(Christina Hornisher,
USA, 1973,
76 mins)
"I always liked seeing people as they really are. A camera does that. It doesn't hide anything. It makes you see what's underneath."--Mark
It's not unusual for a novelist to write about a novelist or a filmmaker to make a film about a filmmaker. It's less unusual, though not uncommon, for a filmmaker to make a film about a cinematographer, even less so when it comes to a photographer, like David Hemmings in Antonioni's Blow-Up.
Though cinematographers play a key role in the filmmaking process, they aren't seen as storytellers in the same way as directors, writers, or editors. Instead, they serve as our eyes–the audience's eyes. We see what they see, or more to the point, what they want us to see, regardless as to whether the director is calling the shots or whether they're given carte blanche to shoot as they see fit or with significant input. Sometimes the director and cinematographer are the same, but there are more films made by these double threats, like Steven Soderbergh/Peter Andrews, than about them.
Cinematographers are essential, and yet they're seen as comparatively introverted. I couldn't say whether that's true or not, simply because we don't hear from them as often, and many are more interested in doing the work than promoting themselves. As portrayed on screen, they often come across as highly skilled, on the one hand, and...kinda weird on the other.
So it goes with Mark (musician Christopher Augustine from sunshine pop band Every Mother's Son), the protagonist of experimental filmmaker Christina Hornisher's sole narrative feature. Mark works as a cinematographer for adult film director Jobal (musical collaborator Dick Glass), who specializes in peep show loops.
It's a living, but like his focus puller predecessor in Michael Powell's Peeping Tom, Mark would prefer to work in features. It doesn't matter whether it's for money, prestige, or the chance to work on projects of greater artistic merit. To quote Gang of Four, "To have ambition was my ambition." Mark doesn't have much–tellingly, his birdcage is empty–but at least he has that.
Hornisher's script, which does not fuck around, never spells it out, and nor does it need to. Plus, Mark isn't especially talkative, which fits his antisocial character, and also serves as a boon to non-professional actors, like Glass, with little dialogue-memorization experience, though Augustine had some.
The director, writing under the pseudonym Paul Hansen, wastes no time in revealing Mark's true specialty: killing women. The obvious theory is that he's a misogynist, and he is, but his work in the adult film industry has activated impulses that were already there. Hornisher doesn't blame pornography per se--Mark also visits strip clubs and adult bookstores--but it's an inciting factor, and he doesn't appear to have been doing it for long.
In a pre-credit sequence, he walks down the Sunset Strip. It's dark and neon-lit, but hardly devoid of hustle and bustle. It's like the vision of Times Square in Allan Moyle's Times Square; a glimpse of a pre-gentrified tourist destination filled with mom and pops and grubby locals, rather than well-scrubbed tourists.
In a diner, Mark spots a hippie chick with long, frizzy hair and a beaded headband (the mysterious Dianna Huntress, who appears to be biracial, like her part-Puerto Rican director). They hit it off, and she takes him home, setting the mood by placing a record on the player and sharing a joint.
Cinematographer John H. Pratt, in his sole feature, and camera operator and future professor John-Pierre Geuens (Lemora: A Child's Tale of the Supernatural), Hornisher's ex-husband and the father of their son, zeroes in on the Janis Joplin and Paul McCartney--his 1970 self-titled solo debut--records in her collection, but that's not what we hear on the soundtrack.
Instead, it's USC grad and future superstar composer Basil Poledouris (Conan the Barbarian) in a jaunty mood. While I don't believe Hornisher had the budget for any major label hits–there aren't any on the soundtrack–she struck gold with Poledouris, who does fantastic work from start to finish. At first, I thought his theme for this sequence was too bright and poppy, in a mod 1960s way, but it becomes darker and wiggier as events take a turn.
After the couple retires to her couch, the woman takes off her top and then her jeans. Mark removes nothing--though he will towards the end--while caressing her body in a gentle, admiring way, but then his hands graze her neck, and it's clear what's about to happen. Quick as a wink, his caresses turns to squeezes; she struggles, slumps, and dies.
