It's Me (1976)

Thanks to the thoughtful gratitude of a Dutch comrade and SS reader, I was finally able to wallow in the strangely entrancing pulchritude of the first feature-length film of one of my favorite filmmakers. Indeed, It's Me (1976) directed by the great Dutch renaissance man Frans Zwartjes (Visual Training, Behind Your Walls) is, not unlike most of the auteur’s films, an innately idiosyncratic piece of avant-garde cinema where the grotesque somehow becomes strikingly gorgeous. Unlike many of the director’s better known films like Anamnesis (1969) and Living (1971) where the characters oftentimes resemble reanimated corpses and deathrock fans and the settings resemble some unspeakable sort of post-Christian pandemonium, the film is somewhat documentary-like in its essence and its clearly set in a contemporary setting, though the emotions and behavior expressed by the female lead are unequivocally grotesque and oftentimes unnerving. A non-narrative one-woman show starring Dutch diva Willeke van Ammelrooy—a woman with a long and eclectic career who has starred in everything from Swinging Amsterdam exploitation trash like Pim de la Parra’s Frank en Eva (1973) to fantastique arthouse classics like Harry Kümel’s De komst van Joachim Stiller (1976) aka The Arrival of Joachim Stiller to Oscar winning feminist insipidity like Marleen Gorris' singularly misandric carpet-muncher movie Antonia's Line (1995) to big budget Hollywood kitsch like the Sandra Bullock vehicle The Lake House (2006)—It’s Me is a sort of haunting yet strangely darkly humorous psychodramatic portrait of an insufferably self-absorbed actress whose vulgar displays of vanity and self-absorption is only transcended by her waning sanity and pathetic loneliness.  In short, the film depicts Western womankind at its worst.  

While I have yet to have the honor of seeing everyone of Zwartjes’ films, I can only assume that the 68-minute feature is the auteur’s most overtly Warholian effort as a lo-fi document packed with impassioned improvisation where the actress and her onscreen persona are completely blurred (thankfully, van Ammelrooy is classier than Warhol superstar Viva). In fact, Warhol is one of the few filmmakers that Zwartjes has described as an influence, or as he once stated in an interview with experimental queer filmmaker Mike Hoolboom, “What made a huge impression on me was the New American Cinema. The municipal theatre in Eindhoven presented a new American film program in the early 1960s. For the first time I was able to see films by Bruce Connor, by Markopolous, by that fatso… Peter Kubelka and by Andy Warhol. I thought: Jeesus Christ, what’s going on! In THE SHOPPER by Warhol, the camera is first pointed at the ceiling and then sinks downwards, but you can feel that it was not done by hand. The bolt at the top of the tripod wasn’t screwed tight. The camera sinks down by itself, splendidly. While the camera keeps on shooting, you can meanwhile hear someone talking. The protagonist just keeps on going. The crazy thing is that I started to be irritated by the film after a little while and I went out to get a drink. I must have gone back and forth ten times and each time that I opened the door to have another look, I thought, damn it all, it’s awfully good! Those screenings had a big influence on me.”   Of course, It's Me is not plagued by the sort of grating technical ineptness that is typical of a Warhol film.  Indeed, with a number of seemingly immaculately framed soft-focus shots, Zwartjes's film certainly has an ethereal essence despite its relatively humdrum one-room setting.

 Of course, what really makes Zwartjes’ films quite different from Warhol and his collaborator Paul Morrissey’s cinematic works is that it is a virtually immaculately directed and edited piece of unconsciously high class celluloid art that was created by a man that developed his own preternatural filmic language, but I guess one should not expect anything less from a filmmaker that once boldly stated, “My own motor system determined the film style. It never occurred to me to wonder: can this shot follow on after this one? If you start wondering about that you should be looking for another job straight away.” If one thing is for sure about It’s Me, it is that Zwartjes is absolutely obsessed with every inch of female lead van Ammelrooy's silky skinned body as the camera compliments the actress' every curve and crevice. Indeed, in no other films does a woman’s body, movements, and facial expressions tell the entire story, or lack thereof. Likewise, in no other film does a woman’s most pathetic and banal moments become so striking. A film that could be retitled ‘The Dejecting Domestic Habits of A Chainsmoking Dutch Dime Store Diva,’ It's Me—a film that focuses on the terribly dull daily habits of an actress that no one seems interested in hiring—takes a surprisingly aesthetically entrancing approach to demystifying the allure and intrigue of the sort of ravishing statuesque woman that most men would give one of their testicles to fuck. 

 Considering that it is the only one of his full-lengths films that has been officially released on DVD, I have always wrongly assumed that Pentimento (1979)—an avant-garde dystopian flick full of fine female flesh and East Asian scientist that perform curious experiments on said fine female flesh—was Zwartjes’ first feature.  Needless to say, it was a pleasant surprise for me to discover It's Me, which does for Willeke van Ammelrooy what Philippe Garrel's Les hautes solitudes (1974) did for tragic American actress Jean Seberg in terms of giving an oftentimes exploited and seemingly damaged diva the opportunity to flex her acting chops and express herself in a rather raw and vulnerable fashion that some people, especially those looking for a mere masturbation aid, would probably find to be a tad bit off-putting and even unsettling.  Indeed, while the film might feature a brief beaver shot or two, the heroine, who oftentimes seems like she is only the brink of a total mental breakdown, is hardly depicted in an erotic fashion, at least in any conventional sense (notably, van Ammelrooy first gained fame for her debut role as the eponymous wanton woman in Fons Rademakers' classic Stijn Streuvels adaptation Mira (1971)).

While Zwartjes was apparently disappointed with the results of his first feature, leading lady van Ammelrooy would regard it as one of the greatest artistic successes of her rather long and eclectic acting career despite the fact that she portrays a less than likeable lady of the considerably loony sort. Aside from Zwartjes himself, Mat van Hensbergen, who also shot Adriaan Ditvoorst’s criminally underrated epic satire De mantel der Liefde (1978) aka The Mantle of Love and would later curiously act as a camera operator on Hollywood trash like Cheech and Chong: Still Smokin' (1983), acted as the film's cinematographer. A bizarrely captivating cinematic works where Zwartjes seems to have traded in the visually grotesque of his earlier films for the emotionally grotesque as personified by a pretty vapid beauty that seems to suffer from a strangely neurotic form of self-worship, It’s Me might be about only one woman but it ultimately works as a subtle critique of modern Occidental women in general as van Ammelrooy's character suffers from an exaggerated form of the sort of insufferable psychosis that is all too prevalent among members of the so-called fairer sex in Hollywoodized post-WWII Europe where a sort of wholly corrosive and vulgar Coca-Cola pseudo-culture reigns. Indeed, incessantly unconsciously brainwashing herself with magazines featuring female nudes that she constantly compares herself with, the nameless the heroine—an actress that has turned her apartment into a virtual shrine and fantasy realm of her own making—is a fully willing victim of female tabloid trash and seems to live solely to triumph over and/or win the respect of other women, or so the viewer can only assume by her bizarre behavior. 

 As Jean-Luc Godard attempted to communicate in both overt and covert ways in his semi-autobiographical eight feature Une femme mariée (1964) aka A Married Woman in regard to the sort of metaphysical affliction that plagues many modern Western women (notably, the filmmaker was convinced that his then-wife Anna Karina was incapable of loving him due to being debased by pop culture), the contemporary European female is incapable of true love and monogamy because she has brainwashed by magazines and cultural trends that have informed her that the ideal 'liberated' woman is a self-worshiping and self-glorifying hedonistic whore of the culturally retarded sort who is only interested in her own quest for pleasure and shallow reputation among other vainglorious women that live to model their largely worthless lives after the fantasy worlds created by the homo advertisers of Madison Avenue.  Notably, in regard to a montage from his film featuring an assortment of advertisements juxtaposed with a song sung by Sylvie Vartan, Godard stated, “If I have show . . . the place that magazine advertisements occupy in the life of this woman, it’s because certain forms of advertising are going so far as to become people’s own thoughts. The models that are proposed to people are becoming identical with the people themselves. Even their sex life is not their own, it’s already displayed on the walls. People’s existence is no more than the reflection of what they see, their freedom is a prefabricated thought.”

