Gog 2This film to me is an astonishing work! What you see here is rough-- the film was made almost fifty years ago and the video of it has deteriorated. Why do I say it's astonishing? I made it without any formal training in directing or editing or producing. I was 24 when I started the project. I wrote the script, acted the lead, directed it, edited it, co-produced it. In other words, I behaved as a fool, an ignoramus, and a megalomaniac. Is it any surprise, then, that the piece is seriously flawed? And yet-- as I watch it now, an old man, my career essentially behind me, I find real virtues in it. It was completed in 1960, played a few festivals: there was no Sundance in those days. It played in the Edinburgh Festival, the Boston Film Festival, the Bleeker Street Cinema Festival sponsored by Jonas Mekas group. There was definite hostility from the Mekas group. All of the films in the festival were either 8mm or 16mm. "Gog, Magog" had been shot in 35 mm! (it was shot, incidentally, in three days) At the Bleeker Festival, Mekas' star director, Ron Rice, shouted out when I appeared on screen, "It's Errol Flynn!" Mekas insisted that the projector be shut down. The critic Edouard de Laurot, who had been a partner with Mekas and then a rival, was a fan of my film and promptly assaulted Rice. A near-riot broke out. De Laurot ran up on the stage, grabbed a microphone, and screamed out, "My name is Edouard de Laurot. In 1954, with Jonas Mekas, I founded 'Film Culture Magazine' and began the American film avante garde movement and you, Jonas Mekas, have betrayed the movement!" There was more shouting and scuffling, but finally the film was allowed to play and it was received not altogether badly. For a few weeks a minor battle raged in avante circles. De Laurot was a passionate defender of "Gog, Magog"-- as was Peter Bogdanovich, who was only a teen-ager then, but an influential avante garde critic. De Laurot, a passionate, if somewhat lunatic leftist, kept comparing me to Fidel Castro, who had only recently come into power in Cuba. Truth is, however, my film had little to do with what Mekas and his crowd were up to. People liked the acting in the film, some liked the style, many, including the British film bible, "Sight and Sound Magazine", found it heavy-handed and overwrought. Reviewing the film in the Edinborough Festival, they called it "unbelievably pretentious." At some point, the legendary Hollywood director, Otto Preminger, screened it in his apartment on Manhattan's Upper East side. After, I asked him how he liked it. "Not very much," he said in his heavy Teutonic accent. I was, of course, somewhat nonplussed. "How was my acting?" I muttered. "You're a very good actor," he said. The film was a watershed in my career. It convinced me I should not direct film: I did not have the stamina or guts. I also discovered that I didn't have the stomach to be an actor: I took criticism far too personally. I did remain comfortable as a writer, however, and over the next few years devoted myself more and more to writing and eventually forged a career as a novelist, playwright, and screenwriter. But now, in my near dotage, I look at this flawed attempt and ask myself, why was I so hard on myself? What was I making such a big deal about? It was my first film. I accomplished an amazing, mini-Orson Welles, imaginative success. I could have been a director, an auteur; I could have had a possibly lucrative career as an actor. I was much, much too hard on myself. In watching "Gog, Magog" you'll have to play all four sections and live with jerky and fuzzy footage. Let me know what you think! DSM Oh, yes, you'll notice that wonderful Dom Deluise has a supporting part in the film. He was a dear friend and it was his first movie... code pour embarquer la vidéo : >>> http://www.youtube.com/embed/yOmzE3OqKJ8 <<< |