Geuens then zooms in on his light blue eyes and freezes the frame.
Along the way, we get a good look at the unnamed woman's naked body. Though the term "female gaze" indicates a film made by a woman, I reject it in this case. Hornisher's gaze is female only in the sense that she is, and if I didn't know the director was female, I wouldn't have guessed. Most of the nudity involves women, including the peep show loops which feature one to two female performers and one robed man in an eerie S&M scenario.
I'm not suggesting that any of this is sexist or exploitative. It was par for the course at the time, and avoiding or minimizing nudity wouldn't have been true to the milieu in which Mark operates. Hornisher's gaze is female more in terms of context. We see naked women, just as he does--and just as John-Pierre Geuens does--but that's all he sees, and form follows function, since Hornisher doesn't allow us to get to know any of them until the end. Prior to that, it's a character piece about a man who grew up with, works with, lusts for, and doesn't understand the first thing about women.
There isn't a lot of violence in the film, and there are only a few victims–obviously, one is one too many, but Mark isn't a relentless Rodney Alcala-type killer–and it's never prettified. It's fast and blunt. He does his thing with crisp efficiency. No fuss, no muss, and zero regrets, because he's one sick bastard.
It's also how Mark executes his day job. He shows up with his equipment in a big metal case, sets things up, enjoys a smoke before the performers arrive, and gets to work. In the first such sequence, the set is on one level, while Joban watches from the second. If Mark works dispassionately, the rotund Jobal pants, sweats, and licks his thin lips in a lascivious manner.
Before the shoot begins, a performer walks down the steps from one level to the next, as Geuens films her from below, upskirt-style. It's Hornisher's not-exactly-female gaze in full effect, because this isn't necessarily what Mark sees in this instance; it's what Hornisher and/or her camera operator has chosen to show us. It's creepy, sexy, and funny all at the same time.
Though Jobal attempts to make small talk with Mark between setups, the DP isn't having it. He neither likes nor respects his employer, not least because he's a stained-tee slob who won't loan him a camera to work on non-porn reels in his spare time (in reality, Augustine and Glass were friends). With only sex loops to show prospective employers, Mark's chances of landing a legit gig are slim to none, though he tries, with mounting desperation.
When he isn't working, Mark walks around Los Angeles taking pictures, since he's also working on a portfolio. This entails a trip to the Los Angeles Zoo, which may or may not be symbolic, since he focuses on the lions and tigers, and he's definitely an apex predator himself--though they're locked behind bars and he isn't.
He also fields calls from a domineering sister who predicts Mary Lynn Rajskub's Elizabeth in Punch-Drunk Love, the most amusingly bossy of seven similar sisters. In both cases, overbearing mothers and sisters are posited as reasons why both men, Mark and Adam Sandler's Barry in P.T. Anderson's 2002 picture, are so angry and discombobulated by women.
Hornisher does something unusual in this sequence and layers Mark's sister's voice, so it sounds like she's speaking from several mouths at once. She's putting us in his head, and it's as disorienting as it is discomforting, though the entire brother-sister dynamic–in both films–feels somewhat misogynistic, if more intentionally so in the case of Hollywood 90028.
Mark and Barry may not be suffering from the angel/whore complex that afflicted Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver, but their condition represents a branch from the same tree, since they believe one good woman can solve all their problems, except they aren't really looking for women; they're looking for miracle workers. Barry finds one in the person of Emily Watson's Lena, and the film ends on an idyllic note, whereas Mark falls for adult film performer Michele (Jeannette Pilger),who isn't an angel, a whore, or a miracle worker; just a woman feeling lonely while her musician boyfriend is out of town (in 1975, life imitated art when she married British bass player Pete Sears).
So, the two begin an affair, which involves a spaghetti-making sequence that shows Mark's rarely-seen fun side, a photography session in Griffith Park, and a drive through Bunker Hill during which Mark laments the real estate speculation degrading the Los Angeles in which he has resided for a third of his 29-year-old life (like Michele and Hornisher's military father, he relocated from the Midwest).