Undoubtedly, the heroine in Zwartjes’ film is the unintentionally humorous extreme in regard to the dark and depressing phenomenon that Godard describes, as her entire existence seems predicated on something she saw on television or in a movie, even when she is all by her lonesome (in fact, one assumes she does not have a social life because the fantasies contained within magazines and movies have acted as a sort of sick psychological substitute). Of course, quite thankfully, Zwartjes’ film is a mostly visceral experience and does not succumb to the sort of calculated pedantic intellectual methods that are quite typical of Godard’s films. Like a minimalistic avant-garde Dutch mutation of Roman Polanski’s Repulsion (1965) sans the schizophrenic horrors, murder, and sexual repression, It’s Me is indubitably a somewhat ironically titled work in that the heroine seems to have no true organic identity or personality of her own, but instead seems to exist solely to attempt to live up to the counterfeit glamour and shallow sexual appeal of her favorite unclad print starlet while she wastes away in her apartment in a bizarre yet banal hermetic ritual of movie and media induced self-transformation. Whether or not her character is based on herself, her younger self, and/or other actresses she encountered during her career, it is quite clear that van Ammelrooy is all too familiar with the internally damaged dame she portrays to the point where one has trouble separating the actress from the character.  Indeed, for better or worse, It's Me is Willeke van Ammelrooy completely raw and uncensored.

 After a sort of ‘Gothic chic’ glamour shot of van Ammelrooy, the film abruptly cuts to a shot of her foam-covered hand in a bathtub in a scene where it becomes immediately apparent that she lives for pleasure, especially the smaller pleasures in life. As demonstrated by the fact that she slowly sprawls out her limbs in the bathtub like a sleeping dog stretching in the sunlight, the heroine is a master when it comes to basking in her bourgeois domestic luxury. Notably, the viewer does not even see van Ammelrooy’s face for the first time until well into the 6 minute mark after her phone rings and she exits the tub in a rather relaxed fashion. Not surprisingly considering the context of the scene, the viewer has the distinguished pleasure to see van Ammelrooy's bosoms and beaver at virtually the same time we first see her face, but such brazen physical nakedness is nothing compared to the erratic emotions and strange psychological quirks that she will ultimately expose in Zwartjes' extra claustrophobic chamber piece. As for her phone call, the heroine says things like “Oh yes!!!” and “fine” like a phony porn star during what is clearly a patently pointless and painfully generic conversation. While most of the film is in English, it is oftentimes inaudible because Zwartjes opted to layer secondary audio tracks over the dialogue, thus giving the viewer the impression that the protagonist is scatterbrained bimbo that suffers from cognitive dissonance, among other things. After her fairly brief phone call, van Ammelrooy strips off her clothes and gets in the bathtub again so that she can drain the water, though she takes the opportunity to smoke a joint as she waits for the water to go down the drain. After she is all nice and clean, the heroine is ready to spend the rest of the film roaming around her small yet rather striking apartment like a histrionic harpy that is high on an inflated and wholly delusional sense self-esteem and a dubious cocktail of drugs. 

 As a result of a clearly fruitful collaboration between Zwartjes, his beauteous wife Trix Zwartjes, and a chick named Floor Peters that seems to have no other film credits to her name, the slightly flamboyant production design in It’s Me is absolutely alluring and quite fitting as the heroine’s apartment looks like that sort of flat Werner Schroeter might have put together had he worked as a production designer on a color sequel to David Lynch’s Eraserhead. Naturally, as someone that seems to spend all day inside where she is free to smoke while lounging around naked, van Ammelrooy seems to love her little lair as it probably the only place in the entire world where she is able to truly be herself and sharpen her acting talents without seeming like a total fool. Indeed, acting and resembling a slightly more tolerable and feminine Katharine Hepburn, the heroine says to an imaginary audience in an extra exaggerated melodramatic fashion things like, “You don’t want to understand” and “Oh, it’s a wonderful feeling…those people around me.” When she is not practicing acting, van Ammelrooy looks at magazines full of nude female models and then uses a portable mirror to compare her tits, pussy, and other body parts to those of said nude models. While it is dubious as to whether she is a dyke or even a passive part-time lily-licker, there is no question that van Ammelrooy lives in a personal estrogen-marinated pandemonium full of fiercely unflattering feminine psychological idiosyncrasies and bare and busty unclad female bodies where no masculine presence can be found. After all, one would expect that van Ammelrooy would receive at least one visit from a sensually potent male suitor of some sort, but the heroine seems more interested in closely examining her own boobs and smoking blunts than smoking a fuckpole or being vaginally pillaged by some young hunk.   Indeed, in the hysterically feminine world of It's Me, men are not even part of the equation, which is unfortunate considering that the heroine seems like she could at least be temporarily relieved of her internal turmoil if some kind young man were to make her feel like a real woman by sexually ravage her.

 While only mere speculation, I can only assume that the heroine’s single greatest obsession is trying on new clothes and shoes, which she does countless times during the film. Indeed, when van Ammelrooy straps on a pair of fancy high-heels, she does it in such a sensual and sensitive fashion that one can only assume the sort of delicacy that she puts into diddling herself. In contrast, when the heroine brushes her hair, she does so in a sinister fashion to the point where it seems like she might explode into a seething rage of irrational violence. In another scene, the heroine demonstrates her physical elegance by performing a little ballet routine while smoking a joint and fiddling with a large feathered fan in a fairly dark room that is lit by nothing but a small static TV screen. Of course, van Ammelrooy spends a little bit of time watching some Zwartjes-esque black-and-white footage of herself on a tiny TV screen during a fleeting metacinematic moment that seems to be a nod to the director's previous black-and-white shorts. After opting to play with her hair and making it quite curly, the heroine hatefully stares into the camera and then subsequently has a mental breakdown of sorts where she kicks things around her apartment and eventually sheds tears of anger and frustration. In fact, van Ammelrooy eventually mentally deteriorates to such a troubling degree that she begins pacing back and forth in her flat while mumbling incoherent mumbo jumbo. As to why the heroine acts the bizarre way that she does, she gives a hint when she states to her phantom audience, “ME. . .I’m not tired. I’m not lazy, too. I just do my profession. This is me. I’m only an actress” and then coughs and complains in a less than believable fashion, “I’m dying.” Towards the end of the film, the heroine picks up her obviously much prized gold-colored phone and spouts what can only be described as a garbled mess, though it seems somewhat doubtful that there is someone on the other line. When van Ammelrooy eventually gets off the phone, she sheds a tear as if she cannot bear the fact that no one is calling or interested in her. In the end in what is undoubtedly a fittingly unnervingly beautiful conclusion to an unnervingly beautiful film, the heroine stares directly at the viewer with a smirk on her face that grows from a goofy smile to maniacal laughing. 

 If It’s Me seems to be about anything, it about female narcissism, delusion, and self-deception, which of course seems to be especially prevalent in attractive actresses who have assuredly infected the rest of Occidental women with their perverse prima donna propensities.  Undoubtedly van Ammelrooy’s character seems like a sort of Dutch porn star Norma Desmond, albeit without the wealth and prestige that she would need to keep spectators and servants around to pay witness to her megalomaniacal displays of infantile vanity and nostalgic self-worship. Indeed, in many ways, one could argue that It’s Me is one of the most misogynistic films ever made (incidentally, Zwartjes’ later feature Pentimento was viciously attacked by feminists, who once raided a screening of the film and destroyed a print) as it paints an unsettling portrait of the so-called fairer sex, but I seriously doubt that it was the director’s intention as Zwartjes has never been a filmmaker with any strong intellectual or socio-political pretenses, even if one could argue that his cinematic works say more about their particular zeitgeist than most Dutch films from the same era.

