CINEMATIC ArtROCITIES
As a lifelong horror movie fan, I pretty much started at the bottom of the art barrel, at least in terms of respectability. What wallowing in the muck of horror has meant, however, is that I’ve been in an enviable place, in terms of art appreciation, of having nothing to lose. As a fan of a disreputable genre, one that demands its practitioners blur the line between good and bad taste and explore things generally considered best left unexplored, I was more or less left without a rule book.
Discovering things under rocks, cinematically speaking, is addictive, and soon I was expanding beyond the horror genre to other forms of outsider art, from the likes of John Waters (Pink Flamingos, Female Trouble), the eager works of Ed D. Wood Jr. (Plan 9 from Outer Space, Glen or Glenda), the subversive films of Mike and George Kuchar (Sins of the Fleshapoids, Hold Me While I’m Naked) and Kenneth Anger (Fireworks, Scorpio Rising), to the sex-trash films of Roberta and Michael Findlay (The Touch of Her Flesh, The Curse of Her Flesh, The Kiss of Her Flesh), and the Cinema of Transgression via Richard Kern (You Killed Me First, Fingered) and Nick Zedd (They Eat Scum, Why Do You Exist).
This “confusion” of high and low art has been an invitation to engage with marginalized works, to redefine concepts of artistic worth, and to discover some truly personal moviemaking. It’s a result of both my desire to embrace a less rigid understanding of taste, and a response to my boredom with mainstream expectations and valuations.
Consider filmmaker Doris Wishman. Born in New York in 1912, Wishman began making films after the death of her husband in 1958. Her early work was mostly in the genre known as “Nudie Cuties,” films that were shot at nudist camps and other similar locales. You get the picture: relatively innocent Sun & Skin flicks. In truth, with few exceptions, I find most of these early Wishman works deadly dull.
By the mid-1960s, however, Wishman was making what were known as “Roughies,” movies that were overall tougher and sleazier. This was when her work really started to illustrate the infamous (in admittedly niche circles) Wishman Touch: weird cutaways to feet and inanimate objects at unexpected moments, never showing a person’s face when they’re talking, Doris’s voice, nasal and dripping with New York accent, issuing from the mouths of various onscreen characters due to her habit of shooting without recording live sound, singularly unsexy sex, and plots that are more ideas than fully realized storylines. Wishman’s lowbrow jump cuts, confounding of aural expectations, and unconventional narratives share more than a little with the respectable arthouse sensibilities of filmmakers like Jean-Luc Godard.
The key differences between Godard and Wishman, however, is first ability, and then I would argue, intention. Godard (I’m a die hard fan) was consciously creating art; Wishman was just getting something on the screen. The tertiary marker here is viewer expectation/reaction, which is based on accepted notions of “quality” and “taste” (read: societal acceptance).
Pound for pound, if you were to weigh what I derive from the work of both filmmakers – a unique perspective, confounding of expectations, intellectual stimulation (albeit from opposite ends of the spectrum), the breaking of rules, a disregard of (or sometimes a response to) commonly accepted morals and values, and perhaps most importantly, pleasure – you’d end up with an equal measure.
Wishman, who died in 2002 at the age of 90, left a legacy of some 28 mind-bending films behind her, including Bad Girls Go to Hell (Figuratively speaking.), The Amazing Transplant (It’s a penis.), Deadly Weapons (They’re breasts.), and A Night to Dismember (It’s a mess.).
Another filmmaker dismissed as only a purveyor of trash is Andy Milligan. Milligan, who died of AIDS in, as they say, “abject poverty”, at the age of 62 in 1991, actually garnered a positive critical reputation for his avant-garde off-off-Broadway work in the late 1950s and early 1960s. He made the transition to motion pictures in 1965 with a critically acclaimed 32-minute short entitled Vapors, shot entirely in a New York City bathhouse. It’s Milligan’s film work from the late 1960s through the end of the 1970s, however, that most Milligan fans most cherish.
Shot predominantly in and around his Staten Island home or in London, England(!), Milligan’s films are a sight to behold. They play as if Rainer Werner Fassbinder took a page from the Herschell Gordon Lewis Playbook (he’s the man credited/blamed for creating Blood Feast, the first official Splatter Movie), and used leftover 16mm film ends while shooting without an accurate eyepiece that could determine what was actually being captured on film. All this in costumes sewn together by Milligan under the nom-de-seamstress Raffiné. Milligan was, if nothing else, a hard worker and a Renaissance man.
Perhaps Milligan’s most idiosyncratic cinematic touch was the “swirl camera” move that involved whipping his handheld camera around in all directions so that the viewer sees only a disorienting and histrionic blur. It’s a lot – not to mention inexpensive, low concept, and an artistic misfire – but not altogether unfitting considering Milligan’s recurring themes of dysfunctional families, interfamilial sex, and general misanthropy.
Although thematically similar to Fassbinder’s work, Milligan’s early films are inspired in their experimentation by Andy Warhol’s art flicks of the 1960s, an inspiration that Milligan acknowledged. Milligan, however, would never set his camera on a tripod and point it at the Empire State Building for 485 slow motion minutes; Milligan would have made at least six movies given that amount of film to work with.
Among Milligan’s most beloved titles are The Ghastly Ones, Seeds, Nightbirds, Bloodthirsty Butchers, The Rats Are Coming! The Werewolves Are Here!, and Fleshpot on 42nd Street.
Again, the primary differences between Milligan and Fassbinder are the same as that between Wishman and Godard: ability, intention, viewer expectation/reaction. Regardless, maybe the thing that Wishman and Milligan have over Godard, and Fassbinder is, if not talent, then a certain kind of practicality to their work. Hey, does that make them less bourgeois and more proletarian?
It’s my belief, however, that Milligan initially set out to make genuine movie ART™, and that he was in the process of developing the talent to create it. Viewing his work chronologically, however, leads me to suspect that his dysfunctional and tumultuous private life and the demands of the exploitation film industry were just too much to sustain it. Still, why insist on shooting period pieces, why burden yourself with the task of creating costumes for your entire cast, unless you care?
With rare exception, I don’t make a case for either Wishman nor Milligan as arthouse auteurs. Their films speak for themselves, they are what they are. What Wishman and Milligan, as well as countless other maligned filmmakers, have in common with cineastes, however, is something that should be immeasurably important to any artist: their ability to engage with the viewer.
Answering, not “What is art?”, but “What do I want from art?” was my way into the work of marginalized filmmakers. I discovered that what I want is a sense of form (medium), even if it’s a misuse of that form. I want it to have a perspective, a point of view, even if it’s a crass one. I want it to surprise me: show me something new, take a trope in a new direction, confound me. I want it to engage me.
The works of Wishman and Milligan (and Godard and Fassbinder) do just that for me. After all, the worst thing art can be, I think, is boring. Respectability, who needs it?
If you’d like to further thumb your nose at conventional notions of good taste, Vinegar Syndrome, with the American Genre Film Archive (AGFA), have released The Films of Doris Wishman: The Daylight Years, The Films of Doris Wishman: The Moonlight Years, and my personal favourite, The Films of Doris Wishman: The Twilight Years. Severin Films has released a single box set called The Dungeon of Andy Milligan Collection, containing 14 films. For more reading on Milligan, check out Jimmy McDonough’s essential book The Ghastly One: The Sex-Gore Netherworld of Filmmaker Andy Milligan.
