THE TRANSCENDENTALIST (Charles Laughton, 1951)

The Transcendentalist finally makes peace with itself about an hour in, settling into a nonsense rhythm reminiscent of another sub-prime classic you'll have on the tip of your tongue, like the name of a minor lover you spent a long week promising to never forget on one of the more tousist-ridden Greek islands when you were eighteen and promptly didn't write to, ever, despite wanting to. (Why didn't you?) Gary Cooper, heretoforth vibrating with alacrity between folksy hero and weary cynic (a pendulum on which almost every Hollywood lead swings, at least if they're not on the one that ticks on homespun innocence and tocks, unbelievably but inevitably, on genius and glory. Neither are exclusive; many character arcs greedily take in both donging devices, or an unholy mixture of both), takes sixty minutes of chewing gum (beautifully, slowly, sexily, evoking the old Wrigley's slogan 'Too much mastication will make you go blind', a minor classic of inverse-advertising that made the kids chew their way through the fifties) before he ups the gears into something more, something om; He discovers a fifty-foot meta-Cooper at exactly the same time as James Agee and Dirk Langston's script begins to sing a second simultaneous song, spreading melodic shards in many new curves; this is also the exact moment that Charles Laughton's direction seems to twist into a new heaven, somehow capturing the exact moment that Western Philosophy meets east, causing a blissful Oz to permeate the director's canvas/Kansas.

Hyperbole? Watch it, and you too will think that the film suddenly shifts from black and white to colour. But it doesn't; it just seems that way, an illusion created by a coincidence of genius. ' Every one of my mother, Colin Cowdrey, Eleanor Roosevelt and Rin Tin Tin see the ending in colour,' said Graham Greene in a Times piece in 1956, going on to refute the myth that dogs are colourblind, instead suggesting that they see in fact a dim rainbow, in which blue is especially noticeable to their eye... 'so perhaps Rin Tin Tin appreciates the waterfall sequence here in a somewhat nuanced way'.

A metaphysical detective story becomes decadent, endless inqury; Cooper wanders into the golden countryside, not leaving a linear plot behind but somehow multiplying it tenfold and making even more sense. The gates of noir are flung apart.1 Somehow, you wonder, if in fact mankind would have been condemned long ago but for these curious puzzles we create to confuse the gods. Art doesn't just amuse us, it buys us time, until we can figure out a suitable escape plan. And so flippant jokes can actually be mordant philosophies, and Gary Coopers can actually be religious vessels, carrying our fevered hopes as far as they can before their knees buckle and they grow tired and tiresome.

'Our noons were in the same sky,' said Cooper of his time working with Laughton, Agee and Langston. The public wavered, however, finding the hard stare of genius too much to bear, and went to see other entertainments instead. 'Such is life,' remarked Laughton, I shouldn't wonder that if Christ was resurrected in our lifetimes, we would surely fail to notice.'

The Transcendentalist is the first of two one-hit wonders of Laughton's directorial career in Hollywood, the other being Night of the Hunter (1955), another slice of sublime dissonance.

(Nance... Nancy- that was it her name, knew her for a week in 1993. Or Susan. From Stepney, or Colchester. A six-foot tall tomboy in a West Ham shirt on the verge of blooming into a stunner, a fact of which she was all too oblivious. She was relatively spiteful in play on holiday, but wrote two letters full of longing back home. There was no response. She is thought of seldomly, but once every six months a girl with her likeness walks past and causes a wave of wistfulness.)

The Transcendentalist Directed by Charles Laughton Produced by Paul Gregory Written by James Agee, Dirk Langston, United Artists 92 mins Release Date US: Jan 1951/UK: Aug 1951

Tagline: 'He's gone.'

1. David Lynch was heavily influenced by The Transcendentalist, and the central motif of a detective encircled by mysterious evils was evident in Twin Peaks, with Lynch even naming his Special Agent hero after Gary Cooper.

