The Demiurge and the American Eyesore

It is the custom of illuminated manuscripts to transform sacred words into shimmering icons which break, easily, beyond the sensory limitations of simple text, rendering ordinary letters into evocative, animate visual form that invites the eye to idle awhile at the brink of transcendence, rather than stand at a distance, remote and unyielding, daring to be comprehended, accepted, believed. Strange and barely recognizable wildlife appears on vellum leaves, creatures that wind and unwind in ceaseless whirlpools of bejeweled abstraction. Or they are, if you prefer, the spirited exoskeletons of snakes, dragons, waterbirds — Celtic and Germanic obsessions meeting the Apostles of Christendom. Emerging in the British Isles between 500–900 C.E., The Lindisfarne Gospels provide an arena, lapidary and starlit, where paganism devours Christianity while also birthing the religion anew into what can only be described, if you're honest, as “motion pictures.”

Put simply, movies are books, volumes of light, zoetic leaves and letters that move beyond their trellis, leaving us to decipher a purely visual enigma; all the more impossible to contain within mortal consciousness because the light of this steadfastly irrational art has swallowed up the text. There are those, however few in number, who have claimed to decode this cryptic iconography. But mysteries remain, not unlike those — strange, delved, bewildering — contained within the  gospels of Christianity.

These mysteries urge upon us a wholly radical reconsideration of silent cinema, of the book in film, of whispering pages. Pages fluttering like leaves. Of Stan Brakhage, who gave us a series of works entitled The Book of Film — yet otherwise seemed incapable of regarding the universe independent of its sensual properties. Of Hollis Frampton and Peter Greenaway and even Wes Anderson, and certainly of Robert Beavers, who incorporates the sound and motion of turning pages, placed in relationships and analogies with other actions, as with the moving of birds' wings in flight. The films of David Gatten, which deeply engage with the idea, even the history of books.

This is not, in other words, the middlebrow notion of film as pure, narrative-bearing text that we are confronting. This is Mallarme’s concept of the book, the Proustian model of the book. It is its ultimate realization, par excellence, and by far the most apposite. Works that require different modalities of reading/touching words and saccadic rhythms involving different velocities of hyphenation and partial retention and compound phrases through the softest of collisions, where we come up against the everlasting mystery of the silent voice, the ‘little’ voice inside each of us; an imagined external voice that reads to us quietly, that is ours but seems to be another's. This voice is not the voice of the author nor the voice of a corporeal stand-in for somebody who may once have read to us the most thrilling book in the world somewhere in our long-ago childhood. It just is. 

Night Tide, as much as any work in any canon, is guided by that voice, from which a strange, and strangely hushed, invitation steps forth and lingers in the air: beckoning you with the satiny force of its resident sideshow mermaid, whose foretold underwater death lends her a mythic sense of bereavement, somewhere on the same scale with America’s deceased open roads and lost prairies. Linda Lawson (Mora), despite her offscreen life as a marvelous nightclub chanteuse, never sings in any conventional sense. Throughout the film, her breathy speaking voice expresses intense, alien musicality lurking behind an opaque and equally lyric curtain of melancholia. Her words become almost incantatory, summoning one gnostic boardwalk from the film’s various grubby locales. As if she were inviting us to come to Malibu to live above a merry-go-round, take breakfast with a hot sailor and a hotter mermaid, spend endless hours in Venice Beach, of all places, with an old rummy sea captain, listening to the strange tales behind the morbid souvenirs of his life.

It is here that Night Tide urgently needed a practitioner of the darkest arts in her existence beyond moviedom, an Aleister Crowley adherent, who vaunts herself into the frame as if bearing Crowley’s Book of the Law.

Enter Marjorie Cameron: credited simply under her preferred mononym, Cameron. She upholds the same code of elsewhere-ness that permeates Night Tide, moving the audience’s hunger between those familiar genre raindrops and other visual cliches. If every footfall on dry land gives our unnamed out-for-a-stroll sea witch more power, then she wields that power to vex and trouble the supposed obligations of horror films with such an obscure species of realism that it would not be difficult to imagine her long and powerful strides walking us into cinema’s distant past, where naturalistic acting sheds decorum, taste, chivalry, and good table manners; and where, decades after Venice Beach had appeared in Kid Auto Races at Venice (1914) — Charlie Chaplin’s debut film — a major Hollywood production once stood. 

