me was the fourteenth-century manual on contemplation The Cloud of Unknowing.”

In one form or another, this sense of the world as a wastebin makes its way into every Morrissey film, a treasured motif that he connects to an early encounter with the sewer-set climax of Carol Reed’s The Third Man (1949), of which the filmmaker has said: “This notion that the conflicts of modern life, so debased and degenerate, are fittingly placed in the ultimate setting of human waste, was an idea that never left me.” His films are heaped with cast-offs, human and otherwise, and his known enthusiasms are remarkably consistent in their concern with refuse. Mixed Blood gives a starring role to the Brazilian actress Marília Soares Pêra, best known for her role in Héctor Babenco’s Pixote (1981), and the appeal of that film to Morrissey, with its depiction of uncared-for youth struggling to survive by rummaging through rubbish bins in waste land favelas, should be rather apparent. So, too, the draw of the reality television show Hardcore Pawn (2010-14), about a family-owned and -operated pawn shop located on Detroit’s 8 Mile road, in which proprietor “Les” Gold and his two children are confronted by a steady stream of victims of capitalism trying to unload their junky heirlooms for a few bucks of gas money. (Here we are not far from the community built around the outdoor flea market in Madame Wang’s, stocked with discarded doorknobs and, of course, heaps of toilet seats.) In Spike, the key toilet appears in the overcrowded public school where India and Bandanna’s mother teaches, trying to educate zoned-out kids in humankind’s noble heritage from inside a repurposed bathroom.   

All of this may sound unremittingly grim, but Morrissey is here as ever a firm follower of the “Make ‘em laugh” pleasure principal, serving up a bitter pill philosophy with an easy-to-swallow sugar coating. (Otto Preminger’s brusque review of Heat in a panel following its New York Film Festival screening—“Depressingly entertaining”—hits the nail rather squarely on the head.) Spike is, beat-by-beat, an almost deliriously enjoyable viewing experience, as was confirmed by the steady gales of laughter at a public screening last month; the melancholy only sinks in later. The movie bops along on a wall-to-wall soundtrack of buoyant contemporary Italian pop, with songs from the 1984 album Malattia d’amore by Pupo, neé Enzo Ghinazzi, given a particular place of pride. Spike pitches woo to Angel in an outdoor line dance sequence where they, along with dozens of young Bensonhurst Italian-Americans, move in swoony harmony to the honeyed strains of “M’innamoro di te,” a single by the Genoa group Ricchi e Poveri. The incongruity of rangy, macho, pushy Spike going through the slow, feline, fey motions of the dance is very funny, as is his explanation to Angel of the spell the music casts on her: “That’s ‘cause youse a good Italian girl. This music is like ya heritage, ya know? It’s been around for hundreds of years.” (The song was released in 1981.) This scene, however, follows on another that shows lockstep racial solidarity in a darker light—the brutal scuffle with the Puerto Rican outsiders, its bone-crunching body slams ironically scored to Ricchi e Poveri’s feather-light “Sarà perché ti amo.”

When not busy railing against rock n’ roll, Morrissey has proclaimed his preference for “ethnic” music, and in Spike, as in Mixed Blood, he turns his focus on hyphenated-American communities who haven’t yet wholly been rendered down in the melting pot of U.S. consumer capitalism, which he seems to regard as something like a boiling cauldron that disintegrates the bonds of family, community, and tradition in order to create atomized, isolate individualists, the ideal marks for a junk-peddling culture. (He has a particular distaste for fast food, as evidenced in Spike when Cacetti’s wife tells her stockbroker to invest in “high-fat foods,” and in Madame Wang’s when a bloated matriarch played by Jimmy Maddow stuffs her son with Big Macs.) There is, nevertheless, a dose of irony in Morrissey’s association of Angel with jukebox fantasies, as the contrast he builds in his treatment of Spike’s two romances is one between the forgotten richness of real feeling and the poverty of aspirational fantasy in a plasticine present.

Morrissey acquired a certain infamy for the then-novel sexual explicitness of his films, particularly those with Dallesandro in the late ‘60s and ‘70s, but he is explicit only when dealing with sex-as-business: Dallesandro fondling his landlady for a rent reduction in Heat; the various erotic negotiations that make up Blood for Dracula; or the assignation between a young prostitute (Christina Indri) and a diaper-clad client in Madame Wang’s, among that film’s myriad perversities. The backseat barter between Spike and Angel doesn’t go further than Spike unbuckling his belt in preparation to go to work planting his seed, but this suffices to establish the basis of their relationship in material exchange—his body in trade for her dowry—rather than spiritual communion. By contrast, Morrissey is positively coy when dealing with deeper connections, as is evident in his treatment of the slow-blossoming bond between Spike and India. The evolution of their relationship is depicted largely as a series of silently exchanged glances, like those that conclude the film, and there’s a jolting moment when Bandanna chides Spike for chasing after Angel after he’s gotten India pregnant—jolting, because we haven’t up to this point so much as seen them kiss. Their romance, the pivotal element in Spike’s eventual settling, occurs off-screen, as though Morrissey is too discreet to barge in on something so precious. (Yacowar draws an apt comparison between the treatment of the Spike-India relationship and the off-screen consummation between Kier’s Dracula and Milena Vukotic’s spinster Esmerelda in the otherwise ultra-graphic Blood for Dracula.) His own life seems to have been marked by a similar discretion; as Warhol recalled: “The running question was, did [Morrissey] have a sex life or not? Everyone who’d ever known him insisted that he did absolutely nothing, and all his hours seemed accounted for, but still Paul was an attractive guy, so people constantly asked, 'What does he do? He must do something...’” In latter-day interviews, one can find the oft-censored Morrissey preaching the virtues of “commonsense censorship.”    

So in Morrissey we have both Puritan and pornographer, another paradox to add to a pile that already includes: anti-communist admirer of steely Soviet resolve, terminally pessimistic director of mostly comic films, noninterventionist filmmaker who believes in the necessity of control, conservative Catholic who was a fixture in an underground milieu filled with drug users and deviants, and proud independent operator who believes in submission to traditional hierarchies… Looking at Morrissey’s many, seemingly antithetical facets, some might find evidence of canting hypocrisy—“Is Paul Morrissey,” asks Yacowar, “the poor man’s Cecil B. DeMille, who wallows in the orgies around the golden calves, then covers himself with a pat pontification?” The author answers his self-posed question in the negative, which might be expected given that he wrote a whole book about Morrissey, finding in his films a laudably persistent moral humanism and a vision that “embraces the sinner even as he condemns the sin.”

That’s as may be, but in truth I’ve never put a premium on artists resolving the disparate aspects of their personalities into irreproachable and airtight value systems to be communicated in crystalline transparency through their work; if all questions are settled before starting out to make a film, why make the thing at all? This is probably why I value DeMille’s filmography, with its tug-of-war tension between Christian piety and SM perversity, more than Yacowar seems to, and why I keep a bedside vigil with the ailing cinema, which still sometimes allows bits of happenstance and irreconcilable information to slip in and muddle messages, those bits of disarray that remind us of lived experience in all its complexity and confustion. In addressing the anomalies of Morrissey and his films, it’s worth quoting some of the director’s own stated views of character: “People are really capable of being many different things. If it’s all written down for the actors and they read their parts in advance and they figure who they are and what kind of person they’re going to play, they play that kind of person all the way through the script. When it’s informal and free, they can be lustful here and childish there and sympathetic here and not so sympathetic in other scenes. I found it very useful as far as characterization goes.” As he would succinctly put it elsewhere: “I like complicating a character. If you make them embody contrary thinking then they’re a little bit funny, a little more human.”

This human quality is what I value in the films of this most self-effacing of filmmakers, Paul Morrissey, who never wastes an opportunity to swipe at the Frenchified notion of the vaunted auteur—though I would argue that his notion of auteurism is based in a common misinterpretation of the actual Cahiers du Cinéma line, which was not so much premised on a director’s total dominion over every element of a production but on the understanding that a mechanical art being practiced amidst the hurly-burly of a film shoot couldn’t perforce be truly controlled, only channeled, and that every film was a combination of intent and accident, and that an identifiable style wasn’t something hidebound but rather a pattern of responses to unpredictable circumstances, and that practitioners of an artform so close to life shouldn’t be valued for winnowing life down into something so narrow as a dunning, repetitious message, but rather for being consistent in their inconsistencies. All of which is rather more complicated than just saying “The director is the omnipotent force responsible for making a movie,” which is what auteurism usually gets boiled down to, because as we know, people have a positive passion for simplifying things.  

The cut-and-dry designation of “right-wing filmmaker” is a meager vessel to attempt to decant a bundle of contradictions like Morrissey into, just as the designation “left-wing filmmaker” struggles to iron out the stubborn wrinkles in the thinking of Pier Paolo Pasolini, who would come to resemble Morrissey more than a little in his revilement of consumer culture and his desolate surety, late in his life, that apocalypse was nigh.

Both Morrissey and Pasolini repeatedly took slum-dwellers and those society shunned and abandoned as their subjects, in Pasolini’s case designated as the “sub-proletariat,” in whom potentially regenerative vestiges of the peasant culture of centuries past survived in a brutalized present. Both men perceived that seemingly irreversible harm had been done to the most vulnerable of their countrymen and -woman by postwar prosperity, the erosion of tradition by pervasive consumerism that followed and, eventually, the license encouraged by an emergent “counterculture.” “I’m scared of these slaves in revolt,” said Pasolini in an interview conducted the day before his murder, “Because they behave exactly like their plunderers, desiring everything and wanting everything at any price”—a statement which neatly summarizes the Dallesandro-Kier dynamic in The Blood of Dracula. I know of only one instance of Morrissey speaking of Pasolini on record (he briefly calls him “great” in a 1980 interview), though he’s gotten somewhat more expansive discussing his admiration of 1963’s Il Gattopardo, another film of fading aristocrats whose card-carrying Commie director, Luchino Visconti, embodied an impressive internal incongruity, being both Comrade and to-the-manor-born Count.

If the films of radical right-winger Morrissey, at least in terms of presiding themes, find ready comparisons to those of left-identified filmmakers like Pasolini and Visconti, this could be accounted for by a kind of horseshoe theory of socio-political abjection—the anguished reactionary traditionalist shares with the revolutionist firebrand the conviction that the existing system is irredeemable, and differ though they may in their prescriptions for what made or might make a better world, this sense of horror gives them more in common with one another than either share with the middle-range liberal who imagines that the necessary amelioration of the catastrophe of contemporaneity can be incrementally improved within the present parameters of possibility. You don’t exactly have to leap a vast chasm to get between Pasolini’s conception of the industrialized world as a pigsty rife with cannibalism in Porcile (1969) and Morrissey’s of the United States as a dumping ground populated by wretched, dehumanized gleaners in practically every film he made. It was Pasolini who began one of his poems “I am a force of the past/Tradition is my only love”—the lines are spoken in dubbed Italian by a film director played by Orson Welles in La ricotta, Pasolini’s contribution to the 1963 omnibus film Ro.Go.Pa.G—but only the fact that Morrissey generally avoids such grandiloquent language betrays that the words aren’t his own.

Some sense of Pasolini’s view of “the past” may be gleaned from his relationship with the work of Ezra Pound, another radical modernist steeped in tradition. Born in Idaho in 1885 and raised in the vicinity of Philadelphia, Pound had established himself as the dean of modernist literature in the course of a series of editorships that took him first to London, then to Paris, before he finally settled in Rapallo, in the north of Italy, in 1924, two years after Mussolini’s March on Rome. At the close of the Great War, which Pound viewed as a devastating blow to the European civilization he’d so admired, Pound found what seemed a reasonable explanation for the cataclysm during a chance 1918 meeting with Maj. C.H. Douglas at the London offices of socialist journal The New Age, where Pound contributed a regular column. The founding prophet of the “Social Credit” movement, a theory of economics that proposed the government issuance of debt-free money, Douglas blamed the war on finance capitalism, the “usury” which Pound had already come to disdain as much as he did democracy, and which he associated with international Jewry. Thusly, publicly proselytizing for his first great cause, “Social Credit,” led Pound to his second, a passion for fascism generally and for Il Duce’s regime specifically, the virtues of which he extolled over a series of radio broadcasts delivered first from Radio Rome, then from the Nazi Germany-controlled puppet state established in the north in response to the rapid progress of the Allied Italian campaign, the Republic of Salò. 

The capital-in-exile city, located on the banks of Lake Garda in Lombard, would be the setting of Pasolini’s final film, Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma (Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, 1975). During the film’s culminating cavalcade of tortures, witnessed via binoculars by giggling spectator Aldo Valletti, a quotation from Pound’s “Canto XCIX”—part of a 116 section poem cycle that Pound labored on from 1915 to 1962—is heard on the radio, concluding: “Small birds sing in chorus/Harmony is the proportion of branches/as clarity.” (The Canto in question, Pound’s re-writing of the Kangxi Emperor’s 1670 Sacred Edict, reflecting his long engagement with Confucianism, wouldn’t have been broadcast in Salò, not having been published until 1959 as Thrones de los Cantares XCVI-CIX.)

Soundtracking the barbaric slaughter of innocents with Pound’s lyric extolling of Confucian social order may be read as an implication or indictment, but Pasolini can elsewhere be found approaching Pound in a positively collegial manner. In winter of 1968, a decade after Pound’s long imprisonment by the United States government on charges of treason had come to an end, Pasolini presided over a television interview with Pound that was filmed for RAI television italiana in Venice, the director having stepped in at the last minute to cover for the Sicilian poet Vanni Ronsisvalle. Pasolini begins the interview by quoting the opening lines of Pound’s “A Pact,” his grudging 1913 address to another pioneer in poetry—“I make a pact with you, Walt Whitman-/I have detested you long enough”—then repeats the same lines, with Pound’s name now replacing Whitman’s. He doesn’t mention the last four lines—“It was you who broke the new wood/Now is a time for carving./We have one sap and one root-/Let there be commerce between us”—but the impression of an extended olive branch is clear enough.

By the time of a December, 1973 article, published a little over a year after Pound’s death, Pasolini even seems to have come to regard Pound as a kind of kindred spirit in his veneration of a lost rural tradition, writing: “Everything that came to Pound from this peasant world by way of his father and the mythic figure of his grandfather can be seen in the way Pound idealized Chinese culture. Pound’s China is born from that archaic world of the peasants from which the modern American farmers have descended. Pound… was not at all an Orphic poet. He wanted—he firmly and madly desired—to remain in that peasant world… His ideology was made up of nothing less than the veneration of the values of that world (revealed to him in concrete form by pragmatic, virtuous Chinese philosophy.)… The ‘coherence’ of the Cantos consists in a retreat to the heart of the peasant world for which ancient China is a symbol; where governments become ever more tyrannical and illuminated.” While not overlooking Pound’s vulnerability to “reactionary ideology,” Pasolini ascribes it to his subject’s “peasant background,” which may seem a bit rich considering that mythic grandfather, Thaddeus C. Pound, had been a member of the U.S. House of Representatives, but Pasolini made no such distinctions, considering Americans as a whole the descendants of sub-proletarian immigrants.

If Pasolini felt he could afford to be indulgent of Pound’s fascism in the mid-‘70s, this was because he had come to view the fascism of Blackshirts, jackboots, and castor oil as a defanged relic of the pre-industrial past, an “archaeological fascism,” and he was now consumed with a more pernicious breed of contemporary fascism, which he named in this excerpt from a December, 1974 column in L’Europeo: “I believe, I profoundly believe, that the real fascism is the one that the sociologists have called, with too much good will, ‘consumer society.’” This new enemy, Pasolini insisted, had succeeded in remaking its subjects’ and colonizing their inner lives with a totality its predecessor might have envied; as he put it in his 1973 article ‘Acculturation and Assimilation’: “No fascist centralism ever managed to do what the centralism of consumer civilization has successfully accomplished.” Salò was about the Italy of 1945, but also about the Italy of 1975, showing the dawn of the country’s new, hedonistic fascism in the last spree of its old fascist regime.

Pound’s “detestation” of Whitman would seem to have been a matter of anxiety of influence above all else—in the years prior to his beginning on his Cantos, he had been known to slip into imitation of Whitman’s repetitious, cataloguing metric, and he always retained something of Whitman’s preening, affected self-presentation, as well as Whitman’s conviction of poetry’s destiny as a dynamic force in the world. (When asked about the possibility of a poet “actively engag[ing] the world in which he lives” in the RAI interview, Pound replied “It’s necessary, if truly lived… not to drift to the periphery,” just before proclaiming “politics” as “a provisional word,” and “only vocabulary.”) Pasolini, it may be argued, had more motive for his enmity to Pound. Pasolini’s younger brother, Guidalberto, had been killed at age 19 in 1945, while fighting to liberate Salò with the Osoppo-Friulian Brigade of the anti-fascist Partito d’Azione near the Italian-Slovenian border. That same year, two anti-fascist Italian partisans would drag Pound out of his redoubt in Sant’ Ambrogio, after which he would begin his long confinement at the U.S. Army Disciplinary Training Center outside Pisa. If Pasolini was willing to make peace with Pound, it’s perhaps because he was increasingly, despairingly conscious of his own inability to change the course of contemporary events through his activity as a thinker, poet, and filmmaker, and had occasion to wonder how much an American crank babbling about monetary theory on the radio had actually contributed to his brother’s death. As America had Whitman as its bard, so Italy had poets who seemed to address the nation as a whole—Dante long before nationhood, and then that first Duce, the proto-fascist d’Annunzio, who’d ruled briefly over the Free State of Fiume. Pasolini had perhaps envisaged himself as following in their footsteps, only to discover that artists no longer shaped the destinies of nations, if indeed they ever had. Mussolini had begun his career as a journalist and novelist, but in time found a more efficacious outlet for his active imagination.

Pasolini’s dimming hopes for the future of Italy and humanity as a whole are evident an essay titled “Abiura dalla Trilogia della vita” (“Abjuration of the Trilogy of Life”), written while he was at work on Salò. Where his trilogy—consisting of Il Decameron (1971), The Canterbury Tales (1972), and Il fiore delle mille e una note (1974)—had been undertaken in the belief that fallen humanity could be rehabilitated by uncorrupted, unfettered eros, by the time of Salò, Pasolini had come to believe that the liberational promise of sex had been demeaned by the commerce’s cruel mandates. Wrote Pasolini: “First: the progressive fight for expressive democratization and sexual liberalization has been brutally overcome and frustrated by the consumerist power’s decision to bestow a wide (and false) tolerance. Second: even the ‘reality’ of innocent bodies has been violated, manipulated and tampered with by the consumerist power: indeed, such a violence against bodies has become the most glaring fact of a new human epoch.” Rather than an Age of Aquarius, Pasolini saw a new kind of immiseration resulting from the sexual revolution, so-called, concluding that “a [kind of] society that is tolerant and permissive is the one in which neuroses are most frequent, insofar as such a society requires that all the possibilities it allows be exploited, that is, it requires a desperate effort so as not to be less than everybody else in a competitiveness without limits.”

Pasolini’s idea of the permissive society as an instrument of control more finds an echo in a statement of Morrissey’s: “Pandering to basest instincts, the stupid liberal says ‘Let it all hang out,’ ‘Do whatever you feel like doing.’ With three big carrots, sex, drugs, and rock and roll, they rule, they have the power, they control life under them with a much stronger hold than the Soviet dictators with their enforced puritanism ever dreamed possible… Unfortunately, once you’re cast adrift from custom and tradition they all want it on their own inverted terms.” Liberation, according to Morrissey, is enslavement—whereas conversely, “In the mind of a conservative everything good lies in an ideal reality. That reality is attainable through some kind of control.”

While certain affinities exist between Morrissey and Pasolini, or Pasolini and Pound, or even Pound and Morrissey, their divergences are equally vast. Each has their individual Utopian strain, a vision of “ideal reality,” but their visions vary, as do the ways they impress themselves on their work. Pasolini’s reverence for tradition is not, as in the cases of Morrissey and Pound, grounded in a desire to return to an imagined orderly past, but in a desire to use the desirous elements of that past to remake a moribund present. (Wrote Pasolini in 1962: “It is necessary to tear the Monopoly of tradition from the hands of traditionalists. Only revolution can save tradition.”) Morrissey may share Pound’s belief in hierarchal social arrangements as the best guarantor of maintaining peace and happiness, but where Pound’s Cantos provide instructive maxims, Morrissey’s is a gallows humor art comprised largely of negative examples of what occurs when men and women are abandoned to freedom, and in them characters who might be regarded as mouthpieces for their director’s wisdom are no more or less ridiculous than the rest. (When India and Bandanna’s law-and-order minded, Italophile mother meets Spike, she enthuses over Italy’s legacy of Great Men: “Julius Caesar! Mussolini! Al Capone!”)