DOZENS OF JESUSES: THE BIGGER, TRUER LIFE OF LEXINGTON SAFFRON-DIGARD (Bob Williams, 1995)

'I said the Beatles were bigger than Jesus. Lexxie reckons he is Jesus. Dozens of Jesuses' John Lennon, 1975.

We find secondary evidence everywhere; we see it there, on the screen, the famous Beatle talking, in that famous voice, and saying things, but where are we? When are we? And most pertinently, Who? Appearances deceive; for, if you were to watch this document to Lexington Saffron-Digard, you might believe him to be one of the most notorious artists of his day; you would believe him to be, if you trusted the producers (and do we not, always), an enfant terrible who died only weeks after his difficult memory was pieced together here; he apparently expired of a coma overdose in 1995, but don't look through the archives of obituary fame and infamy: He is not there, and the latter part of this documentary, in contrary design, confronts us with a proposition as to why this is (besides the more probable: the people forgot; they grew bored; he didn't compel us to remeber, et cetera, et cetera): We are expected to hang our disbelief from the ceiling as fanciful decoration, and instead swallow a claim so big that, we must surely believe it, heartburn and all.

But first: if we take the narrative at face value, then, and this happens:

Saffron-Digard was 62 when he died, so the story goes, and left behind him a trail of carnage that perhaps might have made him a household name, had his fitful creativity matched it. Born John Saffron in Marseille in 1933, John's mother, (famed?) English starlet of stage and screen Joan Saffron, gave up her career to be a mother and raise her boy overseas. John never knew his father, but was soon taken with his stepfather, anarchist painter Jean Digard. At the outbreak of war in 1939, the celebrity family moved to New York, where young John went to art school with other rich refugees. We see interviews with many of the people whose bodies were subsequently touched by Digard, and are offered a compendium of quotes, a veritable billboard of taglines. 'His life and art swung from the deliciously peurile to the fabulously bland', says Andy Warhol, seen here in a genuine talking head appearance, whereas William Burroughs (appearing sideways, bust-like) describes him as 'a morality vacuum, sucking lizard-like the freshness from stony-broke sonnofabitches'.

Chronologically, then, if we are to follow this string... continuing with how, when at art school he grew disillusioned with the limitations of his mediums, and became obsessed with inventing a new primary color. He was vindicated when the Federation of American Gradings included his new tone 'Vari' alongside Red, Yellow and Blue in their Annual Completist Encyclopedia (the collated data of 'everything', the eighty-sixth edition of which in 1966 ran to twenty five thousand volumes, and by 2001 had hungrily expanded to almost twice that). The invention of a new primary colour hugely infected the fashion industry, and a loving montage of late sixties mods in various Vari outfits (including the timeless Vari-toned vest that Clint Eastwood wore in One Fun Gun (Segio Leone, 1968) acts as a triumphant pivot in the middle of the film.

After Vari, things grew harder for Saffron-Digard. His ambitions caused his subsequent life to be an unsatisfying one, and his dreams only grew larger. Dozens of Jesuses doesn't disappoint, lingering on never before seen video of Saffron-Digard in action during these times. We see the derring-do of the time he covered Manhattan Island in red paint thrown from five hundred Red Baron style biplanes in his 'live art show' Paint The Town Red (1969), a stunt which granted infamy, and we also witness the building and firing of an oversized handgun for Shoot The Moon (1972). The pistol, three hundred feet high, managed to down an orbiting satellite, to the delight of a roaring audience and the consternation of NASA.

Subsequent art shows were increasingly extreme, but got him less attention: His carving of his initials into the sun using laser technology in LSD (1973) was deemed a failure when no-one noticed, and it wasn't until his retooled muse came up with Invisible (1985) a show at the Museum of Modern Art, that he regained some credibility in critical circles. The show featured three walls of a room, containing a chair, a table and a TV. Digard sat in the chair, in a shirt that was the same colour as the walls. He stayed there, completely still, for months, until he grew faint and vague to the eye, for the minor camouflage combined with the lack of movement rendered him almost unseeable. 'I didn't become like a stick insect, or a chameleon. There was no magic, just a performance of the concept that we are visible through our actions. If we are inactive, we disappear, forgotten' said Digard himself, on leaving the room.

