Budgetary concerns precluded the use of a process screen, a technique commonly used in film to give the illusion of movement in car scenes. These shots would typically be shot in a studio with any landscape seen through the windows of the car projected onto the process screen. In Carnival of Souls the car scenes were actually shot on location inside moving vehicles, using a battery powered handheld Arriflex camera. The shots are very clean, and have since become the industry standard. The use of the Arriflex, an extremely mobile camera traditionally used in news photography, gave them the opportunity to concoct elaborate camera moves without the use of expensive dollies or cranes. The inventive camera work of Maurice Prather is one of the things that sets Carnival of Souls above other low-budget horror films of the same vintage.
Another effective scene was shot for only a few dollars. Central to the story is the car crash at the beginning of the film. It is important that the viewer see the crash to understand its devastating nature. The cars were arranged through a contra deal, but having them smash through a bridge was a different and potentially more expensive matter. “What do you think it cost us for a city like Lecompton, Kansas, to let us wreck their bridge?” asked Prather, “Thirty-eight dollars. They said, ‘Yeah, you can do that as long as you replace the rails you knock out.' It was nothing to replace the rails.”
Carnival of Souls is a potent thriller, and like The Blair Witch Project rises above its humble beginnings to deliver some truly frightening moments. I particularly like the use of sound in a pair of scenes where Mary finds herself shut off from reality, unable to make herself known to those around her. Harvey heightens the tension of those passages by eliminating all sound except the clicking of Mary's heels. The eerie silence conveys Mary's alienation far more effectively than any musical score could.
The crisp black-and-white Carnival of Souls doesn't look or feel like a modern horror film and contains moments of wooden acting and stiff dialogue, but it has undoubtedly influenced a generation of filmmakers. Its steely-eyed look at the horror that can lie just under the surface certainly influenced David Lynch, while other horrormeisters like John Carpenter and George Romero have acknowledged its importance.
Herk Harvey never made another feature (he became a teacher at Kansas University), but he did live long enough to see his film become a cult classic. He died in 1996, eight years after it was theatrically rereleased to great critical fanfare.
CHELSEA GIRLS (1967)
“Paul loaded the camera. Andy pointed it and Gerard started the tape recorder — there were always endless amounts of waiting. Of course there were endless amounts of drugs too, which sort of made up for it.”
— Mary Woronov, star of Chelsea Girls
Any wine expert can tell you that certain bottles, when stored properly, improve with time. Think of Chelsea Girls as a nicely aged bottle of Meursault Sancerre 1967 — smoky, but displaying a tremendous presence; rich and boldly flavored. Viewed with a mix of curiosity and bewilderment at its initial screenings, Chelsea Girls has become Andy Warhol's best-known film and a true underground classic.
Pop artist Andy Warhol liked to hang out at the El Quixote restaurant, located downstairs from the fabled Chelsea Hotel at 222 West 23rd Street in New York. He would meet his entourage (most of whom were staying at the hotel) for a cheap dinner washed down with jugs of sangria and would discuss the events of the day. During one of these meals Warhol says he “got the idea to unify all the pieces of these people's lives by stringing them together as if they lived in different rooms of the same hotel.”
Warhol had been tinkering with films since the early '60s. His pieces were primitive point-and-shoot exercises featuring ad-libbed dialogue and naturalistic performances. His films were studies of people doing mundane things — one film, Eat, showed Robert Indiana eating a mushroom for 33 minutes; another, Haircut, was a half-hour movie of one man ritualistically cutting another man's hair. His idea for Chelsea Girls was to be his most ambitious film to date.
Between June and September 1966 Warhol shot 15 one- and two-reel films at various locations around New York City, including the Chelsea Hotel and his Factory studio. The process was the same each time. Each scene was shot in one take until the 35-minute film load had run out. Warhol's thesis was simple: point the camera at exciting people, let it run, and something interesting was likely to happen. “This way I can catch people being themselves instead of setting up a scene and shooting it and letting people act out parts that were written,” he said. “Because it's better to act naturally than act like somebody else.” The short films had no plots or scripts, save for some rough outlines that were discarded early in the shooting process.
