When Lynda Had Fun!

In 1964, "Wien Film" refused to print 6/64 Mama und Papa. When Kurt Kren handed in the original, the film grader said with an undertone of sympathy that, given the many cuts, one would not be able to make out anything, anyway. His worries were groundless: when Kren came to pick up the print, some people with flushed faces left the projection room, telling him to get out and never to come back again. A few months later, a similar scene took place at "Listo", where 9/64 O Tannenbaum was not accepted. Kren ultimately found a place that took his films, based on actions by Otto Muhl and Gunter Brus: a house on Peter Kaiser Gasse in Jedlersdorf, a neighborhood in the East of Vienna, on the other side of the river Danube. There, in the 21st district, on the most remote outskirts of town, films were developed and printed in self-made contraptions reminiscent of washing-machine drums. The man who ran the business single-handedly intimated that he was used to explicit images owing to customers from the blue movie scene. The facts that the credits in a few Kren works from those days are slightly out of place and that the name "Kren" next to the copyright sign goes beyond the edge of the frame can be explained in this context. On request, credits were in-house productions, but they were made with a camera that had no view finder, for which reason slipped boards were none too unusual. There were no objections to the films' content, formal and creative issues played a secondary role.

Be that as it may - the "© Kren" jutting out over the frame can easily be understood as a metaphor of the avant-garde and a harbinger of cinema outside the screen - Expanded Cinema. It is precisely during the "Jedlersdorf period" in his oeuvre that Kurt Kren demonstrates some of its best knacks to modern cinematography.

In his essay "On the question of form" dating from 1912, Wassily Kandinsky proclaimed that the "Great Abstraction " and "Great Realism" were equivalent. Kandinsky's text marks the acme of a development in Western art that started in the late Middle Ages and can be followed stringently ever since the renaissance. It is a development that oscillates between two polarities: on the one hand, there is a type of painting that sets aspects of form and composition aside to depict nature as accurately as possible. On the other hand, there is the opposite type of painting that strives for the strict adherence to formal principles in all its idealizing styles. This longing for a lofty reproduction of reality, which concurrently seeks to express that which is hidden behind the appearances, unites a great variety of styles and artists, such as idealizing Classicism, Gauguin, Expressionism and Mondrian's extreme formalization of the phenomenal world along the same lines of visual development. Kandinsky deals with what he calls the other genealogy of modern art which is based on "realistic" art striving to depict everything true to nature. However, when it turns away from space to represent the moment as we perceive it, it introduces the component of time into the structure of the picture, something reflected in the light application of paint, in sketchy freehand drawings: objects become volatile. The imminent renunciation of form found in Naturalism (the reproduction of phenomena the way they appear) eventually leads - via Impressionism - to a two-pronged approach ending in the disintegration of form: in Kandinsky's free abstraction and in the extreme realism of the ready-made and comparable collages of objects from the workshops of the Dadaists. The Great Abstraction foregoes the mediation of the perceptual world and represents the creative media themselves; the Great Realism foregoes representation, substituting for it the object itself. To put it in a nutshell, the names Kandinsky, Mondrian and Marcel Duchamp map out the terrain wherein twentieth century art is located. As we all know, the aesthetic issues at stake in the conflicts between these positions in the visual arts also come to bear on cinematography with some delay. Their impact is all the more tremendous, and Kurt Kren's contribution in this context is no less than outstanding, from a global perspective, too.

Gunter Brus and Otto Muhl: they depart from the easel painting and use the human body as their expressive central means in art. This common trait tends to obscure the fundamental differences between their actions. On the one hand, Brus and his grandiose pathos belong to the tradition of Expressionism. The way in which he uses paint gives it a continuing central function as a link between body, surrounding space and delimiting surfaces. On the other hand, Muhl is the Dadaist among the Actionists. His version of realism does not need the expressively fraught double bottom of a special world of signs (as in Brus's surgical gauze, scalpels, scissors, razor blades and tacks). Muhl's staged realities are still lives of paint, refuse and food in motion, spirited, and devoid of symbolic or allegorical allusions. Where Brus arranges a mise-en-scene of creatures suffering, Muhl is looking for fun.

