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Nailing his camera down in a corner of the Factory and letting the film run out, Andy Warhol is nothing less than cinema's Lautréamont, "on boit le sang en léchant les blessures." Burgess' A Clockwork Orange is the text at hand, not an enactment or even a read-through but an improvisatory distillate, an instantaneous record of a batch of amphetamine kooks making the words flesh. The hunky antihero (Gerard Malanga) is introduced in a close-up like a hangover Cocteau bust, a slow reverse zoom reveals a cramped, leather-bound mise en scène that appears slapdash while in reality balancing various meticulous planes of action. "What's your pleasure now, Scum Baby?" Motown replaces Beethoven as the droog's music of choice, twice he launches into onanistic pirouettes to "Nowhere to Run" while one of the background swells cackles like a mad scientist. The Ludovico technique proceeds amidst torn magazines, disco balls and dripping wax, the "reprogrammed" hustler is strapped to a chair and made to bellow through his bondage hood: "I feel pain!" Throughout these unbroken takes, Edie Sedgwick is perched on the corner of the screen, a stranded mermaid swaying slender arms and flicking cigarette ashes, a girlish sliver in the sadomasochistic murkiness. Warhol's catatonic rough-trade parody, a rehearsal for a snuff spectacle, a stunning canvas of frontal light and encircling chiaroscuro, and, finally, an invitation to the dance. ("Do what you like, but don't keep me waiting," drone The Kinks as the party refuses to wind down.) If Kubrick didn't watch this, then Fassbinder certainly did. With Ondine, J.D. McDermott, Tosh Carillo, Jacques Potin and Larry Latrae. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |