Wojnarowicz

THE INVISIBLE MAN SCREAMED

A Tribute To Experimental Filmmaker, David Wojnarowicz

Exclusive tribute interview with New York City transgressive auteur, Nick Zedd

Written By: Matt Sanborn
Mondo Film & Video Guide Contributor

He slides through the darkness over the pavement of New York City unseen.  Thin and unnoticed, shoulders hunched slightly, his head down a bit.  There is no money in his pockets and down every alley and street an encounter waiting that might cost him his life.  Some nights he passes over every block in Manhattan.  Exhausted, he dreams of a place to sleep soundly for just one night.

Blank faced people pass by him, all looking the same.  On the street corner where he waits men approach him, their faces lacking absolute detail.  He follows – alley, hotel, backseat of a car, make a few bucks, eventually returning to the streets of a city that will one day celebrate his immense artistic talents.  

It is a dangerous ghost-life, but better than the one he has left: The father, the screaming, the guns, threats, murdered pets, confusion, humiliation and a severe disconnect from the America which surrounds him.  He has escaped to here, to a place far more dangerous but more accepting in some ways:  A city that is a sea full of men, full of johns, one of whom he will meet and whose virus will cost him his life.  Moving upstream through a sea of people, no one notices him; he is invisible.

The Manhattan Love Suicides; David plays the near invisible man, in the first of four Richard Kern shorts comprising this film.  A spasmodic, ultra-hyper man is following the couple through the streets of New York City.  The older man drops the woman off and the younger man follows like a shadow.  They two men walk, the younger nipping at the heels like a puppy, the elder ignoring him.  In the face of the follower there is longing and a knowledge that he will never truly get what he wants.  He slips into the man’s apartment; again it is the unnatural needy movements that cry out “Love me.”  Yet there is no love.  A power game of control is underway; one the actor surely knows all too well in his heart.  The young man’s rage manifests itself physically as his neck explodes.  The rage and jealousy continues as he literally falls to pieces.  It climaxes the way it always must for this type of man, the type of man David played in life – alone on the floor, mocked and used by people much better off than he.

Washington D.C mid 1980s. Jesse Helms was fuming.  Homosexuals were creating blasphemous images of his beloved carpenter god on the cross.  Even worse they were portraying their sick, decadent lifestyle as something people should just accept.  Government money, that could be going to fund Iran-contra, or create missiles or nuclear silos, or fund righteous warriors fighting the Russians in Afghanistan like the American jihadist Osama Bin Laden or pay Saddam Hussein in his war against Iran, was going to ass-fucking artists.

Helms, the powerful senator from South Carolina would not be stopped.  He would be the one who saved Christian America from these hate crimes of thought.  He would be the one to make these works disappear.  He would make sure none of us could ever see any of David Wojnarowicz’s art hanging on a wall, and it’s no different today either.

Several months ago, hands of a faceless, obedient human robot turns off the video by a gay, anti-church film maker.  The publically funded institute had caved from pressure from the right-wing to once again make gone his thoughts and ideas without a trace.  It seems a brief scene of ants crawling over a crucifix has put people praying to an invisible man in the sky into a frenzy; especially The Catholic League and Speaker of the House John Boehner.  The walls were blank and off white until something a lot safer, a lot more government approved, would take its place.

Outside the Smithsonian artists and other concerned citizens hold posters of David Wojnarowicz with his mouth sewn shut. But this artist, actor, film maker, writer extraordinaire and AIDS activist refused to be invisible – refused to be silent – leaving behind some of the most intriguing and thought provoking art and art house films the New York City scene and the country had ever witnessed.  As his body faded his vision did not.  But now out of sight safely from public view in the Smithsonian is David’s 1986 incomplete silent film.

A Fire In My Belly; Shot with an 8mm hand held camera while he was in Mexico, the film is a noiseless journey through a poverty decimated, Church dominated country, where violence is religion and poverty is the one and the same; where this unholy trinity is the norm.  Wrestling, cockfighting, indigent indigenous people, bullfighting, the abuse and misuse of other animals, a sad circus, cheap toys, are spectral images woven together creating a tapestry of helplessness and decay.  The film is attacked for a mere few seconds of ants crawling over a crucifix.  But what is really offensive to the critics is that the film was made by a gay man who died a painful, slow death of AIDS.

Escaping the haunted house that was his home and rampaging, violent father, he escaped to a city, much like Mexico he portrayed in Fire, where a person can go unseen.  Much like the city he fled to before his father could kill him.  A city known for its danger that seemed far less treacherous than the ultra-violent angst ridden faggot hating, phony, plastic suburbs he had run from.

