Headpress
Once a part of NewYork’s Cinema of Transgression, his films were kinky, outrageous and caused trouble. Now an established erotic photographer, RICHARD KERN thinks he no longer needs to make films. STEPHEN PORTLOCK finds out why.
The Not So Evil Cameraman
An Interview with Richard Kern
headpress The most striking thing about the photographs in your book Model Release is the tenderness of them compared to some of your films, for example The Evil Cameraman. There seems to be a gentleness and kindness towards the subjects which one wouldn’t have expected.
richard kern Yeah. It’s mainly because I got older I guess. I had a meeting with John Waters one time and he told me that you can be an angry young man when you’re young, but then when you get old it just looks silly. You’d still be complaining about everything and still trying to make a dark profound statement. That really hit home and a lot of people think it’s like a sell out but it’s just evolution. A lot of that film work was done when I was a drug addict so I had a much darker, much more aggressive, view of the world, and that’s totally changed now.
Do you still take drugs at all?
No. Not for about fifteen years.
In that you have a naked woman you are creating an erotic scenario, but you don’t seem to be consciously saying ‘I am trying to get you aroused’.
No. I’m not looking for that at all. At least not in my own stuff. Hopefully a lot of the pictures look like I just stumbled upon some moment in the model’s life when she was doing something and take a photo. Even though most of them are extremely set up.
In a lot of cases there does seem to be an air of innocence to the photography that reminds me of Pierre et Gilles in their more restrained moments and stripped of a certain amount of the campiness.
Yeah. Oh well, hopefully stripped of the campiness. But I’m looking for some innocence, because there’s not enough in the world. A lot of these models are anything but innocent. I mean, they’re innocent in their own way, but they’re worldly people.
So where did you meet them?
All over the place. Somebody might know a previous model and they’d contact her. A lot of people contact me from my website, and there’s a few that I get from agencies. It is a lot of friends of friends of friends.
What type of film was used for the photos in Model Release?
They are all 35 millimetre and 645 medium format.
So how does this contrast with your earlier collection New York Girls?
New York Girls, from the early nineties, had a lot of bondage in it, a lot of leather clothes. All the girls had tattoos and piercings and they looked menacing. Totally different to my new stuff. I haven’t shot any fetish stuff in at least five years. I shot a girl for this magazine Taboo which requires bondage and stuff like that, but I really don’t shoot that at all anymore. That was a particular area of work I did in the past.
Sure. Now to go back a stage, you were born in the Southern half of America, in North Carolina. Was that the bible-belt?
Yeah. I grew up going to Southern Baptist church, for three years I guess.
So was your work a kind of rebellion against your upbringing?
I think it was more that at the time of making the films I could not crack the New York club scene, art scene, any scene. I was always on the outside and I had this super aggressive attitude. It’s like The Sex Pistols. If they hadn’t been so aggressive, they would have never got anywhere.
Your dad edited a local newspaper. Did that have an influence on your work?
I think his photography did. He was also one of the photographers. There were three or four reporters and a couple of photographers. It was something that was different to what everybody else was doing. We went to a drowning one time and a KKK rally, but there was a lot of boring stuff like a group of men eating dinner.
What were you like at school?
I was a good student, but I was one of the outsider types, looking for something outside of their environment. There were two or three guys I hung out with in high school, but back then in 1972 the only thing linking us to the outside world was movies and Rolling Stone, Creem or something like that. That movie Woodstock had a huge influence. So did Easy Rider. I saw it in my home town in the middle of nowhere and when the guys got shot at the end of the movie, half the audience stood up and cheered and the other half, people like me went ‘wow that’s cool — they have long hair and they’re riding motorcycles and doing drugs and having sex’.
Then you went to art school. Why did you choose photography and philosophy?
I was a philosophy student for a long time, and then at the last moment I switched to art. I started panicking about what kind of career you get in philosophy and my favourite teacher said that perhaps I’ll be able to get a good job in a bank. In the art department you could pretty much do whatever you wanted. Art has always been the place where you look for a kind of excitement that doesn’t exist elsewhere.
