In 1980, shortly before adapting his play A Coupla White Faggots Sitting Around Talking into a video with Michel Auder, Gary Indiana wrote a journal for BOMB Magazine in which he describes unwittingly encountering Catholicism at every turn as he navigates the downtown arts scene. I think about this piece often because, one, it ambivalently describes Catholic Heaven as “being a lot like Switzerland, but without Godard and Alain Tanner,” and, two, because it ends with Indiana and Florence Lambert taking MDA and going to see Alien (1979). Somewhere in between, Lambert and Auder show Indiana their newest video work, Jesus. The video stars Taylor Meade as a bishop who is attacked by Satan, swinging a giant rubber phallus, across the streets of Tribeca. “What I so much value in Michel’s work,” Indiana writes, “is its organic necessity, the way it arises naturally from his life.”
Auder, an ultra-prolific media documenter and portraitist of Warhol’s Factory, has been experimenting with film, magnetic tape, and digital video in real-time since the late 1960s. Auder’s Cleopatra (1970), shot on 16mm and one of his best-known if least-exhibited works, was made on the precipice of an industry breakthrough. It played at Cannes, angering and befuddling its funders, who allegedly snatched and destroyed all of the film’s physical elements. This setback was enough to cause Auder to swear off the expenses and time consumption of celluloid. Instead, he purchased a Sony Portapak with Shirley Clarke, his neighbor at the Chelsea Hotel.
Auder’s films imbue the New York existence of himself and his compatriots with mythic trappings, albeit with a smirk—a tossed-off Bible verse, a quotidian legend. Except watching his films 50 years later, an additional irony reveals itself since 1970s downtown New York already has that affect. The cheeky, fabled courtliness of Auder’s downtown transmissions has solidified into actual legend over the decades. Perhaps this is why it is such a perfect time to revive Cleopatra, currently looping inside of the East Broadway gallery OCDChinatown.
The gallery is dressed to look like one of the New York hotel rooms in which Auder filmed and the projection of the film is the only major focal point inside the space—a window to a near-unimaginable Manhattan past. The digital file being projected is a scan of the last remaining duplicate 16mm print, a third-generation positive kept at Anthology Film Archives by Auder’s friend, Jonas Mekas. The duplicate printing results in embedded scratches, oversized grain, and the loss of details in the shadows and highlights. The digital reversing of the acetate print’s red-shifting renders the film in unearthly pastel colors. The burned-in decay only adds to the feeling that you are viewing an exhumed artifact.
Cleopatra is a remake of Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s 1963 epic in much the same way that 1991: The Year that Punk Broke is a remake of Madonna: Truth or Dare—an even cleave between reverence and its polar opposite. The title character is played by Auder’s then-wife, Warhol idol Viva. (“Just keep telling her, you look sixteen, baby!” the Romans are advised.) Louis Waldon, Viva’s scene partner in Warhol’s Blue Movie (1969), plays Caesar. (“Stop calling me Benito!” he fumes.) The film begins, as an intertitle declares, in “Upstate Egypt.” Try as I might, I have yet to discover where specifically in “upstate New York” these scenes were filmed—though I supposed that’s part of the gag, and it’s a pretty good one. Heavy snowfall north of the city stands in as Egypt’s desert sands.
“Ever since you Romans arrived it’s just been one… chaotic… orgy after another,” Cleopatra says. “I’m not used to so many men around.” These incredibly silly orgies, sucking the wind from the sails of Old Hollywood opulence, are primarily shot in the Hotel Chelsea. In one scene, Cleopatra is surrounded by adoring nude women, including Andrea Feldman and Nico, who discuss her pubic hair as exotic birds, monkeys, and dogs prowl the room. (All of the animals were allegedly actually living in the suite at the time.) Occasionally, an intertitle that only bears the word “CENSORED” interrupts the film, though only during the most modest moments.
Cleopatra eventually agrees to visit Rome and the crew skips town, arriving at the airport and boarding an actual Italy-bound flight out of New York. The Italian shooting locations seem purposefully dreary, as if the landscape itself is in on the smarmy joke. The cast’s outsized personalities and improvisation—when it is audible over the buzzing of the age-old optical track—carries the film’s comedy, although I am predisposed to favor the moments when the whole plot and conceit are disregarded completely, such as a shot in which an anxious Taylor Meade, in full costume, rushes past Auder and shouts, “I’m… behind the camera for the next hour.”
Cleopatra is on view through April 13 at OCD Chinatown.
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