The Los Angeles Free Press, May 1, 1968
THE BEST FILM ON THE CURRENT CINEMATHEQUE 16 PROGRAM IS THE ONE Ronald Nameth made from Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable when that intermedia show was playing Poor Richard’s in Chicago.
I say “from” rather than “of” advisedly. Since Nameth’s movie exists independently as a work of art in the way that most screen adaptations, regardless of their origins, do not. As a jangle and concord of sound and image, a poetic expression of all the arts of white magick, of the cinema of imagery built around the strobe-light rather than the arc, it is something wonderful and exciting.
From Warhol’s intermedia, the sharp cry of pain and desperation which seems to be the heart of all his work, Nameth has employed a pulsation of light and sound to modulate an event into an abstraction. With its stop-framing, sunbursts of light, bloodbursts of color, its mixture of black and white, negative, its dancers moving sinuously through the vortex like memory’s white ghosts, its metallic glint of silver and slivers of clashing color, even in its use of the heavily-grained print for aesthetic purposes, it has become dance-animation of a decadent dream.
Near the end, for instance, in one of the few images held to any length, there’s a stop-frame sequence of Gerard Malanga, turning his head from right to left, a poet sleep-walking through his own dreams. But which poet? Malanga is a poet. But is this Malanga? The imagery through most of Nameth’s movie is more reminiscent of Rimbaud. The Rimbaud of A Season in Hell. The Rimbaud who believed in all marvels. Who knew Beauty, found her bitter, and cursed her.