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Some notes on aesthetic
principles
The children of Hollywood, Hitler, and Coca Cola
The aesthetic foundation and conceptual premise for The Anita Pallenberg
Story are taken, of course, from our understanding and appreciation
of other cultural products; in this essay I would like to address, in
particular, certain key aspects of our engagement with some notable
contributions in film.
Although our video takes
Rock and Roll and contemporary fine art as it's stated intention ---
and these themes manifest themselves most obviously in the film ---
our consideration of and appreciation for prior cinematic contributions
and styles of film-making is what enabled us to conceptualize a framework
within which we could work.
Of particular note are the works of three filmmakers --- and one film.
The filmmakers who we have examined, learned from, and critiqued most
assiduously are Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Jean-Luc Godard, and
Andy Warhol.
The single film which occupies a multi-dimensional place in
The Anita
Pallenberg Story, functioning as catalyst, touchstone, blueprint
--- and source of political and philosophical error --- is Robert Frank's
Cocksucker Blues, 1972.
We also, of course, looked at other "Rock and Roll Tour" documentaries,
especially those of D.A. Pennebaker. And some of the pseudo-docus on
the life of '60s Rock legends, like Oliver Stone's movie about Jim Morrison,
and the Bette Midler film based on the life of Janis Joplin, The
Rose. From all of these we realized the primary locations in the
life of the touring musician: the hotel room, backstage, and the performance
stage --- and these three central locations became our three central
locations for shooting the film.
Other less practical and more indirect influences came from other sources:
RAINER WERNER FASSBINDER
"I believe movies can be made in a less dictatorial way."
Rainer Werner
Fassbinder, Venice, 1971
It goes without saying that there is so much that is remarkable about
Fassbinder. Of course I am not alone in recognizing him as the greatest
member of the New German Cinema. For me, in fact, he is the only one
--- Wenders, Herzog, and Schlorndorf, for instance, mean nothing to
me. And of Alexander Kluge, I have not seen enough.
As all viewers do in regard to any work of art, our appreciation for
Fassbinder is circumscribed within our own parameters of interest. In
the work of Fassbinder, we are especially interested in his process,
his reinterpretation of Hollywood cinema, his homosexuality, and his
sexism.
1. Fassbinder's Process
What is most intriguing for us here is the communal approach Fassbinder
brought to his role as director and actor. His cast and crew were people
with whom he wanted to make and sustain personal relationships --- often
very destructive relations, for sure. Although his conceptual abilities
for filmmaking as a medium and its attendant techniques appear to have
been extraordinary --- he could conceive of a set-up and camera position
and lighting as quickly as he could write dialogue --- his primary interest
was not that. He wanted, as has often been stated, to produce 'a family'.
He was so involved in the conceptualization of a script and a cast and
the actual shooting that he frequently eliminated himself from the editing
process altogether. (And since he favored one-take shooting, in a sense
he edited the film as he wrote and shot it.) A natural and gifted actor
(he 'began' his career in film as an actor), Fassbinder was nonetheless
quite uninterested in acting in the traditional sense. He used acting--and
it's prop: the script --- as a device to enable the actors/his friends
to discover and reveal aspects of themselves. He was interested in acting
as a mechanism that would allow greater levels of self-awareness, that
could strip away the layers of social convention and repression that
keep us away from ourselves and allow us to hide ourselves from ourselves
and others. That being so, his approach, nonetheless, appears to have
been unnecessarily violent. He was cruel, to himself and to others.
Fassbinder's mockingly self-reflective film, Beware the Holy Whore,
reveals this more than even all the others. Although presented as a
'fiction,' or even as a film about filmmaking (with it's homage to Godard,
by way of Lemmy Caution/Earnest Constantine), Beware the Holy Whore
is in fact a kind of documentary about Fassbinder, an autobiography
even. In this film, Fassbinder has members of his standard entourage/cast
playing the parts of each other --- the exception is Hanna Schygulla,
who appears to be playing herself.
