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“What’s up, Doc?”

From The Movie, Chapter 33 (1980). -– J.R.

It was in 1940 that a brisk, buck-toothed city rabbit first sank teeth into carrot. briefly paused, gazed with indifferent aplomb at a lisping country rabbit-hunter with a shotgun and coolly inquired: ‘What’s up, Doc?’ This official debut of Bugs Bunny occurred at the beginning of A Wild Hare, one of nine cartoons that were supervised that year by Fred (known as ‘Tex’) Avery, a brilliant animator from Dallas who was working for Warner Brothers. The cartoon won an Academy Award nomination and the durable comedy team of Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd promptly went into business.

‘That darn wabbit!’

Bugs Bunny, first seen in Porky’s Hare Hunt (1938), had a complicated cross-bred genealogy. Remembering the ‘What’s up, Doc?’ expression from his high-school days in Texas, Avery had decided to place it in the mouth of a sharp Brooklynese rabbit who knew everything. Avery later recalled in an interview:

‘So when we hit on the rabbit we decided he was going to be a smart-aleck rabbit, but casual about it, and I think the opening line in the first one was, “Eh, what’s up, Doc?,’ And gee, it floored ‘em! They expected the rabbit to scream, or anything but make a casual remark — here’s a guy with a gun in his face! It got such a laugh that we said, “Boy, we’ll do that every chance we get.” It became a series of “What’s up, Docs?” ‘

Avery’s account neatly illustrates a principle of comic dynamics underlying much of the anarchism and violence in Hollywood cartoons. The formal function of cool understatement in relation to comic mayhem is surprise and contrast — and part of the special talent of a madcap, colloquial animator like Avery lies in establishing calm centers in the midst of slapstick hurricanes. This is rather like what Buster Keaton did in live-action films during the silent era when he used his own imperturbable poker-face to provide a foil to the tumultuous world he often encountered. Bugs Bunny with his cool ‘What’s up, Doc?’ was arguably the first major exponent of this principle in cartoons. But he had many followers; not just other Avery creations, like the memorable basset hound Droopy (born at MGM in 1941), but equally nonplussed figures such as the Road Runner and The Pink Panther, who were created by fellow animators.

Cat and mouse games

A related principle in cartoon dynamics is the way that certain long-term antagonists are initially conceived as functions of one another, so that Bugs without Elmer Fudd (or an equivalent enemy) is like a cart without a horse. This certainly seems to have been the case with the creation of Tom and ]erry in Puss Gets the Boot (1941), an MGM cartoon produced by Rudolf Ising (whose cartoon character Little Cheeser was a forerunner of Jerry) and jointly directed, without credit, by newcomers William Hanna and Joseph Barbera. Although in this effort Tom went under the name of Jasper and Jerry had not yet acquired a name of any sort, the essential rules and conditions of their sadomasochistic relationship were already clearly established.

Tom is ordered by Mammy Two-Shoes, the stereotyped black maid always seen from the viewpoint of cat and mouse and never glimpsed above her apron, to catch Jerry and suffers cruel, brutal and protracted punishment as a consequence (which leads in turn to him getting the boot from Mammy). He undergoes a series of horrific tortures that were to grow more complex and graphic over the years as the pace of the cartoons quickened and the salient facial expressions of cat and mouse became better defined. It would be misleading to call Tom and ]erry the cartoon equivalents of the Three Stooges, yet it does seem evident that the proportion of sheer physical pain endured in their respective shorts, compared to that in other types of comedy, gives them a similar association in the public mind — an association of slapstick with ill-tempered aggressiveness and violent physical abuse.

In all fairness to both sides in the long debate about the nature of cartoon violence, a remark made by Pete Burness, a participant in a 1963 press conference with animator Chuck ]ones, bears repeating:

‘In the American cartoon, death, human defeat, is never presented without being followed by resurrection, transfiguration. A cartoon character can very easily be crushed and made into a plate by a steam roller, may be fragmented, cut up by a biscuit-cutting machine, but he gets up immediately, intact and full of life, in the next shot. So it seems obvious to me that the American cartoon, rather than glorifying death, is a permanent illustration of the theme of rebirth.’

Getting the bird

This sounds quite fitting in relation to the unswerving optimism and quixotic faith in his own ingenuity held by Wile E. Coyote as he repeatedly endeavors (and fails) to trap the Road Runner — suffering grotesque accidents and indignities all the while — in a series of cartoons launched by Chuck Jones in 1948.

