By Johnny Ray Huston

EMERGING HANDSOMELY COLOGNED and equal parts shy and sly from his coffin-size, many-altared bedroom in a Victorian apartment, Jose Rodriguez speaks in fast, mumbly bursts. Upon meeting a person, it usually takes this long-limbed Virgo with Sagittarius rising only a minute or two to ask for his or her sign, so the information can be processed by a mind well-versed in the book Sextrology. "I can't beat around the bush," he says. "I can be poetic sometimes, but I tend to go for it."

Close to the knives: One of Jose Rodriguez's many Untitled works is a strikingly ritualistic collage film.

That's an understatement. Rodriguez's strongest images burn themselves into your brain. I first found out back in early 2002, shortly after he'd nearly been expelled from the San Francisco Art Institute. None of the series of Untitled movies that former S.F. Cinematheque director Steve Anker showed me one night – including a teasing extended glimpse at a little boy eating a phallic banana while standing against a red brick wall, and a disturbing vision of a cat slowly decaying in an endless white landscape – was the one that got Rodriguez in trouble. But that doesn't mean they didn't generate classroom controversy.

The movie that pushed schoolmates and administrators over the edge involved a dog in heat, one of Rodriguez's fingers, and a sustained close-up of a father figure's laughing face. Together, these elements more than hinted at a type of intimacy that could be considered abuse. "Students made complaints," Rodriguez says. "After I showed the film, the class was distressed. The teacher said, 'This is not right' and went and talked to the principal. Then I was suspended, kicked out of school.

"I called a lawyer because I was scared. [People] told me that some cops came to the school and were asking for me. But I guess it was the SPCA or some animal rights people. It was a bad time. Later [filmmaker and SFAI teacher] George Kuchar told me, 'You know, Jose, you need to be careful. You shouldn't make it real – make it fake. You'll get the same effect.' "

By the end of 2002, Rodriguez had been vindicated, in a way – I'd placed some of his films on my top-10 list of the year, he'd been invited to show his work at the New York Film Festival, and Film Comment rewarded him with a two-page profile.

Still, that piece of advice from underground great Kuchar is telling. Rodriguez's early work goes for the jugular – or other regions – with a disarming forthrightness akin to that of Kuchar's late contemporary Curt McDowell. It would be a mistake, though, to say Rodriguez aims only to shock. There's an uncanny dreamlike quality to his use of movement and point of view. He has star presence in front of the camera. And viewed together, his first 8mm efforts cast a compelling spell, their imagery, by turns bestial and dirty and religious, forming a mystery of sorts about family.

Witness the Dreyer-like grounded shadowplay of Rodriguez's dizzying Homesick. Or take Silence of the Bride, a black-and-white portrait of one of Rodriguez's older sisters. As an organ eerily glows on the soundtrack, the film presents a series of pictures of her. Before marriage, she's smiling; after, the grin has vanished, replaced by a grave expression. The final image – a lingering shot of her in the passenger seat of a car, looking back as it drives away – perfectly captures the ache of (to borrow a film title from Rodriguez's friend Cathy Begien) relative distance.

The middle child among six sisters and two brothers, Rodriguez grew up "very feminine" in rural Mexico before his folks relocated to the Fresno area. Members of his family starred in and sometimes filmed scenes from his initial Super 8 smart bombs, shot among the farmhouses and fields that were his childhood stomping grounds.

When Rodriguez showed his first cinematic effort – a "suicide film" made while he was still in high school – to his mom, she had a strong reaction. "She said, 'That's garbage! I don't ever want to see it again!' " he says, adding, "She knows I'm kind of kooky. But what's a mom to do?" Nonetheless, as Rodriguez began work on the "castration film" Virgo Catharsis, his mother was on hand to help out. "I said, 'Mom, will you kill this for me?' And she did," he explains, referring to a rooster. In Virgo Catharsis, Rodriguez bites the head off of the black bird and blood spills over his body. As he lies saintlike under a white sheet on a scorched-earth field, church bells toll with growing intensity.

Sexual abuse and animal sacrifice are recurrent motifs in the movies Rodriguez made during school. In one Untitled film, a cousin of his frolics shirtless, then a hand gropes a doll that closely resembles her. "My cousin had this life-size doll, and I touched it, sexually," Rodriguez says. "I felt this intense bad pain in my chest. I felt evil. I didn't know how to deal with it, so I made a film. But I don't feel like I molested someone."

He had a similar reaction with the cat in his film Despoiled. "I was playing with a kitty," he says, "and I was with a friend – she's a Cancer, she loves animals. I said, 'Oh, I should make a movie of killing this cat.' She said, 'Argh! If you do, I'll kill you!' Then the next day, I felt bad – a cat from the same litter died. My neighbor had thrown the cat away, and I said, 'That cat died? I want it!' "

"I was disturbed when I pulled the eyeballs out of the cat [between shots]," he continues. "I felt like God was going to make me go blind." Yet the evidence of carnage and postmortem rot in Despoiled isn't as disturbing as the way it's filmed: a series of savage edits occur as the camera slowly draws away into a gray and snow white void, while on the soundtrack, a chorus of high-pitched mee-owwing voices asks, "Where's my kitty?" and a lone voice (Rodriguez's) answers, "I don't know."