This film about making a film, set on location in Spain, consists of
a series of scenes that recount the rudimentary organizational aspects,
both practical and social, of filmmaking: the money is never there and
never enough, the gofers have delusions of grandeur, the producer is
a fake, the set is not right, the lighting must be fixed, the camera
needs to be set up, the director is an egomaniac, the cast and crew
are forever getting drunk. Fassbinder once said that Beware the Holy
Whore is about the filming of his film previous Whitey, also
from 1970. In Beware the Holy Whore, the film within the film
is about a man who murders a woman in a grand villa. The drama on the
set of the film within the film is about sex and alcohol. What interests
us in Beware the Holy Whore is the way Fassbinder utilized melodrama
and pseudo-documentary as formulas within which he created a movie about
himself. Although the film appears to be 'about filmmaking,' this is
only its surface.
2. Fassbinder, as a reinterpretation of Hollywood
The French New Wave and the New German Cinema, monikers for the small
cadre of filmmakers which emerged in France and Germany, respectively,
in the decades after WWII, share an interest in Hollywood cinema. They
are, as Godard has written, the first generation of filmmakers to historicize
cinema, approach it self-consciously. Fassbinder said somewhere that
he was always, in fact, trying to 'make a Hollywood movie' but that
the European aesthetic tradition, with its implicit assumption of contemplation,
would not and does not allow a European to 'make a Hollywood movie.'
In one interview, in Berlin, 1971, in conversation with Christian Braad
Thomsen Fassbinder stated:
"A European director is not as naive as a Hollywood director. We always
feel a need to reflect on what we are doing, why we are doing it, and
how we will do it, though I am sure the day will come when I , too,
shall be able to tell a perfectly naive story. I am trying to do that
more and more, but it isn't easy."
What's especially funny about this remark is that it misplaces the
emphasis of the cultural forces that 'make' a movie. By which I mean:
it is Hollywood, as a distinct place in time composed of a distinct
economic structure and an economic dependence on a ideologically-specific
audience, which DOES NOT ALLOW reflective or contemplative filmmaking.
It is NOT a question, simply, of a director's aptitude or cultural
background --- in fact, Fassbinder's favorite 'Hollywood director'
was a European, born in Hamburg: Douglas Sirk. The assumption that
Sirk, and other Hollywood directors, actors, and others involved in
Hollywood filmmaking from the '40s and '50s, were naively making mass-entertainment
is not completely true. Some were in fact, doing the best they could
do in a highly controlled production structure that dictated and limited
their artistic freedom. About working in Hollywood, Sirk has said: "Of
course I had to go by the rules, avoid experiments, stick to family
fare, have 'happy endings' and so on." Fassbinder's appreciation for
Douglas Sirk was so heartfelt that he visited him in Los Angeles.
Most prolific in Hollywood during the 1950s (Sirk was an emigre who
worked as a director, first in theater and then film, in Germany,
including during the Reich, until 1937), Sirk was the king of melodrama.
In addition to borrowing and readapting Sirk's melodramatic style
of scripting and filming a story, Fassbinder also borrowed many of
Sirk's camera techniques and set-ups, including Sirk's penchant for
mirrors and stairwells. Fassbinder consciously 'remade' one Sirk film
using Sirk's All that Heaven Allows as the basis
for his Ali: Fear Eats the Soul. Fassbinder changes Sirk's story
of love made impossible because of the rigidity of class obstacles
by substituting the prejudices of race and German xenophobia. In addition,
unlike Sirk, whose stories most often take place among the wealthy
--- you get better looking sets that way --- Fassbinder set his tale
of impossible love to occur between a cleaning woman and a Gastarbeiter.
Fassbinder's 'remake' is more consciously political than Sirk's original.
With All that Heaven Allows, however, Sirk claimed that the
studio loved the title --- because they misunderstood it: "They thought
that it meant you could have everything you wanted. I meant it exactly
the other way. As far as I am concerned, heaven is stingy."
Our understanding of Hollywood movies is always dependent on our position
as the audience, on what we project INTO the film. A film, like any
work if art, does not exist outside of its audience ---what we bring,
as viewers, to a cultural product is in fact what completes the work.
With Sirk, for instance, I can remember dismissing his work when I was
at university during the early 1980s: we all did. The emotionality of
his films is always bordering if not completely collapsing into kitsch.