To borrow a publisher’s term, Kid Auto Races unveils Charlie’s “first thus edition” as that indefatigable tramp: “That Mighty Vagabond” to whom Jim Tully would later dedicate his 1924 hobo novel, Beggars of Life. Chaplin scowls, mugs, and sticks out his tongue. Both an intruder to the Venice fairground’s ongoing festivities and a portal into that vast territory of new ideas, the extreme close-up. 

Cameron and Chaplin: two towering figures. One entirely obscure, the other known to everyone on earth, even in 1963, the year that Night Tide lapped like an expressionist wave against the screens of the American drive-in circuit. The primary condition for a mass haunting had been established — i.e., that Lemon Popsicle/Strawberry Milkshake species of innocence proffered by America’s music industry between 1957 and 1964. The horror genre always has to have some component of innocence to be truly devastating, be it the existential kind that inspires the malevolence everyone paid to have vicarious transit with, or the mere victimization of the unsuspecting. Either way, there was no other period in popular culture when innocence of any variety was so lavishly examined, then toyed with, and finally killed. The free-floating chord that opens the Everly Brothers song "All I Have To Do is Dream" remains a lamentation in sound: the sudden recrudescence of Poe’s beating, tell-tale heart. 

The ambient national temperature neared frigidity in 1961, the year that Night Tide was completed and Dwight D. Eisenhower left America’s “Military Industrial Complex” ringing in our ears. If we sense something familiar, even a coziness, about Night Tide’s boardwalk carnival, where the horror dimension remains almost entirely on the edge of consciousness, it could be perverse nostalgia talking — the eerie combination of ColdWar ennui and our looming fear of comeuppance, Poe on the wind. Dennis Hopper, in his first starring role, would later recall that it represented his first “aesthetic impact” on film since his earlier appearances in more mainstream productions, such as Rebel Without a Cause and Giant, had denied him meaningful outlets for collaboration. 

Like smoke, the truth gets in Hopper’s eyes. Intense, somewhat myopic — they seem to be always focused on distances beyond the frame. Deeply hollowed under a very straight brow, so they peer out warily like a cave-dweller’s, wondering if this was such a good idea, and considering a strategic retreat from director Curtis Harrington’s ramshackle kingdom by the sea. If Hopper contributes his dreamy aura, then producer Roger Corman rescued the seemingly doomed project by re-negotiating the terms of a defaulted loan to the film lab company that prevented the film’s initial release. His generous risk-taking birthed a movie monument that would add Harrington’s name to a growing collection of talent, midwifed by the visionary responsible for nursing the auteurs of post-war American cinema. And here we enter a production history as gossamer as Night Tide itself.  

Dennis Hopper is young in Night Tide. Yes. Impossibly young for those who know him only from his titanic second act’s intrusion on the American consciousness in David Lynch's Blue Velvet, or even the grizzled nothing that his second act ultimately offered before he breathed his last. Nonetheless it is here, stuck in a tight-assed sailor's suit and plastered on God only knows what for much of the film's production, a Young Mr. Hopper, recently emerged from James Dean's often risible shadow, trains his vision as a reluctant American druid might; as if it were not just Curtis Harrington's movie after all.

They would meet again in outer space, three years after Night Tide confounded grind house moviegoers throughout America. Yet, as if deliberately, perversely, laying waste to a collaboration that had unearthed so many riches, Harrington elected to give his now 30-year-old star nothing meaningful in which to display his talents. Queen of Blood (1966) finds Hopper, an ironic grin on his lips — the precise inspiration for which should best remain unknown — contentedly somnambulating through the skimpiest of roles, until he's exsanguinated by a mint-green space vampire. 

