Noel Black, Pretty Poison, 1968, stills from a color film in 35 mm, 89 minutes. Left: Sue Ann Stepanek and Dennis Pitt (Tuesday Weld and Anthony Perkins). Right: Sue Ann Stepanek and Dennis Pitt (Tuesday Weld and Anthony Perkins).

NOEL BLACK’S satisfyingly sordid first feature, Pretty Poison, was released in 1968; eight years prior, the film’s male lead, Anthony Perkins, had his breakout role in Psycho, and his costar, Tuesday Weld, appeared as one of the titular Sex Kittens Go to College. These earlier screen incarnations crucially inflect the characters they play in Black’s film. In Pretty Poison, Perkins’s Dennis Pitt, a fragile fantasist in his early thirties out on probation—his earlier crimes include burning his aunt’s house down—could be thought of as Norman Bates’s less damaged cousin. Weld’s Sue Ann Stepanek, a sexed-up eighteen-year-old high-school honor student who’s been seduced by Dennis’s conspiracy theories, often lures him to “Make-out Alley”; soon she’ll coax him into her matricide plan.

Written by Lorenzo Semple Jr. and based on Stephen Geller’s 1966 novel, She Let Him Continue, Pretty Poison tanked at the box office and was dismissed by many critics, never earning the accolades that greeted two other criminal-lover films of the era, Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and Terrence Malick’s Badlands (1973). Though often spiked with mordant humor, Black’s movie, unlike those more celebrated titles, has no layer of cool detachment or irony; Dennis and Sue Ann throb with hurt, confusion, desire, and rage. Out in the real world for the first time in years, Dennis, whose parole officer secures him a job in a small-town Massachusetts chemical plant, can barely function outside the cocoon of his Scientific American–strewn Airstream trailer, often resorting to supercilious speech as a defense mechanism. He seems to possess one outfit—a light-blue oxford shirt and gray corduroys, an ensemble that makes Perkins, thirty-six at the time, look barely old enough to shave.

Weld has the opposite effect: She was in her mid-twenties during shooting—and looks it. Yet the discrepancy between the actress’s age and her character’s imbues Sue Ann, whom Dennis first notices carrying the flag for an all-girl rifle drill team, with a necessary perversity. Immediately turned on by Dennis’s silly CIA talk—“We’re under surveillance” is his pickup line, delivered at the local hot-dog stand—Sue Ann avidly follows all of his crazy directives, simply for the adventures they promise. When Dennis’s scheme to commit eco-terrorism at his workplace goes awry, it ignites in his girlfriend insatiable lusts—both for blood and carnal pleasure.

The flaxen-haired sweetheart, one minute concerned about being late for her hygiene class and the next aiming a pistol right at her mother’s heart, has an active tongue: It darts out from her mouth when she is concentrating, preparing to kill, or registering delight. The fleshy organ also helps deliver the teenager’s deepening mythomania, which, by film’s end, has surpassed even Dennis’s. If Weld’s and Perkins’s roles before Pretty Poison informed their characters, the compatibility they established in Black’s film would greatly enrich their next (and final) collaboration: costarring as Maria Wyeth, the unraveling Hollywood wife, and B.Z., the tormented bisexual producer (and Maria’s only friend), in Frank Perry’s 1972 adaptation of Joan Didion’s Play It as It Lays.

— Melissa Anderson

Pretty Poison plays February 3 through 9 at Film Forum.

Gob Squad, Gob Squad’s Kitchen (You’ve Never Had It So Good), 2012. Performance view, The Public Theater. Photo: David Baltzer.

OF KITCHEN, the 1965 film directed by Andy Warhol from a script by Ronald Tavel that was largely ignored by its star, Edie Sedgwick, Norman Mailer rhapsodized: “It captured the essence of every boring dead day one’s ever had in a city, a time when everything is imbued with the odor of damp washcloths and old drains. I suspect that a hundred years from now people will look at Kitchen and say, ‘Yes, that is the way it was in the late Fifties, early Sixties in America. That’s why they had the war in Vietnam. That’s why the rivers were getting polluted. That’s why there was typological glut. That’s why the horror came down. That’s why the plague was on its way.’ Kitchen shows that better than any other work of that time.”

