Peter Kass’ Time of the Heathen (1961) is an American indie film so obscure that nobody has seen or heard of it, and that’s only a slight exaggeration. The heathen must be having its time, for an excellent restoration is currently touring art houses and festivals.
The opening legend announces: “The story of this film takes place in a period four years after the BOMB [underlined] fell on Hiroshima.” Then follow images of a white man called Gaunt in the credits (played by John Heffernan) walking or shambling towards the camera, his mouth agape, surrounded by literal darkness. The shots of walking in darkness alternate with shots of a landscape overwhelmed by gray sky. We hear Lejaren Hiller Jr.‘s score as performed by the University of Illinois Wind Ensemble; the score will later become electronic.
When the Expressionist credits are over, we open on Gaunt, still walking, but now in a more identifiable rural landscape. Although Time of the Heathen was shot around Oyster Bay, Long Island, I reckon it’s set in the American South for reasons to be explained. For now, the jug-eared, tic-laden Gaunt wears a formal suit with a jacket and button shirt over an undershirt. He stops and gapes in alarm as the camera glides towards him. He looks up.
Military planes in formation fly overhead in a thunderous roar. The camera pans down to a different observer sitting on the bank of a lake, thus spiritually and visually linking the two watchers. Here’s where the black and white camera begins to announce its poetic tendencies. The second watcher is a young African-American boy, who we’ll learn is called Jessie (Barry Collins).
Now, the action cuts to a fraught scene of three people in a kitchen. Seated at the table are the master of the house, Link (Orville Steward), with his shotgun, and his nervous adult son Ted (Stuart Heller). Link and Ted are white, while doing dishes at the sink is Marie (Ethel Ayler in her film debut), a young African-American. Silent compositions emphasize that Ted gives Marie the eye, that the uncomfortable Marie tries to ignore it, and that the annoyed Link is aware. Link grabs his gun and says he’s going into town, and Marie should finish up work and go home. “You hear me, girl?” She turns and says, “Yes, sir.”
Then, the camera follows behind a police car approaching Gaunt. He stops, and a subjective shot from inside the car gives us the sheriff’s voice as he tells his deputy to pull over and question this strange tramp. They’re rousting him. Gaunt says he’s “walking through”, and when asked where he’s from, he replies, “All of it, just seeing the country.” He quotes the Bible, reciting the title’s passage from Ezekiel. This seems to perplex the cowboy-hatted sheriff (Nathaniel White).
Is Gaunt an itinerant preacher? Such figures aren’t unknown in the South. Consider such diverse examples as Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood (1952) and Sinclair Lewis’ Elmer Gantry (1926), which have been powerfully filmed. As the sheriff stares at Gaunt, the dynamic shifts when Link drives by and makes unfriendly remarks about “garbage washing up around here lately, stirring up trouble. They’d do us a real service if we wipe them off the land.”
Link’s comments can best be understood by a later exchange in which the sheriff tells neighbor Dan (Dan Goulding), “Never knew Link to be interested in getting justice for colored folk before. Don’t think he’s turning into one of them integrationists, do you?” They both chuckle at the absurdity of their ironic joke, and the sheriff gives Dan some jolly pats on the chest. Their dialogue is loaded with unspoken understanding, which implies they have some notion of what’s really going on with Link’s behavior.
On a level raised above Dan and the sheriff, two impassive women look down silently upon them like two of the three Fates, unless they belong to the weird sisters of William Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Is their third companion out stirring up the plot?
This point in history saw a much-publicized phenomenon of Freedom Riders, civil rights activists who came to the South to challenge Jim Crow laws and register black voters. This program began in May 1961, and the Southern reaction was to complain loudly about “outside agitators”.
All these implications would have been clear to audiences in 1961 and made them forget the purported 1949 setting (four years after Hiroshima), and that’s why dialogues in Time of the Heathen suggest a Southern setting. Returning to the plot, the intercutting among these characters embarks on the melodrama driving the action as Ted makes unwelcome advances to Marie. The film indulges that reliable trope of the struggle where someone hits her head against something and is accidentally killed.
