Michael Armstrong | The Image / 1969

lazarus

by Douglas Messerli

 

Michael Armstrong (screenwriter and director) The Image / 1969

 

Michael Armstrong’s 1969 film (shot in 1967), was David Bowie’s first movie at a point in his career when he was generally not well-known, although his “Space Oddity” did appear the same year this black-and-white art film was released.

     But Armstrong was already infatuated by the young performer, which, as commentator Alexandra Heller-Nicholas points out on-line in Kyd, is apparent in this 14-minute work.

     The film clearly has its problems, Armstrong having planned a three-day shoot, but given a series of obstacles—including the fact the equipment did not show up on the first day—he ran out of money and had to create many of scenes by slicing and pasting pieces of previous action into later film sequences. As even he points out, the process of creating the film in the cutting room perhaps made for a better film than if he had been able to shoot the more continuous narrative story as it was originally meant to be.

     Nonetheless, the movie was thoroughly panned. Bowie himself describes it with vague distress:

 

“My first true film appearance was in a movie called The Image, an underground black and white avant-garde thing done by some guy. He wanted to make a film about a painter doing a portrait of a guy in his teens and the portrait comes to life and, in fact, turns out to be the corpse of some bloke. I can’t remember all the plot, if indeed it had a plot, but it was a 14-minute short and it was awful.”

 

      Others felt very much the same way about the work. As Heller-Nicholas recounts, New Music Express “sniggered at it when it was released on home video in 1984 to cash in on Bowie’s superstar status: ‘Gasp with horror as your hero gets murdered not once not twice but five times. Gasp with astonishment as he gets up entirely unharmed. Wonder with puzzlement how his acting career ever survived the carnage.’”

       It wasn’t helped by the fact that Armstrong himself described it as “a study of the illusionary reality world within the schizophrenic mind of the artist at his point of creativity.” And even the director, in public conversations, has described the film as a bit “creepy.”

      Other reviewers and listings have unfortunately categorized the film as either a monster film or a horror movie. And to top it off, the British Film Ratings chose to award it with an X Certificate for its violence.

      Although it clearly shares elements of those genres, it is neither a work of horror or about monsters, and the violence that the British censors saw going on was committed against a hallucination of a painting that cannot, in fact, be truly destroyed.

     If we can agree that it is an amateurish work, it is still a fascinating piece of underground filmmaking and, in this case, looks somewhat better in the colorized version that appears on YouTube.

        Armstrong’s The Image actually has much more in common with The Picture of Dorian Gray than with any horror movie. As in Wilde’s work the artist (Michael Byrne) is painting, on a rainy cold night, a beautiful young teenager with whom he becomes enamored.

 

      Too bad the work of art, the young look-alike to picture of Bowie with hands outstretched, is a truly awful portrait painted in a mix of styles that call up Impressionism, Sunday-painter realism, and a Keane painting. The film asks us, fortunately, to imagine it as a highly-skilled portrait of Bowie, presenting us only with brief glimpses of the abysmal portrait.

         What we immediately comprehend, in any event, is that this young beauty is calling out, almost from the dead, for an embrace. And having painted the longing figure, it is only natural that the artist, as in the case Basil Hallward in Wilde’s original, falls in love with the image he has created. In this case there first appears to be no model to whom he might bequeath the beauty he has captured, but the painting itself seems to call the being, much as in the myth of Pygmalion, to life!

     Strange noises, a drop of paint from his brush onto his own sweater, and a quick flash of something passing by his studio window begins the artist’s gradual realization that his “monster” or Pygmalion-like beauty—ultimately the viewer must choose between the two—has actually come to life.

    Terrified by the images, the artist hurries off upstairs, only to spot the same vision of the living boy out his second-story bedroom window. The boy is now, fully-alive, is his studio, in the hall, wherever he looks, and he realizes despite the boy’s beauty and his outstretched hands, that the image cannot be allowed to exist if he wants to survive.

     He clobbers “the image” with a small metal bust of a classic artist inexplicably laying on the floor. The image comes back to life, and, just as NME described it, the artist takes up a knife.

     But what the magazine devoted to music evidently didn’t comprehend about the film is that he doesn’t even need to stab the young man, who willingly meets him on stairway, moving toward him in act of love that simultaneously immolates himself upon the point of the knife.

     The gesture is clearly sexual, as he moves even after being stabbed steadily closer to the murderer, laying his head upon his shoulder, before falling sliding down upon the artist’s own body to the floor. Yet he cannot die, apparently, as long as the artist himself calls him back into being. And it takes several more attacks to do away with ghost.

 

      But even that terrible act of expurgation does not seem to work, as the artist falls down upon his own painting, now truly like Dorian Gray stabbing the picture itself before finally giving up and laying down his head upon the very canvas and its simulacrum. The camera slowly pulls away to show a small photograph sitting on a table nearby of the same young man before the film rolls to an end.

       The suggestion is that the teenage boy had been his lover, a homosexual companion of the painter. But what we don’t know is whether his painting was created in an attempt to expiate for or purge his own homophobic past, the destructive actions of the film symbolically representing his past behavior; or whether the young man has simply died, and the artist, having called him up, is terrified by his own haunting memories and delusions.

       All we can know is that he has lost that young boy and in recreating him has broken his heart and soul all over again. He realizes now is that you cannot kill the past. The handsome young boy pleading for his love will be with him forever. And even if he is of two minds about that reality, schizophrenia, I would argue, has absolutely nothing to do with it.

     Given Bowie’s own bisexuality and the nearly perpetual recreations of himself over the years of his later musical career “with its myriad multifaceted guises,” as Heller-Nicholas argues, “it is virtually impossible not to consider [this film] somewhat prophetic. If nothing else, she admits that its hard to watch the film, “certainly conscious of its own homeotic overtones,” not to read it from a queer perspective.

       Armstrong himself recalls that “David was a terrible flirt in the way in which he dealt with you. He did that with me. He was flirtatious, it was a part of him … He always seemed to be playing a cat and mouse game with you. I said that he would either be a giant star or make a lot of money in the Piccadilly men’s loo.”

      It seems a little disingenuous, accordingly, for Bowie to have forgotten the name of his very first director and to describe the work as merely a piffle. Actually, this amateur work catches elements of Bowie’s magnetic personality and metaphorically plays out his ability to time again, after being brought down by critics and audiences, to get up and reinvent himself in a slightly different manner, a kind of endearing musical monster/magician.

 

Los Angeles, May 23, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (May 2024).