What attracted you to New York?
At school I found out that New York is where everything is happening. I just realised one day that I had to leave.
And how did you meet a number of your friends like Lydia Lunch, Jim Thirlwell and Sonic Youth?
Everyone knew each other and it was just like any club scene. If you go to clubs, you’re going to meet people and this person will introduce you to that person. I met Lydia through David Wojnarowicz and through Lydia I met Sonic Youth and Foetus, and on and on and on. Sonic Youth had been around for a couple of records but they weren’t big yet. David Wojnarowicz was also just getting started and he was getting some attention as a painter and he broke out after that. Foetus was Lydia’s boyfriend for a long time. Lydia was an icon already because of the no wave scene and I’d been a big fan of hers so naturally I was happy to meet her and thrilled to work with her.
What were these initial collaborations?
They were like staged events where she would be on stage with someone and I would be in the audience heckling her or heckling them, and I would jump up on stage and kill the other person with a knife or something, but it was all rigged with fake blood and everything.
So, how did you get into film-making?
I’d made films in high school but then I didn’t for a long long time. I was making a lot of fanzines from college and then when I was in New York I kept on making them, but they were art fanzines. They were people’s stories and pictures. One of them was called The Heroin Addict, another The Valium Addict, and a third Dumbfucker. They were all like punk rock. Everyone did them. Then I realised that if I made some films I would move a lot faster than I could with photographs. People actually view a film and it has an effect on them that really pumps up your value.
Then in 1988, you moved to San Francisco and cleaned up of your act. Had you’d gone too far down the road on drugs?
Something like that, yeah [laughs] and then I quit. That’s all it was.
I read that you were hanging out with small time crooks?
That was just people who do drugs
How far are the films a collaborative process? Lydia Lunch for example comes across as a pretty larger than life character.
Yeah. Yeah. The films I made with her were definitely collaborations big time. For example in Fingered, she called and said ‘we’re going to make a movie about a phone-sex operator who goes off with one of her clients and kills some people and then they pick up a hitch-hiker and kill her’. That was the story and then we went to la and I laid out a bunch of stuff that happens and her and Marty Nation who’s the guy, every night we worked on the dialogue for the next day’s shooting. I didn’t do any of the words. The whole film took about two weeks from start to finish. We shot in two days with four days of editing. The same process applies for The Right Side of My Brain.
What about Nick Zedd and the music videos?
I was making a movie Manhattan Love Suicides where it was supposed to be that everyone who falls in love commits suicide. Nick had an idea for a movie where he’s both the man and the woman. It worked for my movie because then at the end, I have the woman part of him kill herself. The rock videos are always a collaboration because it’s a product and the musicians have certain things they want in it.
Today, are you still in touch with Foetus, Lydia Lunch and Nick Zedd?
Yeah, I talk to Lydia every few months and I see Foetus every couple of weeks in town, and Zedd I see every few months. Lydia lives in California.
Am I correct in believing that there’s a photo taken by you on the Bruce LaBruce website?
Yeah. I shot Bruce with a big religious candle with a radius of about one and a half to two inches stuck up his butt, but in exchange I was in one of his movies, Super 8½. We were both trying to see who could do the most extreme stuff and he wanted a girl to fuck me with a dildo but the chemistry wasn’t right. That was a hard shoot. The girl who was in that shoot has since disavowed all contact with her past.
In Super 8½, Googie the lesbian film maker is making a film called Submit to my Finger and the title has reminiscences of Submit to Me and Fingered.
Bruce said it was an homage to Fingered, and what’s really funny is years and years ago he used to write for an avant-garde film magazine in Toronto. Someone said ‘have you seen this review of your films’ and it was this guy just ripping my films apart, and all this stuff, and that was Bruce LaBruce. Then years later he started making his own films and he totally did an about-face and realised that all that stuff was a joke, and he apologized.
So how do you feel about charges of homophobia? You astonished me by admitting in an interview with Jack Sargeant that you had been homophobic in your youth?