When an artists’ ideal reality comes to seem out-of-reach, what results are frequently works of despair, evocations of squandered potentialities and all-consuming desolation. There will be no end to the sifting through the rubble of T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” in search of meaning, but there’s at least some general consensus that Eliot, an American expat who’d decamped to Europe in search of civilization like his friend and editor, Pound, was expressing some of the same postwar malaise that had driven the man he called “il miglior fabbro” (“the better craftsman”) in the poem’s dedication into the waiting arms of Maj. C.H. Douglas. In addition to the howl of Salò, Pasolini left behind a draft unfinished novel of 133 fragments and some 500 pages that he’d been working on at the time of his death, Petrolio. (Pasolini had planned for the finished novel to be four times as long, a project comparable in scope and formal ambition to Pound’s Cantos or Gregory Markopoulos’s 80-hour Eniaios cycle.) Finally published in 1992, among the more memorable passages in its disjointed fragments is a description of apocalyptic environmental destruction: “Finally, an immense pile of trash appeared, in a sort of large hollow in the earth, with an /unbreathable acid/ odor and the sparkle of tin and the more <opaque> sparkle of plastic; part of the trash had been burned, leaving a barren expanse of ashes; the rest was burning. The fires hissed, faded, or flared up suddenly, fed by the polluted wind, in the most absolute solitude.” The desolation of Pasolini’s final works was matched by his own finish. When a woman living in a shack on the beach in Ostia discovered the murdered Pasolini’s body on the morning of November 2nd, 1975, she initially mistook the corpse for a discarded bag of refuse. Gary Indiana, writing about Pasolini and his paradoxes, summed up the final irony of his death thusly: “For this worshipper of vanished times and values was the victim of the most entrenched prejudices surviving from the past. Embracing the stereotype of the noble peasant, he was hounded throughout his career by the homophobia and pious ignorance of peasants, and finally got murdered by one.”

Morrissey may be envied the fact that, unlike Pasolini or Pound, he seems not to have had any cherished illusions of potential regeneration to be disabused of, never having wavered from his serene knowledge that ours is and has long been a landfill world, a Waste Land where the center had long ago ceased to hold. When the filmmaker was emerging from out of Warhol’s shadow at the beginning of the ‘70s, as in the aftermath of World War I, the scent of garbage seems to have been thick in the air. The New York Dolls, a proto-punk five piece whose gender-bending sartorial style owed something to that of Morrissey’s leading ladies, released a debut single, “Trash,” in 1973.2 Baltimorean John Waters, ten years Morrissey’s junior, began his own trilogy—the so-called “Trash Trilogy” that consisted of Pink Flamingos (1972), Female Trouble (1974), and Desperate Living (1977)—just as Morrissey and Pasolini were finishing up theirs. Waters, like Morrissey, had a nose for the stench of all-American filth, though where Morrissey loudly bemoaned the spectacle of waste, Waters seemed to revel in all the splendid squalor. Watching Desperate Living, one distinctly has the sense that Waters regards the rag-and-bone outlaw community of Mortville—once Edith Massey’s despotic Queen Carlotta has been dethroned—as a rather pleasant place to settle down.

This crucial difference notwithstanding, Waters and Morrissey’s films are not so unalike as one might think. Both are before all else comic artists; Morrissey may have been appalled by the tackiness of contemporary America and Waters tickled pink by it, but both regard laughter as the proper response to the spectacle. Both share a predilection for casting transgender and transvestite performers—in the case of Morrissey’s Women in Revolt (1971), all three female leads: Curtis, Darling, and Woodlawn. And finally, both are united by the unmistakable fondness with which they regard their often ridiculous, sometimes duplicitous, but never despised characters, and the actors who perform as them. “I’m sensitive to all the characters equally,” Morrissey once stated. “I have no favorites. In an immoral world no one is better or worse than any other.”

This generosity—one is tempted to call it Renoir-esque—renders even the most seemingly straightforward of Morrissey’s works far more difficult to pin down when they’re subjected to any real scrutiny. Women in Revolt, for example, is usually succinctly summarized as a parody of the Women’s Liberation Movement, a return fire from the Factory following radical feminist Valeria Solanas’s near-fatal shooting of Warhol in 1968. (Morrissey was in the toilet, of all places, when the shooting went down.) But the film itself complicates such a reading; writing in his Screening the Sexes, Parker Tyler notes that “mere description is beggared when it comes to rendering into words what Women in Revolt ‘is,’” before going on to summarize the film’s essential paradox: “The gimmick and the grandeur are all together. We never forget, nor are we meant to forget, that these ‘actresses’ are males. And they are most male when most absurdly pretending to be female… Somehow [the film] provides a transcendent insight, piercing and not without blood, into what the Marilyn Monroes and Jean Harlows of film history always used to be about.”   

Women in Revolt, in its unusual approach to the feminist phenomenon, is a work no less rich in internal tensions than Henry James’s 1886 The Bostonians, the book that Richard Lansdown called “A remarkably experimental modern novel, written by a man of conservative values. It is judgmental about people with whom the author identified, and lenient towards attitudes hostile towards large areas of James’s own intellectual and personal inheritance. The strength of the contradictions embodied in the novel are a guarantee of the pleasure it has to give.”

Not everyone would agree with Lansdown’s assessment. When James’s portrait by John Singer Sargent, commissioned on the occasion of his 70th birthday, was put on display at the Royal Academy exhibition in May of 1914, a suffragette by the name of Mary Aldham, using the alias Mary Wood, produced a meat cleaver and gave the area of the canvas around James’s right eye three solid whacks. Explaining her actions later, she wrote simply “I have tried to destroy a valuable picture because I wish to show the public that they have no security for their property nor for their art treasures until women are given their political freedom.” Aldham didn’t make any mention of having read The Bostonians, but anyways she doesn’t strike me as the type to go in for Jamesian ambiguity.

As a general rule, I don’t go in for shooting artists or vandalizing works of art—above is the distinctive cast of Rodin’s The Thinker that sits outside the Cleveland Museum of Art, damaged by a dynamite blast in March of 1970—regardless of what I may think about the justness of their cause for doing so or the offense of the work. I caught a bit of Matthew Vaughn’s X-Men: First Class (2011) on a bar television set the other day, and though I can say unequivocally that it is the most atrocious-looking thing I have ever seen, I believe it should be preserved for future generations, like Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph des Willens (1935), as a testament to the banality of fascism—the old-fashioned kind that Pound advocated for in the case of Triumph, the consumer culture sort that Pasolini decried in the case of First Class.

That same tendency towards conservancy means I can’t get on-board with Morrissey’s advocacy for “commonsense censorship,” a phrase which begs the question: “Whose common sense?” (Those who call for limitations on free speech often seem to do so under the inexplicable assumption that it will be themselves or people who share their values who’ll be setting the limits.) Because I’ve read too many Edward Yang interviews, I can’t swallow Pound’s prescription of sublime Confucian order as the panacea for the untidiness of contemporaneity, and though I rate Pasolini’s as a first-class mind, he gets positively weird on the subject of students with long hair, among other things. On the whole, all three men fired got off some cogent points about consumer capitalism and the downsides of modern western democracy, but then I’ve been known to down a Big Mac from time-to-time, and I can’t pretend my soul is immaculate. Nevertheless, in either conflict or concordance, each artist has given me something—we can call it simply, as Lansdwon does, “pleasure.”

There is a certain kind of with-us-or-against-us binary mind that regards all talk of “nuance” as so much anxious prevaricating by insufficiently committed aesthetes trying to preserve their “problematic faves” from the dustbin of history with pleas to keep art clean and clear of politics. It would be insupportable to claim that artists’ personal politics—or their absence of personal politics—are wholly irrelevant to the work that artist produces; in fact, I don’t know that I’ve ever heard anyone say as much. (Arguing against the efficacy or interest of art-as-activism is another matter.) The fragments of Petrolio are difficult enough to make sense of as it is, and to understand Pasolini’s burlesqued treatment of an “anti-Fascist reception” in the novel—somewhere between the Dostoevsky of Demons and the Tom Wolfe of Radical Chic & Mau Mauing the Flak Catchers—it behooves one to know something of Pasolini’s attitude towards contemporary student radicals. Pound the poet cannot be separated from Pound the crackpot social-economic theorist, nor would he have asked to be, viewing the roles as inextricable, and part of the same grandiose mission.

The figure of the absolutist aesthete goes to the mat without so much as getting a punch in, as strawmen tend to. The real debate, however, has never been between parties advocating for strictly political or apolitical readings of art, but rather between reductive and expansive attitudes towards it. Can most any work be clarified into a descriptive kernel: “fascoid,” “as relevant now as ever,” “copaganda,” “pornography,” “a call to action,” and other old favorites? Is the essential thing to know how a film or novel might vote or what rallies and reading groups it might attend if it were suddenly to acquire human form, or are there other factors at play that require that plodding, painstaking business of digging through layers of discordant data and multivalent meanings, a process that requires living with art rather than cataloguing it, pinning it, and shelving it away in little Letterboxes?

Understanding the idiosyncrasies of artists’ stated ideologies—and with Morrissey, Pasolini, and Pound we’re dealing with three particularly idiosyncratic ones—can tell you something about their work and what they may be trying to put into it, but it can’t tell you everything, at least not if one believes an artwork can pose questions alongside certitudes, access vagaries of experience that can’t be jammed into boxes marked “right” and “left,” and present a view of the world more expansive than that of the meager individual that produced it. An observation made by Néstor Almendros in his Man with a Movie Camera, referring specifically to cinema, speaks to this final point. “Films are sometimes superior to their makers,” writes Almendros. “This may explain why at times I like films made by people who I find unpleasant or whose ideas are contrary to my own. It is possible to sit through a film made by someone who personally doesn’t deserve five minutes of one’s time.”

How to explain the phenomenon that Almendros describes? I suspect it amounts simply to a taste for new pleasures, new beauties, and new manners of expression that overwhelms the distaste for an individual’s personality or ideas. Whatever differences lay between them, Pasolini and Old Ez shared these tastes, this common root and sap, a fact evident in the Pound interview when Pasolini admiringly quotes one of the “Pisan Cantos,” written at the beginning of Pound’s incarceration, to the poet himself: “Under white clouds, Cielo di Pisa/out of all this beauty something must come.”

It may be that these lines don’t quicken your pulse—nor the dewy loveliness of cinematographer Tonino Delli Colli’s images in Il Decameron, which seem to have come from the dawn of the world; nor the image of sublime submission that ends Spike. This may considered a simple matter of taste—“What I do in my house, you might not do in your house,” as another American poet, Luther Campbell, once put it—though no matter of taste is entirely simple, for an individual’s sense of the beautiful tends to have not a little to do with their sense of truth.

We are coming close now to Keats and his Grecian urn—for the airy Romantic idealist an axiom of aesthetic pleasure, for the pure materialist a trinket left behind by a hypocritical slave-owning civilization. Most of us, myself included, probably lay somewhere in-between on this spectrum, though in recent years we’ve seen quite a bit of culture writing that touts the virtues of inuring one’s self to the pleasures that a work of art might give because it originates from a sensibility alien to one’s own, and this strikes me not as a matter of progress, but of impoverishment of the imagination. Asked for his advice to the young in that ‘68 interview, his final for television, Pound’s brief response was “Be curious.” I take this to mean taking an active interest in things standing outside of one’s self, in perspectives outside of one’s own, and this is what I fear is becoming ever-scarcer when characters in narrative art are judged for their “relatability,” when film stills are splattered across social media with the descriptor “Literally me,” and when demographic representation is discussed in terms of “feeling seen.” None of which is necessarily new or risible, though it does beg the question: shouldn’t art also allow us to see other people?

It is an undeniable fact that Pound’s curiosity led him to some very curious places, and observing the pride with which many now habitually display their incuriosity through a defensive evasions or an affected jadedness, the most charitable reading I can give this is that they’re afraid of being compromised through an encounter with some corrupting element. Purity is a possession to be valued in the absence of others, which is why Pasolini believed it to be the lone asset of the sub-proletariat with nothing else to their name, and why unaccomplished youth tend to place a premium on it before they acquire the inevitable tarnish that comes from contact with the world. Some will even hang onto their sense of purity awfully late into life, something easier than ever to do thanks to the many marvelous buffers that technology offers against the world and its sullying compromises. This is probably why you tend to encounter so many paragons of perfect virtue in the virtual sphere, while IRL they’re curiously thin on the ground.

There is so much art we’ve been told we no longer need to “bother” with—though you could be forgiven for wondering why, if someone finds it such a bother to watch a film or read a book, they are writing about these subjects at all. The past is a problematic country: they do things toxically there. So neatly do the reformist dictates of ethical media consumption dovetail with the efforts of “content providers” to shorten our collective cultural memory until they only have to wait six months between reboots of the handful of remaining IP, if one didn’t know better you might regard the process as downright reactionary.

This closing off of the self from art and artists deemed undesirable, unsettling, or outmoded was confronted by Pasolini in his “The Poetry of the Tradition,” a plea for pleasure published in a 1971 collection titled Trasumanar e organizzar (To Transfigure and to Organize), addressed to the youth of a “Calvinist generation” who had become “hardened against anything that didn’t ooze the right sentiments” and “spent the days of [their] youth speaking the jargon of bureaucratic democracy never departing from the repetition of formulas.” In a particularly stirring run, Pasolini writes:

“The books, the old books passed before your eyes
like the belongings of an old enemy
you felt obligated not to yield
to beauty grown in the soil of forgotten injustices
you were in the end devoted to good sentiments
against which you defended yourself as against that beauty
with a racist’s hate against passion;
you came into the world, which is vast and yet so simple,
and encountered those who laughed at the tradition,
and you took literally that mock-ribald irony,
erecting juvenile barriers against the ruling class of the past,
youth passes soon; oh unfortunate generation,
you’ll become middle-aged, then old
without enjoying what you had the right to enjoy
and can’t be enjoyed without anxiety and humility
and thus you’ll realize you’ve served the world
against which, so zealously, you ‘carried on the struggle’:
it was that world that wanted to discredit history—its;
it wanted to wipe the slate clean of the past—its;
oh unfortunate generation, and you obeyed by disobeying!”

If you’ve enjoyed this piece, please consider becoming a paid subscriber to Employee Picks, as that’s the only means I have to receive remuneration for researching and writing it.  

The drain trap on everyone’s memory has its own built-in idiosyncrasies when it comes to what flotsam remains and what passes straight on through; I can speak intimately only as to what my bits and pieces get stuck in my own flawed mechanism. Before a couple of recent revisitations I could’ve told you just a few things about Alain Corneau’s Police Pytho…

Read more

About a month ago I was riding the 7 line on the Paris Metro, jotting furiously in a pocket notebook, as is my wont, and a stranger, a guy with Shannon Hoon-ish locks who I’d have guessed to be somewhere in his twenties, noticed a name and address that I’d written down in its pages, and asked me a question. I should explain that I divested myself of my smartphone some time ago, consequently losing on-the-go access to the convenience of Google Maps and the like, and having done so requires me to prepare for any outing into unaccustomed territory by scrupulously writing out directions in advance. This is of course a massive annoyance, not least to the friends and loved ones who are forced to shoulder the burden of my technophobia, and very likely comes off as an infuriating affectation, but one of the comforts of aging—perhaps the only one—is that, if you’re doing it right, you give ever less fucks about looking like a ridiculous ponce. The address in question was 34 rue Daubenton, in the 5th arrondissement near the University of Paris III, and what the stranger asked me was “Allez-vous à la Clef?”

In my life as a repertory rat, this is the first and only time that a stranger has ever seen fit to strike up a conversation with me on the basis of any of the telltale signs of morbid cinephilia that are habitually dangling from my bedraggled person—contrary to popular belief, toting Tag Gallgher’s John Ford on one’s morning commute does not function as a piece of PUA flare. It’s illustrative of the degree to which the Cinéma la Clef Revival, a communally programmed and operated squatter’s cinema in the Quartier Latin who’ve spent the entire month of February under threat of eviction, captured the Parisian imagination this winter.

The La Clef Revival phenomenon can’t be explained by clichés about ardent French cinephilia; in Paris, as everywhere around the world, hardcore moviegoers are graying, aging, and shuffling off this mortal coil. A friend coming from a late January Cinémathèque Française repertory screening of Histoire de Marie et Julien (2003), part of the Cinémathèque’s Jacques Rivette retrospective, reported an audience of about a half-dozen, with an average age of approximately 88. This makes perfect sense, because what young person in their right mind would want to find themselves stuck in Bercy for an evening? In 2005 the Cinémathèque left behind its space in the bowels of the Palais de Chaillot, its residence since 1963, for a new home in that deathly dull 12th arrondissement neighborhood, settling into the former American Center building by starchitect Frank Gehry, which looks like a rejected design for a correctional facility in Fort Wayne, Indiana that one of Gehry’s assistants happened to find lying around when the commission came in.

La Clef Revival enjoys a considerably more propitious location for drawing the youth crowd than the Cinémathèque. The stretch of the Left Bank in the vicinity of the Sorbonne is home to more cinemas per square kilometer than perhaps anywhere else in Europe, if not the world—though this bastion of movie mania has suffered under the besiegement of urban redevelopment. A map of Saint-Germain-des-Prés featured in Axel Huyghe and Arnaud Chapuy’s recent volume on the storied Le Saint-André-des-Arts cinema allows one to see just how many movie theaters have turned off their lights since the heyday of the 1950s, back when Rivette was the holy terror of the trivia nights at the Studio Parnasse in Notre-Dames-des-Champs. Further cinema casualties have been inflicted by Covid closures, like the charming Accatone on rue Cujas1, snapped up after its shuttering by the neighboring Hôtel Excelsior. I’m not sure if they plan to keep it as a cinema space, but at any rate it won’t be named after a Pier Paolo Pasolini movie, and this seems to me an obvious loss for world culture.

That Paris isn’t quite itself anymore is a common complaint among Parisians, who’ve seen rents spike as absentee Airbnb renters infest the center city, inspiring many to light out for cheaper, grungier destinations like Marseilles and Brussels, which promise a temporary reprieve from the onslaught of corporate bulldozers—temporary, of course, because it seems they’ll arrive everywhere eventually, and flatten everything in their path2. This goes some ways towards explaining why La Clef Revival, a bulwark against the marching profit motive in the heart of Paris, has become a cause to rally to. As various well-known well-wishers put in appearances in the leadup (and aftermath) of a threatened Feb. 1st eviction by force, still looming at the time of this writing, it felt like the hottest ticket in town.

Having heard about La Clef Revival for some time from friends both at home and abroad, I set out to attend the cinema’s 8:30 screening of Une chambre en ville, being presented by Leos Carax on the evening of January 31st—potentially La Clef’s final screening. The line of disconcertingly good-looking, stylish kids that wrapped around the block 45 minutes before showtime said in no uncertain terms: “Better luck next time, Gramps.” Granted that the prospect of seeing police truncheons and tear gas lent the evening a certain grim allure of possible “value-added” entertainment, but the sight of a large number of hip Parisians who could just as easily have been having sex or swirling around in K-holes or whatever it is that young people do these days instead clamoring to watch a 1982 Jacques Demy movie together was intriguing and more than a little heartwarming. What exactly was going on here?

An abridged history: La Clef was opened as a three-screener, de cinéma d’Art & Essai La Clef, on October 10, 1973, with salles of 226, 97, and 86 seats, as well as an attached restaurant, Auberge de La Clef. This was under the management of one Claude Franck-Forter, the son of children’s clothing manufacturers from Troyes who had a small family fortune to play with and a yen to try his hand in film exhibition. I would’ve bet good money that La Clef had been built as a porno palace, given the fact that its façade is graced by a rather phallically suggestive key, but Monsieur Franck-Forter puts this theory to rest in a history of the La Clef hosted on their website, explaining: “For me, a key represents a mythical, almost magical object, because its etymology in several languages ​​describes either something that allows access to be limited, or the opposite, that is, to open it widely.” The only poster legible in the rare vintage image of La Clef online is for Francesco Rosi’s Lucky Luciano (1973), and the programmer through the Franck-Forter era was the perfectly respectable Bernard Martinand, a co-founder with the late Bertrand Tavernier of the ciné-club Nickel Odéon and a longtime associate of Henri Langlois at the Cinémathèque, where he would serve in various capacities after his time at La Clef. Guess I’ve just got a dirty mind.

After seven-plus years doing a brisk business with students, playing revival titles in mornings and late nights and new releases in-between, La Clef hit the skids at the beginning of the ‘80s. This situation Franck-Forter attributes to the new availability of inexpensive color televisions and a new hesitancy among distributors to give big-budget movies to small houses: the small fry gets screwed over, plus ça change. After closing the cinema in 1981, Franck-Forter sold La Clef to Comité d’Entreprise de la Caisse d’Épargne d’Île de France (CECEIDF), the works council of a regional branch of the Caisse d’Épargne cooperative banking group, since 2008 merged with the Groupe Banque Populaire, and still the building’s present—or, more accurately, absent—owners.