Kurt Kren enters the picture amidst these two contrasting Actionist programs - and he, too, reacts in strikingly different ways. Ever since his second film - 2/60 48 Kopfe aus dem Szondi -Test - Kren had organized his material according to serial rules.*1* He counteracted the mimetic abundance of the film with brittle mathematical principles (the length of a take was determined from the sum total of the two preceding takes: 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34 frames). All his early films were edited in the camera by means of the single frame mechanism. Kren lastingly made his mark in the history of cinematography when he developed his flash-editing technique from his fifth film onward - 5/62 Fenstergucker, Abfall, etc. is characterized by cuts down to single frames. Here, too, the sequence was determined by serial patterns laid down in scores.

The serial flash editing technique is what Kren uses to create a contrast to "Realist" Muhl's actions. Unlike single-frame editing in the camera, real editing enables a much more appropriate option to formalize within the sequence of images. A single-frame process in nature, as shown in 3/60 Baume im Herbst, has no repetitions; each frame holds a new view in store. In the first action he filmed, 6/64 Papa und Mama, Kren's editing leads to many interlocking continuous shots; central takes recur like a leitmotif, circular motion and networking can be observed throughout the film. Kren painstakingly weaves the fury in front of his camera lens into dense geometrical figures. Shot/countershot sequences alternate, jumping back and forth between single (!) frames, they turn the Actionist turmoil into ornaments, rigid geometrical patterns, the equivalent in time to what Mondrian used to distill on canvas in space. Then comes Kren's first film with Gunter Brus 8/64 Ana - Aktion Brus. The expressive style Kren is suddenly confronted with makes him depart from seriality and flash editing. His response is the "Great Abstraction." Free gestural photography corresponds to Brus's pathos; Kren pumps images of Tachist disintegration onto the film strip. While flash editing had made Muhl's actions rage, the repetitive qualities had ensured that the "moving ornament" was still legible. The single-frame process Kren uses to record Brus's action as if writing with his camera makes the image almost less than discernible; 10b/65 Silber - Aktion Brus floats even more freely in the pre-representational haze of gestural traces. When Kren steadies his camera a little more for a change, he is less interested in the action than in the abstract traces left by the act of painting - the splashes of paint on the studio walls. Where Dadaist Muhl celebrates Naturalism taken to extremes, Kren responds by strategies of concentration as found in Mondrian, and Expressionism, for that matter. Confronted with Expressionism as continued in Brus's actions, Kren resorts to the "Great Abstraction'", clearing the board of all signs fraught with meaning. However, there are two exceptions to this rule: 9/64 O Tannenbaum featuring Muhl is characterized by the use of the single frame mechanism and a static camera; 10/65 Selbstverstummelung shows Brus in relatively long takes following an A-B-C-B-C-D-C-D-E-etc. pattern. These two films do without applying an aesthetic opposite in terms of structure, and as a result, they are comparatively documentary in character.

The dialogue with Modernism, which Kren had an important share in shaping, can be tracked down in most of his 49 films. Not even Dadaist realism is missing in 18/68 Venecia kaputt, in 27/71 Auf der Pfaueninsel, in 29/73 Ready-made, in his expanded movies. But let's move on to Kren's latest film, thirty years after he started.

In 1995 Kurt Kren turned the centenary of the cinema into a commemorative year. The office "hundertjahrekino" commissioned him to make a trailer which he gave the title tausendjahrekino.*2* For several weeks, Kren filmed tourists in the square in front of St. Stephen's in Vienna while they were taking pictures of the cathedral or recording it on video. He used frequencies of 2, 4 and 8 frames per second and touched the limits of his lens: maximum focal length (66 mm) and minimum distance (1.2 meters). The takes are usually two to four frames long, they do not follow any fixed rule. The soundtrack is a brief sequence from Peter Lorre's movie Der Verlorene (FRG 1951) in which a drunkard recognizes a killer protected by the Nazis, accosts him and repeats over and over again: "We've met before, I don't know where, but we've met before. . . " "When the end of the film draws near, the same voice is heard again over the din of an air alert: 'Everybody down to the heroes' shelter, everybody die a hero. . . '. Kren associates the anniversary of cinematography with the Third Reich, which was to last a thousand years. 'One Hundred Years of Cinema' also means images ruling for one hundred years, images which have lost there referentiality and come to dominate reality. The question is whether the tourists will actually 'have come to know' St. Stephen's Cathedral. When the voice on the sound track sends everybody down to the heroes' shelter, Kren pans up St. Stephen's, his camera shaking. At the end of the film he seems to seek the lost reality of the cathedral, but it has been bombed by the images."*3* The technical-formal givens mentioned above arouse curiosity beyond such an interpretation. Tourists taking pictures of cathedrals and similarly large structures may inevitably move the onlooker to ask: "How do you get such a big building into such a small thing?" The trivial technical reply would be: infinity focusing and the longest focal length possible - a wide-angle lens. As regards the focal length of the cameras used, Kren positions himself on the opposite end of the scale from the tourists. But that is not the only point. Instead of seeking clarity by keeping his distance (infinity focusing), thus concerning himself with mimesis, he gets as close to reality as his lens allows him to. The low frequency of frames he works with stipulate long exposure times: in combination with a hand-held camera and telelens, this leads to rather blurred images. Again, we have arrived at the figure of handwriting on the way to Kandinsky's "Great Abstraction," and again, Kren wants to visualize the other side of the appearances.

