Permanent Vacation

Admittedly, while I tend to either love or hate most auteur filmmakers, especially those of the arthouse or avant-garde oriented sort, Jim Jarmusch (Broken Flowers, Only Lovers Left Alive) is a rare a filmmaker that I both like and loathe, though his most recent films have caused me to feel mostly more of the latter. Of course, unlike a lot of contemporary cinephiles (who typically borrow most of their ideas and fetishes from the French New Wave and the anti-Occidental Frankfurt School influenced academics and critics), xenophilia, non-ironical ethno-masochism, flagrant La Nouvelle Vague worship, dimestore existentialism, post-Beat Generation hipsterdom, and degenerate jazz are things that leave a rather bitter taste in my mouth, so naturally I find it to be an innately impossible task to fully embrace any of the films in Jarmusch’s somewhat uneven oeuvre. Although not really a major figure of the movement when it was still around, Jarmusch's roots lie in the underground No Wave Cinema scene of the mid-1970s through mid-1980s where he did things like work as a second recordist on his bud Eric Mitchell’s largely forgotten midnight movie Underground U.S.A. (1980), acted as a cinematographer on his longtime girlfriend Sara Driver’s Paul Bowles adaptation You Are Not I (1981), and ultimately directed his first and mostly rarely seen feature Permanent Vacation (1980), which I finally decided to watch the other day after many years of procrastination. According to Jarmusch himself, it was his comrades of the No Wave scene who talked him into directing his first feature, or as the auteur stated in the documentary Blank City (2010) directed by Celine Danhier, “I used to sort of follow Eric [Mitchell] and Amos [Poe] around and they were always saying, ‘Jim, when are you going to make a feature film. Come on, Jim make a film.’” I must confess that, after reading a couple reviews of Permanent Vacation, I expected the worst and braced myself for a film that I assumed would be an all the more slow, pedantic, and posturing take on Jarmusch’s second feature Stranger Than Paradise (1984), yet it ultimately somewhat surprised me and exceeded my admittedly fairly low expectations.  Indeed, while I would probably hate Jarmusch if I met him in real-life, his debut at least allowed me to somewhat understand where he is coming from and why he has an insatiable love for old dead negro jazz musicians, goofy anachronistic clothing, emotional sterility, and seemingly pointless posturing (or what he and his fans probably call ‘style’).

 Shot on a relatively miniscule budget of around $12,000 as an intended master's thesis while Jarmusch was attending the film program at NYU (somewhat humorously, he was denied a degree because the university did not appreciate the fact that he used his Louis B. Mayer Foundation scholarship to fund the film), Permanent Vacation is a slow burning, very consciously stylized, semi-autobiographical (the lead character is a composite of Jarmusch, his factory worker brother, and lead actor Chris Parker), and a virtual manifesto of the filmmaker’s seemingly fairly consistent Weltanschauung as a passive nihilist, self-stylized NYC hipster, degenerate jazz lover, and perennial too-cool-for-school rebel-without-a-cause. Indeed, for a Jarmusch fanboy to describe the film as one of the director’s lesser works (even respected critic Jonathan Rosenbaum described the film as, “The only Jim Jarmusch feature that qualifies as apprentice work”) is nothing short of hipster heresy and strong evidence that they do not actually sincerely like the auteur or his films, but instead are more interested in what he and his films stand for (e.g. negrophilia, hipsterism, passive nihilism, etc.). Featuring a real-life eternal wanderer and decidedly disillusioned social outcast in the lead role (Jarmusch specially tailored the character for the lead ‘actor,’ who fittingly uses his real name), Permanent Vacation is a sort of overtly offbeat (anti)bildungsroman about a metaphysically dead hipster hobo and fiercely forlorn fashion victim who probably felt he found a true kindred spirit (or at least, a cool quote to steal) when he read Arthur Rimbaud’s words, “I found I could extinguish all human hope from my soul.”   While Jarmusch's film will not give you hope for hopeless hipsters, it will give you the sense that Nietzsche was right in regard to his ideas of the ‘eternal return’ and especially ‘Amor fati’ (of course, Jarmusch is still interested in these themes as Broken Flowers (2005) especially demonstrates).

 While fairly unknown (it never received a theatrical release) and poorly reviewed in the United States, Permanent Vacation was well received in Germany where it earned the Josef von Sternberg Award at the 1980 Mannheim-Heidelberg International Filmfestival and impressed New German Cinema ‘alpha-auteur’ Wim Wenders so much that he gave Jarmusch some film stock to work on his next feature Stranger Than Paradise (notably, Jarmusch also worked as an assistant on Wenders’ doc Lightning Over Water (1980) aka Nick’s Movie about the remaining days of Hollywood rebel Nicholas Ray, who the filmmaker also acted as a personal assistant to). Undoubtedly, one of Jarmusch’s greatest ‘talents’ as a filmmaker is that he is one of the few American filmmakers that has been able to express the sort of existential despair that is quite common in the films of the great European arthouse filmmakers of the post-WWII era, especially those of New German Cinema. Indeed, as a largely plot-less work sprinkled with occasional cinephile references that features a quasi-antihero with a flat affect and nothing to live for except vintage negro music and attempting to look and act ‘hip’ (personally, I found the young man to be quite unwittingly ludicrous, which is probably the only thing charming about him), Permanent Vacation almost seems like Jarmusch’s attempt to make a NYC equivalent to early Wenders flicks like Summer in the City (1970) and The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick (1972). With its gritty and almost cinema-vérité realist aesthetic, Jarmusch’s film falls somewhere between the scum-covered American-dream-damning of exploitation auteur Nick Millard’s anti-masterpiece Criminally Insane (1975) and the German era ‘hard ghetto’ meditations of Iranian auteur Sohrab Shahid Saless like Tagebuch eines Liebenden (1977) aka Diary of a Lover and Ordnung (1980) aka Order.  As far as American influences go, aside from the No Wave scene, Jarmusch's film seems to owe a very heavy debt to the fairly small yet nonetheless very important and highly influential oeuvre of largely forgotten NYC underground auteur Peter Emmanuel Goldman. Aside from the plight of the lead in Permanent Vacation being quite similar to the protagonists in Goldman's features Echoes of Silence (1967) and Wheel of Ashes (1969), the opening scenes of the almost somnambulist-like masses walking in slow-motion in the seedy streets of NYC bears a strikingly resemblance to various scenes in the forgotten auteur's short Pestilent City (1965) to the point where it almost seems like borderline plagiarism.  Luckily for Jarmusch, Goldman is now largely forgotten today, including among serious cinephiles, even though his final feature Wheel of Ashes starring Pierre Clémenti is probably the only real direct link between the NYC underground and La Nouvelle Vague.  Of course, what makes Jarmusch important and singular is that he dared to make such decidedly dejecting and audience-alienating works in the land and era of Spielberg and Lucas where movies are mostly made with the exact opposite intent as Permanent Vacation, which is a work that prides itself on escaping from the escapism of Hollywood and instead dwells in an inwardly dead state of mind where Weltschmerz reigns. 

