Time capsules

Coming Apart -- and Blair Witch redux?

"I was deep into Freudian treatment with a doctor I admired, and at the same time I was hanging out with some other psychiatrists who were rather pathetic and contemptible -- if for no other reason than that they were leading the same promiscuous life as me," says Milton Moses Ginsberg in a colorful Film Comment memoir about making Coming Apart, his 1969 independent feature that plays one week at the Coolidge Corner starting this Friday, August 20.

Ginsberg's movie would be about this Jekyll-and-Hyde phenomenon he had observed among '60s shrinks: all there and responsible during the 50-minute hours, but fucked-up/freaked-out losers on their own time. The schizoid embodiment of all this is Dr. Joe Glazer (Rip Torn), who, away from the office, sets up a hidden, Nixonian 16mm camera in a rented apartment to record his shady, dissolute life.

This Coming Apart guy, Glazer, sleeps with half the chicks of Manhattan, honestly, the lunatic half, as they peel off their clothes and, ever-bare-breasted, squeal to get down to it, as if Dr. Joe were an indie-film creation of Ian Fleming. "Oh, you're raping me!" one announces happily. "Oh, slap me!" Another requests that he put cigarettes out on her already much-burned chest. "Won't you fuck?" another begs. "I can't masturbate anymore." And so our therapist-by-day does his manly nightly duty, though unhappily, drowning in self-loathing.

Coming Apart is an amazing late-1960s time capsule about thirtysomethings desperate to drop out like the Vietnam-age collegiates, to take drugs and swing. I sincerely wish it held up stronger as a movie. Although Ginsberg's film has had extraordinary 30th-anniversary success this year playing at MOMA and the Film Forum in New York City, I find Coming Apart numbingly repetitive and formless, one shallow sex scene like another, climaxing in an ugly party of odious people at which -- what else? -- several attendees shed their clothes.

The scenes are shot sometimes in Warholian real time, sometimes in Godardian "jump cut." The acting is either mumbly or Cassavetes-style at its most chaotic and shrill. The parade of obtuse-to-the-camera ghoulish Manhattan types foreshadows Paul Morrissey's 1970 Trash, which to me still resonates in 1999. For one thing, Trash is funny. The dalliances you see are inevitably offputting and intentionally clumsy: hopping-out-of-your-pants-while-your-shoes- are-still-on-sex, a pantyless fräulein go-going by rubbing her crotch up and down our shrink's bare leg, etc. Call me old-fashioned, but if I'm asked to be a voyeur, I'd like to be turned on once in a while by what I am naughtily watching. Not Coming Apart, which is a kind of "last hurrah" downer of hetero fornication.

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Coming Apart was, to Ginsberg's credit, among the first narrative films ever (also 1968's David Holzman's Diary) to feign "realness" by having the characters in the movie set up a lightweight camera and record their lives in front of it, making everything seem eerily like cinéma-vérité documentary. You know it's fiction, and yet . . . The Blair Witch Project uses precisely the same aesthetic strategy with video portapacks, though I would be extremely surprised if the young filmmakers had knowledge of their forebear. But that's not the big Internet debate these days concerning Blair Witch. The issue (and people have told me they've heard about a potential lawsuit) is whether co-directors Eduardo Sanchez and Daniel Myrick borrowed their "original" story from a 1979 Brazilian gorefest, Ruggero Deodato's Cannibal Holocaust.

I confess to having shown Deodato's scandalous flesh feast in a course I taught in "Transgressive Cinema" at Boston University. Transgressive it is, and no film so repelled my students as this disgusting saga of a haughty American film crew who go into the Brazilian jungle in search of cannibals. Lo, they become rapists, pillagers, and plunderers themselves, with a My Lai mentality, until they are bloodily murdered and, of course, devoured raw by the pestered natives. You can read at length about Cannibal Holocaust in Mikita Brottman's 1997 Meat Is Murder! An Illustrated Guide to Cannibal Culture. You can rent the tape at several of the more imaginative video stores about town. (I dare you to request it at Blockbuster!)

Are the Blair Witch boys familiar with it? The four-person documentary crew in Cannibal Holocaust are missing in the jungle. We discover their fate when a search party locates the unedited film footage of their last days. What we see: the crew filming one another, joking before the camera, as they march deeper and deeper into the thickets and get lost and finally killed. The shooting, as in Blair Witch, is handheld 16mm, and it gets crazier and foggier as the horrors take over the characters' lives.

Did Sanchez and Myrick steal from Cannibal Holocaust? I watched the films back to back and I can't say with authority. It could all be coincidental, a smart idea thought of twice. In any case, the two films are so, so different (the earlier flooded with on-screen sex and violence, the second interestingly chaste, with the terrors off camera) that I give The Blair Witch Project the benefit as an admirably original work.