More than anything, I could not help but be reminded of the ideas of anti-feminist Jewess Esther Vilar in her revolutionary text The Manipulated Man (1971) in regard to women and how they only seem to be concerned with what other members of their sex think. After all, throughout the film, van Ammelrooy is either comparing herself to other women or attempting to look like other women by trying on various outfits, thus providing credence to Vilar’s words, “Yes, only women exist in a woman’s world. The women she meets at church, at parent-teacher meetings, or in the supermarket; the women with whom she chats over the garden fence; the women at parties or window-shopping in the more fashionable streets; those she apparently never seems to notice – these women are the measure of her success or failure. Women’s standards correspond to those in other women’s heads, not to those in the heads of men; it is their judgment that really counts, not that of men […] Men really have no idea in what kind of world women live in; their hymns of praise miss all the vital points.”  Indeed, the genius of It's Me is that, although it only features one single character who rarely speaks, it is quite apparent that her superlatively superficial mind is almost solely focused on the styles, mannerisms, make-up, and hairdos of other women as if she is totally devoid of both an independent mind and distinct personality.  Of course, the heroine's truest self is ultimately revealed during her rather unflattering moments of neurotic rage.

 It has been my personal experience that the more a woman changes her appearance in a dramatic fashion and ‘reinvents’ herself, the more mentally unstable she is. I have also noticed that when women are at a low point in their lives and ‘feel’ ugly, especially when they have dumped or have been dumped by a boyfriend, they tend to get a ridiculously unbecoming hairdo that matches their melancholy or general mental instability. Of course, it is quite revealing that the uniquely unhinged female of It’s Me incessantly tries in vain to find a look that she will be content with, as her behavior demonstrates a perpetual state of internal chaos that no shitty dye or perm job could help alleviate. Notably, the heroine seems the most relaxed and mentally sound when she is naked, as if she feels completely free and not plagued by psychological and cosmetic baggage.  On the other hand, as Vilar noted in regard to women and their natural naked state, “Woman regards her natural self merely as the raw material of a woman. Not the raw material but the end result has to be judged. Unmade-up, without curls and bracelets and necklaces, women are not yet really present. This explains why they do not mind running around in curlers or with cold cream on their faces. It is not ‘they’ at that stage – they are still occupied with the process of becoming ‘them.’ They succeed with this sort of make-believe all the more easily because they are not hampered by any kind of intelligence.” Judging by Vilar’s admittedly rough but nonetheless reasonable remark, one can only assume that the great self-loathing Hebrew Otto Weininger was not too far off when he described women as being innately soulless and lacking true individuality, for their main concern is superficial appearances and maintaining a perennial aesthetic masquerade lest men discover that they are nowhere as intriguing or enigmatic as they would have you believe. 

I think it is quite fitting that a film entitled It’s Me ultimately demystifies female beauty and presents it as an absurd charade, as the viewer ultimately sees what is arguably post-WWII Holland’s most famous diva at her most literally and figuratively naked. Indeed, while a good number of men like to put pussy on a pedestal, especially premium grade pussy, and see dames as Delphic creatures that can never be truly understood, most women are thoroughly less intriguing than the extravagant costumes and make-up they wear, or as Vilar noted in regard to the major con that is femininity, “This femininity, synthetic in origin, consists of two different components: emphasis on secondary sexual characteristics and distancing herself by means of masks […] The first component serves to make her desirable to man, the second to make her mysterious to him. She herself thus creates the equivocal, unknown ‘opposite sex,’ making it easier for him to accept his enslavement. Thanks to the wide range of possible transformations each woman can offer a man – and a ‘real’ woman varies her looks just a little every day – she keeps him in a state of constant bewilderment. While he is still trying to find yesterday’s woman in today’s, she gains time to achieve her own ends. She will maneuver the man into an untenable position, all the time skillfully distracting his attention from the stench of a rotting mind beneath the pleasing mask.” Of course, it could be argued that the deathly pale corpse-like women featured in Zwartjes’ classic shorts like Visual Training are a symbolic depiction of womankind in its unmasked state and It's Me is simply the auteur's first realist work. 

 Aside from possibly effeminate dope-addled frog Philippe Garrel (Le revelateur, La cicatrice intérieure aka The Inner Scar), no other heterosexual cinematic auteur has demonstrated a deeper obsession for womankind in their natural habitat than Zwartjes, which is arguably most apparent in It’s Me where the viewer is forced to confront a less than mentally sound diva without both her literal and figurative make-up, thus making for a fairly singular cinematic experience that is just as grueling as it is rewarding. Undoubtedly the film will prove to be a strangely unsettling experience for any heterosexual man that has ever had to deal with the incessant indecisiveness, irrationality, and self-obsession of a beauteous broad who believes her physical appearance and, in turn, mental well-being and personal comfort are above all other concerns in the world. Of course, as Zwartjes’ film hints during the scenes where the lead attempts to act like a Golden Age Hollywood diva, the art of cinema has only compounded these particular forms of female psychosis as virtually all women now find themselves comparing themselves to the greatest beauties of the silverscreen. 

 Somewhat ironically, despite lacking the pancake make-up and eerie undead eroticism that is associated with the female figures in the director’s earlier films, the all-too-female heroine portrayed by van Ammelrooy is easily the most innately grotesque, repugnant, and insufferable woman that I have ever encountered in a Zwartjes flick.  Indeed, while the viewer is exposed to van Ammelrooy's naughty seductive stares and provocative physical gestures, It's Me is ultimately about as erotic as watching a raving afro-adorned negress receive electroshock therapy, even though Zwartjes still manages to showcase the heroine's pulchritude.  Notably, despite depicting the largely ugly and painful emotions of a delectable dame in a tiny apartment, it is also indubitably one of Zwartjes' most beauteous films.  Aside from the strikingly tableaux and agonizingly alluring lead, the film certainly benefits from its original electronic musical score by Zwartjes and Lodewijk de Boer (who created music for a number of Zwartjes' films and who later directed van Ammelrooy in his sole feature The Family (1973), which anticipates the ambient sounds of contemporary underground Danish musical projects associated with like record labels like Posh Isolation and Janushoved, including Internazionale, Croatian Amor, and Rosen & Spyddet, among various others.  While I must stop short of describing It's Me as a lost masterpiece, it is, like most of Zwartjes' oeuvre, certainly ripe for rediscovery among serious cinephiles that appreciate filmmakers that test the bounds of the entire artistic medium of cinema.  Certainly, one also cannot ignore a film that more or less subtly affirms Weininger's wise timeless words: “A man's real nature is never altered by education: woman, on the other hand, by external influences, can be taught to suppress her most characteristic self, the real value she sets on sexuality. Woman can appear everything and deny everything, but in reality she is never anything. Women have neither this nor that characteristic; their peculiarity consists in having no characteristics at all; the complexity and terrible mystery about women come to this; it is this which makes them above and beyond man's understanding – man, who always wants to get to the heart of things. . .”

-Ty E

Ursula (1961)

If there is an avant-garde film that comes anywhere close to depicting the unhinged psychosexual nightmare the was the abusive childhood of uniquely inarticulate white trash serial killer Henry Lee Lucas—the genetically challenged fiend that inspired the eponymous lead of John McNaughton’s cult classic Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986)—it is indubitably the ominously oneiric experimental horror short Ursula (1961) directed by little known subversive avant-garde auteur Lloyd Michael Williams (Line of Apogee, Two Images for a Computer Piece). Indeed, not unlike many serial killers and criminals in general, Lucas was abused by a single mother during his childhood and, like the poor little boy depicted in Williams’ film, he was forced to wear a dress (in fact, Lucas’ mother was a sexually savage prostitute that made her little boy watch while she was being sensually serviced by various strange men). Also like Lucas, the cross-dressing little boy in the film ultimately brutally murders his mother with a knife in what one might describe as an aberrant act of patently perverse poetic justice of the anti-Oedipal sort. Of course, judging by his later rather subhuman adult appearance, Lucas was probably never a pretty blond boy that could easily pass for a girl like the poor little eponymous lad in Williams' film, but I digress.