This bit of hyperbolic hindsight or “typological glut,” published in Edie, An American Biography (1982) by Jean Stein, edited with George Plimpton, also may be found in the description of Kitchen on the Warhol Stars website (www.warholstars.org), an Internet treasure, as is the website of the late Ronald Tavel (www.ronaldtavel.com), which contains the script of Kitchen as well as all of Tavel’s other scripts, journals, essays, manifestos, and scabrous gossip. The Mailer quote and the description of Kitchen (appropriated from Stephen Koch’s Stargazer: The Life, World and Films of Andy Warhol [1973]) were e-mailed to me by Tavel friend and associate Norman Glick as a way of encouraging me to hotfoot it to the Public Theater to see Gob Squad’s production of Gob Squad’s Kitchen (You’ve Never Had It So Good). Glick liked the production a lot, especially the parts that used Tavel’s actual lines or paraphrased them, as in, “This cake is just like my life. One meaningless layer after another.” He was upset, however, that the piece did not give Tavel proper credit, despite the note in the program, printed in large black type, which explains that “the original screenplay for Andy Warhol’s Kitchen was written by Ronald Tavel.” Acknowledging collaborators was not in Warhol’s playbook, and history has done nothing to challenge his auteurist assumption. Gob Squad is riffing on a Warhol film (actually more than one), and the fact that Tavel’s layer-cake metaphor most likely inspired the pile-up of past/present/future that is the joy of the production won’t change an audience’s perception that it’s Warhol’s kitchen alone that Gob Squad has taken over.

On entering the Public’s Newman Theater, audience members are encouraged to tour the area behind the triptych of large video screens on which the entire performance will be projected. At once backstage, stage, and soundstage, the space through which we amble is divided into three sections. The titular kitchen (a narrow table, a few chairs, a cupboard) is at the center flanked by a bedroom (just a bed really) and a more amorphous area where a chair is positioned for “screen tests.” Small video cameras on tripods are trained on each area. Lounging around the set are the cast and crew, several sporting the unisex horizontal striped pullover favored by Warhol superstars. At what might be considered the climax of the performance, four actors clad in these signature shirts will engage in a high-speed mock orgy on and around the kitchen table.

During the tour, the actors are quite chatty. I tell them that I saw the premiere of Warhol’s Kitchen in 1966 at the theater directly across Lafayette Street from the Public, where the Blue Man Group has been in residence for more than two decades. It was then the Film-Makers’ Cinematheque. They tell us that the tour is important because it proves to the audience that the black-and-white video projections which constitute almost the entire performance (and which resemble the texture and tonalities of Warhol’s black-and-white 16-mm films) are a simulcast of the performance taking place in the colorful, three-dimensional space behind the screens—and not a prerecorded video. The strategy works. Paradoxically, the video, which is larger than life but also ghostly, is more convincing than seeing flesh-and-blood performers moving around a three-dimensional space imitating Warhol superstars could possibly be.

Which is not to say that the Gob Squad actors are not extremely skilled and lively. At the performance I saw, the leading roles were played by Sharon Smith, Nina Tecklenburg, Sean Patten, and Simon Will. Whereas Warhol’s performers mixed up being themselves with playing themselves or playing nominal characters, the Gob Squad adds another “layer,” as Tavel would have it. “I’m Nina and I’ll be playing the character of ‘Nina’ in Kitchen,” Tecklenburg says, addressing the camera/audience directly. But it’s clear that she is also attempting to re-create the character played by Elektra in the film Kitchen, and she acknowledges the absurdity of such a re-creation. Time contracts and expands.