Following the purchase, Caisse d’Épargne kept two of the La Clef screens functioning as cinemas—now down to 120 and 65 seats—while using the rest of the premises as a cultural center for their employees. By 1990, the screens were being made available for outside organizations to program, most notable of these Images d’Ailleurs, who focused on screening works by African diaspora filmmakers and films from the Arab world; this was the brainchild of Togo-born Sanvi Panou, a “slameur” poet who’d appeared briefly as an actor in Jean-Luc Godard’s Week-End (1967) and recorded, as Alfred Panou, with the Art Ensemble of Chicago in 1969. (You can listen to his “Je suis un sauvage” here; it’s a hot track.) Around 2009-10, a new programming team moved in, consisting of Dounia Baba-Aissa, Raphaël Vion, and Nicolas Tarchiani, who continued to work along the lines established by Panou, until, in 2015, Caisse d’Épargne announced their decision to sell the cinema, closing its doors in April of 2018. This is where the Association Home Cinema comes in.

In September, 2019, the Association Home Cinema (hereafter AHC) illegally occupied La Clef, and began a program of free daily screenings that has continued to the present day. A court order was issued demanding the group leave the space by December 19th of that year; an appeal of the decision was duly filed, and during the wait for a court date, the world stopped functioning. This effectively operated as a stay of execution for AHC, and while most of Paris—indeed, the world—went into work-from-home hibernation, the AHC was in a frenzy of beaverish activity, including the publication of a house fanzine, workshops, and regular broadcasts from a webradio station. And, vitally, as screens across Paris went dark, La Clef Revival soldiered on with public outdoor screenings projected on the cinema’s outer wall. I’m not going to speculate as to if the screens inside were being made use of during the same period—that can be the AHC’s little secret—but I emphatically hope that they were.  

I finally wedged my way into the doors of La Clef Revival on the evening of Wednesday, February 2nd, to see Claire Denis present a 35mm print of her 1990 S’en fout la mort (No Fear, No Die). In point of fact, I didn’t see either Denis in the flesh or the print, but rather a simulcast of her introduction and a low-resolution digital projection in the smaller downstairs “overflow” theater. This seemed to me entirely reasonable, as I’m a late-to-the-party outside interloper, and anyways I can enjoy some heavily artifacted deep blacks when I’m in the right mood.

Denis, who since my visit has returned to La Clef to present her 1994 U.S. Go Home, is a particularly ardent supporter of this cinema which hasn’t lacked for support from both famous names and rank-and-file moviegoers. In response to an offer to buy La Clef made in early 2021 by the entrepreneurial firm Groupe SOS—an offer rebuffed by the AHC—a letter of support was issued by la Société des Réalasiteurs des films, a filmmakers’ association, with signees including Denis, Alain Cavalier, Bertrand Bonello, Vincent Macaigne, and Nicole Brenez. (The last-named was instrumental in one of La Clef Revival’s great programming coups, coaxing a seven-film carte blanche program out of Jean-Luc Godard, a figure not known for keeping a particularly high public profile, in October of 2020.) With each new hurdle faced by La Clef Revival, statements of support have continued to spill in: from filmmakers, like that old anarchist Luc Moullet, from festivals (Cinéma du Réel), and from other cinemas (Brussels’ Cinéma Nova and Marseilles’ Videodrome 2, among the finest in the Francophone world.)   

Since receiving its eviction notice, La Clef Revival has ramped up their screening activity, routinely opening shop at 6 AM. (I genuinely believed that I would make it out to a before-sunrise screening of Gregg Araki’s 1997 Nowhere on the 9th, but where the mind is willing, the flesh is sometimes weak…) During this all-hands-on-deck period, a cavalcade of filmmakers have stopped by to present their work and show solidarity, among them Alejandro Jodorowsky, Marie Losier, Serge Bozon, Sébastien Lifshitz, and Wang Bing, who introduced his Man with No Name (2010) earlier on the day of Carax’s Une chambre en ville screening. The significance of Carax’s choosing to screen a musical drama, made by Demy at the outset of the rapacious ’80s, that unfolds against the backdrop of a skull-cracking labor dispute in c. 1955 Nantes was, I trust, lost on no-one.

Prior to the theaters filling up on my Wednesday night visit to La Clef Revival, a quartet of AHC members passed the mic to deliver addresses to the crowd milling in the lobby, a cozily junky space where beer and box wine was on sale for two Euro a cup, its walls plastered with flyers and posters, most prominently one for Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s Memories of Underdevelopment (1968) overlooking a badly out-of-tune looking upright piano.

The general content of the oratory—at least as I could discern with a toddler’s ability to comprehend spoken French of the rat-a-tat-tat Parisian variety—can be gleaned from a recent post at Andy Rector’s Kino Slang blog, which offers the AHC platform statement, read aloud that evening, in a translation courtesy of filmmaker Valérie Massadian, who presented her 2011 Nana at La Clef Revival on the 1st of February. (Rector’s also links an admirable English-language primer on La Clef Revival from the Romanian film magazine Films in Frame, authored by Flavia Dima, which is further recommended reading.)

If I don’t feel compelled to dwell on the politics of the AHC or the nature of the programming at La Clef Revival, it’s because my position towards the entire endeavor—which is one of unequivocal support—is based on general principles rather than any ideological sympathy or enmity.

The first of these principles is that a cinema being programmed with passions and prejudices, whatever they may be, is in almost every case, superior to the absence of that cinema. If La Clef Revival, per their platform, are inclined “project and produce queer, anti-racist, radical films,” well, hell, that’s a-okay by me, I can get down with plenty of that stuff… but any question of aesthetic or ideological alignment is strictly an afterthought. If the only occupant of the La Clef was a filthy, scabby crank with a 16mm projector playing a monthlong program of Sam Wood at his most lugubrious, I’d still be all for it.

Over the last couple years, I’ve had the second track from John Cale’s 1975 album Slow Dazzle stuck in my craw—the one that features Cale bellowing “They’re taking it all away” on the hook. It’s a catchy little ditty, sure, but it also seems an appropriately despairing anthem for times in which the earth is being steadily and purposefully denuded of every routine pleasure that makes life worth living. This certainly isn’t limited to cinemas—real cinemas, not those suburban outlet store equivalents that exist as a dumping ground for sixteen screens of Disney dross—but the aggression on that front has been particularly virulent, which is why I’ve had to dutifully write about six hundred versions of this piece through the years, addressing matters from Jersey City Mayor Steven Fulop’s attempt to oust the Friends of the Loew’s from their rightful home in Journal Square to the Bolsonaro government’s callous, unforgivable treatment of the Cinemateca Brasileira.

The act gets a little tiresome, admittedly, but then this death-by-a-thousand-cuts attack on the greatest popular artform is pretty tiresome, too, so here we go again. I write this in the aftermath of news that San Francisco’s Castro Theatre, a cinema since 1922, will become a venue for coders to guffaw at the comedy stylings of Jim Gaffigan, and of a cry for help from an association of exhibitors in Italy, a country where 500 of a total 3,600 screens have stayed dark post-Covid. Times change, yes, but there are people high up who have their thumb on the scale when it comes to determining how they’ll change, and I’m very far from being convinced that business closures commanded with insufficient promise of compensatory remuneration and loss-leading Silicon Valley juggernauts running on endless influxes of venture capital flattening competition and dismantling anything that keeps people away offline for even a solitary second could be called “the invisible hand of the market.”

Our decisions have been made for us and we’ve been done dirty, from dead-tech DCP to archives jealously guarding their holdings under lock-and-key to non-profit arts organizations in the death grip of numbskull board members insensate to tradition and invariably enthralled by the siren song of techie novelty, their rheumy eyes briefly lighting up at the words “podcast” or “VR.” The case of La Clef Revival is rather cut-and-dry, but I wouldn’t be averse to every CVS and supermarket that used to be a movie theater being reconverted to its original function at gunpoint. I’m on the side of cinema, and at this juncture, that doesn’t leave space for quibbling over property law.

The second reason for my support of La Clef Revival is a conviction that culture that comes from the ground up—that is, people united by common cause just getting together and doing a thing—is almost invariably superior to that which comes from the top down.

Before heading to La Clef, I met up with a friend—the Canadian filmmaker Sofia Bohdanowicz, now based in Paris, responsible for some of the images accompanying this piece—at Ciné-Images, a consummately excellent movie poster shop in the 7th arrondissement. Ciné-Images is located across the street from the presently-under-renovation Cinema La Pagode, an ersatz Japanese-style “temple” built in 1896 by architect Alexandre Marcel which, save for a brief closure during the Occupation, operated continually as a cinema from 1931 to 2015.

The renovation of La Pagode, by all accounts badly needed, is occurring at the behest of—and with the funds of—Charles S. Cohen, the real-estate mogul-turned-arthouse impresario who is owner of the Landmark Theaters and Curzon Cinemas chains, and the rightsholding custodian of the collection of classic film titles amassed under dubious pretexts by collector/slimeball Raymond Rohauer, a rather infamous character in silent film circles.

It is, of course, better that La Pagode should get a fresh coat of paint and be reopened to showing movies than that it be turned into a Carrefour, but let’s be realistic: it probably won’t be distinguished by anything other than architecture, because it’s a Cohen cinema, and before he’s anything else, Cohen is a money guy, long on cash and short on taste. Some may recall an earlier high-profile venture into exhibition by Cohen, his purchase and rehab of New York’s Quad Cinema, reopened in 2017. The official story was that Cohen, inheritor of a small empire, was a thwarted cinephile who’d joined the family business out of duty; now, having done his diligence in increasing the net worth of Cohen Brothers Realty by however many billions, he was free to play patron, a modern-day Medici of the Seventh Art, bringing on honest-to-God programmers at his theater and spending his amassed lucre on shipping 35mm prints of Just Jaeckin movies to New York with no thought for the bottom line, because a big pile of money to burn can go a very long way, as Charles Foster Kane observed when describing his losses in the newspaper business defiantly to befuddled bank bean-counter Mr. Thatcher.

But then, almost nobody really operates that way, at least not for long. Inherited wealth may in some cases be squandered splendidly—I’m thinking of Andrew Getty, who before his death in 2015 poured his inheritance into making a genuinely vile horror movie, The Evil Within (2017), and some would say that Annapurna had a pretty good run before the plug was pulled. But if you have enough money to afford to lose a little on a passion project, you probably got that pile by thinking about balance sheets above all, and that habit dies awfully hard, and so the Quad today has settled into being a perfectly unexceptional “arthouse” cinema that presumably pays for itself, just as, in all likelihood, La Pagode will.

The circumstances that allow La Clef Revival to operate are particular to France, which has a proud tradition of amateur operated cine-clubs—like the Nickel Odéon—and a system of legal concessions in place to ensure the continued existence of such groups, as well as “associative” cinemas like La Clef Revival, the last such institution in Paris. The Films in Frame piece, cited earlier, quotes from a 2012 report from the Opale cultural resource and social/solidarity economy center, which describes the associative cinemas as “answer[ing] to a social demand rather than the laws of the market.”

Dima writes from a Romanian perspective, addressing an audience of cinephile countrymen and -women who’ve faced unique adversity. Aside from the paucity of serviceable materials available to screen—addressed in this interview that I conducted last year with director Radu Jude—there’s the small matter of a catastrophic 2015 fire at the Colectiv nightclub, with subsequent scrutiny of the structural integrity of entertainment venues of all kinds leading to the closure of most of central Bucharest’s cinemas. While knowing full well that French cinephiles face different challenges—and enjoy different resources—than those in Romania, Dima asks: What can we in Romania take away from the example of La Clef Revival? And what, for that matter, can cinephiles around the world learn from it?

This brings me to the final reason for my support of Cinéma La Clef Revival: excepting cases in which one is subjecting others to harm without their consent to do so, I am almost without exception in favor of people being bad and doing things that they’re not supposed to—i.e. continuing to operate a cinema during a proclaimed public health crisis.

I first heard of La Clef in mid-2020 from an American friend who was waiting out the first wave of Covid on the Continent, and who had been to the theater several times. (“They fed me pasta for free the first time I went,” he enthused to me via WhatsApp.) His experience left me deeply jealous, and deeply embarrassed that nothing equivalently insubordinate was happening on the home front.

As someone who managed to criss-cross the Atlantic a few times during the plague years, I had some opportunity to observe a contrast in attitudes between friends in New York City and Europe, and the comparison did not—a handful of reckless, beloved degenerates aside—tend to favor the North Americans. The reasons for this contrast aren’t hard to explain, at least as regards the United States: the bare minimum of provision was made for out-of-work citizens, our health care system is comically atrocious, and, in the face of laggardly, disorganized, altogether fuddled government response, the burden of responsibility for “stopping the spread” was thrust onto the individual, resulting in the creation of a generation of presumably well-meaning neurotics who will never again leave the house without N95 masks covering every square inch of their bodies. The campaign to make people believe that compliance was synonymous to conscientiousness was ruthlessly effective, and as it was being pushed ahead, common sense went out the window. The divisiveness of the Trump presidency engendered a politicization of the pandemic that has continued to this day: good lefties had to treat a disease with very specific demographic targets as the bubonic plague, good righties had to laugh it off all the way to the ventilator. (Don’t take my word for it, you can read about it in the Grey Lady!)

I have not observed quite the same Manichean divide in Europe, or at least in France. In Marseilles last summer I stumbled across a rally protesting the then-recent implementation of Passe Sanitaire laws, rendering the right to free movement in the social sphere contingent on providing proof of vaccination, and a local friend confirmed my impression of the unusual makeup of the gathering, composed of groups representing the far-right, the far-left, and just about everything in-between. This is an anecdotal observation, only worth about as much as such things usually are, but it may help to explain how a leftist collective operation like La Clef Revival could be celebrated for continuing to operate during the pandemic in Paris, while anyone in New York would’ve been pilloried for doing the same thing.

Some might say that inviting people to congregate and watch movies during a pandemic, running the risk as such a thing might of spreading further contagion, falls under my abovementioned “harm without consent” category. I would respond that there was more harm in abandoning the public sphere en masse to be razed and reshaped by human-hating tech billionaire shysters who determine our fates whilst sitting cross-legged in a tent at Burning Man, and that if you were a relatively healthy young person who wasn’t passing the pandemic living in close quarters with an octogenarian, there was no compelling reason that you shouldn’t have been able to, if so inclined, treat yourself to a nice little movieshow in the company of a few friends and strangers. Anyhow, we all know that Covid germs just float up to the ceiling in movie theaters.3

It’s almost certainly unproductive to spend the rest of our natural days relitigating who was laudably responsible and who was and derelict of duty to their friends and neighbors through the Covid years, but that’s never stopped a good, old-fashioned clamor for moral high ground. At least the tut-tutting has died down a bit these days, in the streets and online, particularly since the New War dropped—an event which may make rallying behind a squatter’s cinema in Paris seem less crucial than it did, say, a month ago. Here I feel compelled to cite a quotation from an undated letter by Godard, addressed to the Cinémathèque’s Henri Langlois, which graces the side of La Clef Revival:

“What consoles me, anyway, is knowing that there is always somewhere in the world, at any time––when it stops in Tokyo it starts again in New York, in Moscow, in Paris, in Caracas––there is always, I say, a little monotonous noise, but intransigent in its monotony, and this noise is that of a projector projecting a film. Our duty is that this noise never stops.”

When I was about seventeen, I played Henry Antrobus in an amateur theatrical of Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth. This wasn’t a high school production—I would never sully myself with an official extracurricular!—but rather the work of an organization called the Renegade Garage Players, who staged classics with casts made up of teenagers and mentally and physically disabled adults with, as you might imagine, rather avant-garde results.

Wilder’s play was first presented in 1942, not long after the United States’ entry into World War II; my memory is a little hazy on most of what happens in it, but I can tell you the play is an extended allegory for the life of man- and womankind, and the various tribulations we as a species have faced through the millennia, written in a moment fraught with fear for the future. What I can recall of it most vividly is the absolutely piercing line-reading that the young woman playing my wife gave when upbraiding the family maid for neglecting the hearth: “Sabina!” she would say, with a shrewish shriek that rattles me to this day, “You let the FIRE go out!”

The fire, if I remember rightly, serves as a heavy-handed metaphor for civilization, and as such must be stoked at all costs; at any rate, the line has been bouncing around my head for twenty-some years, and will probably keep rattling around in there until closing time. I bring it up only by way of saying that I’ve always liked janky spit-and-tape operations like Renegade Garage Players, and I like people who keep the projector going, and I like people who tend to the fire, and I like what they’ve done at La Clef Revival, very much.

You can donate to La Clef Revival here.

You can slap your John Hancock on a Change.org Petition here.

Greetings from Employee Picks headquarters, located in an out-of-order lavatory in the deepest sub-basement of the Trump Tower, next to Barron’s old “Time Out” room. This is Nick Pi…

Read more

Read more

Read more

Read more

That jive jamboree at the U.S. Capitol in January, 2021 was yet far away when, on Saturday, September 12th of last year, the IRL streaming community got an anticipatory taste of national attention when a 28-year-old homeless YouTuber, Lifes Mavrek, alternately known as “Armando,” “Mando,” “Mondo, “Homeless Mando,” “Travelin Papi,” and “Salmon Andy,” livestreamed himself defecating in the driveway of the San Francisco home of speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. While IRL streamers—people who make an interactive sport of their daily lives by streaming and monetizing their mischief—count viewers and followings in the thousands while collecting revenue far out of proportion to those numbers, knowledge of their operations has remained largely unknown to all but the extremely online, particularly at the grotty, close-to-the-street level occupied by Mando, whose bowel dump sortie was circulated by deviant netizens with the hashtag #Poopalosi.

I didn’t prepare any Best of 2020 lists to summarize the cinematic accomplishments of last year, which newshounds may recall was marked by worldwide lockdowns and the dismantling of life as we’d known it, but if I had, #Poopalosi would’ve been a cinch to make mine, and for all I know more people saw it than anointed Best Picture Nomadland, because quite a few of us spent the last fifteen months extremely online.

It’s a small thing in the grander scheme, but among much else I will remember last year as the year that I became unstuck from contemporary cinema. This was, to some degree, a decision that was made for me—certain regular publishers of my writing ceased to publish regularly or at all, others pivoted to more extensive coverage of streaming releases and serial television, subjects in which I am unutterably disinterested. I did see a few films tagged as products of 2020 by U.S. release date, and a few of them—like Tsai Ming-liang’s Days, Angela Schanelec’s I Was at Home, But…, Bill and Turner Ross’s Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets, and Paul W.S. Anderson’s Monster Hunter—I even liked a great deal, but once the final count had been tallied, there had probably not been a year since I learned to toddle when I saw so few new feature films. The sort of movies that I would normally have seen on the festival circuit I didn’t feel like watching in my living room, and a lot of them I didn’t really feel like watching at all. It’s possible this break is a temporary one, and a part of me hopes that it is, because I write about films for my daily bread, and even though I can eke out a subsistence living strictly engaging with movies that belong to the distant past of Before Times, I would like to believe that cinema is still a living art, and to stay savvy to where the life in it lies. Maybe I’ll play catch-up with last year eventually, and belatedly join my voice to the annual chorale of affirmation: “At a time when many have speculated that the death of cinema is at hand, the medium showed a surprising new life…”

Instead I passed a year, principally, in the weeds of film historical arcana. When I needed a shot of contemporaneity, I did a little monster hunting of my own in following the streamers, like Mando, or whatever he’s being called now. Contacted after l’affaire Poopalosi by the New York Post, Mando would frame his dropped deuce as an act of protest: “What better way to show someone the message, you know? We need more access to bathrooms, we need more access to resources out here.”

True enough, though any message was only incidental to Mando’s actual raison d’être which, like that of a great many IRL streamers, is to be a nuisance for the amusement of their at-home audience, egged on and rewarded for this activity by viewer donations, commonly referred to as “donos.” The announcements of incoming donos pop up in the chats that accompany livestreams on various platforms, along with a message from the “benefactor”—usually an encouragement, insult, or some manner of inflammatory gibberish. These missives are typically read aloud by a text-to-speech (TTS) program from a portable speaker mounted somewhere on the streamer’s person, often to incendiary effect, as online audiences tend to use this form of telepresence to escalate any developing situation at hand. Paying for the pleasure of broadcasting the n-word repeatedly via TTS is particularly popular; this is referred to as “the Keemstar dono,” named in dubious honor of Daniel “Keemstar” Keem, who today runs the YouTube gossip channel DramaAlert, his claim to posterity tied up with his groundbreaking petition to flood a chat with a certain epithet. 

The IRL streaming community is comprised of a criss-crossing network of nomadic annoyances that includes defiantly unhygienic drifters, boy band burnouts, gamers-gone-wild, wannabe rappers, self-destructive alcoholics, methamphetamine enthusiasts, and alt-right famewhores, with a large percentage of identifiable sociopaths cutting through all these categories. I should add that there are very people using the IRL streaming form to create more socially acceptable or constructive content. I have not encountered these streams and, to be frank, haven’t sought them out, because the most debased form of the phenomenon is the one that seems to me to communicate something essential about the present moment. The IRL streamers I have become intimately familiar with represent the economy of internet clout taken to its most dissolute extremes, something like black sheep relations to far better-known vloggers and “YouTube personalities”—themselves not precisely a universally esteemed group.