But if Tom and Jerry, like Bugs and Elmer, can be regarded as antagonistic characters who are generally accorded nearly equal status, it might be argued that the Road Runner, by way of contrast, is scarcely a character at all. More precisely he appears to be an almost impersonal force in the universe — a force bent on tempting, testing, eluding, defeating and then once again inspiring the indefatigable Coyote to try again with his wide and inexhaustible assortment of Acme implements.

Indeed, the endlessly repeated gags and actions in Road Runner cartoons are invariably perceived from the vantage point of the hapless Coyote — a character as well-developed as Bugs Bunny or Jerry Mouse (who, significantly and unlike Elmer or Tom, are also frequently characterized through their personal selections of domestic furnishings, in caves, holes and crevices) — although he never utters a word. The fact that Chuck Jones was central to the development of Bugs, Coyote, Daffy Duck, Speedy Gonzales, Sylvester the Cat and other cartoon favorites at Warners may help to explain why these characters intermittently seem to share some of the same tired humanity in their plaintively drooping features — above all, immediately before and after disaster strikes them.

As a rule, an audience feels less mitigating sympathy (or empathy) for a Road Runner or a Woody Woodpecker because they are not substantial enough as personalities to encourage such sentiment. Woody was an invention of Walter Lantz at Universal around the same time that Avery and his cohorts were concocting Bugs Bunny at Warners. Lantz’s honorary Academy Award in l979 emphasized, in particular, his creation of this cheerful, noisy bird. An aggressive plumed creature with a somewhat abrasive five-note hoot of triumph that was musically integrated into his theme song, Woody can perhaps best be compared to Screwy Squirrel — an aberrant Avery creation who lasted through only five cartoons in the mid-Forties — as a set of loony, hysterical reflexes rather than a full-blown character.

By the same token, the Woody Woodpecker cartoons — animated over the years by Shamus Culhane, then Don Peterson and later Paul Smith — can sometimes be regarded as pleasurable with or without the behavioral charms of their hero. More often than not Woody was a prop in setting up gags rather than a comic persona in his own right. In The Hypnotic Hick (1953) — one of the few cartoons made in 3-D — he is characteristically cast as a delivery boy who has to present a letter to a buzzard on a construction site, a mere conduit in the chain of visual gags.

The coolest cat

Much the same could be said for a later cartoon character, the Pink Panther, however removed the Panther’s suave demeanor may be from the woodpecker’ s shrill hyperventilation. Considering that the Panther’s debut was in the animated credits of Blake Edwards’ live-action The Pink Panther (1963) — the feature which also introduced Peter Sellers’ bumbling Inspector Clouseau — it seems possible that cartoon director Friz Freleng (a former Bugs Bunny animator) and animator Ken Harris might have taken some of their inspiration from the debonair David Niven — another star in the film — in delineating their animal’s cool composure. The blander virtues of the American television cartoon The Pink Panther Show, produced by Freleng and David H. DePatie, can perhaps be ascribed to the built-in blandness of the medium itself — with its pumped-in laugh tracks giving home viewers less opportunities to think or feel for themselves. These Pink Panther cartoons are, on the whole, less violent than Forties cartoons though the Panther, embarking on some quest to satisfy his curiosity or prove his determination, is occasionally badly injured. The more horrendous casualties, however, are reserved for the Clouseau cartoon character, often left charred black by a stick of dynamite thrust back at him at the crucial moment by his adversary (usually a fat French villain with a broken nose and a five o’clock shadow).

The limitations imposed by television are noticeable in the work of other Hollywood animators: Avery’s commercials for an insect spray and powdered soft drink (the latter featuring Bugs Bunny) and Hanna-Barbera characters like Yogi Bear, Huckleberry Hound and the Flintstones. Among the heavyweights it appears that only Chuck Jones has been fortunate enough to preserve his autonomy in TV specials — reminding older viewers what anarchistic cartoon slapstick was really like when Hollywood was in its heyday.

JONATHAN ROSENBAUM

Old Remake for a New City?

From The Soho News (June 11, 1980). — J.R.

Underground U.S.A.

A film by Eric Mitchell

St. Mark’s Cinema, midnight

“Sometimes I think most of the ’70s is being spent in

cars, discussing remakes,” a Hollywood assistant once

woefully remarked to me. She didn’t know how lucky she

was. Sometimes, in my less happy moods, I think that

most of the 80s will be spent in theaters, watching the

same remakes that were being discussed in the ’70s.