Gob Squad briefly ventures into Warholian boredom, although it never falls apart as thoroughly as the end of the original Kitchen does when Edie burns her hand on the stove and other performers wander about aimlessly for at least ten minutes. When nothing much is cooking in Gob Squad’s kitchen, one’s attention turns to the right or left screens, where passages of Sleep, Kiss, and a Screen Test or two are reenacted. At one point, the all-purpose kitchen table is used for a female version of Blow Job (the action, as in the Warhol version, kept discreetly below the frame line). About halfway through the performance, audience members are drafted to replace the lead performers. (The initial behind-the-screens tour may be a way for the Gob Squad to size up which of us is ready for fifteen minutes of fame.) The draftees add a layer of the unpredictable to what is clearly a precisely tuned—and therefore anti-Warhol—theatrical machine. Still, they are not free to do whatever they please. Instead they are given headphones through which they are fed stage directions and dialogue, which they then repeat.

As I remember, Warhol did not cue his performers through headsets. In Kitchen, pages of Tavel’s script were pasted on every available surface, but failing to avail herself of any of them, Sedgwick sneezed her way through the entire film. It was Jean-Luc Godard who outfitted his actors with invisible earbuds so that he could control how they moved and what they said while the camera was running. Warhol was as much indebted to Godard as Godard was to American Pop art. The striped pullover/boy-cut hair combination that we see in countless photos of Andy and Edie was first worn by Jean Seberg in Breathless (1960). Gob Squad nails the Warhol/Godard connection by including a bit of the Breathless theme music in the wittily collaged score that sets much of the tone of the production. Opening with the “Bell Song” from Lakmé (a Factory favorite), it sends us out humming the Beatles’ “A Day in the Life,” suggesting that Gob Squad’s Kitchen aims to be as endearing as Warhol’s was antagonistic.

— Amy Taubin

Gob Squad’s Kitchen (You’ve Never Had It So Good) plays through Sunday, February 5, at the Public Theater in New York.

Lionel Rogosin, Come Back, Africa, 1959, stills from a black-and-white film in 35 mm, 85 minutes. Left: Zachariah (Zacharia Mgabi). Right: Miriam Makeba.

BY THE TIME Lionel Rogosin began filming Come Back, Africa, his unsparing look at life under apartheid, in Johannesburg in the summer of 1958, South Africa’s brutal system of racial segregation had been law for ten years. The film’s US premiere, on April 4, 1960, came just two weeks after the Sharpeville Massacre in South Africa, in which police opened fire at blacks protesting the highly restrictive pass laws, killing sixty-nine people. (Come Back, Africa opened at New York’s Bleecker Street Cinema, which Rogosin founded expressly to debut the film after unsuccessful bids to find willing venues or distributors.) Five decades later, and almost twenty years after apartheid’s dismantling, Come Back, Africa remains a vital document of a hideous regime.

Rogosin’s second film, much like his first, the landmark On the Bowery (1957), a nonjudgmental portrait of Lower East Side drunks (their skid row now replaced by luxe hotels), combines vérité footage with staged scenes, using nonprofessional actors. (In a 1987 interview, Rogosin explained, “[W]hat I was aiming for was to fuse . . . [Robert] Flaherty’s poetic films and the fictional narratives of the neorealists.”) Setting out to, as the opening credits state, “portray the true conditions of life in South Africa,” Rogosin devised numerous subterfuges while filming Come Back, Africa, sometimes telling the ever-vigilant authorities that he was making a travelogue for a tourism board, at others that he was shooting a musical.

Writing the script with Lewis Nkosi and William Modisane (both, journalists at the time for Drum, an antiapartheid magazine, have small roles in the film), Rogosin structures his story around Zachariah (Zacharia Mgabi, whom the director found in a bus line). A refugee in tattered shirts and blazers from the famine-stricken KwaZulu homeland in the nation’s southeast, Zacharia comes to Johannesburg in desperate search of a job. Without a work permit, he is unable to secure employment in the gold mines; he is quickly dismissed by racist employers (or bosses too timid to confront delusional, racist accusations) at the series of jobs he does manage to obtain: house servant, garage employee, hotel waiter.

