June 17-24, 2004

screen picks

by Sam Adams

The Legend of Leigh Bowery/How to Draw a Bunny (Thu.-Fri., June 17-18, 9:15 p.m., Sat., June 19, 6 p.m./Wed.-Thu., June 23-24, 7:30 p.m., Sat.-Sun., June 26-27, 5 p.m., $6-$8.50, Prince Music Theater, 1412 Chestnut St., 215-569-9700) Like the warriors in Troy, though rarely as well-groomed, artists long for immortality. But what Leigh Bowery and Ray Johnson craved was something more akin to transubstantiation. Johnson, says Billy Name, "wasn't a person — he was art," while theater director Stephen Laing calls Bowery "the person who came closest to living his life as a work of art." Though documentaries are usually hampered by their subjects' unavailability, both Charles Atlas' The Legend of Leigh Bowery and John Walter and Andrew Moore's How to Draw a Bunny are enhanced by their posthumous perspectives. Without the artists around to confuse matters, both exist only in their works, and the memories of their friends, which sometimes amount to the same thing. Along with the woefully misguided Martha Graham séance Ghostlight, which screens with Legend this weekend, the films turn art into archaeology, though it's hard to say if they're out to explain the creator though his works, or vice versa.

An avant-garde fashion designer who quickly decided his creations were too special to be worn by just anyone, Leigh Bowery put as much effort into designing himself as his clothes. Sometimes, he'd literally sculpt in flesh, duct-taping his fleshy torso to make breasts, tucking his penis like a drag queen and topping it with a merkin made from a dime-store wig. At others, he'd resemble nothing so much as a glammed-out Mexican wrestler, with his eyes and mouth reduced to slits in a sequined, mirrored mask. In 1985, he founded the famed London nightclub Taboo (the basis for the recently flopped Broadway show, with Boy George incarnating his late contemporary), where, as one habitué puts it, if you didn't come home black and blue, you hadn't had a very good night.

In London, Paris and New York, the Australian-born Bowery was a subject of endless fascination. Michael Clark choreographed dances for him, despite Bowery's ungainly frame and lack of training, while Lucien Freud painted him in the nude, the closest we come to seeing Bowery unadorned. (A dancer reports that Bowery would turn up for rehearsals in shabby street clothes, but even those outfits seemed calculated to shock: The most outlandish thing Bowery could do at that point was look dowdy.) But perhaps no one was as fascinated with Bowery as Bowery himself. For two weeks in 1985, Bowery exhibited himself to the public in a London gallery, but the glass in front of him was a two-way mirror: the audience could see him, but he chose to see only his own reflection.

Bowery clearly aimed to shock — when one chat-show host confesses himself startled by Bowery's appearance, he coos back, "Thank you" — but Legend barely begins to speculate what his other aims might have been. Costumes with phallic projections and random cutouts reflect the same desire as Bowery's own performances: to attack the boundary between public and private space, self-reflection and narcissism. But Legend is so overwhelmed with Bowery's public persona that it rarely pauses to consider his inner life. Perhaps it's fruitless to speculate who he might have been when he was alone, but it's worth considering what he saw when he looked in the mirror.

A more melancholy figure, How to Draw a Bunny's Ray Johnson dramatized his life in more subtle ways. A collagist whose work is full of subtle verbal and visual puns ("Keir Dullea, Gone Tomorrow" reads one snippet), Johnson called his performance pieces "nothings," and he often created work just to give it away. His "correspondence art," which generally took the form of elaborately crafted envelopes, is both witty and obsessive: Poet Gerry Ayres recalls how his poem about Charles Lindbergh inspired scores of envelopes playing off Lindbergh's famous nickname, once pairing a Lucky Strikes logo with a photo of Lindy's restaurant.

Despite the admiration of peers like Chuck Close, Roy Lichtenstein and Christo, all interviewed here, Johnson remained a solitary figure, more admired than celebrated. (He wasn't easy to collect, either: Morton Janklow recalls how Johnson halved, then doubled the price he wanted for a series of portraits.) In retrospect, not even Johnson's contemporaries feel they knew him: One recalls he felt like each of Johnson's friends saw only "a piece" of him. How to Draw a Bunny, which begins its run on Wednesday, duly assembles the puzzle, but it's the pieces that don't quite fit that prove the most fascinating. Did the 67-year-old Johnson commit suicide in 1995, and if so, was his death really a final performance, the "something big" he told associates he'd been working on? The closest we come to an answer is a piece of Johnson's work, discovered in a box under a sheet of paper. Not quite in plain sight, accessible yet hidden, it's the perfect crystallization of Johnson and his work.

Pickup on South Street/Tigrero: A Film That Was Never Made ($29.95/$24.95 DVD) It's looking to be a banner year for Samuel Fuller fans, with the semi-restored cut of The Big Red One and a fistful of DVDs on the way. Fuller's love of tough-guy patois sometimes got the better of him, but it never sounded as good as in Pickup (1953), which delves into the light-fingered classes like a superheated cousin to Robert Bresson's Pickpocket. The red-baiting plot is barely perfunctory, no more than an excuse for Fuller to swing by the underworld haunts he knew as a newspaperman. If the movie's hero is indisputably Richard Widmark's short-tempered thug, its heart belongs to Moe, Thelma Ritter's matronly stoolie. Selling garish ties along with information, Ritter's loveable informer is played almost for laughs, except for the devastating zoom in on her face when Moe announces her price: "Fifty dollars." Rarely is the movie's intensity so quiet; shades of the incandescent luridness of The Naked Kiss and Shock Corridor, but Pickup's hysteria is fenced in, more overcooked than hard-boiled.

Criterion's Pickup includes a pair of Fuller interviews as well as an excerpt from his rip-roaring autobio The Third Face. But for full-on Fuller, look no further than Tigrero, the 1994 documentary which takes Fuller back to the Amazon, 40 years after plans fell through to shoot a film there with John Wayne, Ava Gardner and Tyrone Power. Revisiting the children of the Karajá tribesmen he once befriended, Fuller shows them his vintage footage, snippets of which convey the excitement of the film he might have made. Mika Kaurism…ki's film is more lyrical than investigative, though, less interested in Fuller's failure than his ability to endure it, and to keep conceiving films, even if some of them never made it out of his head. (A snippet of what would have been Tigrero! did prove useful, recycled as the colorized dream of a black-and-white inmate in Fuller's masterpiece Shock Corridor.) Fantoma's DVD is bolstered with audio commentary by Kaurism…ki and Fuller's onscreen foil Jim Jarmusch, an excerpt from Fuller's script and, best of all, 20 minutes of Fuller's original 16 mm Cinemascope footage.

Misc. Picks Even confirmed Kubrick-haters (guilty as charged) won't want to miss International House's tribute to Dr. Freeze, running through Sunday, and mainly drawing on recent prints. See you at Barry Lyndon.