What about the people whose outlines haunt Kren's hazy shots? They all look at the cathedral through their view finders, at the sculptures in the round adorning its facade. These sculptures in the round of human bodies standing freely are precisely the objects via which perceptual reality began to enter the realm of art in the late Middle Ages. These sculptures were the first formulations of a program that was ultimately to be implemented by the Renaissance, and its visual echo is still refracted by every camera lens of this world. In tausendjahrekino, we witness a meeting with the "Lucy" of the photo, film and video generation: these Gothic fossils are to photographic mimesis what the first mother of humankind is to anthropologists. The only difference is that the participants in this family reunion on St. Stephen's Square are not aware of the fact that they are related. "We've met before, I don't know where, but we've met before... "For Kren, this is tausendjahremimesis, and no end to it.

*1* For a detailed analysis of his first, pre-serial film 1/57 Versuch mit synthetischem Ton cf Tscherkassky, Peter: Die rekonstruierte Kinematographie. In: Horwath, A./Ponger, L./Schlemmer, G. (eds.): Avantgardefilm. Osterreich 1950 bis heute, Vienna 1995, p. 41-44.

*2* Kren has been making films to order for some time: 44/84 foot' age shoot'- out was the first commission, three trailers (45/88 Trailer; 46/90 Falter 2; 49/95 tausendjahrekino) and an episode for the compilation Denkwurdigkeiten eines Nervenkranken, part 3, after Ernst Schmidt jr., followed. Moreover, in 1996 Kren will be on screen playing a hard-rocking bishop who is also an expert stripper for the cinema advertising film of the movie magazine "Meteor" (directed by Franz Novotny).

*3* Jutz, Gabriele: Eine Poetik der Zeit. Kurt Kren und der strukturelle Film. In: Scheugl, Hans (ed.): Ex Underground. Kurt Kren seine Filme. Vienna 1996, p. 109.


