The Films of Richard Kern

[StevePulaski]

The Films of Richard Kern

NOTE: Over the next three months, I will be reviewing most of the short films found in the Blu-Ray Richard Kern: Hardcore Collection. The short films will be watched/reviewed all in the same day, and this will generally take place in the early part of the month.

Death Valley '69 (1985)
Directed by: Richard Kern

Rating: ★★★

Death Valley '69 serves as the music video for the metal band Sonic Youth's popular song, and there's probably no better force of nature to bring the song to visual life than underground, New York-based director and photographer Richard Kern. Kern specializes in the depraved and the sick-minded, and Death Valley '69, with its home-video aesthetic, unsteady camerawork, and scuzzy presentation, exude all of that quite fittingly. The music video, despite only being five minutes long, hits hard and remains relentless in its grittiness. It gets by almost entirely on the humid, sun-soaked atmosphere it presents, showing a group of young people vacationing in a grassy field, soaking up rays and engaging in bloody brutality. The video is gory and ruthless, but also quite artistic, mind you, with Kern's style seeping through like the mass amounts of fake blood he uses on set. Kern's strength is portraying the sick and the unkempt in a way that's artistic and beautiful, thanks to shots wildly experimental ideas, quirky camera angles, or a combination of all those plus downright unique and twisted ideas. Death Valley '69 is a beautiful introduction to his principles that only exceed as one continues to peruse his filmography.

Directed by: Richard Kern.

The Bitches (1992)
Directed by: Richard Kern

Annabelle Davies and Linda Serbu in Richard Kern's The Bitches.

Rating: ★★★½

Pornography, in its most primitive or contemporary sense, is something to relish because it gives many adequate pleasure that they either can't readily achieve in the current moment or, perhaps, for an indefinite time in their lives. Experimental pornography, however, is something that doesn't always provoke the kind of masturbatory tendencies or arousing qualities that most mainstream pornography can. However, Richard Kern's experimental short The Bitches manages to be equal parts subversive and utterly wild as well as being arousing and humbly erotic.

We open watching two beautiful women, Annabelle Davies and Linda Serbu, fondle and caress one another in the presence of another man (Charles Wing), who is occasionally invited to partake in the fun with the two beautiful ladies. The ladies are dressed in lingerie and pantyhose, in addition to being topless, which invites dirty-but-not-too-dirty vibes into the mix, up until the last half of the short, which takes an unexpected turn into complete and total perversion. Saying anymore would be spoiling the true insanity, which more-or-less crushes the eroticism in favor for something more taboo and completely unpredictable in a wild sense. Needless to say, I loved it.

The Bitches' black and white cinematography, a common feature for Kern, even his more contemporary work, also provides for a uniquely erotic sense of tone in a way that's totally punk-rock and on point with his filmography. The world needs more of this kind of boundary-breaking, full-fledged, unapologetically original art and Kern delivers here on nearly every level.

Starring: Annabelle Davies, Linda Serbu, and Charles Wing. Directed by: Richard Kern.

You Killed Me First (1985)
Directed by: Richard Kern

The family in You Killed Me First.

Rating: ★★★½

Richard Kern's You Killed Me First concerns Lung Leg's Elizabeth, a hormonal, indecisive teenage girl who doesn't know what she wants other than to feed her notion to rebel and critique. Her family is made up of a bunch of squares and conformists, leaving her disillusioned with her boring life and at odds with her parents constantly. Elizabeth begins to rebel quite heavily, going by "Cassandra," and refusing to comply with her parents' limiting orders.

You Killed Me First has Kern absolutely slaughtering typical, suburban niceness and the convention that lies behind a spotless white-picket fence and a beautiful three bedroom home. In a way, one could infer this was Kern's upbringing in a sense, defying convention in a bold and powerful way, simply by refusing to play by the rules and create the kind of personal paradise he was comfortable in and he wanted to embrace. This short takes a completely normal and familiar concept and spins it on its head, featuring bizarre instances and ridiculous depravity only Kern could make so appealing and fun. This is the kind of deviance that sucks you in to the point where you could almost see yourself committing, or at least finding the attraction in bending the rules to fit your own personal wishes.