Warhol's direction of the scenes was minimal. Eric Emerson, credited as The Boy in the Kitchen, remembers Warhol simply instructed him to tell the story of his life, and “somewhere along the line to take off all my clothes.” While Warhol didn't provide much guidance on the set, he did have other methods to draw incendiary performances from his actors. All the performers knew one another and were part of the scene that Warhol had created in his Factory art studio. The actors were using drugs, and all vying for Warhol's approval. He used this scenario to create tension among his “superstars” by spreading gossip and unkind remarks that the actors were allegedly making about one another. He encouraged them to express their feelings about one another in their scenes. This methodology was disagreeable and sometimes cruel, but it made for compelling viewing. Bob “Ondine” Olivio, who played The Pope of Greenwich Village in the film, called this manner of working unpleasant, but added with a bit of unintentional hyperbole, “he pulled out of these people, including myself, some of the best performances ever on screen.”
Warhol did capture some unforgettable images. Transvestite Mario Montez cut his scene short after being reduced to tears by the insults of two boys sitting on a bed. The taunts and the tears are real, and the scene is harrowing.
In another scene real life and infighting take over. Before filming began, Susan “International Velvet” Bottomly told Warhol she was expecting a call from a modeling agency. He told her that would not be a problem, and to use the call in the scene. When the phone rings a fight ensues between Velvet and Mary “Mary Might” Woronov when Mary won't let Velvet answer it. “That's my call,” says Velvet. “You don't have a call,” Mary replies, “You have a fat ass.” It may seem trite now in light of television's reality shows, but the realism drips off the screen, and the viewer is left wondering if what they are seeing is real or contrived. That feeling is enhanced when one of the actors, obviously growing frustrated with Warhol's process, looks into the camera and asks, “When is that fucking thing going to stop?”
Warhol pieced together Chelsea Girls after reviewing the reels at the end of September 1967. A close examination of the 15 half-hour scenes revealed an unintentional, rough story line. Warhol realized that he could piece all these loose bits of footage together into one film. The problem was he was unable to edit the footage because he had shot it all on newsreel cameras that recorded the sound directly onto the film. This technique prevented separation of sound and picture, so to keep the sound in sync he would have to run the 35-minute segments uncut. To prevent a prohibitive seven-hour running time, Warhol ingeniously used a split-screen presentation, with sound only on one side at a time, to cut the running time down to three-and-a-half hours. Warhol created a standard order for the reels, though by juggling the order of the scenes and remixing the sound it is possible to create a different movie each time it is screened. In 2000, director Mike Figgis used a similar approach in his film Timecode, which was shot on digital video and presented on a quadruple-split screen. Figgis would personally host screenings, remixing the sound based on the reactions of the audience.
Chelsea Girls isn't perfect, but at three-and-a-half hours it has enough compelling moments to make it worth watching. For example, Ondine's attack on the Roman Catholic Church, climaxing with the line, “Approach the crucifix, lift his loinclot
h, and go about your business!” is searing stuff, and is still shocking today, decades after it was first released. What I find most fascinating about the film is the way it blurs the line between reality and artifice. Warhol orchestrated a sordid look at the soft underbelly of his life in New York, and it is hard to tell what is real and what is performance art, although the drug use and infighting seem authentic.
Warhol was not a skilled filmmaker. He didn't concern himself with properly recording the sound. The camera zooms wildly, constantly refocusing and jiggling. This looks and sounds like an underground movie, but there is a punk rock DIY energy about the film that propels the action.
In 1967 Chelsea Girls was met with mixed critical reaction, and generated hundreds of column inches in the newspapers. Warhol was philosophical about fault-finding attacks from the establishment. “Until then the general attitude toward what we did was that it was artistic or camp or a put-on or just plain boring,” he said. “But after Chelsea Girls, words like degenerate and disturbing and homosexual and druggy and nude and real started being applied to us regularly.”
CHERISH (2002)
“She'd get out more . . . if it wasn't a felony.”