I didn't bother to re-look at Sirk until I was in my 30s and I was astounded
then by what I saw: he appeared to me then as a whole new director,
nothing at all like what I thought I knew about him the first time I
saw his major films, such as Written on the Wind, ImItation of Life
and Magnificent Obsession. I realized I had been completely
wrong about him, and began to look up and view more of his films. On
reviewing, I decided that his work was in fact very political --- and
it stopped feeling like melodrama to me, and began to assume a classical
sensibility with stark moral and spiritual overtones. Sirk is in fact
one of the Hollywood directors that Leslie Singer and I have viewed
most often together, since it is easy in New York to rent his major
films on video even though many of the Manhattan videoshops do not even
accord him his own shelf in their Great Directors sections. Leslie
and I have a running disagreement regarding the appropriateness of labeling
Sirk "melodrama" because I think Sirk's films are in fact classical
(and she laughs at the dramatic movements, i.e., they are 'melodramatic'
to her.) But since discovering Sirk's experiences under Hitler when,
as a theater and film director before '37, he witnessed his close friends
and left-wing associates becoming Nazis and giving state's evidence
against him and others I am even more convinced that I am correct in
viewing his high-blown dramas as classical. He was someone who in his
life experienced a series of incredible betrayals, most of which were
associated with the rise and consolidation of Hitler's power. Unless
one believes that Hitler's activities constitute a melodrama, one cannot
accept the films of Douglas Sirk as melodrama. That Sirk's characters
require extreme situations --- car crashes, deaths, hospitals --- to
find themselves doesn't mean that the scenarios are implicitly melodramatic:
it is realism to him. Or rather, another way of considering it is simply
within the terms of the Tragedies of Classical Theater, or those of
Shakespeare. There is nothing that has been written that could be said
to be MORE melodramatic than Sophocles's Oedipus. Or perhaps
Sirk's scenarios are considered 'melodramatic' (and Sirk himself called
them that --- for him melodrama meant the conjunction of melos (music)
and drama, which, after the introduction of sound, all films are in
a sense) because of their relationship to the idea of fate which, after
all, is not a twentieth century premise. The great ugly machinery of
Hollywood is so big that it can't help but have occasionally produced
some things that are better than itself: just like America itself, perhaps.
This was one of the rehabilitative aspects of the French New Wave and
the New German Cinema --- to retrieve and reclaim aspects of productions
made within the Studio System, especially within consideration to those
in the role of 'director', hence the auteur theory developed by those,
like Godard, associated with Cahiers. For those of us raised in the
United States who have no direct access to other cultures (people like
myself who are historically removed more than a few generations from
all of the 'original' cultures that predate the formation of the current
USA population from emigration, slavery and colonization), Hollywood
movies are, like Coca Cola, Ford Motors, and Television, our culture.
Or, perhaps more accurately, our anti-culture. For American society
is not positioned in relationship to either a culture or cultures, but
rather, exists as a marketplace. While other societies, both prior and
present, appear to have formed a cultural basis alongside leisure, to
have developed systems of meaning --- sometimes called art-purposively
independent of economic need when a surplus economy has been established,
the United States hasn't really and doesn't actually. We live in a market
place. Although this is an idiomatic European prejudice against America
--- that we have no culture and are only motivated by money --- there
is not a real argument that can be made against it. And there is a surplus
of evidence, both anecdotal and structural, to illustrate this truism.
Cinematically speaking, while other cultures sustained and to a limited
extent still sustain other film production industries, American has
been dominated by Hollywood since there was a Hollywood. Although American
vanguard cinema --- the independent makers that worked alongside the
Beats and other cultural movements in the USA during the 40s, 50s and
60s --- is still cherished today for its attempts to maintain a cinematic
tradition outside of Hollywood, for many of us, including myself and
Leslie Singer, this tradition --- whose exemplar is Stan Brakhage --
-is nearly useless. Except for their insistence on working outside of
an industry controlled by profit-motivation, there is little inspiration
to be gained from them. And nothing, technically, to be learned: there
is not one good script to be found amongst them, no acting that makes
an impression, no scenarios that are memorable --- and hardly a riveting
image amongst the thousands of feet of celluloid they shot. Instead,
they expect audiences to be wowed by flickering candle flames. If then,
one is interested in the full possibilities possible to explore in this
tradition called cinema: the reflective, post-Hollywood, interpretive
models offered by the likes of Fassbinder and Godard are the obvious
starting points. They simultaneously lead back to and away from some
of the possibilities that shine out from the tarnished rubble of Hollywood.