At one point in the short, Elizabeth's girlfriend remarks how if she keeps up this kind of socially taboo and unacceptable behavior, no sorority will accept her. Elizabeth doesn't care, nor can we assume Kern's desire to be accepted is particularly high either. Both have a unique and incorruptible view on themselves and the capabilities they can provide to make them better, more enriched people. You Killed Me First is an underground testament to individualism in an extreme and occasionally perverse sense, but the audience who have this kind of mentality will certainly find it and be enriched far beyond any square ever could.

Starring: Lung Leg, David Wojnarowicz, Karen Finley, and Jessica Craig-Martin. Directed by: Richard Kern.

The Right Side of My Brain (1985)
Directed by: Richard Kern

Lydia Lunch.

Rating: ★★½

Richard Kern's The Right Side of My Brain is, from what I've seen so far, his dreamiest and most hypnotic effort, frighteningly potent with its saturated black and white photography and frequently haunting with its narration by its lead actress, Lydia Lunch. Lunch plays a woman, who uses the entire twenty-four minutes of the short to voice her rambling opinions on sex, her own self, and the entirety of existence. It's a short that gets pretty immersive for a few minutes, but the monotonous and overall dreary style gets tiresome far too quickly for its own good, leaving the short sort of wading in the water for the latter half. Even an intriguing fellatio scene involving Black Flag's Henry Rollins doesn't add much variety to a short that kind of talks around itself and never finds a great deal to say.

It ends, however, with probably the most potent quote of Kern's short filmography that I have seen, which could very well serve as his defining motto for life. That quote is, "we'll take the bad with the bad and make it worse."

Starring: Lydia Lunch and Henry Rollins. Directed by: Richard Kern.

The Sewing Circle (1992)
Directed by: Richard Kern

Rating: ★★★½

Richard Kern's The Sewing Circle is a brash and deviant little devil of a film, concerning a young woman (played by Kimbra Pfahler, boasting a "Young Republicans" shirt for added humor and irony) who decides to have the lips of her labia sewn together by a punk-rock woman (Lisa Resurrection), whilst her other girlfriend holds her hand for support. It's an immensely cringe-worthy film, as can be expected, due to its content, but the whole time, I must admit, I was unable to turn away.

Kern's films are so experimental and so different from what is socially acceptable that you must look at them through a lens of subversion and cinematic anarchy. One must respect all of what Kern goes for in his shorts: a punk-rock soundtrack, a gritty look to each short's videography, ribald acting, ridiculous costumes and characters, and added grossout elements are just some of what he manages to pack into each one of his shorts and, for the most part, achieves greatness time and time again.

The Sewing Circle is a frightening little film; Kern states it was made during a time when he was struggling with self-identification and body harm and mutilation was something that was going on around him quite pervasively. He, in turn, created a short film that takes the act to incredible extremes and shows what we do in the name of acceptance and beauty. He shows the sewing process in extreme detail, which made me realize that when other directors would decide to look away, Kern, an uncommonly brave soul, decides to zoom in and show process.

Starring: Kimbra Pfahler, Lisa Resurrection, and Carrie. Directed by: Richard Kern.

X is Y (1990)
Directed by: Richard Kern

Tomoyo in X is Y.

Rating: ★★½

Richard Kern's X is Y is a slight exercise in all things anarchic and attributable to No Wave, an underground cinematic movement in Lower East Side New York. It's a visual kaleidoscope and an auditory cacophony, as it shows a young woman (Tomoyo) showing off her automatic fire arms set to a soundtrack of thrash metal and repetitive busy-signals from somebody who keeps trying to call the phone number 666-6666. Combine this with Kern's predictably grimy visual style, filled with scuzzy production values and heavy grain, but ostensibly lacking an extractable idea (does this concern female empowerment? The power of guns?) and you have a short that, again, works more on an experimental basis than the basis of being a short film.

Starring: Tomoyo. Directed by: Richard Kern.