For Curtis Harrington, Queen of Blood represented one step too far into the kingdom of low-rent kitsch. The lush sets and seductive color schemes, all of which was residue from the original Soviet Space Opera, cannot rescue what was ultimately no more than a typical AIP recut job. Harrington’s sensibility, here asserting itself only by its absence, demands rarefied air wafting through the schlock — Edgar Allan Poe blowing inspirational kisses — far-reaching vibrations and implicit metaphysical questions. Throughout his career, Harrington would rely on such to brace himself against the endless pitfalls of junk film-making. There was no more perfect example of this balancing act than Night Tide. Despite its scant budget and dubious standing (it was, after all, his first attempt at a commercial feature) Harrington managed to capture long-established Hollywood eminences, like cinematographer Floyd Crosby (Tabu) and composer David Raksin (Laura, The Bad and the Beautiful). Their contributions keyed with surprising sensitivity to an all-embracing place-ness, the feeling that the cast, the script, everything on the screen, is synonymous with the rotting, low-horizon dream that Venice Beach had become: a gaudy ruin, irreplaceable yet destined for erasure, the memory of an adolescent USA greased for the skids of late-stage capitalism. 

If Harrington had not had the ruined mall of hell unveiled  in 1905 as Venice of America as a setting for his occult fable, he might have been forced to build it himself. In American cinema, luck smiles like this on an auteur only rarely. Certainly no studio-bound artifice masquerading as urban grotesquerie could have been more perfect, more just. It had started life decades before as the dreamscape of a globe-trotting Conservationist and real estate developer named Abbott Kinney, who intended it from the first as a wellspring from which Mankind’s Betterment would emerge: a place for the children of Manifest Destiny to elevate their minds before their first taste of imperial conquest had worn off.

But as a would-be aesthete on the culturally barren West Coast of North America, Kinney’s first and greatest mistake, the googly that effectively kneecapped his harebrained improvement project for all time, leaving in its place the freak show Southern Californians know and love (after a fashion), lay in the assumption that his mission could be accomplished simply by emulating, slavishly, the visual landscape of Venice (the old one in the Old World). That by staging an architectural riot of colonnades and pillars and canals, the human spirit would take flight from this, its dustiest outpost. By the 1930s, however, after somebody had struck oil and derricks were springing up like industrial dandelions in a residential area that some were still, with a straight face, calling a peninsula, no amount of boosterism could alter the reality that Venice Beach had fallen into an all-American eyesore; a rotting amusement resort, built on a swamp and now abandoned even by tourists.

“Venice, California,” Ray Bradbury would one day write, casting perspective with an unmistakable degree of awe, “had much to recommend it to people who liked to be sad. It had fog almost every night and along the shore the moaning of the oil well machinery and the slap of dark water in the canals and the hiss of sand against the windows of your house when the wind came up and sang among the open places and along the empty walks.” Death Is a Lonely Business, Bradbury’s 1985 novel, is set in 1949 and, certainly without meaning to, evokes a film that neither states its own origin-story nor seems to imagine anything else beyond its own expressionist visions of a churning sea:

“At the end of one long canal you could find old circus wagons that had been rolled and dumped, and in the cages, at midnight, if you looked, things lived, fish and crayfish moving with the tide; and it was all the circuses of time somehow gone to doom and rusting away.”

As if anticipating these images, if not literally these words, Night Tide assembles a distinguished skid row where underworld docents by the dozen pop into being with dazzling efficiency. Picture a thousand elves rising with glee to the same, single-minded curatorial task and you’ll have a sense of what is involved here. As a demiurgic force, to put it another way, Harrington does not emerge with this film from nothingness. He had spent two decades fruitlessly bashing his head against the avant-garde wall, West Coast division, a schlockmeister arriviste suddenly gone Hollywood – that is, any imaginable “Hollywood” rude enough to splotch him right in the kisser with flat root beer or leave him smelling of exhaust fumes and gravel, hot from the hissing sand beneath. 