Filmographie

1/57 Versuch mit synthetischem Ton. 2 Min. sw. 17m. Ton
2/60 48 Kopfe aus dem Szondi-Test. 5 Min. sw. 47m
3/60 Baume im Herbst. 5 Min. sw. 55m. Ton
4/61 Mauern pos.- neg. und Weg. 6 Min. Farbe. 67m
5/62 Fenstergucker, Abfall etc. 6 Min. Farbe. 58m
6/64 Mama und Papa. 4 Min. Farbe. 43m. Materialaktion: Otto Muhl
7/64 Leda und der Schwan. 3 Min. Farbe. 32m. Materialaktion: Otto Muhl
8/64 Ana. 3 Min. sw. 29m. Aktion: Gunter Brus
9/64 O Tannenbaum. 3 Min. Farbe. 32m. Materialaktion: Otto Muhl
10/65 Selbstverstummelung. 6 Min. sw. 58m. Aktion: Gunter Brus
10b/65 Silber. 2 Min. sw. 23m. Aktion: Gunter Brus
11/65 Bild Helga Philipp. 3 Min. sw. 27m
12/66 CosinusAlpha. 10Min.Farbe. 101m.Matenalaktion:OttoMuhl
13/67 Sinus Beta. 6 Min. sw. 65m
14/00 Kurdu *
15/67 TV. 4 Min. sw. 45m
16/67 20. September. 7 Min. sw. 75m. Mitarbeiter u. Darsteller: Gunter Brus
17/68 Grun-rot. 3 Min. Farbe. 32m
18/68 Venecia Kaputt. 22 Sek. sw. 4m
19/68 White-black**
20/68 Schatzi. 3 Min. sw. 27m
21/68 Danke * *
22/69 Happy-end. 4 Min. sw. 47m
23/69 Underground Explosion. 6 Min. Farbe. 60m. Ton: Karlheinz Hein
24/70 Western. 3 Min. Farbe. 33m
25/71 Klemmer und Klemmer verlassen die Welt *
26/71 Zeichenfilm oder Balzac und das Auge Gottes. 1 Min. sw. 6m
27/71 Auf der Pfaueninsel. 1 Min. sw. 16m. Anni Brus, Diana Brus, Gunter Brus, Alois Egg, Wolfgang Ernst
28/73 Zeitaufnahme(n). 3 Min. Farbe. 32m. Mit Hans Peter Kochenrath
29/73 Ready-made. 3 Briefe von Marx oder der Terror der Medien. 12 Min. sw. 136m. Ton. Mit Kurt Kren
30/73 Coop Cinema Amsterdam C. 3 Min. Farbe. 35m
31/75 Asyl. 9 Min. Farbe. 92m
32/76 An W+B. 8 Min. Farbe. 84m
33/77 Keine Donau. 9 Min. Farbe. 95m
34/76 Tschibo. 2 Min. Farbe. 23m
35/77 documenta*
36/78 Rischart. 3 Min. Farbe. 33m. Darsteller: Kurt Kren
37/78 Tree again. 4 Min. Farbe. 41m
38/79 Sentimental Punk. 5 Min. Farbe. 49m
39/81 Which Way to CA? 4 Min. sw. 38m
40/81 Breakfast im Grauen. 4 Min. sw. 37m
41/82 Getting warm. 4 Min. Farbe. 39m
42/83 No Film. 3 Sek. sw.
43/84 1984. 2 Min. Farbe. 20m
44/85 Foot-age Shoot-out. 3 Min. Farbe. 30m
45/88 Trailer. 3 Min. Farbe. 30m
46/90 Falter 2. 30 Sek. sw. 35mm. Ton: Wolfgang Ernst. Prod.: Hubert Sielecki
47/91 Ein Fest. 3 Min. Farbe. 27m. Ton
48/94 Fragment W.E. Farbe. Endlos-Schleife. Ton: Wolfgang Ernst live auf Geige
49/95 tausendjahrekino. 3 Min. Farbe. Ton: aus "Der Verlorene" von Peter Lorre. Trailer fur hundertjahrekino. Initiator: Hans Hurch
* Film verloren ** Expanded Movie bzw. Koncept

Lynda 61

One of the highlights of my youth was a trip with my grandparents across Arizona. It was on that trip, on July 5th, 1968, that my life was altered forever.

Crusing along Interstate 10, we had just barely entered Arizona when we saw the signs: great big red arrows pointing the way ahead, the text black on a lemonade-yellow background, and in big, green, "dipping font" letters was the reason for the existence of these signs:

"The Thing!" 150 Miles Ahead!

"The Thing!" 60 Second Death!

"The Thing!" What Is It?

"The Thing!" You...Will...Be...AMAZED!

The signs seemed to stretch on forever when suddenly, there it was in Dragoon (or Cochise), AZ: my first taste of an honest to goodness roadside attraction/curio museum (and, really, neither "honest" nor "goodness" have much to do with any roadside attraction in the middle of the Arizona wastes.

Out front, "The Thing!" could have been mistaken for anyone of thousands of auto-outposts along the many highways and byways of America. At the edge of the road, of course, was yet one more billboard: ""The Thing!" You Have Arrived!" Pulling into the parking lot (last paved, or so it looked, as a part of the 1956 Highway Act), there was ample parking for cars, trucks, buses, mules, UFOs and at an island to one side we could fill up on no-name-o gasoline: "Ethyl at 42 cents a gallons? Robbery!"

The compound itself was, for the roadside archeologist, a look into the past not only of roadside attractions, but of this desolate stretch of highway. To one side it might have been a truck repair shop of some sort, or maybe a supply depot, possibly connected with a local mining company (the hills in that part of the world are dotted with the decaying remains of mines). The name of the original company had faded in the summer suns of years past and covered by many coats of paint (also faded) for the many incarnation that this place along the road had gone through before becoming the center of "The Thing!" universe.

The main "business" part of the place was a wood-framed building, slightly newer than the metal building onto which it had been grafted. Once upon a time, who knows what purpose it had served. An open space with large windows: perhaps it had actually been built for the purpose of being the lobby of a desert highway curio museum. More than likely, it had began life as a diner or as a market. Had to tell as the place had been, over the years, thoroughly "The Thing!"-ized: the same wonderfully garish red and black and yellow and greens as the endless, endless, endless billboards.