 Almost terminally nihilistic teenage protagonist Aloysious Christopher Parker (Chris Parker) is a man with no plan aside from perennially drifting from one place to another, or as he less than eloquently narrates in a fairly monotone fashion that makes one question whether or not he is a eunuch (he sounds like a drug-addled lesbian hooker), “My name is Aloysious Christopher Parker and, if I ever have a son, he'll be Charles Christopher Parker. Just like Charlie Parker. The people I know just call me Allie, and this is my story -- or part of it. I don't expect it to explain all that much, but what's a story anyway, except one of those connect the dots drawings that in the end forms a picture of something. That's really all this is. That's how things work for me. I go from this place, this person to that place or person. And, you know, it doesn't really make that much difference.” A sort of passive misanthrope who probably does not even have enough energy or will power to truly love or hate people, Allie compares people to inanimate objects and rooms, stating that, when it comes to individuals, there always comes a time when the, “newness is gone [...] And then there's this kind of dread, kind of creeping dread. You probably don't even know what I'm talking about. But anyway I guess the point of all this is that after a while, something tells you, some voice speaks to you, and that's it. Time to split.” Although he is still just an adolescent, Allie is already wise enough to know that, “People are going to be basically the same” and thus has no problem physically and emotionally drifting in and out of peoples’ lives like some sort of melancholic ghost (actually, Allie's parasitic lifestyle, superficial charm, lack of long-term goals, criminality, emotional shallowness, and proneness towards boredom, among other things, indicated that he might suffer from psychopathy). Upon randomly dropping by the dilapidated apartment of an assumed lover named Leila (Leila Gastil), Allie is asked, “Where have you been? I haven’t seen you since Thursday” and he less than emotionally replies as if it is no big deal that he has worried the shit out of his quasi-girlfriend with his unexpected absence, “Walking….Just, walking around. I can’t seem to sleep at night. Not in this city.” Not even seemingly vaguely interested in love or even carnal pleasures, Allie proceeds to goofily dance to degenerate jazz while Leila hypnotically stares out of a window as if hoping that she could be anywhere else other than where she currently is in life. When his culturally confused one-man dance session is over, Allie demonstrates he is a degenerate descendent of Narcissus by intently staring at himself in a mirror while combing his hair and proudly declaring, “You know, sometimes I think I should just live fast and die young. . .and go in a three-piece suit like Charlie Parker. Not bad, huh?” Needless to say, Leila is less than impressed with the protagonist's outmoded James Dean-esque declaration, but it seems that in Allie’s own mind he is a misunderstood superstar who is the only person that is truly capable of understanding his own brilliance. 

 In a scene that seems to reflect Allie’s fragmented mind and incapacity for concentrating on anything for any extended period of time, the protagonist reads an excerpt from mysterious pseudonymous French poet Comte de Lautréamont’s classic proto-surrealist poetic novel Les Chants de Maldoror (1868) aka The Songs of Maldoror and then says to Leila, “I’m tired of this book, you can have it.” When Leila tries in vain to receive some warmth and affection from the protagonist by complaining, “I’m tired of being alone,” Allie matter-of-factly replies, “Everyone is alone” and then goes on a predictable pessimistic rant where he attempts to rationalize why he is proud of being a bum and then mentions how his once-normal mother went totally insane after his father abandoned their family. After discussing the fact that he has not seen his institutionalized schizophrenic mother in over a year and that he would like to the visit the ruins of his childhood home, which was supposedly destroyed in an imaginary war by “The Chinese,” Allie leaves Leila for good and heads to the place where he was apparently born, though he does not seem to find what he is looking for. In the ruins of where he was born, Allie bumps into a shell-shocked war veteran (Jarmusch regular Richard Boes) who is convinced that he is still fighting the Vietcong. After giving him a cigarette, Allie gives the mentally unhinged vet the somewhat sound advice “go some place different […] that’s what I’m going to do” and the ex-soldier abides as if following an order given to him by a drill instructor. Unfortunately for Allie, he is far less open to taking advice from others, as he is a young man who treasures personal sovereignty above all else, even if it requires that he lead the life of the most destitute of rootless cosmopolitans. 

 When Allie visits his mother (Ruth Bolton) at the scum-covered mental institution where she has been interned, it becomes quite apparent why the protagonist has a hard time emotionally connecting to other people, as his mentally perturbed progenitor barely acknowledges him and treats him like he is a pestilence when she actually does, randomly stating to him regarding his eyes in a fashion that reveals that she clearly has yet to get over her husband leaving her, “They don’t belong to you. They were taken out of your father’s head.” With his mental mommy treating him with an emotionally crippling combination of disdain and apathy and her all-the-more-mental roommate laughing hysterically for seemingly no reason, Allie naturally decides to use the opportunity to leave when a nurse (played by Jarmusch’s longtime girlfriend, filmmaker Sara Driver) comes in the room and tells the protagonist to temporary leave so that she can give the patients their clearly much needed medicine. After his brief stop at the ghetto nut-ward, Allie walks through a ruined neighborhood that resembles a bombed-out third world city where he happens upon a literally raving mad yet stunningly beauteous Hispanic woman (María Duval of Roger Vadim’s And God Created Woman (1988)) who is wearing nothing but a slip and has make-up smeared across her tragic little face. When Allie asks the loony Latina “Are you alright?,” she screams, “Go! Get out of here!,” so the protagonist decides to go on his less than merry way.  Of course, seeing such a ravishing babe in such a sad and sorry state only provides validity to Allie's hopelessly pessimistic personal philosophy.  Indeed, it as if misery, absurdity, and destitution follow Allie everywhere he goes, but I suspect he would not have it any other way.

