Boys of Life (19 page)

i It that m.iK

I thougl AH then I

ths in tl D

BO ) F I I F I

whelmed me, and even buying somebody a postcard and writing l! ind

getting a stamp tor it and then finding .1 mailbox to put it In all tl simple little things were wax too much foi mc even to thlnl ftboUl

doing. It was all 1 could do to go out ol the apartment to th< lltth Cuban grocery store down (he blo< I and b\X) I ll* pa< I

But when Next Yeai in (romorro/i finally cami out, I wai feel in greataboutbeingthishi.umoviesi.il and everything I actually went out and bought a postcard of the Statue of Liberty, and I VfOti on ll that I was starring in this movie and I told I« d thi tltl( OJ ll and h( should watch for it. Which to look ba< I- on wi 1 dumb thing to do 1 but how was I to know Ncxi Yeai in ( wmorrah ■■■■■ n'l 1 -■•■ tl show up at the Arrowhead Drive In MN l< 1. in I in m

I can't remember what else I laid, but then how much CM V"" say on a postcard any way:f I think I mentioned to him how I I just skipped out, and I hoped he didn't much I thlnl I

told him I was goin^ to come visit him 01 KW1

D PAULRUSSELL

through, bo it was .ill so blurry you couldn't tell anything about it—just these washed-out colors changing around like in .1 kaleidoscope and some woman talking nonsense. At the end oi it Carlos turned to me

and laid in this really loud voice, so everybody could hear, "Remind me tO wash the dildo when we get hack to the hotel room." Which it

you don't think that was the pertect thing to say, especially so loud

that everybody could hear, then you probably wouldn't have liked ( los all that much.

There In Montreal was the first time 1 saw the movie all the uav through, though I'd seen hits and pieces here and there during the

spring, and since like 1 said before we did the dialogue a couple of

months .ittcr the camera stuff, it was hard to tell how it was .ill supposed to h 'her until you saw the whole thing finished. Carlos was

very proud of it, and he kept looking OVei at me in the movie theater tO see it I was enjoying it. Which 1 was, even it I was sort of shocked when 1 saw how they'd done this treatment to make the him look really

old and grainy, with scratches and blips and stuti m it 1 didn't know

he w to Ao that. But it was tun to see how there was a kind of

stor\ hidden in there wheie 1 would'vc het vou moncv there wasn't, and how Carlos had picked that store out from all the othei scenes Seth had shot that he decided not to use. Some of which were mv

rites, like the one wheie we go down m the abandoned

Subway tunnel to visit a friend of Sammv's hut can't find her. and

instead we find this regular living room set up down in the tunnel, this

old sofa and lamp tad ible, and ahout a hundred rats swarming

it.

I d mhei much eke ahout Montreal except watching the

movie I got really drunk on champagne at some reception when

Iressed m tuxedos except ^ larlos, who nevei wore anything

in his life except Hans ,md a hl.uk 1 shut and hl.uk leather m<

vho's always been » hum It was the first time I r\ct got drunk <>n champagne I he next day, I had the worst h

| the last tune I drunk on *. hamp.i

In I r, though, I tememhet

havii tty wild sex with Carlos in the hotel swimn

n it was totally d<

, ss the i hit w ith the people that

i w ritten u\> in » lot

that tall. awA -

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It u,h this fall vi.i\ when even In Nem York it u us and there

were yellow leaves on the trees along the street the Interviewei came to the apartment, and since he laid he'd buy lunch Carloa grabbed me and the three oi ui went to this little Polish restaurant. I here were lots oi restaurants like- thai In the neighborhood. I'd go by and lee those old Polish men litting in there, and always wondei what Sammy thought about them, He never had anything to do with .im oi them, even though he was Polish too. Bui I guess they weren't lews like he was, and so he- didn't trust them, ["here must've been too many things he remembered about living In I odb tor him ever to trust anything Polish anymi

We ate this ioup made out of beets, borsch they <.all it. I wasn't too thrilled with tlu- Idea oi beet soup, but Carlos said it was the thing to have, and it was tree, so I ate it and it wasn't bad.

