learning to read: jane’s psychotic episodes
by Douglas Messerli
Paul
Bartel (writer and director) The Secret
Cinema / 1966, released 1968
32
years before the Peter Wier film of 1998, Paul Bartel directed, as a kind of
entry film, The Secret Cinema, in
which an innocent, clumsy, and rather unperceptive woman, Jane, is filmed in a
series of episodes, revealing her downward mental spiral into madness, a
madness, in fact, caused by the fact that her psychiatrist, a closet filmmaker,
is filming her life without her knowledge.
So begins a series of adventures in
which the clueless Jane sleepwalks through her life, without realizing, until
her mother (the wonderful Estelle Omens) reveals that she has been seeing her
daughter in the movies, that she is being captured on film in situations that
include her best friends, her lover, her boss, her mother, and trusted doctor.
We know—we have been forewarned even
by Bartel’s subtitle, “A Paranoid Fantasy”—that Jane’s life can only end in
madness, for Jane, as hilariously stupid as the cinematic episodes make her out
to be, can still not figure out how to read the totality of her betrayal until
a series of absolutely madcap and bizarre incidents, played out by her
psychiatrist and nurse, reveals what he has been up to. By the time Jane
realizes the true extent of her abuse by all those around her, it is far too
late, as she is captured in a straightjacket and sped off to an asylum.
In this work Bartel satirizes not only
the period’s “underground” movie making, in which absolutely anyone and
everyone was gist for independent filming, but through his cinematic
presentation of the fashionable clubs (he uses the real Arthur club for filming
his The Raided Premise scene) and the equally fashionable dining spaces (for
Jane’s meeting with her mother, Bartel managed to use, during after hours, a
restaurant at the Plaza), he intimates that an entire society is in the know,
of which others remain ignorant.
In the end, Bartel himself as director,
metaphorically speaking, seems to turn into an enemy of the badly hair-dressed actress
who plays Jane (Amy Vane, a UCLA friend of his), using her clumsy-frazzled
performance as a key to get himself hired on as a film director.
The ploy evidently worked, with Steven
Spielberg asking Bartel to revise his film for TV in 1986).
Los Angeles,
January 20, 1916
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