These IRL streamers are, then, the underbelly of an underbelly, and in writing about them here, I’m abandoning my usual practice of using this space to pursue a criticism of enthusiasms. What this community kindled in me for the better part of a year would best be described as “morbid fascination,” and I can’t in good conscience endorse anyone going down the same rabbit hole that I squirmed my way into during this time, effectively playing canary in the content mines. I also can’t pretend that I didn’t find the experience occasionally enlightening and entertaining, or that, even while not having given one red cent in donos, that I remain unpolluted by my compulsive spectatorship. In any case, fair warning: Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here.

BAKED

Whereas big YouTubers occasionally will “go live” on Instagram or Twitch, these interactive performances are part of a broader package of content; the IRL streamer, in the main, has only the golden shower of their stream to proffer, performances often disappearing after a short time or scrubbed from the internet in an attempt to destroy incriminating evidence, which lives on in diehard viewers’ archives of lowlight clips, found on message boards like ip2always.win, LiveStreamFails, and KiwiFarms. Where a Logan Paul or a PewDiePie may occasionally step in a cow pat of controversy, they generally attempt to toe a line allowing them to appeal to the broadest possible demographic, maintain their platforms, and keep their profits steadily coming in. The outlaw fringe of the IRL streamer community cater to only the most degenerate or the most based, depending on one’s perspective, and resign themselves to a peripatetic existence scampering from channel to channel and streaming service to streaming service, along the way snatching donos out of the air like banknotes blowing around a cash booth . Their independent bad behavior is part of an ongoing, kaleidoscopic drama of unbalanced, anti-social humanity run amok, with individual ronin streams running together and separating to form an insanely complicated narrative that puts the Marvel Comics Universe to shame.  

For example: Before his brush with politicized infamy, Mando, a husky Mexican-American with a patchy beard and a physique simultaneously looming and droopy, was best known as an associate of O.G. IRL streamer Ice Poseidon and the “friend” and personal assistant of pop star-turned-OnlyFans model Aaron Carter, who had housed Mando in exchange for YouTube consulting until December, 2019, when Carter kicked Mando out after he complained about Carter’s dog and made fun of his patron’s music during a stream. Having left his ordure in ‘Frisco, Mando proceeded to link up with Anthime “Tim” Gionet, better known as Baked Alaska, and they hit the road like the vaudeville teams of yore. Baked is a 34-year-old internet personality—the word is used very generously here—who has shown a barnacle tenacity in staying in the public eye. An Anchorage native, in his bygone youth he assayed a marketing degree from Azusa Pacific University into a Warped Tour internship and then a stint at Buzzfeed, where he ran the Twitter and Instagram accounts for Tasty, the site’s arm for food-related material. (He’d previously been a C-list Vine-maker, specializing in fucking with unsuspecting employees and customers at Targets and Whole Foodses and the like.)

Baked was first catapulted to minor notoriety around the time of the 2016 presidential election and subsequent media fracas over the land-rush discovery of the so-called “alt-right.” He was tour manager for a then-ascendant Milo Yiannopoulos and worked for “Gorilla Mindset” philosopher Mike Cernovich; racked up views on a video in which, after purporting to have been pepper sprayed (possibly self-administered) at the 2017 Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally, he was seen gasping “Keep streaming!” while on all fours with milk dripping off of his face; and scored up still more hits in another where he whines interminably about a woman breaking his “brand-new iPhone 7” outside of Playhouse nightclub in Los Angeles after his failure to respond to her request to stop taking video of her. Baked is compactly built, wears a bleach-blonde fauxhawk, a chinstrap beard that’s sometimes trimmed to a goatee, and signature nacreous Pit Viper sunglasses. He dresses for maximum visual noise, all bright colors and clashing patterns, with a particular predilection for camo and the American flag, and looks like a post-internet artist who went to MICA who you might find passed out in the corner at Rubulad in 2010.

Baked fell out of favor with Yiannopoulos and Cernovich not long after the land grab and cacophony of hillbilly elegiacs that followed the Trump election, and thereafter endured his wilderness years. He stayed in the picture as best he could through participation in the internet Bloodsports community—a loose confederation of “race realist”-leaning live YouTube debate channels, the most prominent of these run by Andy “Warski” Pires—and chameleonic attempts to rebrand, including a post-Christchurch mass shooting mea culpa and a stint with Yang Gang which may or may not have been a bit. He has since returned to the far-right fold, affiliating himself with the 22-year-old Nick Fuentes, a Bloodsports staple and fellow “Unite the Right” veteran who, via the streaming service DLive, which he founded after being barred from Twitch, addresses a steadily growing audience known as Groypers, named for an obese meme varietal of Pepe the Frog, seen smiling serenely while resting his chin on tented fingers. (After a slow start, Fuentes’s DLive sermons today reach upwards of 50,000 viewers.) Baked’s journey has been documented via his IRL livestreams, which began sometime around 2017, but snowballed in popularity via association with Fuentes and the organization America First Students. Last year Baked became nigh ubiquitous, to the chagrin of many in the livestreaming community who view him as a roving opportunist. His 2020 motto was the MAGA-esque initialism YOBA—“Year of Baked Alaska”—which he could be heard chanting while capering around in the office of Oregon Senator Jeff Merkley on January 6th, for it appears YOBA didn’t end with the calendar year. (Fuentes was also on the ground in D.C., but denied claims that he entered the Capitol.) 

During the buildup to the presidential election, Baked continued to practice a proven formula for content generation that he didn’t invent, but excelled at: aggravating people, creating and escalating tetchy social situations, and generally keeping the trolls and lols coming. In the lingo of IRL streaming, this is referred to as “pressing”—basically, pushing someone’s buttons—until they blow their lid and start acting the fool, with whoever comes off the worse in the resulting conflict said to have been “maxxed out.” This, of course, is where the fun, such as it is, begins.

In 2020, the mask protocols demanded by many businesses provided a lubed-up opening for many a press, retail workers being favorite targets as they aren’t at liberty to walk away from the source of ire: see for example Baked and Mando at a Burger King stop during their odyssey, where, after refusing an employee’s request that he mask up, Baked is escorted out while gleefully calling the staff “slaves” and “NPCs” for trying to enforce company protocol as Mando plays conciliatory good cop, explaining to a worker in a “Flame Grilled Living” t-shirt that his partner is “Asperger’s high-functioning.” At this point Mando and Baked are still performing their double-act from the same script, but the bonhomie doesn’t last long.

In another road trip video, Baked and Mando sit together at a Wendy’s, Baked bouncing in his chair and doing a hyperactive fist-pumping dance across the table from a visibly agitated Mando who sits, head down, trying to block out his partner’s shenanigans. A middle-aged female employee arrives to ask the two to leave, and as she does, Baked cranks a tune on the portable speaker attached to the strap on his backpack, which contains the cellular transmitter essential to streaming. The song is “Nigga Nigga Nigga” from the 2007 film Gangsta Rap: The Glockumentary, and mostly consists of the title being repeated in a rat-a-tat cadence. (Had his TTS been turned on, we very likely would be hearing the same thing with a hard-r.) Baked, incidentally, was formerly a comedy rapper: he started out doing Alaskiana numbers like “Grizzly Bear Trappin’,” in 2016 recorded an unlistenable “MAGA Anthem,” and continues to issue the occasional ballad, doing to the eardrum what Mando did to the Pelosi driveway.

Baked enjoyed a rapid rise in IRL streaming, but it’s hard to say what percentage of his viewers are only hanging around to see their favorite lolcow—that is, a dull-minded herd animal who serves up rich Grade A creamery content, oblivious or indifferent to the fact that they’re being milked for laffs by fans who loathe them—receive his comeuppance. He is routinely pilloried on message boards as an arriviste, a slippery mountebank who adopts and abandons trends or, as one boarder put it, “a doxing faggot that purposely is trying to destroy this community whilst he is slapping and hitting women.”

A man with a Houdini-like ability to slips cuffs and evade arrest, to the joy of many onlookers Baked went to the pokey last December after twice Macing a bouncer outside Giligin’s Bar and Shrimp Hut in Old Town Scottsdale, Arizona. Jubilant commenters who’d been waiting for the man they loved to hate to take a fall could be seen bemoaning the fact that Maricopa County sheriff Joe Arpaio’s seven-acre “tent city” jail was no longer in operation. Baked, who last year released a heavily Auto-Tuned song called “We Love Our Cops” and accompanying music video, gave off a “Fuck the police” for the camera as the sirens flashed. You should watch it only if you’re looking for reconfirmation that we are all actually in Hell already, nostrils plugged with the acrid stench of Flame Grilled Living.    

ORIGINS

Modern, vocational IRL streaming, as practiced today by Baked and Mando and many others, has its origins in livestreaming video games. Inasmuch as any original genius of IRL streaming can be identified, it is Ice Poseidon, formerly known as Paul Denino, spoken of in hushed tones as the first gamer to emerge blinking with his camera into the light of day, like that first fish struggling from the brackish sea onto the primordial Pangean shore. Denino, a native of Martin County, Florida born in 1994, started using his nom-de-stream when he was twelve years old and an ardent player of the online role-playing game RuneScape. The RuneScape community remained a central element of Denino’s social life—very possibly the central element—after he graduated high school, and while working as a line cook, Denino began to upload videos of his RuneScape prankery onto YouTube, operating a livestream on Twitch where people could watch his gameplay and goofing and building a community of viewers who became known, somewhat ominously, as the Purple Army.

The inspiration to take his stream—and the Purple Army—out of the proverbial parental basement came in July 2016, when Nintendo released Pokémon Go, an augmented reality (AR) product that gave a real-world dimension to its gameplay. To capture and train Pokémon, players would follow a GPS-generated game map based on their surroundings to PokéStops and Pokémon Gyms, their on-screen avatars following their real-world peregrinations. And so, as the legend has it, before heading out to scour the plentiful surface parking lots of Palm Beach for Bulbasaurs and Snorlaxes, Ice Poseidon strapped a webcam to his head, thus giving birth to modern IRL streaming. Denino, a scraggly, lemur-eyed, high-energy ectomorph with an unexpectedly gruff baritone, wasn’t the first human to stream out-of-doors, but he had malevolent charisma enough to build an ever-larger community around himself, and more than any other person can be looked to as IRL streaming’s Founding Father, or Original Sinner.

Was 2016-17 the moment when IRL and the internet began to converge once and for all? The argument can be made. At the time my friend Michael Bilandic, a filmmaker and cogent thinker on all things online, was keeping me breathlessly posted on the saga of Shia LaBeouf, Nastja Säde Rönkkö, and Luke Turner’s insipid post-2016 election installation work HEWILLNOTDIVIDE.US, comprised of a publicly displayed camera with the words “He Will Not Divide Us”—the “He” referring to you-know-who—written above it, with passers-by encouraged to voice this phrase to an audience watching via 24/7 livestream.

Instead of a rallying point for its inscribed #Resistance audience, the camera became a magnet for interloping Trumpists, right-wingers of all stripes, and various bored shit-talkers. Initially set up at the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, Queens, HEWILLNOTDIVIDE.US was moved repeatedly to avoid unwelcome attention, all to no avail. Removed to a nondescript “unknown location” in Greenville, Tennessee, accompanied now by a flag emblazoned with the title of the piece, HEWILLNOTDIVIDE.US was discovered in less than two days by 4chan users taking note of airplane contrails and celestial navigation—some of the same swift-fingered researching that would later be turned to doxxing IRL streamers like Ice. If the intention of LaBeouf and company had been to bring every crackpot in America out of the woodwork, it must be judged a thumping success—and having had a lungful of fresh air, the freed genie disdained its old bottle. Baked caught up with HEWILLNOTDIVIDE.US in Queens, where he can be seen on video pressing a security guard until he threatens to smash Baked’s camera phone, which as you can imagine happens a lot.

As r/The_Donald posters and idle neckbeards chased an empty-headed piece of protest art born of a celebrity’s vanity gallery career across the United States and Europe, Ice Poseidon continued to rack up spectacular metrics. In summer of 2018, Denino, who had relocated to Los Angeles during his rise to power, was the subject of a New Yorker profile by Adrian Chen. The piece describes Denino’s cultivation of a “foulmouthed trickster” character—like a modern-day Loki or Kokopelli, one supposes—pressing his way around the globe. Chen also outlines the occupational hazards of livestream celebrity, which include the loss of privacy and the occasional “swatting,” in which a livestream viewer possessed of the streamer’s address or location will place a false report of some hazardous situation unfolding at the scene, resulting in the SWAT team kicking in the streamer’s door, to the onlooking culprit’s delight. Chen’s profile also notes that at the time of the author’s meeting with Denino in January, the then-23-year-old was set to earn $60,000 in a single month.

Quite understandably, in the wake of Ice Poseidon’s breakthrough, his formula for success spread like kudzu. Like a water-soaked Mogwai, Ice Poseidon reproduced Gremlin imitators wielding selfie sticks, wearing nattering speakers and, in many cases, looking for novel ways in which to be bothersome.

The rewards were potentially great, the investiture slight. If you want to be an IRL streamer, first you need a camera. This will likely be a smartphone, with the Samsung S9 and S9 Plus series, as well as Galaxy S10 and S20 variants particularly popular, though some opt for a dedicated camera like the GoPro Hero 7 or the knock-off EKEN H9R or a nice Sony AS300 Action Camera. You may then throw down for various mounts: a nice selfie stick like the Smatree SmaPole Q3S, a gimbal mechanical stabilizer, or perhaps a backpack mount to free up the hands. And you will most probably be wearing a backpack—the Gunrun.tv packages custom-made jobs—to house all the odds and ends that will keep you online, including a power bank such as the 26800 mAh Anker, which provides a day’s battery life on a four-hour charge. You can trust to the omnipresence of Verizon for an uninterrupted stream, and many do, but the true professional may also invest in their own mobile hotspot, such as the Netgear Nighthawk M1 or LiveU Solo HDMI. Streaming to Twitch, YouTube, DLive, or another platform of choice—or necessity—is accomplished through a streaming and recording program, OBS Studio. The chat platforms and payment plans are provided by third-party live-streaming software, the most popular of these being Streamlabs, Donationalerts, StreamElements, and Nightbot, which allow the streamers to cash in their donos—part of the reason Androids are preferred is because they handle multitasking, particularly with the chats, better than the iPhone. Finally, to receive incoming sound alerts, you’ll want a small Bluetooth speaker, something like a JBL CLIP 3 or the WONDERBOOM 2, recently endorsed by the New York Times, that will keep the lively TTS palaver chirping away.

With this initial investiture paid in, a flotilla of IRL streamers with colorful sobriquets were unleashed upon the world. There was Bjørn Lisdorf, a Dane who’d gained a Twitch following by playing Entropia Universe. Recently unemployed in his home country and inspired by Ice Poseidon’s newfound prosperity, Lisdorf travelled to Los Angeles with the zeal of a convert tracking down the Nazarene and, adopting the mononym “Bjørn,” he’s remained a power player since by virtue of his ability to generate the rancorous rivalries and drama that are dono paydirt—a comparison to hyped-up, trash-talking pro wrestling feuds would not be inappropriate.

The IRL streamers produce more beef than the state of Texas. Bjørn was for a time quarreling with Ebenezer Lembe, aka EBZ, a fortysomething former Uber driver from Cameroon drawn into the fold after meeting Ice Poseidon on the job. EBZ, reliably press-able, also had a high-publicity clash with Billy the Fridge, born William Berry, a hulking white rapper from Seattle who when he first appeared on the scene was pushing 700 lbs., though he has since slimmed down considerably. Beneath marquee names such as these you found the character actors, the Andys—Arab Andy, Asian Andy, Mexican Andy, Tracksuit Andy and, foremost among them, Andy Milonakis, aughts-vintage viral sensation-turned-star of MTV’s The Andy Milonakis Show, white rapper (are you sensing a pattern?), and a former Ice Poseidon associate. Milonakis blew up as a streamer after showing up on Ice’s feed, and anyone who followed the same route thereafter was dubbed an “Andy.”

Reps are built through these acts of “stream sniping”—unknowns finding the location of established IRL streamers and just turning up there, sometimes just hoping to hitch their trailer on a star and siphon off a few viewers, sometimes looking to cause trouble like young bucks in a Western looking to make a name by plugging the fastest gun out there, which I guess would’ve made Ice, for a time, John Wayne in The Shootist (1976). Or perhaps they could better be compared to pugilists chasing a belt—and internet clout has even infected the tradition-bound world of the Sweet Science, as an untested club fighter like Logan Paul, by virtue of name recognition alone, was until recently cleared for a shot at the undefeated Floyd Mayweather Jr.

This ever-more-populated cast of characters has been tracked and discussed on the various abovementioned message boards—after a 2019 reddit ban of communities dedicated to IRL streamers, the subreddit devoted to Ice, r/ice_poseidon, became IP2always.win—the “IP” stands for Ice Poseidon, though any affiliation with Ice, now a bête noire of the board, is long over. Such Oedipal relationships are not unfamiliar—I spent a chunk of the ‘00s on Hipinion, formerly the official message board of Pitchforkmedia, which after being removed from the site became a popular destination for people looking to make fun of the picture of Pitchforkmedia founder Ryan Schreiber as a podgy pale teenager in suburban Milwaukee wearing a Pac-Man t-shirt and sporting an ill-advised pink New Wave-y hairdo.

The distance from throne to pillory barrel is very little online. As the IRL streaming scene grew in popularity, Ice, indisputably the central figure of the community’s early years, began a precipitous plummet, this triggered by the failure of his attempt to create a mansion for the confederation of streamers admitted to his CX Network and the shutdown of the network itself in March of 2019 following an FBI raid and seizure of Ice’s streaming equipment, after which a chastened Denino fled from Los Angeles to Austin. Along with other unsavory tech types the Texas capital has become a streamer haven, home to many of the most feral of the breed of unsavory tech types, for generally streamers prefer warm weather climes that favor year-round street life and ample possibilities for pestering people.

Ice’s decline left a vacuum as his CX Network begat the IP2 Network, inheritor to a certain tradition of scumbag streaming, which various tenable successors have emerged at the apex of: Bjørn, the infamous ONLYUSEmeBLADE and, last year, Baked, who rode election-year action and an open defiance of the pandemic-era stay-at-home advisements heeded by some skittish streamers to his YOBA putsch. The Capitol crash was followed by an Elba exile, but as to if he has yet met his Waterloo remains to be seen.

A STREAMER’S QUALITIES

If the new mobility of the IRL streamer was a departure from the trail blazed by the indoors streamers of yore—Ice’s travels included a European Grand Tour of a sort you’ll find in no Baedeker—the phenomenon of hustlers and exhibitionists building an audience by offering an unblinking vantage on their lives is not. Chen finds a precedent for the IRL streamers in the “lifecasters” of another era, citing the case of Jennifer Ringley, the Dickinson College junior who in 1996 installed a webcam in her dorm in Carlisle, Pennsylvania and broadcast images of her mundane life—black-and-white, updating every three minutes—through her JenniCam website.

While JenniCam and its imitators certainly have their place in streaming history, one key element of their appeal—the possibility of intimate disclosure of the female body in a domestic space—makes them seem nearer ancestors to the now professionalized, nay, industrialized, and largely housebound occupation of the camgirl. (There are those in this line who specialize in public stunts like surreptitiously sticking a dildo in their asshole while seated in the back of a Panera Bread, but they are outliers.) What is missing in this linkage are the elements that mark IRL streaming in its more extreme, and therefore more visible, manifestations: masculine debasement of self and others, and general public inconvenience.

The IRL streamer is a new breed of flâneur, though rather than following Charles Baudelaire’s exhortation to “wed the crowd,” he—and it usually is a “he”—prefers to assail it, antagonize it, and molest it. Some other precursors suggest themselves here: There is George Urban, better known as Ugly George, famous for his misadventures on his Manhattan public-access cable show The Ugly George Hour of Truth, Sex, and Violence, which would document his roving the canyons of Midtown, buttonholing women and trying to induce them to unbutton before his camera. There is also the Jamie Gillis of the On the Prowl series, begun in 1989, the first of which follows Gillis and porn actress Rene Morgan as they cruise around North Beach, San Francisco in a limousine looking for strangers to plow Morgan. (Five attempt to push rope; two succeed to the point of vaginal penetration.) From here it’s a short leap to Joe Francis’s Girls Gone Wild tapes, and to countless other gonzo frolics.

These comparisons, too, are slightly shaky, not least because sex, for some time anyways, remained a department of transgression that IRL streamers ventured into least often. There are exceptions to this, but even these favor emotional terrorism and debasement to what most would regard as titillation, as when Attila Bakk, aka Attila, a Hungarian-born streamer originally based out of Windsor, Ontario, did boffo metrics last November through drunkenly denigrating a sex partner, fellow streamer Jewel Rancid, on- camera, afterwards reading vicious chat comments aloud while she could be heard vomiting off-screen. Later, after Rancid has passed out, Attila, who has the visage of a depraved imp, indulged in a to-webcam monologue that begins with a bellowed “You will never get this lifestyle,” continues through his confronting in the nude a complaining neighbor who comes to his door, then ends in a barrage of n-bombs. Insofar as can be determined, this is the couple’s idea of a good time, and there is some evidence that Rancid, who pads her income selling mayonnaise fart videos online, has an insatiable appetite for humiliation—none of which is to say that this activity, to whatever degree it can be judged consensual, is “good” for anyone involved. Just in time for Christmas last year, Attila and Jewel released a single they’d recorded together, a Human League-ish pop tune called “Leaving Town,” whose chorus goes: “Leaving town/ Gonna do it/ Blowing loads/ Making movies.”  

