Peter Kass’s “Time of the Heathen” is as a lot artifact as paintings. Symptomatizing each Chilly Struggle angst and the start pangs of the New American Cinema, the film premiered in late 1961 on the influential movie society Cinema 16, the place it acquired combined critiques and dropped from sight.
Newly excavated and restored, Kass’s “psychological drama of guilt and violence” (because it was blurbed on the time) will get its first New York run at Movie at Lincoln Middle, by Could 16.
A gap title units the motion 4 years after america dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan. A gangly, odd-looking white man recognized within the credit as Gaunt (John Heffernan) strides by a generic rural America, Bible in pocket — searching for what?
After being questioned by the police, he stumbles throughout a farmhouse, the place we now have simply witnessed a white man named Ted (Stewart Heller) sexually assault and kill a Black lady, Marie (Ethel Ayler, later to play Clair Huxtable’s mom on “The Cosby Present”), who was a housekeeper for Ted’s father. A xenophobic ornery cuss, Pa (Orville Steward) returns and makes an attempt to border Gaunt, the haunted loner, who, his life at risk, flees with Marie’s equally threatened younger son, Jesse (Barry Collins), who’s deaf and mute.
The temper is apocalyptic. (Kass’s title comes from a doomsday passage within the Guide of Ezekiel.) Lejaren Hiller’s fanfare-rich rating is alternately intrusive and supportive, however Ed Emshwiller’s sharp, ingenious cinematography suggests the basic, visible dramas of a Nineteen Twenties silent movie.
In a way “Time of the Heathen” is 2 motion pictures. The primary is a manhunt. The second interrupts the narrative because the noose tightens round Gaunt and Jesse; with Hiller’s rating more and more atonal, Emshwiller (a pulp sci-fi illustrator who turned an newbie filmmaker), uncorks a montage through which Gaunt’s tormented consciousness is represented by an assortment of trippy distortions and grim associations, together with a bomb web site over Hiroshima and pictures of ravenous Asian and African folks.
Writing in Esquire, the critic Dwight Macdonald used “Time of the Heathen” as a cudgel in opposition to New American Cinema, which he thought of pretentious and simple-minded. However the motion’s prime apostle, the Village Voice critic Jonas Mekas, praised the film for its sincerity, anticipating Macdonald’s disapproval by provocatively linking it to such different so-called silly movies as Robert Frank’s “The Sin of Jesus” (which shared the invoice with “Heathen” at Cinema 16), Jack Garfein’s Actor’s Studio manufacturing “One thing Wild,” and his personal protest movie “Weapons of the Bushes.”
“Heathen” was acknowledged as a political assertion. In late 1963, the weekly Los Angeles Sentinel introduced that it had been picked up for distribution and, after being proven at a collection of advantages for the N.A.A.C.P., would have a nationwide rollout. Kass’s movie was additionally launched in Britain, paired with Andrei Tarkovsky’s antiwar “My Identify Is Ivan,” nevertheless it by no means returned to New York. Nor did Kass make one other characteristic.
Mekas’s enthusiasm however, “Heathen” is much less “silly” than studied, with a tutorial really feel that presages its makers’ subsequent careers. Hiller established a pc music facility on the College at Buffalo. Emshwiller made many experimental movies and movies and served as a dean at California Institute of the Arts. Kass, who directed the 1964 theatrical manufacturing of Lorraine Hansberry’s “The Register Sidney Brustein’s Window,” had a profitable profession as a instructor of performing at New York College.
Kass’s obituary in The New York Occasions known as him infamous for his “fervid” strategy. In its earnest depth, “Heathen” presents proof.
Time of the Heathen
Could 10-16, Movie at Lincoln Middle in Manhattan, www.filmlinc.org.
