Richard Kern, again

Folks who read my post about the films of R. Kern are directed to this page at the wonderful archive of avant-garde culture Ubu Web: two films by Kern, My Nightmare and Thrust In Me are available there for download, along with other material by Nick Zedd, Jon Moritsugu, Tessa Hughes-Freeland, and others, and also a manifesto of the "Cinema of Transgression" by Zedd. The films are in .avi (xvid) format and range from about 3mb to over 260 mb.

The Yellow Teddybears (1963)

Salvation Films, a UK-based video company specializing in cult films, releases British exploitation films under their "Jezebel" imprint with the tagline "Sexy Retro from the Saucy Seventies," attempting to evoke freewheeling, mod visions of Swinging Britain through colorful, retro package design and hot-cha-cha copy, however, the films included on their Sex-a-Go-Go 3-DVD set, all made before the seventies, suggest at the very least that exploitation in Britain took awhile before finally hitting its stride (at least in comparison with the trailers for other, later films the set includes on the discs). None of the films on this set are truly memorable, but all have their interest: the latest film on the set to appear, 1969's Zeta One, an improbable spoof of both sci-fi and spy films, is the film that shows the most skin (and some endearingly cheesy costuming and set design) and features a performance by Charles Hawtrey, the comedian best known for his work in the low-brow, Benny-Hill-esque Carry On films; while Secrets of a Windmill Girl (1966) began life as an attempt by producers Tony Tenser and Michael Klinger, who, as the Compton Cinema Group, had acquired London's Windmill Theatre (from the thirties to the sixties a London institution with its distinctive brand of spicy variety theatrical programs), to document the Windmill "revudeville" shows and ended as the story of a dancer's rise and fall from Windmill girl to stripper, and featured an early performance by Pauline Collins, an actress who later established herself (and received an OBE) through prestigious television and Broadway performances. Earliest, lowest on the meter in terms of salaciousness, and to my mind the most interesting is 1963's The Yellow Teddybears, the focus of today's discussion.

Painfully earnest and preachy (and -- unless we are talking about a "Continental" version of this film which also circulated for a while that featured spliced-in scenes with completely different actors -- without nudity or really any suggestive content) the film is a drama about premarital sex among teenage girls who go to a particular suburban school. The title refers to small teddy-bears which are worn by a clique of girls at the school, the significance of which is inadvertently found out by their biology teacher (Jacqueline Ellis): only girls who have slept with a boy may join the club and wear the insignia. Only a few years out of university herself and also sexually experienced, she is shocked, not because these girls are having sex, but because they are having sex for the wrong reasons, and she confronts them in class for using sexuality for competitive and status purposes instead of its deeper and more personal significances. Meanwhile, one of the "teddybears," Annette Whitley, has been keeping her pregnancy a secret, and when her attempt to obtain an abortion is discovered by her father, she runs away to London, and her enraged father blames the school for corrupting his daughter's morals.

The final scene which unfolds from this development lays the film's agenda out on the table for you, as Ellis is called to a meeting with the headmistress and the board of governors of the school for her remarks to the Teddybears, and the scene is a veritable kangaroo court of the forces of hypocrisy, respectability, and repression versus Ellis's honesty, understanding and candor, as her frank admission of having had sexual intercourse before marriage (with, it is implied here, her fiance who is a drawing teacher at the school), which was made to the girls as part of her advice against promiscuity, is inflated into charges of corrupting morals by a group of self-righteous characters obsessed with what effect this scandal might have on the school. Meanwhile a subplot concerns Whitley's classmate (Georgina Patterson) who, having sat in the bedroom with her boyfriend while he sleeps off too much drink at a party, is then mistakenly considered to have qualified for the wearing of a teddybear.