On opposite sides of the road, Gaunt and Jessie curiously spot each other, almost as recognition. Gaunt makes a strange hieratic gesture of bringing his right hand to his right eye as though to open it further. Then Jessie walks away, as nervous as he has every right to be, and for some reason, Gaunt starts to follow him. Why is he doing this? It seals Gaunt’s fate, for Jessie walks straight to the scene of his mother lying dead on the ground, followed a few seconds later by Gaunt. The dominated and gutless Ted burbles that it was an accident. His father adds to the bad timing by showing up and deciding to resolve the problem by shooting the two witnesses.
Gaunt and the seemingly shell-shocked Jessie hide in the loft of neighbor Dan’s barn, and it hardly looks great when the stranger is found lying there with his arms around the kid. Dan’s just been told by Link that “my housekeeper’s just got herself raped and killed” and the villain is a “tall scrawny stranger ugly as sin”. That’s when Gaunt learns Jessie is mute, although not deaf. This time, when Gaunt flees in terror and abandons his mute witness, Jessie chooses to chase after Gaunt and attach himself to him as the camera dollies before and behind them.
This Gaunt/Jessie dynamic exemplifies how Time of the Heathen is both openly symbolic and subtly literary. Jessie’s muteness isn’t just muteness. As a black child in a racist society, his muteness represents being disregarded and disbelieved, being powerless, and also a chosen defensiveness. More mystically, it turns Jessie into a silent god-figure who listens impassively to Gaunt’s semi-coherent confessions while lost in the wilderness or, rather, hiding in the woods, as Gaunt repeats, “I didn’t know. I didn’t know. I didn’t know.” Later, a doctor (Moses Smith) will say, “I must say for a mute boy he can make himself abundantly clear when he wants to.”
On the literary level, the fact that a white man and a black child are fleeing pursuit inverts the relationship between Huck and Jim in Mark Twain’s 1884 novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Twain’s story was part of contemporary cinema via Michael Curtiz‘s 1960 MGM production starring Eddie Hodges and Archie Moore.
In Twain’s novel, the travelers find an abandoned house floating on a raft. In Time of the Heathen, the travelers find the wreckage of a house in the woods, and Gaunt launches into childhood memories and monologues about his father. “His hands were strong, I remember, but always unclenched. I broke a window, and the air was filled with bits of glass… He died in fierce silence. When he struck me with unclenched hands, he wept.”
He goes on like this, reliving disconnected traumas and hearing voices as the score turns more electronic and the house becomes a heavy metaphor for America. In a later scene, he’ll say. “There’s blood in my throat. I’m choked by the blood in my throat.” Is he a traveling killer? Perhaps Time of the Heathen previews a rather brilliant indie that seems to have vanished from sight, Servando Gonzalez’s The Fool Killer (1965), based on Helen Eustis‘ 1954 novel. That’s about a shell-shocked war vet traveling in post-Civil War America with a child.
At this point, there are about 30 minutes left in the 75-minute Time of the Heathen, and we haven’t gotten to the stylistic selling point comparable to the hallucinatory climax of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1967). Here, we must explain the many hats worn by Ed Emshwiller, who’s not only the photographer for Time of the Heathen but also one of its producers and editors. Emshwiller is credited with “Cinematography and Art Work”.
Emshwiller is famous for two careers that lightly overlap. In one career, he’s a fine arts painter who became one of the most celebrated illustrators of science fiction magazines and paperbacks. His second career, which began concurrently with Time of the Heathen, was his interest in avant-garde film. His first entirely self-signed production was Thanatopsis in 1962, one of several experimental dance films. He pioneered experiments with video and computer animation. He founded the CalArts Computer Animation Lab and served as dean of CalArts’ film and video department from 1979 to 1990.