And so we get to the final, thrusting claim of the film, the twist which casts doubts over the entire enterprise: that this fidgeting prankster, in an age of impossible visibility, performed the greatest vanish of all: He not only disappeared from view, but he managed to eradicate all memory of his life from the collective consciousness. No mean feat: even the most minor of artists leaves a bloody tooth or a layer of skin in someone's basement. But Saffron-Digard managed it: To erase himself. The last scene of the documentary involves Williams himself explaining how a strange man came to him one day, saying that he was Saffron-Digard, and that this meant nothing to anybody on the planet, due to a 'humungous sleight of hand'.

'He was sickly. Ill. He knocked on my door in New York. He told me he was dying, and that he wanted someone to document his life. He gave me a scrapbook and a reel of film, and left.'

The reel contained the period footage that appears in this film: The filmed interviews with Warhol, Lennon, Burroughs and Onassis that provide the testimonies about Saffron-Digard's character. But they were the only evidence that Williams found about the artist's existence. Says Williams in the film: 'I realised then that this documentary was not to be a recap of a minor artist life, but the single proof of his existence. Somehow, he had managed to make us forget all of his stunts, with some kind of cosmic will. Obscurity is one thing. But to make us believe he never existed.... that's quite something else.'

Williams had several phone conversations with the artist, including one in which Saffron-Digard, when asked by Williams why he wanted a film made, said 'It ain't a good trick if the audience don't clap'. As Williams pieced together footage, he heard more and more from his subject, right up until his death. 'Part of we wonders if his death was just another evasion' Williams says. He only man at Saffron-Digard's funeral. His headstone bears the Baudelaire line, oft plagiarised: 'My dear brothers, never forget, when you hear the progress of enlightenment vaunted, that the devil's best trick is to persuade you that he doesn't exist'. And so, things come to pass.

What of the artefact, the testimony? The film has since been treated with suspicion: some see it as a grand prank, an invention of a fake hero; others as a work of wondrous fiction. But there are those who suspect that there may be a certain integrity in the work- individuals have come forward claiming to remember the day Manhattan was painted red, bemused that no-one else remembers, or neighbours who knew Digard, models who claim a child was fathered by him. A small band of Digardians claim his stunt as the biggest in the history of performance, and priase his act of wiping himself from history, rendering his own biography fictional, something which was later unproved to be false, over and over.1

But ultimately, we ask ourselves: Was Saffron-Digard's best trick that he convinced the world that he existed in order to convince them that he didn't exist, in order to then convince them that he did? Or not?

Who knows.

Dozens of Jesuses: The Bigger, Truer Life of Lexington Saffron Digard Directed by Bob Williams Produced by David Lynch Music by David Boeddinghaus Sony Pictures Release Date US: March 1995, UK: March 1995 Tagline: 'The Man That Time Forgot'

1. One extreme group of Digardians, calling themselves 'Anonymiads', have even started eliminating all evidence of their own existence: Deleting Social Security numbers, social networking profiles, burning photographs, and are believed to be so widespread that entire towns are threatened with disappearing from the map.

OL' JAZZFACE (David Lynch, 1981)

Q:What do you get if you cross a gorilla with a human?

This biopic of the gorilla that caused a sensation in twenties New York has been maligned as David Lynch's worst movie, perhaps unfairly. Made just after The Elephant Man and covering a similar narrative arc (outsider is outside; outsider comes inside; outsider prefers, and preferred, to be outside), Ol' Jazzface is a true-to-life story of Bess Lucas, a half-girl, half-gorilla who was born to immigrant parents on a boat to the US from Europe and abandoned on Liberty Island. She went through a horrific youth in the tenements of Brooklyn, being bullied and beaten by all, until kindly nun Sister Peters (played here by Ellen Burstyn, who was nominated for as Oscar for the role) took her in and introduced Bess to music. Authorities forced Bess into an institution after she ripped the arm off of a bully, but she subsequently escaped (after years of hair-pulling) and found fame in vaudeville as 'Ol' Jazzface', a singing, dancing comic whose deranged stage persona and aggression to the drunken crowds caused a stir and pioneered the Gorillage School of stagecraft, an approach used by such disparates as Mae West, Lenny Bruce and Melt Banana.