As it happens, I watched this film as the US Food and Drug Andiminstration approved a new vaccine for human papilloma virus (HPV), a sexually-transmitted disease which can lead to cervical cancer. The requirement that the drug be administered to girls before they are sexually active has occasioned a furor among parents and religious groups who are worried that inoculation against a disease that leads to some 4000 deaths a year from cancer be construed to make premarital sex seem "okay." It is a little depressing waching this film and noticing that the attitudes it shows -- that sex before marriage is some sort of taboo which must be enforced by ignorance and vulnerability to negative consequences -- are still with us today. The point that social pressure to be sexually attractive and active must be met by a response more compassionate than rigid repression allows is impassionedly made by Ellis to the governors, who present a wall of hostility, arrogance, and superiority: "You ask for charity, we ask for chastity," says one of them, a smarmy lawyer played by Raymond Huntley. Meanwhile, Whiteley, last seen hitching a ride with a creepy, randy young truckdriver on her way to an uncertain future in London, is deemed not of great importance to the school's governors, since she has left the school and the district; the possibility of scandal besmirching respectability trumping any compassionate considerations.

Director Robert Hartford-Davis never made much of a name for himself as a director, going on to make a number of other exploitation films before going to America where he directed television before passing away in the late seventies.

Gate of Flesh (1964)

The 1960s and '70s were a fertile period for genre cinema in Japan: they impress me in much the same way as Hong Kong film of the eighties and nineties do with their combination of freewheeling creativity, style, and exploitation values, and probably no other filmmaker of the period did it as distinctively as Seijun Suzuki. He began making films at the Nikkatsu studios in the fifties but hit his full stride in the early to mid-sixties. They seem weird and arty today, with lots of bright color, weird visual flourishes and a cocktail-lounge cool, but art was the last thing on Suzuki's mind when he made them. To this day Suzuki maintains that he was not motivated by visual aesthetics or symbolism, or even a particular passion for film: it was just his job. He was a B-movie director, he will say, who worked on projects assigned by the studio, projects destined for the second-feature slot on the triple-feature programs which were standard in Japanese moviehouses at the time. Nevertheless, no one made pictures quite like Suzuki, and his influence is seen all over in Japanese exploitation film.

Gate of Flesh (Nikutai no mon, 1964) was my introduction to Suzuki's work, a melodrama set in postwar Tokyo during the early months of the Allied occupation, a time when devastation and poverty are everywhere and where survival is the main preoccupation. Maya (Yumiko Nogawa), a girl who has come from the countryside looking for work, joins a group of prostitutes: in exchange for their protection, she must abide by their code of conduct, rule number one being never to sleep with a man for free. Girls who break this rule are severely and brutally punished before being turned out to fend for themselves. Into this tight-knit group comes Shin (Jo Shishido), ex-soldier and petty criminal, wounded and on the run from the Allied MPs after stabbing a GI, and his guts and charisma prove attractive to all the girls, provoking infatuation and then dissension: when Maya finally sleeps with Shin, the others turn on them both, drumming Maya out of the group and betraying Shin to the local yakuza.

Gate of Flesh was based on a novel by Tajiro Tamura which was originally filmed in 1949 and has been filmed again twice since Suzuki's version. This was intended as a vehicle for Jo Shishido, a star who was a major box-office draw and one of the more out-there of Nikkatsu's tough-guy leads, and who worked with Suzuki on a number of films and always seemed to have a handle on what Suzuki was doing. Charismatic and tough in a very Japanese way (it's been my observation that just about every culture seems to have its own distinctive flavor of tough guy, at least as far as film is concerned), Shishido had a distinctive face (thanks in large part to cosmetic surgery early in his film career), a sonorous baritone and a crazy fire in his eyes that made him ideal for heavies and especially anti-heroes. As good as he is in this film, it is Nogawa who shines in this torrid and often bitter film as her character is whipped through all sorts of extreme emotions and appears to grow up before the viewer's eyes from a hungry, frightened and childlike newcomer to a coy and flirty teenager to the heartbreak and suffering of adulthood. Misako Tominaga is also noteworthy as an older member of the group who does not share the girls' dress, aggressive "American" manners, or their simplistic view of men and sex as a meal ticket.

