Caligula, Furiosa, Warhol, etc.
My moviegoing ebbs and flows. Sometimes I live at the cinema and other times I barely see anything. I haven’t gone to much this summer, thanks to a mix of not having the headspace for it and queasiness re the surge of Covid-coughers and just a lack of interest in trudging through the sweltering city and getting home late at night. But I did manage to get out there.
I saw Ti West’s MaXXXine (2024) and it was stupid but fine. I saw Oz Perkins’s Longlegs (2024) and enjoyed the grimy Fincherisms and found the supernatural-procedural bits promising but ultimately felt like, “Hmm, maybe winking and super-pastichey alt-horror is not for me.” George Miller’s Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024) was fantastic though — Miller has his own unique vision that dozens if not hundreds of lesser minds have tried to pay homage to across the decades, and he’s just kept figuring out how to refine it, sharpen it, search his soul for new means of approach. I had trouble with the unrelenting balls-to-the-wall adrenaline levels on Fury Road (2015), and was delighted by how much space Miller offered us in Furiosa. There was a visual depth and dynamism to the Wasteland where the easy way out would have been to leave it parched, bleached, flat.
But deserts (and their stories) are more complex than that, something I was reminded of while watching the dramatic Monument Valley backdrop of John Ford’s The Searchers (1956) in 70mm at the Museum of the Moving Image, in a beautifully restored blowup meant to evoke the film’s original high-resolution, widescreen VistaVision presentation. Hell of a movie: the ultimate allegory for The Group Project, in which very different people have to band together toward a common goal and you have to negotiate around limitations and biases and the naïveté you might have as a “good” person when it turns out the “bad” people have more useful institutional knowledge than you and you need their help.
Another quite noteworthy restoration this summer, which I saw in August at the lower Manhattan Alamo Drafthouse, was Caligula: The Ultimate Cut (2024). This new version uses a ton of archival footage to bring Bob Guccione’s failed-but-legendary 1980 bacchanal back to the original vision of screenwriter Gore Vidal and its estranged director Tinto Brass (Brass is nevertheless unhappy with the cut and is suing Penthouse Films). Is it good? I wouldn’t make that leap. But it’s definitely more coherent. Like Little Boots himself, it falls victim to its own toomuchness. It’s worth watching for two reasons: (1) pattern recognition of the ugliest, most violent, most basely grotesque impulses of tyrants, so you’re reminded that guys like Trump are not outliers in history, they’re a recurring trope of what unchecked power does, and it won’t stop unless we stop it (2) the profound influence Caligula production designer Danilo Donati’s visual sensibility has had in informing music video (1990s GNR and Meat Loaf), opulent softcore (The Red Shoe Diaries), classical vaporwave (an eerily postmodern use of Greco-Roman marble statues), the tacky aesthetics of fascism (the Trump Tower of 1983 to the present and all the Italianate suburban McMansions of the pre-crash 2000s). It’s like, take Jodorowsky and Ken Russell and infuse it with something a little too prescient for comfort and also a subject too distant in history to read as “retrofuturist” (even though “a leader who’s a malignant piece of shit” is, you know, twas ever thus). And it’s interesting to look at the 1980 Caligula as an inflection point for the British theatrical tradition — especially in how it uses the finest UK stage and screen actors of the day, like Malcolm McDowell, Helen Mirren, John Gielgud, and Peter O’Toole — you can sense the wildness and fearlessness and unhinged experimentalism of the sixties and seventies giving way to the goopy lowbrow spectacle of the Andrew Lloyd Webber eighties.
So I love love love when I’m watching something and even if it’s not “good” by standard metrics, it engages my brain on some conceptual, connection-drawing level and I’m all aflutter through every second. I hadn’t seen Cindy Sherman’s lone feature film Office Killer (1997) since the nineties, and now I get to watch it by historicizing it, situating it, appreciating a time when you could scramble the money together to make a scrappy project on the strength of some cool actors you want to work with and a silly and half-baked but undeniably resonant premise, and even get Todd Haynes to help out on the script. What a joyful thing.
Less joyful but no less compelling were Paranoia (1966) and Drink aka Drunk (1965), two hyper-rare films screened last night as part of the Anthology Film Archives’ Essential/Unessential Warhol series with the assistance of Greg Pierce, Director of Film and Video at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. Shot, occasionally shown, and never formally released, these two works represent early stabs at Andy Warhol moving away from silent, still film portraits shot on his Bolex and into more commercial aspects of movie production such as sync sound and ensemble casts. The sound his Auricon camera captures on Paranoia (an ensemble tableau of Silver Factory superstars in the dappled evening light and Art Nouveau redux of a modish uptown boutique) is abysmal, and I appreciate it because of the distance it emphasizes between the bored boring beautiful people and an audience that would never be invited to the party. We can only make out snatches of their chatter — would we want to hear more? Or do we need our superstars to exist in perpetuity as vague, dim, enigmatic? And did Warhol understand our push-pull ambivalence in 1966?
I’m going to wager he understood it in 1965, when he filmed Drink aka Drunk with the Falstaffian and garrulously cerebral far-left documentarian and New York art gadfly Emile de Antonio drinking an entire bottle of J&B in the filthy Factory stairwell over the course of the Auricon’s two 33-minute reels. I gasped when it dawned on me that de Antonio had actually finished the bottle more or less by the end of the first reel, and we still had half an hour to go as voyeurs alone together with the subject as he disintegrated under the influence and the harsh lighting setup, becoming nonverbal then pre-verbal like an infant and weaving out of consciousness and conscious itself until the reel flashed death-white. It’s here again, as with Paranoia, that the abstraction so central to 1960s artmaking and soundmaking creeps in through the unintelligibility. It’s actually genius that Paranoia and Drink were paired together on the same program, because they take such similar approaches to showcasing, respectively, the untouchable invulnerability of the privileged exotic and the increasing distress of a depressive deep thinker who’s aware Warhol regards him as the entertainment, a hired jester, whose onscreen downfall is for yuks at best and at worst part of some pernicious engineered sadism under the guise of direct-cinema “cultural anthropology” (prefiguring the engineered sadism of reality television). Extremely hard to endure, extremely fascinating, and I totally get why over the ensuing years, de Antonio sued and wrote cease-and-desist letters to keep it from seeing further light of day.
