I read about Liquid Sky in the Dutch filmmag Skoop, saw the film on
the French-speaking Belgian television, bought the LP with the soundtrack and
finally saw the film on a Sunday afternoon in arthouse cinema Desmet in
Amsterdam. In May 2017 the only
remaining 33mm print was shown in New York. The film is available on DVD. Good news : the film will be re-released in cinemas around the world.
Director Slava Tsukerman is working on a sequel. If he gets his project financed, Margaret is coming back to today’s New York City and Anne Carlisle is going to play her.
A plot description alone
hardly conveys the sublime degree to which Tsukerman and crew transcend reality
in this film. But it stars Connecticut-born fashion model Margaret (Carlisle),
who lives in a Manhattan penthouse with her girlfriend, performance artist and
heroin dealer Adrian (Paula E Sheppard). Early in the film, a small flying
saucer perches on the roof of their apartment, attracted to Adrian’s stash. But
the aliens soon discover a more potent means of harvesting the dopamine they
need to survive: the human orgasm. Margaret realizes that something is
dissolving and absorbing her sexual partners at the moment of climax. She
quickly weaponizes this discovery in her struggles with the assorted creeps and
predators she meets in the fashion world, including rival model Jimmy (Carlisle
in drag). With Liquid Sky, Tsukerman consciously constructed a cult film that
offers a unique perspective on the early 1970s/late ’80s Downtown New York City
arts community that uses the fantastic to stand apart from more traditional
films about the scene, which typically focus on some combination of Basquiat,
Haring, and Schnabel.
The film’s exploration
of New York culture and nightlife was far removed from Tsukerman’s early life
in Moscow. He wanted to make films from a young age, but his Jewish heritage
kept him from being selected for the country’s one film school, which only
accepted 15 students per year. The indefatigable film fan instead pursued his
career of choice through an alternate route: enrolling in engineering school to
mimic the path of his idol, pioneering Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein. His
technical background led to a career directing science documentaries, though
his approach indicated a preference for circumventing stylistic norms that
would come to fruition in Liquid Sky.
“Instead of making real
documentaries, a couple of my friends and I created a new genre, a mix of
everything: fiction, documentary, animation, special effects,” he said,
attributing this innovation to the difficulty of conveying abstract concepts
like quantum physics.
These tendencies are
fully apparent in Liquid Sky, where mixed media are employed to portray unreal situations.
When Margaret and Adrian’s alien visitors arrive, the screen fills with
multicolored, kaleidoscopic animation. A sphere shooting lightning-like
squiggles sits at the center of the tableau. While this abstract imagery is
used throughout to represent the aliens, documentary techniques are crucial to
the narrative; fashion shows in small dark rooms are framed like tribal rituals
captured by an ethnographer, and performance art is recorded at a fixed,
objective distance. Tsukerman uses a patchwork of tools from different genres,
heightening the viewer’s sensation that he or she is watching a singular
cinematic work.
The most noteworthy technical
aspect in a film bursting with noteworthy technical aspects is the atonal
synthesizer soundtrack that ploddingly propels the action from scene to scene.
Composed by Tsukerman in collaboration with Brenda Hutchinson and Clive Smith,
the consistent, mechanical music of the opening, coupled with several slow,
steady zooms, offers the feeling that the film is gradually progressing toward
a goal or a reveal, but its discordant melody creates a sense of unease
regarding the destination. Despite the score’s haphazard appearance, its effect
is very calculated.
“I take music in films
very seriously,” Tsukerman said. “In most cases, I know what music is going to
be in the film very early, even during writing the script or before shooting.
In the case of Liquid Sky, I wanted a kind of circus music, but electronic
because it was about aliens. I wanted an electronic circus, very primitive.”
As the film’s standout
actor, Sheppard builds on this sonic tapestry with her art, which fuses
electronic music and poetry. Her performance of the song “Me and My Rhythm Box”
— chanting nonsense stanzas like “My rhythm box is sweet / Never / Forgets / A
beat” over digital percussion — makes her the nexus of insanity in this bizarre
world. The actor’s work teeters on the border between meaningfulness and
incomprehensibility, seeming like a parody of the stereotypical, unhinged
performance artist. However, there is an authenticity in Sheppard’s feralness
that attracted Tsukerman.