Horoscope (1991)
Directed by: Richard Kern

Rating: ★★½

The same thing can be said about Richard Kern's Horoscope that was said with X is Y in that this particular short is respectable on the principles of being an anarchic product of the No Wave cinematic movement but not so much on the merit of being a successful short film. The short's plot is entirely vapid, showing three people (Holly Adams, Bob Drywall, and Squeak Wilnetz) dancing around almost entirely naked set to Kern's scuzzy videography. Thankfully, whenever Kern makes these small little shorts he seemingly believes are different and revolutionary, he keeps them short and doesn't turn a two or three minute idea into twenty minutes of redundant activity. He saves the real ideas for longer shorts and exercises these kinds of momentary pieces of amusement as nothing more than that.

Starring: Holly Adams, Bob Drywall, and Squeak Wilnetz. Directed by: Richard Kern.

Fingered (1986)
Directed by: Richard Kern

Lydia Lunch and Marty Nation.

Rating: ★★★½

Fingered, from what I've seen so far, is Richard Kern's masterpiece, ranking alongside The Sewing Circle and You Killed Me First. No matter how you slice it, the short is a wickedly devilish representation of punk-rock pornography and has gone on to be a much loved piece of work by the cult director John Waters. We open by focusing on a phone sex operator (played by the gorgeous Lydia Lunch), who, we see, leads a life of tending to the perversions and fetishes of her callers, one in particular loving the idea of mother/son incest. Upon engaging in one successful call with another depraved soul, Lunch's character finds herself taken under the wing of another punk-rocker (Marty Nation) and the two engage in rough sex and an ill-behaved road trip, acting as if they're Bonnie and Clyde.

Lunch and Nation form a hilarious dynamic, as the two try to one up each other in their depravities, and Lunch's repeated acts to break free of Nation's violence also had a recurring element of fright to the picture. The no-budget aesthetic of Kern's, mixing very grainy black and white with a thrash metal soundtrack, assists in making this film look as visually grimy as possible, as if the events in the film weren't dirty and perverse enough. Finally, the sex in the film transcends eroticism into pure horror and rough unpredictability, as if Kern, who has already made very arousing shorts like The Bitches, is now trying to subvert sex into a more horrific sight than a pleasant one.

Fingered is messy and vile, but it's those traits that make it so watchable and so intoxicating as a short. Like most works of Kern, it contains visuals you can't unsee and material that you would've never believed to exist, if you were strange enough to ever even think of it in the first place.

Starring: Lydia Lunch and Marty Nation. Directed by: Richard Kern.

My Nightmare (1993)
Directed by: Richard Kern

Rating: ★★★½

Richard Kern's My Nightmare is a frightening short film about trying to realize the desires man has long internalized, be it about women, sex, or pleasure. In this film, shots of a man (Kern himself) lying on a bed masturbating to the thoughts of a woman (Susan McNamara) stripping and performing a wide variety of fetishes with him are juxtaposed together, creating a very vivid masturbatory fantasy before the woman finally enters the man's life.

Kern uses canted angles quite frequently during My Nightmare, which help provide for a pleasantly uneasy effect, making us question if we're supposed to be uncomfortable or aroused during these particular scenes. As always, Kern knows no boundaries, fully allowing both the male and female bodies to be explored by one another and themselves for the six minute duration of this short. It's so raw and scuzzy that the limits it pushes are the most attractive thing about it.

When the woman finally meets the man at his front door, we see all the spark and flutter of this relationship drop down a few notches. What was once very lively, spontaneous, and sexual becomes a very rote and perfunctory modeling shoot for McNamara's character by the Kern character. My Nightmare details the sharp contrast between the beauty of imagination and the drollness of reality. It's one of the many things juxtaposed here that shouldn't go unnoticed or unappreciated.

Starring: Richard Kern and Susan McNamara. Directed by: Richard Kern.

Submit to Me (1985)
Directed by: Richard Kern

Rating: ★★★

Submit to Me gradually goes from being an arousing work of punk-rock softcore pornography to a demented, devilish display of insanity. It begins by showing hypnotic clips of women serenading the audience before turning into a much darker, more sinister music video, with music by The Butthole Surfers and increasingly stark, often gory imagery shown for good measure.