While Curtis Harrington (Games, What's the Matter with Helen?) began as an avant-garde filmmaker and became a master of the covertly queer hagsploitation subgenre, Mr. Williams, who is all but completely unknown today, should be credited for directing what is the first (and probably last) experimental Grande Dame Guignol film. Indeed, it is almost incomprehensible to think that anyone, especially an American, would direct an experimental horror film in the early 1960s featuring a little dude in drag that concludes with said little dude brutally butchering his bitch of a mother with the same exact knife that she just used to slaughter her sexually confused son’s new pet frog.  To be fair, Ursula is a fairly subtle and hardly graphic film, thus its particular brand of psychosexual perversity might be lost on many contemporary viewers who expect to see buckets of blood and guts. Of course, as a man that previously directed an experimental surrealist adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s 1871 poem Jabberwocky entitled Jabberwock (1959), Williams—an auteur that is even pretty much completely unknown among cinephiles and avant-garde film fetishists—was no ordinary filmmaker, but I guess one should not expect anything less in a country were art cinema is hardly respected and horror cinema is mostly considered titillating teenage trash. 

 While I am hesitant to go as far describing Ursula as a lost masterpiece, I certainly see it as a sort of important missing link of American avant-garde horror cinema that has yet to get its due as work featuring certain sexually subversive themes that predates works ranging from Frank Perry’s post-psycho-biddy classic Mommie Dearest (1981) to classic sexually schizophrenic slasher trash like Sleepaway Camp (1983). Indeed, despite the fact that he was one of the co-founders of The Film-Makers' Cooperative aka The New American Cinema Group along with Jonas Mekas, collaborated with pioneering female animator and filmmaker Mary Ellen Bute on her film The Boy Who Saw Through (1956) starring a very young Christopher Walken, and has worked with important queer cinema figures ranging from Warhol superstar Taylor Mead to raging kraut queen Rosa von Praunheim, American avant-garde authority P. Adams Sitney did not even make a single reference to Williams or any of his films in his supposedly comprehensive text Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde, 1943-2000, but then again he also forgot about important proto-counterculture auteur Peter Emmanuel Goldman (Echoes of Silence, Wheel of Ashes), among various other negligent omissions. Aside from James Sibley Watson and Melville Webber’s quasi-Expressionist Poe adaptation The Fall of the House of Usher (1928), Harrington’s 1942 amateur teenage reworking of the same Poe story and Fragment of Seeking (1946), and a couple other examples, American experimental horror cinema is all but nonexistent, with Williams indubitably being it’s most criminally unsung auteur. Aside from Ursula, Williams also demonstrated a knack for the forebodingly cinematically phantasmagoric with esoteric cinematic poems like Opus#5 (1961) and Two Images for a Computer Piece (1969), with the latter featuring a notable original musical score by Vladimir ‘father of electronic music’ Ussachevsky. While I have not been able to track down his later longer cinematic works like Line of Apogee (1968) and Rainbow's Children (1975), Ursula seems to be his darkest and most daring yet, at the same time, most accessible and revolutionary film as a genuinely haunting homo oneiric celluloid nightmare made at a time when being a homo was more or less illegal and thus something to be petrified of, or so one would assume after watching the somewhat surprisingly unsettling short. 

 Based on the vaguely autobiographical short story Miss Gentilbelle by writer and sometimes screenwriter Charles Beaumont—a man probably best known for penning many episodes of the original The Twilight Zone TV series whose tragic death at the premature age of 38 as a result of “a mysterious brain disease” seems like something that he might have penned himself—Ursula is pure celluloid Americana in the greatest and most fullest sense as a piece of organic yank horror that can only be compared to a handful of other cinematic works like Richard Blackburn’s criminally underrated Lovecraftian vampire lesbo flick Lemora: A Child's Tale of the Supernatural (1973) and Don Coscarelli’s classic surrealist horror piece Phantasm (1979) in terms of contributing to a truly authentic and artful American horror film mythology that is completely outside the alien influence of the culture-distorters of Hollywood. Notably, Armenian-American NYU film professor Haig Manoogian, who acted as a mentor to a young Martin Scorsese and even produced his first feature Who's That Knocking at My Door (1967), is credited as an ‘advisor’ on Williams' film. In fact, despite earning Williams the Bronze Medallion at the 1961 Cannes Film Festival (incidentally, he previously won the Silver Medallion for his short Jabberwock in 1959), Ursula is actually a student film, hence the completely unknown actors and composer. In my less than humble opinion, the film’s low budget and sometimes amateurish production values (including glaringly dubbed voices) ultimately work to its advantage, as Ursula, which feels like it is set in antiquated Anglophile realm that is equal parts Southern Gothic and Victorian Gothic, seems like the creation of a decidedly damaged young man that was less interested in trying to make a film to entertain people than to provide himself with therapeutic emotional release by documenting the decay of his own mind in a most visceral manner. Indeed, I do not know much about Williams but just by watching his fairly idiosyncratic horror short, which was notably made at a time when wholesome TV swill like The Andy Griffith Show was extremely popular, I would assume that that he had a sadistically bitchy mother who stunted him manhood and ultimately turned him into a woman-hating homo. 

 Undoubtedly, the central theme of Ursula is how damaged and broken things can never be fixed, especially when it comes to the mind. Indeed, at the very beginning of the film, tragic she-boy protagonist ‘Ursula’ (Calvin Waters, who has no other film credits aside from being the producer of an aborted reality TV show about an eponymous gay negro fashion designer entitled Living Life with Dwight Eubanks (2009))—a poor little lad who has been forced to live as a girl—accidentally tears a brand new dress he is wearing after falling from a tree upon being called to come inside by his supposed mother (Dorothea Griffin), henceforth leading to horrific consequence for the protagonist where he must learn a lesson about the impossibility mending. Naturally as a crazed cunt that wants to brainwash her son into becoming a girl, Ursula’s mother—a woman that is clearly too old to be his biological progenitor—is extra irked when he dares to do such a boyish thing as tearing his clothing whilst playing outside. After bitching to him like a sexually repressed witch on the rag, “Oh, you ungrateful child! Look at yourself – destroying your finery. Such a pity. It can never be replaced,” Ursula’s mother declares in a calmer yet all the more sadistic fashion, “Let’s play a little game about mending things, shall we?” and then demands that he go fetch his beloved pet parakeet. Although just a young and vulnerable child, Ursula realizes that his malevolent mommy has seriously unsavory intentions with his pet as he apologizes in advance to his bird by stating “I’m sorry little bird. I’m sorry” as if he already knows what will happen to it. Needless to say, Ursula’s mother slaughters the bird and even makes the boy protagonist hand her the knife that she uses to kill it with. In a scene that demonstrates Ursula’s seething hatred for his mother, Ursula thinks to himself “I hate you” while staring at her immediately after she kills parakeet. After killing the bird, Ursula’s sadistic mother hands the boy the bird’s dismembered body parts and states in a fashion that makes her sound like an old spinster school teacher who has devoted her life to gaining pleasure from covertly browbeating small and impressionable school children, “Take her in your hand. Do not forget her wings. Now then, shall we mend the tiny bird? Shall we put her together again? Glue her pretty little wing back?,” to which he sadly replies, “No. Nothing can be mended.” Of course, the emotional and psychological damage that Ursula’s mother has done to him also cannot be mended as the fittingly creepy conclusion of the film ultimately demonstrates. 