Beyond chronicling the injustices Zacharia faces, Come Back, Africa captures Sophiatown, a Jo’burg ghetto and black cultural hub where much of the movie was shot, on the eve of its all-too-real destruction. (Soon after filming, Sophiatown was razed and rebuilt as a whites-only enclave.) It is here that Zacharia will seek out job advice at the shebeen, a bare-bones establishment for drinking and kibitzing. Toward the film’s end, the newcomer will stop by the watering hole to listen avidly to political discussions (“I don’t understand, but I like it”), the debate interrupted by the magical appearance of Miriam Makeba (a Sophiatown resident), practically unknown at the time, who sings two songs, then exits; her exuberant cameo helps explain why she was later dubbed “the girl with the smile in her voice.” Come Back, Africa is filled not only with the sounds of Makeba’s mellifluous vocals but also those of the bands of boys in short pants and newsboy caps playing penny whistles and the street buskers plinking out “(Let Me Be Your) Teddy Bear.” Rogosin’s ruse that he was making a musical turned out to be partly true; yet no audio in Come Back, Africa is as piercing—or unshakable—as the keening heard in the closing minutes.

— Melissa Anderson

Come Back, Africa plays January 27 through February 2 at Film Forum.

Whitney Sudler-Smith, Ultrasuede: In Search of Halston, 2010, color film, 94 minutes. Production still.

A THIN WIKIPEDIA ENTRY with occasionally illuminating talking heads, the scattershot documentary Ultrasuede: In Search of Halston skimps on its subject but tells you more than you ever wanted to know about its director, Whitney Sudler-Smith. A constant irritant, whether as smug narrator or twerpy on-screen presence, Sudler-Smith finds it necessary to include a conversation with his mother about what “in my past inspired me to do this film,” his third. She recalls that he loved the 1977 movie Smokey and the Bandit and was on a best-dressed list in Washington, DC, in 1989—apparently Sudler-Smith’s only qualifications to chronicle one of America’s greatest fashion designers and the 1970s, Halston’s most prominent decade.

The director, frequently in the frame with his interviewees, often can’t formulate a coherent question or fixates on the banal, asking Phillip Bloch, a stylist and former Studio 54 busboy, “What was the most fucked-up thing you saw there?” Yet despite his complete ineptitude as an interviewer, Sudler-Smith managed to land sit-downs with many in Halston’s inner circle—including Liza Minnelli, who exhorts the filmmaker, “Go do some research. Find out about stuff,” advice that is largely disregarded—and fashion cognoscenti like André Leon Talley, who pleasingly swats the director down when he interrupts his helpful précis of the designer’s career.

Halston’s greatest successes, such as the pillbox hat he designed for Jacqueline Kennedy for her husband’s inauguration in 1961 and the simple shirtwaist dresses made of the titular synthetic material (exemplars of what Talley calls “casual chic”) are given cursory mention, as is his tumultuous relationship with window dresser and debauchee Victor Hugo. In the film’s most embarrassing moment of sociohistorical “research,” Sudler-Smith, seen driving through the streets of Manhattan in a Trans Am, says offscreen, “I wondered if Halston’s minimalist designs were some kind of reaction to the insanity around him. I needed to find out more about the dark side of New York in the ’70s.” And who better to turn to than . . . Billy Joel. The MOR entertainer, captured showing off his motorcycles, and whose only connection to the designer was name-checking him in his 1979 hit “Big Shot” (“And they were all impressed with your Halston dress”), proves even shakier on history than the director: “There was a blackout—I think it was in ’77 . . . ”