It’s not hard to explain the relative paucity of sex in IRL streams. Homosocial as the scene may be, homosexuality is officially abhorred—damning rumors of a relationship between Fuentes and Australian streamer CatboyCami continue to swirl—and there are not so many female streamers willing to roughhouse with the boys or subject themselves to the pitiless scrutiny of the stream: the unflattering screenshotting and the inevitable meme-ification. (Chen documents that communal outcry surrounding Ice Poseidon’s relationship with a fellow streamer, Caroline, “broken up” by a concerted and seemingly successful attempt to hurt him by cutting down on his donos.)

To the dismay of many, including a quite vocal Ice, Twitch has had a steady uptick in female streamers, many of them appearing on the site’s non-gaming “Just Chatting” section. The objection to “titty streamers,” so-called, is frequently expressed as a desire to prevent what has long been perceived as a haven for mostly male gamers from becoming a camgirl site, an inevitable de-evolution into fawning and simping to be anticipated once the fairer sex appear on the scene. Many women have nevertheless commanded large followings on Twitch and other streaming platforms, but the likes of Cal Poly student Maya Higa, who leveraged her following to raise $32,000 for local homeless in May of 2019, is not likely to appear in the same stream as any of the roving footpads and highwaymen that I’m discussing. Those that do—women with monikers like Goocheese, Sweet Erin, Alice, and Sammy figure in the unfolding drama—generally don’t last for long, and when they do, they do through exhibiting a sponge-like ability to sop up punishment. The IRL streamers of IP2, then, provide an alternative to an ever-more-feminized Twitch, a “No Girls Allowed” zone in which any mitigating or civilizing influence from the fairer sex that might hamper the pursuit of pure lulz is kept to a minimum.

Content generation by way of pressing, from the days of Ice Poseidon on down the line, is based in brazen harassment and intimidation, and I don’t think it’s too bold to claim that this is a field in which the male of the species excels. One might place the IRL streamers in a tradition of overwhelmingly male prank culture that includes Longmont Potion Castle crank calls, the output of Nathan Fielder and Sacha Baron Cohen, parody meme accounts, and Jackass’s hidden-camera forays into the public sphere. (Recently there has been an attempt by some boarders to pull the troubled Bam Margera, disinvited from the shooting of Jackass 4 due to unaddressed drug abuse issues, into the orbit of IP2.) A prank divides the world between “us” and “them”—those who are in on the joke and those that aren’t—or, in this case, those who are doing or watching the streaming and the civilians who are caught up in the stream, deer-in-headlights style. For a Baked, the Other is identified with familiar messageboard troll slanders: cucks, SJWs and the abovementioned NPCs, short for non-player characters, a term adapted from tabletop role-playing to video gaming. An NPC isn’t controlled by the player, but rather following a Dungeon Master’s whim—Soros, I guess?—or a programmer’s script and cues. The player has free will and agency; the NPC does not. As a way to designate humans who are not regarded as fully human, it seems to have overtaken the previously ubiquitous “sheeple” in popularity.

Between the various prank artists I’ve listed there exist vast differences in approach, in wit and conceptual intelligence, and in the attitudes evidently held towards their unsuspecting quarry, with the IRL streamers unquestionably the stupidest and the cruelest of the lot. And yet, what they do does exert a discomfiting fascination, for it delivers something of the Shock of the New, and this bears description. For none of the above comparisons, from gonzo to Steve-O, can boast of the interactivity of the IRL stream, nor of its simultaneity, and the total unmediated unpredictability—and the air of potential danger—that comes with it.

Ugly George and Jaime Gillis, of course, have the option of editing what they’re doing after the fact in order to make themselves look better or to move a scene along—though if either did much of the former, whatever was left on the cutting room floor must really be something to see. The IRL streamer is either off or on; watched in the present tense, their missions of mayhem are interrupted or compressed by no ellipses, and by no moments of respite. Simultaneity removes any sense of foregone conclusion from what we’re watching. If Cohen had happened to have been blown away by an incensed concealed-carry type while out making mischief in his Borat togs, one imagines we’d have heard about this before seeing it, if see it we ever did. The outcome of the IRL livestream, however, is undetermined. And if one peruses the chatrooms and message boards dedicated to IRL streamers for any amount of time, it becomes evident that a large part of the attraction to these streams is the anticipation, even the expectation, of seeing someone die in real time.

This suggests another antecedent for the IRL streamers: that of blood sports, of the Circus Maximus, of the fairground attraction. In Death Riders, a gorgeous, rambling 1976 documentary about young, fearless itinerant stunt performers making their way across the U.S.A. doing motocross jumps and controlled car crashes, you can hear the troupe’s announcer expertly whetting the audience’s appetite for destruction before each act: “He has been cut out of many cars while the car is still on fire, so… anything can happen,” “Two sticks of 60% dynamite is placed eighteen inches from his head… He may not even walk again, he may not even breathe… He could be killed doing this act.” This combination of threat and promise is key to the ballyhoo of the IRL stream. A poster on KiwiFarms describes a fantasy that’s by no means unusual: “I hope Baked gets capped in one of these streams… The stream would be Kino.”

MAKING KINO

The term “Kino,” Russian for “cinema,” is a redditor shorthand for high-brow cinema, as differentiated from the sort of things the plebs and NPCs go in for. It conjures up the Kino-Pravda newsreels of Dziga Vertov and his Kinok collective—as the Russian Civil War raged, Vertov ran a film-car on Old Bolshevik Makhail Kalinin’s agit-train which allowed the Kinoks to shoot, develop, cut, and project films as they traveled the country, in the process recording revolutionary history, as nearly as possibly, as it happened.

The agit-train, and Vertov’s subsequent filmmaking activities, may be counted as one attempt to resolve a problem that has frustrated many a cineaste through the years: to close the gap between cinema and events, which are forever moving ahead and just out of reach, and to bring forth a cinema that has the same potential for unrehearsed spontaneity as life itself. Vertov sought a new kind of filmmaking that would capture “life caught aware,” which could be practiced quite literally—he was not averse to the usage of hidden camera—but also denoted a practice of sneaking up on life, of recording what happened through life’s sudden confrontation with the camera, a kind of ambush.

Fresh hope for the prospect of a “live cinema”—if we think of cinema as bound up with theatrical exhibition, as people did for much of the lifespan of the medium—came with the appearance of broadcast television, transmitted live in the early years of TV, but for decades the concept of live cinema was not much further developed. With the advent of video recording, live television became largely the provenance of news and sports, and movie theaters’ dependence on celluloid projection scuppered the possibility of broadcast simultaneity. There were attempted exceptions, like producer William “Bill” Sargent, Jr.’s Electronovision process, in which performances were shot live and edited on the fly in the fashion of live television productions before being transferred to film for theatrical exhibition, but “prepared” cinema remained the rule.

Electronovision, which promised to deliver something of the live-wire thrill of Richard Burton in Hamlet or James Brown and the Famous Flames on the T.A.M.I. Show (both 1964), essentially invented the template for the NCM Fathoms “events” of today. The Fathom simulcasts of KISS concerts and The Metropolitan Opera were made possible by the 21st century digital changeover, in which DCP overtook 35mm as the standard for theatrical projection, an event which has reignited the dream of live cinema in some bosoms. Francis Ford Coppola, a great enthusiast of the live broadcast productions of television’s Golden Age, conducted two “experimental proof-of-concept” live cinema workshops in 2015 and ’16 at the Oklahoma City Community College and at UCLA’s School of Theater, Film and Television, and wrote of his experience in a 2017 book called Live Cinema and Its Techniques. Coppola imagines “live cinema” as a work that would combine the living-and-breathing immediacy of theatre and live television with the deliberate and variegated shot selection of cinema, achieving “a cinema-like expression which required that the shots not just be coverage, but real building blocks in the cinematic telling of the story.”  

In his book, Coppola recounts accidentally getting stoned on the rock promoter Bill Graham’s marijuana butter cookies at the 1979 Academy Awards before taking the stage to present a Best Director statuette to Michael Cimino, taking the opportunity to make a messianic prediction of the coming of a “communication revolution that is about movies and art and music and digital electronics and computers and satellites and above all, human talent [that is] going to make things that the masters of the cinema, from whom we have inherited this business, wouldn’t believe possible.” Coppola goes on to describe his own failed revolutionary undertakings: a catastrophic live television event for California Governor Jerry Brown’s 1980 presidential run, and the ultimate decision not to shoot his 1982 One from the Heart in the fashion of a live, multi-camera, one-shot television production, deterred by his cinematographer Vittorio Storaro. Still struggling with the problem of live cinema into his eighties, the fading Maestro has words of praise for Woody Harrelson’s contribution to the medium in Lost in London, which he calls “a Milestone in the history of Live Cinema.” Screened live in some 500 cinemas on January, 2017, Harrelson’s directorial debut, in which he stars as himself, is a single-camera, single-take caper, loosely based on a run-in with the London police that Harrelson had one night in 2002. 

Police encounters are regular a staple of IRL streamer content, but there has been little to suggest aesthetic ambitions or foresight on the level of Coppola’s or Harrelson’s, and as close as streamers have come to tackling traditional cinematic exhibition was an Ice Poseidon event announced last December at the flagship Alamo Drafthouse in Austin—which ended, predictably, in a shitshow. If the IRL streams are live cinema, they are live cinema of a different category than any imagined by Coppola who, for all his farsighted futurism and undimmed belief in the potential of technology to transform and evolve cinema, doesn’t seem to have imagined the phasing out of the role of directorial authority and discretion in imagining cinema’s future.

I suppose that no-one anticipates their own obsolescence, any more than they do their own death, least of all a megalomaniac who can still recall being the conquering hero of New Hollywood, issuing orders to a squadron of attack helicopters in Philippine airspace. But we are now a lifetime away—my lifetime, in fact—from the world in which Coppolas and Ciminos had that kind of weight to swing around, and if there is to be a renascence of live cinema, there’s not much reason to expect that men or women of their ilk will direct it, or even to expect that it will be directed in any recognizable sense at all. Did you know that Francis Ford Coppola published a book in 2017? How many people do you think did?

LOST IN AMERICA

While Pokémon Go brought streamers like Ice and his imitators out of their bedrooms and basements, the COVID-19 pandemic and widespread self-quarantining that followed it briefly appeared destined to drive them back in. This was the case for some, reduced to the IP2-disdained “desktop streamers,” aka Desktop Andys, but certainly not all, and those who remained in the streets, like Baked, reaped the rewards of more-than-usually captive audiences.

IRL streamers are drawn, as moths to the flame, to events of any kind—rallies, protests, riots, the Los Angeles Lakers winning the 2020 NBA Championship—and in the year of lockdown the streamers offered one window on spasms of unrest around the country, and other curious sights besides. In April, Captain Content, a Spanish-born IRL streamer, could be seen wending his way through an anti-social distancing protest in Nevada, his TTS brightly nattering “Fuck Trump supporters, you are all pussies.” As protests and unrest in New York welled up in response to the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, on June 3rd, 2020 you could see 18-year-old YouTuber Malik Sanchez, aka Smooth Sanchez, wandering through the West Village and vicinity of Union Square, accosting mostly white passers-by, identifying himself as being in the employ of “the CEO of Black Lives Matter,” and insisting that his marks “Take a knee for George Foreman,” in some cases asking them to apologize for their white privilege after kneeling. At first several blow by, and are berated by Sanchez for doing so, but then he hits a streak, and one pedestrian after another concedes to solemnly kneel on the sidewalk at the edict of the CEO of BLM in tribute to the inventor of the Foreman Grill, still very much alive and probably capable of KOing Logan Paul.

An outraged Tucker Carlson showed a clip of Sanchez’s stream on his program as an illustration of bullying mob mentality run amok, demanding “the atavistic ritual of self-abasement” like an occupying army gloating over their conquest. Dmitri Solzhenitsyn, writing in the National Review some days later, gleaned satirical intention beneath Sanchez’s self-described trolling, opining that Sanchez had unmasked a cultish aspect in the contemporary liberal imagination, through his stream showing people who “have transcended the material plane and reached a level of mystical elevation in their political fervor,” for whom “the woke genuflection of repentance is like unto a kneeling prayer.”

Presumably Carlson and Solzhenitsyn—grandson of the author of The Gulag Archipelago—mean what they say, whatever one happens to think of it. The ideology of the IRL streamer troll is more difficult to pin down, and deliberately so. Many are frankly apolitical; some, like Trumper-baiting Captain Content, ostensibly gravitate leftwards; others, like Baked and Sanchez, ostensibly skew right, though one can’t imagine the buttoned-down respectability conservatism of Mitt Romney and company much appealing to their sensibilities. The IRL streamer phenomena corresponds almost exactly to the Trump era and the troll culture concurrent to it, and Trump’s preternatural ability to press and trigger seems to have provided many a streamer a guiding light—as Norman Mailer wrote from the 1972 Republican convention, the presidency is “a primitive office and inspires the tribes of America to pick up the modes and manners of their chief.”

The invincibility of the troll springs from the troll’s total mutability. Because there is no core self to protect, attack and offense can be adjusted freely to the needs of the moment, to best bedevil the individual being dealt with. The pose of victim is blithely adopted when convenient, discarded just as quickly. In a much-circulated stream from early last October, Sanchez, a hobgoblinish Latino kid with an overbite who looks like he weighs 110 lbs. soaking wet, gets in an altercation with a man in line outside of a California Donuts location—this was part of a much-touted trip to Los Angeles—which ends with Sanchez Macing the man repeatedly, to little visible effect.

Sanchez is with two compatriots, one of them the Austin-based IP2 streamer SCJ—the initialism stands for “Scuffed Jim Carrey.” (“Scuffed” is a terminology from the Ice Poseidon days, referring to Ice’s derelict, careless lifestyle, which has become as much an intrinsic part of the streamer aesthetic as extreme asceticism was to the Bolsheviks.) When the man, who they for some reason have begun to identify as “David,” makes a comment about SJC’s mother, he responds “My mom’s dead… My mom died fighting for this country… My mom’s a patriot… My mom got a Purple Heart.” Sanchez and SJC pelt “David” with a stream of “Faggots,” and when he then responds in kind, SCJ bounces back with a mock-offended “I’m gay, bro, by the way—I’m bisexual… Look at you, bullying a bisexual autistic man.” Sanchez and SCJ repeatedly identify themselves as “17-year-olds,” which they are not, presumably with a view to making “David” believe he would face charges for assaulting a minor if he responded to their three-on-one provocations with fists. And as Sanchez, SJC, and their third, Jacob Zone, unseen because he’s filming the action, pile into their car to beat a giggling retreat, who should be there in the back seat but Baked himself.

It is hard to overstate just how relentlessly negative all of this is, so much so that anyone participating in this attention economy must presumably cease to register the negativity as anything other than room tone, a dull buzz, the mephitic natural state of things. While Sanchez and SJC pelt “David” with abuse and he returns fire—not nearly so adroitly, it needs be said—the comments section in turn scrolls by seething with all kinds of omnidirectional abuse: for the cucked “David,” for Sanchez and SJC, even for the widely loathed streamer ONLYUSEmeBLADE, who’s nowhere to be seen. Opines one Ric Flair, “pretending to be kids to protect yourself might be the most pathetic thing I’ve ever seen.” Pretty noob comment, honestly. What Sanchez and SJC are doing is par for the course: the bad faith exploitation of grievance politics, used for the loopholes they offer that facilitate evasions and “Get Out of Jail Free” card escapes. The troll streamer’s one true creed is content at any cost, be it through burlesqued cries of victimhood or a well-placed Keemstar dono or twenty.

Later in October Sanchez made the news again, arrested after climbing to the top of the Queensboro Bridge. In the video from his stream, which is still online (TK), he can be seen clamoring up the struts and sway bracing on the north side of the bridge over the Roosevelt Island Tramway, from which position he squirts Mace down towards pedestrians passing on the walkway below, hollering “How does the jizz feel?” Someone called “Dickhead” tips Sanchez $2.00, this accompanied by a request to “Shit in your hand and drop it on someone,” which Sanchez declines to do. All of this is relayed via Sanchez’s TTS which is set up to speak in a clipped and very civilized English accent, pronouncing “Faggot” as “Fay-get.” When the police finally arrive, stopping traffic to question Sanchez from below, they ask for identification, to which he answers: “SMOOTH SANCHEZ, CONTENT KING!”

PRESS OR BE PRESSED

This drive to self-publicize is not a new development in the life of this fame-hungry Republic. In 1886 Manhattanite Steve Brodie gained instant celebrity by claiming to have jumped from the Brooklyn Bridge, and assayed his fame into a saloon on the Bowery, and it is not too much to imagine that had he the equipment available, he might have done the jump with a GoPro in tow. When drama is lacking, it is the sworn duty of the streamer to provide it—to press or be pressed. This tendency is elevated to pure grotesquerie in Eugene Kotlyarenko’s 2020 film Spree, a sort of social media- age Taxi Driver (1976) with touches of Man Bites Dog (1992) and Natural Born Killers (1994) in which Kurt Kunkle, a low-engagement influencer wannabe who makes a living as a driver for an Uber-like ride-hail service, played by Stranger Things’ Joe Keery, manages to finally attain long-sought-for virality by going on a nightlong murder binge, aided along the way by some savvy stream sniping.

While much content comes of terrorizing an unsuspecting public, quite a bit of it is generated through power struggles within the streaming community, a la Bjørn and EBZ, or EBZ and Billy the Fridge. Streamers form allegiances and rivalries, with an eye to synergizing brands or generating content through conflict. Baked succeeded in running Captain Content off IP2, then had a public falling out with Mando after their road trip, shouldering in on his former partner while Mando gave an interview to local news at a pro-Trump rally in Phoenix, Baked then heading off with a satisfied “Cucked his interview.” In New York City, Sanchez made a show of vying for the content crown of Hampton Grosso, aka Hampton Brandon, who owes much of his own notoriety to his very public beefing with Ice Poseidon, having come to Ice’s home and trashed his patio before later trading punches with Ice in front of the Baja Fresh Mexican Grill on Hollywood Boulevard over the Walk of Fame star commemorating Western star Chill Wills.

Brandon, a tall, athletic white boy with malevolently slinted stoner eyes who returned to his hometown of New York in spring 2020 is a no-joke brawler, cooling his heels in lockdown until late last year for a plethora of charges. Sanchez responded to news of Brandon’s release on his stream, musing “I think the script just got more interesting.” With drama the name of the game, certain streamer rivalries have an air of screenwritten tidiness, and there is consequently a widespread suspicion of the authenticity of the internecine squabbles popping up in this world where, after all, everyone is lying all the time. (A recurring bit occurs when these jackals pump one another up after Macing innocent bystanders, hooting “Yo, you had no choice!” and “Bro, she was assaulting you!” and things of this nature.)

Accusations of kayfabe and general imposture run rampant in chats and threads devoted to IRL streaming, as it does in the world as a whole. This becomes a running joke in Spree—as Kunkle racks up kill after kill, his chatroom fills up with heckles of “FAKE.” But with the bar for content constantly being raised—or lowered, if you prefer—the IRL streams are jarred by eruptions of quite convincing violence, or the threat of it. In November Steel Puma, a Baked lieutenant, was dropped with a flurry of punches from another streamer named Joker, leaving Puma stunned, his MAGA hat spinning on the sidewalk. In September, a Trending Topic emerged concerning Frank Hassle, a professional YouTuber harasser who showed up streaming on the doorstep of longtime target Boogie2988 in Fayetteville, Arkansas. Boogie2988 was there with a gun to greet Hassle, and pumped off a warning shot.

Keeping track of feuds and shifting allegiances is a full-time job. Those wageys—message board slang for those with day jobs—who can’t stay on it in real-time can get their recaps via a variety of venues: not only the /r/LivestreamFails community, a grease trap that preserves the lowest moments of the day, but places like the late CX News, The Rocky Reina Show, or Cognitive Thought, hosted by an Englishman billed as Rooster Cogburn, which did a feature-length episode on the ongoing downward spiral of ONLYUSEmeBLADE. (The theme song for Cognitive Thought, presumably self-recorded, is a glum hip-hop track that announces: “Welcome to the internet, you  best prepare your brain.”)