Inside was the "lobby" and ticket counter of the museum behind which sat a couple of ancient folks behind the sales counter staring off into the distance and smiling in that way people smile when it's easier to smile and stare off into the distance than to fall over dead. Off to one side was the Snax area (cold pop, also no-name-o snack pies, perhaps manufactured by the same people who supplied the gasoline out front. Perhaps made out of the same stuff as the gasoline out front).

The entrance to the actual museum was off to the side, with a big red "The Thing!" arrow pointing the way into to Curio Museum Land, USA.

I must confess that most of the stuff inside is lost to me now, down the dusty trails of real un-recovered memory. Two high points of note that have stayed with me down the years are "Hitler's Staff Car!" (a mid-1950's Mercedes with English license plates) and, naturally, "The Thing!"

Now, the staff car was a highlight because of the name recognition, certainly, but more so on a deeper, personal, level because I knew that it was a bogus deal. Hitler in a car that had to have been built at least 10 years after his death? And from England, to boot? But rather than feeling gypped by this, I felt enthused: I was 12 and I knew that I was face-to-chrome grill with a 100% "yeah, but the sign sez..." fake! At first it was the thrill that someone -- adults! -- had tried to pull a fast one over on me that no doubt actually did get a few highway suckers. But that I Knew It Was A Fake! But then, the experience became mixed with something quieter, and every bit as thrilling as the overt fakery: that at some level, who ever it was who had put all of this stuff together knew that this was bogus and while they hoped to pull the flimflam on some of the rubes, they also knew that there'd be some of us who'd see that it was a fake that was supposed to be a fake.

I was that day, in that hot and dust shed, suddenly included into a vast, secret tribe of illuminated tricksters. And this membership has served we well in the years since.

The other great high point was, of course, "The Thing!" itself. And for as shoddy a presentation it was, it didn't disappoint.

"The Thing!" was located in the back of the place, about three-quarters of the way through the experience. Flanking the aisle leading to "The Thing!" where smaller versions of the highway "The Thing!" signs warning the public of the shocks that lay ahead. If people didn't think that they could take it, they could easily leave through a convenient doorway and meet up with the rest of their party later. That "chicken door" led, big surprise, directly into the gift shop out in the lobby of the place, leaving the lost souls who couldn't take the "You...Will...Be...Be...AMAZEMENT!" of "The Thing!" to kill time by buying somewhat pricey items such as hand-crocheted poodle toilet paper roll covers.

For those of us who had the intestinal fortitude (as one of the signs put it) to really see "The Thing's!" close-up, we found "The Thing!" area to be somewhat less than grand: A simple 6 inch-tall platform over which hung one last smaller "The Thing!" signs with the words we had been waiting for: "Here...It...Is!!!"

"The Thing's!" display room was really an alcove, separated from the rest of the exhibits by old sheets of pegboard suspended by bailing wire from the rafters overhead. The back of the alcove was a wood-slat door that had been swung open for ventilation, revealing the desert, and several rusted out junker cars dotting the landscape outside (the predecessors to the current "death car?").

On the platform was a wooden box, something of a suspiciously slick-looking creation that must have been salvaged from a commercially produced display of some sort or the other. Slick from a distance and against the glaring light from the desert beyond actually kind-sorta...alter-like. Up close, of course, I could see that the box was somewhat shopworn around the corners, the chipped press-board showing through the places that the 79 cent-a-can Krylon© paint and duct tape hadn't been able to cover.

The top of the case was sealed by a thick sheet of scratched Plexiglas, salvaged from who knows where and held in place with a frame of two-by-fours nailed securely into the insecure box, all in an effort to keep out the prying hands of the rubes.

Or was it to keep "The Thing!" in it's box?

We stepped up on the platform and approached. High spirits, sure, 'cuz we were about to finally get a look at "The Thing!" itself, but also more than a bit of trepidation. I mean, after all that build up, all of those many, many billboard, what the heck were we really going to see?

We crept slowly -- reverently? -- toward the box and we peered inside. The arrangement was a box within a box: inside the "fancy" outer case simple wooden coffin. Had the owners of "The Thing!" merely thought of this as good showmanship and good security, sealing the plain, functional coffin inside of the outer, "all for show" case? Or had they attempted to emulate the funereal practices of the ancient Egyptians, with the heavy, flashy outer sarcophagus and the simpler inner coffin? Or was a bit of both, some odd quirk in the ancient human psyche that makes such arrangements -- outer for show, inner for go -- the natural way to present "The Thing?" Freud or Barnum, Forest Lawn or Tutankhamen?