If I said that, I was probably joking. I’m probably no more homophobic than any other basically hetero guy. I went through a whole bi period in my life and I’d probably still be doing it if my girlfriend was into it. I don’t think I’m homophobic. I mean, I shoot a lot of guys.
In the porn business, I see some heavy homophobia, but if you’re doing stuff to impress upon other men how tough you are, wouldn’t that be a gay activity in the first place?
Bruce LaBruce called himself The Reluctant Pornographer and Russ Meyer has described himself as a first class pornographer. What is your relationship with porn?
The stuff that’s in Model Release I don’t really consider pornographic. It’s just portraits but without clothes. I do shoot pornographic stuff specifically for sex magazines where, hopefully, it will get the people aroused, but it’s very soft. For Hustler, I’ve done a lot of journalism where I go somewhere with a reporter and I shoot some crazy sex scene. They are the most enjoyable jobs I am doing now. For example seeing all these people working in a big Nevada whorehouse The Bunny Ranch is such an extreme version of what I am normally used to - shooting in New York or even shooting nude women.
You mean fucking and blow-jobs?
Well I didn’t watch much of that, but just seeing how they live, you know…very strange. You can have a preconceived notion of something and then find that it’s nothing like what you thought.But I shoot for a lot of their other magazines like Barely Legal, Leg World and Taboo. All these magazines. I used to think ‘I’m not getting my work published in regular magazines’ but then I realised, I’m published in three or four magazines a month at least, but they’re all porn magazines.
Are your films pornographic?
I wasn’t trying to arouse anyone in any of those movies. They were all nihilism and sex is bad and probably a lot of that comes from the fact that during that time when I was doing heroin I wasn’t having sex. You know, you might have sex every six months. Like if you stopped doing dope for a while you might get a hard-on but otherwise it’s not happening. Even before that it seemed like sex ruined everything. But that was the people I was hanging out with.
It’s more like a transgressive kind of porn where you’re just trying to break taboos. For example, the whole idea of Fingered was to show sex in such a bad light that you might not want to have sex after it. But then I met a lot of people who said ‘I watched Fingered and we had the wildest sex’. Usually if you have that kind of sex, your relationship’s going to be over pretty soon.
It seemed that you’re meant to identify more with Lydia Lunch’s character and her slight revulsion at this hick.
Yeah. That was the idea. Lydia always plays the victim in the movies, but a weird kind of victim. But everything they said in that film was supposed to be a cliché. It was supposed to be like seeing an entire movie in the trailer.
You have been charged with objectifying women, but you also seem to be laughing at yourself and male sexuality?
Well the first half of The Evil Cameraman was shot when I was a drug addict, and that was the way I was seeing things, really dark, like ‘I’m this really tough, mean guy’. Then I got off drugs and it says ‘two years later’ and I’m this kind of geeky guy that’s chasing around this girl whose just hopping all over the place and I pull out my dick and I’ve got a big swastika tattooed over it and she just laughs at me and goes hopping off and that is more the reality of the situation. It was called The Evil Cameraman because back when I was making those movies I would go somewhere and it would be like ‘that guy. I don’t even want him in here. That guy is disgusting, he’s evil’ you know. And then they’d meet me and they’d say ‘Oh you’re not anything like that’. I was just playing off the idea that people have about the people that do a certain kind of stuff.
It was also very rooted in reality. The girl in the first half was someone I was hanging around with at the time and our relationship was really weird - not so much bondage and stuff but we were doing drugs all the time and it was all twisted. And then I was going out with that girl who was walking on her hands afterwards, and that’s the way she was - so energetic and bouncy that it was like almost a joke compared to the people I used to hang out with.
So, you’re not into S&M then?
In my personal life I don’t practice it. My girlfriend would just laugh in my face if I said about putting on these rubber clothes. I can’t even get her to wear stockings.
