VANTAG galeria: 10/07/15

Wednesday, October 7, 2015

The Act of Seeing

Times Square, New York, is not what it used to be, and thankfully there are still a few people who are determined not to let you forget it. From the late 50s to the late 80s the area around 42nd Street, “The Deuce” as it was nicknamed, was every degenerate’s portal into a world of unadulterated bliss.
The Act of Seeing, a new book centred on film posters from that era, by director Nicolas Winding Refn (with journalist Alan Jones), is helping to keep this fantastically scuzzy part of social history alive. If you want to know where a culture’s head was at during any given time, cleave open its cranium to scavenge for collected pop-culture detritus and you’ll get a good estimation of its psychic harmony. Looking at the grindhouse films and their artwork that populated the Times Square cinemas over that 30-year period, New York, and by proxy America, was evidently an even more messed-up place than the history books or Disneyland let on. But then again, we’ve always known that the apple pie cooling on the windowsill was laced with LSD. No nation that has proffered such a blend of Evangelicalism, rampant war-waging, homespun yokelism and aggressive capitalism as essentially mainstream cultural yardsticks could be expected to offer anything less than the most rancid sicko’s glorious wet-dream as cultural ephemera.
And for the most part, it’s all perfectly detailed in The Act of Seeing. When the Danish filmmaker moved to the States as an eight-year-old in 1978, The Deuce was off limits and the cultural significance of the grindhouse theatres was on the wane. According to Nicolas though, the area became almost mythological to him as a boy, and it’s not hard to note the influence that this genre has had, osmosis-like, on his own body of work, and on many other directors working today.

"You take something that’s considered trash, represent it in a certain way, and suddenly it’s considered high art."

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Hunger: Did you have a pre-existing interest in these films before you acquired the collection, or was it something completely new to you?

Nicolas Winding Refn: Well, I’ve always had an interest in the themes of films such as these and I like their obscure historical nature. I collect a lot of things about Times Square, generally, and I started taking a strong interest in a filmmaker called Andy Milligan, a very singular kind of filmmaker, whose films were pretty much only ever screened in Times Square cinemas during the 60s and 70s. I started to collect the negatives from his movies, and during that process I got in touch with Jimmy McDonough, who wrote a book about Andy [called The Ghastly One: The Sex-gore Netherworld of Filmmaker Andy Milligan], and I bought a lot of material from him. Jimmy acquired the one-sheets [the common display format], by taking them off walls, out of dirty glass front-of-house frames or finding them lying around in the dusty basements of old Times Square cinemas. He said, “I’ve got all these posters as well. Do you want to buy them?” I said, “Absolutely.” By that time I’d bought everything from him, including all his original Sleazoid Express magazines [the house journal of the grindhouse scene, founded by Bill Landis], for which he wrote. Bill and Jimmy were the two great exploitation writers of the early 80s and they took East 42nd Street very seriously. I collected as much as I could and on top of that I got about 1,000 posters. When they all arrived my wife was like, “What the fuck?!” I hadn’t even heard of many of the movies.

I read that you have a very large collection of vinyl too. It sounds like you have quite a serious impulse to collect things.

I love the game of collecting. I love unearthing things. I used to collect VHS back when that was exciting. I come from the video age, so that was fun. Then everything became accessible and it wasn’t fun. I guess when I find things that I become obsessed with I overdo it. It’s like Eton mess: you can’t get enough of it when you’re eating it, but after a while you’re like, “What the fuck am I doing?!”

In your introduction to the book you wrote: “It’s keenly interesting to me how the perception of these films has changed — that what was once considered trash and worthless has become historical and treasured.” Do you think our ability to be interested in what was once trash and worthless has been diminished now that the internet acts as a digital receptacle for almost everything that’s been written, recorded or filmed?

The absurdity of it is what we might see as the Warhol effect — that you take something that’s considered trash, represent it in a certain way, and suddenly it’s considered high art. There’s something beautifully strange in the fact that, up until now, everything has been subject to some kind of documentation in terms of pop-culture. Whether it’s music, film, books or photography, it has been documented. Now, because of the digital revolution and all the creative energy that flows out of it, it’s almost impossible to document everything because there’s so much of it. We come from a time, you and I, when there was definition. Something could be defined, it could be stored and it could be preserved. Now there’s so much happening that that’s becoming impossible. I wanted to document a certain period in movie memorabilia and a certain way of publicising movies that, when they came out, were regarded as trash. Maybe they weren’t, but it’s all about representation and how it’s preserved after all these years. I like reimagining something and mutating it to get another kind of enjoyment out of it.

"I wanted the reader to never know what was coming next, similar to what it might be like as a viewer watching those movies: you never knew what you would see, but there was the promise of something extreme."

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These posters seem to be at once shocking, extreme, kitsch, and maybe even a little quaint by some of today’s standards. Has reviewing these posters made you consider taste and how modern taste has evolved in the last half century?

Well, you could never get away with some of the titles now. They’re so outrageous. It’s interesting to see what you could get away with then. On the other hand, there are some that are very tame and silly. But what’s great about them is that they’re so in your face. These are all one-sheet posters, not pamphlets, you know? The ones I like most are the ones so crudely put together you don’t even know if there’s a title or not, or if it’s for a play or an exhibition. There’s one called, Darling, Are You Bored With Men? Who even thought of that?

You said that you arranged these posters editorially in a similar way to how you arrange your films. Could you expand on that?

It took some time to get the right order and decide what each one would be paired with on the opposite page. For me, it had to be that as you turned the page, new extreme images would [hit] you; they would be very disconnected and very individual, but at the same time there would be a recurring theme. I didn’t want the book to become predictable. I wanted the reader to never know what was coming next, similar to what it might be like as a viewer watching those movies: you never knew what you would see, but there was the promise of something extreme. It took me about a year to really nail down the right order.

The title, The Act of Seeing, suggests a passivity that these titles and posters might contradict. They don’t ask you just to see but to engage.

Absolutely, and what’s odd about them is that they could never live up to what they promised, so the act of seeing is actually the act of imagination. Imagining what you might see is often more exciting than what you do see. Keep them wanting more by never giving them enough.

You’ve been looking back at something with a sense of posterity; do you ever act creatively with one eye on posterity and one on the present?

I tend to be very interested in immediacy or what’s just around the corner. I think that creativity is aided by technology, so it’s always about looking ahead. I’m very interested in the future. It’s important to know the past in order to destroy it, in order to create the future.

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The Act of Seeing is published by FAB Press October 7.
Taken from Hunger issue 9, on sale now and available here. For your local stockist, check here.

http://www.hungertv.com/feature/the-act-of-seeing/

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