The strongly drawn characters make for torrid drama, but Gate of Flesh is also memorable for its expressionistic visuals, its bitter and angry view of Japan's defeat in the war, and its pioneering venture into "pink" or softcore sexual content. Much of the Suzuki look has to do with longtime collaborator Takeo Kimura, who did production design for many of Suzuki's films, and much of it also has to do with the low budgets Suzuki had for his projects and the ways Suzuki and Kimura devised to get the most out of those budgets. Postwar rebuilding had eliminated most if not all traces of the devastation of the war, leaving no suitable locations, so a set was built from a warehouseful of scrap lumber being stored on Nikkatsu's lot, using labor that was recorded as routine cleaning and maintenance. Much has been made of the "symbolic" meaning of the color coordinated outfits, a color for each character, that Maya and her fellow hookers wear, but the main purpose of single colors was simply to distinguish them from the other hookers in the neighborhood, and it led to my favorite sequence when each of the girls shares her private thoughts about Shin in settings that match their outfits and have almost no continuity with the rest of their surroundings. Also, superimposition is used to show characters' points of view and reactions, as when a closeup of Nogawa's face, both anguished and ecstatic, is superimposed over Tominaga's punishment for her liaison with a mild-mannered schoolteacher.

Gate of Flesh's view of the aftermath of the war from the perspective of the Japanese is also interesting because it differs so much from the way we especially in the US have been taught about the Occupation. In 1964, anyone old enough to attend this film would probably have had some vivid memories of the period: its hardship and poverty, and the humiliation of living under the boot of foreigners. Suzuki himself had been called up towards the end of the war, and his own wartime memories were of retreating from the Phillippines and being shipwrecked after American fighters bombed his ship, and he has recalled candidly that his own view of the Americans at the time he made Gate of Flesh was less than positive for just this reason, and the sadness, bitterness, and anger of defeat hangs over the film like a cloud. Tominaga's character is a widow who lost her husband in the war, and Maya's brother was lost in Borneo, and Shin is a constant reminder to them both. For his part, Shin is cynical about politics, as are all the characters; they have the point of view of people whose lives have been up-ended by war, and who have little time for arguing over politics. The most moving passage of the movie on the topic of the war is when Shin and the girls get drunk together and Shin, his head shrouded by a rising sun flag covered with the names of his comrades, sings a soldier's song which fades into quiet weeping, and this flag figures in the end of the film, floating in the gutter, as the camera moves up and takes a long shot of the city and the Stars and Stripes flying in the distance.

Finally, Gate of Flesh is notable as a harbinger of what would eventually become a staple of Japanese genre film: sex. While small indie producers and distributors were already making softcore adult films, Gate of Flesh was reportedly the first major-studio film to go in the adult softcore direction with its nudity and disturbingly sadistic punishment scenes, scenes that even today will not sit well with many viewers, especially in the West. Japanese genre cinema would go further in the ensuing decades, and here we see the beginnings of what would become a major trend: nudity and themes of obsession, perversion and misogyny, which is hard to justify on moral or social grounds but also puts the "sex-obsessed" Western media in some perspective.

Richard Kern

In the eighties, when the feminist critique of sex and violence in the media was making headlines and gaining adherents on both the left and the right, "transgressive" and "confrontational" were the mantras for any artist working for "underground" cred, and New York City filmmaker Richard Kern made a reputation with no-budget Super-8 shorts full of violence, eroticism, gore, sleaze, and black comedy. In making these shorts Kern had the help of some very high-profile names on the cutting edge of the music and art community at the time: Lydia Lunch, Henry Rollins, David Wojnarowicz, Karen Finley, J. G. Thirlwell (probably better known as Foetus), the Butthole Surfers, Sonic Youth, Clint Ruin, and Nick Zedd were some of the people who appeared in or contributed music to Kern's films. Film Threat put out a collection of these films on a two volume VHS edition called Hardcore, and lately I picked up a double sided DVD from Third Wave Media called The Hardcore Collection: The Films of Richard Kern.