3. Fassbinder's Homosexuality
It's not simply a question of Fassbinder's lived experience of homosexuality
--- although this is an area which could be better explored than has
yet been, especially since so many of his associates prefer to downplay
has faggotry in order to herald him as a heterosexual. I get the sense
that they think they are doing him a 'favor'. It is a common 'favor':
since those of us who don't live according to heterosexual prescriptives
are considered not to be as 'good' as the others, people who want Fassbinder
to be better appreciated for his genius like to make the point that
Fassbinder was not 'only' or 'really' homosexual --- this brings Rainer
into the dominant and favored class of people, where a great artist
should be, huh? Fassbinder set himself up for this, of course: he kept
marrying women, even though he only cried for men. We are more interested,
however, in the ways in which Fassbinder subsumed and hid homosexuality
in his films, the frequency with which he chose to tell a gay story
as a heterosexual one. Our interest in this aspect is part of a larger
cultural tradition, within the 20th-century especially, of gay and lesbian
writers and filmmakers who are forced, due to a heterosexual imperative
that is dominant in all cultures, to refashion gay and lesbian experience
into an apparently heterosexual tale. Within the American tradition,
Tennessee Williams is the exemplar of this. Perhaps the greatest American
playwright of this century --- he is my favorite --- most of his plays
are about the personal relationships between gay men, but they are written
and staged and performed AS IF they are about the intimate dynamics
between men and women. Within the cultural and political confines of
American theater, Williams had no choice: love between men and women
is a, if not THE, grand theme of theater and life --- he was forced
to fashion his experience according to accepted convention, according
to heterosexuality. The same kind of deliberate 'refashioning' is to
be found in the works of many other lesbian and gay writers from the
Modernist period: including, James Baldwin, Christopher Isherwood, Marguerite
Yourcenar, Somerset Maugham,
Edward Albee, Lorraine Hansberry, Willa
Cather, E.M. Forester,
Truman Capote, Virginia Woolf, to cite just a
few. Of course Fassbinder's last film Querelle, is based on a
novel by one of the first deliberately-homosexual writers, Jean Genet,
whose social and literary success in Paris was aided so much by his
reputation as a thief and a criminal.
4. Fassbinder's Sexism
Oh, perhaps Fassbinder's sexism is no different from anyone else's,
but it's he who concerns us. Because, like Godard, he considers himself
political, contentious, and aware of the particular corruption that
infects and informs bourgeois European society. His 'women', as produced
in his films, are usually drag queens. Which is to say, they are Metaphors
of Women. As to what a real woman is or could be, it's perhaps not surprising
we can't find her in cinema --- she doesn't yet exist in real life.
Douglas Sirk was stuck in the machinery of Hollywood, forced to make
films about families and happy endings, well, that's nothing compared
to the role history and patriarchy have forced us--women--to play. Mothers
and whores: these roles have supposedly been altered, or expanded, for
women during the twentieth century. But it's quite difficult to find
evidence of this: we are still the exceptions. For Fassbinder, women
are props. They could just as easily be a mirror or a mannequin. In
The Bitter Tears of Petra van Kant, they ARE mirrors and mannequins.
In The Bitter Tears..., for instance, Fassbinder forces images
of women, and the real-life women who portray them, to substitute for
men. The Bitter Tears.... is a fag story, but told by Fassbinder
as a story of women. How do we know? The central political flaw in the
film, the fundamental error which reveals that the story is not 'really'
about women, is the economic fiction upon which the film is based. Petra
is presented as a successful fashion designer who is economically able
to 'keep' Karin. In the economic circumstances of 1970, when the film
was made, this financial circumstance while not impossible was hardly
conceivable. What was more likely then--and is still more likely today--is
that a man is buying another man or, what is even more common, a man
buys a woman. I don't mean to suggest that this flaw undermines completely
the success of the film: it does not. Rather, it participates in the
general reproduction of sexism within cinematic language that is nearly
ubiquitous, expect that the fake-lesbianism Fassbinder presents here
is not a common scenario in twentieth century cinema. At all. Still,
neither Petra or Karin can be said to be lesbian --- just that the relation
between them is suggestive of what is suggested in the term lesbian.
