ShareMovie - Bucket Of Blood (Roger Corman, 1959)
American comedy horror film staring Dick Miller as waiter-turns-artist Walter Paisley ... "The ultimate art movie." (Jen Ray)
A Bucket of Blood is a 1959 American comedy horror film directed by Roger Corman. It starred Dick Miller and was set in beatnik culture. The film, produced on a $50,000 budget, was shot in five days,[2] and shares many of the low-budget filmmaking aestheticscommonly associated with Corman's work.[3] Written by Charles B. Griffith, the film is a dark comic satire[2][4] about a socially awkward young busboy at a Bohemian café who is acclaimed as a brilliant sculptor when he accidentally kills his landlady's cat and covers its body in clay to hide the evidence. When he is pressured to create similar work, he becomesmurderous.
A Bucket of Blood was the first of three collaborations between Corman and Griffith in the comedy genre, followed by The Little Shop of Horrors and Creature from the Haunted Sea. Corman had made no previous attempt at the genre, although past and future Corman productions in other genres incorporated comedic elements.[2] The film works as a satire not only of Corman's own films, but also of the art world and teen films of the 1950s. The film is noted as well in many circles as an honest, undiscriminating portrayal of the many facets of Beatnik culture, including art, dance and style of living. The plot has similarities to Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933). However, by setting the story in the Beat milieu of 1950s Southern California, Corman creates an entirely different mood from the earlier film.[5]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Bucket_of_Blood
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Who Says the Art World Isn’t Scary?: Roger Corman’s Classic, A Bucket of Blood.
If there’s a better satirical film on the art world than A Bucket of Blood (1959) then I certainly haven’t seen it (note: John Waters’ Pecker comes close). This playful jab at the beatnik artist types of the 1950s easily translates into the ridiculousness of contemporary art. Reportedly made by “King of the B-movies” Roger Corman for a mere $50k, A Bucket of Blood is a thoughtful and provoking look at the beginning of modern art as cultural phenomenon. It has a lot in common with the 1953 version of House of Wax (André De Toth) in its representation of the frustrated and revengeful artist, however, it moves beyond the artist as “individual” to cleverly mimic -- and mock -- the capriciousness of the art world as a whole. As Sarah Thornton writes in her enthnographic study Seven Days in the Art World, ‘It’s [the contemporary art world] structured around nebulous and often contradictory hierarchies of fame, credibility, imagined historical importance, institutional affiliation, education, perceived intelligence, wealth, and attributes such as the size of one’s collection.’ [1] More than fifty years after its release, the satire in A Bucket of Blood continues to be relevant, relatable, and totally hilarious.
Inside every artist is a madman!
Walter Paisley has the ability to recite word-for-word the rhetoric spouted off in the art gallery / coffee shop where he works, but has no tangible talent to become the famous artist he desires. He is an outsider amongst this approved group of artist outsiders; he’s the busboy, slow but eager, strange but sincere. He doesn’t even mean to kill his landlady’s cat, which he actually does in an attempt to save its life, but is somehow savvy enough to cover the corpse in clay to create the object d’art his own hands could never replicate. Even when he makes his second kill, a police officer charging him with drug possession in his own apartment, his honest claims of innocence somewhat justify smashing the guy's head open with a pan. Walter was only trying to make some pancakes after all.
After he debuts his second sculptural masterpiece Murdered Man, the aforementioned policeman, the accolades within the artist community solidify his newfound status and Walter’s ego takes control. He goes on to kill an annoying young woman (a self-proclaimed muse and sculptor) and then, at random, a sawmill worker. He realizes he has to kill in order to keep up appearances, retain his celebrated status, and continue artistic production.
Walter is drunk on power (and booze) and, thus, the inevitable downward spiral begins…he gets rejected by his love interest, Carla, and a horrified crowd finally discovers the bodies beneath the clay. Disillusioned and desperate, he unsuccessfully tries to kill Carla and retreats to his apartment where he covers himself in clay and hangs himself, falling victim to his own artistic practice. Walter’s ongoing pursuit fueled by artistic desire is what Deleuze would term “a process of becoming”. In Deleuze and Horror Film Anna Powells says, “Becoming is the movement of particles to form molecular assemblages in the mobilization of desire,” adding “Becomings themselves are traditionally positioned as the source of horror. For Deleuze, however, rather than the horror of an abject, polarized other, both beauty and terror are located in the transformative condition.” [2] While the Deleuzian argument is that becoming is durational and in a continual state of flux, Walter’s transformation has been completed. He has “become-art”.
Life is an obscure hobo bumming a ride on the omnibus of art - Maxwell H. Brock
A Bucket of Blood certainly pokes fun at what is considered visual art and laughs loudest at those who fall for its charms. No one in the art world escapes: artists, collectors, writers all indulge in whims of fancy and the control systems of taste. What is perhaps most interesting about the portrayal in Bucket of Blood is the juxtaposition of what was happening in the “real” and very serious art world at the time. This was the period when Abstract Expressionism, not realistic renderings, was finishing its reign with New York artists like Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Willem deKooning and California artists like Clifford Still had just blasted away realism. Performances and happenings by Robert Morris, John Cage, Yves Klein and Allen Kaprow were starting to change artistic boundaries as well. Ironically, the release of Bucket of Blood sits right on the cusp of post-modernism and self-reflexivity of the 1960s and movements such as Arte Povera and Conceptualism (a new standard target for art mockery) were still on the horizon. Basically, modern art had already moved on from the Beat Generation days of Kerouac, but the world in which Corman depicts was very much fresh in the public’s memory.
A Bucket of Laughs
What makes A Bucket of Blood an enduring film is the implementation of humor amongst the fright. The seemingly mismatched yet absolutely symbiotic combination of humor and horror compliment each other when they collide (now a standard practice) in horror films. Noel Carroll, a theorist who explores emotional relationships and reactions to horror, says, “Ordinary concern for human injury is never far from our minds as we follow a horror fiction…In order to transform horror into laughter, the fearsomeness of the monster – its threat to human life – must be sublimated or hidden from our attention. Then we will laugh where we would otherwise scream.” [3]
Corman’s pointedly aimed jokes at the 1950s avant-garde art world therefore subvert the audience’s corporeal relationship to the horror shown, making us less on-edge and more able to enjoy the satire/horror experience. This horror-parody is a progressive state of being, making us laugh through and at art. It's crazy man and, like, totally far out.
[1] Sarah Thornton, Seven Days in the Art World (Great Britain: Granta Books, 2008), xii. [2]Anna Powell, Deleuze and Horror Film (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005), 66 and 78. [3] Noel Carroll, Beyond Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 254.
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