Foto-graphy

James Fotopoulos develops a grim midwestern vision.

By Johnny Ray Huston

THE FIRST WORD in the title of James Fotopoulos's low-budget 16mm feature Back Against the Wall signifies a body segment, and it also means "again." A series of long, cold stares at the purgatories located next door to bleak sex-industry pockets of urban and rural middle America, Fotopoulos's third feature is populated by people trapped in rooms – trapped with one another and without much to say. The men in Back Against the Wall are part of the furniture they're invariably sitting or lying down on. Bones barely able to support their heavy weight, they linger like lumpy flesh cushions on the wooden or metal frames that support them. In Fotopoulos country, bodies decay quicker than beds and couches, even though those beds and couches are cheap.

Fotopoulos's shorts and full-length works to date possess a not always compelling fascination with dark-haired, vaguely gothic young women. Casting male roles, he assembles a gallery of older loners who make B-movie supporting players seem glamorous. The critic Manny Farber, famously fond of "the modesty and infiltrating of good bit-playing" in '40s and '50s genre films, celebrated such types. Fotopoulos, equally obsessed, stars them as near-mute grotesques; when physical agony forces them to retreat to a bathroom, his camera invades their privacy.

The first section of Back Against the Wall's ever deteriorating triptych is dominated by a man who has no command over his surroundings. Referred to as a "genius," Levey (Martin Shannon) spends the majority of his time in bed, walled in by boxes of books, one tome resting on top of the hill that is his stomach. The wrinkles on Levey's face have turned into deep valleys. His futile pursuit of knowledge is occasionally interrupted by the impromptu lingerie modeling of June (the handsome Debbie Mulcahy), a younger woman who works at a strip club. His anti-beauty is trumped by his Ping-Pong partner Ed (Ernie E. Frantz), who has no neck and a multitude of chins.

Back Against the Wall is a sleazoid express traveling nowhere slow, and two of those characters are present for all three sections of its ride – a journey from residence hotel to bizarre porn-set farmhouse and back again. In true grind-house tradition, sex is always one wall away, but Fotopoulos isn't interested in teasing viewers with potential turn-ons; he wants the unseen and imagined to seem more horrible than the ugliness he's willing to show. The farmhouse segment alternates between stark winter landscapes and indoor scenes that place drug use and ludicrous "erotic" costumes against rustic, antique backdrops. The nameless figure in charge of the proceedings is yet another creepy older man: a bespectacled grandpa in plaid flannel who – in the movie's weirdest moment – purrs and meows before a blood-spattered table.

More than one writer has linked Back Against the Wall to the earliest sexual nightmares created by two Davids – Lynch and Cronenberg – but Fotopoulos is still in a formative stage. Dialogue-free, his dozen or so short films are closer to the nihilism and bloody nudity of Richard Kern and Nick Zedd. As influences go, the former terrible two are preferable to the latter, and the countless crimson-stained bodies in bathtubs that populate Fotopoulos's short works don't hint at the understatement Back Against the Wall benefits from. (In interviews, the director – who, unsurprisingly, can quote Colin Wilson from memory – is serious about critiquing his recurrent subject matter, but shorts like "Growth" don't convey much more than an adolescent fixation on all things gooey. Or a pretentious art student's fixation on all things abject.)

It's worth noting that neither Cronenberg nor Lynch emerged from the media-centric coasts. Chicago-based, Fotopoulos grew up a few houses away from the lot where a certain John Wayne Gacy once put his shovel to use, but it would be a mistake to reduce the filmmaker's grim concerns to that biographical detail. In broader, more accurate terms, Back Against the Wall is a product of – and response to – an oppressive Midwest terrain where vast stretches of vacant land alternate with crumbling industrial cities, a terrain where humor comes from other people's misery. The movie's relentless visual dis-ease is underlined by the soundtrack, a series of bell-jar atmospherics occasionally interrupted by a burst of heavy metal or techno.

Fotopoulos, 25, shares some stylistic traits with 23-year-old Pennsylvania native Andrew Repasky McElhinney, whose second feature, A Chronicle of Corpses, was showcased at this year's San Francisco International Film Festival. Both use long takes and are drawn to grim interiors (McElhinney cites Detour director Edgar Ulmer as a personal favorite, though Back Against the Wall's use of fleabag hotel room settings is more blatantly indebted to Ulmer). Fotopoulos's newest movie, Christabel, an interpretation of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's unfinished poem, premiered this spring, while McElhinney is in preproduction on Flowers of Evil, a modern tale that takes its title from Charles Baudelaire.