I have done no research on the background of the film, and have read
nothing that might suggest more directly why Fassbinder chose to fashion
a story of 'bad love' in this way. That lesbian love is always 'doomed
love' or at least a form of emotional corruption is, however, the most
consistent narrative within which lesbian love stories have been told
in dominant literature. The cycle of abjection begins with Radclyffe
Hall's classic, The Well of Loneliness, which was banned outright
upon publication in England in 1928 and the subject of one of the most
notorious literary trials of the century in the United States the following
year. Since Hall's novel is a thinly veiled autobiography of her own
life, it is not possible to blame Fassbinder or anyone else for portraying
as art or fiction what many lesbians have and continue to experience
as life: The social and political forces of society do not encourage,
and even explicitly forbid, romantic and sexual love between women.
The tension between lived experience and its production as culture is
what concerns us: in particular, the political problems associated with
any semblance of 'realism.' Realism, whether in documentary or in quasi-realistic
cinema, commits the philosophical error of believing in itself TOO MUCH.
Reality, after all, is itself simply a form of representation. Reality,
as we experience it in life and witness it in film, masquerades as truth
when, in fact, reality is only ever what we think it is. And so often
we misrecognize ourselves and others. For us, the misunderstanding of
men and women is the central concern. We don't believe in the so-called
difference between the sexes; or, rather, we believe that what is called
'difference' is in fact a political construction. The challenge, of
course, is to conceptualize cultural perspectives and actions which
help reveal what we understand. Of course one can say it: but conversation
has such a limited audience. Of course one can speak it in lecture halls
or classrooms: but a live performance is so exhausting --- and I am
so tired of being yelled at in public. It is the beauty of cultural
products that they circulate even when you are not physically present.
From Fassbinder we didn't learn much about feminism: but we learned
so much about the possibility of cinema to not only tell a story but,
additionally and more productively, to challenge viewers to consider
the political terms of their emotions and their lives. The raw intensity
of Fassbinder's desire to get to the core of people --- his viewers
as well as his actors --- is what makes him incomparable. His nose was
especially sensitive to the smell of corruption and false pretense:
I read somewhere that he said that he is most interested in 'what stinks.'
I don't mean to pretend that The Anita Pallenberg Story is anything
close to achieving what Fassbinder achieved in his best films (of his
37, I think there are at least 10 which are major works). Only to say,
that we are influenced by him, and interested in 'correcting' what he
didn't fully comprehend: the politics of women's subordination.
JEAN-LUC GODARD
Today I still think of myself as a critic, and in a sense I am, more
than ever before. Instead of writing criticism I make a film, but the
critical dimension is subsumed.
Jean-Luc Godard, Cahiers de Cinema, N. 93, 1961
All you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun.
Jean-Luc Godard,
paraphrase, now a common idiom among cineastes
My appreciation for Godard dates as far back as my awe of Fassbinder:
I was introduced to both as a student. In the early 1980s, while still
an undergraduate at the University of Chicago, I wrote film program
notes for the Film Center at the Art Institute of Chicago. The director
then, Richard Pena, now the director of the New York Film Festival,
is an avid Godard fan. My favorite college professor, the Frankfurt
School scholar Raymond Geuss, was also a Godard fan, as were many of
my friends. We watched and discussed Godard's main films from Breathless
to the late seventies. After this initial and engaged immersion with
Godard, I couldn't watch any of his films start-to-finish for more than
a decade. I couldn't tolerate the sexism and would walk out of the movie
house: I found the work painful to witness. Although Godard appears
at times to understand the position of woman as commodity, he doesn't
allow himself to accept the historical terms that dictate this abjection:
like most men, he blames us for being whores. In the early 1990s, when
I began the research on my archival video on the feminist art movement,
Not For Sale, I was looking for cinematic models for how to tell
a history. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, had purchased a copy
of Godard's French television series, Histoire du Cinema a few
years before. It's one of the beauties of the Museum of Modern Art that
they still take their library seriously, including their film and video
holdings. This type of serious institutional relationship to scholarship
might be taken for granted in Europe but in the United States one can
make no such assumption: Try calling the Whitney Museum of American
Art to make an appointment to see something in their collection, or
have access to their supposed library and you'll see what I mean. I
called MoMA and asked if Leslie Singer and I could view Godard's "Histoire
du Cinema" and a few weeks later we had seats in one of the private
screening rooms, The Louis B. Mayer Suite. The series is too long--six
hours, I think. And it is terrible. A montage of nonsense. The challenge
to historicize cinema in its own medium was either over Godard's head
or he was bored --- I don't know which. What I remember most is the
footage of Godard seated behind a reel-to-reel deck, a big cigar in
his mouth and his repeated utterance: Histoire du cinema. It
was laughable really. Still, in a way, it brought me back to Godard:
after witnessing his failure with Histoire I was interested again
in viewing what had once so compelled me. I found that I could again
appreciate his more obviously political films (the ones which other
people dislike the most it seems): Weekend, Two or Three Things
I Know About Her, Alphaville, and Sympathy for the Devil.