— Advertising tagline for Cherish
Cherish is one of those films that people like to call quirky. It is an odd little story about a fantasy-prone woman named Zoe who winds up under house arrest for a crime she didn't commit. Robin Tunney plays Zoe as a hapless 29-year-old computer animator hopelessly in lust with a co-worker named Andrew (Jason Priestly). Many drinks later at an after work party in a nightclub, Zoe finally gets Andrew's attention. Before accepting a ride home with him she checks her car, only to be hijacked by a mysterious man in a mask who forces her to drive drunk and steps on the accelerator as a cop stands in front of the car trying to flag them down. The police officer is killed, the strange man disappears, and Zoe is arrested for vehicular manslaughter.
To avoid hard jail time while waiting for trial, Zoe cuts a deal to live under house arrest, wearing an ankle bracelet that sets off an alarm if she strays from her loft. At the beginning of her sentence her living situation doesn't seem that bad — there are worse ways to do your time than in a huge Ikea-filled loft in San Francisco — but the limitations of movement soon become obvious, and you realize that any place can become a prison if you aren't allowed to leave.
Despite not being allowed to set foot outside her front door she forges relationships with several people — a pizza delivery man, her wheelchair-bound downstairs neighbor, and a gawky local deputy played by Tim Blake Nelson. Through her confinement and the friendship of outsiders Zoe sheds her emotional handicaps and blossoms into a confident, resourceful, self-reliant woman. She's innocent, and since no one believes her, she must find the proof that will set her free. At this point the movie breaks loose of its claustrophobic feel as Zoe takes control of her destiny and hunts down the obsessive man who ruined her life.
Robin Tunney rises above the occasionally messy script to actually give Zoe an interesting screen life. She's spirited, likeable, and delivers a heroine with a bit of edge. She's the offbeat girl you see at the coffee shop, the brainiac with a secret inner life. She makes interesting choices that her more mainstream contemporaries might have avoided. Jennifer Connelly might have played Zoe with steely determination, while Kirsten Dunst would have brought a veneer of sweetness to the role that would undermine the character's natural anxiety. Instead Tunney plays Zoe as a subtle oddball, a woman just slightly out-of-step with everyone else. It is this very quality that makes her transformation so much more interesting and believable. Few recent Hollywood movies have strong central female characters, so it is refreshing to see a film in which the female lead is in virtually every scene.
Tim Blake Nelson's lovesick deputy is an understated gem of a performance. At first he's all business, but he slowly warms to Zoe and finds his well-ordered life slowly turned upside down as he develops decidedly unprofessional feelings for her. His is a key character, on the one hand representing authority and incarceration, and on the other Zoe's ticket to freedom. It's a finely layered act without any of the showy aspects of his work in O Brother, Where Art Thou? or Minority Report.
Other well-known names pop up in small supporting roles. Alternative rocker Liz Phair fares well enough in the bland part of Brynn, one of Zoe's co-workers, but doesn't make much of an impression. Nora Dunn, best known for her five-year stint on Saturday Night Live, plays a no-nonsense attorney with gusto, but it is Jason Priestly as the object of Zoe's affections who steals the show. Age has rounded his handsome face somewhat, which makes him less a teen idol and more the good-looking guy who could actually work in the next cubicle to yours. It's a self-deprecating portrayal that slyly pokes fun at his former cheesecake status.
The pop music of the 1970s and '80s propels the movie, and is used to illustrate Zoe's inner life. The themes of stalking and unrequited love are underscored by radio hits by Hall & Oates and The Association. The songs may sound familiar, but in this context the lyrics to “Tainted Love” by Soft Cell or 10 CC's “I'm Not in Love” resonate with creepy undertones.
Cherish isn't a perfect movie. The basic plot is implausible. Anyone who has watched Law and Order can tell you that people who are suspected of killing police officers are not treated to house arrest, and certainly no cop would treat Zoe the way that Blake's character does. If you can ignore the movie's key flaw, there is a great deal here to appreciate.
COCKSUCKER BLUES (1972)
“It's a fucking good film, Robert, but if it ever shows in America we'll never be allowed in the country again.”
