`Coming Apart,” just released on VHS and DVD, is the type of fascinating time capsule curiosity of a bygone era of filmmaking that home video often plucks from obscurity.
The year was 1969, a time of new permissiveness on-screen as witnessed in such iconoclastic independent and foreign films as “Medium Cool,” “Putney Swope” and “I Am Curious (Yellow).” But the stylistically audacious “Coming Apart” broke the looking glass with its nudity and sexual content.
In one of his first leading screen roles, Rip Torn gives a tour de force performance as Joe Glazier, a psychiatrist who installs a hidden camera in the studio apartment he has rented in the building of the mistress who has recently left him. The camera changes angles, but never moves from its vantage point in front of a mirror in which all the action transpires.
Joe films a series of emotional encounters and kinky trysts with a parade of female visitors, most memorably a masochist up for any kind of depravity and a former patient (force of nature Sally Kirkland) who, as the film’s shattering conclusion suggests, will be the Valerie Solonas to his Andy Warhol.
The role, Torn deadpanned in a phone interview, was “a stretch for me. I’m the kind of guy who hides in a shower, actually.”
Anticipating “The Blair Witch Project,” “Coming Apart,” is presented as found footage. “There was a lot of conjecture,” Torn said, laughing. “[Some said] it was a scandal that I had just set a camera up and trapped these women into this.”
In fact, he added, “it was all scripted. My leading ladies gave a party for me and gave me a token medal for not copping one unscripted feel. It was all very professional.”
Shot in black and white in three weeks, “Coming Apart” was written and directed by Milton Moses Ginsberg, who had edited documentaries for the Maysles brothers. Though Ginsberg said he does “shy away from the biographical” and insists that this film is not a reflection of himself, he does allow that it is “a story about a lovesick creature, and I was going through that at the time, and so I rented an apartment in my old girlfriend’s building to make a movie about a guy who rents an apartment in his old girlfriend’s building.”
“Coming Apart” was intended as a fusion of documentary and fiction forms in the manner of Jim McBride’s “David Holtzman’s Diary” (1967). If the film is “murder on an audience,” as Ginsberg wrote in an essay that is included on the DVD, it is maybe more so on him. “I find the film so personally intense that I haven’t seen it from beginning to end in 30 years,” he said. Savaged by some critics, “Coming Apart” disappeared following its fleeting theatrical engagement in 1969 in less than a handful of cities. In 1998, New York’s Museum of Modern Art resurrected it for a series devoted to late ’60s films. In 1999, New York-based Kino reissued the film theatrically.
While Ginsberg himself did not become as famous as he thought “Coming Apart” would make him, he has had a distinguished career. Three documentaries he has edited, “Down and Out in America,” “Educating Peter” and last year’s “Personals,” have won Academy Awards. He remains true to his unflinching and uncompromising vision. “I think the human condition has eluded American filmmakers,” he said. “I always want to say [to other filmmakers] to reach into your souls and fill out the space with human emotion, and authentic, real experience, because, in the end, there is nothing else one should want to make a film about.”
“Coming Apart,” a Kino on Video release, is available for rental on VHS. The DVD, which also includes audience Q&As with Ginsberg, Kirkland and Torn, retails for $30. To order, call 800-562-3330.
