'Wrapped in an Enigma, Hidden in a Film Archive'

article by PAUL CULLUM here.

 

IF the filmmaker J. X. Williams didn't exist, someone would have had to invent him. And if someone had, it would have been done in one of the darker corners of contemporary cinema: the world of "found footage."

An exploitation filmmaker with a storied past, Williams is credited as director of the 1965 documentary "Peep Show" - a kind of spiritual vortex of sub rosa Americana surrounding the Kennedy assassination. After supposedly being suppressed for decades, it was recently shown at the Anthology Film Archives in New York, the Film Forum in Los Angeles and a handful of other museum, gallery and festival settings throughout the United States and Europe. (It is expected to be screened at the Lausanne Underground Film Festival in October.)

Shot in stark black-and-white and augmented with copious archival film, "Peep Show" tells a tangled tale of a rigged 1960 election, secret C.I.A. training camps in the Florida outback, sex stings in Mafia hotels and a little-known Mob plot to addict Frank Sinatra to heroin.

But film connoisseurs will instantly recognize much of the documentary's "historical" source material: Sinatra's struggles with heroin are clearly excerpts from "The Man With the Golden Arm" (1955). A New York skyline is an exterior from John Cassavetes's first film "Shadows" (1959). Images of Chicago and a voice-over are lifted from an obscure police thriller titled "City That Never Sleeps" (1953). And a taxicab blowing up is actually the explosion that breaks the seven-minute tracking shot at the start of Orson Welles's "Touch of Evil" (1958).