 In a fairly blatant tribute from Jarmusch to his mentor, Allie wanders into a movie theater that is screening Nicholas Ray’s The Savage Innocents (1960) starring Anthony Quinn and Peter O'Toole, though the protagonist seems less interested in seeing the film than chatting up random strangers that he meets in the lobby. After buying some popcorn and asking an attractive movie theater employee about the “Quinn Eskimo movie,” Allie is told a story relating to the Doppler effect that he surely will forever cherish about a suicidal saxophonist playing “Over the Rainbow” by a jolly middle-aged negro (Frankie Faison of The Silence of the Lambs (1991) and HBO’s The Wire (2002-2008)) with a bad case of the giggles. After leaving the movie theater without actually watching the movie, Allie happens upon an avant-garde saxophonist played by John Lurie (who co-composed the film's musical score with Jarmusch), who asks him, “What do you want to hear, Kid?,” to which the protagonist replies in an uncharacteristically excited fashion, “I don’t care, as long as it’s vibrating bugged-out sound. Man, what a sax.” After Lurie passionately plays an autistic avant-garde jazz version of “Over the Rainbow” on his sax, Allie goes to spends the night on a roof on some random apartment building. The next day, when some random young bourgeois bitch in a fancy convertible asks Allie to do her the simple favor of putting her envelope in a mailbox that he is obnoxiously leaning on, the protagonist retorts in a prissy fashion, “What do I look like, the mailman?” and then steals the young lady’s car after she makes the mistake of attempting to deal with the letter herself. As the young lady bitches about the fact that Allie has stolen her car, some random negro hobo pops out of nowhere and adds insult to injury by boorishly blabbering, “That dude was wild style. Ohhh, no. You better get your ass out of her before he snatches that up too.” After some momentary hesitation, Allie decides he needs quick crash and opts to sell the stolen convertible for a mere $800 to some lowlife crook played by French-born No Wave auteur Eric Mitchell.  Of course, since the car is stolen, it is no big loss for Allie, who just wants to get the hell out of the rotten Big Apple before he rots with it.

 Ultimately, Allie gets a passport, buys a boat ticket, and prepares for a pilgrimage to Paris where he assumedly plans to live in exile for an indefinite period of time just like so many artists and would-be-artists before him. Almost too fittingly in what one would might describe as a borderline mystical scene, Allie spots his French doppelganger (Chris Hameon)—a character that may or may not be inspired by a young version of Jarmusch's French-born buddy Eric Mitchell (who somewhat fitting plays the crook who gives Allie the money that he uses to buy his boat ticket)—while leaning against a fence while waiting for his boat to France. When Allie asks the stylish frog, “Are you going on the boat, too?,” the suave Frenchman says “No” and explains, “See, I had a lot of trouble, so I have to get out of Paris. And now my friends are crying. See, I never cry. 'Cause I know when things change, I have to go somewhere. And now I think that New York is going to be Babylon for me. Well, that's where I've got to live.” After sharing their tattoos (the Frenchman has one reading “mommy”), the two kindred spirits part way and Allie narrates, “I was thinking about the note I left her when I got on the boat. But how can you explain something like this to someone? I'm just not the kind of person that settles into anything. I don't think I ever will be. Isn't really anything left to explain that can be. And that's what I was trying to explain in the first place. Just not like that. I don't want a job, or a house, or taxes although I wouldn't mind a car, but... I don't know. Now that I'm away, I wish I was back there more than even when I was there. Let's just say I'm a certain kind of tourist...A tourist that's on a... permanent vacation.” In the end, Allie stares back at NYC as the city gets farther and farther away as his boat drifts to Frogland where the protagonist probably hopes to find a surplus of pretentious plodding deadbeats just like himself. 

 The fact that Permanent Vacation was included as a mere extra feature with the Criterion Collection DVD release of Stranger Than Paradise as opposed to receiving its own individual release is a true testament to the fact that it is most certainly Jarmusch’s most wrongly neglected and most understood work and the fact it only received a warm reception in Europe, especially Germany, is only fitting.  After all, as the great cinematic works of New German Cinema certainly demonstrate, no group of people expressed a great sense of existential despair, deracination, social and cultural alienation, and nihilism better than the post-WWII German filmmakers, but I digress.  Personally, I would rather re-watch the director’s debut any day over his later and more conspicuously contrived works like Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1999), Coffee and Cigarettes (2003), Broken Flowers (2005), The Limits of Control (2009), and Only Lovers Left Alive (2013), but then again I am not a Jarmusch cheerleader and find many of fetishes and obsessions to be nothing short of odious, obnoxious and, in many cases, laughably shallow and insincere. Indeed, if I want to watch a film that pays homage to Godard and the French New Wave, I will watch an early Fassbinder flick like Götter der Pest (1970) aka Gods of the Plague or Der amerikanische Soldat (1970) aka The American Soldier and on those rather rare occasions where I get an irrational thirst for ebonics and negrophilia, I will most certainly go to a real black director like Melvin “Block” Van Peebles, Felix de Rooy, or Jarmusch's perennially pissy pipsqueak pal Spike Lee. Indubitably, what makes Permanent Vacation so raw, refreshing, and authentic is that it features a real-life shrieking hipster hobo of the pathologically posturing sort in the lead role as opposed to a dry Hollywood clown like Bill Murray or all-too-stoic exotic spade like Isaach De Bankolé (ironically, one of the biggest complaints that most reviewers seem to have against the film is lead Chris Parker’s grating voice and dubious acting skills, but I personally found these admittedly annoying ingredients to be perfect for the specific character). In fact, the film is such a singularly delectable and unadulterated expression of its particular zeitgeist that Jean-Michel Basquiat was snoozing in a sleeping bag in John Lurie’s apartment while Jarmusch was shooting the scenes where Parker hangs out with melancholy hipster diva Leila Gastil. Additionally, Jarmusch structured the film around Parker’s authentic natural aura and attitude, or as the auteur explained regarding the film in the doc Blank City, “…I wrote it for Chris who’s a very animate person in real life. And, as I started filming, he was not animated in the same degree, so I followed that and the style of the film sort of slowed down.” Indeed, Permanent Vacation is surely slow, but it would not work any other way, just as Jarmusch’s buddy Wenders’ greatest films would not either.  After all, there is nothing really exciting or action-packed about existential despair and passive nihilism.