Inspired by Poe’s "Annabelle Lee," the film’s title suggests horror. But aside from a few shots consonant with horror filmmaking, Night Tide escapes taxonomy, typology, or genre, instead fueling itself on acts of solidarity. A tarot reading at the film’s heart gives Marjorie Eaton her time to shine, traipsing into nickel-and-dime divination from her former life as a painter of Navajo religious ceremonies. Let’s also remember that Curtis Harrington’s “B” movie was originally screened by Henri Langlois at the Cinematheque française with Georges Franju in attendance. 

***

Indeed, by the Sixties, collaborative waves were crashing everywhere at such a rough-and-tumble pace that few mainstream producers could surf them. 

The frisson of La Nouvelle Vague should be appreciated within a tempest of plurality that shook Hollywood, whose executives and ballyhoo artists, trained in the relative stasis of studio-system majesty, were being tossed willy-nilly on the backs of Italian, British and German breakers. And, emerging from this unpredicted deluge of international currents, spawning endlessly exploitive countercurrents, came American castaways from the past, paupers thrown back on their native shores. And the sleazy-sounding double bills that resulted also unleashed an aberrant wonder: the movie’s compact leading man, a force previously held captive by the studio system, appeared like some homunculus refugee from the Fifties USA. Edgar Allan Poe’s vision would remain incomplete until cinema came along. In the decades following, his cinematic apotheosis would arrive on four wheels, fancily dressed in aerodynamic tail fins and shameless chrome. The American drive-in’s heyday during the late 1950s and early 1960s — a period which saw approximately 4,000 outdoor theaters dotting the nation — was the embodiment of American Prosperity. Its final touches were seen everywhere in suburban sprawl, brought to fruition by Robert Moses’ nightmare of ubiquitous commuter highways strangling cities and creating such snarling traffic that even more asphalt expansion becomes necessary. The Sixties bears witness to two form-following-function masterpieces, both of them born in Venice, California: Night Tide and the Shelby Mustang GT350.

Oozing into existence from beneath American grind houses appeared a reptile film species, looking forward and backward in the same instance. Backward, that is, to the extreme commerciality of 1940s Monogram horror films, and still further to fin de siècle dime museums with their giddy advertisements for Joe-Joe, the Dog-Faced Boy; and forward towards Joe Sarno, a master klutz of underbelly filmmaking. The biblical proscription against graven images, the primary source underlying all movie censorship, birthed exploitation films, which were fueled from the outset by “perversity,” the drive to grab that reforming impulse in order to turn it inside out. Film, a presumptive medium of the devil, would no longer redeem but indulge. In his 1990 book Behind the Mask of Innocence, Kevin Brownlow puts paid to this still-persistent myth of unspoiled, lamblike moviegoers in a bygone republic far away, seeking fairy tales and lies anywhere they could find them. His is a staunch chronicle of a period in cinema awash in depictions of every foul condition known to the world outside the movie screen.

Venice, California, already an incongruous interzone, made a suitable target for Orson Welles’s creativity when Universal-International wouldn’t trust him to shoot in a real Tex-Mex border town. With the addition of a fake checkpoint, posters advertising strippers, suitable extras, goats and donkeys, it became one of Welles’s trademark shadow kingdoms, dreamworlds like Kane’s Xanadu (“the stones of many a real palace”), or the world of The Trial, with its courtrooms and offices somehow crammed into a railway station, or Othello, in which various chunks of Italy and Morocco were spliced together, clashing architectures married by match cuts on kicks, glances, turns.

At a key moment in Ed Wood, Tim Burton’s hagiographic 1994 insult to the memory of Edward D. Wood Jr., its two intrepid screenwriters concoct a fictitious meeting between the meretricious auteur and the filmmaker he is said (here, anyway) to most admire, Orson Welles. There is no suggestion, as there might have been, of communion between these industry derelicts. Just a quick exchange between two men staring down defeat, drowning their sorrows in a Hollywood gin palace: Wood, due to his arrant lucklessness; Welles, because Universal-International wants Charlton Heston to play a Mexican in his next picture.

