Gutter Auteur

Download or read book Gutter Auteur written by Rob Craig and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2012-12-01 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Grindhouse filmmaker Andy Milligan has been the subject of a revealing biography, and boasts a grassroots fan base, but his remarkable work has thus far received no serious critical overview. Working virtually alone, on infinitesimal budgets, often using a used 16mm newsreel camera, Milligan crafted some of the most unique melodramas of the 1960s and 1970s. Often mounted as period pieces, using costumes sewn by the filmmaker, Milligan's gritty, bizarre films come across as inimitable meldings of the avant-garde theater of Jean Genet, the experimental films of Jack Smith, and the random cinema verite of a lunatic with a home movie camera. Yet Milligan's films are anything but random, ruminating at length on profound sociocultural themes of the day, including the emptiness of the sexual revolution. Evident throughout all the films are two pet themes: a rabid deconstruction of the heterosexual paradigm, and a grotesque illumination of the family as breeder of dysfunction.