Kern's films are painted with a large brush and indulge just a little too enthusiastically in shock to be quite disturbing. Kern takes pleasure in flaunting taboos and engineering collisions of sexy and violent images, but does not, with the exceptions of The Right Side Of My Brain (1985) and Fingered (1986), which were both scripted by Lydia Lunch, go seriously into problems or issues, but stays mainly in a sort of neo-exploitation groove. The two Lunch collaborations explore her ambivalent attraction to -- and repulsion from -- male violence. The Right Side Of My Brain is narrated by Lunch while she appears in fantasy sequences with various ominous-looking men, before she in turn dominates another woman (and, yep, that tattooed guy there is indeed Henry Rollins). Fingered is a tale of Lunch and her psycho boyfriend on the road on a sort of punk-Starkweather rampage, sparked by the guy's jealousy and his penchant for spontaneous violence, with Lunch's character eventually becoming herself brutalized and brutalizing by the end of the film. These are also probably Kern's best films. The balance of Kern's work is rather spotty, with a collection of shorter films, Manhattan Love Suicides, showing some odd little stories, such as a grimacing man following a middle-aged artist home and who spontaneously loses an arm and busts open a jugular when he doesn't get attention, in "Stray Dogs." You Killed Me First, with David Wojnarowicz and Karen Finley as the uptight parents of a misunderstood, rebellious daughter played by Lung Leg, a frequent Kern player, is a hilarious black comedy. Other films, like Submit To Me (1986) and Submit To Me Now (1987), are sorts of post-punk stag film which string together a lot of sexual and violent images with little concern for structure or theme, or the filmmaker indulging his interest in various kinks, which have a sort of peep-show charm to them, if you enjoy that sort of thing. The Evil Cameraman (1986) and My Nightmare (1993) are digs at Kern himself as a pervy filmmaker who gets rebuffed by women who come to his shoots.

In essence, Kern's aesthetic in these films is little removed from that of the kid who takes the opportunity of getting his friends together to make as wild a film as he can while his parents are away, which makes his work look more energetic and surprisingly less nihilistic over time. In time and in general tenor of material, he has a lot in common with "transgressive" underground artists and musicians like Genesis P-Orridge and G. G. Allin, without the pompous baggage that often went along with their work. In recent years Kern has been working mostly as a photographer, continuing a fascination with eroticism and voyeurism but in a lighter vein than at the time he made these films, but his films have had some influence, mainly on the fringes on the culture where art, porn, and the underground meet, as on the popular website Suicide Girls and their punk-meets-pinup aesthetic, and in the films of Bruce LaBruce, an underground filmmaker based in Toronto, who paid homage to Kern in his Super 8 1/2 with a cameo by Kern and a parody called Submit To My Finger.

BRUSH WITH GREATNESS? Lung Leg was one of Kern's more frequently-appearing performers, both as model and in speaking roles, and her presence in these films is hard to forget. Fragile and gangly in appearance, she looked hurt and vulnerable, but also tough and, above all, full of rage. Her presence embodied the "punk" attitude in Kern's films probably even better than Lydia Lunch's appearances. Lung Leg also appeared on the cover of Sonic Youth's album Evol in a photo taken by Kern at the time when Kern and the band were collaborating. When I saw these films for the first time about five years ago, I discussed them with my friend Susan and she told me that Lung Leg actually lived here in Minneapolis for awhile, which made me remember when I worked for a Kinko's on Lake and Hennepin some years ago and had some encounters with a woman who occasionally came in to make copies. She was pale, mostly dressed in black, with dark hair, cat-eye glasses, and dark lipstick which always seemed to be smeared. As a customer I remember her as somewhat curt and antisocial. I also seem to remember her waiting for buses in the neighborhood. I never learned her name or met her socially, and it was only years later, after having seen these films and discussed them with Susan that I began to wonder whether this mystery woman might not have been Lung Leg. If so, what brought her to Minneapolis? Did underground film fans recognize her on the street? What did she think of the films she made with Kern? After a few encounters, I never saw her again, and I don't think these questions will ever be answered.