 After suffering the trauma of witnessing the senseless slaughter of his most beloved pet by a wicked woman that is supposed to love and protect him, Ursula naturally suffers from severe nightmares that night involving swarms of screeching birds, sinister large gnomes, an ominously luminous moon, swinging gothic chandeliers, a desolate beach, and his mother calling his name and laughing in a maniacal fashion. In fact, Ursula's nightmare is so long, consuming, and intricately horrendous that he has to be physically awaken by his mother, who yells in his face while attempting to force him out of bed, “You have missed lunch. You were told to be downstairs prominently at 12:30 and instead I find you resting, like a lady of great leisure.” After his rather rude maternal awakening, Ursula hangs out by a creek near his house where he discovers a frog that he makes his new but hardly improved pet. As demonstrated by his remark, “Ugly frog. Let’s play a little game, shall we? Mommy will teach you how,” Ursula fully realizes he will not have his new green buddy for long as he plans to sacrifice him to accomplish his own matricidal fantasies. 

 When Ursula shows off his new pet his mother, she predictably hatefully shouts in his face while grabbing him by the collar, “Really, you have surpassed yourself in wickedness” and then grabs a large dagger-like knife from a dilapidated cabinet with a broken glass window. When the gender-challenged boy protagonist reveals that he named the frog “Ursula,” his mother remarks in a bitchy bourgeois fashion while brandishing the knife in a somewhat sensual manner, “Really?! …But how very appropriate,” thus underscoring her sick and seemingly insatiable sense of sadistic glee. While his mother is admiring the poor frog that she has just so senselessly slaughtered, Ursula quietly goes to the cabinet and grabs the knife that was just used to slaughter his green friend. Just as his mother drops the dead frog on the floor that she just killed while maintaining a facial expression of abject disgust, Ursula says “mother” and then kills her off-screen by brutally stabbing her to death (the only thing the viewer hears is her echoing scream which, as one reviewer already noted, anticipates the scene in George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead (1968) where Mrs. Cooper is stabbed in the cellar by her zombie daughter). In the end after the rather climatic scene of Schadenfreude inducing matricide, Ursula, who is now all alone and psychosis-ridden, rocks back and forth with his hands wrapped around legs while in a fetal position as he repeats to himself his dead mommy's words: “Wicked girl. Bad girl punished. Must be punished. Bad girl…punished. Must be punished.” As the disturbing final scene reveals, the titular boy transvestite’s mind cannot be mended.  In that sense, Ursula almost feels like a kaleidoscopic avant-garde prequel to Hitchcock's Psycho (1960) where one learns how Norman Bates developed his mommy issues, cross-dressing tendencies, and fetish for carving up crazy cunts with knives.  Thankfully, unlike later films featuring sexually deranged cross-dressing killers like Russ Meyer's Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970) and Paul Bartel's Private Parts (1972), Williams' film never succumbs to trashy campy humor or cheap sexual innuendos.

 Undoubtedly Ursula is a film that cannot be fully appreciated unless one considers its particular historical context. Indeed, the film was made at a time when most America gays were still in the closest and thus queer filmmakers oftentimes sought more esoteric means to express themselves, hence why there is probably so few great fag experimental filmmakers nowadays. Additionally, considering the taboo nature of cocksucking at that time, it should be no surprise that many of the queer experimental filmmakers of the 1950s and early 1960s made films about internally tortured, troubled, and/or otherwise mentally unsound individuals as the early films of both Gregory J. Markopoulos and Kenneth Anger clearly reveal. Notably, in the handful of reviews that I found on Williams’ film, about half of the reviewers did not even realize that the titular character was a boy, thus underscoring the film’s quixotically queer essence. Certainly, it is dubious as to whether such a hermetically homosexual film where fagdom is a source of painful fear and loathing would be made nowadays, especially considering both the mainstream media and public schools are absurdly attempting to brainwash kids into thinking that trannys are normal and getting your dick chopped off is a normal medical procedure. Indeed, one could argue that Ursula is packed with the perturbed pathos of generations upon generations of raging closet queens. Incidentally, although the source story, Miss Gentilbelle is somewhat autobiographical in the sense that the author’s mother used to punish him by making him wear a dress and even threatened to kill his pets, Beaumont was a rampantly heterosexual man and he even once wrote a short story entitled The Crooked Man that was published in Playboy in 1955 about a morally and sexually inverted dystopian world where heterosexuals are a minority that are actively persecuted by homos. Considering the rampant homo-approved language policing of the American public by the mainstream media and government institutions, bullying of bakeries and other private businesses and groups that do not comply with the softcore authoritarian aberrosexual agenda, and defiling of the American legal system via gay marriage and other patent absurdities that make a mockery of law and Western Civilization, it seems that Beaumont’s story is not so far-fetched as the pink NKVD, like their Zionist compatriots, hold a preposterous amount of power in the United States, but I digress.  Of course, if Ursula demonstrates anything about homos and their place in a supposedly homophobic Western society, it is that gay artists created more nuanced and enigmatic works before being gay become something to be ostensibly proud of.

 As largely the result of being included as one of the films in the Other Cinema DVD compilation Experiments in Terror (2003) alongside vaguely similarly themed experimental horror shorts ranging from Peter Tscherkassky’s The Entity (1982) revamping Outer Space (1999) to Damon Packard’s ridiculously spasmodic avant-splatter piece Dawn of an Evil Millennium (1988), Ursula is undoubtedly Williams’ easiest to find film. Notably, Miss Gentilbelle was later adapted by Alfred Hitchcock Presents director Robert Stevens under the titled ‘Miss Belle’ in 1968 for the Hammer Films TV show Journey to the Unknown. Additionally, a Hebrewess hack named Tara Miele, who recently created a stupidly sentimental  and distinctly disingenuous anti-Trump agitprop PSA entitled Meet a Muslim (2016) for a rather dubious quasi-commie Jewish-Muslim propaganda outfit, directed a patently pointless version of the story entitled Miss Gentilbelle (2000). Needless to say, Williams’ version is the greatest adaptation of Beaumont’s story as the sort of film that makes the viewer fantasize about what the auteur could have done with the material of a horror literary maestro like H.P. Lovecraft had he had the budget and means to make an actual feature-length film with professional actors and a decent composer.  Indeed, Ursula is the rare sort of cinematic work that makes me long for an organic American experimental horror cinema that unfortunately does not really exist, as it feels like a filmic tease from a movement that died in its infancy.  While I have watched the film a number of times, it leaves me hungry for more ever single time in that sense that it is rather apparent that the Williams had the capacity to create so much more. 

I almost must confess that every time I watch Ursula, I am reminded about virtually every single serial killer that I have ever read about it.  After all, it could be argued that the eponymous little boy is just as much the monster of the film as his loathsome mother, as he completely transcends her transgressions and graduates on to matricidal murder before he even reaches puberty.  In that sense, the film is like a sort of anti-nostalgic coming-of-age film for serial killers as Henry Lee Lucas, Richard Chase, Gary Ridgway, Edmund Kemper, Bobbie Joe Long, and countless other real-life serial killers experienced childhoods involving maternal abuse similar to that of Ursula.  Arguably more importantly, Ursula is, in terms of brutality and aesthetics, the closest thing to a fag filmic equivalent to a Brothers Grimm fairytale. Indeed, forget Larry Yust's Shirley Jackson adaptation The Lottery (1969)—a 20-minute horror short that is well known for scaring generations of American school children who were forced to watch it in their English classes—Williams' short should be mandatory viewing in public schools lest the United States be condemned with another generation of deluded fatherless youth who believe that cross-dressing is the height of cultivation.

