Enchantment: The Fantastic Films of Michael Krueger
This week on Art & Trash, a very special episode…
As someone who grew up watching movies like Creature from the Haunted Sea and The Giant Gila Monster, I don’t suffer the same discipline others seem to when it comes to suspending my disbelief. If a filmmaker piles up books of carpet samples and puts some googly-eyes on their creation and calls it a monster, I’ll go along for the ride, grinning silently without the need to self-consciously declare, “that looks so fake,” and “how cheesy!” I figure if anything this is the great leveller when it comes to how we watch so-called trash: our willingness to accept that what happens in a movie doesn’t need to resemble an exacting reality.
Some of these thoughts were riding with me when I started work on Enchantment last month. I’d thought for some time that I’d make an episode about Night Vision, which is as great a film about the creative process as any I’d ever seen; but it was only after I had seen the director’s previous film, Mind Killer, that I decided I had to make as comprehensive a study of his work as I could. I have no doubt that there is much more to be said than what I’ve said here about these two movies, made somewhat miraculously back-to-back in 1987.
Michael Krueger was a fan of science-fiction blockbusters. I think one would have to be to serve as an editor and publisher of a magazine like Fantastic Films, which sported interviews with the teams behind the space operas and effects spectaculars that defined the post-New Hollywood era of studio filmmaking. Like many genre-focused blockbuster-era cinephiles looking to Hollywood for a path forward, Krueger took inspiration from the classic monsters of Universal Studios, and in his films there are allusions, in both story and image, to the Invisible Man, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Dracula, and the Wolfman. He was also preoccupied with the idea of demonic possession, and both Mind Killer and Night Vision feature characters who have been overtaken by forces greater than themselves, and whose egoistic frailties have transformed them into instruments of violence.
Krueger and his business partner managed to land a deal with Prism, the international home video company, whereby Prism would finance their films so long as they could be made for less than $250,000. It’s by this arrangement that they made these first two films, which allowed them to move on to other projects, projects for which Krueger would take a backseat, serving only as a screenwriter and producer. He died from cancer at age 39, only two years after completing Mind Killer and Night Vision. What claims can be made about a filmmaker who only made two films, and further to that, in such a brief, condensed period of time? There are qualities that tie the films together, qualities that suggest what Krueger might have done had he continued to tell fantastical but modest, Denver-focused stories. But I’m not really interested in leaving room for speculation: he was already ascendant in his career, and when he died, Krueger’s company was producing a 3.5 million-dollar runaway production in Montreal (The Amityville Curse, issued this month on blu-ray from Canadian International Pictures).
We learn through imitation. In some ways, Krueger’s creative path suggests what happens to the protagonist of Night Vision, Andy Archer, when he is distracted, again and again, from the creative work of writing, by his haunted VCR, what I refer to in the piece as ‘the sewer of stories’. Andy tries to write what he knows, but the problem is that he knows nothing. Krueger wrote what he knew, and what he knew was movies. Like the best Roger Corman movies, Krueger’s were developed at a necessary speed that surrendered them to a subconscious force. Night Vision is about automatic writing; it seems at times to be the result of automatic filmmaking.
For readers in Toronto, this Friday (tomorrow) I’ve programmed a screening of films and videos by media artist Christine Lucy Latimer at Innis College, room 222, 7PM, co-presented by the Cinema Studies Institute and the curatorial collective AD HOC. Information below.
The films and videos of Christine Lucy Latimer defy their containers: they reveal the fragile systems underlying media; they press the boundaries of image-making machines; they embrace the faults and frailties of vision. Almost all of Latimer’s work is silent, but nothing is truly silent: Latimer draws out images that recall the hums, tweets, and mechanical moans of the technology with which she made them. Latimer’s work began long after most of the formats she pursues had become obsolescent. Refusing the universal nostalgia of the antique camera and the antique image, her works are undeniably present-facing and playfully disobedient, ethereal, abstract. Supremely self-conscious and yet mystical, they are seances that draw out the ghosts in the machine. In this program, fourteen pieces, almost all of them of a hybrid constitution, chart Latimer’s evolution from 2002 to the present, from films and videos that bear an overt eroticism (the scrambled kickboxing of Mosaic, the glow of a stripping woman filtered through a toy camera in Ghostmeat) to explorations of the patina of resilient media (the damaged digital photos of House Pieces, the foldable hologram imprints of Tender).
These are just amazing works that take on media hybridity in a way seldom seen. Her work will be the topic of an episode of Art & Trash next season.
The future of this season’s a bit up in the air! I’m taking a week off from it, regardless. There are two to three more episodes I’d like to make before the end of the year. We’ll see! In the meantime, keep your eyes peeled for more episodes of Detours to see through the waning days of Noirvember: next up, Otto Preminger’s Laura, starring heartbroken golem Dana Andrews. Till next time.