Don Levy | Herostratus / 1967

burning up

by Douglas Messerli

 

Don Levy (screenplay and director, based on an idea by Levy and Alan Daiches) Herostratus / 1967

 

Levy's 1960s masterful film, Herostratus, is, as critic Amnon Buchbinder has noted, "among the most influential of unknown films." Its method of imagery shows up in numerous European and American movies, from a broad range of directors including Antonioni, Kubrick, Godard, Resnais, and Ashby. Yet none of these can quite match the raw intensity and, at times, overreaching pretensions of Levy's powerful work. It was his only full-length film, clearly synthesizing all of his concerns—scientific, psychological, political, and artistic—of his short life. Levy committed suicide at the age of 55 in 1987.

 

     Although this film certainly does have a narrative, it would seem almost pointless to talk about plot. The film begins with a handsome young man on the run (Michael Gothard as Max) and ends with a similar scene, Levy's structure being, a bit like Hitchcock's Vertigo, elliptical. It is as if Max were living out his terrors as in a nightmare, never able to escape the endless pattern of disgust and desire.

     Dressed throughout the film in white, Max is for most of the work, a kind of virgin hippie, a man whom he himself describes as being at the bottom of the scrap heap. His dreary little room, its walls covered with newspapers and other ephemera, a doll hanging by its neck on rope, parallels his own inner state, a kind of empty rebellion that cannot seem to reach expression—much like the angry young men of Britain's late 1950s and the later drugged out hippies of both England and the US of the decade when this film was made. He is, in part, trapped by the social extremes of the age—extreme wealth and painful poverty—controlled by large institutions who use erotically laden psychological effects to sell their goods (even the orange latex gloves attached to the film's model, Helen Mirren) to the populace at large.

     His anger is best expressed by Levy through Max's mad ax-swinging revenge on his landlady as he maniacally destroys his own habitat. Yet he is unsuccessful even at that. He is, put simply, a failure at everything. Presuming himself to be a poet he writes absurd love poems while never having engaged in sex. As his nearby tenant, Sandy (Mona Chin), observes he is unwilling even to express his own mind, to chance engagement with the universe. The advertising executive Farson puts it best: he has created nothing, done nothing, been nothing. In short, he is “no thing” but an agent of the world in which he lives.

     In Greek history, Herostratus was a young man who, seeking notoriety, burned down the Temple of Artemis, a lavishly constructed tribute to the goddess of the hunt, the wild, and childbirth, a building built by King Croesus that was recognized as one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. When captured, Herostratus not only admitted responsibility for the arson, but proudly proclaimed to have accomplished the act, hoping to gain attention. The authorities executed him, and, in an attempt to condemn him to obscurity, forbade the mention of his name under penalty of death. Nonetheless, we know his name today through the historian Theopompus's Hellenics.

 

    Max is burning up inside, perhaps, but puts nothing to fire in the world. With ax in hand, rather, he visits the offices of Farson, proposing a bold idea to gain himself attention: he will offer the rights to his own death, a suicide by jumping from a high building. The very fact that Farson actually considers this proposal reveals the extremes to which he and his society are willing to go to make money, his readiness to sell life itself, a theme repeated throughout Levy's film through highly artificed, somewhat surreal images of overdressed models and, in particular, scenes of a dancing stripper spliced together with images of the slaughterhouse, the carcasses of dead animals juxtaposed against the body of a living temptress: meat against meet. Even Farson's cold-hearted secretary-lover, Clio (Gabriella Licudi), wants nothing to do with Max's proposal, but nonetheless, is enticed into the project by sexually rewarding Max a final dinner and his first sexual encounter with a woman.

     The portrayal of women throughout Herostratus is quite obviously misogynistic, for which it has been severely criticized in recent years. In many respects, however, that is precisely the film’s point. The moody young Max, like his culture, perceives women as objects and connects them in his mind with animals. In one of the film’s most memorable images Max is laid out on his bed apparently masturbating as the screen presents us with a psychedelically-tinted image of a stripper dancing, intercut with clips of a cow being disemboweled. Levy himself, as critic Amy Taubin, writing in Artforum, pointed out, “employs the saturated color and chiaroscuro lighting of the American avant-garde filmmakers Kenneth Anger and Gregory Markopoulos, as well as their implicitly gay psychodramatic trance-film structures.”

     Taubin continues: “As those two filmmakers often did, Levy focuses his film on a single highly eroticized male figure, whose fractured psyche is mirrored in an editing scheme where action in the ‘real world’ is constantly broken by eruptions of the unconscious in the form of violent, visceral, and free-associative imagery.”  

 

    The full level of Max's sexual and mental naivety is revealed when he falls in love with Clio, determined now, for the first time, to cling to life. Farson's revelation, however, that her love has been paid for by him, not willfully given, and his lies about her reactions to the hesitant boy's sexual skills, sends Max over the edge, a psychological reaction that, ironically, is not matched by a suicidal jump. Instead, Max accidentally kills a rooftop photographer, who falls trying to save Max from what appears to be his attempted leap into death.

     The "accidental murder" sends Max—representing a kind of tragic mix of James Dean and Malcolm McDowell—on the run once more; but this time we know that he has no place to go, that the run will lead only into homelessness and death.

      The actor who played Max, Gothard, himself committed suicide after years of depression in 1992, at the age of 53.

 

Los Angeles, March 29, 2012

Reprinted in different form and expanded content from Nth Position [England] (June 2012).