Robert
Film Comment
by GARY HILL
For a campus whose mini
factions of activists find
meaning in artificial gestures
of protest over a 30-year-old
Hollywood flick, the experien
tial now must mean little.
When white property owners
won't rent to blacks, to Indians,
to Mexican-Americans, to hip
pies, in our very own Lincoln
City, political protest over
Tarzan and the Apes comes off
stamps7
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PAGE 8
Frank makes It
as camp and meaningless as
the film itself.
The experimental now. Me
and My Brother.
University of Nebraska
students and instructors who
attended Refocus 70, a
photography-film conference in
Iowa City tost week, saw a 3-year-old
film more immediate
than the current protest, and
much more worth fighting for a
chance to see than any three
films on this year's Union
schedule.
Me and My Brother by
Robert Frank.
The central figure is Julius
Orlovsky, the catatonic
schizophrenic brother of Peter
Orlovsky, Allen Ginsburg's
lover.
The film was shot and edited
over a three year period during
which Julius was released from
a mental hospital, lived with
his brother and Ginsburg in
New York, accompanied them
on a reading tour to Kansas,
lived with them in San Fran
cisco, drifted off by himself
several times, was
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rehospitalized and again
released.
But the film is not so much
about Julius as it is about
Frank's process of establishing
cinematic relationships
between himself and Julius,
between himself and his own
world (New York) of which
Julius is a part
The film is a problem-solving,
a getting-at the essense of
a process called life. Julius Is
spending himself. He is alive
and dying. So is Frank. So is
Ginsburg. So is the psychiatrist
who asks silent Julius an hour
full of questions as he projects
upon the patient symptoms of
his own guilt and fear.
Take your medicine, he says,
it will make you less afraid.
And Frank slams the round
shouldered psychiatrist, tie-less
now, glasses off, a tiny round
tandaid like a badge of
vulnerability at the corner of
his mouth, into an elevator the
size of a closet with a black
man the size of a tree.
The black laborer stares. The
white professional fidgets. He
pokes at the board of buttons,
tries to turn his back, to open
the door on any floor. A frozen
gesture of fear. The door opens,
the black man grabs him, lifts
him from the floor by his col
lar, the door closes, the black
man puts him down, and with a
swipe at his sweaty bald head,
the psychiatrist is back in his
office chair, Julius to his right,
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happen mow
the tour over, bis face still
twitching.
Frank's scenes serve not as
story-form accounts of a se
quential progression of events
making literary sense, but as
reflective surfaces, back and
forth against which the essense
of the film bounces.
The truth of the film, the
truth of Frank's life, the truth
of Julius, exists somewhere in
the sensory crossfire set up by
these surfaces.
Watching him' sit silently
amid the ruckus and the words,
it is tempting to judge Julius a
sage. At a poetry reading in
Kansas, Peter Orlovsky and
Ginsburg chant and wail and
hammer finger cymbals and,
when the crowd shouts for it,
they try to make Julius, sitting
with them onstage, say
something.
Say something. Say
something. Finally, from
Julius: "Say something."
Does he mean for the poets
themselves to stop for once and
really say something, that is,
say something important,
something meaningful,
something that will get us all
out of this mess, that will
relieve our pain? Or is he
simply, dumbly, mouthing the
words he hears?
With Julius, you can't tell.
That's clear. He is sick, a
schizoid.
But having Julius around
puts everyone's behavior in
question. As the character
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HSKS
playing the part of Frank putt
it: "If you stripped anyone of
their style, they'd be where
Julius is."
Styleless. And yet, the best
an actor (brought in to play
Julius in a film being made in
this film) can do, is to assume
a verbal style and set of
gestures approximating bis
own idea of how it is to be
Julius.
Ideas are word-bound. And s
the actor's portrayal of a maa
whose principal puzzle is his
silence, is primarily verbal.
Consequently, this second
surface Julius provides a rich;
dimension of sensory specula
tkn which shapes more comw
pletely the schizoid realm and
Frank's relation to it.
One cannot know the ex
perience of another man's
behavior. And, as Julius
motives cannot be known,
neither can those of anyone)
else. Things happen, that's all.
A social worker questions
Julius about his life and urges
him to reach out with his hand
to touch hers, and we think we
know her intentions. Later, the
woman makes the same
gesture, the same plea, to a
lesbian actress who obliges her.
We were mistaken.
What did you mean by that?
Continued on Page 9
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FRIDAY, APRIL 10, 1970