The Sticking Place Theatre and Film productions

People have always been afraid of what the the movies will do to them. Political leaders fear that the masses may be moved to revolt by propaganda films. Moralists and ministers are concerned that the youth of the land will be debauched by nudity, profanity, and bare breasts. Censors believe that violence and criminal glorification will lead to a further breakdown in law and order. Because of this imagined power, movies are the only major art form of the twentieth century that has been banned, rated, cut, denounced from the pulpit, seized by the police, condemned by the forces of organized religion, prohibited by anxious parents, and even boycotted by projectionists.

Two recent books have taken as their subject the power of the moving image to subvert and transform our lives. One of these, Sexuality in the Movies, is primarly about sex and sensuality: the other, Film as a Subversive Art is much broader in scope, dealing not only with the erotic, but also with everything in film that is sacrilegious, revolutionary, pornographic or destructive of complacency and the status quo. Despite the differences in content and approach, both books are ultimately speculations about the relationship between the art object and the audience, about the mind rape and seduction that takes place in the soft darkness of the movie house.

The superior book, Film as a Subversive Art, is the more difficult to discuss. The fragmented, fascinating text deals with religions, political and sexual extremes. The language is rough and many of the accompanying stills are disturbing, documenting such matters as the inhumity of the Nazi executioner or the blunt skill of the surgeon during an autopsy. This disturbance of the reader is, of course, the whole point of the book; for Amos Vogel has set out to show the ways and means by which he belives film undercuts traditional manners and morals. 'This is a book,' Vogel writes, 'about the subversions of existence values, institutions, mores and taboos - East and West, Left and Right, by the potentially most powerful art of the century.' This is a book about the power of film to change our lives.

Film as a Subversive Art is ambitious and eclectic. Vogel arbitrarily divides the subject matter into three main categories — The Subversion of Form, The Subversion of Content, and Forbidden Subjects of the Cinema. The opening section details the artistic stratagems and achievements of those cinema artists who have found new directions in both narrative and non-narrative cinema. Included are long discussions of the Soviet silent film, expressionism, surrealism, and silent American comedy (the epitome of unconscious anarchy). Each of these sub-sections has a short, generally thoughtful introduction, followed by program notes on individual titles and amply captioned stills. (There are more than 350 stills in the book — many unique — and the layout serves them well.) There is also consideration of other aspects of the cinema: the destruction of time, space, plot and narrative, the ultimate elimination ol the image, the screen, and even the camera. Vogel here goes to the outer formal limits of the cinema where Stan Brakhage makes Mothlight by glueing the wings of moths on a clear strip of celluloid, and where Michael Snow creates La Region Centrale by splicing together three and a half hours of panning shots of an empty landscape.

The second main section of Film as a Subversive Art deals with the subversion of content. Vogel documents the propaganda and polemics of the revolutionary cinemas of China. Eastern Europe and the Third World. Examples vary between a documentary on acupuncture to a brutal East German film about the sufferings and 'confessions' of American pilots downed over North Vietnam. In stark contrast, Vogel also considers the terrible poetry of the Nazi cinema — the Leni Riefenstahl documentaries on Nuremberg and the 1936 Olympics, as well as overt Nazi propaganda films like Baptism of Fire and The Eternal Jew. There is, of course, nothing in the Nazi films to suggest the horrors that Vogel later confronts in the chapter on concentration camps in his third and startlingly original section on love and death in the cinema.

The act of birth and the fact of death are the alpha and the omega of Vogel's Forbidden Subjects — lovely, celebratory movies on childbirth (once irrationally banned) contrast with those films that deal with death. Real death. Not finely-crafted, Technicolored demises, but rather death in black-and-white—a seagull dying on a beach, or a doctor dismembering and dismantling a body during an autopsy (filmed in objective detail by Stan Brakhage), or the brutal accounts of the death of six million Jews in German camps. There are the now-familiar shots of mass graves and cadaverous bodies inches from death, but there are images even more brutal. The bewilderment in the eyes of a young child on his way to a horror he can't comprehend, the distorted features of a young woman recently hung, and a pitiful Jewish orchestra that once accompanied those who were about to die to the gas chamber, soothing primal fears with music. It is a catalogue for a season in hell, and Amos Vogel — compassionate, clear-eyed — is our guide.

Vogel challenges our assumptions about what death and sex are really like. He shows us more than air-brushed beauties in the slick magazines or the funereal elegance of bodies laid out in Sunday best, lightly powdered to disguise the pallor of death. The stills and text in Film as a Subversive Art push the reader quickly past what is known and comfortable, forcing us to examine the limits of the human condition.

There is still much here to shock and affront, despite the fact that American notions of obscenity and pornography have changed radically over the past several years. What we learn are the limits of our ability to recognize and accept the permutations of human conduct. The questions we are forced to confront are: What is there left to learn? Why must we know what we never wanted to know? Vogel partly begs the question for many of his taboo themes are treated only in commercial movies — bestiality in Woody Allen's Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sex, coprophilia in Alfred Hitchcock's Frenzy, child murder and molestation in Fritz Lang's M. Perhaps the most offensive pictures Vogel does include are from Otto Muehl's sado-masochistic cinematic 'happenings,' which feature the defilement of the human body (not to mention spirit).

What Vogel ignores are the existence and the implications of the genuinely shocking 'films' that are made for the 42nd Street and mail-order trade which feature every perversion known to humankind including genuine bestiality, sadism and sexual relations between adults and young children. It is these films that truly test the limits of our tolerance. It is not difficult to guess the reasons why Vogel prefers the comfortable precincts of the Art Film, where it is not necessary to confront some of the more disturbing consequences of our prurience and our liberation.

American Film, November 1975

© Stephen Zito/American Film
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