The Films of Christopher Maclaine
Christopher Maclaine, a beat poet of the 1940s and ’50s living in San Francisco, made only four films in his lifetime; the first and longest two–The End (1953), which is 35 minutes, and the 14-minute The Man Who Invented Gold (1957)–present the profoundest challenge to viewer identification I know of. Avoiding the extreme (though brilliant) conceptual anticinema of such filmmakers as Maurice Lemaitre, Maclaine tells stories based in social reality but in a manner so profoundly fragmented, so unnerving, as to give even viewers who’ve seen the works many times a series of perceptual shocks. Among the greatest films I’ve ever seen, these twin fables of doom and redemption are also unlike any others I know. After perhaps 20 viewings of The End over the past 30 years, I feel as if I’m only beginning to understand its greatness.
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I know of only four treatments of Maclaine in print that go beyond a few sentences. Jonas Mekas wrote a very short rave review in 1963, Brakhage offered enthusiastic appreciation in his 1989 book Film at Wit’s End, and filmmaker J.J. Murphy has published two articles, one in Film Quarterly (Winter 1979-80) and the other in Film Culture (1983). What little is known about Maclaine’s life is the result of Murphy’s research. Born in Oklahoma in 1923, Maclaine graduated from the University of California at Berkeley in 1946 and soon founded a small literary magazine; he also published his poetry in other small magazines and in several books he had printed, the last in 1960. Frequently broke and dependent on friends, he cultivated the image of the mad artist; both Brakhage and Murphy compare him to Antonin Artaud. He became a drug casualty when methedrine was introduced into the Bay Area in the late 50s; much stronger than the amphetamines he’d previously taken, it caused permanent brain damage. When Brakhage describes visiting him in the early 60s, Maclaine sounds like the classic speed freak; at about that time he also made at least one suicide attempt. By the mid-60s he no longer recognized his friends, and in 1969, unable to care for himself, he was placed in a state institution, where he died in 1975.
The End certainly has a center: six stories of people on the last day of their lives. Most are about to commit suicide, or some metaphorical equivalent, but the mushroom cloud with which the film begins and ends reminds us that, as Maclaine’s voice intones on the sound track, we await “the grand suicide of the human race”–his conceit is that his characters have reached the end of their personal ropes the day before a nuclear holocaust. Throughout the film he compares the dehumanizing effects of mass culture to the dehumanizing effects of personal despair, weaving these two threads together until the mannequins he films in store windows, the anonymous people he films on the street, and his characters all seem variations on the same half-living, half-dead persona. In this film Maclaine bridges the longtime split between socially or politically engaged film-making and more poetic, self-referential work; The End simply takes as a given that societal and personal sicknesses are inextricably connected. Partly a response to the homogenized, white-bread 50s, the film has plenty of black humor (a murderer recalls his mother telling him again and again, “They’ll hang you yet, Charles”), reminding me of the dark jokes we used to make in elementary school about how hiding under our desks was going to save us from the bomb.
Maclaine’s editing constitutes neither accretion nor fusion but a kind of visceral tearing, questioning not only the unity of our culture but the possibility of a unified consciousness, anticipating many postmodern theorists who seem unaware of his work. For Maclaine, each character’s existence is a discontinuous flood of often unrelated thoughts. (Murphy quotes a psychiatrist who knew Maclaine on the effects of speed: “All the ideas come out” in a rush, he said, “like putting tomatoes through a strainer.”) But The End is a powerful, even ecstatic experience not because it’s disjunctive but because it establishes a tension between emotionally engaged and alienated modes of thinking, a tension that pervades the imagery, editing, and sound track. Just as the pink flowers pull us away from the concrete steps, so the first section ends not with Walter’s suicide but with his murder: the narrator tells us that the murderer, “for reasons we know nothing about,…decided to blow the head off the next person he saw.” And just as the pink flowers are compelling in themselves, so Maclaine speculates on the sound track that the murderer must also have a story worth telling.
Brakhage, and many other avant-garde filmmakers after Maclaine, have celebrated simple acts of perception that can reframe the world–our potential to transform the mundane into the magical. Maclaine does it here in a shot no one seems to have noticed, a little throwaway image that not only sums up his idea but anticipates a whole era of filmmaking. Even as he discovers this magic, however, he pulls away from it: this miraculous shot is undercut by the “hard to believe” line that precedes it and by the fact that it lasts a scant 21 frames–less than a second.