 Although it might surprise some, Italian self-described ‘super-fascist’ philosopher Julius Evola had some positive things to say about beatniks, bohemians, hipsters, and other counterculture types in an essay featured in the volume L’Arco e la Clava (1968) aka The Bow and the Club, where he stated, “From our point of view, a brief study of these phenomena is justified, because we share the opinion, expressed by a number of “beats”: namely — and in opposition to what psychiatrists, psycho-analysts and “social workers” think — in a society, a civilization, like ours, and, especially, like that of the USA – one must in general admit that the rebel, the being who does not adapt, the a-social being, is in fact the sanest man. In an abnormal world, values are inverted: whosoever appears abnormal, in relation to the existing milieu, is most probably precisely the “normal” person, in the sense that in him there still subsist traces of integral vital energy; and we do not follow those who want to “rehabilitate” such individuals, whom they consider to be sick, and “save” them for “society.”” Of course, what separates super-fascists like Evola from neo-Beat hipsters like Chris Parker and Jarmusch is that, while the former supports a sort of active nihilism as endorsed by Nietzsche, the latter embraces a sort of frivolous passive nihilism that can only lead to a life of nothingness upon nothingness without end.  In a chapter entitled  ‘Sartre: Prisoner Without Walls’ featured in his classic text Cavalcare la Tigre (1961) aka Ride the Tiger, Evola would point out that commie existentialist messiah Jean-Paul Sartre once absurdly wrote, “Freedom, choice, nihilation, and temporalization are one and the same,” but of course such naive thinking only leads to the sort of psychological prison and metaphysical purgatory that plagues the protagonist of Permanent Vacation, which was highlighted by the Guido Baron when he wrote, “One finds oneself already faced with the well-known situation of a freedom that is suffered, rather than claimed: modern man is not free, but finds himself free in the world where God is dead. ‘He is delivered up to his freedom.’  It is from this that his deep suffering comes.  When he is fully aware of this, anguish seizes him and the otherwise absurd sensation of a responsibility reappears.”  Of course, like the protagonist of his film, Jarmusch seems to have bought into the existentialist con that he is totally free, even if the self-satisfied cynicism and literal jazz worship of his films says otherwise.

 Luckily, Jarmusch apparently does not fully embrace the attitude and lifestyle of the patently preposterous ‘pretentious deadbeat’ protagonist of Permanent Vacation, or as he stated in an interview with Bomb Magazine, “I think nihilism is a realistic outlook, but I see both positive and negative aspects in the approach of the main character. His self-imposed exile from existing institutions: work, school, family, etc., is certainly positive, but his difficulty in communicating with other people in the same situation is relatively hopeless. More and more, intelligent young people are put into this almost hopeless situation. That’s what the film is about.”  While it is certainly true that more and more people are dropping out society, these individuals, not unlike the protagonist of Jarmusch's film and the countless carbon-copy hipsters with ironic Civil War mustaches that currently live in NYC and other trendy urban neighborhoods, have ultimately taken a path that is ultimately more hopeless and senseless than that of the average sub-literate Evangelical Christian hillbilly.  Certainly, the same defeatist ‘postmodern slave morality’ that led Hebraic hipster Norman Mailer to proudly proclaim himself to be a “White Negro” and inspired William S. Burroughs to become a trust-fund-sponsored “junky” and “queer” also led Jarmusch to directing a film like Permanent Vacation, which also acts as a sort of unintentional cautionary tale about what might happen to you if you're a bourgeois white boy who starts mimicking the culture of poor old dead negroes. Naturally, the same dead-end passive nihilist (anti)philosophy also explains why that, aside from technical prowess and overall professionalism, Jarmusch’s films have not changed all that much since his debut, as they typically rehash the same sort of offbeat scenes and eccentric encounters. In fact, Jarmusch’s treasuring of the Tschandala and metaphysically dead deadbeats and derelicts seems to have only grown over the years, yet he is now much more personally distanced from his material and, to the decided detriment of his films, instead of hiring his friends to play themselves, he dreams up rather ridiculous fantasy characters like jigaboo samurais and undead rockers.  At least when Permanent Vacation was first released, the viewer could entertain the idea that Jarmusch might one day grow out of his already-then-outmoded hipster Weltanschauung.

-Ty E

Rome ’78

If Federico Fellini had been an autistic British queer with next to nil artistic talent living abroad in NYC during the late 1970s, and attempted to adapt Satyricon using his uniquely untalented dope-addled degenerate friends as actors and a couple East Village apartment and pseudo-classical landmarks as settings, it might begin to describe the unsurprisingly forgotten, ludicrously low-camp micro-epic Rome ’78 (1978) directed by British painter James Nares (TV Faces, No Japs at My Funeral). Best remembered today as a footnote in American underground filmmaking history than a revolutionary piece of cinematic art, Nares’ first (and last) narrative feature is considered a landmark work of the so called No Wave Cinema, which was a highly derivative and obscenely overrated NYC film movement that probably contributed less to the (de)evolution of the art of cinema than Robert Redford or Whoopi Goldberg. A virtual who’s who of late-1970s dope-addled NYC hipsterdom, Rome ’78 features actor/filmmaker Eric Mitchell (Underground U.S.A., The Way It Is), lecherous lard ass Lydia Lunch, musician James Chance (Teenage Jesus and the Jerks), actor and musician John Lurie (Stranger than Paradise, Down by Law), platinum blonde East Village diva Patti Astor, and homo proto-reality-TV star Lance Loud, among various other sub-popular figures of the then somewhat artistically incestous ‘No Wave’ scene. Notable for being “the first and only No Wave epic,” Nares’ one-time excursion into Super-8 feature films is easily the most superlatively shitty and compulsively campy ‘sword-and-sandal’ flick ever made as a work that unequivocally proves that the (anti)aesthetic of Andy Warhol and the man that made his films, Paul Morrissey, can be utilized for making epic costume films. In fact, Nares would confess in an interview with The Village Voice regarding his glaring influences, “I think the films I was most thinking about then were the Warhol/Morrissey films—LONESOME COWBOYS, TRASH, that sort of thing.” Indeed, like the shot-on-video Tennessee Williams adaptations of proud ‘aesthetic nihilist’ John Aes-Nihil (The Drift, Suddenly Last Summer), Rome ’78 can be described as one of the true bastard (anti)cinematic bastards of the Factory brand of films. Like the early costume films of Derek Jarman (Sebastiane, The Tempest) stripped bare and lacking the high-camp aesthetic integrity and hyper homoeroticism, Nares’ film is riddled with botched lines, obnoxious unintentional laughter, and the in-camera flash-frames that are a grating signature quality of the early Warhol-Morrissey projects like My Hustler (1965) and Bike Boy (1967). Despite featuring the aesthetic grace of wino vomit, Rome ’78 is, for better or worse, one of the true ‘classic’ films of the almost wholly disposable No Wave Cinema movement and thus is a must-see film for any cinephile that is masochistic enough to endure it. Indeed, if you enjoy toothless art fags slurring marvelously moronic dialogue, posturing homo hipster man-children trying in vain to resemble heroic Roman soldiers, Lydia’s Lunch’s unclad thunder thighs, and non-fratboy oriented toga parties where the only ones probably giving head are the men, Nares’ film is probably for you. 