As with Fassbinder, the Brechtian influence on Godard is discernible
--- and it is what interests me the most. It was Brecht who laid the
groundwork for a theater that isn't, as the word 'play' implies, "to
please." He offers us something new to work with. There is one scene
in The Anita Pallenberg Story which is truly Godardian: it was
scripted that way, shot for that effect, and the editing has maintained
this initial sensibility. It is a press conference: two female reporters,
one the British rock critic and cultural icon Julie Burchill, the other
a reporter from Rolling Stone magazine. (A London fashion journalist,
Stephanie Theobald, plays Julie Burchill; the Egyptian-born artist Ghada
Amer plays the reporter from Rolling Stone.) The reporter's questions,
directed to Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, are either literal reproductions
of actual rock critic questions directed to the Stones during the late
sixties --- or slight modifications on similar questions we found in
written and film documentation of press conferences with the Stones.
Since the point-of-view of the players is established within the scene
to exist in direct opposition ---the reporters are seated just across
the coffeetable from Mick and Keith --- the camera angle can be maintained
to appear as if each line is spoken directly to the audience. We were
especially interested in some of the lies the Stones deliberately circulated
to the media, during their rise to international fame in the late sixties.
These falsehoods include practical as well as philosophical misrepresentation.
For instance, the Stones' manager, Andrew Loog Oldham, insisted on telling
the press that the band was going to make a film from Burgess's novel,
A Clockwork Orange, long after Stanley Kubrick bought the rights
to the book and there was no possiblity that the Stones could have it.
We have Mick repeat this lie in our film. When asked if he is working
on a film, he says yes, that they are still working on A Clockwork
Orange. The way Mick and Keith answer questions regarding the political
implications of their lyrics --- the racist and sexist connotations
in songs such as Brown Sugar --- is equally dishonest, though
misrepresentations of intention are of course more ambiguous than misrepresentions
of factual record.
ANDY WARHOL
None of Warhol's films ever achieved the artistry of Fassbinder or Godard.
Andy is an interesting, provocative and even prescient filmmaker, though
not a great one. Like so many of his other cultural gestures, Andy's
films are valuable because they open certain artistic windows --- not
because they are fully realized works in their own right. His films
are deliberately amateur efforts. Since he was already Andy Warhol when
he took up the camera, it was possible for him to make and produce and
distribute his 'underground' efforts --- possible until most of the
art cinemas in the United States were either torn down or reclaimed
by the Hollywood Studios during the late 1970s and early 1980s, when
Andy lost his audience and the possibility for revenue. Andy said that
everyone is a star. And this amateur approach to acting and filmmaking
has given us license to do the same: to make a feature film without
any professional actors, to work in a medium that requires high capitalization
even though we don't have any. To work against and without regard to
the established professional standards of the field. It's not that we
don't appreciate the special visual quality of 35mm film. It's not that
it wouldn't be sublime to have a dolly capable of taking the camera
along a long, drawn-out, slow, steady pan. It's not that we haven't
witnessed the stunning affects that can be achieved by filming in a
studio where enormous budgets are given over to stupendous sets enhanced
by brilliant lighting. But, well: in our society, at this particular
time, those technical advantages are reserved for the masters of the
entertainment industry. Or, yes: we also have Franco Zeffirelli making
his grand kitsch sets for the Metropolitan Opera too. It's quite a spectacle
at The Met: the singers and musicians at the opera are artists--but
their sets and their staging are all kitsch, as Zeffirelli appears to
have learned stage design from a Vincent Minnelli musical. One of the
best things about going to The Met is witnessing how many great overtures
currently exist in Ford Motor commercials and guessing which Hollywood
movie Zeffirelli used as the basis for his barbarous concoction. (I
saw Placido Domingo in Pagliacci this season --- and really, this time
I think Zeffirelli did a John Ford film.) Thinking about Warhol, in
particular his films, allows us to bypass the anxiety of filmmaking
outside of the dominant industry and acting outside of acting. If we
didn't have the amateur model Warhol offered, we wouldn't have an artistic
precedent--- although there are of course others, and still are, making
films outside of Hollywood and television, Warhol is still the most
compelling to us. He is the most obvious example within the fine art
situation. He is also, after all, implicated in the personal and professional
biography of the Rolling Stones, especially that of Mick Jagger. And
Warhol's artistic and professional legacy continues to exert incomparable
influence on all of us who currently inhabit the fine art scene in New
York. Or, as I said in an interview with MTV on the occasion of the
Sotheby's auction of Warhol's estate in 1988: "Warhol, he is like a
god."
