‘The Manhattan Love Suicides’ was streaming on 4:3 in July 2019
A gritty, black and white anthology film released in 1985, Richard Kern’s The Manhattan Love Suicides is a compendium of four short films exploring doomed love and fatal obsession. Shot on Super 8 film in the streets of downtown Manhattan, ‘Stray Dogs’, ‘Thrust in Me’, ‘Woman at the Wheel’, and ‘I Hate You Now’ spotlight gore, B-movie flair, and confrontational humor - and are just assaultive as their titles might suggest.
The films are designed to outrage and shock: In ‘Stray Dogs’, a love-sick man (David Wojnarowicz) literally falls apart when he’s refused attention from the artist he adores. ‘Thrust in Me’ stars Nick Zedd playing a dual-role which ends in death and autofellatio. The ‘Woman at the Wheel’ combats both the male ego and their male body parts, while the characters of ’I Hate You Now’ disfigure themselves out of love and betrayal.
Filmmaker and photographer Richard Kern was a fixture of ‘The Cinema of Transgression,’ which announced itself as a collective of artists who proposed that “any film which doesn’t shock isn’t worth looking at.” When exhibited, their films were often punctuated by walk-outs and later attempts at censorship. At a time when structuralism and minimal avant-garde filmmaking was celebrated, humorous narratives and scenes which manifested disgust were true cinematic rebellion.