[Tie guy from American /Wrn was this weasely, with wire rims and curly black hair. He had a little tape recordei Inset on the table, and a notepad with questions he'd written. He started right In, not giving Carlos s chance to eat or anythin

That was the first tune I ever heard Carlos talk about his movies, and it was Incredible. It u.is .1 (larlos I'd never seen before the c larlos I knew would rather talk about dildoes than movies, and he nevei seemed to take anything .ill th.u mtiihisK. I mean, tins was somebody who thought being able to shoot .1 flame out oi youi rear end was just

tlu uul now here w.is this other ('arlos talking \ei\ leriously

about things I could hardly even understand. And tin Interviewer was loving it he w.is rocking back .uul forth in his seat, he was so ex< ited,

though partly I think that w.is this nervous tu of his. But it .im l

me. When Carlos started talking, at hrst I thought he uas pulling the

guy's leg and what he uas saying didn't make ,mv sense. But then the

interviewer started asking more questions, like he understood Carlos, and I inswered like he understood the question, and they went

back and forth like that t.>r about an hour. When it was over I uas 1, and they seemed I ike they could go on and on which i^ what the interviewei said, "I wish we could |ust go on and on like

this."

I started to understand why Carlos brought me along. He wanted

me to hear him talk about the movie the u.iv he did, becaUSC he- u.inted me to blOW those things hut didn't think I'd listen it he JUSI S8t me down and tried to fell them to me directly.

1 didn't s.i\ .1 thing through the whole lunch I would've sounded

D PAUL RUSSELL

too stupid. Plus, I figured the interviewer was SO caught up in Carlos he didn't even know who I was. But then—this is tunny. When the article came out a few months later, in the little introduction where he described the restaurant and what Carlos looked like and all, there I was big as lite. Which I thought was a hoot, the way he described me.

I got Earl to rind that interview tor me in American Film magazine, and I want to put it in here so you can get an idea what it was like tor this seventeen-year-old kid to sit there in that crowded little restaurant and listen to Carlos talk about this experience we'd all had, him and me and Sammy and all the others who were involved in it. The amazing thing was, what he'd experienced was totally different from what we experienced. Or at least what I did. If you'd asked me what that movie was about, I'd have said this old Jewish guy and this kid goofing In front of the camera. But sitting there listening to him talk, I suddenly started to see how, when Carlos looked at things, he saw them like everybody else, but at the same time he saw right through them too. I don't quite know how to put it. He saw what was on the other side ot normal things.

That was scary. It made me think how much 1 was missing when

I looked around at things, and how much Carlos was seeing. What it made me remember was one night when Carlos had come in. and 1 was

reading some comic hook. He took it right out ot my hands when- 1 was reading it, and stood there flipping through it. He looked sad, he

shook his head. "You just don't know how many pictures there are

rhc\ haven*l put in thai comic hooks oi yours," he said. "Miles of pictures left out, foi every one they show you."

He let it drop to the floor. At the tune it didn't make too much

hat he W8S Saving but in that little Polish restaurant that

afterna m, it started to.

I his is riu- w.i\ the\ printed il In American Film, the human 1981

Car/os Reichart he a a little

. nun /us apartment Veselka is bustling uf midday, on amiable mix <»/ old ttmeri and f/»< trend)

impanied Blair, the nsBeni) attractive urn <>/ his lasesi film H

a look "/ sut/.tisc as 1/

Mr m the aci / half exj

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challenge me, to glare of me defiantly, bin he dum't J m raid fit*

Utjs charmingly cordial and guarded, Of least initially — though as

the mttrvieu pi ,mJ things /oosc-nal up a bit I reaiited Ik

Jdnn^ ai me. This is a director whose intriguing

quality is, for me, flU COnceflfRltion. WVu-n he /irsr hurst upon the

i u if/i Burning City m 1976. it seemed to many viewers as

if he were intent on devouring film-making whole, transforming the

entire genre with a single Stroke. The intensity of his work is matched by the pace he sets for himself: Burning City (1976), ine (1977), Mother Chicago (1978), Ur (1979), and currently, at the New York Film Festival, Next Year in Gomorrah.