So, too, is it a chore to keep track of the location of the streams themselves. Streamers, whose bread and butter after all is the violation of community standards, are forever being reported and kicked off various platforms, only to then, Whac-a-Mole style, pop up immediately on another. Ice Poseidon moved to YouTube after being banned from Twitch, then migrated to Mixer, then moved back to YouTube after that service shut down. In October, Baked Alaska’s account was removed from YouTube thanks to the efforts of Vic Berger IV and Tim Heidecker, who shared a clip of a Baked stream in which he berates employees at a Chevron station with an implicit request to have Baked deplatformed, earning Heidecker a deeper animus among alt-right adjacent IRL streamers than that which he’d already enjoyed for perceived infractions against controversial comedian Sam Hyde.

The beatifically based Hyde is a figure held in nearly universal esteem in the IP2 community, as such esteem is a rarity here, as streamer-viewer relationships depart from anything that might be termed “fandom.” Streamers’ open contempt for certain viewers of the stream is typical, as is the viewers open contempt for the streamers: locked in a mutually demeaning transactional relationship, both sides are constantly exchanging imprecations in the chats. The streamer knows that the scoptophile viewer cannot look away; the viewer knows the streamer is a monkey dancing for donos, useless without an audience, and the biliousness of the relationship is palpable. In the Attila/Jewel Rancid sex scene he pauses to slur to camera in mid-coitus: “The incels love this.”

Other streamers trade less in open affront to the world than in the spectacle of their own debasement and self-degradation. (You might argue, and not without reason, that all of this only amounts to debasement and self-degradation, but at any rate it does take different forms.) Perhaps the most noteworthy self-sacrifice is ONLYUSEmeBLADE, born Brian Risso, a hardcore alcoholic who first gained notoriety in 2009 with YouTube videos of his Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare play, in which he would cut down opponents using only the knife mechanic. BLADE followed the Ice Poseidon transition from gameplay streamer to IRL streamer, his specialty “drunk streaming,” which he described thusly: “I sit in front of the computer and people donate money for me to take shots and take shots and get stupid and pretty much it’s a shitshow.” In other words, BLADE learned there’s an audience out there eager to see him fall on the knife himself.

Where the spectacle of a Sanchez or a Baked stirring shit offers the viewer to the chance to participate at a distance in addressing the world in an attitude of open disrespect or affront, the attraction of BLADE’s public disintegration is more akin to that of being onlooker to a multiple vehicle collision, with points of interest to date including unwelcome gropings of women, weight gain and muscle mass loss, rape accusations (the abovementioned Goocheese), loss of control of bladder and bowels and, from 2019 to present, the development of slowly worsening and suppurating sores on his legs believed to be connected to his diabetes, the progress of which BLADE’s “fans” have diligently monitored and memed. BLADE’s channel disappeared last November with an announcement that he was leaving content creation, this corresponding to news that his girlfriend, Becky, was expecting twins, the greatest content creation of all.

ON TOUR

BLADE could in 2020 be seen with Baked and others in “RV6,” one of the supergroup-style events that are staples of IRL streaming, the sixth in a series of trips taken by a clutch of streamers in the eponymous recreational vehicle, criss-crossing the highways of America, causing trouble wherever they go, and turning on one another during drunken, debauched nights when no other low-hanging fruit is in sight. If one dysfunctional narcissist is entertaining, a group of them will be more entertaining still—the idea is a staple of reality television, with roots that run through Howard Stern’s Wack Pack, Andy Warhol’s Superstars, and John Waters’s Dreamlanders. (More common message board references are to The Jerry Springer Show and Bumfights, which are probably closer to the practical results.)

In the IRL streaming community, specifically, the origins of the ensemble act may be traced back to the heyday of BattleCam.com and the BattleCam House. BattleCam.com, the social network community connected to the HD internet television provider FilmOn, was the brainchild of Alkiviades “Alki” David, the Nigerian-born Cypriot Greek heir to a fortune built on Coca-Cola bottling plants. After writing, producing, directing, and starring in two indie films seen by precisely no-one, David turned his attention to the world of content, launching the internet-based television provider FilmOn.tv in 2009. (FilmOn also has a music division, and for a time counted Chief Keef as its most significant signee.)

In 2013, FilmOn announced a new “Live Interactive Anti-Social TV Show,” in which six men and six women culled from Alki’s website were confined in a house in East L.A. and would, by responding to truth-or-dare style prompts from the viewing audience, compete for basic amenities and “exit passes” allowing them to leave the house. (Upon entering the outside world, the liberated participants would be followed by a camera crew, and given every financial incentive to create more mayhem.) Said David on the launch of the show, “Jerry Springer is a watered-down version of BattleCam House. I'm sure it’s going to really upset the vocal minority but most will get a kick out of the antics of our BattleCammers.” Pitching the site, David gave a minor tweak to the old Warhol adage: “BattleCam.com provides a platform for any attention seeker to achieve international stardom; now, everyone can be world-famous for 15 seconds from the comfort of their home computer.” While I don’t believe IRL livestreaming has yet produced a Warhol figure, it may yet yield up a Valerie Solanas.

The BattleCam House was followed by David’s Road to Hell, a prank show in which David plays a limo driver who lures men into his car with the promise of On the Prowl-style connubial bliss, then torments them. The challenge-based model of the BattleCam House, taken from game shows and reality television like Fear Factor, was picked up by other content creators, with Ice Poseidon hosting a series of CX Fear Factors. And then there were the communal living situations, like the “Vegas Compound” featuring ONLYUSEmeBLADE, Attila, and a fiftysomething streamer fond of fisticuffs who goes by OG Geezer, engaging in all manner of squiffed, depressing depravity. The RVs took the show on the road, and kept the crew in claustrophobic close quarters sure to generate content, like Billy the Fridge taking off a passed-out BLADE’s sneakers to examine the gangrenous hole in his big toe.

RV6 was bankrolled by Casey Content God, one of the Medicis to the streamer set, who obtained the 2006 Coachmen Mirada which was to be the scene of the rolling debauch. The cast is a revolving door, with streamers joining and departing, often in a huff. In the mix at one time or another, alongside Baked and BLADE, were Carl ii, Demon Andy, Dope District, Johnny Boston, Chaggot, Skimask Andy, Schizo Sammy, Stop Speeding, Aldy1k, Laura, Steel Puma, Shooter McFaggot, and Loulz, a previous unknown who briefly emerged as the trip’s breakout star. Tires blow, and hours are spent struggling to repair them. Much content is created by Baked entering establishments with his TTS on, which invariably starts yapping the Keemstar dono.

There are encounters with cops, and with stream snipers, Loulz among them, who gains fan-favorite status not only for his willingness to not only keep the TTS cranked loud and proud but to augment whatever’s coming in with slurs of his own. Normies are pressed, and then sprayed with bear Mace, referred to by IP2 as “content spray.” Baked, who is officially sober—a point much contested on the message boards—acts as a sort of ringleader and instigator, and he has the best room in the RV. Ample meth is acquired and smoked, not without incident—during one deal Johnny Boston has his phone snatched, leaving Baked and BLADE to negotiate with the thieves for its return. BLADE can otherwise can be relied on to get blackout drunk on Jäger nightly, usually creatively interfered with after he crashes out—at one point an Egg McMuffin is duct taped to his head. As he slumbers, the rot on his legs continues a steady progress towards putrefaction. He is earning, by some at-home- viewer estimates, a princely sum. The Keemstar donos roll in at $20 a pop, and they roll in often.

One of the last stops for RV6 was a visit to a post-election “Stop the Steal” rally in Phoenix, which quickly went pear-shaped. Baked, barking about Jews during an Alex Jones oratory, is rendered silent by a musclebound man in a Superman tank top who tells him “Shut up with Jewish shit… You’re trying to segregate people. There’s evil people of all fucking races. Just shut the fuck up.” Baked goes on to try to ingratiate himself with a pack of Proud Boys, insisting “I know Gavin [McInnes],” but is likewise rebuffed. (That the men might have crossed paths at Misshapes in 2008 seems eerily possible.) On the evening of November 8th-9th, as the RV was struggling back to Los Angeles, its momentum ground to a halt after a member of the crew, Dope District, was arrested with a felony battery charge after fracturing the skull of streamer Aldy1k. RV7 was in the works, along with a streamer house in Mexico, though all of this seemed unlikely after Baked broadcast on DLive from inside the Capitol, resulting in the demonetization of he and other IP2 streamers. Casey Content God, not a man to be easily deterred, went ahead and announced plans for an RV7 in August, 2021—though it was eventually delayed until December.

I, TOO, AM PRESSED

Smooth Sanchez missed RV6 but he was back on the street after his bridge stunt in plenty of time for Halloween, which he spent streaming in the East and West Villages, asking women for their phone numbers between bouts of boasting of himself as “the alpha incel king” and quoting Travis Bickle and “Supreme Gentleman” Elliot Rodger, all while his TTS bubbled with gems like “Fuck all women. You don’t deserve our beautiful cocks.” On ip2alwayswins and KiwiFarms, there was a consensus that all of this was careening towards catastrophe, that you can only press so far and so long in a country that is armed to the teeth, and you can only freebase so much stepped-on shit in a country lousy with Fentanyl, and that someone eventually was going to die by someone else’s hand or their own—which, of course, was the incentive to keep tuning in to these circling-the-drain spectacles.

Previous spectacular flame-outs are still spoken of with reverential awe. A prime example is the last hoorah hurrah of IRL streamer Arab Andy, who was arrested in 2019 after creating a panic in a classroom on the University of Washington campus when his TTS announced “Countdown successfully started,” suggesting a detonation was imminent—when the cops were climbing up the Queensboro Bridge to get Smooth Sanchez down, several variations of this were heard. Arab Andy is back now, with a channel where he discusses K-Pop, but the consensus is that he’d lost his spark in the slammer, and that the old magic is gone.

While Arab Andy, having had his fill of hubris and nemesis, now blabbers about Girls’ Generation for a diminishing audience, the high-wire act continues apace for other IRL streamers, and fuses continues to run down. My friend Bilandic snapped the above pic of Sanchez spotted in the wild on January 17th, at an anti-mask rally in Union Square. This was a few months before feds frog-marched him out of the East Village apartment that he shares with his grandmother, mother, and uncle for having cleared the outdoor dining area at a Flatiron restaurant on Valentine’s Day, shuffling in and announcing “Allah Akbar… Bomb detonating in two minutes.”

Rep and rap sheets grow in tandem. Bjørn may or may not have been detained by the Danish government after making threats to the Prime Minister on his stream, OG Geezer was very definitely stabbed in the leg during a street scuffle, and Chicken Andy was seen driving around with a guy called Crack Rock Johnny looking for guess what controlled substance—this not long after he looked on, dumbfounded, in the parking lot behind the STRAT Hotel in Vegas while his girlfriend, Alice, was beaten into a state of hydrocephalic swelling by former porn actress Bobbi Dylan. IP2’s other favorite amour fou couple, Attila and Jewel Rancid, whose druggy erotic fumblings have been surfacing on sites like Chaturbate and eFukt, were married on March 22nd, and during a brief period of connubial bliss kept the Austin PD occupied with domestic dispute calls—Attila purchased a fire axe and brandished it menacingly to great fanfare, and much ghoulish speculation occurred around the issue of when and how it will be put to use. Smart money had it that Chicken Andy or Stop Speeding, whose pseudonym is a veritable cry for help, were first in line to OD, but early January brought news of the death of RV6 cast member Johnny Boston, born John M. Flaherty, at age 45, a known opiate enthusiast who’d been back home in the Commonwealth, streaming from Beantown’s Methadone Mile. Any memorializing, however, took a backseat to January 6th and the Capitol Hill Follies.

After an adult life spent in breathless pursuit of metrics, the breach of the Capitol at long last elevated Baked from eCeleb to national story, CBS News Los Angeles news identifying him as a “Noted Nazi Miscreant” in a segment describing the ongoing manhunt for implicated riff-raff in the days following that bizarre be-in. Right up to the moment of his arrest Baked was still fave-ing and RTing from a locked Twitter account, but the YOBAstream would soon fall silent as, per court documents: “The judge and federal administrator admonished him to stay off social media.” Another tidbit worth noting: “Gionet’s attorney said his client is a self-employed ‘filmmaker’ but he’ll have to get new employment so he can be monitored.” In the opinion of at least one lawyer, then, when we’re talking about IRL streaming, we’re talking about cinema. Leaving town… gonna do it… blowing loads… making movies…

If you’ve enjoyed this piece, please consider becoming a paid subscriber to Employee Picks, as that’s the only means I have to receive remuneration for researching and writing it.

As a rule I’ve preferred to post anything that concerns the business end of this venture alongside some new High Quality Original Content, but as latest crop of H.Q.O.C. isn’t ready to go to market at present, you’ll have to make do instead with a droning shareholder’s meeting and some notes about works in progress. Below is information pertaining to th…

Read more

This piece is about, among other things, collecting and commodification, scarcity and value, and before getting into the swing of things I’d like to address a few minor matters pertaining to the economics of this Substack. If you have no interest in such gibble-gabble, the “fun” begins in earnest after the page break.

Production on the “value-added” phys…

Read more

Claude Chabrol is a bit like one of those prolific murderers who, long after being locked away or sentenced to the chair, keeps adding to their body count tally as unaccounted-for corpses turn up buried around the countryside. There is more Chabrol to dig up all the time: a 52-minute adaptation of Henry James’s late tale “The Bench of Desolation” for Fr…

Read more

Paid subscribers unwind over a tawny port at the Employee Picks clubhouse on W. 47th St.

This is another of those entries that combines pure practicalities with other ephemera. If you would prefer to hop ahead to the other stuff, simply scroll down to the page break and you’re there. What’s up front has to do with specifics about some tchotchkes due to p…

Read more

On Monday, March 23rd of 1936, 52-year-old Paul McCullough was being driven to his Massachusetts home by his longtime friend, Frank T. Ford, when McCullough requested that Ford stop at a barber shop on Medford Square, his stated intention being to pop in for a shave. What transpired there, according to patrolman John Millis, quoted later in the Cincinna…

Read more

Read more

I have only seen Jean Garret’s Fuk Fuk à Brasileira (Fuck Fuck Brazilian Style, 1986) in the manner that I have seen most of the Brazilian films that I’ve seen affixed with the scurrilous “Cinema da Boca do Lixo” label: on a contraband file, often of appallingly low quality, passed along by some fellow degenerate, usually with subtitles provided by an amateur enthusiast, if indeed subtitles are to be found at all. Yet I know that a fairly fresh 35mm print of Fuk Fuk à Brasileira does exist, because it was struck, by the Cinemateca Brasileira, for a 2012 program of Cinema da Boca do Lixo at the Film Festival Rotterdam, using public funds. The miraculous perversity of a public institution supporting such a thing I can only explain by describing Fuk Fuk à Brasileira and the Cinema da Boca do Lixo, a low-born, sublimely sketchy popular phenomenon; the poetry of it all I can only explain by discussing the Cinemateca Brasileira and the role of the cinematheque in guarding film history, which I will come to in due time.     

Fuk Fuk à Brasileira, a sort of sci-fi porno picaresque, stars Chumbinho, a little person actor standing around three feet tall and a Boca do Lixo workhorse, as “Siri” (Crab), a mute who narrates his story telepathically. As the film begins, he is working as a houseboy for an upper-class couple, Mr. Julio and Mrs. Lia, who are so accustomed to his presence that when he comes to deliver a glass of refreshment, they don’t bother to stop fucking doggystyle in front of a framed picture of Marilyn Monroe. (The sex is real, explicit, and frequent.) A peaceful existence that consists of Siri’s wearing a motocross helmet and punching a medicine ball while the lady of the house masturbates in front of him, orally servicing her while she stuffs her face with pretzel sticks in bed, and being showered with gift dildos from Mr. Julio, comes to an abrupt end one night as the couple are hosting a guest for a threesome. Mr. Julio orders Siri to fetch some lubricatory butter, but his announced ambitions break up the party. “She ain’t no Maria Schneider, but I’m gonna fuck her ass,” says Mr. Julio; “Listen, you ain’t no Marlon Brando either, ya know,” replies the guest, fleeing. Mrs. Lia, too, exits, upon sensing the unpleasant viscosity of the unguent; it’s margarine and, as she explains in a huff, “My butt only accepts butter.” Undeterred, Mr. Julio heads downstairs, where he greets the sight of a nude Siri lying face down on the sofa with the ominous phrase “A man has got to fuck what a man has got to fuck.” Faced with the threat of rape by his employer, Siri flees to the upstairs bathroom, where, cornered and frantic to escape, he flushes himself down the toilet. When Mr. Julio finally kicks in the door, he is just in time to see Siri’s last extremity, a hand, rattling down into the bowl, following Siri to freedom.

Liberation by way of the sewer: an apt metaphor for the Cinema da Boca do Lixo, which takes its designation from a colloquial name—“Boca do Lixo” translates as “Mouth of Garbage”—for the slice of the Santa Ifigênia neighborhood in São Paulo in the area of Rua do Triunfo’s intersection with Rua Vitória near the city’s central railway terminus, the Luz station. The neighborhood became a haven for foreign film distributors in the 1920s and ‘30s, with Fox, Paramount, and Metro renting warehouses in the vicinity. Rio de Janeiro was then still the center of Brazil’s federal government and leading film production center, home of film studio Atlântida Cinematográfica among others, but booming, bumptious São Paulo had the superior railway infrastructure, and distributors were drawn there by the proximity of the train lines and the access they supplied to the vast inland state.

By the mid-‘50s the Boca, a seedy district to begin with, had become a wide-open red-light district; when local government cracked down on flesh-peddling in Bom Retiro—the former center of such activities in São Paulo, run by Jewish gangs—the action moved to the Quadrilátero do Pecado, bounded by the avenues and streets Duque de Caxias, Protestantes, São João, and Timbiras. Thanks to the nearby terminal, cheap hot-sheet hotels abounded, and with the booming business came the pimps, bandits, cut-purses, and black-marketeers who would malinger on Andradas, Aurora, Timbiras, and Vitória streets. Hiroito de Moraes Joanides, for a time the reigning O Rei da Boca do Lixo, made a killing in the streets on girls, cocaine, and methamphetamine. His father was an admirer of the Japanese emperor, hence the name, but Hiroito was suspected to be no admirer of his father, accused and acquitted of parricide after the old man’s fatal stabbing—the only one in a long list of crimes he denied responsibility for until his dying day, diligently cataloguing the rest in his 1977 autobiography Boca do Lixo, having turned man of letters after his arrest for murder in 1962.

Around the same time Hirohito’s reign was coming to an end, the Boca was becoming the center of a new and more disreputable kind of domestic filmmaking community made up of newcomers and refugees from the collapse of Maristela, Multifilms, and Vera Cruz, the Brazilian studios of the 1950s, a community very often operating outside the auspices of the commercial mainstream but reliant as the majors had been on the nearby railways to ship the goods to market. (That frequenting the area in the periphery of train stations invariably brings one closer to the working-class and shirking-class life of a city is a phenomenon I’ve discussed in a previous piece on the German Bahnhofskino.) The symbolic center of this industry—which in fact consisted of businesses scattered all over downtown São Paulo—was the three-and-a-half block stretch of the Rua do Triunfo, dotted with distributors large and small, equipment rental and repair companies, and, at No. 155, the bar-restaurant Soberano, a meeting place for filmmakers, technicians, actors, and hustling film students, a sort-of Brown Derby of the Boca do Lixo. As early as 1949 producer Oswaldo Massaini had set up his Cinedistri Ltda. on Rua do Triunfo, and other would-be moguls would follow in his wake. And so it happened that once upon a time in the Boca the garotas de programa (“program girls,” a genteel phrase for a call-girl) and the penny-ante gangsters and the movie people and other assorted adventurers came to live and drink and try to turn a few real side-by-side. According to Ozualdo Ribiero Candeias, a legendary figure of the Cinema da Boca do Lixo, an unspoken truce existed between the thieves and the showfolk: “Nobody messed with us.”

Garret, a native of the Portuguese Azores archipelago born José Antônio Nunes e Silva, came to Brazil to stay around 1966, when still in his late teens, and his life in Brazil—he died in 1996, by some reports disillusioned and depressed that the industry that had provided him his livelihood has disappeared—roughly corresponds to the rise and fall of the Cinema da Boca do Lixo. The bastard filmmaking ethos of Cinema da Boca do Lixo—to call it a “genre” or “style” doesn’t quite cover something so amorphous—has no exact birthdate, but 1967 is an important year, for it was the year of A Margem (The Margin), the debut feature from Candeias, an autodidact farmer’s son and former truck driver, civil servant, and furniture polisher who’d turned out his first 16mm short in 1955, learning by doing.  

This significantly titled production was a shoestring affair offering a slice of life as lived among the poor who inhabit the muddy banks of São Paulo’s Tietê River, at its center two stories of unrequited passion: that of a black prostitute for a tight-lipped, arrogant loafer without job or prospects, and that of a slightly cracked beggar for an office girl who moonlights in a brothel. Stylistically bifurcated, the first half of A Margem lays out and explores a radical aesthetic premise, shooting entirely through the subjective perspective of one character or another—the same approach taken years later by that greatest of English sitcoms, Peep Show, with shifts of perspective obeying emotional and aesthetic considerations rather than merely keeping up with who’s talking, talking being very scarce in Candeias’s film. (The filmmaker was drawing and expanding on the perspectival experimentations in the previous year’s O Corpo Ardente by Walter Hugo Khouri, another frequent Boca do Lixo habitué, and a sort of bridge figure between the Cinema Novo intellectuals and the Boca primitives.) What begins as a woman’s ambling pursuit of a reticent lover transforms with the dawning of propriety, responsibility, and tenderness, before the movie mutates again with the first sudden, savage incursion of death. The things that Candeias does with point-of-view and use of foreground space are continually surprising, and the film as a whole is a work of extraordinary intimacy and intuition—two of the most valuable qualities that cinema can have.