"When I first showed the cat film in class," Rodriguez says, "People laughed their asses off – they thought it was hilarious. But then I screened it to a different audience at one of my shows, and everyone was silent. Someone came up to me later and said, 'You know, I wanted to strangle you for making that because it was so upsetting.' "

Rodriguez admits he aims to provoke. "I respond to the audience's response," he says. "The way they perceive [the films], that's how I feel I should feel about them. With the [aforementioned] doll film, I wanted people to accuse me the way they accuse bad guys. I wanted to see how they'd treat me – to be a martyr and be judged."

At times this impulse yields masturbatory exhibitionism. In 2003, when San Francisco Cinematheque invited Rodriguez to share an evening-length program, he capped it with a near-interminable video of himself jerking off in a half dozen or so settings: on a kitchen table, in a shower as Morrissey's "Hairdresser on Fire" blared from a stereo. (In a different, unshown video, a friend fists Rodriguez's mouth to the sounds of Morrissey's "Trouble Loves Me.") "I just wanted to expose myself, see how much I could embarrass myself," Rodriguez explains. He adds that he has junior-high footage of himself jerking off, and goes on to wonder if he would get in trouble for its sexual depiction of a minor – himself – if he showed it in public.

Rodriguez's best work, however, offers something other than simplistic provocation. A chief example is a striking, ritualistic collage film that involves stone cherubs, foamy waves of sperm and spit, and the filmmaker's naked torso. The latter is alternately penetrated by a finger (in an echo of the infamous dog film) and many sharp knives – that is, when it isn't being birthed from his father's mouth. It's just one of many of his movies titled Untitled. At times he's removed his name from them, labeling them "Anonymous" or "Truly Yours"; at others, he's taken on pseudonyms such as Jose Luis Duarte.

In the years since his turmoil-ridden time at the S.F. Art Institute, Rodriguez found work at a local art house. He keeps annual top-10 lists of what he's seen. Lukas Moodysson's Lilya 4-ever inspired him to make a T-shirt saying, "Jose 4-ever." He also praises Irreversible and the "beautiful" ending of The Piano Teacher, says Barbet Schroeder's Our Lady of the Assassins had him seeing dead people, and claims he took a date to see Kim Ki-duk's notorious fishhook thriller The Isle. "Bully, by Larry Clark, I saw, like, five times," he enthuses. "The last time, I saw it on LSD and thought I was going to puke at one point, but it was so great."

Recently, Rodriguez has found a friendly community of fellow video- and filmmakers at the Edinburgh Castle Pub, which holds a fun, informal film night every other Monday. Along with Begien, David Enos, mistress of horror Sarah Enid, and others, he's taken part in thematic nights devoted to subjects as deep as family and as silly as pumpkins.

Last October, a program titled "Rodriguez vs. Begien" packed the Edinburgh Castle's upstairs space. Clips of a bloody brawl between the two filmmakers bracketed Begien's handsome post-Sadie Benning diary works and Rodriguez's color-saturated epiphanies. Illusions of the Divine finds Rodriguez on his knees, bloody palms upward, staring directly into the sun – at one point his face turns blue, due to an object he's coiled tourniquet-like around his neck. Another film, Fresh and Death, begins with Enid stomping on a jelly-filled dead rat on her way to a rooftop French kiss-athon with Rodriguez. A clear divide placed between their faces causes their lips and noses to smush and swell into distorted shapes.

Near Fresh and Death's close, a hand squeezes bejewelled, bright red roses, and the flowers ooze a sticky, cumlike substance. Perhaps Rodriguez has taken Kuchar's words to heart, because some artifice has seeped into his work. It's also taken on some tenderness; his contributions to the Edinburgh Castle's family-themed program included a sweet miniature portrait of a mother and daughter with matching haircuts.

At the moment, one of Rodriguez's long-term projects is a "Boy Crazy" series, which allows him to act out his obsession with men who have a tendency to be unattainable. One such object of affection, a movie theater coworker, is the star of The Temptation of St. James. "He told me, 'I'm very emotionally unavailable,' " Rodriguez relates. "I said, 'That's cool – but are you physically available?' "

The best installment in the series so far is Eulogies, a black-and-white film made while he was still in college. "The guy in the film was in some of my classes," Rodriguez says. "I never talked to him. I ended up writing love letters and sneaking them into his bag or mailbox or locker. Eventually, he figured out who I was – I was stalking him too; I'd spend all day looking for him. He was a nice guy; he was actually concerned about my safety because one letter was suicidal a little bit. I always stalk nice guys.

"We talked, and he said, 'What do you want?' I wanted to say, 'Everything.' "

Eventually, Rodriguez succeeded in taking pictures of his crush. What he did with them is a case study in obsessive-compulsive creativity: He made hundreds of prints of one picture, then cut them up and disfigured and destroyed them with paint, tape, and glue. He took some outside and threw leaves and tomatoes and water on them until the emulsion started to come off. He then filmed the finished photos one at a time, pairing them with a creepy score. If Eulogies' subject ever saw the finished film, he'd probably be impressed – and more than a little unsettled.

The Edinburgh Castle's moviemaking environment has Rodriguez and friends appearing in each other's films. Nonetheless, the stars of his earlier work still might be more notorious. Rodriguez was pleased when writer Chris Chang ended his Film Comment profile with the news that Rodriguez and the dog that almost got him kicked out of school were still friends. "We are," Rodriguez affirms. "I came back home the next year [after the film] and talked to the dog – looked in its eyes and said, 'Hey, how are you?' We didn't do anything more sexually. But she'd follow me everywhere I'd go."

Jose Rodriguez programs a night of movies June 6, 9:30 p.m., Edinburgh Castle Pub, 950 Geary, S.F. Free. (415) 885-4074.