— Mick Jagger to director Robert Frank
You probably haven't seen one of the best movies about rock and roll ever made, and Mick Jagger wants to make sure that you never do. Cocksucker Blues, the legendary documentary about the Rolling Stones, is so raunchy it even made the Fab Five blush. Although it was produced with the full co-operation of the band, they still took director Robert Frank to court to block its distribution.
The Rolling Stones first met the Swiss-born photographer Robert Frank at a mansion in Los Angeles during the sessions for Exile on Main Street. As Europeans they shared a common fascination with American culture. The Stones were walking encyclopedias of Southern blues, while Frank had traveled the States in the mid-'50s snapping a series of photographs that would be released as a book titled The Americans. By the time of their meeting in 1972 the Stones were the biggest rock band in the world, and The Americans was already regarded as one of the classic photography books of the century.
After their initial meeting Frank was hired to provide the cover art for Exile on Main Street. He gave them a photo he had taken in 1950 of a collage of circus freaks from the wall of a tattoo parlor on Route 66. The cover photo was met with such critical acclaim that the Stones decided to expand their working relationship with Frank, and hired him to shoot a no-holds-barred documentary of their 1972 American tour, to be produced by the legendary owner of Chess Records, Marshall Chess.
The Stones had not performed in the U.S. since the December 1969 debacle at the Altamont Racetrack, the final date on a tour that was filmed by Albert and David Maysles and released as a full-length feature film titled Gimme Shelter. Shot in the waning moments of the 1960s, Gimme Shelter not only documents the actual end of the decade, but its ideological end as well. During the Altamont concert the Hell's Angels, hired by the Stones to act as security, used pool cues and knives to beat an 18-year-old African-American audience member to death. As the Stones played “Under My Thumb” and Meredith Hunter lay dying on the ground, the image profoundly signaled the end of the era of peace and love. It was an historical moment, and the Rolling Stones had it on film.
Gimme Shelter is an above-average rockumentary, and the inclusion of the controversial Altamont footage assured that it would be successful. Three years later, it was time for a follow-up. Jagger decided to call the new movie Cocksucker Blues after a raunchy tune he ha
d written about a gay hooker in London, and gave Frank an all-access pass to shoot wherever and whatever he wanted. That was a decision that would later come back to haunt the band.
Frank chose to shoot the film cinema verité style in crisp black and white, which lends a stark newsreel feel to the movie. His dispassionate eye neither judges nor comments, preferring to let viewers draw their own conclusions as he films Keith Richard's descent into heroin addiction, or a battered woman trying to hide her face from the camera. There are many outrageous sequences in the film: saxophonist Bobby Keyes and Keith Richard indulge in one of the great rites of passage for any rock star — throwing a television out of a hotel window; Keith advises Mick on the best way to snort cocaine; naked groupies masturbate for the camera — and one gets the feeling that they are genuine, despite the Stones' later claim that Frank staged some of the more decadent scenarios. As part of a legal settlement with the band Frank was forced to add a disclaimer at the beginning of the movie stating, “all scenes except the musical performances are fictitious.”
To my mind the thing that makes this documentary special, setting it heads above the other anything-that-is-worth-doing-is-worth-overdoing music movies is not the sensational sex, drugs, and rock and roll footage, but the shots of the band in the downtime between concerts. This, I suspect, is the side that the myth-hungry Rolling Stones didn't want you to see.
Frank unblinkingly shows us the tedium of life on the road, and allows the real lives of the band members to be revealed. Mick, the ultimate rock star, for example, is seen trying to deal with his high- maintenance wife Bianca, who is often seen crying and playing with a small music box. The band is shown killing time between gigs by ordering room service, engaging in inconsequential conversations, or simply by not speaking at all. This was hardly the high glam life that would be expected from the “World's Greatest Rock and Roll Band,” although these are the scenes that humanize the group and put a pinprick in the bubble of fame that surrounded the Stones in their glory days. Director Jim Jarmusch called Cocksucker Blues “definitely one of the best movies about rock and roll I've ever seen. It makes you think that being a rock star is one of the last things you'd ever want to do.”
The 100 Best Movies You've Never Seen Page 5
