Excerpts from
THE FILMS OF PAUL MORRISSEY
by Maurice Yacowar
Cambridge University Press, 1993

       INTRODUCTION

       Paul Morrissey may be America’s most undervalued and least shown major director. In a career spanning more than twenty years he has made more than a dozen feature films of consistent weight and moral concern, with a distinctive aesthetic. While he has been often appreciated for individual films (or scenes), few writers have followed up on John Russell Taylor’s 1975 assertion that the films Morrissey made for Andy Warhol “can stand comparison with anything else the cinema of today has to offer.: In the publishing splurge that followed Warhol’s death and his Museum of Modern Art retrospective, Morrissey remained an obligatory name in passim but has hitherto not been accorded a full study.
       Some reasons for this neglect are obvious. For one thing, Morrissey’s doggedly personal course detached him from all film movements, major or minor. His views make him unique among American independent filmmakers: he is a reactionary conservative. Aesthetically, his roots in Warhol’s minimalism excluded him from both the commercial and the art-house mainstreams. Yet his faith in character, narrative, and the discriminating deployment of the cinematic apparatus also barred him from the avant-garde. Also, Morrissey stayed outside of the politics of the New York underground film movement. Neither Warhol nor Morrissey was involved in their New American Cinema Group, which convened in September 1960, or in any later derivative. Morrissey proudly avers, “I’m totally independent of the independents.” As he described their early “experiments” to the New York Times in 1972, “The stars should be the center of the film.... When a movie is all one director’s eye, it’s devoid of life.” Morrissey rejected “cutting away from people and treating people like objects” for the more humanistic purpose, “to give the performers the films.” This was actually the crucial ethic in Morrissey’s aesthetic. It resulted in what John Russell Taylor called “documentaries of the human spirit, of subjective rather than objective reality.” Morrissey’s works, Taylor says, “play scrupulously fair with their characters: the films do not build myths, they merely record them.” In attempting to revive the power of stars in Hollywood’s heyday, Morrissey sometimes took an extreme position:
       A couple of hundred years from now if you look back on the 20th century you will remember the movie stars. They are the people who truly dominate. Not Picasso with his dinky wall decorations which have no relation to people. People aren’t genuinely interested in what he’s done - and he’s considered the greatest artist of the 20th century. People are interested in film and the performers.... I don’t think they'll talk much about the directors. Or the painters. Or the writers. But I think Holly Woodlawn will be remembered.
       Morrissey’s humanist morality is clear in his respect for his performers and his submission to their intuitions and revelations. Morrissey by reflex embraces the sinner even as he condemns the sin. His obsession is not with the spectacle of squalor but with the pathos of a wasted humanity. If he returns and returns to intense images of the sordid life, it is in the spirit of the Juvenalian satirist, who feels so passionately the horror of his vision that he rages against the folly he surveys. Morrissey is no more hypocritical in his moral focus than Swift was, another intensely moral man given to scabrous representation of the corruptions of his time. The reiterated rigor and and consistent morality distinguish Morrissey from Warhol’s aesthetic nihilism.
       Morrissey has remained as committed to traditional narrative as to morality. As he recalls, during his early film years, “If it didn’t make any sense it was art, but I was always a narrative film-maker.” Because “My films were silent, with a narrative, not avant-garde Jonas Mekas-type movies.... no-one heard of me.” Where the underground’s new poetic cinema exulted in abstraction and fantasies, Morrissey clung to his commitment to character. So out of Warhol’s Factory came - paradoxically - a traditional narrative filmmaker. Morrissey’s traditionalism gleams through all his studies of life in the American underbelly, whether the Los Angeles narcissists or the drug-numbed New York street kids.
       Despite the consistency of his moral vision, in the auteurist age Morrissey was a director who did not appear to direct. Instead, he entrusted his performers with developing their own characters. So despite Morrissey’s dogmatic conservatism, he has produced, in John Russell Taylor’s words, “a cinema of complete human acceptance: however odd the characters are, they are never patronized, never made fun of, never presented as material for a quick camp giggle.... Morrissey belongs to that select band who make films in such a way that the film becomes a transparent envelope, through which we can enter, telepathically, their minds.” This makes Morrissey’s bleak satires radically humanist. Morrissey shared Jean Renoir’s trust in the improvisational grace of his (quite different) actors. But he also shared the moral embrace that Renoir articulated as Octave in The Rules of the Game (1939): “You see, on this earth, there is one thing which is terrible, and that is that everyone has their own good reasons.”
       Whatever his sources, Morrissey has exerted a remarkable influence. On the one hand, his aesthetic of improvisational discovery nourished the rich vein of film docudrama that includes Alan King, Jim McBride, Dennis Hopper, Norman Mailer, Shirley Clarke, and Robert Kramer. On the other hand, his cinema of humanist eccentricity can be traced on into the work of Robert Frank and the films of Jonas and Adolfos Mekas, Albert Brooks, Jim Jarmusch, Henry Jaglom, Jonathan Demme, and the Coens, all of which together form arguably the liveliest tributary in contemporary American film.
       Be that as it may, Paul Morrissey stands alone in American cinema as the independent independent. In the language of his favorite director, Carol Reed, Morrissey is an outcast from all the islands, from the independent to the commercial, a man between, an odd man out, with no camp (in either sense) safe from his subversion. Yet so bracing and compassionate are the epiphanies of this reactionary conservative’s films, that they can speak to and for even a dread liberal (such as the author).