In Time of the Heathen, one year before he began making his own films, Emshwiller seems to have been given free reign to mix black and white with color and found footage into one of his characteristic plays with sound and image, including superimposition and bits of color animation. The lengthy experimental section includes images of an ancient white-bearded black man who laughs at Gaunt amid ruins.
Gaunt’s legacy of being “choked with blood” is finally explained allusively, complete with photos of damaged children, and we learn why the BOMB ties in to Time of Heathen‘s story. Gaunt, who vaguely resembles a clean-shaven Uncle Sam, embodies America and civilization’s collective guilt, as well as personal guilt, toward war, violence, racism, and inhumanity at large. This section of the film becomes a nightmarish, hyper-edited, avant-garde freak-out as the melodrama wends its way toward Shakespearean tragedy.
Time of the Heathen is Kass’ only feature film, who’s more famous as an acting teacher and Broadway director. For example, he directed the original 1964 production of Lorraine Hansberry’s The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window.
Calvin Floyd is listed as producer. He then produced something called Faust (1964), a modern update from writer-director Michael Suman, which played the Berlin Film Festival. My goodness, where’s that movie? He also directed the 1974 documentary In Search of Dracula starring Christopher Lee, and later the horror films Terror of Frankenstein (1977) and Sleep of Death (1980), both starring Per Oscarsson. The fact that he produced Al Adamson’s Black Heat (1976) shows the connection between arty indie cinema, horror, and blaxploitation. Floyd collaborated often with his wife, Yvonne Floyd.
Time of the Heathen can be associated with a trickle of postwar indies that address racial angles in the shadow of “the Bomb”. The earliest was probably Leo Hurwitz’s Strange Victory (1948). Then came Arch Oboler’s Five (1951), set after a nuclear apocalypse and anticipating by several years the more mainstream release of Ranald MacDougall’s The World, the Flesh and the Devil (1959). John Cassavetes’ Shadows (1959) and Shirley Clarke’s The Connection (1961) are also important in this regard.
Some indies, bless their hearts, took a more “exploitive” (that is, commercial) approach to films about race. Prominent is Roger Corman‘s The Intruder (1962, aka I Hate Your Guts), from Charles Beaumont‘s 1959 novel. Also prominent but less available is I Passed for White (1960), written and directed by Fred M. Wilcox a few years after he made, so help us Zeus, the big-budget science fiction festival of Freudian repression known as Forbidden Planet (1956).
Several early ’60s indies with Something To Say have found a revival in the spotlight of restoration and re-evaluation this century. Indeed, 1961 was a banner year, yielding such examples as Alexander Singer’s A Cold Wind in August, Jack Garfein’s Something Wild and Allen Baron’s Blast of Silence. Nor should we forget Leslie Stevens’ Private Property (1960). These films concern themes of sex and/or violence without the racial element, but they all are connected to the same zeitgeist.
The beautiful print of Time of the Heathen is restored in 4K resolution by UCLA Film & Television Archive and Philadelphia’s Lightbox Film Center. They used 35mm negatives owned by the British Film Institute, so the film comes with a British rating certificate and the British Lion logo. For reference, the restoration team compared with a 35 print by the Swedish Film Institute. The restored edition provides the stereo mix of Hiller’s electronic score from the Sousa Archives at the University of Illinois.
The print sources indicate how invisible the film has been in the US. Some write-ups have claimed it was never released in the US, but IMDB indicates otherwise without getting too specific. Not only was Time of the Heathen released in England but in several European countries, and it won the grand prize at Italy’s Bergamo International Film Festival in 1962.
Time of the Heathen plays at Chicago’s Gene Siskel Film Center and New York’s Film at Lincoln Center through 23 May. Later dates are scheduled for 18-21 June at Guild Cinema in Albuquerque, New Mexico; 25 June at Hollywood Theatre in Portland, Oregon; 14 July at The Cleveland Institute of Art Cinematheque; 16-18 August at Trylon Cinema in Minneapolis, Minnesota; and 10 November at Regal Rivera in Knoxville, Tennessee. More info can be found at the distributor’s website, Arbelos Films.