Director's Cut

ArtForum, March, 1998 by J. Hoberman

The transformation of "found" film-footage into fetish object goes back at least as far as Joseph Cornell's 1936 Rose Hobart, which distilled a Hollywood potboiler into an eccentric portrait of the leading lady. Such "re-directing jobs," as Waters calls them, are not interested in narrative per se, although the punch-line structure demonstrated in the title of his curtain piece, 12 Assholes and a Dirty Foot ("the last taboo in porn") is deployed throughout in manners ranging from the punning 7 Marys to fifteen Peyton Place picture-postcard landscapes - cutaways, according to the artist, from unshowable sex acts - that culminate in a snapshot of author Grace Metalious' tombstone.

Waters' gags are rigorously conceptual; at the same time, a number of his re-direction jobs recall the so-called structural-materialist avant-garde of twenty-five years ago by using such facts of cinematic expression as academy leader and especially, credits. (In one piece, the signatures of five European auteurs are trumped by that of Hollywood hack Randal Kleiser.) Dorothy Malone's Collar surveys one of the more enigmatic fashion statements of '50s Hollywood, while Portrait in Black - in which Lana Turner fades into solarization - is one of several pieces suggesting cheaper and more authentic versions of Warhol multiples. Indeed, the empty frame of Liz Taylor's Hair and Feet is a statement on celebrity that out-creeps Warhol, as does Movie Star Jesus - a crucifix assembled from images of Willem Dafoe, Jeffrey Hunter et al. doing their time on the cross.

Nothing if not movie literate, Director's Cut offers a number of alternate takes on film history. Francis - a double-feature juxtaposing images of the well-known talking mule and the homonymous Hollywood historical figure played by Jessica Lange - is one of the more frivolous examples of Waters' revisionism. Baby Doll Gets Up effectively relocates the venerable Kazan-Williams shocker in the world of Pink Flamingos. Ross Hunter Turns into Douglas Sirk is a witty "found" comment on the transformative powers of auteurism. (A similar desecration is effected throughout by the juxtaposition of Waters' axioms like Divine or Edith Massey with various real stars and media personalities.) The economical Otto freezes images from Otto Preminger's 1957 Saint Joan for a near-definitive statement on the destructive power of directorial megalomania and naive will-to-stardom.

Waters resurrects some of his own juvenilia, most spectacularly a sequence from his first 16-mm featurette, Eat Your Makeup, 1967, when the director was twenty-one. Scarcely less tasteless than the climax of Oliver Stone's JFK, this re-creation of the Kennedy assassination - featuring Divine in black wig and pillbox hat - is called Zapruder. Nor does Waters fail to appropriate aspects of his favorite films, ranging from the grotesque Tony Richardson-Jean Genet collaboration Mademoiselle to William Castle's The Tingler to the soft-core porn film Inga. In an afterward that provides substantial annotation for his praxis, the always-articulate artist makes the unverifiable, if unlikely, claim that he never watches a movie he loves twice - he's afraid he'll be disappointed the second time around. This fetishization of his own fetishism is one of the few jokes Waters declines to explicate.

J. Hoberman contributes regularly to Artforum.