A Margem would be one of the foundational texts of a “movement” sometimes referred to as cinema marginal. The term had more traction with critics than with filmmakers, used to group together a new crop of films that, while often artistically ambitious, were more willfully populist in nature than those of the highbrow Cinema Novo, which had flourished at film festivals abroad. Chief Cinema Novo theorist and filmmaker Glauber Rocha hailed from the state of Bahia, in the country’s northeast, and Cinema Novo was largely a Rio-based movement; Candeias and the Cinema da Boca do Lixo filmmakers belonged to São Paulo, the crass, commercial, and far less picturesque upstart megalopolis to the south. These were films and directors self-defining in opposition to Cinema Novo, but also set apart from Hollywood, always endeavoring to flood the Brazilian market with U.S. product, and from the high-finish output of the foundered Brazilian studios—or, often, the state-run Embrafilme, founded in 1969—due to the rough-and-ready nature of these independent, seat-of-the-pants undertakings, and their frequent commitment to working-class and bas-fond subjects. And this loose confederation of filmmakers found a home in the Boca do Lixo, where João Callegaro and Carlos Reichenbach set up their Xanadu Productions to make the omnibus film As libertinas, and where 21-year-old Rogério Sganzerla picked up scenes for his O Bandido da Luz Vermelha (The Red Light Bandit; both 1968).

A marginal cinema, yes, but also an underground cinema—the Cinema da Boca do Lixo has sometimes been called “udigrudi” cinema, udigrundi being a corruption of the English “underground” coined, pejoratively, by Rocha. (By the late 1960s the Cinema Novo that Rocha had prophesied and proselytized for had lost its initial velocity, and well before Rocha began to loudly praise the military junta of Ernesto Beckmann Geisel in the mid-‘70s, many Brazilin cineastes had come to regard the Cinema Novo as an establishment to be bucked, not a vanguard to be followed.) And the underground was quite literally the territory of another artist often associated with the Cinema da Boca do Lixo, José Mojica Marins: his on-screen alter-ego, Zé do Caixão, or Coffin Joe, was an undertaker who, when not preparing the dead for burial, busied himself scouring village streets, striking terror into townsfolk, and searching for a woman worthy to bear him a son.

For Marins, as for Candeias—who’d done uncredited work on the script of Marins’s 1963 Meu Destino em Tuas Mãos (My Destiny in Your Hands)—making films in Brazil in the mid-‘60s was practically a matter of working in a vacuum, managed through a pot-luck production method described by Marins in a 2005 interview: “My way of financing my film is in the form of cooperative. I was the pioneer in using the system of coop to produce films. After the collapses of Vera Cruz, Maristela and Multifilms it seemed that it was the end of Brazilian cinema. There was no way to produce more films. It went that way until the government began to fund cinema productions. That was the moment that the independent filmmakers began to appear. Sganzerla, Candeias, Reichenbach, all used the system of cooperative.”

Quite literally, Marins had been raised in the cinema: his father managed a movie theater in São Paulo’s Vila Anastácio, and he claimed to have gained his sense of vocation from viewing there an educational short about venereal disease. As with many a Boca do Lixo showman, he was proudly self-taught, telling an interviewer “I never read a book about cinema. It all comes from my head; any book would impede me. I did not want to make normal cinema. I broke rules, like the axis rule, with my technique. And I hate those technical gadgets like the image assist. I just tell them: Take the camera and a 25 objective lens. No, a 14. I don’t even need to look.”

Marins had introduced his Zé do Caixão, cutting a striking figure with his black beard, cloak and top hat, and his rake-like, curling fingernails, in his first horror effort, 1964’s À Meia-Noite Levarei Sua Alma (At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul). He was a gifted guignol entertainer with a relentless, punitive approach in the editing room and an innate rapport with his public—a largely Roman Catholic public with a deep-seated belief in Evil—sealed by his penchant for direct-to-camera addresses. There was something for everyone in Marins’s tale of a self-styled Sadean atheistic Übermensch who publicly eats leg of lamb with relish on Holy Friday and on a whim maims the scuttling, superstitious peasants who surround him with impunity: the vicarious thrill of total revolt against all forces of authority, as Zé do Caixão denounced the hypocrisy and timidity of society; the reassuring stroke of divine spiritual retribution to bring the reign of terror to an end, however temporarily. Antihero Zé do Caixão made a sensation, launching a comic book empire in addition to a film franchise, and a few years later when Volkswagon released the VW 1600 on the Brazilian market, the boxy four-door—a rarity in the country at the time—was nicknamed, for its supposed resemblance to a casket, the Zé do Caixão.

Marins would be an essential part of the future Jean Garret’s introduction to the world of cinema—in the image above Garret can be seen, kneeling, blonde and boyish, with other graduates of Coffin Joe’s “academy,” an abandoned synagogue in Brás where Marins trained actors and technicians, and shot portions of À Meia-Noite Levarei Sua Alma and the second Zé do Caixão film, 1967’s Esta Noite Encarnarei no Teu Cadáver (This Night I’ll Possess Your Corpse). The young Portuguese, after supporting himself for a time as a bookseller, had by 1967 adopted the pseudonym Jean Silva, and begun working as an advertiser and photographer, producing photonovelas—comic book-style stories using sequential photographs accompanied by dialogue bubbles—to be published in the youth magazine Melodias. On the shoot for 1968’s Trilogia do Terror, a horror anthology on which Marins directed one of the segments, Garret worked as a scene photographer, stage manager and, in the Marins episode Pesedelo Macabro (Macabre Nightmare), as an actor. Some sources take the association back still further, listing Garret as the assistant director on Esta Noite Encarnarei no Teu Cadáver. Whatever the case, through Marins, Garret had come to the Boca, and in the Boca he stayed.

Garret continued to act—for Marins again, in his 1968 antholoy film O Estranho Mundo de Zé do Caixão, and also for Candeias, who’d directed another of the Trilogia do Terror segments—and also to work as a set photographer, serving in that capacity on 1974’s Adultério, as Regras do Jogo by Ody Fraga, another towering figure of the Cinema da Boca do Lixo. Fraga, a native of Florianópolis nearly a decade Garret’s senior, had been working as a scriptwriter since 1960, and had co-directed his first feature with Armando de Miranda in 1966, O Diabo de Vila Velha, a “Western” set in the sertão (“hinterlands”) of northeast Brazil—the sertão film was at that time a commercially proven genre—with a script by Fraga and Marins. It wasn’t until the mid-1970s, however, that Fraga began to work steadily as a director: more than steadily, in fact, beginning a streak of sudden, startling prolificity.  

This was a period in which the Brazilian film industry as a whole was working overtime to satisfy a new demand for product, a demand driven by a number of factors. In 1971, twenty-eight million tickets were sold in Brazil for Brazilian movies, about 15% of the total, a percentage kept down thanks to the MPAA’s quest for Hollywood hegemony. In 1978, the number was sixty-one million. Part of this may have had to do with new resources being pumped into Embrafilme, by the middle of the decade under the steady-handed management of Roberto Farias, with the result of improved local product that could compete with on level footing with foreign films—in 1976 ten million Brazilians watched Sônia Braga in Bruno Barreto’s Dona Flor e Seus Dois Maridos (Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands), making it the most financially successful film in Brazilian history. Part of it, also, was the lei da obrigatoriedade, or “Obligatory Law,”  a law instituted by the authoritarian Brazilian military government that had ruled the country since spring of 1964 and enforced by Embrafilme and the Conselho Nacional do Cinema (CONCINE). The lei da obrigatoriedade made it mandatory that cinemas screen Brazilian movies for certain number of days of the year. In 1969, the bar was set at 63 days, and it would inch up over the decade to come. In 1976, this number climbed from 84 days to 112. In 1978, the quota increased again, to 133. In 1979, it hit a ceiling of 140 days a year.

The ‘70s were a boom period for Brazilian cinema, and they were the heyday of the pornochanchada—the term is a portmanteau, combining “porno,” which should need no introduction, and chanchada, a musical comedy genre that dominated the Brazilian box-office in the 1930s and ‘40s, when they were pumped out by the Rio studios. The term pornochanchada is often treated as a synonym for “sex comedy,” and to be sure there were more than a fair share of newly liberated bombshells, chiseled studs, exasperated cuckolds, nosey old ladies, repressed clergymen, sweaty-browed perverts, and all the rest to be found on Brazilian screens during the peak years of the genre. A frequently cited inspiration for the pornochanchada was the commedia all’italiana cycle of the 1960s and ‘70s, which played to enthusiastic crowds in São Paulo, a place whose enormous population of oriundi (descendants of Italians)—about half of the state—amounts to more Italians than can be found in any city in Italy. Garret’s studies in sexual pathology like 1975’s Amadas e Violentadas (Beloved and Raped) and 1979’s A Mulher Que Inventou o Amor (The Woman Who Invented Love) are rather closer in affinity to the Italian giallo thrillers of the period, however, and one risks missing a great deal in writing off the pornochanchada as mere horned-up frivolity.

The cynical read on the pornochanchada phenomenon suggests that the military government was only too happy to let brainless beachside sex romps proliferate, serving as T & A bread and circuses for a horny and therefore distracted public, though critic Inácio Araújo, in his essay accompanying the 2012 IFFR program, finds an anti-authoritarian underpinning to early taboo-busters like Sganzerla’s O Bandido da Luz Vermelha and A Mulher de Todos (1969), which helped to pave the way for an explosion of erotic cinema in the decade ahead: “This was the time for young people to celebrate the work of Marcuse, Norman Brown, beatniks and surrealists. In short, the ideal of personal liberation associated to political liberation, mostly deriving from May, 1968 in Paris, was beginning to set itself in this conservative environment.”

In any case, the pornochanchada spread like clap through the Boca do Lixo. Massaini, the Boca pioneer who’d tasted prestige when Anselmo Duarte’s Cinidistri-produced O Pagador de Promessas (The Given Word) won the Palme d’or at Cannes in 1962, in the 1970s went in for pornochanchada, with Cinidistri money backing Anibal Massaini Neto and Olivier Perry’s A Infidelidade ao Alcance de Todos (1972), Victor Lima’s Tem Folga na Direção (1976), and José Miziara’s Embalos Alucinantes (1978). Even Marins got in on the action, with 1976’s Como Consolar Viúvas (How to Console Widows), directed under the pseudonym J. Avelar. The pornochanchada begat its own stars, most of them women, and scouts scoured the country for new beauties: Helena Ramos, Zaira Bueno, Nicole Puzzi, “Muse of pornochanchada” Aldine Müller, Matilde Mastrangi, Helena Ramos, Zilda Mayo, Arlete Moreira and her sister Claudette Joubert—both of whom would work with Garrett—and Miss Brasil 1969, Vera Fischer. The wide-open sexual marketplace of Quadrilátero do Pecado found its equivalent operating under the cover of legitimate entertainment on the Rua do Triunfo, as oftentimes parts were decided through testes de sofá (sofa tests), which are exactly what they sound like. Marins, whose ill-starred O Despertar da Besta (Awakening of the Beast) contains a particularly grueling testes de sofá scene, remembers “a mother taking her virgin daughter to get a role in erotic films”; Fischer claimed she escaped the worst by feigning a particularly bloody menstruation; Müller, who went on to success on telenovelas for the enormous television network Rede Globo, recalls bringing her son to work, and thereby generating sympathy and protection.

None of this is to suggest that the testes de sofá were more common in the world of Cinema da Boca do Lixo than they were elsewhere in Brazilian film and television—there is a significant amount of anecdotal evidence to suggest that this is not the case—but to be realistic about the circumstances under which the industry operated, and to some degree operates still. Earlier this year, David Cardoso, Jr., son of the greatest of male pornochanchada stars, claimed his career had been stymied for refusing testes de sofá at Globo.

Cardoso Sr. had arrived in São Paulo from the Mato Grosso do Sul, found work as an actor after starting out as a technician for comic performer Amácio Mazzaropi’s Pam Filmes, shot to celebrity after his starring role in Glauco Mikro Laurelli’s A Moreninha (1970), and three years later was in a position to found his own production company, Dacar Produções Cinematográficas. It was Cardoso who offered Garret his first writer-director gigs, both released in 1975, A Ilha do Desejo and Amades e Violentadas, the latter a more-than-worthy entry in the serial killer-in-love microgenre that includes Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom (1960) and Claude Chabrol’s Le boucher (1970).

In Amades e Violentadas, Leandro (Cardoso, uncharacteristically bearded and bespectacled) is a successful author of crime stories who lifts his premises from memories of the murders that he’s seen committing in flashes of uncontrollable rage—whenever intimacy with a woman threatens to lead to consummation he’s stricken by childhood flashbacks to his father’s sexual humiliation and eventual revenge, and soon after death follows for his would-be lover. A chance for redemption comes into view when erstwhile hunter Leandro has the chance to turn protector, beginning a chaste romance with a woman (Fernanda de Jesus) who he finds fleeing from a satanic sect (!) preparing her for sacrifice, but prying eyes and a putrefying corpse in his Bluebeard’s cellar finally forestall any chance for a new beginning, a police dragnet closing in only to find that Leandro has already put a bullet in his brain rather than risk connubial catastrophe befalling his beloved.

As many a giallo, Amades e Violentadas is the kind of volatile concoction born of the sexual anxieties resultant when, in a deeply Catholic country, a swinging new morality meets the staid old morality, and when those anxieties are observed and distilled into genre form by an astute artist. The masculine neuroses of Amades e Violentadas find a feminine rejoinder in A Mulher Que Inventou o Amor, a superb vehicle for Müller, in a part that both acknowledges and subverts her role as a blank slate upon which male fantasy can be projected, and reveals her talent for mesmerizing opacity. (Müller would later star in what is often described as Garret’s most personal film, 1980’s O Fotógrafo, made for his own production company, Íris Produções Cinematográficas.)

The film opens as Doralice (Müller), a naïve bumpkin, is cornered and deflowered in the meat locker of a butcher’s shop by its porcine proprietor, who sends her home with some filet for her trouble. Doralice fears that her prospects for marriage are gone with her maidenhead, but her roommate, who spends her weekends working as a garota de programa, explains the ropes of the profession, and very soon Doralice has graduated to being the kept woman of a cultured old doctor, an impotent erotic connoisseur who’s like a low-rent version of Alain Cuny in Emmanuelle (1974) who lectures her on opera and generally Eliza Doolittles her into the new identity of “Tallulah,” a woman of grace and refinement. Whether as Doralice or Tallulah, our heroine experiences no pleasure in bed, only learning to placate the egos of the men she sleeps with through a theatrical performance of moaned ecstasy. The real thing is reserved for her ritualistic masturbation sessions, performed in a wedding dress bought with prostitution proceeds, before the image of telenovela star César Augusto (Zecarlos de Andrade), who she seduces in the course of a round of role-reversal games—paying a motorcyclist for sex, picking up a young gay man at the park while in masculine drag—that allow her for the first time to find pleasure with another in bed.

From first neon-splashed trauma to blood-and-roses finale A Mulher Que Inventou o Amor is invested with a chill beauty by cinematographer Reichenbach, a Boca do Lixo utility player who in addition to directing his own films worked on those of others in just about every capacity imaginable. Reichenbach also shot Garret’s forebodingly gorgeous, Fraga co-scripted Excitação (1976), a horror-thriller in the vein of Polanski’s Apartment Trilogy set largely in and around an isolated moderne beach house that’s the scene of a fraught love quadrangle. Garret loved impeccably decorated interiors shot like specimen cases under glass and strategically deployed splashes of color (eye-searing reds are a particular favorite), and his soundtracks always swing, though he took some flak for his reliance on classical cues, as though such things should only be the provenance of highbrow swells. A stylist with a graphic designer’s eye for immediate visual impact—it turns out the photonovelas were a good school for teaching the mysteries of mise-en-scène—Garret had an especial affinity for damaged psychologies and an understanding of the fantasy lives of his countrymen, as well as a keen comprehension of the degree to which those fantasies were shaped by the culture industry that he served. All of these factors came together in this popular artist-entertainer pushing the boundaries of so-called pornochanchada, a genre whose days were numbered when certain other boundaries began to fall.

While there was a great deal of leeway allowing for bared bosoms and even sadistic violence of the sort meted out by Zé do Caixão, censorship was very much a factor under the military government that allowed for the flourishing of Cinema da Boca do Lixo, and the rules under which it was enforced were ever-changing and unpredictable. Marins himself faced the censor board’s ukase with his O Despertar da Besta, completed in 1969, though its psychedelic climax was not to melt minds in Brazilian cinemas until 1983, the film a scourging indictment of a corrupt society awash in and dependent on drugs and sick sex, featuring Marins stepping out from behind the cover of Zé do Caixão to defend himself in a trial-by-television-panel. João Silvério Trevisan, the screenwriter of A Mulher Que Inventou o Amor, a prominent gay rights activist and one of the most highly regarded novelists and essayists of his generation, turned to literature when his career as a director was scuppered, his kamikaze first feature, 1970’s Orgia ou O Homem que Deu Cria (Orgy [Or: The Man Who Gave Birth]) hidden from view immediately. Sganzerla, whose short-lived, clandestine production company Bel-Air Films, formed in 1970 with Júlio Bressane in Rio de Janeiro, was conceived in opposition to the government and operated without the blessing of the censorship board, spent most of the decade to come in exile.

Hardcore sex on screen, held at bay for some years by the military government, came late to Brazil, but it came with a vengeance when it was discovered that there was big money in money shots. Reichenbach’s 1981 Anarquia Sexual (Sensual Anarchy) was the first Brazilian film to be released with a new designation from the then-recently-formed Conselho Superior de Censura (Superior Council of Censorship): “espetáculo pornográfico,” or “pornographic spectacle.” The film’s alternate title, O império do desejo (The Empire of Desire), denotes a debt to Nagisa Ōshima, whose 1976 In the Realm of the Senses had been a massive hit in São Paulo when it finally opened in the city’s art houses in ’79. Along with Italian imports, the Japanese cinema made an indelible impression on certain of the Boca do Lixo directors; Reichenbach, one of the more cinephiliac of the bunch and a dynamo deserving of more space than I give him here, was for example a habitué of the cinemas in São Paulo’s Japanese-majority Liberdade neighborhood. I don’t know if Shohei Imamura’s films ever got much play in the Liberdade cinemas, but Imamura’s description of his principle subjects—the lower half of the human body and the lower half of the social structure—could certainly be applied to much of the Cinema da Boca do Lixo.  

With Laente Calicchio and Raffaele Rossi’s 1981 Coisas Eróticas, Brazilian hardcore had its Deep Throat (1972), its crossover sensation, seen by nearly five million Brazilians. Italian émigré Rossi, a millionaire for a moment thanks to this coup, blew most of his profits on a short-lived indoor soccer team, Grêmio Recreativo Rossi, but he had shown others the way to fortune, and they followed. By 1984, 69 of 104 Brazilian films shown in São Paulo were pornographic, and the more polished and pricey sort of pornochanchadas had breathed their last.

The 1980s, marked by the hardcore invasion and a precipitous drop in ticket sales accompanying a period of broader economic stagnation in Brazil and the appearance of the VCR, were the last gasp days of Cinema da Boca do Lixo. Some of the films of these years seemed to embarrass even their slumming authors, though I confess to a sweet spot to them, the best of which display the creative ferment that marks any period of decline and decadence, a genuinely grimy lowlife élan, and a sense of total erotic abandon. I have seen enough at this point to be familiar with the particulars of fellatio as it was performed in São Paulo at the beginning of the 1980s—languorous and breathy, with a great deal of twirling tongue action—and to wonder if sex is one of those things, like regional accents and guitar tone, that has finally been standardized by the all-over imposition of mass culture.  

A particular favorite filmmaker of this period is the maniacal Sady Baby, born Sady Plauth, whose films evoke a world of nihilism, wanton violence, and total libertinage—at least insofar as I can tell, never having seen one subtitled. No taboo goes unshattered, including bestiality, as suggested by the title of one of Sady’s first films, 1984’s Emoções Sexuais de Um Cavalo (Sexual Feelings of a Horse) (Sady Baby, from a 2013 interview: “I put a lot of myself into that movie.”)