ROBERT FRANK, COCKSUCKER BLUES (1972)
Robert Frank's film, which was first commissioned by the Stones and
has since become, due to their legal prohibition against it, a well-known
bootleg (Frank can only show it when he is physically present, and only
for 'educational purposes'), is in a sense a blueprint for
The Anita
Pallenberg Story.
1. Like Cocksuker Blues, our film is a bootleg --- it is not
intended and cannot go into commercial distribution because we have
not and do not intend to try to purchase the rights to quote passages
from music by the Rolling Stones or to cite Godard and Fassbinder.
2. Unlike Robert Frank, we conceived and produced our film AS A BOOTLEG.
We don't intend and will not make money, nor did we ever wish to reach
a mainstream audience or attempt to procure the profits people hope
to make from commercial theatrical distribution. If Mick and Keith like
our movie and want to put it on television--of course we will help them.
3. Some of our fictionalized scenes were written in relationship to
Cocksucker Blues. From Frank's documentary, we found Mick's enthusiasm
for the Southern United States, Keith's struggle to order a bowl of
fruit through room service, the rape and humiliation of groupies, the
wide-spread heroin addiction, the racism reproduced in the proliferation
of jive-talking Black men, and other elucidating and depraved moments
of life as a Rolling Stone.
4. We chose to mimic some of the moments of Cocksucker --- and
deliberately chose to refuse to repeat or otherwise simulate others.
The Cocksucker scenes we refused to reproduce, and why, are:
*Naked Women. Typically, Frank's film has scores of naked women--and
no naked men.The ubiquitous groupies appear getting fucked on the private
plane, spread-beaver on the hotel bed, etc., etc. We refused to simulate
this, NOT because it didn't happen (it still happens between male rockers
and female fans in the late 1990s), but because it is tragic and humiliating
to us and we don't wish to enshrine it through reproduction. It is awful
enough that so many women continue to be acculturated into an understanding
of their sexuality based in whoredom. * Needles, syringes and heroin.
I hate needles. I hate heroin. It is an awful drug, perhaps one of the
most nefarious substances produced by man. If there is a devil, the
language he speaks is heroin. Heroin has played a major part in twentieth
century culture, especially in the United States and most especially
in popular music, from Jazz to Rock. This is unfortunate, not necessary:
but still true. Like objectifying reproductions of women (see above),
images of heroin usage are impossible to render critically. About images
of physical violence, I feel the same way. We have no interest in reproducing
the most oppressive and dehabilitating aspects of human behavior.
*Jive-Talking Black Men. Frank offers his viewers jive-talking Black
men scalping tickets at Stones concerts and pool playing Black male
musicians in the South. Within the context of such obvious white male
privilege --- the Stones, their money, their success, their Britishness
--- the footage of Black men is oppressively colonialist, although it's
probable that Frank considered his documentation progressive and not
racist and the Stones considered their jam sessions and pool playing
with Black men the height of political consciousness and advanced racial
awareness.
When sexual (see Naked Women, above) and social relations
exist across extreme gulfs of political and economic inequality, they
are not and cannot be perceived as equal. It doesn't matter if the Master
has succeeded in making the Servant smile. When presented without any
indications of political disparity and oppression --- that is, when
presented "realistically" --- such representations participate in support
of the corrupt political situation which produces them.
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