Introduction

Summary

Paul Morrissey may be America's most undervalued and least shown major director. In a career spanning more than twenty years he has made more than a dozen feature films of consistent weight and moral concern, with a distinctive aesthetic. While he has been often appreciated for individual films (or scenes), few writers have followed up on John Russell Taylor's 1975 assertion that the films Morrissey made for Andy Warhol “can stand comparison with anything else the cinema of today has to offer.” In the publishing splurge that followed Warhol's death and his Museum of Modern Art retrospective, Morrissey remained an obligatory name in passim but has hitherto not been accorded a full study.

Some reasons for this neglect are obvious. For one thing, Morrissey's doggedly personal course detached him from all film movements, major or minor. His views make him unique among American independent filmmakers: he is a reactionary conservative. Aesthetically, his roots in Warhol's minimalism excluded him from both the commercial and the art-house mainstreams. Yet his faith in character, narrative, and the discriminating deployment of the cinematic apparatus also barred him from the avantgarde. Also, Morrissey stayed outside of the politics of the New York underground film movement. Though Robert Frank and Emile de Antonio were Warhol's friends and influences, neither Warhol nor Morrissey was involved in their New American Cinema Group, which convened in September 1960, or in any later derivative. Morrissey proudly avers, “I'm totally independent of the independents.”