 While seemingly ceaselessly stupid and senseless on the surface, Rome ’78 ultimately features a triple-layer allegorical critique of the decadence of three different cultures, including (but probably not limited to) the ancient Roman Empire, the post-counterculture American plutocracy/pseudo-empire, and the No Wave movement itself, with the latter obviously seeming like the most hopelessly decadent and depraved of them all. Not featuring a single drop of testosterone during its over-extended 80-minute running, Nares’ film is delightfully and distastefully tongue-in-cheek to the core in its flagrant, flaming American fag approach to Roman decadence, as a work that ultimately makes Tinto Brass’ abortive Gore Vidal adaptation Caligula (1979) starring Malcolm McDowell seem like Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus (1960). While featuring a bodaciously bitchy and insanely infantile dictator antagonist that likes little boy dicks named Caesar, Rome ’78 is clearly an aberrosexual cinematic molestation of the tragic story of Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus (aka Emperor Caligula), who has always been the victim of ahistorical cinematic obloquy, but never to such a uniquely unflattering extent. Indeed, the so-called ‘Caesar’ of Nares’ film is a literal motherfucker and prissy pederast portrayed by ‘visual artist’ David McDermott (of the duo McDermott & McGough, which is best known for using various archaic 19th-century style photography processes) who screams about realizing his deluded dreams which involve, among other things, Bolshevik-esque methods of genocide and theft. Partly filmed illegally on private property (Nares would pose as a potential renter and would unlock the windows in buildings so that he and his crew could break into the apartments later and film their scenes), as well as neoclassical tourist attractions in NYC like Ulysses S. Grant's tomb, Tribeca's American Thread Building, and a couple places that look too elegant and aesthetically pleasing to be located in the rotten Big Apple, Rome ’78 is ultimately a particularly potent reminder that aesthetic autism has always been an innate characteristic of American underground cinema.  Featuring a somewhat obvious combination of both scripted dialogue and wayward acting and inexplicable dialogue that was improvised right on the spot, the film was notably described by filmmaker Nares in the documentary Blank City (2010) directed by Celine Danhier as a work where, “I typecast my friends in roles where they could sort of act out what was going on in their real lives in a way.”  Indeed, it is quite apparent while watching Rome ’78 that Nares had certain ‘Superstars’ in mind when he assembled the film, which bleeds a certain collective ‘scenester’ excess and all around degeneracy that one can only assume epitomized the post-punk No Wave scene.

 A former slave turned glorious Roman soldier with a low IQ but lofty intentions named Metellus (Eric Mitchell) is scheming to overthrow the government and murder young degenerate Emperor Caligula (David McDermott) with the help of some campy conspirators, or as he brags to a comrade, “Just between you and me, I don’t give a shit about Caesar. Nothing could be more convenient to me than the disappearance of that little brat.” Metellus is fucking Caligula’s wanton wife Lydia Lunch (who stoically states, “My marriage was just a formality”), but the emperor couldn't care less because, as the Roman soldier says, “Besides his sister, he only really likes boys.” Indeed, proud widower Metellus cannot get enough of the Empress’ “imperial ass” and she is more than willing enough to give it, so long as the philistine soldier feeds her grapes when not plowing her puss. When Caligula sees Metellus and his wife lying together, he is far from angered and instead cries like an autistic toddler, “No one likes me anymore” in the hopes of being comforted by his apathetic ladylove. Metellus uses the opportunity to berate Caligula for the decline of the Roman economy and then argues regarding his own plans to fix things, “We’re thinking about going into the business of selling the Roman way of life.” Assumedly stealing his ideas from the bolshevik playboy, Caligula argues that he plans to fix the economy be killing all Roman children and then forcing their parents to give the Roman Empire their inheritance, arguing, “They’ll be so happy the emperor came to visit them and then they will die.” Indeed, Caligula immediately begins carrying out the plan by rounding up children and slaughtering them, but it ultimately proves to be a bad idea because it just gives his people more reason to welcome his seemingly inevitable assassination. While having his soldiers arrest young children, including newborn babies, Caligula proudly declares he is the only one in Rome that is allowed to wear purple and then proudly states, “I’m the only baby in the room” when all the kids have been cleared out. 

 As a supremely infantile megalomaniac that loves hearing the sound of his own superlatively gay voice, Caligula likes standing outside and screaming things like “I am the Emperor of the universe” and that he is a “god” that “owns everyone” because he created them in a “dream.” Unfortunately for him, no one seems to listen to Caligula, which probably has to do with the fact that he is an incest-inclined pederast who has been cuckolded by an ex-slave. When an eastern empress named Queen of Sheba (Anya Phillips) shows up with her own personal fuckboy (musician James Chance) and attempts to create a merger with Rome and her all the more backward nation, Caligula immediately blows her off, stating, “No one can join with Rome. Rome is too great," and then complains that slaves outnumber civilians and asks for troops. Apparently, Sheba is desperate to join Rome because her own nation is being overrun with a cancerously growing slave population, which absolutely disgusts Caligula as indicated by his remark to the empress, “Well, I have to admit a nation run with slaves would be most distasteful.” Meanwhile, John Lurie, who thinks he is Jesus Christ, laments regarding the current sorry state of Roman art that it is certainly also true for the No Wave movement, “Our artists are the worst.” Later, while hanging out with Mr. Lurie, Caligula goes on an insane tirade and screams while sounding like a lovelorn poof who has just discovered that his size queen beau has just cheated on him with an AIDS-ridden Puerto Rican, “If my fantasy does not rule, Rome will decay…And the trash and the filth and the garbage of the barbaric tribes will sweep into my city and everyone’s civilization will end…And the beauty and the culture that has been handed down from century to century will be lost…Lost to idiots and morons.” Of course, since Caligula’s “fantasy” involves cross-dressing and buggering little boys, it is nothing compared to the moronic martial prowess of Mettelus, who plans to take out the gutter queen posing as an eternal emperor for once and for all. 

