43 years later, J. J. Murphy’s claim that “The virtual neglect of Chris MacLaine’s [sic] films over the past 25 years constitutes one of the major embarrassments in the history of American experimental cinema” needs no qualification. As little is known of Maclaine as of his extant work: The End (1953), The Man Who Invented Gold (1957), Beat (1958), and Scotch Hop (1959). At 33 minutes The End is, by far, the longest. It premiered at Frank Stauffacher’s Art in Cinema program at the San Francisco Museum of Art (later SFMOMA).
Several hundred attended; Stan Brakhage, then twenty, was in the front row. Riot broke. People yelled and chairs flew and he could not stop watching. He felt that the top of his head was coming off. Excepting Brakhage’s own anecdotes and a few vague and urgent sentences by Jonas Mekas, all information about Maclaine before a screening of his oeuvre by the Pacific Film Archive, San Francisco Cinematheque, and SFMOMA in 2010 comprised two brief and searching articles by Murphy.
He was born in Wapanucka, Oklahoma and christened Clifford. He graduated from Berkeley with a Spanish degree in 1946, and thereafter to 1960 published poetry in San Francisco. He read for drinks and meals well before it was hip. He released four issues of the literary magazine Contour with Norma Smith, who briefly was his wife. He acquired a reputation as “the Antonin Artaud of North Beach”. Their work shared a messianism and a madness. He took to booze and methedrine. In 1974 he shuffled up and down North Beach with house slippers and gone eyes. In 1975 he died.
Stauffacher funded The End, largely through the Kinesis Film Society. Jordan Belson was the cameraman; he shot cheap Kodachrome. Maclaine narrates. It is at once ecstatic and absurd. Bagpipes trill throughout. It surveys his friends on their last living day, in six parts: Walter, Charles, John, Paul, an unnamed man (played by Maclaine), and a couple. Most end in individual suicide. The mushroom cloud which begins and ends the film portends a general one.
Walter, needing too much and too specious comfort from his friends, is told “in very clear late 20th century language that he had better clear out until he learned something about give and take and less demand.” He runs, as though it were his own idea. Just over a hill, he will sleep and wake and run no more. For reasons we know nothing about, another man decides to shoot him. He had a few minutes to go. If he had known he could have passed from one dream into the next. We could have followed the unhappy killer to the courthouse, to solitary confinement, watched him sit whimpering, confused, and defeated as his head was shaven, through the grey and sanitary corridor given to those who run amok, watched through the window as he strangled and tried to catch a breath to say “Mama”. We have not enough time.
For reasons we know nothing about, Charles murdered his landlady and her daughter. Arrest is immanent. He stands in doorways and hears what his mother had said to him as a child: “They’ll hang you yet, Charles.” He does not cherish spending his days wondering what had made him sever what men held sacred. He takes a walk. What does one think in one’s last moment? One thing or fragments? By afternoon he knows it is no longer a matter of time but of decision, and decision is no longer a matter of delaying his end but of finding a place to put himself before it. He approaches the Golden Gate Bridge, enjoying his walk. With his last dime he removes himself from his bewilderment. “The slate was already clean.”
John wanted to be a poet. He realized that he had nothing to offer poetry and that poetry had nothing to warrant offering. He turned clown until “he could no longer take the pain from his head by talking. Nothing meant anything and anything meant nothing and nothing meant nothing.” He gave a final act and bowed out at its peak. None dared interrupt his last words. Applause went to the living.
Paul knew that to live enough to love on earth he must hate and murder. He could do neither. He resolves instead to go to a leper colony and give himself to the most hideous as nurse and lover, wanting only to see whether the leper could return his love when Paul, too, should become one. If not he would rejoice, “rotting to the death he’d chosen”, that love was given to at least one human being. He approached City Hall. We are told that he will get as far as the information desk before his time is over.
Maclaine asks the viewer to write the fifth story. He provides a character (himself), “the most beautiful music on earth” (the 9th Symphony), and some images (legs and wheeling sky). Someone has hurt him. He hesitates before a house. He is about to enter when “he is suddenly both blind and deaf, and he takes this as a message from somebody that he had better accept his master.” He walks away. The film ends with lovers on a beach. They and what they hold — pipes, stones, tides — appear and disappear. Each grasps the other as if they were still there. They walk the earth as if it were already gone. Then — sirens, flowers and burning. The red thread of fate ends in an air-raid shelter.