Willie & Phil -- Paul Mazursky’s remake of Jules and

Jim, set in the American ’70s — isn’t opening for a couple

of months yet. John Carpenter’s The Fog and several

other recent quickies have already remade Carpenter’s

Halloween, which was itself a partial remake of The Thing

(which Carpenter is now planning to remake more directly).

And to round off this minisurvey of new, original

thinking (if you want to exalt the conventional, call it

classical), the new Eric Mitchell film, the l6mm

Underground U.S.A., which already sounds like a remake

of Sam Fuller’s Underworld U.S.A. — is actually

described in its own pressbook as a remake of a remake:

“Taking the classic theme of Sunset Boulevard seen

through Heat,” Underground U.S.A. ”tells the tale of the

end of a superstar of the ’60s, and the dissolution of an era

when everyone thought they had a chance to be a star.”

Mitchell’s fashionable punk feature was playing to a

packed house, extra folks choking the aisles, when I

caught it last weekend at the Theater for the New City,

site of the old Gate Cinema before moving to St. Mark’s

Cinema. What new city, one wonders, could possibly

grow out of these ashes? I can’t deny, though, that

Underground U.S.A. is attractively shot (by Tom Di

Cillo) in rich, chalky colors that are beautifully lit, and

that a few striking moments flare across its features.

Much of the latter can be charged up to some deft, fleeting

mime from Taylor Mead in the opening sequence. and

some rock and punk records that are used to accompany

various long takes.

***

Several viewers have already suggested that Eric

Mitchell’s third feature (after Kidnapped and Red Italy,

the latter of which echoes a few scenic effects from

Antonioni and Fellini, “remakes” Fassbinder, and I must

confess that the cross-reference that sprang to mind most

often wasn’t Heat or Sunset Boulevard, but

Katzelmacher. Deliberately or not, both movies are a lot

about poses and posing — standing still for the portrait

maker — and the boredom that inevitably arises from this

work. I think it’s relevant to what bothers me about

Underground U.S.A. that Mitchell could turn to a

conservative, defeatist cynic like Fassbinder — the W.C.

Fields of the new German cinema -– for his inspiration.

(If European punk insolence is what he’s after, he might

have settled on something tougher, like the work of Chantal

Akerman — who is not so much the Nancy as the two-

fisted Sluggo of the movement. )

The over-familiar plot, whereby a wealthy ex-star (Patti

Astor) picks up a hustler (Eric Mitchell)’ pretends to

launch a comeback, fails, and takes a lot of pills and

booze, isn’t so much delineated this time around as

periodically referred to, in order to keep the movie going.

At no point does it seem to carry much conviction for the

actors involved, most of whom seem happier when

they’re merely asked to stand (or lie) still, and the

dramatic burden is assumed by rock and punk records.

As with Heart Beat (a “remake” of On the Road), one

often feels that most of the director’s mental energy is being

spent composing specific camera setups, and that

most of the ideas in the film come from the separate shots,

not from whatever unity lies between them. One also feels

that Mitchell is relatively in command –- dramatically,

filmically — every time he lets an old pro actor like Mead

or a snazzy single dictate the movie’s own heartbeat. (It

seems significant that the high point of Red ltaly occurs

when “Be-bop-a-lou-la” is on the soundtrack.) Yet he

seems to be at a distinct loss every time his script and/or

his less resourceful actors — including Astor and Mitchell

himself — have to ply their way through a rhythmic

vacuum. The actors don’t know what to do at these moments,

the words won’t tell them, and spectators often fidget

through these awkward pauses, too, helped along

by an occasional half-uncertain giggle.

***

One could theoretically find (and, I suppose, look for)

“deconstructive” virtues in this sort of enterprise, and

argue that Mitchell is burying the joint legacies of Billy

Wilder (Sunset Boulevard) and Paul Morrissey (Heat)

by reproducing affectless versions of each, rather like Andy

Warhol. One could also find, perhaps, some punk virtue

in the acute physical discomfort that seems to inflict most

of Mitchell’s characters — signs of unresolvable frustration

that are reproduced in the spectator’s own restlessness.

(”Fun’s not fun after a point,” Rene Ricard remarks

to Astor in a dimly lit bar that might be the Mudd Club. ” l

never have any fun’” are Mitchell’s closing words in the

film, and I believe him.)