“[Adrian is] a very
typical character as part of the punk and post-punk culture,” he recalled. In
auditions, “a lot of very good actresses were mimicking punk, but I couldn’t
believe them. They were hypothetical. Not real. I knew that Paula, who didn’t
look like a punk with her long hair, has a very strong acting quality and
projection. That was the main thing which made the character”
Slava Tsukerman :
“The idea behind Liquid
Sky was to create a parable, which would include most of the hot topics of the
period: sex, drugs, rock ‘n’ roll, violence, and aliens from outer space. The
story is, at its heart, a spoof of those traditional Hollywood scripts, and the
movies portraying the quest to live out ‘the American dream’.”
“When I was explaining
the idea of Liquid Sky to my friends – many of whom went on to help me create
the film – they liked the idea a lot. Among my group then was film distributor
Ben Barenholtz, who launched the careers of David Lynch and the Coen Brothers,
and some of the most original filmmakers of our time. Ben practically created a
system for getting cult films out there: midnight shows were his idea, for
example. He was the first person to read the Liquid Sky script when it was
finished, and he said to me ‘I have the impression that you’re planning on this
becoming a cult film,” and I told him he was right. I knew it would become one.
And it did.”
“I think a metaphorical
film like Liquid Sky cannot use visual elements of reality without
modification, the way they would be used in a documentary or a more
true-to-life film. Although we did a lot of research in nightclubs, we couldn’t
use the direct aesthetics we saw there without changing them. We were also very
influenced by modern art, and trends within that at the time. I encouraged
Marina to create a special, unique style for the costumes, based on existing
fashion that might be seen in the clubs, but more metaphorical, more
exaggerated, and more stylised. I hoped that the audience would pick up the
style we presented because it would mean Liquid Sky really had become a cult
film, and it happened. I remember how happy Marina and I were when we walked
past Bloomingdale’s windows and there were mannequins in there that looked
exactly like characters from Liquid Sky.”
“One Canadian critic
wrote that Liquid Sky demonstrated ‘the neon underbelly of Andy Warhol’s
world’. I think this critic really understood me: Andy Warhol was my idol at
the time. Besides references to Warhol, I had this vision of an apocalyptic
world and most of the exterior scenes were shot at dawn, at the so-called
‘magic hour’, which created the atmosphere of the permanent mystical,
fluorescent, artificial night. As for the interior, Margaret’s penthouse was
covered with mirrors and neon lights: the mirrors were reflecting the neon
lights and the other mirrors, making it look like the room had no walls, like
it was suspended in space. It gave the whole thing a very mysterious feeling.”
“To balance the
theatricality of the film’s story and its visual style, I wanted the characters
in it to be as realistic as possible, so many of the actors in Liquid Sky are
my friends playing roles based on their own characters and events of their real
life: we wrote the script around them. Anne was the ideal actress to play the
lead character in the film – she really was a new wave fashion model, with half
of her hair blue and half of it red. From the very beginning, the idea was to
build the story around her, and as one of the co-writers of the script she was
happy to turn her real life into art. Some of our friends read the script,
though, and didn’t end up taking the part because they were too shocked by it.
The actor that was supposed to play Jimmy wasn’t happy with how we had
presented him and we decided to re-cast the role.”
“When the actor first
playing Jimmy stepped down, we tried to find another actor to play him, but in
my subconscious, I probably always knew that Anne would play both parts. I
always suspected that the character of Jimmy was a part of Anne’s personality.
When she was a little girl, her mother would dress her up as a boy and called
her Jimmy, so we used that when we created the part. Eventually I said to Anne:
‘listen, let’s make you Jimmy!’ We did a small experiment – we dressed Anne in
my clothes and went to a nightclub, where no one recognised that she was a
woman. She even picked up a girl there! And that was it: we made the decision
that she would play both parts. Androgyny and gender fluidity and sexuality
were all important aspects of the film and having Anne play Margaret and Jimmy
lent it additional depth.”
The making of obscenely fashionable
cult sci-fi movie ‘Liquid Sky’. Interview by Emma Elizabeth Davidson. DazedDigital, June 29, 2018.
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