You Killed Me First; Crude and in many parts very poorly acted, but Richard Kern’s scream of rage at all that is hypocritical and false about suburban life is a true underground classic.  David portrays the typical T.V. dad, with a violent, viscous bend.  Based mostly on his true life experiences with his father, it all comes out here.  He recreates real life events where his dad killed his pet rabbit with a cleaver and toted guns around the house, pointing them at family members.  Lung Leg is the real star of the show here.  Tripping on acid she barely bleats out her lines, but her fury is palpable, and although it comes off as amazingly amateurish, (sometimes you can hear the 8mm camera whir), it is a counterstrike to the mainstream 1980s “isn’t NYC the place to be” films like Crocodile Dundee.  Most dismiss it out of hand because of its primitive framing, but this is one of the most important films to come out of the school of film transgression during that decade.

Where Evil Dwells; A dummy stares into the screen, shot from cheap 8 mm stock that David and partner Tommy Turner have obtained.  A bloodied and eye gouged David sits with the puppet on his lap.  He falls down dead, replaced by Turner who mocks his friend’s corpse.  He laughs along with the dummy until it turns, stabs him to death, and then laughs at the stack of corpses.  As with any good underground film, the director’s selected the music without care of rights, and the soundtrack, which uses groups like AC/DC is distorted, slightly off its mark, and becomes abrasive white noise. And as with any good NYC film shot during this period, it cares very little about its audience.

 For the first fifteen minutes, the viewer is plunged into what seems to be a forming story of American youth gone bad – teens tormenting drivers by hanging mannequins over a bridge onto the New York State Throughway, causing cars to hit the fake bodies.  These same teens dig up corpses and defile the remains.  A roller coaster ride is shown in first person – one evil is in motion, once it goes over that first hill – it cannot stop unless something hits the equal and opposite force.  Performance artist and painter Joe Coleman watches the ride from the sidelines laughing away.

The next fifteen minutes bring the viewer into a Heaven you’ll never be allowed into, and then a hell more ghastly than anything Dante ever described.  Visions more terrifying and provoking than what Coffin Joe brought to the screen in Awakening of the Beast.  It is an urban hell not much different than what is going on in the real world.  On Earth as it is in hell the images scream.  Scenes of rape, defilement, and an overall atmosphere that if Hell really did it exist, the two filmmakers might just have captured it in a hand-held style here: A barbaric, despicable place, yet one that can be reached not too far from your back door.

The film is very loosely based on crack-head head-banging teen Ricky Kasso, (a teen on teen killer that has had five other films based loosely upon him), who lead a band of disenfranchised youths into crimes leading right up into a murder of a peer.  Kasso hated is father, a theme that resonated strongly with David as well as Turner.  About an hour of the film was destroyed in a fire after filming was completed, and what is left is a long-version Night Flight style video running about thirty minutes.  Money also was tight on the shoot, and long gaps occurred between filmings.  A full script still exists, for people wanting to see what could have been.

Postcards From America; A movie based on David’s life released two years after his passing at age thirty-seven.  It is more a semi-autobiographical work than a true account of the life of one of America’s most fascinating voices.  A voice calling out not only through film and art, but also in his fantastic writings.  Perhaps an even more prolific writer than artist, his works is the next step from William Burroughs.  If Burroughs is the father of punk – the progenitor of the Sex Pistols – loud, self obsessed and screaming “fuck you,” then David is Joy Division, subtle, silently brooding, standing alone softly saying, “I am fucked.”  His two most definitive pieces: In The Shadow Of The American Dream: The Diaries Of David Wojnarowicz (1988) and Close To The Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration (1991).

In The Shadows was taken from diaries beginning when David was enrolled in Outward Bound to help save him from himself and his desperate teen years, the young writer already shows amazing control in his writing and other worldly understanding of exactly what is going on around him.  He was already sexually experienced by 12, and we see early on the man’s eyes were never allowed to see anything but a dark, unforgiving world.  This diary style writing matures over the years, with hard looks under a street light of his terrifying existence as a male hustler and street walker.  

Close To The Knives was written after his HIV positive diagnosis; this book truly deserves the title A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.  Written in interview form, Joycean stream of consciousness and Burroughsian decadent prose, this is a staggering, monumental, heart-wrenching book of a supremely self-realized man who knows he does not have long to live.  A scream from the darkness where no one cared to ever look: “WHEN I WAS TOLD I’D CONTRACTED THIS VIRUS IT DIDN’T TAKE ME LONG TO REALIZE THAT I’D CONTRACTED A DISEASED SOCIETY AS WELL.”  

Wojnarowicz shows us a decaying, corrupt, contemptuous society where his friends die in droves, visits to sham AIDS cure clinics where doctors cannot he locate a liver on a medical chart are frequent, drag queens fighting are all around, politicians trying to rob America of its art is accepted by the mainstream, and everything else that made Reagan’s America such an o-so-special place.  This book should be compulsory reading, bumping out something as pretentious as The Old Man in the Sea, and force children to see what this country does to those who don’t fall into the life-style it demands.