American film: Some critics have complained that your films tend to proliferate images with an abandon that risks incoherence. Thiit seems a criticism to which Burning City and Ur are particularly susceptible.

Carlos reichart: / seem to be an image-producing machine. You'll say this openness could also apply to someone who has nothing to say, but I hope that's not so in my case. The fact is that the series of films, beginning with Burning City through Ur ami m>w this latest, has destroyed that need I had to identify myself sentimentally or ideologically with my subjects. I have to put my faith in a kindling of fantasy. Keeping my distance from my own mannerisms, my own stylistic quirks.

af: Some have detected in that a decadent impulse.

reichart: Oh / don't think so at all. Vd rather evoke the surrealist tradition of Cocteau or Bunuel, which seems to me par-ticuLirly vitalist and, in Bunuel's case especially, fraught with overt political implications. The old surrealist tradition grafted onto the early American genius of a Keaton or Chaplin. But it's true what me extent, in that my primary, that is to say initial impulse was definitely toward the aesthetic, what I'd call the holiness of the image—but then we're talking the late fifties, early I kn<>u I was a poet first. I had three books of poems out I | cr did any film work.

af: And your first film work?

reichart: Well, that's a complicated story, but basically it was these friends in New York I met through the antiwar moi

D PAULRUSSELL

ment and they knew Antonioni, who was going to be in the States shooting. There WOS this whok crew of people going over the script for that film, Sam Shepard was (me of them, for example, and somehow they put me on the payroll for it and there I was, a script doctor when all I'd done before was write some poems and know some people.

af: There was also the street theater work, which obviously prepared you in some way for that kind of work. How did that tic in 7

reichart: That was mostly improv with big doses of Brecht and good old-fashioned agitprop. I don't think we ever worked from a script, which perhaps prejudiced me against the rigidity of scripts because I still rely mosdy on improv from my actors.

af: But clearly it's improv that's carefully controlled. One doesn't make film after film with the total "feel" of a Rcichart film without being in some kind of control.

reichart: You COtdd say / believe iv. an ordered chaos. The strict rules of chance. The spontaneity of my actors is invariably well rehearsed, and as a result, I'm seldom surprised K the happy accidents as they occur along the way.

af: Which is why you tend to work with the same peopU and

reichart: Well, that and the fact that these arc the people I know—people l'\c been with shu Sammy Fmkelstehn

and Netta Abramowitz and Verbena Gray, so they're all trained in improv, guerilla theater. It was the war thai woke us all up. That made us start seeing the various structures economic, cultural that insinuate themselves within even casual you might almost say aa idental imc ■

u k hah i: Such as the strut tures oj so catted normal Ufe The ■ I ologjes thai buttresses that

■ mi Seth Rosenheim, who as cinematographs ■o films has been u idely praised

ponsibU fbi the look oj everything I didn't even knon about

vhen I started \ stiU

think something up, I do that? H< eithti says

Aiul m thai 'it '

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reichari: (laughs) Absolutely.

af: Vow must be the only director m America who dubs all his films. Why that curious practu

reichart: W'c'/I. / think dubbing enriches a character. It's part of ms taste for pastiche—it raises a character out oj the zone of naturalism. What I often do is cross two nonprofessionals. I bebeve m polyvalence m a character. I like elaborating a character.

af: Your latest film has been met with a certain amount of

incomprehension hut also a great deal of enthusiasm. Personally I

find the film very mysterious, unsettling—like looking at an old

photograph album and realizing everyone whose picture is m there

is dead now.

reichart: Next Year in Gomorrah is mysterious first and foremost because it's fragmentary. But its fragmentanness is in a \ense ssmholie—the general fragmentariness of our enih:ation as it will appear to some future civilization. This is the real mystery of the film and the world represented in it. Like an unknown landscape wrapped m a thick mist that clears here and there, but only for a short time.