-Ty E

Tunguska: The Crates Are Here

As far as truly iconoclastic auteur filmmakers are concerned, you probably cannot do better than belated Teutonic Renaissance man Christoph Schlingensief (Mutters Maske aka Mother’s Mask, Kettensägenmassaker aka The German Chainsaw-Massacre) whose intricately incendiary cinematic works oftentimes straddled a refreshingly unhealthy line between tasteless scatological schlock and audacious avant-garde celluloid art. Indeed, one of the most refreshing things about Schlingensief is that he was not afraid to savagely mock his greatest cinematic heroes into oblivion whilst using some of the most grotesque and infantile yet undeniably clever means imaginable. For example, in honor of one of his greatest cinematic heroes, the auteur had a real-life retarded mensch dress like Fassbinder—leather jacket, goofy hat, and all—in his cinematic (anti)love letter to New German Cinema Die 120 Tage von Bottrop (1997) aka 120 Days of Bottrop starring Fass regulars Udo Kier, Margit Carstensen, Irm Hermann and Volker Spengler. Of course, one could certainly easily argue that Schlingensief’s entire cinematic oeuvre is both a ruthless critique of and tribute to cinema and cinema history, but probably none of his films are more obscenely obsessive with cinema history and its discontents than his first feature-length flick Tunguska - Die Kisten sind da (1984) aka Tunguska: The Crates Are Delivered. The final entry in a somewhat confounding triptych entitled ‘Trilogy of Film Criticism - Film as Neurosis’ that also includes the two shorts Phantasus muss anders werden (1983) aka Phantasus Go Home and Die Ungenierten kommen - What happened to Magdalena Jung? (1983), Schlingensief’s film is, if nothing else, that greatest and most hysterically hilarious assault on avant-garde cinema and experimental filmmakers that has ever been committed to celluloid. Featuring various surprisingly aesthetically pleasing avant-garde techniques throughout that demonstrate that Schlingensief was no novice when it came to masturbatory filmmaking skills, as well as  seemingly random excerpts from early Teutonic experimental animator Oskar Fischinger’s Komposition in Blau (1935) aka Composition in Blue and Kenneth Anger’s Eaux d'artifice (1953), the film oftentimes feels like the extremely confused creation of the severely autistic bastard broad of Lotte Reiniger and Andy Milligan as a lavishly constructed low-camp abomination where the hopelessly horrendous acting and nonexistent storyline is only transcended by its startlingly striking beauty and corrosive comedic genius. Advertised by the film’s distributor filmgalerie451 as “Schlingensief's way of getting even with German avant-garde film,” the feverishly fucked little flick tells the quasi-tragicomedic tale of a young and attractive married German couple on vacation that has the misfortune of getting stuck in an old dilapidated and figuratively haunted house with three decidedly deranged avant-garde film researchers after their car breaks down in the cold yet exotic hell that is Siberia.  Needless to say, Tunguska is a must-see work for any semi-serious Schlingensief fan, though I am not sure I can recommend to Stan Brakhage fanboys, film students, or anyone else really aside.

 A film that refreshingly mocks the megalomaniacal delusions of grandeur and overall social retardation that plagues many enterprising avant-garde filmmakers, Tunguska seems to be especially an intricate and semi-loving yet nonetheless brutal attack against Schlingensief’s former mentor Werner Nekes, but it also has older and more cryptically autobiographical roots that date back to 1968 when the director was only 7 years old. Indeed, when he will just a wee lad that was best known as the son of a respected pharmacist, Schingensief had the distinguished honor of attending the scandalous fourteenth annual ‘International Short Film Festival,’ which was held in his hometown of Oberhausen.  Of course, 1968 was an important year for the budding young auteur as it was also when he shot his first 8mm film and resolved to begin an artistic career that he would eventually become (in)famous for as a cinematic iconoclastic that ultimately proved to have more testicular fortitude than any of the cinematic upstarts that signed the legendary Oberhausen Manifesto (incidentally, Schlingensief would eventually befriend the manifesto's most famous signer Alexander Kluge). Deriving its title from both an enigmatic fictional film that debuted in 1967 but was scrapped shortly afterward due to disinterest and the somewhat mysterious Tunguska event of June 1908 when a cataclysmic explosion over the sparsely populated Eastern Siberian Taiga flattened 2,000 km2 (770 sq mi) of forest in what was ultimately the largest known impact event on Earth in recorded history, Schlingensief’s debut feature is also arguably the most insanely idiosyncratic take on the ‘old dark house’ mystery ever made (indeed, despite lacking grotesque bisexual porn featuring ugly people doing ugly sexual things, the film even puts Curt McDowell’s Thundercrack! (1975) to shame in terms of sheer abject absurdity). In terms of its preternatural poetical essence, crude cannibalization of various genre conventions, strange sardonic approach to Gothic themes, innately anarchic spirit, and dubious morality, Tunguska is like a kraut cinematic equivalent to Comte de Lautréamont's novel Les Chants de Maldoror aka The Songs of Maldoror.  

 Considering that Schlingensief’s previous film in his ‘Trilogy of Film Criticism - Film as Neurosis,’ What happened to Magdalena Jung?, was an extremely loose reworking of German Conservative Revolutionary movement writer Ernst Jünger’s book Das abenteuerliche Herz. Figuren und Capricios (1938) aka The Adventurous Heart: Figures and Capriccios, it is only fitting that Tunguska—a uniquely unpretentious cinematic work that, quite ironically, makes relatively practical use of somewhat pretentious avant-garde film techniques—makes a mockery out of a far-leftist counterculture kraut like Werner Nekes. Notably, Nekes would later bitch to Schlingensief that his next feature Menu Total (1986) was “a fascist film,” so it almost seems like the auteur somehow had a premonition that his mentor would eventually trash his films and thus trashed him in advance in a most silly yet nonetheless quite artistically fruitful fashion. Notably, the reason Schlingensief opted to direct a film about a tyrannical trio of avant-garde scientists on road to North Pole to show Eskimos experimental films was because, as the auteur states in the doc Christoph Schlingensief und seine Filme (2005) aka Christoph Schlingensief and His Films directed by Frieder Schlaich, “That’s where I thought experimental film was headed.” In short, unlike hyper hermetic avant-gardist like Nekes, Schlingensief always wanted to make films that were seen by all sorts of people and not just fellow autistic filmmakers that are involved in a sort of perennial circle jerk like Jonas Mekas and his pals. As Schlingensief also explained in Schlaich’s doc, “After these two films [PHANTASUS and MAGDALENA JUNG] I naturally developed a latent rage against Nekes. I thought, why should I becomes Nekes? What’s with all this crap? […] I wanted to separate myself.” Needless to say, despite the fact that some of his films like the preposterously titled T-Wo-Men (1972) and Der Tag Des Malers (1997) aka The Day of the Painter feature hot Sapphic pornographic action between hot twat kraut counterculture carpet-munchers, Tunguska is easily more enthralling than anything that Herr Nekes has ever directed (though I must admit that I have a softspot for Nekes' Uliisses (1982) simply due to the fact that it features punk dyke diva Tabea Blumenschein in a rather striking performance). 