The trouble with this argument — as well as its seductiveness

– is that it excuses anything, fashion included. I’d rather point

out the interesting mise en scène conducted around objects

on a breakfast table., a lovely miniature spotlight trained on

Astor in the back of a dark limo, and the delightful conjunction

of a two-tone. light-and-shade painting and a similarly designed

dress at the star’s unattended champagne party. They at least gave

me something to hold onto, unlike the disintegrating

characters and plot.

Film Criticism on Canvas

From the June 1982 American Film. — J.R.

Fans of the brilliant, eccentric, and pioneering film critic Manny Farber who have been regretting his recent absence from the scene simply haven’t been looking in the right places. In fact, the sixty-five-year-old writer, teacher, and former carpenter has been a painter even longer than he’s been a critic, and over the past few years he’s been doing what he calls “auteur” paintings — canvases that recast the subjects and methods of his criticism in a number of fascinating ways.

Using a bird’s-eye view of small objects on a stagelike platform, his paintings, paens to such directors as Howard Hawks [see Howard Hawks II, 1977,  472 x 500, above], Sam Peckinpah, Marguerite Duras, and William Wellman illuminate the filmmakers’ styles and themes. “The compositions and structures are always always based on my take on the directors,” Farber says. “And they’re critical in the fact that I’m usually going away from what I think is known territory, in painting as well as in movies.”

One example of Farber’s oddball approach is his Stan & Ollie, which is full of references to the comedies of Laurel and Hardy, but scarcely uses their faces at all. “I wouldn’t dream of doing anything that would be that easy or straight — it would seem corny to me,” Farber explains, going on to describe his strategy of seeing all their films as minimal one-to-one compositions — one body, object, shape, or mass against another. (The painting was originally called 1 + 1.)

In the case of Thank God I’m Still an Atheist, his 1981 tribute to Luis Buñuel (535 x 420 in size), Farber is playing with all sorts of toys and objects that are distinctly Buñuelian. Tarotlike cards bear stray phrases, words, and images — “de jour” from Belle de jour, “Rey” from Fernando Rey, a cow from L’age d’or, a bell from Tristana.

Some details are puns expressed in rebus form, so that one card with a milk bottle beside another with a licking tongue and the word “way” equals The Milky Way. Small boxes labeled “1. vehicles” and “2. junk of little importance” seem to denote Farber’s particular affection for Buñuel’s Mexican B-films. On the right, beside a watermelon slice and a lynx, is an eye violated or stabbed by a cross — which illustrates the way that Catholicism (the crucifix) and Surrealism (the sliced eye of Un chien andalou) are often virtually interchangeable in Buñuel’s movies.

In addition, according to Farber, “the painting’s whole compositional strategy was based on that zigzag walk that the hero of El does — up the big staircase, or across the institution grounds at the end –whenever he’s in a fury of psychological frustration and anger. That always struck me as one of the most beautiful Buñuelisms, and so instead of a serpentine circling out of this circular painting, I decided to do a zigzag. It made that picture enormously difficult, because it’s a hard thing to pull off. Critically, it’s trying to do something with the black humor of Buñuel almost all the way through.”

Farber’s paintings have been exhibited in New York, Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, and La Jolla. The next showing is being planned at the Gagosian Gallery in Los Angeles. – Jonathan Rosenbaum

Problems with Pasolini

From The Soho News (June 4, 1980). -– J.R.

Porcile (Pigpen)

A Film by Pier Paolo Pasolini

Bleecker Street Cinema, June 6

Salò

A Film by Pier Paolo Pasolini

Based on the 120 Days of Sodom

By the Marquis de Sade

Bleecker Street Cinema, June 11 and 12

“The problem with Pasolini,” a friend observed to me succinctly many years ago, “is that he wants to be fucked by Jesus and Marx at the same time.” A “pre-industrial,” populist poet and novelist from northern Italy whose relation to the Catholic Church and the Italian Communist Party were as passionately idiosyncratic as the homoeroticism of his films, Pasolini remains, nearly five years after his brutal murder, an indigestible provocateur in relation to our culture – someone who can be neither entirely absorbed nor totally rejected, but lingers like a troubling, irritating sore.

