(3 of 4)
Most of the new film makers are as far out as their films. Many of them are poets and painters who belong to the New Bohemia and can be found on Manhattan's Lower East Side or in San Francisco's North Beach. They are apt to wear hair to the shoulders and beards to the ears; some smoke grass and turn on frequently with LSD. A few can count on a small, steady income from film rentals. But most under ground moviemakers, though their movies as a rule cost less than $500, feel lucky if they break even.
Inevitably, the kooks and the kinks have given the new cinema a bad press. At the center of the movement, however, stands a creative cluster of imaginative moviemakers. Among them:
Robert Nelson, 36, a 6-ft. 3-in. San Franciscan, is a black-and-blue humorist who made one of the comic classics of the experimental cinema. Oh, Dem Watermelons is a daffy documentary about all the horrible things that can happen to watermelons. They get kicked like footballs, gutted like chickens, smashed on sidewalks, slashed with ice skates, riddled by bullets, split open and rubbed over the bodies of beautiful women. The monstrous irrelevance of it all is fracturingly funny—until suddenly the spectator realizes that the watermelon is meant to symbolize the Negro.
Marie Menken, 57, wife of Willard Maas, an avant-garde bard who made some well-known experimental movies in the '40s, is possibly the finest film poet the underground has produced. She has a subtle feel for rhythms, a grand flair for colors and a gay wild way with a camera that leaves the eye spinning. In Lights, a 5½-minute study of Manhattan after dark, she slashes at her subject with a camera as an action painter slashes at his canvas, and the great stone city breaks up into a wriggling calligraphy of flash and filigree.
Kenneth Anger, 34, is the wild man of the movement and one of its most creative craftsmen. A fanatical occultist, he practices the blood rites of devil worship and has splashed the walls of his San Francisco pad with a Nazi banner and words written in blood. Anger's notorious Scorpio Rising is a jaggedly cubistic piece of black cinema that examines the big strong she-men who gun along with the cycle cult. The movie concludes with a satanic black-jacketed bacchanal that looks like the last stages of an amphetamine nightmare.
Ron Rice, a hard-living New Yorker who died in 1964 at the age of 29 while shooting a film in Mexico, made the most affecting movie that the new cinema has turned out to date: The Flower Thief. Certainly a vagrant, possibly an imbecile, the film's hero wanders the streets of San Francisco by day, a grown man pulling a little wagon that carries his Teddy bear. At night he goes back to the abandoned factory where a gang of derelicts chases him through the cellars with a terrible silent intensity. As interpreted with a marvelous simplicity by Taylor Mead, a Beat poet, the hero is part Chaplin and part Myshkin —a holy idiot, unaccommodated man.