 In Tunguska, the viewer watches in abject anticipation as a collectively crazed trio of over-the-hill and fairly physically grotesque experimental filmmakers-cum-researchers use various form of vintage experimental cinema as a means to debase, subjugate, and brainwash individuals until they become psychosis-ridden followers of the “new filmic language” (aka avant-garde religion). The Führer of the filmic dictatorship is a lecherous lard ass named Roy Glas (legendary New German Cinema character actor Alfred Edel of Alexander Kluge’s post-Auschwitz exercise in ethno-masochism Die Artisten in der Zirkuskuppel: Ratlos (1968) aka The Artist in the Circus Dome: Clueless), who runs a largely imaginary empire of cinematic derangement.  Seemingly inspired by the artistic theories of Carl Jung, Glas somewhat dubiously believes that the only way a true avant-garde cinema can emerge is if it is rid of neurosis (personally, I think a great deal of avant-garde art is the direct result of neurosis and psychosis, but I digress). Not unlike Nekes and his one-time wife Dore Oberloskamp (aka Dore O.), Glas’ foremost collaborator is his similarly insane scientist spouse Ireen Fitzler (Anna Fechter). In a possible mocking reference to Nekes and his then-wife Dore’s first breakthrough film, Jüm-Jüm (1967), Tunguska begins with a prologue from the avant-garde antagonist describing the premiere of his eponymous film, which was an abject failure and thus, not unlike the majority of experimental films, regulated to the celluloid dustbin of history where it probably belongs.  As an assumed result of the failure of his film (Glas never actually says whether or not he was the one that actually directed Tunguska), Glas and his compatriots sought to “find and explore news aspects of zeitgeist and expression of film” and they felt the best way to do so would be to take part in an absurdly nonsensical expedition to Antarctica to demonstrate to primitive Eskimos the ostensible power of experimental film. Unfortunately for Glas and his small team, which includes his wife Ireen and a four-eyed lunatic named Lossowitsch aka ‘Losso’ (Vladimir Konetzny), never made it to their location due to a plane crash and thus have been stranded in Siberia ever since in a thankfully relatively uninhabited area where few people will have the grand aesthetic misfortune of enduring their distinct brand of meta-authoritarian cinematic oppression. Unluckily for the film’s young married protagonists, Rolf (Mathias Colli, who went on to co-write, assistant direct, and star in Schlingensief’s Veit Harlan reworking Mutters Maske (1988) aka Mother’s Mask) and Tina (Irene Fischer, who went on to become a writer/actress on Hans W. Geissendörfer’s long running TV series Lindenstraße), their tiny red car breaks down in Siberia and they soon find themselves being emotionally, psychologically, and aesthetically terrorized by Glas and his oppressive goofball Gestapo. 

 If you are looking for any sense of sanity or traditional logical in Tunguska, you surely will not find it, but one should not expect anything less from a Schlingensief flick where spastic acting, compulsive spontaneity, and cryptic and not-so-cryptic dark yet surprisingly mirthful humor runs rampant. Indeed, like virtually all of the director’s cinematic works, the film completely blurs the line between nightmarish farce and melancholy fever dream, as well as aesthetic nihilism and super sophisticated schlock. In short, Schlingensief seems to make no lie of the fact that he intends to torture and aesthetically assault you just like the film’s gluttonous villain Glas, yet he does it with a knowing smirk like a demonic schoolboy who has just lit a bag of shit on fire on his good Catholic next-door neighbor’s front porch. Featuring Schlingensief himself under the assumed pseudonym ‘Christoph Krieg’ as a raving mad man who speaks of hope for humanity and other frivolous deluded fantasies before being violently murdered by an infantile retard, the film is a genre-molesting absurdist allegory that is packed with perverse poetry, sassy sadism, and surprisingly practical experimental techniques. A foreboding fairytale full of loudmouthed psychosis-ridden monsters and mumbling brain-damaged degenerates, Tunguska plays a pernicious game with classic genre conventions that Gothic horror, romance, mystery, sci-fi, and thriller genres and is glued together with avant-garde effects in what might be described as the filmic equivalent of a Teutonic tranny Frankenstein monster on bad acid. Not unlike many of the films of Jean-Luc Godard, it is immediately apparent while watching Schlingensief’s debut that it was directed by a man that lives and breathes film and wholly believes “cinema is everything” and “everything is cinema.” In other words, it seems that Schlingensief himself also suffers from a sort of cinematic psychosis, but unlike Nekes and the avant-garde researchers depicted in Tunguska, he at least realizes it and is brave and audacious enough to mock and ridicule those who believe Peter Kubelka is the second coming of Christ and that Hollis Frampton is an immaculate cinema god among men. 

 If the lovable retard Arnie played by a very young Leonardo DiCaprio in Lasse Hallström’s What's Eating Gilbert Grape (1993) had an all the more mentally challenged Teutonic brother with ambiguous magical powers, it would probably be Herr Norbert (Norbert Schliewe, who once notably worked as an animator for Nekes). Norbert is an exceedingly erratic, unpredictably violent, and somewhat mysterious man-child of the fairly unhinged sort who has been trapped in the wilds of Siberia ever since he was involved in a plane crash that apparently killed his entire family, including his much beloved sister. Upon looking at a magical mushroom in the woods, Norbert sees an image of married couple Rolf and Tina and thus knows they are stranded somewhere in the area, though he is initially to shy to approach them. When Rolf and Tina eventually find Norbert lurking inside a somewhat sinister dilapidated house that they have yet to discover is the home to the avant-garde researchers, they are somewhat startled by him. While Rolf initially comforts Norbert by acting as a sort of loving paternal figure to him, the unpredictable retard somewhat freaks out Tina when he mistakes her for his dead sister. For whatever reason, Herr Norbert also has an affinity for pulling Tina’s hair while repeatedly proclaiming that she is his sister.  While Tina is certainly more mentally balanced than Norbert, they will both ultimately fall under the spell of the preposterous cinematic brainwashing of Glas and his gang, thus leaving poor Rolf to fend for himself when it comes to maintaining his sanity in a subtly morbid world of cinematic mind-games and cineaste oriented groupthink.

 The next day after spending their first night at the half-ruined house that might be best described as cine-maniac manor, the married couple gets somewhat of a surprise when another dubious weirdo, a less than sane and creepily hospitable semiotician named Major Pater Hilf aka ‘Major Father Help’ (Schlingensief), knocks on the door of the house, aggressively introduces himself, and then randomly picks up Tina and clumsily drops her on the floor.  For whatever reason, Major Help takes Rolf and Tina mountain climbing and then starts a fire that he more or less proclaims is a symbol of hopeful redemption for all of humanity. When Major Helps demonstrates his latent sadistic side by daring to attempt to burn Herr Norbert’s hand in the fire, the unpredictable retard immediately gets his revenge by using Rolf’s car to run over and ultimately kill the zany semiotician. Before unwittingly proving that his fiery symbol of hope is totally worthless by dying not far from it, Major Help uses his last couple minutes of life to sing a melancholic pop song to Rolf and Tina on an electronic keyboard that magically appears out of nowhere. At this point in the film, it seems like hope is nothing more than an absurdist joke that will never be encountered by the married protagonists, who soon come to realize that there is no more hellish fate than to fall prey to the nonsensical esoteric ramblings and uniquely unsavory schemes of the outstandingly arrogant avant-garde filmmakers that haunt the area.  Indeed, as Rolf and Tina soon discover, they would be much better off if the house that they are staying out was haunted by ghosts instead of a trio of compulsively conniving charlatan filmmakers.