The recent and very belated release of his version of The Canterbury Tales (1972), the second part of his “trilogy of life” after The Decameron (1971), offers spectators a chance to catch more farting jokes than can probably found in Blazing Saddles. His vastly superior version of The Arabian Nights (1974), which rounds off the trilogy –- probably the most sustained flirtation with paganism to be found in his work –- has yet to reach these provincial shores.

Pigpen (1969) and Salò (1975), on the other hand –- two somewhat related and much less hopeful movies about the worst in us, which are turning up in successive weeks (and on three separate double bills) at the Bleecker – are still around to demonstrate what makes this director so problematical.

Salò, I should confess, is the only conceivably great film that I can think of that I’ve felt no strong desire to see more than once: rightly or wrongly, I decided that the one time I saw it (at La Pagode in Paris, four years ago) was more than enough. Pigpen I’ve seen twice: at the 1969 New York Film Festival, and late last month (through the courtesy of New Line Cinema, its 16mm distributor); and neither time has it seemed like a great film, or even a very good one –- although it sure smacks a lot of the late 60s now.

***

Pigpen intercuts two horrific stories. In one, a silent, starving hippie (Pierre Clementi) in a vaguely medieval period, wandering through a striking volcanic wasteland (a splendid location used at the end of Pasolini’s 1968 Teorema), becomes a cannibal and attracts a band of followers, all of whom are caught and sentence to death by representatives of the Church. Just before he’s tied down to be devoured by dogs – a fate only discreetly hinted at in long shot – the hero utters one sentence several times: “I killed my father, ate human flesh, and I tremble with joy.”

In the other story, a talkative, wealthy, German hippie named Julien Klotz (Jean-Pierre Léaud, with an Italianate fringe of beard), son of a powerful industrialist, pontificates about feeling split between the student revolutionaries and the conformists to an adoring, radical admirer (Anne Wiazemsky) in and around a palatial mansion. Then, as he goes into and out of a cataleptic coma, his father (Alfredo Lionello, with a Hitler moustache), learns from a private detective (Marco Ferreri) that a competitor he’s planning a merger with (Ugo Tognazzi) is a former Nazi butcher with a facelift, while the former Nazi learns from his own private detective that Julien, an apparent virgin, has been regularly fucking a pig. As the magnates celebrate their newly formed joint empire of “beer, buttons, and cannons,” a peasant (Ninetto Davoli – a Pasolini standby who also witnesses the demise of Clementi in the other story) reports that Julien has been eaten alive by a pig. After being assured that not a single trace of Julien is left, the Nazi says, “Okay. Shhh! Don’t tell anyone.” End of movie.

Primarily a writer in his conceptions, Pasolini doesn’t always translate well. Even without any fluency in Italian, I’m inclined to blame part of the stiffness of Pigpen on the unhappy English subtitler, who lets Wiazemsky say of her fiancé, Puby Jannings, “His reformism is clean, his morale strong,” and allows a poetic refrain of Julien to come across like a parodic, disco version of Look Homeward, Angel: “A fallen leaf…a creaking door…a grunt.” But part of the blame can be placed on Pasolini, too. The actors in question here are the second Mme. Godard and the movie-star stand-in for the French egos of Truffaut, Godard, Rivette, Eustache, and even Bertolucci; the fact that they’re both supposed to be German (along with Lionello, Ferreri, and Tognazzi) –- although they’re dubbed by other actors to speak Italian, thereby depriving them of half their acting equipment –- helps to account for some of the allegorical fuzziness and material indifference, which allows Pasolini to wallow in certain tortured pet conceits without ever really testing them.

The conception of Pigpen remains basically literary, despite the rather mechanical decision to alternate between extreme long shots and close medium shots in both intercut stories. Beyond this repetitive seesawing pattern, the staging of the German story is so subservient to the verbiage that the mindless ricochet between angle and reverse-angle in the dialogue quickly comes to resemble painting with numbers. (The Clementi sequences work much better in film terms even though they seem to occur east of nowhere, because the volcanic landscape functions at least as an exciting location.) It seems significant that virtually all the horror-show stuff about consumerism, cannibalism, and bestiality is kept stubbornly offscreen, making the movie more of a blueprint or prospectus than a realized construction.