Maclaine’s editing is at once apocalyptic and sublime. His cuts do not fuse — linearly, first this, then that, or synthetically, two images along a single theme. They fragment. He cuts indiscriminately between personal ennui and mass production, half-live mannequins and half-dead crowds. Hollow men stagger up San Francisco as the frame tilts hellward years before Hitchcock’s eye. Even his narrative is an undoing of narrative. Always and already, it ruins the possibility of reckoning with it — again, and yet again, there is no time; we must move on. Always and already, cuts — grinning faces, dancing puppets, parking meters, flexing arms — mar whatever pity the pathetic stories rouse. They push and pull the narrative from monochrome to color, close to far, live to still. It is the strained hand and sudden eye of a speed freak. The sense of rhythm holds, coarse and exquisite.
Brakhage later learned, from Jordan Belson and a woman who once lived with Maclaine, that Maclaine had fallen from a tree as a child and everything “had gone awry ever since”. He noted that the retardation didn’t affect the content of Maclaine’s work but its form; he seemed unable to express his pain and joy but in a time-loop. Brakhage once described a conversation where Maclaine’s every sentence would break into another story; “if you listened long enough, all the stories finally unwound in the whole tapestry of his talking.” A shrink who knew him said that ideas came out of him like “tomatoes through a strainer”.
Brakhage returned to San Francisco 10 years after the premiere of The End with a mind to find Maclaine. Someone in some dive told him to walk through a realty office, take the back door, ignore the balding man who yelled that he wasn’t going to stand for this anymore, turn left at a courtyard, take the stairs, and yell in a window two-thirds of the way. He did. He never saw a worse face than in that window — “mean, stubble-bearded, desperate, eyes rolling, pupils dilated”. Maclaine was 35; he looked 55. There was no respect in which he was not wretched. The room was full of doorknobs, candlesticks, baroque and rococo plaster, pocket knives, and cleavers. Most were metal and all polished and sharpened to gleam and pitch. There was no other entrance. Maclaine said that he let Brakhage in because he was wearing green pants, and anyone walking down the street in San Francisco with green pants must be alright.
Maclaine often visited Brakhage. He threw his knives and punched his walls. When he took something in front of Brakhage’s children, the visits stopped. Brakhage called a distributor. Maclaine signed the contract. Speed thinned and sickened him. He lost his balance, vision, and memory. He was in the psychiatric ward of San Francisco General for 3 months in 1963. He tried to kill himself at least once. He was in Sunnyacres Convalescent Hospital for 6 years in 1969. Brakhage found the original prints on the dusty floor of a hot closet, amid the bright doorknobs and knives. If he had come the next year, it would have been too late.
When people would suggest that Maclaine’s death was tragic, Brakhage would suggest that millions die similarly and leave nothing behind. Even when pitching toward his end, Maclaine signed for the preservation of his work. But what could one leave before death that would preclude its tragedy? I lived in North Beach for a few years. It is difficult to convey how containing it is, for all the space it leaves you for your extremes; my neighbor had gone a decade since leaving a 3-block radius. He was an artist. He said that he could only maintain peace in his work if he contained himself within the constant fleeting — shoes, cars, hours. Here is the living cleft from a living relation to what happens to them.
My favorite scene in all of Maclaine is not in The End but in Beat; a woman with a black umbrella twirls and glides up, down, and across the street like Gene Kelly. After a few rounds, you notice that she confines herself to one block; when she leaves it she is neither free nor easy. Maclaine wrote that “Any expression of the human mind (soul? id? ego?) is to be valued, if not for its excellence, at least for its daring.” He’s wrong. Suicide and murder are acts of daring, but are rarely valued (by the sane) on that account. There comes a time when the daring which leads a man to kill results not of resistance to his time but of complicity with it. There comes a time when the understanding of one’s time precludes any sane and sustained peace with it. It is Maclaine’s genius to have shown that one moment of peace is more shattering and incomprehensible than the end of all that we can comprehend. His is an aimless tension between the need to refuse the material world so long as man is man, with the inevitability of its destruction so long as men are men. But we have no time; we must move on.
