Underground USA: Filmmaking Beyond the Hollywood Canon
Xavier Mendik & Steven Jay Schneider (editors)
Wallflower Press, 2002
Belonging on the same shelf as Joan Hawkins’ book Cutting Edge, Underground USA is an interesting volume which collects articles offering studies on both exploitation and experimental filmmakers. (Ms. Hawkins contributes a piece on Abel Ferrara’s The Addiction.) Perhaps the greatest praise one could give this book is that it gives equal weight to exploitation filmmakers Herschell Gordon Lewis, Doris Wishman and Larry Cohen, as it does to people like Bruce Conner, Andy Warhol and Harry Smith, who made avant-garde cinema.
It is great to see representatives of cinematic polar opposites brought between the covers of one book, but unfortunately the marriage between their fields is seldom realized. The pieces that do stand out are the few that recognize this blurring of the two forms. For instance, Stephen Bissette’s piece on director Curtis Harrington remains in memory because his career alone bridged the gap between what people consider art and trash. He was a pioneer in the 1940s American Underground (his own Fragments of Seeking is a key work; and he was the cinematographer of Kenneth Anger’s Puce Moment), and then 20 years later he was directing Baby Jane-style horror melodramas. All of these titles mesh together in a consistent tone that illustrates the director’s love of recreating old movie styles.
Elena Gorfinkel’s article offers a thoughtful analysis of how the vicarious needs of pleasure-seeking highbrows were satisfied by seeing the artsy-chic sex films of Radley Metzger, so they wouldn’t have to rub elbows with the raincoat crowd at 42nd St. grindhouses. Also, a chronological study of the biker film shows how the genre satisfied both the juvenile delinquents (with The Wild One), and S&M fetishists (with Scorpio Rising). But learned pieces like this are few and far between.
One is reluctant to write negative press about a book like Underground USA because you want to applaud the editors for having the foresight to create a book which joins both the high and low cultures of fringe cinema between its covers. And for that matter, it is refreshing to see any glossy book that gives space to someone like Doris Wishman, whose work would normally get covered in a xeroxed fanzine. In that regard, this book may open up fields of study for people who approach it from one discipline, and may be intrigued to explore the other. Even so, a lot of the articles are skin deep at best. In fact Bissette confesses to only having seen Fragments of Seeking in Harrington’s avant-garde period, and admits having little recollection of it. A similar act of “the fact that I’m writing about them should be enough” pervades many pieces, such as Michael Bowen’s on Doris Wishman, with all due respect, only invests a little interest into her radical style, and fails to communicate what it is saying.
Originally published in Vol.#1, Issue #15.
Greg Woods
Greg Woods has been a film enthusiast since his teens, and began his writing "career" at the same time- prolific in capsule reviews of everything he had watched, first on index cards, then those hardcover dollar store black journals, then an old Mac IIsi. He founded The Eclectic Screening Room in 2001, as a portal to share his film love with the world, and find some like-minded enthusiasts along the way. In addition to having worked in the film industry for over two decades, he has been a co-programmer of films at Trash Palace, and a programmer/co-founder of the Toronto Film Noir Syndicate. He has also written for Broken Pencil, CU-Confidential, Micro-Film, and is currently working on his first novel. His secret desire is for someone to interview him for a podcast or a DVD extra.