***

I wouldn’t –- couldn’t -– say the same thing about the terrifying Salò, which, as the late Roland Barthes pointed out, derives its powerful impact largely from its literalness: staging the tortures of de Sade’s The 120 Days of Sodom point by point, detail by detail, even though Pasolini enforces a kind of shotgun marriage between this novel and a relatively recent historical phenomenon by situating all his simulated atrocities in the last stronghold of Italian Fascism, established in a town on Lake Geneva in 1943. Like it or not, Salò is a realized work that accomplishes a good deal of what it sets out to do -– to appall us with the spectacle of our own worst capacities, and to confront us with the even more disturbing and conflicted responses that this may elicit in us.

If the underlying motto of Jean Renoir’s profoundly humanist The Rules of the Game (1939) is that “everyone has his own reasons,” the terrible achievement of Pasolini’s last work is to turn this notion on its head – assume that everyone can be regarded as an object – and then apply this postulate to the most disgusting antihuman events imaginable, while retaining the Renoir strategy of refusing to take sides.

It is this adamant refusal on Pasolini’s part that makes the experience of watching Salò so unbearable – the deliberate absence of a fixed moral perspective from which we can conceivably identify with either side, the torturers or the tortured. Unlike, say, Jack Nicholson’s Porky Pig imitations in The Shining, there is nothing in Salò that allows us to feel superior to the people that we’re watching, and the lack of this solace soon becomes horrifying.

Barcelona Boogie and Pittsburgh Punk

From The Soho News (June 4, 1980). In the interests of full disclosure, I should note that Jackie Raynal was and is one of my dearest friends. — J.R.

Deux Fois

A Film by Jackie Raynal

Bleecker Street Cinema, June 9

Debt Begins at Twenty

A Film by Stephanie Beroes

Millennium, May 24

Recalling my four successive visits to the Cannes Film Festival in the early ’70s — when the daily glut of movies and accompanying hardsell was already enough to turn a hardened film freak into a deflated beachball — I still harbor fond memories of the kind of movies that used to spend my days looking for, and the ones that would savor for days more, days on end, once I found them. They were movies that allowed me and Cannes to slow down and linger a bit and regain our strength, and afforded us that pleasure by refusing to hype us into or out of anything that denied either of us the solipsistic joy of total self-absorption.

By taking their own sweet time (all the time in the world) to explore their own bittersweet fantasies, and allowing us to follow them only if we insisted, these movies were like little self-contained oases conjured up and plunked down improbably in the midst of camel stampedes, which is probably why so many of my colleagues hated them — and why most of you, in turn, have heard of so few of them, if any at all. (Pedro Portabella’s Vampyr, James B. Harris’s Some Call It Loving, Werner Schroeter’s The Death of Maria Malibran and Nelson Pereira dos Santos’ Who Is Beta? are four characteristically lush and obscure examples that spring to mind.)

As luck would have it, I never had the pleasure of discovering Jackie Raynal’s Deux Fois (Two Times) in those circumstances, even though it was made by a Frenchwoman around the same period — a professional film editor on a visit to Barcelona and environs in 1969. (Today, Raynal is a New York filmmaker and a programmer at the Bleecker Street Cinema, whose Monday Independent Cinema series coincidentally included The Death of Maria Malibran when it started back in April, and concludes with a double bill of Deux Fois and Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen’s Riddles of the Sphinx, on June 9.)

But if I’d seen Deux Fois at Cannes back then, I’m sure it would have gotten me over a few lumps. And even though this is years later, when Francophobla seems to be raging, and hippies are prone to be regarded as less appealing than (say) the German measles — when, in short, the specter of a goofy French avant-garde hippie film of that period isn’t likely to sound very fashionable –- it just might get you over a few lumps, too,if you give it half a chance.

***

Deux Fois was made in 35mm and black and white, features Raynal in practically every sequence, and has no plot of any sort. Instead of a story it gives you a flow of sequential events that formally rhyme with each other in a variety of ways, so that the title is a succinct representation of the method involved (although there are certain things that the film gives us three, four or five times, too, always with distinct variations). Consequently, on one level the movie is a kind of elementary editing puzzle that asks, “How did I get from this long-take sequence to this one that follows it?” and/or “What are the sexy forms of duplicity between these two sequences — their secret points of agreement and accord, as well as their strongest points of tension?” It’s a film, in other words, about a couple, and about coupling — there is a man who appears with Raynal in many of the sequences — as well as repetition.

