Zimmerman: Fade To Black (1980)

Although Vernon Zimmerman had co-written and directed Unholy Rollers in 1972 and filmed Terrence Malick’s screenplay of Deadhead Miles in 1973 – an adaptation that never saw the light of exhibition – he only ever had total artistic control over one film before he retired from the directing spotlight altogether to teach graduate screenwriting at UCLA. That in itself would be enough to suggest that there’s something singular about 1980’s Fade to Black, a dark satire about a lonely Los Angeles cinephile who goes on a murder spree against everyone who’s ever taunted or mocked him, while dressed up as a succession of his most beloved movie characters. But there’s also something singular about the moment in cinephilic history that Fade to Black occupies and dramatises – the moment just before VHS ushered in a new wave and type of film fandom. In Zimmerman's vision, that’s presented as a moment at which celluloid is gradually occupying rental space more than public exhibition space, with Eric Binford (Dennis Christopher) working in a massive lending warehouse where he helps courier films to cinemas by day and takes them home to the personal cinematheque he has established in his bedroom by night. As he moves from reel to reel, he sketches out a space in which cinephilia is peculiarly visible as a paraphilia, just because it's in the process of shifting from the big screen to the small screen and from celluloid to tape, shrugging off the culturally acceptable – and by this stage more or less invisible – fixations engendered by the traditional movie palace only to rediscover their perverse, neurotic and voyeuristic co-ordinates in the private space of a new kind of home theatre. Cinematic cinephilia is denatured, but VHS cinephilia is too emergent to feel naturalised either, with the result that all Binford’s cinephilic quirks and tics feel prosthetic, fetishistic and sexually deviant in some way, shrouding us in a wealth of memorabilia, paraphernalia and marginalia – all so many forms of autoerotica – that recover cinephilia as a fringe act, and criminal activity as the height of cinephilic consummation, perhaps explaining why every cinephilic moment converges on horror fandom. That’s not to say that Eric’s cinephilia necessarily gravitates towards horror films – the slasher cult was still pretty emergent at this stage, as a freshly minted poster of Halloween attests – but that the film intercuts classic cinematic excerpts with Eric’s real and imagined criminal life in ways that viscerally skew their black-and-white nostalgia to recover their inner brutality, everything about them that might have spoken to the darker kind of cinephile in the early 80s. At his most visionary, Eric’s crimes therefore feel like a form of auteurism as he remakes some of the most iconic and iconographic Hollywood poses, silhouettes and stances as horror archetypes, most memorably in a scene in which he glimpses both Freddy and Chucky in his own haunted version of Hopalong Cassidy. And Zimmerman is also too enmeshed in this transitional moment to affect any kind of critical distance from it, eschewing ironic detachment in favour of an absurd, extravagant realism that floods the film itself with the very cinephilic touches Eric fetishises – bizarre, oddball, superfluous details and nuances that make no narrative or emotional sense, but flesh out this emergent vision of VHS-soaked LA in the most beautiful and breathtaking ways, as if anticipating the pausing, perusing and selective viewing of the first generation of videophiles that was just around the corner.