 When Rolf and Tina finally encounter avant-garde researcher Roy Glas and his two equally demented minions, they are immediately trapped in a pernicious autistic psychodrama involving warped mind games and reckless displays of unhinged hedonism.  In a scene where Glas and his crew watch experimental footage of Tina frolicking through a forest in an exceedingly elegant fashion, it is hinted that the mad avant-garde scientists have been spying on the protagonist ever since they reached Siberia.  Naturally, Glas takes an instant liking to the fairy sexy Tina and even dares to put his hand on her thigh right on front of her hubby Rolf while verbally mocking him. When Glas’ wife Ireen declares there is an emergency and claims there is some sort of an accident, it is later revealed that she just wanted to use Rolf’s car to pick up some booze. Undoubtedly, Glas’ supreme arrogance and vanity is only transcended by his grotesque displays of gluttony, thus Rolf and Tina spend much of their time watching the megalomaniac savagely chewing on seemingly half-cooked animal flesh while talking bullshit. Rolf oftentimes has his two comrades collectively shout in vain the Nazi-esque “strength and power,” especially when they are viewing one of their avant-garde atrocities (one of which is the above mentioned footage of Tina looking like quite the elegantly dressed Fräulein while frolicking through a forest). Of course, it does not take long before Glas has Rolf and Tina go through torturous sessions of avant-garde brainwashing. Indeed, during one of such sinister sessions, Glas’ stone cold Himmler-esque minion Lossowitsch jumps around with a white sheet over his body like a spastic ghost as Kenneth Anger’s Eaux d'artifice is projected over his chest while the avant-garde researchers loudly chant incoherent avant-garde nonsense. Needless to say, when Glas cryptically asks Rolf “Fischlinger or Eggeling?” in reference to early experimental Aryan animators Oskar Fischinger and Viking Eggeling, the protagonist has no clue what he is talking about. Unfortunately, Tina is brainwashed with Glas’ ‘filmic language’ as demonstrated by her bizarre behavior during the screening and later that night when she tells Rolf a seemingly nonsensical bedtime story with a strange happy ending  involving a “bad dance instructor in Tunguska” and a mob of animated blue building blocks that kill their creators but not said bad dance instructor. The blue blocks are eventually revealed to be in reference to Fischinger’s animated short Komposition in Blau, which Tina dreams about after she falls asleep. 

 While Rolf and Tina eventually manage to escape the avant-garde researchers home even though the latter seems to have developed Stockholm syndrome as demonstrated by her strange and innately irrational cult-like affection for Glas and his gleefully sadistic comrades, the only gas attendant (Schlingensief regular Sergej Gleitmann) in the area refuses to give them gas, thereupon leaving them stuck in Siberia. In a belligerent fit of self-destructive desperation, Tina opts to steal Rolf’s car and then drive it off a cliff, thus resulting in her death via skull fracture. With his beloved Tina dead and nowhere to go, Rolf desperately runs back to the avant-gardist’s lair and informs them of his wifey’s untimely demise. Needless to say, Mr. Norbert, who believes Tina is sister, seems just as emotionally shattered as Rolf by the female protagonist’s tragic demise. As for Glas and his crew, they seem rather unaffected by Tina’s death and set it fit to burn her body on some rocks near a lake in what seems like a sacrificial burning pyre to the gods of avant-garde cinema. While Rolf mentally deteriorates so badly that he tries to join the avant-garde cult, Glas and his crew opt to steal his car and leave him stranded in Siberia.  Indeed, it seems Rolf is just not good enough to join the cult as indicated by Glas' elitist remark, “No, Rolf, we're too different.  Tina is dead!”  In what is indubitably a sad reflection of his progressive psychological degeneration, Rolf also somehow forgets that Tina is dead and goes looking for her around the researcher's lair in a Norbert-esque fashion, as if he is in denial that his ladylove is gone forever.  Not surprisingly, it seems that Glas was only interested in titillating Tina, hence his almost seemingly pathological tendency to mock her marriage to Rolf.  Additionally, before the mad scientist trio steals Rolf's car and leaves the protagonist stranded in the bowels of Siberia, Lossowitsch sternly states, “We make solitudinarians!,” as if to rub in the recently widowed young man's face that a rather grim and lonely fate awaits him.  In the end, the film concludes with a epilogue from Glas where he declares his research is a success and “Film as a form of neurosis. Our research continues.”  Of course, as demonstrated by his decidedly deleterious effect on the protagonists, it seems that Glas' research is a total failure as he spreads neurosis wherever he goes and seems to have absolutely no clue as to sire the psychosis-free avant-garde that he and his loyal compatriots dreams of.

 While I have always had an appreciation for avant-garde and experimental cinema and am always interested in examining the cinematic oeuvres of the most idiosyncratic of auteur filmmakers, I must admit that I have found most of these film directors to be obnoxiously obsessive one-track onanists whose cinematic works reflect the worse sort of impotent celluloid wankery. In that sense, it does not surprise me that Schlingensief’s mentor Nekes incorporated pornographic imagery in his films, as it would not surprise me if the most arousing thing in the world to him was his own films. In that respect, I somewhat appreciate the sometimes literally masturbatory films of Paul Sharits (Ray Gun Virus, T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G), who seems to have ironically acknowledged in a tongue-in-cheek fashion the masturbatory nature of experimental cinema in general as opposed to succumbing to the banally calculating and unnervingly emotionally barren mathematical approach typical of the algorithmically-driven films created by other filmmakers associated with the Structural film movement. Incidentally, when Nekes attempted to direct a somewhat conventional comedy film, Johnny Flash (1986), it came off as a poor prude’s take on a Schlingensief flick, thus revealing the extra esoteric auteur's seeming incapacity to create emotionally engaging cinematic works that appeal to people aside from fellow avant-garde filmmakers and half-crazed cineastes (incidentally, Schlingensief acted as a cinematographer on the film). As Tunguska reveals, a life revolving around arcane avant-garde filmmaking can only lead to pernicious and highly deleterious side-effects like psychosis, fits of rage and irritability, the loss of a wife or girlfriend, and/or an incapacity to appreciate emotionally engulfing films featuring lines of dialogue and sexy chicks with nice tits and shapely derrieres, among other things.  Of course, the true genius of Tunguska is that it manages to alienated both autistic avant-garde cinema fanboys and culturally retarded philistines alike, but I guess one should not expect anything less from the debut feature of the singular auteur who was arguably the last great iconoclast of cinema.

 By directing a film with blatant B movie and exploitation conventions featuring a cast of mostly quasi-retarded weirdos that most people would be petrified to touch with a ten-foot pool that relatively seamlessly utilizes a number of striking experimental tricks and techniques, Schlingensief managed to make a marvelous mockery of an ostensibly sacred realm of cinema history that has been safety guarded by avant-garde gatekeepers like Jonas Mekas and P. Adams Sitney for half a century. While I am admittedly probably more obsessed with experimental cinema than the average cinephile as reflected in my appreciation for filmmakers ranging from Frans Zwartjes (Living, Pentimento) to Ed Emshwiller (Lifelines, Thanatopsis) to Gregory J. Markopoulos (Twice a Man, The Illiac Passion) to Lloyd Michael Williams (Opus 5, Ursula) to Albie Thoms (Rita and Dundi, Marinetti) to Dietmar Brehm (Blicklust, Blah Blah Blah), I will be the first to admit that virtually all segments of the experimental realm—whether it be the late career esoteric cocksucker counterculture cinema of James Broughton, aberrant Aryan pornography of Viennese Aktionists like pedo cult leader Otto Mühl, or frivolous found-footage tweaking of banal Brit Malcolm Le Grice—deserve to be ruthlessly mocked, ridiculed, and/or lampooned and Schlingensief was most certainly the best person to do it. Indeed, whether it be remaking classic high-camp Nazi melodramas, creating a reunification themed kraut mutation of Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) featuring Udo Kier with a swastika mustache, or bringing the Aryan high kultur of Bayreuth to the most culturally barren and impoverished corners of the dreaded Dark Continent in an absurd stunt that surely rivals that of the mad avant-garde researchers of Tunguska that attempt to expose Eskimos to experimental cinema, Schlingensief was indubitably the best dude to parody the pretenses of cinema history’s most autistically arrogant sons. Of course, Schlingensief may be the only great artist in history that could never be properly parodied or receive the lame Hebraic Saturday Night Live treatment as a man whose real-life personality and preternatural charisma was more entrancingly hyperreal and downright hilarious than any neo-vaudevillian comedy sketch ever could be.  Indeed, after watching Tunguska one can only come to the natural conclusion that it was directed by a cracked kraut genius with an untameable spirit that makes George Grosz seem like Norman Rockwell by comparison in terms of sheer artistic Weltanschauung.  In other words, Heil Schlingensief!!!

-Ty E