But Wait, There's More!

[The next in the series, in which I start to lay out the conceptual parameters of the investigation more thoroughly.]

You've probably all heard of Manny Farber's "termite art" (as opposed to "white elephant art"). This stuff I'm exploring is more like "fairyfly art" -- fairyflies, actually parasitic wasps (which makes the metaphor more suggestive!), are the smallest insects in existence.

I mentioned in my last post that this stuff just gets weirder and weirder, and I think there is a historically important truth hidden in that weirdness. The film world between 1955 and 1975 was undergoing profound changes, perhaps the most profound since the coming of sound. Television production was challenging film production, but a lot of the same people were involved both in TV production and low-budget film production. The studio system was breaking down a bit, especially with regard to controlling actors. "New waves" were transforming national cinemas around the world. Widescreen cinema started to take hold; black and white photography became increasingly anachronistic. (I first typed "antagonistic" -- now there's a meaningful slip!)

A lot of postwar talents, actors and others, found themselves by the late Fifties either drifting into TV, or lower-budget productions, or films made internationally and on the fly with unconventional funding, or their own self-productions, or all of these. So the shape of both existing careers and newly launched careers got odder. Think of as big a star as Errol Flynn ending his career with a peculiar foreign-shot vanity production like Cuban Rebel Girls. That's more than just an oddity or a joke; that's the sort of thing that was increasingly happening regularly.

Genres and film styles started to morph based on these patterns -- consider the internationalization of the Western, for example. Noir, already dying, was certainly affected, and spent its last decade in a sort of low-rent cinematic nursing home.

I'm collecting more examples of these phenomena, which I'll report on in a series of posts; it's too much material for one post. Here is a suitably disorienting specimen, which sounds a bit like noir-on-crack:

Time of The Heathen (Peter Kass, 1962)

The IMDB synopsis makes my head hurt:

"A wandering drifter, religious fanatic Gaunt, accidentally sees the rape/murder of a black woman, Marie, by farm boy Ted. The boy's father, Link accuses Gaunt of committing the crime and attempts to get his son to kill both Gaunt and another witness, Marie's mute son. The two victims escape, pursued by father, son and town sheriff Cal into the woods where Gaunt kills Ted and is wounded by Link. With an infected wound, the delirious Gaunt relives his past in flashback, revealing that he was one of the Enola Gay crew members responsible for dropping the atom bomb on Hiroshima.”

Come again?

This film was made by the short-lived production company of science fiction illustrator and experimental film-maker Ed Emshwiller. Director Peter Kass had acted in the American premiere of Sartre's play No Exit in 1946, under the direction of John Huston, and later was an acting coach to such stars as Faye Dunaway, Olympia Dukakis, and Val Kilmer. He wound up making "Law & Order" episodes.

The disorienting quality of such credits taken together tells an important story. Most actors, writers, directors, and other workers in the film/television/radio/theater business are not living high on the hog, doing satisfying project after satisfying project. Even those who fit that description often fit it only very briefly. For most, staying in the business involves eking things out, taking what comes along. And there were some very peculiar things coming along in that 1955-1975 period, in which entertainment kept shifting its shapes. I mean, a feature film in Esperanto? Smellovision and AromaRama? Otto Preminger directing Skidoo? Ed Wood (a more illustrative figure than most realize) directing anything? It was craziness, and it's fun to research.