 Needless to say, when Mettelus is told by a stunning blonde beastess named Octavia (played by Patti Astor) that “someone…is after your blood” and “It seems that there is a price on your head,” he decides he needs to take decisive action and carry out his Game of Thrones-esque coup d’état. Knowing that various factions want him murdered, Caligula decides to fake his own death by telling everyone in Rome that he was murdered in his sleep. Before faking his death, Caligula’s brother attempts get him to runaway with him, pleading, “We can’t die. If we die, we’ll kill the empire ourselves. They’re going to murder us now. We have to sustain the life of the empire. Somehow through it all, we are gods. We have to survive,” but the Emperor refuses, stating, “Why didn't you tell me this when we were six years old? Why did you wait until I killed twenty million people to ask me to go live on a farm with you?!” After it is announced that the Emperor has died, Caligula appears in drag under the name “The Deity Venus” and then proceeds to have a couple of his enemies murdered, including John Lurie/Jesus Christ. Caligula-as-Venus also rebukes Metellus, bitching to him, “How dare you want to sexually abuse the emperor. How dare you, you piss. How dare you want to use the emperor like a woman […] You can’t have the emperor…You can’t.” Needless to say, macho Mettelus is hardly impressed with Caligula’s queen-ish spiel. After killing the Emperor’s guard and virtually everyone else, Metellus asks “Who’s next?” and proceeds to murder Caligula, who pathetically pleads, “I’m only six years old. I’m just a baby.” Using his trusty sword, Metellus proceeds to slaughter Caligula and then shoves his weapon in his mouth like it is a giant cock. While taking the phallic sword in his mouth, Caligula cries, “I’m still alive,” but Mettelus makes sure to inform him, “You’re dead.” 

 Notably, auteur James Nares would brag in an article for The New York Observer regarding an audience response after a screening of Rome ’78, “I heard laughter, which was good […] I think I saw people leave and then they came back again. Very encouraging. This was not very well received and we intended it that way,” thus reflecting his hopelessly hipster-like mentality when it comes to his intentionally lackluster style of filmmaking Somewhat fittingly, Nares seems to consider the film to be nothing more than old news as indicated in an interview with The Village Voice where he stated, “It's my only attempt at a narrative film with actors. It has its moments—quite funny at times, quite beautiful at times, too. But it doesn't interest me so much now.” Personally, I consider Rome ’78 to be, at the very least, one of the ‘masterpieces’ of the No Wave Cinema movement. It should be noted that virtually all of the greatest films associated with the movement were directed by foreigners, including the campy WWII ‘thriller’ The Long Island Four (1980) directed by Swedish twink Anders Grafstrom and starring Klaus Nomi as a Nazi spy, as well as French-born filmmaker Eric Mitchell’s Underground U.S.A. (1980) and The Way It Is (1985) starring a very young Vincent Gallo. Unlike the later works associated with the movement like those of Scott B and Beth B (who helped spawn the innately inferior ‘Cinema of Transgression’ movement), Nares and Grafstrom’s films rely on attitude and gutter grade comedy as opposed to cheap and sensational sex and violence, among other banal beaten-to-death things. While Nares never directed another narrative feature, he did direct some video art work, as well as the fairly worthwhile and brilliantly title documentary No Japs at my Funeral (1980), which features a candid interview with an IRA member. Despite being a decidedly decadent piece of innately amateurish celluloid swill that is ultimately as debasing as the dying cultures it criticizes, Rome ’78 is ultimately of Spenglerian proportions as far as No Wave Cinema is concerned, thus making it a work worthy of following in the lo-fi cinematic tradition of it's proudly conservative influence Paul Morrissey. While not exactly depicted from a flagrant conservative angle like Morrissey’s film, Nares’ micro-budget epic surely manages to express the worst of the worst in terms the particular zeitgeist it belongs to. Indeed, as a work that features homely perennial whore Lydia Lunch as an empress, a frog wimp like Eric Mitchell as the most macho and murderous of Roman warriors, a toothless raging queer queen portraying Caligula, and various deadbeat dope-addled NYC art fags standing around and talking about nothing while acting as the supposed movers and shakes of the Great Roman Empire, Rome ’78 indubitably demonstrates that Sir Nares was quite right when he stated regarding No Wave Cinema in the documentary Blank City, “I do think that…the movies were somehow, all about New York…Even when they were about ancient Rome.” I almost hate to state it but, despite being a totally tasteless piece of hipster trash, Nares' film is ultimately even more effective than Fellini Satyricon (1969) when it comes to making parallels between the decadence of the Roman Empire and the contemporary Occident and especially NYC. Additionally, I not only had more fun watching Rome ’78 than the obscure Fellini rip-off Satyricon (1969) aka The Degenerates starring Tina Aumont, but also Kubrick's Spartacus (1960) and virtually any other Hollywood sword-and-sandal or Italian peplum epic that I have ever seen.  After all, when I see a man sporting a dress, it better be for comedic effect, even if he is portraying some sort of genocidal Roman dictator.

-Ty E

Our Trip to Africa

After recently watching Austrian auteur Ulrich Seidl’s most recent piece of pleasantly perverse cinéma-vérité, Im Keller (2014) aka In the Basement, and witnessing the almost surreal scenario of a small and stocky elderly Austrian mensch happily discussing his various hunting expeditions on the Dark Continent and how his wife once made Wiener Schnitzel out of one of the the various warthogs that he had killed, I decided it was about time that I watch the legendary landmark experimental doc Unsere Afrikareise (1961-1966) aka Our Trip to Africa directed by Peter Kubelka (Mosaik im Vertrauen, Arnulf Rainer) so I could witness some of these strange Schluchtenscheisser hunters in action while in the company of mostly naked black Africans. A 12 ½ minute doc with an almost hypnotic (meta)montage structure that was very meticulously and consciously edited together over a shocking 5 year period from about ten hours of sound recordings and a few hours of footage, Kubelka’s film unequivocally makes a playful mockery of the Viennese petit-bourgeois European hunters it depicts and that is surely one of it's greatest strength.  Although he deeply resented the hunters, Kubelka decided to work on the film because he was unemployed at the time (in fact, not until after the filmmaker came to New York City in 1966 and screened Our Trip to Africa did he receive great praise and, in turn, gainful employment as a legendary film lecturer) and very much wanted to come into contact with real negro tribesmen. Although hired by the hunters to record their exotic safari, Kubelka cinematically defecated on his boss’s in a manner that was somewhat typical of his curious filmmaking career, as a mensch that thrived on being intolerably difficult and seemingly senseless in his rebellion against the people and companies the commissioned him to make films for them. Indeed, when Kubelka was hired in 1957 to create a commercial for the powerful beer company Scwechater, he senselessly shot footage with an ancient camera that lacked a finder featuring barely visible people (apparently, the director was given the opportunity to use some of the most beauteous models in his country, but he surely let that opportunity go to waste) pretentiously drinking beer out of wine glasses, only to be sued by the company that hired him and be subsequently forced to leave the country upon completing the completely commercially worthless 1 ½ minute avant-garde ‘advert,’ which had the ironical title Schwechater (1958). Clearly, by the time he got around to making Our Trip to Africa, Kubelka thankfully had yet to learn a single lesson from the negative backlash and personal misfortune that his iconoclastic and aesthetically nihilistic avant-garde antics and overall seemingly pathologically passive-aggressive behavior (not surprisingly, Kubelka was raised in what he described as a “matriarchal situation,” which was the result of his half-Jewish father never being around) caused him and seemed apathetic about the prospect of being perennially unemployed, so he ultimately unleashed what is probably the most intricately obnoxious and schizophrenic yet strangely jolly vacation home movie ever made. Indeed, it might deeply offend certain absurdly anally retentive cinephiles to say this, but Kubelka’s film is unquestionably the Africa addio (1966) aka Africa Blood and Guts of avant-garde and experimental filmmaking.  As Our Trip to Africa delightfully demonstrates, when you mix Mondo Cane-esque imagery and ‘Structuralist’ filmmaking (or what Kubelka himself calls ‘Metric Montage’), you get the most compulsively curious of results, as opposed to pretentious banality like much of Kubelka's other work.