It is a fanciful scene, there for a laugh among cinephiles and little more. Yet it is only when one considers this moment further that the connection begins to bear the light of truth. Touch of Evil, with its canted angles, its racing camera and violent playground of chiaroscuro lighting; its deranged performances and Latin rock pulse and sexual ambiguities; even Welles’s own lumbering, Tor Johnson bulk — It all smacks of Wood, if ever he’d been blessed with more than a two dollar budget and a soupçon of creative judgment. In its final moment it is less the border nightmare it started out as than some kind of mongrel South Texas kaiju eiga — William Shakespeare's Godzilla — as Welles’s bloated police chief, prior to expiration, flops into a grimy canal while Special Guest Star Marlene Dietrich, done up in Gypsy garb, intones an epitaph that, a quarter-century before, could have been King Kong's. That is, if the beauty that killed the beast actually existed in the universe you just visited.

Celluloid, as Touch of Evil demonstrates to greater effect than most movies have, preserves the dead better than any embalming fluid. Ghosts flit in and out of its parameters, reciting their own epitaphs in pantomime or florid speech; revenant moths trapped in perpetual motion. Film is bona fide illumination — as opposed to religion’s metaphorical kind — representing the supremacy of alchemy and necromancy over sackcloth and ashes. The inmates, emboldened under the spell of Klieg lights, were not only running the asylum, but re-shaping the world in its image, and the blunt instruments of church and state proved impotent against the anarchy of this freshly liberated ghetto.

Perhaps the cinema gods required more modest offerings. Yes. Maybe something on the order of a sixteen-year-old American Gnostic in the 1940s, armed with a Keystone 8mm movie camera and wretched homemade sets would suffice to truly capture that tragically foreclosed future embodied by the first half-century of film. Such instruments as this would become a living reminder that here was a means of illumination with a misspent childhood that had come of age in a series of shady elsewheres. In storefronts, fairgrounds, Vaudeville dumps and, of course, the nickelodeon parlors of a "Let's-Pretend We're Edwardian" America. Every permutation of this fledgling medium signaled a crying need for a new history, for other inmates of a very low order of provenance to escape, to light out for the territory ahead of the rest, afraid of nothing; inspired by big, walloping, thunderclap epiphanies. 

***

The public library in Beaumont, California had a policy in the mid-1930s of strictly segregating its holdings. A great, fortress-like structure set, as they often were, in the species of small, placid American city that generations of authors would, without ever setting foot in it, describe as sleepy.

But as a kind of unintentional rebuke to the small-ness, the placid-ness, if not also the American-ness, of the place, its library was stocked with the literary fruits of Modernity itself. All the big names were in evidence: Gertrude Stein, e.e. cummings, Conrad Aiken, you name 'em; even the recently liberated "One Book Ulysses." For a small town, it could be said, the library assumed much about its community. But due to their often unruly content, these treasures of the hour were, as it is with most libraries, not permitted to be lent to children.

One exception was a child named Curtis Harrington. As he would later write in his memoirs, his budding fascination with the world of adult appetite and, suggestively, its darker corners was encouraged by an unusually permissive librarian who allowed the lad, once his interest had been registered, to check out, take home, consume.

It was in the course of one of these safaris, however, that he happened upon the 1919 edition of Tales of Mystery and Imagination, by Edgar Allan Poe. It is a celebrated edition, largely for the illustrations of Harry Clarke — the book itself had been many times celebrated by then — and Harrington is at great pains to impress upon the reader the impact one particular tale of mystery and imagination had on his impressionable mind. "The Fall of the House of Usher," he writes:

"was the story that gripped me, held me in thrall as no other story ever had. By the end of it, I was almost gasping for breath and leapt from my chair in an attempt to relieve the pressure on my brain. The horror of the story’s final revelation of the returned corpse totally engulfed my mind and senses.”

To be clear, Harrington did not come to Poe, and Usher, through a yellowing, dust-covered edition from 1845 or, for that matter, a brutally truncated Classics Illustrated rendering of Usher. By the 30s, a 1919 edition of Poe was less than two decades old, and the immediacy of Harry Clarke's illustrations had more than a bejeweled toe lingering in 19th century art movements like Symbolism — which itself drew enormous inspiration from Poe's concepts of Infinity. The figures, swallowed in patterns that dematerialized human anatomy, swirling linear involutions that made cosmic beings out of mere mortals, the summoning of Poe in visual/book form and the supremacy this would bestow on cinema as a new kind of literary art. Such reversals were regent.