Because of the glare from outside, it took us a moment to see just what it was inside the box. Looking past the glare of the summer sun, past the scratched Plexi, past our own cynical expectations, we looked into the box...

Down in the gloom, lay the inner coffin. And in the coffin lay, finally, "The Thing!" After all that build up, I'm not certain just what we thought we were going to encounter, but nothing, I am sure, like what we did see. Laying there inside the box-within-a-box was "The Thing!", a rather ratty-looking "mummy" clutching the also mummified remains of a baby "The Thing-ette!" Strange that "The Thing!" should have been dressed in what appeared to be the remains of "typical" Navajo ceremonial clothing. Stranger still, "The Thing!" had double teeth, a second set behind the front, both top and bottom.

The effect was, well, one of immediate amazement. And then incredulous laughter. As we peered into the coffin of "The Thing!", and having just seen the bogus Führer-Mobile and all of the other "exhibits" in the museum, my grandparents and I scoffed mightily at this even greater bit of roadway fakery: "The Thing!" Iindeed! Papier-Mâché and mud with a painted baby doll for effect; a couple pair of thrift-store dentures for weirdness.

We made our way back out of the museum, into the heart of the gift shop (show of hands: who thought that it was they who first had the great idea to have guests exit through retail?), past the smilers who may not have moved an inch since we had passed through earlier, and back out into the parking lot.

Scarcely an hour after we had pulled off the road into the parking lot of "The Thing!", my grandparents and I had done the museum, spent a few minutes and (unless there was a crocheted poodle toilet paper roll with my grandmother's name on it that has escaped my memory) very few dollars in the gift shoppe, used the restroom, and set our collective sights once again on the horizon to the east.

And yet...

Flash forward some 33 odd years. What had been a young life, blissfully unaware that there was such as thing (which, at there time, there only sort-kinda was) as themed entertainment design, even more blissfully unaware that there was even a chance that at my now advanced age I'd be spending too much time and effort trying to figure out how to make a buck at it. It's a high-tech, cutting edge, RDE/THRC/A & FE kinda world we live in, and so very, very far removed from some jerk-water, roadside tourist trap B. S. in the middle of the desert.

Despite all of the wonderful buzzwords and theories of group entertainment interaction, and what makes for a satisfying out-of-home experience, and what is the nature of a first-person story in VR, and how do you get the average family of four to purchase an average of 12.5% more in both merchandise and food products (figuring this both with and without the addition of a fleet of well-themed churro wagons to address the impulse-buy snacking needs of the post-parade crowd dynamic), two things came out of that brief and definitely strange interlude at the roadside in the sweltering desert heat so long ago.

The first was something I didn't realize until some years later: from the time we saw the first billboard until we saw the "'The Thing!' Come Again Soon!" sign, the entire experience had completely rewired my brain

The other thing was that, yes, I had been taken by roadside tricksters. I had been a rube, a mark, a...a...tourist. But so what? It was great! It was fun! It was weirdness of low AND high order at the same time. And all hand-made, relying on the imagination and guile of the ancient folks behind the sales counter staring off into the distance and smiling in that way people smile when they know that what's coming is a fake and they know that soon you'll know it, too.

That was show biz, pure (again, not a word much to be used in this context) and simple. Recovered wood, a questionable mummy, and real appeals to some weird mechanism in the ancient backs of our brains. And all of it just as effective as any one of the mighty S. Charles Lee's astonishing atmospheric movie palaces. The show had started, to paraphrase Mr. Lee, on the highway when the first of the innumerable "The Thing!" billboards flashed past at 80 MPH. All along the way, we had built in our mind an image of "The Thing!" that had to be satisfied with a stop there in the desert. And the show was paid off, of course, though not in those tin-roofed sheds. Rather it had happened the moment that the first of these signs whipped past, coming finally to fruition deep in the back of my still-developing mind.

"The Thing!" That maybe-mummy and it's maybe-baby. Yes, they had to be there, of course. Can't do the pitch without delivering the goods. But in the end, they were just the come on, the wienie, the MacGuffin.

But in the end, all of that was a transient experience and not the thing -- or "The Thing!" -- at the heart of it, but rather satisfying the itch to see something that would, in that modern age of 1968, still have the effect of leaving we, the 80 MPH asphalt voyagers (as the billboards promised), "AMAZED!"