First seen as an actor in Arlindo Barreta’s 1983 O Escândalo na Sociedade, Sady appears in nearly all of his own films, a compactly built punk satyr with a luxurious halo of curls and a deviant Droogish chortle, his brutal, smirking screen persona taking the antiheroism of Zé do Caixão to its amoral apex. In 1983’s Meninas, Virgens e P... (Troca de Óleo), he’s a fresh-out-of-prison menace to society, shirtless under a black leather jacket, metal-studded like his blue jeans, and wearing fingerless leather gloves with four-inch nails protruding from the knuckles; retrieving wads of real hidden in 35mm canisters before heading off to wreak havoc, he looks cooler than any film director ever has before or since. The Sady Baby character is not, however, without a sense of justice: at the outset of 1985’s No Calor do Buraco, Sady interrupts an attempted rape on a muddy river bank—Sady, whose films are quite literally filthy, never misses an opportunity to shoot people flailing in murk and mire—ties up the would-be rapist, watches while his intended victim teases him to arousal, then guffaws uproariously when the assailant’s suddenly tumescent member tugs a tripwire attached to the trigger of a rigged-up rifle that blows the scumbag away. 

The soundtracks to Sady Baby’s films, compiled without a single thought to rights clearance, are simply insane: a brief stretch of Meninas, Virgens e P... (Troca de Óleo) gives us the Monkees’s “I’m a Believer,” ABBA’s “I Have a Dream” and, over a scene of male-on-male sodomy, Wham!’s “I’m Your Man.” (Gay sex is less frequent than the heterosexual variety in Sady Baby’s films, but not much less.) An air of menacing lasciviousness hangs over everything, and what there is of plot takes a back seat to extended scenes of sloppy, bibulous, Boschian orgies that have the character of a mosh pit: liquor bottles being glugged down or dumped out, crotches being fondled, and men with drug-glazed faces numbly submitting to blowjobs. Just about everyone fucks and sucks on-screen, except for Sady—this mirrors Jean-Luc Godard’s complaint about Truffaut’s La Nuit américaine (1973)—who employs a stunt cock. Along with Sady Baby, a ragtag repertory company of depraved perverts travels from film to film, their number including a disconcertingly beautiful actress credited as Leyk-Dú and a comic relief old fart called “Bim Bim,” who can be seen with little Chumbinho in his swansong, José Adalto Cardoso’s arrestingly idiotic 1987 As Taras de Um Minivampiro (The Taint of the Minivampire; in this fine film, Bim Bim plays a provincial mayor who hopes that the appearance of a vampire in his town will act as a lure to American tourists, notwithstanding the fact that the creature has blunted fangs, is the size of a Kindergartener, and can only extract blood by sucking on the used sanitary pads of menstruating women.)

What little information I’ve been able to glean about Sady Baby, the man, comes from the profile quoted above by Matias Rech de Lucena, which includes a remarkable personal recollection: “When I was around seven, I used to go to Balneario Camboriu in Santa Catarina for summer vacations with my family. Every day, at the edge of the beach, a guy with curly blond hair, a Viking hat, and a G-string thong would get on a megaphone and announce the beginning of an erotic play called Soltando a Franga, which, loosely translated, means ‘Release the Inhibitions.’ Years later I realized that the strange man hosting sexy public theater on the beach was Sady Baby himself.” De Lucena catches up with Sady Baby at the Caxias do Sul Penitentiary, where he had been doing time since being collared during a routine traffic stop in February of 2013. He had then been missing for five years, rumored to have committed suicide by throwing himself off of a bridge into the Uruguay River, wanted by the police for hiring a minor to play his daughter in a (presumably pornographic) film titled, of all things, The Director’s Daughter. Sady chalks it up to a big misunderstanding, in between nonchalantly mentioning his forty children, his hijinks on an “orgy bus” with which he and compatriots traveled Brazil in the ‘90s, and his Catholic faith.

The pornochanchada directors, no less than newcomers like Sady Baby, followed the money to hardcore during an industrywide crisis. The final Ody Fraga film released during its maker’s life, the Chumbinho-starring 1985’s Senta no meu, que eu entro na tua (Sit On Mine and I Will Enter Yours), was a magic realist diptych: in the first episode, a woman’s vagina gains the ability to speak and a mind of its own; in the second, a man receives the dubious gift of a second cock sprouting from his scalp. Garret’s hardcore outings were as idiosyncratic as his pornochachada, and notwithstanding the fact that O Beijo da Mulher Piranha (Kiss of the Piranha Woman—the title references Héctor Babenco’s prestige hit of the previous year, and the Manuel Puig novel on which it was based) features a scene of a woman blissfully receiving cunnilingus from a tame piranha in her bathtub, Fuk Fuk à Brasileira is unquestionably the wildest.

Shoestring ingenuity is on display from the first seconds of Fuk Fuk à Brasileira: in the opening credits, white lettering on what appear to be overhead projector transparencies are overlaid onto collages of pornographic images or live female anatomy. The title appears between two burning cock-shaped candles, obscured occasionally by a bobbing dildo. The screenplay is credited to one “J.A. Improviso,” a joke that probably doesn’t need translation, and says all there is to say about the air of throw-shit-to-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks invention that prevailed on these “sets”—mostly shabby hotels, lower middle-class hovels, and dodgy drinking establishments. (Sady Baby’s films return to a graffiti’d romper room that palpably reeks of spilled cachaça, testicle sweat, and desperation.) After his deliverance from buggery via self-flushing, Siri sneaks back into his bourgeoise employer’s home where he loads his collection of gifted dildos into a Styrofoam cooler and hits the road, making friends with an acquiescent landlady, a young twink avoiding a gay-bashing from a grunting macho at the beach, and an illiterate hick with a talking horse, all thanks to his load of rubber dongs, which he sells door-to-door after labeling his cooler as a “PORNO-SHOP AMBULANTE.” Then, quite abruptly, to the strains of “Also sprach Zarathustra,” Siri explains that he has been contacted by a spaceship from Uranus, its non-arrival announced by several false-alarm crackles of fireworks: “The special effects department screwed up,” Siri apologizes, “You know how Brazilian cinema is.”

Eventually the craft, predictably shaped like a giant schlong, does appear and puts Siri to work teaching it the local erotic vernacular before showering him with milky gouts of “space sperm.” In a final monologue, Siri, ever the crafty hustler, describes how his new business of selling the jizz to people with sexual dysfunctions has made him a mint, after which the frame pulls back to reveal him surrounded by copulating couples while sitting regally on a toilet: once a flushed flunky, now King Shit. It all makes for a pleasingly puerile ride, one not without something to say about an existence of scraping to get by without resources, in cinema or in life; as Siri observes: “Finding a job?… What’s left in the in the third world for a black illiterate dwarf who can’t talk and hates work?” And soon enough, even the last hangers-on on the Rua do Triunfo would need to freshen up their resumes.

It is possible that Garret, who found work in the “legitimate theater” at the Teatro Bibi Ferreira, didn’t share my high estimation of his hardcore efforts, for he directed them under a new pseudonym, J.A. Nunes—similar precautions were taken by several Cinema da Boca do Lixo filmmakers who’d come up through the 1960s and ‘70s and who now found themselves working in hardcore. Marins, for his part, didn’t hide his role in such productions as 1985’s zoophilia-featuring 24 Horas de Sexo Ardente [24 Hours of Explicit Sex], boasting to a reporter in 2004 that “Only I had the courage to keep my real name in the credits.” (In fact, Fraga did as well.)

At any rate, the indignity was not to last for long, as the Brazilian film industry was headed for a near extinction-level catastrophe. Audiences had been dwindling steadily since the quota system reached its high watermark in ’79, and movie theaters, echoing an international trend, were shuttering en masse—there had been some three thousand in Brazil in 1975; a decade later, the number was about half of that. Some blamed the quota system, which made no provision to offset losses faced by exhibitors, and exhibitors specializing in foreign imports posed legal challenges to the lei da obrigatoriedade. The military government, after twenty-one years, ended with José Sarney’s victory in a direct election for president. Federal meddling in the field of cultural production, be it through the state-owned Embrafilme or the lei da obrigatoriedade, was increasingly felt to have the unwelcome odor of the old regime clinging to it, and Brazil followed the world in its fresh romance with the promises of free trade. Obligations were dropped, Embrafilme dissolved, and with the particular circumstances—cultural, financial, and political—that had allowed for the flourishing of the Cinema da Boca do Lixo no longer existing, so, too, did the Cinema da Boca do Lixo pass from this earth. The Americans came, not to see Minivampires, but to fill the remaining cinemas with their blockbusters. Santa Ifigênia, and the Boca do Lixo, became the center of a new industry, the crack-cocaine trade, part of São Paulo’s Cracolândia, the area next to the Luz station an open-air drug market.

Garret, as director Alfredo Sternheim observed in his essay for the Rotterdam retrospective, was one of a few dispirited Cinema da Boca do Lixo luminaries to pass away before their time: Cinematographer and director Osvaldo de Oliveira died in 1990, aged 59. Tony Vieira, an actor and director who’d followed the familiar pornochanchada to pseudonymous hardcore route, passed the same year, only 52. Reichenbach lived to see his work celebrated at Rotterdam, and died only months after. Marins, at least, survived to this year, and to see the continuing reappraisal of Cinema da Boca do Lixo; in his documentary contribution to the 2015 anthology film Memórias da Boca, he can be seen strolling the Rua do Triunfo, and recalling what once was. He was not alone in preferring the company of ghosts; in an interview given this year, Garret’s onetime champion, the now 77-year-old Cardoso said “I live a lot in the past. When I walk down Avenida São João, in São Paulo, and remember that there were eleven street cinemas there, it makes me very sad. I stay at my place in the Pantanal, watching old movies and getting emotional. I drink a lot… I drink like a skunk, every night.”

The Cinema da Boca do Lixo is gone, but through its films we can still see something of the past where Cardoso spends his sodden nights on the Pantanal, the tropical wetlands which are, as I write, being blackened by wildfires. Which brings us back to the endangered Cinemateca Brasileira, that institution which has been so vital to conserving the legacy of the Cinema da Boca do Lixo, even at its most scandalous—in addition to Fuk Fuk à Brasileira, they struck a print of Senta no meu, que eu entro na tua for Rotterdam—and which now finds its very existence threatened by a hostile government.

The story, in brief: After years of struggling to staunch the bleeding of successive budget cuts, the Cinemateca was faced with a decisive crisis following the election of Brazil’s current president, Jair Bolsonaro. Former president Dilma Rousseff, in 2013, had drained the resources of the nonprofit in charge of the Cinemateca, and the institution was subsequently run by a private foundation, Associação de Comunicação Educativa Roquette Pinto (ACERP). Per a timeline assembled by Rafael de Luna, in September, 2019, several contractually protected Cinemateca employees were shifted to federal positions, while “the press publicized that the new administration was using the Cinemateca Brasileira to hand out jobs to political allies and propagate the government’s extreme-right ideology, with initiatives such as a program of military films.” In December, the government revoked the contract with ACERP, and made no further provisions for the Cinemateca’s funding; by May of the following year, the reduced staff were no longer being paid, nor was the electricity bill. Tensions rose through the summer between ACERP, the striking Cinemateca workers, and the Bolsonaro government, which has made erratic and legally dubious gestures towards running the Cinemateca itself, while seeming only too happy to see the institution starved of resources and its collections endangered until a regime change is sorted out. (At the same time, the federal government has been menacing the Cinemateca Capitólio in Porto Alegre with the possibility of privatization.) On August 12, the forty-one employees of Cinemateca Brasileira were dismissed, with no plans for a transfer of institutional knowledge between administrations, no new administration announced, and not a single member of technical staff remaining to mind the collection in the interim.   

In clear and present danger in this standoff is the continuing operating autonomy of the Cinemateca Brasileira, which is to say, Brazil’s history as written in moving images. There is film history in the singular, and then there are film histories in the plural. Film histories are concerned with aesthetic and moral judgements; they extol and they exclude. Film history does not—it is the sum total of everything that has happened in cinema, at least insofar as we can descry from sifting through what tattered, paltry remains have been preserved and handed down to us through archives. When Rocha, in his early publication Revisão Critica do Cinema Brasileiro (Critical Review of Brazilian Cinema), sought to elevate the reputation of Humberto Mauro, an outsider filmmaker who’d started out in the 1920s operating in the Cataguases with limited resources away from major production centers, he did so while disparaging “mechanical cinema” and a contemporary Brazilian film scene that he describes as “a disastrous alliance between immature auteurs and amateur capitalists.” (This description could be applied to much that I enjoy most in cinema, but that’s neither here nor there.) When Jairo Ferreira, onetime critic for Japanese community newspaper São Paulo Shimbum and 8mm diarist filmmaker, published his 1986 The Cinema of Invention, he limned out a canon of his own, including many of the figures discussed above: Marins, Candeias, Sganzerla, Reichenbach. In throwing a spotlight on anything, something else inevitably is left in the dark.

Spotlight value judgements are the provenance of aesthetes, critics, and artists; the archive, in its platonic ideal, stands above them. Everything is to be treated as if it were important, because our criteria for determining importance are perpetually in flux: we, poor benighted fools that we are, do not know what’s worth holding on to. I say “should” above because the reality of the situation is inevitably thornier; resources and space are limited, and decisions must constantly be made with regard to priority. It is in this tension, between an ideal of comprehensiveness and a reality of scarcity which demands value judgements, that the archive exists.

The politicization of the archive is also, to some degree, inevitable, and also an inevitability with which the archive and its keepers must struggle. For an archive represents history, and to permit history to be edited according to the needs of, say, your preferred political narrative is to permit a precedent that would allow for the other side to do the same should they get possession of the keys to the vaults.

The archive is political, and politics shape archives; that the Russian State Documentary Film & Photo Archive wound up with so many prints with German intertitles after 1945 should be proof enough of this fact. This reality was well understood once upon a time in France, where the dress rehearsal for the much-mythologized May of ’68 was l’affaire Langlois, a protest begun in February when Henri Langlois, co-founder and director of the Cinémathèque Française, was dismissed by culture minister André Malraux and replaced by a little-known film festival organizer named Pierre Barbin. Filmmakers around the world telegrammed statements asking that their films not be shown at the Cinémathèque barring Langlois’s re-appointment, and student cinephiles formed picket lines outside of the Palais de Chaillot, condemning what was derisively called the “Barbinotheque.”  

Putting aside the issue of what existential threat a functionary like Barbin posed to French film culture, it’s worth asking what we might reasonably expect of a Bolsanarotheque. I’m not going to use this space to enumerate everything that’s imbecilic and odious about Bolsonaro—this information is readily and voluminously available elsewhere—but news of his government’s aggressive persecution of the Cinemateca Brasileira did recall to me one minor, if piquant, event in his impressive career of buffoonery. In March, 2019, after widespread reports that Bolsonaro had been subject to mockery at Carnaval events across Brazil, he Tweeted a video taken at a Carnival event in São Paulo, in which a man in Carnaval regalia can be seen on top of a bus shelter playing with his asshole before bending over to allow another man to piss on his head. Any normal human’s response to this would be to think, “Gee, it looks like they’re having fun, that’s great,” but Bolsanaro’s accompanying text read “I don’t feel comfortable showing it, but we have to expose the truth so the population can be aware and always set their priorities. This is what many street Carnaval groups have become in Brazil.”

I thought of this, I suppose, because there is some linkage between the anarchic Carnaval spirit and the spirit of the Cinema da Boco do Lixo—as evidence I’ll proffer the image above, of the Zé do Caixão float as it strikes fear into revelers at the 2018 Carnaval de São Paulo, one of the most beautiful things that I have ever seen. The Cinema da Boco do Lixo was a long party, one kept going, at the core, by fervid working-class energy: filmmakers in many cases originating from the working-classes, making films directed towards the working-classes. It was sometimes gross and crude and born of testes de sofá and God knows what other dirty business, but it was also, in its gross, crude, impolitic way, rudely representative of a nation that is black and white and Amerindian and straight and queer and Catholic and macho and femme and messy and motley and altogether impossible to reduce to clean-cut generalities. (This is not to try to retrospectively cast the Cinema da Boca do Lixo as “woke”—to expect the ambitions and appetites of blue-collar Brazilians in the 1970s to conform to the expectations of upper middle-class North American graduate students in the 2020s would be deranged.) The aesthetic of the Cinema da Boca do Lixo is very often mend-and-make-do, its ethos anarchic—Anarquia Sexual!—and everything about it is sure to be obnoxious to the ethic of whey-faced middle-class propriety to which Bolsonaro’s pearl-clutching Carnaval Tweet gives lip service.

You don’t have to approve of people fucking horses—I personally don’t care if they do—but you do have to admit that it’s one very effective way to épater la bourgeoisie. And in Bolsonaro’s attitude towards the Carnaval, I suspect you can see something of the attitude that the craven underlings recipient of appointments to positions of cultural influence will take towards elements of the country’s artistic history that are inconvenient to an official dogma of propriety. And make no mistake, those underlings are on the march: On September 16, Bolsonaro stooge Edianne Paulo de Abreu was appointed to run Centro Técnico Audiovisual (CTAv) in Rio, a production and conservation institution founded in 1985 through an agreement between Embrafilme and the National Film Board of Canada. De Abreau’s qualifications for such a job, beyond his association with the Partido Social Liberal, are nonexistant; in his public life, he worked as a dentist. Last week Mário Frias, Bolsonaro’s Special Secretary of Culture, gave an interview in which he stated that winners of any federal grants or fellowships for the arts henceforward would need his personal approval. Frias, who’s about as sharp as a doorknob, is a telenovela actor.

I wanted to use the pretext of the Cinemateca Brasileira’s plight to write about Cinema da Boca do Lixo because this is all dismal news that bears repeating, but also because, first and foremost, I wanted a pretext to write about Cinema da Boca do Lixo—and I hope in the future to devote more space here to several of the filmmakers mentioned herein, and to some I’ve overlooked. The operations of the Cinemateca Brasileira, it should be noted, are hardly focused on Cinema da Boca do Lixo, though I have been told that a version of the Rotterdam retro that they mounted in São Paulo, titled “The Boca in Rotterdam,” was received warmly by press and public alike, to the astonishment of the survivors of the scene still around to bask in plaudits. Per Isabel Stevens’s admirable summary of the Cinemateca’s struggles in Sight & Sound Magazine, the Cinemateca, founded in 1940, “is the oldest cinema institution in Brazil and has the largest archive in South America, with 250,000 rolls of film (including much highly flammable cellulose nitrate)… a million cinema-related documents” and some 45,000 titles in its archives, highly regarded worldwide for its photochemical processing capabilities and function as a resource for researchers and technicians.  

And yet even with robust resources and the best of intentions, things go missing all the time. The prints and negative elements of Sady Baby’s films are gone, by some reports destroyed by Sady himself in an effort to avoid potential legal consequences for their contents. Hundreds of hours of José Mojica Marins on television, as host of the programs Além, Muito Além do Além (Beyond, Far Beyond the Beyond) and Um Show do Outro Mundo (The Show from the Other World), were taped over without regard for posterity, never to be seen again in this world or another. How much greater the risk, then, when resources are withheld, and intentions hostile? 

It seemed proper, then, to write about the Cinema da Boca do Lixo in writing about the Cinemataca Brasiliera because, in the event of a crisis, it’s the margins that are always the most vulnerable. I don’t imagine that, come what may, every print of Rocha’s Antonio das Mortes (1969) will ever in my lifetime be in immanent danger of disappearing ; I’m not so confident in the permanence of the Fuk Fuk à Brasileiras. And “unimportant” films deserve attention, too—as the Nazarene had it, so it goes for the archive: “Inasmuch as ye have done it to the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.” This is not to imply that the Cinema da Boca do Lixo is the “least” that Brazilian cinema has to offer, but to be pragmatic about the priority that’s afforded to the kind of art that I’ve been writing about here in the best of circumstances. And if the work of outlaw culture heroes of bygone times can be at risk, how much greater is the risk posed to film and video made without thought of commercial value, to Super 8 footage of a bar mitzvah in Bom Retiro in 1983, or of a supermarket opening in the Recife suburbs, or of a soccer match in Curitiba that nobody can remember the final score of, or a golden shower at the São Paulo Carnaval, or all of the inconsequential scraps entrusted to an archive that, when taken altogether, communicate something ineffable and vital about the life of a nation and its people?

In the face of a rising tide of meddlesome idiocy, it’s beyond my poor powers to contribute much of anything other than this, a mash note to Zé do Caixão and Jean Garret and Chumbinho and Bim Bim, to everything that’s morbid and misbegotten and marginal in Brazilian cinema, and to the men and women at the Cinemataca Brasiliera who have safeguarded the legacy of that cinema through the years, men and women who I have never met, but who I regard as my brothers and sisters. A mash note, and a wish for better times ahead for the Cinemateca and those who have loved it and worked for it, however unlikely such an outcome may seem at this present moment. But in a world where Sady Baby can die and come back to life, might not miracles still be possible?

If you’ve enjoyed this piece, please consider becoming a paid subscriber to Employee Picks, as that’s the only means I have to receive remuneration for researching and writing it. Additionally, please consider sending some money to the Cinemataca Brasiliera workers here, and signing the following petition, which has been making the rounds for some time, to save the Cinemataca Brasiliera. If I encounter additional resources, I will add them here as I do.