print version

Yeah, so, I think I'm gonna take off. I want to travel around for awhile and find myself. And get away from rules, and order, and what I'm supposed to do; away from well-meaning aunts and punching a clock and wearing shoes and getting just too damn "sivilized". We've all sympathized with Tom's friend Huckleberry Finn's journey into the nowhere that is somewhere, into freedom and adventure and space and possibility. And many of us of course have done it, if only for awhile. But Johannes Schonherr gives it a new twist. A native of East Germany who got himself kicked out in 1983 (there's a story, but not this one), Schonherr didn't go out looking for himself. He came out looking for you. Pssst! You! Yeah, you! C'mere! That bulge under the ratty trenchcoat means he's got something to show you.

"Programming a high-brow art movie house and booking critically acclaimed masterpieces and pretentious oddities month after month, year after year, to appease a miniscule crowd of sober-minded cineastes and feeble-hearted intellectuals - what utter boredom! Cinema should be a place for excitement and adventure, for surprises, shocks, and troubling insights into the amazing world of the human mind-set. If the screen action happens to spill out into the auditorium - well, that's all the better!" (p. 15)

So says Schonherr, and so begins Trashfilm Roadshows: Off the Beaten Track with Subversive Movies, a fast-paced trip of a book about Schonherr's adventures both on and off the road showing weird, underground, industrial, propaganda, animal porn, and just plain bad moving images, the weirder and badder the better, washed down with Budweiser, cigarette smoke, and a huge dose of fully ironic joie de vivre. With a raconteur's rhythm and a comedian's eye, he grabs your coat and drags you with him anywhere he can scrounge up a half-working projector, to Germany, Russia, criss-crossing the States, and - but of course - to North Korea. Twice!

So off he goes, to (West) Germany, where his shows get pelted by feminists in baclavas and make the local headlines as 'events.'

...Russia, where he and Jack Stevenson maneuver themselves into a newly de-Sovietized Moscow by some creative application of those versatile instruments of late capitalism, liquid paper and the Xerox machine.

... Seattle, where all the kids want to do is either play music or hear music or hear the soundtrack of movies about music, and where his copy of "Blank Generation," the 1975 punk documentary, has unaccountably had all the Ramones footage neatly excised, leaving only a cryptic note in Swedish in the box reading "...Ramones removed." (p.71)

...New York, where his cinema was so off- off- off-, well, anyplace, never mind Broadway, that it gets written up in all the papers but nobody actually ventures to come.

...the American Heartland, where he fills up his front seat with an old girlfriend, and his back seat with as many used tires as will fit among the film canisters, and proceeds to drive his sort-of-art-car into the ground and learn all about Zen and the art of beater car maintenance. Well, maybe not much about Zen, really. Yeah none, actually.

...North Korea, where it turns out the Great Leader (son of the Great Leader) claims among His other accomplishments the title of film producer, and where they have their own produced-by-the-Great-Leader version of Godzilla, "Pulgasari," in which a little figure made of uneaten food is brought to life by an inadvertent drop of blood, grows big by eating lots of iron - and then of course uses his might to help out in the People's Struggle against Oppression.

...and where his fellow film-traveler, a documentarian from Switzerland, nearly gets arrested as a spy for sneaking out of the hotel to film "backyards ... and other bad things." (p. 142)

Schonherr wants to get high on you: you the bizarre, the cultish, the slightly mad, or the just plain lost; to sit you down and show you something you've never seen before. Or else have seen dozens, maybe even hundreds, of times before, if you're a kindred scrap-screen enthusiast.

I mean, how about this evening's festivities:

"A girl goes on an acid trip, bites into a hot dog and the hot dog screams back at her...A stocky Depression era bum begs for food at the door of an ugly housewife, but gets more than he bargained for when she gives him a bath and forces him to have sex. He happens to be too weak and she kicks him out...A film called "Nothingness" explained to pre-school kids the concepts of, well, 'nothingness'. 'It's what a blind man can see,' apparently...Also aimed at pre-school children was "The Miracle of Touch," a film which divulged that 'You can touch things that are cold, or hot, or soft, or spiky.' " (p. 33-34)

And that's just warming up!

I'm somewhere in the middle, having seen some of this stuff a couple of times before. But liking the screen, as well as the mise-en-scene, I'm being slowly dragged past the cultural outposts with the rest of them. And the thing is, well, it's fun out there.

Especially when this particular adventurer shows up at the local basement microcinema, movies in tow, with his lunatic version of 'My Summer Vacation', leaving G far behind as it lurches from R to X to Z; at the very least you want to stay up and watch.

But actually, if even you've never wanted to go anywhere scruffy or do anything weird or see anything even close to the kind of stuff Schonherr shows, this book belongs next to your armchair. Why? Because he may be crazy, but admit it - when's the last time you had so much fun painting a fence?

Trashfilm Roadshows: Off the Beaten Track with Subversive Movies, by Johannes Schonherr, Headpress/Critical Vision: Manchester, UK, 2002.

(Peggy Nelson is a Bay Area painter and writer whose own scrap collection can be seen at her website.)