Amid such incompetence, Ultrasuede’s greatest asset is the archival material of the couturier himself, his hair slicked back, bedecked in a black turtleneck and white blazer, appearing on Donahue, Good Morning America, and The Love Boat. The era’s great ambassador of queeniness—swish imperiousness tempered by his Des Moines upbringing—once proclaimed, “You’re only as good as the people you dress.” A humble statement by a man with enormous, self-destructive appetites, the sentiment is completely lost on Sudler-Smith. After he asks Minnelli, early in the film, what she sang at the tribute she arranged for Halston after his death in 1990 from complications from AIDS, the performer looks slightly aghast and says, “It wasn’t about me.” Sudler-Smith can’t take the hint.

— Melissa Anderson

Ultrasuede: In Search of Halston opens January 20 at the IFC Center in New York.

Left: Jean-Pierre Gorin, Poto and Cabengo, 1980, still from a color film, 73 minutes. Right: Jean-Pierre Gorin, My Crasy Life, 1992, still from a color film, 98 minutes.

PEOPLE TALK ABOUT HOW this or that director has a good eye. In the case of the experimental filmmaker Jean-Pierre Gorin, it’s just as much about the ear. Gorin, a French-born émigré based in California, has that ear cocked toward outsiders; his films are stories from the fringes of American culture, told by a guy who refuses to tell them the way anyone else would.

Gorin’s digressive, liberated take on the documentary “reads” more like an essay or a diary than like journalism. Loose, spontaneous, and lacking any pretension to objectivity, Gorin’s films are sometimes more about Gorin than you want them to be. But then, isn’t that the case with most filmmakers? At least Gorin is being up-front about it.

Of Gorin’s three feature-length films, Poto and Cabengo (1978) is the only one that focuses explicitly on language. Gorin’s subject is Ginny and Gracie Kennedy, German-American twins who communicate by means of a rapid-fire patois that only they understand—an “idioglossia,” as linguists call it. The concept holds obvious appeal for an investigator of cinematic language like Gorin, whose early film work includes several collaborations with Jean-Luc Godard.

From the beginning, Gorin is present. There is his laconic, accented voice-over narration, which takes some getting used to. During a recording of the twins speaking their indecipherable creole, “WHAT ARE THEY SAYING???” races across the black screen. The filmmaker clearly has films like Truffaut’s The Wild Child in mind when he takes the untamed twins to the zoo, then to the library, where they dash around, tearing books off the shelves faster than he can keep up with them.

Gorin pulls off a structuralist critique that’s also, subtly, a paean to the mysteries of childhood. Their language decoded and explained by linguistic specialists, the twins are sent to separate schools. They learn proper English and the Pledge of Allegiance, part of an indoctrination that will presumably enable them to participate in the same American Dream that tangibly frustrates their parents. The twins have a volatile, infectious energy, and a remarkable dinner scene captures them absorbing and repeating the Kennedy household’s fascinating mélange of German and English. There’s constant chatter in Gorin’s sound track—language is all around us, seeping in. And while part of us craves an understanding of the twins’ alien creole, once translated, it loses its magic.

As in Gorin’s other films, the implication is that this particular idioglossia flourished because its speakers (who are developmentally disabled, although you might not know it by looking at them) were kept mostly sequestered from mainstream society. Poto and Cabengo documents Gorin’s interest in the twins’ private, ephemeral world, just as Routine Pleasures (1986) documents his attachment to the imaginative other-place inhabited by a group of model-train enthusiasts in Del Mar, California.

His interviews with these mild-mannered “train men” are painstakingly boring, which is part of the point. Their language is banal—everything is a “good-looking train”—but Gorin is fascinated nonetheless. “Obsession” and “pleasure,” he reports, are the two words he keeps writing in his notebook. Gorin’s subjects attend to every detail of their intricate simulacrum, including a sound track of train whistles and barking dogs. Having created a miniaturized, nostalgia-infused America for the trains to crisscross, these regular guys preside over it like giants.