 Admittedly, I am not the greatest fan of so-called ‘Structural film’ or Structuralist filmmakers (notably, Kubelka has made the claim that his second film Adebar (1957), which he later turned into a ‘sculpture’ after damaging a frame, was the first Structuralist film ever made), especially of the seemingly aesthetically autistic sort that is peddled by the likes of Lithuanian-born NYC underground cinema/avant-garde gatekeeper Jonas Mekas and his best bud Kubelka is certainly no exception, but with Our Trip to Africa the Austrian auteur actually managed to create something that would appeal to people other than those sad souls that diddle themselves to hopelessly avant-garde works like Stan Brakhage's anti-erotic experimental birth flick Thigh Line Lyre Triangular (1961). Described by the director's fellow Slavic-blooded and deleteriously cinephiliac European homeboy Mekas as, “the richest, most articulate, and most compressed film I have ever seen,” Kubelka’s somewhat sardonic slice of the then-recently-decolonized Dark Continent is indubitably one of the most consciously convoluted and obsessively edited films ever made as a work where countless brief shots are juxtaposed with seemingly unrelated audio (which he calls ‘sync events’), but there is certainly a sort of hermetic method to the (anti)movie madness. Like Werner Schroeter, Philippe Garrel, and Straub-Huillet and various other arcane avant-gardist who truly did not seem to care if anyone understood their films, Kubelka—an uncommonly articulate man that is more than eloquently fluent in English as his legendary film lectures demonstrate—never screens Our Trip to Africa with subtitles, which seems pretty senseless when one considers that the film loses a lot of it's comedic tone when the viewer is unable to understand what the hunters are saying in Viennese gutter German. Basically, Kubelka saw it fit to juxtapose stupid things that the obscenely arrogant and buffoonish Austrian hunters said with scenes of hunting, wounded and dying animals, naked negroes, and other largely uncomfortably ‘goofy’ scenarios that will surely seem like conspicuous clichés to Americans and Western Europeans who have had the misfortune of learning everything that they know about Africa from Hollywood movies. Luckily, in the truly epic 232-minute documentary Fragments of Kubelka (2012) directed by Martina Kudlácek (In the Mirror of Maya Deren, Notes on Marie Menken), the Austrian filmmaker not only translates the dialogue for most of Our Trip to Africa, but also gives a shot-to-shot breakdown of the entire film and it's somewhat unconventional production history, thus revealing important and insightful contextual information about the footage that one could not possibly know otherwise. 

 As Kubelka reveals in Fragments of Kubelka regarding the genesis of Our Trip to Africa, “The plan was that I make a travelogue for the benefit of these people who had taken me on the trip. I had accepted in order to meet archaic people, so when I filmed I had not a definite plan, but they had, so many of the shots have been commissioned. All my films were commissioned films, which I then derailed into something else.” Featuring various emotionally eclectic brief juxtapositions that range from hilarious to horrific and hokey to hopeless, Kubelka’s tightly yet hysterically edited travelogue is ultimately impossible to peg with a specific central theme due to its erratic emotional range, innate abstractness, and discombobulating structure. Indeed, after watching the film, the viewer will have no idea if the safari went well, anyone on the trip got fucked or did some fucking, the slayed animals were actually eaten, or if the negroes like or disliked their strange Aryan guests. In short, the only thing one knows for sure after watching the short is that Kubelka has a tendency to take close-up shots of unclad jigboo genitals (including that of a little boy) and that the filmmaker thinks that the hunters are moronic just as the hunters think that the negroes are moronic.  It should be noted that the schizophrenic emotional tone of Our Trip to Africa is completely intentional, or as Kubelka told his comrade Mekas as revealed in P. Adams Sitney's classic text Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde, 1943-2000 (2002), “My films have a function (this goes for the African film)—I play with the emotions and try to tear the emotions loose from the people, so that they would gain distance to their emotions, to their own feelings [...] When you see certain images or hear certain sounds you have certain emotions. So I must always cry when I see moving scenes, when I see the hero getting the first prize for the biggest round and they play the national anthem . . . I have to cry . . . or when they bury somebody, I have to cry. At the same time, I am angry at myself, because I know that it's just the emotional mechanisms. So, with the African film. I do a lot of this, I trigger a lot of those mechanisms at the same time and create a lot of—at the same time—comic feelings, sad feelings.” Indeed, Kubelka's film might not be as emotionally penetrating as Gualtiero Jacopetti and Franco Prosperi's masterpiece Addio zio Tom (1971) aka Goodbye Uncle Tom, but it is most certainly the most emotionally involving Structuralist film that I have ever seen.