Harrington does not give his precise age at this pivotal moment in his life, and it would otherwise be hard to imagine the directness and imminence of Poe for anyone in that time, or the access that Harrington's youthful imagination had to his mentor. "My memory," he writes, "was seared with it, leaving a scar that I would never lose. It was as if I had discovered my soul mate in the world of literature."

One could almost picture the mostly television director in his twilight years as Roman Castevet of Rosemary’s Baby, a spellbinding raconteur with a carny’s enticing flair for embellishment. Enthralled by the dark Gnosticism of Edgar Allan Poe that had started when the aspiring adolescent auteur mounted a nine-minute long production of The Fall of the House of Usher (1942), Harrington would embark on a checkered film career that combined his occult passions with the quotidian demands of securing steady employment. Night Tide, a humble matinee feature whose esoteric underpinnings would spawn subsequent generations of admirers, united the competing forces of art and commerce that Harrington would struggle with throughout his career. Like Georges Méliès, Harrington pointed his kinetic device towards the more preternatural aspects of early motion pictures to seek out the "divine spark" that Gnostics attribute to transcendence, and the necessary element to achieve that immortal leap into the unknown. What hidden meanings and unspeakable acts Poe had seized upon in his writing were brought infernally to life with a mechanical sleight-of-hand. It was finally time for crepuscular light, beamed through silver salts to illuminate otherworldly and other-thinking subjects.

***

Night Tide’s promises may be eternal, but the same cannot be said of life.

Cinema requires eulogists to commemorate talents excised from canonical film history. And here, the limitless domain of movie orphanhood finds itself represented by an actress officially classified under “Dissipated Outlier”… Scratching remembrances in longhand for the director's 2007 funeral, cult deity Barbara Steele reminds us of Curtis Harrington’s essential gentleness, despite his squalid dinner parties summoning imperial decadence, scenes out of Hogarth. “Once you were inside his charmed circle you would never be banished,” writes Steele, apparently likening the deceased to a fanciful and ramshackle movie set — fashioned by his own living hands — “it was such a delightful place to be, you wouldn’t want to escape… and you loved him with all your heart.” Well, doesn’t that selfsame pas de deux delineate Night Tide's inner world: unwonted inhabitants and mainstream audience (lovingly dragooned), like two bodies joined in a single swirling embrace?

Harrington’s student opus, Fragment of Seeking (1946), had left one professor in USC's Cinema department so stricken that the young auteur was handed a more or less prosaic thank you for his effort and quietly dismissed. This film, with its ruthless blend of confession, confrontation, naïveté and incidental reportage, remains one of the singular creations in the strange, troubling canon of student filmmaking, and wholly unthinkable within the so-called ethics of mid-century USA. Its dream-jumble was born out of the same West Coast wellspring that brought forth the psycho-drama self-portraits of Deren, Sidney Peterson, James Broughton and Kenneth Anger, with its psychically harrowing fusion of male and female characters, while completely devoid of ironic distance or exploitive cynicism, as if its chief aim were the dualism of the ancients.

Fuck the ancients. As he shot Touch of Evil in and around Los Angeles' Venice Beach on a handful of nights in the early spring of 1957, Orson Welles would slyly drape those trashy, less cinematic elements of the Mediterranean counterfeit before him in a voguish noir frock coat; one that would, at once, revel in the inherent ghastliness of such a place while concealing its full absurdity from eyes that would never be able to handle the contradiction. Some years later, fate would conspire to choose Curtis Harrington, a cross-dressing Poe fanatic, to fully capture “The Slum by the Sea” with all its ravaged whimsy set against the lyric humiliation of once-ostentatious digs and the ruined face of spent oil wealth. Singularly unembarrassed by what he saw, Harrington gave audiences a Venice Beach that Welles would not: the sun-dappled occult, the queer, the criminal; a true, flophouse-ridden glory bathed in the endless California sunlight.

By Daniel Riccuito and Tom Sutpen