Perhaps because Raynal made Deux Fois after a long stint of editing commercial French narrative films (including several early works by Eric Rohmer). there is a liberating feel to it that, all proportions guarded, may have something to do with those obscure oases that I used to cherish at Cannes — a sense of ease regained, of identity tasted and slowly chewed. Raynal’s self-absorption, which occasionally suggests a flipped-out, female version of Jacques Tati’s Hulot character — Iuxuriates in the space that it affords itself like a puppy in clover, and whether you feel like stepping inside it or not obviously has a lot to do with your own temperament.

“All the images of our imaginations are real,” Raynal declares in an early autonomous sequence. At their best, the sequences of Deux Fois are like neatly sculpted, delicately lit arenas where different versions of this postulate can be staged, by Raynal and spectators alike. Solipsistic, masturbatory games, to be sure. But isn’t the camera a solipsistic instrument, and moviegoing largely a solipsistic activity — regardless of their manifold alibis and social excuses (which is what most film criticism is all about)? Deux Fois is perhaps an avant-garde film first of all because it allows itself no shame whatsoever for reveling in the pleasures to be found in those simple facts.

***

Whether Deux Fois should be regarded as a feminist film - as was implied by the detailed coverage given itin the first issue of Camera Obscura (”A Journal of Feminism and Film Theory”) in 1976 -– is a differentn matter, and one questioned by Raynal herself in a recent interview (to be published in a double issue of Millennium Film Joumal. due out this fall). In a similar spirit. Stephanie Beroes decided to omit Recital, a 1978 short she described as feminist, from her program of recent work at Millennium last Saturday, because, she said, it didn’t seem to fit the context of the other two films she was showing.

Not that Valley Fever and Debt Begins at Twenty, the films in question, have very much in common –- apart from a graceful craft evident in everything from the hand-held camerawork to the jump cuts and other kinds of transitions. The former movie, a 20-minute short completed early last year, is a conceptual work about perception that takes off from a text by phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty beginning, “There is a perceptual uneasiness in the state of being conscious.” Debt Begins at Twenty, which is twice as long, is a “docudrama” about Bill Bored, the drummer in a New Wave band known as the Cardboards, shot entirely in Pittsburgh.

Beroes, who is 27, has divided much of her recent time between Pittsburgh and San Francisco, pointed out at the screening that one of the differences between the punk scenes in both cities is that the one to be found in Pittsburgh is basically working class, while the one in San Francisco seems to be made up largely of middle-class art students. Certainly a lot of the charm of Debt Begins at Twenty has something directly to do with its youthful cast, which consists mainly of the members of three New Wave groups -– the Cardboards, the Dykes, and the Shakes (the latter now known as Combo Tactics) – who provide one another with serious and enthusiastic audiences.

***

Starting and ending with a Dick Tracy comic strip about punk, the film faithfully follows the movements of Bored in trying unsuccessfully to sell his used record albums, watching TV, reading a comic, talking on the phone and singing “Low Level Radiation” with his band. The images are helpfully outfitted with handwritten subtitles that either duplicate or supplement what’s heard; one that appears over the performance just cited is, “Warning: There is no footage of A-bombs in this picture.”

All three of the bands involved recall some of the spastic/elastic/plastic conceits of a James Chance (or a Brad Dourif, offering a punk performance as the lead hayseed in John Huston’s Wise Blood) without quite the same degree of anger/angularity/anguish. As a modest celebration of music growing like a hothouse flower out of the grayness of Pittsburgh, the movie reminded me in spots of A Hard Day’s Night, Having a Wild Weekend, and even some of the Sam Katzman exploitation specials featuring Bill Haley and Chubby Checker. Different musicians are asked the same questions (e.g., “How would you like to die?”), and we get stirring renditions of such homegrown classics as “I’m Bored,” “Hysterectomy” and “You Need a New Outfit”. (The latter leads off with the intriguing refrain, “Pretend your mind is a dress –- change it.”)

It’s entirely in the nature of the movie’s celebratory punk spirit that it points to (and snickers at) some of its own supposed technical flaws. An “AKG mike” is indicated, Dick-Tracy-like, with an arrow in one subtitle over a shot that allegedly shows us Bored sitting alone; and when Sesame Spinelli, a vocalist with the Dykes, looks the hero up in the final sequence (preceded by the title, “Six Months Earlier”) and winds up making love with him to a joyfully gyrating camera, the self-conscious acting and banal, embarrassed dialogue between them is happily lingered over. Reminiscent at times of some of the early romps of Warren Sonbert involving silent footage of frolicking friends and rock music, Debt Begins at Twenty provides as much honest fun as a day on the beach.