Film and Video Festival Speech
Ultra Violet
Before I begin, let me say how grateful I am to have an opportunity to address all of you at this the Black Maria Film and Video Festival and I wish to thank the organizers in advance for inviting me. You may secretly be wondering what makes me qualified to speak to you today? Could it be that I have appeared in some atrocious movies? Well …possibly … after all I have been in quite a long list of films but I will spare you the gory details! I will only mention a few of them and share some of my recollections, both good and bad.
There was for instance my foray into Hollywood on a film you all know(!) entitled King Simon of the Witches where I quite naturally played the part of …a witch. A box office smash it’s success nevertheless lasted only ..for one day! There was the cult film The Secret Life of Hernando Cortes directed by the abstract sculptor John Chamberlain and filmed on location in the jungles of Mexico. My most vivid memory of this picture was the perilous love scene shot 15 feet above the ground in a baobab tree. This was entirely my idea so as not to make my nakedness so palpable. The lead male actor who starred opposite me in this art film was none other than the Warhol acolyte Taylor Mead.
I also appeared with "The Lion of Literature" Norman Mailer in his cinematic epic Maidstone in which he plays the role of a candidate running for president. Now Norman you may recall stabbed one of his former wives in the chest. Well…she wasn’t the only one! He stabbed my behind with his big paw! He assigned to me the role of a "Belle De Jour" where I had to lie down…naked…again…and play footsies with a black man…it was all very taboo! I was rescued only when the camera ran out of film…much to my great relief.
Now when John Schlesinger asked me to play the part of an underground superstar in his masterpiece Midnight Cowboy; that really was typecasting… art imitating life! I worked for two weeks getting up everyday at 4 A.M. for make-up, where they stuck a blonde wig on my head. I thought it was stardom! Unfortunately for all that trouble, much of my undiscovered, unknown, and undisclosed talent would remain on the cutting room floor, invisible for the world to see. On opening night my eyes did not flicker otherwise I would have missed seeing myself on the big screen.
My most controversial and avant-garde moments were the products produced at Warhol’s silver factory. We were first introduced to each other by Salvador Dali. Andy’s first words to me were "you are so beautiful, you should be in my movie" I later learned that was a phrase he repeated oh about forty thousand times or to just about anyone he met! I starred in his film I A Man along with Valerie Solanis, the woman who later infamously shot him in 1968. Now that’s what some would call real entertainment! A case of "The documentary becoming fiction and fiction becoming the documentary". Warhol was a stargazer, a sphinx without a riddle. He deserves both credit and criticism. His films are talked and written about much more than they are ever seen. Some of them are real sleepers, like the one for instance where a man is filmed while sleeping in real time…through the night…for eight hours straight! At times his cinema "verite" spilled over into cinema "cruaute" (cruaulte). On film at the factory, we were absolutely free. Free to do whatever we wanted, say whatever we wanted. I learned later in the seventies as I struggled to survive that "freedom without wisdom is thralldom".
The first anti-art work which started it all I believe was the French playwright Alfred Jarry’s absurdist drama Ubu Roi written in 1896. Seventeen years later Marcel Duchamp began his deconstructions in art. John Cage followed musically in their footsteps with his 1952 abstract silent piece entitled 4’ 33 followed by Erik Satie’s 1963 composition Vexations, a short melody repeated 840 times for 18 hours and 40 minutes. These were the artists Warhol turned to for inspiration. Their influence shaped his cinematic topology and produced his esthetic silence in sleep. At a time when the Guttenberg galaxy was being extinguished and the worlds of image and instant communication were dawning, Marshall McLuhan prophetically announced in 1967 that The Medium is the Massage. Today, we still must re-evaluate and qualify our own messages. We ultimately become what we behold. What then will we become? What will our message be? Will it be secular or sacred?
In conclusion, I challenge and hope that all of you choose art that is meaningful, uplifting, and edifying. There is already enough violence in this world, be it physical, emotional, visual, or audible. We need healing. It is time to soothe the soul and show mankind how paradise really can exist on earth. We have a choice and a responsibility, let us now exercise it.