The end is visible as  one day that young man awoke with no money in his pocket, and by the end of the day had ten thousand in cash.  A prominent N.Y.C art critic had heaped public praise on him and now he was the talk of the city.  Everyone wanted to see him now.  Everyone wanted to lay their eyes on his work.  His reputation grew as his body began shrinking from the inside.  This virus, three letters which were terrifying the world, now belonged to him.  For a while he had opted not to find out if they applied, but now they did, and there was no cure.  It was a social death first, then a physical one.  But the invisible man would not go quietly.  “I am not going to sit still and be silent about it.”  Yet still, because of what his bloodstream contained, his country did not want to look his way.

“I am invisible.  I have no voice, and suddenly my image is suddenly non-existent. “  As his body faded, his spirit grew.  His landlord wanted him out of the apartment.  The two finally reconciled, with an agreement that if a cure was ever found, he would move out.  

He would never move out.   With his body now vanished, his spirit and work scream louder, and more triumphantly than ever before.  Until we all vanish, this invisible artist will be seen and heard louder and more clearly than when he walked through the seas of faceless people, looking for somewhere to rest.

MONDO FILM: Can you remember the first time you met David, and what your impressions were about him?

NICK ZEDD: Not really. He didn’t leave much of an impression, to be honest. He seemed kind of serious, I suppose. After seeing him play a cartoon-like authoritarian father in Kern’s movie You Killed Me First, I thought he’d be able to play an obnoxious cop and be funny too.  I discussed with David the idea of him playing a cop in my movie Police State which he agreed to do.  He was very enthusiastic about playing a cop because he hated them. We had a long conversation on the phone where he suggested that we go around wearing cop uniforms to scare innocent people by roughing them up and harassing them for real on the street, even kidnapping and beating them up.

I thought that sounded hilarious but a little too dangerous considering what might happen to us if we got caught and asked that he just play the cop the way I wrote it in the script that I had given him. He agreed, then completely flaked out when it came time to shoot the movie and disappeared. I had to replace him with Willoughby Sharp, who was probably better anyway. From this experience I realized that David Wojnarowicz was a liar.

MONDO FILM: His work has recently stirred up a great deal of controversy when it was pulled from the Smithsonian.  What do you think the real reasons behind it being taken out are?

NICK ZEDD: Right wing politicians wanted to score easy points with religious nutcases who the media like to pretend represent a significant demographic when they really comprise a lunatic fringe that should be ignored. Demonstrating the usual cowardice and hypocrisy, the Smithsonian director caved in, resulting in another media event for religious zealots to cash in on when they hit up their moronic followers for cash injections.

MONDO FILM: What is your opinion of   Where Evil Dwells?

NICK ZEDD: It’s an unfinished masterpiece, with a razor sharp cutting edge, crudely rendered, but eminently entertaining.

MONDO FILM: Any idea where Tommy Turner is?

NICK ZEDD: He lives in Queens last I heard, got evicted from his hovel, then shacked up with a Mexican girlfriend. Tommy Turncoat is a useless anus and a pathological liar.  He completely fucked up a taxidermy job on my dead cat and lied about it for eight months before his girlfriend was shamed into smuggling the remains back to me. He turned the corpse of my beloved cat into an unrecognizable mess of road kill.

The last time I ran into that fool, he was blithering drunk, spouting gibberish; spewing inane excuses for his stupidity and incompetence. Tommy is the lowest form of human life, to be avoided like the plague.

MONDO FILM: How important was his work in the history of Transgressive Cinema?

NICK ZEDD: By virtue of Where Evil Dwells and his close proximity to Kern, Turncoat and myself, he deserves an honorary mention, even though his home movies from Mexico weren’t very good, which he admitted.

To quote David (from Jack Sargeant’s Deathtripping book) “I was pretty peripheral to that whole film scene. I participated in some of it. …somehow the focus of their life at that particular time seemed more towards film, toward the medium and breaking open certain things. I always felt like I was watching from or witnessing it from the side.  I mean, if you look at somebody like Zedd or Kern.”

I think David Wojnarowicz’s contribution to that era has been magnified and distorted due to the fact that he became an unwilling martyr, dying before his time. Unnecessary victimhood generally elevates one’s status in the eyes of future spectators from afar. His unflinching outspokenness and resistance to the political and institutional cretins who conspired to destroy him and those like him inspires anyone with a sense of moral indignation.

As with Robert Mapplethorpe; the luster of martyrdom bestows an angelic sheen that bedazzles art critics universally, not to take away from the genuine talent that was manifested.

Such martyrdom seems to cause critical thought to diminish in a fog of sentimentality, while living artists continue to be ignored. It probably doesn’t help that we live in an insane, homophobic, crypto-fascist armed madhouse run by corporate lunatics whose fantasies of world domination are augmented by lies pumped out 24 hours a day in mainstream media, brainwashing millions. Not that it’s an acceptable excuse. Far more subversive and challenging to the status quo would be for curators and critics to recognize the accomplishments of living artists doing equally significant work while they are alive, when it could actually make a difference. Sadly that doesn’t happen. 

For more information on Nick Zedd please visit here.