E-Mail This Article to a Friend Oral support Blow Job, blue movies, Harvey Pekar BY GERALD PEARY

Rarely did I see Roy Grundmann, a contributing editor of New York’s Cineaste magazine, in the first years he moved here to teach film studies at Boston University. When we did meet, he’d apologize for his unavailability, but he remained buried writing his book. That book has finally been published, and as I imagined, it’s an obsessed, brilliantly ambitious tome, offering more ways — personal, analytic, formal, theoretical, historical, cultural, sexual, ethnographic — than anyone might imagine to skin one movie.

But that movie isn’t a world classic like Citizen Kane or La grande illusion. No, Grundmann is discussing a little-seen underground picture, silent and in black-and-white, in which a guy in a leather jacket (he’s the entire cast) leans against a wall. For the duration of the film, we watch him from the waist up as he writhes about. And we ponder what is happening below the frame, which seems to be what’s causing him to writhe. For either 36 or 41 minutes, depending on projection speed.

It’s a 1963 pop tease of cheeky minimalism. The book is Andy Warhol’s Blow Job (Temple University Press; $22.95). Grundmann loves this movie in which, far, far more than Seinfeld can imagine, nothing happens. Certainly nothing X-rated. There’s no cock to see, and no bobbing head revealed. There’s an orgasmic face at one point, but is the below-camera spillage real or gloriously faked, à la Meg Ryan’s Sally? Is it a man down there or a woman? Or a transvestite? Or a giraffe? Or nothing? Who knows? Grundmann (self-described as "a gay white male") offers a series of readings that see the text as a refracted, reflexive expression of Warhol’s homosexuality. But the viewer can choose. Grundmann admits in his introduction that the only reading he can’t fathom is when someone tells him that Blow Job is "simply boring and tedious." How can that be?

Andy Warhol’s Blow Job is an academic work, and difficult to maneuver through at times. But there’s a telling overview of Warhol’s cinema and a fascinating chapter about James Dean’s iconic meaning to gay culture, and to Warhol, and how that guy posing against brick relates to a Warhol drawing mourning Dean’s automobile-crash death. One caveat: Grundmann talks about Vic Morrow’s juvenile delinquent, Artie West, in Blackboard Jungle (1955) as a "psychotic double" of James Dean but doesn’t observe that the fellow getting (probably) sucked off in Blow Job looks far more like leather-jacketed Morrow than like Dean.

There’s lots of on-screen orality in The Good Old Naughty Days, a compendium of French pornographic silent shorts from the 1920s at that’s opening at Allston Cinema this Friday. These shorts, which were shown in brothel waiting rooms to get customers in the mood, have been restored by French film archives. They’re the basic porn scenarios we all know, but from an older, more innocent age. Two women go at it; a peeping tom masturbates to the side before joining in. A dyke teacher spanks her misbehaving students; then she can’t resist. More than food comes on a restaurant’s menu. One short that’s really out there involves polymorphous nuns and a bisexual canine. There’s also a "bi" take on Madama Butterfly. The shorts are in black-and-white and are relatively well shot. Best of all: there are no brassy, breast-enhanced Las Vegas types in the sexual mix.

Once in a while in the movie biz, nice people make it to the top. I congratulate Bob Pulcini and Shari Springer Berman as the filmmakers of the wonderful American Splendor. The New York–based married couple, who met while going to film school at Columbia, have been my friends since they brought their 1997 documentary Off the Menu: The Last Days of Chasen’s to the Locarno Film Festival in Switzerland. They were total unknowns, and I helped them put up crude posters attracting people to their screenings. What a contrast this year at Cannes, when HBO Features threw them a huge celeb party on the beach.

At Cannes I also talked to Harvey Pekar, the great comic-book artist (and jazz critic) whose story is told in American Splendor. He’s retired from his forever desk job at a Cleveland hospital, which, he explained, "Gave me a routine I found out I needed. Structure." Is he going crazy now? "Yes!" answered his wife, Joyce Brabner. "He has tremendous depression and anxieties about money. He needs to understand he doesn’t ever need to write another freelance music review."

Pekar indeed doesn’t realize this. "You work for the Phoenix?" he asked. "Pitch to your editor the idea of me doing a comic. Anything he wants!"

No comic strip yet from Harvey, but you will find his review of Richard Cook’s Blue Note biography in this week's issue.