Bondage is very exciting because you’re very close to the person, like inches away, but you’re not really touching them, and I admit I still get excited by the image of a tied-up woman, if she attracts me in the first place. I know Araki who shoots bondage for magazines and it takes hours. Unless you’re really into it it’s really boring.
But for a lot of bondage people, it’s like wanting to have someone all tied up so you can control them. I’ve been one, so I know. I mean, most of the guys who shoot it, they’re shooting it because they can not control this person in real life so they create a situation in which the woman is totally at their mercy.
I might alienate some people but I’m no longer into dressing for sex. Dressing in our clothing and going out and letting people see like ‘hey I’m wild and crazy because I dress up in a certain kind of clothes’.
There have been some quite extraordinary outrages over a number of your films, particularly Fingered and The Evil Cameraman.
There were some screenings where I thought there was going to be violence, but it never happened, and they were always in Germany. There was one during the eighties in Berlin where this feminist group came in with bats and wearing hoods – I think they were all men – and they dumped paint on the projectors of the theatre and robbed everyone in there. But they destroyed the wrong movie. They destroyed the movie that mine was playing with. That was really funny. And then there was a screening of Fingered in Germany at a college where a woman who heard about the movie took it upon herself to start this campaign to stop the screening. So there was all this hoopla over the screening, and the school cancelled it, but we decided to do it anyway in a private location. All the people found out where it was going to be and again another feminist group came in wearing hoods and that time they threw paint at the screen while the movie was on but then they just marched out. But the whole thing was, if no-one had said anything in the first place, maybe fifty people would have come at the most, but because of all the commotion, there was like two hundred people there. They just defeat themselves.
Oh yeah. Do you understand why Fingered creates such an outrage?
It’s a really aggressive movie and the fact that the characters are saying ‘fuck’ and ‘fuck me’ and ‘shit’ and all that stuff non-stop throughout the movie, it just makes it that much more unbearable. But if you watch it like a couple of times, you realize it’s like a comedy. Today people are really used to seeing the stuff that’s in Fingered in movies, but ten years ago there was a whole different climate about that stuff. I mean, that kind of stuff already existed in movies, but they were the movies I saw on 42nd Street. People were also bothered by the piercing films like The Sewing Circle.
What are the directors who have inspired you?
I was like an art cinema buff. I was really into Godard, Antonioni and all those guys. I like everything.
John Waters, Russ Meyer ?
Oh yeah. For sure.
What about George Kuchar?
I never saw his movies until I’d already quit making mine, and then I was really shocked at the similarities to some of mine, you know. When I saw Thundercrack! I was blown away. The people in it don’t stop at anything. The guy starts fucking the guy or whatever, and the gorilla has sex, and I thought ‘this is great. No boundaries’.
So, have you had problems with censors in the UK? As far as I know, the only one that’s available here is The Evil Cameraman.
Hopefully, everything’s going to be available in the UK soon through the British Film Institute. There may be something in Fingered they have to edit out. If they do, I’m just going to have them put up a black spot where the offending image is supposed to be happening because it makes it feel ten times worse than it actually is.
In America are your films rated NC-17?
No. There’s no rating. I’ve had distributors for more than ten years and I still sell tons and tons of them every month, and since DVD started, they’ve just started selling all over again. Believe me, when I made those movies, I had no idea that anyone would ever want to see them. It’s a bit of a shock to me.
Have you ever been tempted to make a non-underground feature film?
I would love to do it but I wouldn’t know where to start, and I’m into the photos right now. I don’t really feel that I have something to say and to make a movie takes a year or two so who’s going to support me?
So what are you doing now?
What I’m doing now is shooting and shooting. For the past eight months or so, I’ve been shooting a lot of fashion. I’ve shot for Nylon, i-D, Spoon, Purple and others. I’m still shooting porn and my own photos. There’s a book called Kern Noir coming out in September. That’s all black and white images. My book Model Release is being reissued by Taschen around the same time as a paperback. My filmmaking days are over with the exception of some video that I shoot when I’m shooting stills.
With thanks to Jack Sargeant for his help on the images used in this interview.