Bess Lucas' Great-Granddaughter, Martha McTally is the star, and this in itself caused controversy. Lynch insisted on McTally for the role, despite the studio pushing many young actresses forward (Michelle Pfeiffer and Susan Sarandon both auditioned for the role), even going as far as suggesting that using a non-gorilla actress in the role would be grossly offensive.

The movie served helped pave the way for the Animal Rights Act that gave four-limbed mammals the right to vote in certain districts, one of the first bold moves of the Clinton administration. Indeed, in light of subsequent Hollywood reckonings, Francis Ford Coppola's Darn Yankee Cat (1988) and Oliver Stone's Nine Lives (1989) (both themselves examples of fairly large budget kit-lit adaptations that littered screens in the late eighties, made at a point long enough after the unsuccessful Scratch Offensives of the late sixties to be at last palatable to lily-livered Hollywood execs), Ol Jazzface can be seen as an important movie beyond its cluttered aesthetic parameters. Roger Ebert praised Lynch for avoiding sentimental cliche, but wondered when Hollywood would get away from making movies that 'invent a problem that we solved decades ago; then solve the problem onscreen, then congratulate themselves for progressive thinking.1'

Lucas herself died a sad death, her hero status undermined by drug overdoses, cannibal controversies (themselves captured lovingly in Crispin Glover's petrified short Give The Girl A Hand(1994)) fruit busts, drowned dancers in pools. Lynch, sad at having not captured her legacy well enough, has since only used animals in small roles in his movies.

A: A human/gorilla hybrid destined to be shunned by both humans and gorillas, undoubtedly due to suffer numerable sicknesses, probably sterile, certainly lonely.

Ol' Jazzface Directed by David Lynch Produced by Johnson Johnson, Mel Brooks Written by David Lynch, adapted from the memoir ''Nanas' by Bess Lucas Starring Martha McTally, John Geilgud, Danny Devito, Ellen Burstyn Paramount Pictures Release Date UK: Jan 1981 US: Feb 1981 Running Time: 142 mins Tagline: 'Ape Ape Ape'

1. New York Times interview, February 6,1982

BIERCE THE FIERCE (Guillermo del Toro, 2006)

Donald Sutherland stars as writer Ambrose Bierce, who famously walked into the Mexican civil war aged 71 and was never seen again. The film is by no means a biopic, and instead speculates on what might have happened after Bierce's last known sighting- in del Toro's hands, this speculative history is a peppery burrito filled with David Lynch, Ray Harryhausen, Apocalypse Now, spaghetti westerns and Lewis Carroll. del Toro gives us his dreamy nightmare, and his Day of the Dead vision of Mexico is a joy: families who turn into dancing skeletal swordsmen; pinatas that buck and spit fire, empty coffins that wander, looking for mates. Bierce sees visions of his twelve siblings, all whose names begin with the letter 'A'. He has flashbacks from his time in the US civil war, and is frequently under attack from memories of failed cavalry charges by mud-caked blue and gray zombies. The scene is an animated swirl of reflection, a technicolour counter to Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man.

The film has an array of blink-and-you'll-miss'em cameos, including a heavily made-up John C Reilly and Mark Ruffalo as revolutionaries Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata. The pair have one scene as a bickering Tweedle-Dum and Tweedle-Dee, including a bewildering exchange of wordplay and misunderstanding:

Villa (Reilly):'Is it a no?'

Zapata (Ruffalo): 'Yes; it is a No.'

'Yes?'

'No.'

'So you are saying no?'

'Yes.'

'Yes?'

'Yes. We are saying no.'

'You seem unsure. It seems like yes and no in your mind are inter-changable.'