 While edited in an innately non-linear fashion, completely lacking in character development (one never even hears the name of a single one of the subjects), and seemingly all but totally incoherent, Our Trip to Africa is surely guaranteed to give the viewer a nice big chuckle or two, not least of all during an oftentimes repeated shot of a stereotypically dressed white safari hunter resting his rifle on a negro servant’s shoulder while he aims at and eventually shoots a poor zebra. In Fragments of Kubelka, Kubelka notes that, if psychoanalyzed, one could argue regarding the white hunters in the film that, “They couldn’t get the women, so they shot the animals.”  Of course, considering that he personally collects primitive Africa Venus figurines and statues (including a life-size one featuring a giant derriere, which he proudly shows off in Fragments of Kubelka), it seems that Kubelka is projecting his own fetish for dark meat onto the white hunters.  After an opening shot of a white hunter aiming his weapon that the director has described as a sort of ‘protagonist’ (even though the viewer can never clearly see the man's face), one is exposed to various shots that are frantically spliced together involving the hunting of a hippopotamus and a zebra with shots of the Hunters, including a Viennese woman and Arab man, lazily lounging on a boat juxtaposed with one Hunter asking, “What did we shoot?” and another replying “Tell me!,” which is followed by a verbal list of animals that they killed, including a wild boar. After a shot of a dying zebra’s leg moving juxtaposed with a hunter saying “Let’s go,” the film segues into a frame from an African Muslim wedding where, to quote the director, a “very proud” young negress with “fake arrogance” provocatively moves her cloaked head during the ‘Dance of Dove’ where she attempts to appeal to potential male suitors with her provocative passive-aggressive glances. In a shot that is assumedly used to illustrate the ‘cruelness’ and ‘post-colonial arrogance’ of Europeans, an ostensibly wicked white Hunter rides a camel that is being lead by a servile negro guide juxtaposed to the somewhat unnerving sounds of some unseen fatally injured animal succumbing to it's wounds. Of course, Kubelka makes it quite clear that there is no honor in killing beautiful exotic beasts with state of art weapons that have turned hunting, not unlike war, into a lame and reasonably safe lackluster sport as opposed to in the past when it was somewhat of an art and took a special certain talent that involved, among other things, respecting one's prey.  Like with the negroes, one gets that senses that the hunters are sneering at the animals, even after killing them, so Kubelka fights fire with fire by cinematically sneering at his fellow Austrians.  As the virtual all-seeing and all-knowing god of his cinematic realm, Kubelka condemns the hunters to hell while portraying the Africans as the blessed meek who will inherit the earth.

 Undoubtedly, one of the most absurd aspects of Our Trip to Africa is the various shots it features of mostly smiling white hunters interacting with the largely docile and content black natives. While most of these shots feature a primitively dressed negro helping the white hunters in some glaringly slavish and undignified fashion, there is one shot in the film that is almost borderline homoerotic where an Austrian man gently lights a pipe for a grateful negro who seems excited about trying what might be described as a ‘European peace pipe’ for the first time. In another scene, a short white female hunter is depicted making fun of a very tall black game warden in a fairly harmless way that is made to seem almost sinister via obnoxious laughter that has been synced with the scene. Ultimately, Kubelka makes fun of the female hunter by cutting from a shot of her shooting a rifle with the help of her assumed lover to a shot of a dangling darkie dick, as if to imply that the Hunteress would love to castrate colored cocks. While many of Leni Riefenstahl’s detractors attempted to accuse her of fetishizing the unclad African negro body with her best-selling 1970s photographs of the Nuba people of Sudan (in fact, Judaic dyke Susan Sontag even went so far as to absurdly describe these photos of stark-naked negroid bodies as being “fascist aesthetics,” as if physical healthiness and natural pulchritude is somehow fascistic), Kubelka makes no attempts to shield the fact that he is obsessed with decidedly dark African genitals, which include relatively long close-up shots of the breasts, derrieres, and beavers of black women, as well as the swinging wild black snakes of both a man and a little boy. In fact, the film concludes with a shot of a boy’s penis juxtaposed with an African stating in broken English, “I like to visit your country,” which then cuts to an ironical shot of a peasant women treading through snowy Austria synced with the same African saying, “If I find [a] chance.” 

 Near the beginning of the less than radical documentary Free Radicals: A History of Experimental Film (2012) directed by Pip Chodorov, Peter Kubelka stoically states regarding his films, “I never made compromises and really already a long time ago, I didn’t care anymore if anyone likes it or not.” After examining Kubelka’s shockingly small (despite being a filmmaker for well over half a century, he has only made eight short films that barely add up to an hour worth of material) yet admittedly rather singular oeuvre, I certainly have no reason to doubt the truthfulness of filmmaker’s remark in Free Radicals to the point where I would argue that the ‘entertainment value’ of Our Trip to Africa, which is totally absent from most of his other films, is largely the result of a circumstantial fluke. While the auteur is certainly responsible for bringing highly subjective meanings to these scenes with his sync event editing technique, it was actually the hunters who demanded that Kubelka shoot the various specific shots in the film, including the ones where they make themselves seem quite buffoonish and cruel, or so the filmmaker readily admits in Fragments of Kubelka while referencing various specific shots (including a rather unflattering close-up of a hunter proudly holding up the completely lifeless head of a giraffe only a moment or so after ruthlessly killing it). Notably, in a scene towards the end of Our Trip to Africa that is as equally heartbreaking as it is humorous, a wounded lioness that was shot by one of the hunters starts heading towards the camera and tries in vain to attack Kubelka while taking one of its last gasps. In his own highly idiosyncratic way, Kubelka creates a sort of ‘filmic funeral’ for the lioness that tried to attack him by juxtaposing shots of the dead beast being lifted onto the roof of a large truck by half a dozen negroes with a sort of curiously jovial dirge that makes the animal's senseless death seem like a sick joke. 

 Surely one of the greatest aspects of Our Trip to Africa is that, despite the director’s glaring disdain for his Austrian traveling companions and their decadent and destructive bourgeois ways, it is quite apparent that Kubelka had a fun and exciting trip where he got to admire both exotic wild animals and naked negroes in their indigenous habitats. Undoubtedly, I found the film infinitely more intriguing and rewarding than any of the works I have seen by frog commie anthropologist-cum-documentarian Jean Rouch, whose ethnographic films feel rather patronizing in their depictions of Nigerian negroes (notably, native African filmmakers often criticized his films for distorting reality). Thankfully, Kubelka makes no attempts to portray himself as an expert on African tribes or tribal culture in Our Trip to Africa, thus the film has aged much more gracefully than the work of French far-leftist filmmakers like Rouch and René Vautier. Indeed, while I am not an autistic avant-garde film fanboy who rates a film on how hermetic and over-edited it is and thus would hardly describe the work as “one of cinema’s few masterpieces” like the filmmaker’s puffery-inclined comrade Jonas Mekas once did, I would be lying if I did not admit that Kubelka’s glorified travelogue indubitably provides for a highly mesmerizing and unforgettable experience that demonstrates that there are actually filmmakers out there who have made motion pictures that are more ‘compressed’ and meticulously edited together than that of Guy Maddin, which is certainly no small accomplishment. As an intricately edited montage film that somewhat spastically cuts from scenes of dying animals, unclad negroes, and boorish post-colonial Europeans, among countless other seemingly incongruent things, without warning, Our Trip to Africa is sure to offend and discomfort contemporary whites and blacks living in the West who have been weaned on the venomous teat of post-Trotskyite political correctness, which is rather unfortunate considering that Kubelka seems like a fairly happy-go-lucky chap that does not have a single hateful bone in his body, even when he is going to strikingly extravagant lengths to cinematically mock and ridicule his fellow countryman in a film that they commissioned him to make. 

-Ty E