Gorin, looking to complicate the story, weaves in regular voice-over references to Manny Farber, the artist and film critic who brought Gorin to California in 1975 to join the faculty at the University of California, San Diego. Farber never appears on camera, but his paintings do, including one of his Arizona hometown that bears a notable resemblance to the train men’s landscapes. From him Gorin takes the rather wonderful image of the artist as a termite “gnawing at the borders of a subject.”

The LA gangsters in 1992’s My Crasy Life, a Samoan branch of the Crips, are on the fringe of an outlaw group. Gorin remains entirely behind the camera, but a HAL-like computer that holds forth, somewhat bizarrely, from inside a police sergeant’s cruiser seems to do some of his speaking for him. To a greater extent than in his other films, however, Gorin gives these subjects control of their story—or, at least, of the raw materials he will use to tell it. Members of the “S.O.S.” gang rap and conduct interviews with one another, and even if scenes that are obviously staged make these mostly young men seem a bit like tokens, they also give the film the vibe of an empowering creative project, rather than an instance in which a community simply let itself be documented.

Moreover, the artificiality of certain situations (Girl in red car pulls up: “There’s a party tonight”) functions as a comment on the limited options within this adopted society. Beckoning these prisoners of the ghetto life, in typical Gorin fashion, is the otherworldly singing voice that wafts in a few different times near the end. It’s the distant call of the islands, and a moment during which another of Gorin’s recurring themes rings clearly—that of Paradise Lost.

— Darrell Hartman

“Three Popular Films by Jean-Pierre Gorin” is available from the Criterion Collection on Tuesday, January 17.

Yony Leyser, William S. Burroughs: A Man Within, 2010, black-and-white and color film, 90 minutes. Patti Smith and William S. Burroughs. Photo: Allen Ginsberg.

BY THE TIME of his death in 1997, William S. Burroughs had achieved something that very few figures ever manage: He had become supra-human, a living, livid symbol. Only Burroughs’s own name can unite such disparate activities, output, and stances: writer, murderer, painter, junkie, public commentator, cultural critic, concept engineer. In addition to changing the face of literature, exploding the craft’s lexicon of possibilities with his early work, he redefined the role of the public intellectual, becoming his own creation, an “antillectual” who rebuffed even those countercultural movements that claimed him as one of their own.

A hero to artists, philosophers, junkies, and sexual outsiders, Burroughs created work that brought together spheres that tend to function as in-clubs, thereby illuminating the heavy regimentation of the social nexus. Burroughs’s universe was where the art world met the criminal nether regions, where the liberation movements were forced to confront the gun lover, where irruptions of collectivity were shot down by the erratic impulses of a pronounced anarcho-individualism, where punk rock wore a suit and tie.

It is with a supreme sensitivity to the warring aspects of Burroughs’s person that Yony Leyser’s William S. Burroughs: A Man Within transcends traditional cinematic portraiture to endow its subject with the ontological gravity it deserves; in doing so, it lets us bear witness to the enunciation of a style—the manner of being-in-the-world that Burroughs would singly occupy. Indeed, thanks to legions of hangers-on as well as fanatics who looked up to the late author for all the wrong reasons (let’s face it: His defects as a human being were multitudinous), there is a Burroughs Industry one must machete through to arrive at the substance of the man. This, Leyser accomplishes through a combination of talking-head interviews, footage of the perpetually wrinkled and crotchety old junkie at home among friends and before the public eye, and thematic animations by Aimee Goguen and Dillon Markey. A Man Within effectively shows us how a single presence animated the gray sludge of the underworld for the entire second half of the last century. In our current era, which has seen the triumph of the manufactured persona, Leyser’s Burroughs remarks the sad absence of unpopular culture and its monarchs.

— Travis Jeppesen

William S. Burroughs: A Man Within opens at Moviemento in Berlin on Wednesday, January 11.