'In my mind yes and no are a slither apart. This is how I like it.'

'Sounds like maybe to me.'

'No! Maybe is an uncertain word. Zapata is decisive'

Sutherland's Bierce takes in the madness with a weary lack of concern. As battles surround him, filled with heightened passions and disastrous desires, his blank expressions slowly reveal his own worries: What does it mean to die, or to live? His dialogue is filled with cynical lines taken from Bierce's own Devil's Dictionary, such as the time when a young revolutionary tells Bierce that he is a patient man. 'Patience is a minor form of despair, disguised as a virtue,' Bierce responds, sullenly.

The huge array of fantastical happenings in del Toro's Mexico are unprecedented, outside of his own films. Ivana Baquero (star of del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth) plays a girl who may be a refugee of the fighting, an angel, or the ghost of Bierce's sister; Tilda Swinton is a three-armed rebel; del Toro mainstay Doug Jones plays a many-tentacled tree that weeps when traitors are hung from his branches, and unleashes a psychic magic, twisting the battle scenes into obtuse reckonings.

Donald Sutherland sang the title song, The Ballad of Ambrose Bierce, which was written originally by Nick Lowe for Johnny Cash, who did not record the song before he died. The song was originally titled Leaning Alone Against Mexican Stone, and was reshaped with the help of Rick Rubin. Sutherland does a winning impersonation of Cash, and his doomy baritone, descriptive lyrics1 coupled with an evocative video, caused the song to be a big success. A consequence of this was the widely believed internet hoax that the song was a suicide note from Sutherland, and that the actor had killed himself. Some news networks even reported this as fact, and it wasn't until Sutherland gave a press conference to announce his un-death that the hoax was outed.

'The lyrics aren't about giving up,' he said in an interview shortly afterwards. 'They reflect a concern that I think Guillermo had with the film as well. And that is, 'what is success? What is a legacy? What is fame? What is it worth?' These concerns are at the core of the Ambrose Bierce mystery. Why does a seventy something journalist and short story writer go on such a long and dangerous trip? What plan does he have? And Guillermo and I both agree, that while we cannot imagine what Bierce was thinking, we both find the complete disregard for a plan to be the most compelling thing about his case.'2

This controversy aside, the film won rave reviews for it's lavish design and for Sutherland's tired performance. It's meandering plot stopped it scooping major awards, and caused one critic to describe it as 'indulgent as a swimming pool full of cream-cakes; I forgot my rubber-ring of sanity, drowned and now my belly aches.'3

Bierce the Fierce Directed by: Guillermo del Toro Produced by Guillermo del Toro, Alfonso Cuaron Starring Donald Sutherland, Ivana Baquero, Doug Jones, John C Reilly, Mark Ruffalo, Tilda Swinton Warner Bros/Optimum/Picturehouse UK/US Release date: Sept 2006 Running Time 137 mins Tagline:'Death is death when it is death'

1. The lyrics won a 'Best Lyrics To A Song From A Film' Grammy for Lowe Rubin and Sutherland in 2007. They also appeared in the Best American Poetry 2007 anthology (Ed Heather Stone) and as such deserve repeating here. Especially because some school boards in South Carolina removed this anthology from their library shelves precisely because of a perceived 'pro-failure, pro-suicide sentiment' in these particular words.

The Ballad of Ambrose Bierce

I'm Ambrose Bierce

I'm leaning alone against Mexican stone

I'm waiting for the guns that might shoot me

I am a gringo

But I'll beat old age

And disease

I'll never fall down cellar stairs

I am epiphany

I'm dreaming of all those that walk into the fire, rather than into the spotlight

Those that spend a decade in bed, Or have tea at their Mom's instead

Rather than grind out victories

Those that by design or accident will never be finished

I am Von Gogh's destroyed canvasses, Genet's burnt manuscripts

I'm Garbo walking away at forty-four

Forever more

2. Interview with The New York Times, January 20th, 2007.

3. Les Straight, The Times, 12th July 2006