This is precisely the kind of short Richard Kern excels at making; the only issue is it grows repetitive over time. The title also suggests a more domineering focus, but the entire thing is kept fairly minimal in terms of BDSM. The videography, as expected, is cheap but entertainingly so, with amateurish cinematography excluding any opportunity for visual polish. Again, Submit to Me vaguely overstays its welcome but it's a fun watch to see Kern do what he does best.

Starring: Lydia Lunch, Lung Leg, and Margo Day. Directed by: Richard Kern.

The Evil Cameraman (1990)
Directed by: Richard Kern

Rating: ★★

The Evil Cameraman is the first short by Richard Kern that has ever disappointed me. There's enough here to warrant a longer effort by Kern (think thirty minutes or so), but it never even takes off after eleven minutes. It concerns the titular character (Kern himself), who is known for kidnapping models and tying him up in his basement in addition to making them perform tasks as part of their job that they don't want to do.

Right off the bat, this short lacks the kind of wit Kern's work usually bears. Rather than infusing some kind of idea, attractive aesthetic, interesting juxtaposition, or a sense of style, Kern conjures up a disjointed narrative for a short that really should begin after the four minute mark and continue from there. The ending of the brief project even puzzles, as the entire thing seems to have been edited out of order.

Kern is much more capable than what The Evil Cameraman settles for; it's the first disappointment in a collection of mostly superb shorts.

Starring: Richard Kern, Jap Anne, Ice Queen, Little Linda, and Jacqui O. Directed by: Richard Kern.

Submit to Me Now (1987)
Directed by: Richard Kern

Rating: ★★★

Submit to Me Now is the only official sequel that Richard Kern has made, and being that this particular short has very little to live up to in terms of continuing or fleshing out a story, it's honestly a low-stakes sequel all the more. Much like its predecessor, it's a parade of images showing sadomasochistic tendencies, self-mutilation, male and female genitalia, and more raunchy images, all presented with blaring music from Kern's favorite band Sonic Youth.

When it comes to a plotless Kern film, we come for the visuals and stay for the outright zaniness, and that's exactly what Submit to Me Now provides. It's a wild ride through the lunacy of 1980's punk, showing Kern favorites like Lung Leg and the gorgeous Lydia Lunch how we love to see them - scantily clad and bloodsoaked. It's a fun romp that works off of its predecessor thanks to its continued use of hardcore imagery and dizzying visuals, all of which work even for the questionably long runtime of eighteen minutes.

Starring: Lydia Lunch, Lung Leg, Amy Turner, and Tom Turner. Directed by: Richard Kern.

Stray Dogs (1984)
Directed by: Richard Kern

Rating: ★★½

Richard Kern's Stray Dogs is one fourth of an anthology short film by the name of Manhattan Love Suicides, which is one of the many shorts included on Hardcore Collection: The Films of Richard Kern. Stray Dogs follows a series of grotesque characters, one of them played by David Wojnarowicz, who plays an obsessed fan, who desperately tries to get the attention of an actor he adores. It isn't until he starts literally tearing himself apart does the attention he craves begin to surface.

Stray Dogs is an interesting idea of how far one will go to get the attention of the one they love; it's also one of the most grounded (aka normal) Richard Kern shorts I have yet to see. Its reliance on punk imagery, genitalia, and gruesomeness is stunningly minimal and Kern tries harder to focus on a story rather than an amalgamation of styles and concepts. However, this, in turn, makes for a decidedly less interesting project because we know how wild Kern can be, and here, he seems to be simply holding back on us, refusing to release his inner beast. Wojnarowicz is a performer with a unique appearance and over-the-top acting style, and Kern is clearly experimenting with stricter narrative restraints and even black and white imagery, but ultimately, there's not a great deal here to warrant a recommendation when other Kern shorts like The Bitches, The Sewing Circle, and You Killed Me First desperately need to be seen.

Starring: David Wojnarowicz, William Rice, and Robin Renzi. Directed by: Richard Kern.