While I found most everything he said relatable, the monologue also suggests that the times are changing, Mark isn't, and he's going to get left behind as second wave feminism renders Marlboro Men like him obsolete.
While seeing Michele, who he treats with respect, Mark picks up a bubbly hitchhiker (future costume designer Gayle Davis), who recalls 1970s actress Joy Bang, for a day of frolicking on the beach in Venice and in a sailboat on Marina del Rey, but when she starts to speak in a multi-layered voice that recalls his sister, his mood darkens, and he does what he feels he must.
Meanwhile, Mark decides Michele is The One. The feeling isn't mutual. If she doesn't feel she was leading him on, he's not the kind of guy who knows how to pick up on social cues–or even to listen to anything a woman is really saying–but I won't give away the ending. It's better to discover for yourself, assuming I haven't completely turned off any prospective viewers. All I'll say is that there's one ending and then another. One is inevitable, while the other is shocking, but more in execution than in narrative terms.
After the penultimate sequence, Geuens, by way of helicopter, moves away unsteadily from the Hollywood sign, where the film came to its conclusion, much as in Hornisher fan Ti West's recent slasher homage MaXXXine. There is no score, only the sound of the wind. He keeps moving further away as the sign gets smaller and smaller and finally disappears.
Like Gloria Katz, who made Messiah of Evil with her husband Willard Huyck, Christina Hornisher graduated from UCLA film school, steeped herself in the art house cinema of the 1960s, and released her first feature in 1973. Over the years, distributors would slap a variety of titles on both films in order to attract the grindhouse crowd to minimally successful returns. In the case of Hollywood 90028, that included Twisted Throats, The Hollywood Hillside Strangler, and Insanity.
Katz went on to work on seven more feature films, mostly as a writer, while Hornisher was out (she died two years before her film started to make the rounds again in 2005). The new Grindhouse Releasing three-disc set has plenty of information about her background, the cast, and the production, but less about her afterlife, though Marc Edward Hueck, who appears on one of the two commentary tracks, uncovered all he could for the essay "Christina Hornisher: Alone With That Obscure Image of Yourself," in which he compares her career to that of Barbara Loden and Kathleen Collins.
Hollywood 90028 is a cynical, tough-minded film about sexism, misogyny, and the ways Hollywood grinds up strivers, like Mark and Michele, and spits them out.
If the acting isn't necessarily award-worthy, the performances are consistently compelling, it looks great, and Miklós Rózsa protege Basil Poledouris elevates every scene, from folk-oriented melodies with flute and strings to charming passages with woodwinds and chimes to more aggressive moments with standup bass and violin scrapings–phenomenal stuff that always enhances and never overwhelms or detracts from the story.
Hornisher's film follows in the wake of chillers like Paul Vecchiali's The Strangler, William Grefé's Impulse, and the audience-implicating Peeping Tom, which exerted as much of an influence as Blow-Up, while inspiring or at least predicting the Tinseltown visions to come from a generation of contemporary filmmakers who have discovered and embraced her once-lost film, including West, Anna Biller, Nicolas Winding Refn, The First Omen's Arkasha Stevenson, and Palme d'Or-winning Sean Baker of Anora fame.
I wouldn't say it's a happy time at the movies, but it's a memorable one, and I regret that it's the only one we ever got from this visionary filmmaker.
Grindhouse Releasing's 4K restoration of Hollywood 90028 ships on Nov 26 (read about the restoration here). Extra features include Christina Hornisher's short films, Dick Glass in The Erotic Director, a CD with Basil Poledouris's score, two commentary tracks, and a 28-page booklet with photos and essays. Images from Mondo Digital (Jeannette Pilger as Michele in a photo taken by Mark), the IMDb (Christopher Augustine as Mark), Rock! Shock! Pop! (Augustine with Dick Glass), FilmScene (Mark closeup), Hollywood Theatre (Mark and performer), Grindhouse Releasing (Blu-ray art and Pilger in a Mark photo), and Sitges Film Festival (the filmmaker).
