aka Head; The Impure
USA. 1972.
Crew
Director/Screenplay/Producer – Alan Rudolph, Photography – John Bailey, Music – Tom Akers, Alex Del Zoppo & Tim Ray, Electronic Music – Harold Budd, Special Effects Photography – Jan Kiesser. Production Company – Transvue Pictures Corp. Joyce Productions.
Cast
Carl Crow (Neil), Tim Ray (Andy), Winfrey Hester Hill (Baker), Victor Izzay (Dr Kilkenny), Judith Patterson (Janice), Michele Fitzsimmons (Denise)
Plot
Neil joins Dr Kilkenny as an assistant on an archaeological dig in the Mexican desert, searching for artifacts from the Zapote Indians. One night, Neil smokes some marijuana and has a vision of a sinister figure. This causes him to swear off smoking weed altogether. Some months later, Neil recruits Andy and Baker to form a band and the three of them occupy an abandoned house near San Francisco as they rehearse for a concert. Neil is concerned about Andy’s marijuana use and realises that Andy is having the same troubling dreams that he experienced in Mexico.
Premonition was the first film directed by Alan Rudolph. At the time, Rudolph had worked as an assistant director on tv’s The Brady Bunch (1969-74) and to director Robert Altman. A few years later, Rudolph’s films gained increasing acclaim with the likes of Roadie (1980), Choose Me (1984), Mrs Parker and the Vicious Circle (1994) and Afterglow (1997), among others. Rudolph has also made a surprising number of films that fall within genre confines (see below).
Premonition is a film that feels like an uncanny snapshot across the hippie era. We are initially introduced to Carl Crow who joins an archaeological dig because the professor respects his different ways, which mainly involve him lying in his bedroll at night smoking dope. Later in the show, the story is all about three guys forming a band and heading off on a pilgrimage to San Francisco to follow the music. The group even attend and perform at a mini Woodstock-alike concert. The image of Tim Ray and Winfrey Hester Hill heading up the California coastline on their choppers with their guitar cases strapped on the back of the sissy bars of their bikes could almost be an iconic image if it didn’t seem lifted from Easy Rider (1969).
At the same time, Premonition also comes with a stern Don’t Do Drugs message. While tripping on marijuana in Mexico, Carl Crow has a sinister vision of … something. Upon returning, he swears off drugs and then becomes concerned when he sees Tim Ray smoking and experiencing the same visions and becomes determined to make him swear off the weed. All of which makes it feel like a horror movie version of Reefer Madness (1936).
You cannot help but think the film might have had more effect if it has thrown something heavier than weed into the mix like peyote for example. In today’s era of legalised marijuana, the film feels like an overreaction that seems absurdly tame. This is particularly so when you contrast Premonition to the spate of LSD films that came out only a few years earlier in the 1960s – see The Trip (1967) and Mantis in Lace (1968) – and went far further than anything here.
What we get here in terms of visions – a mildly threatening backlit figure, the appearances of three women in white – seems incredibly tame in terms of all the ominous threat the premonitions are given. In fact, the film seem to have no idea where to go and at the end all that happens is that Tim Ray wanders off and disappears, while we get Carl Crow’s voiceover stating he not sure if this even happened. It amounts to a film that mounts an incredibly vague threat only for nothing to ever happen.
There’s an early electronic score from Harold Budd who went on to become a celebrated avant garde composer and a collaborator with Brian Eno, Robin Guthrie, John Foxx and others. Although being very early in the use of electronics, what it sounds like more than anything is the beeping of some type of monitoring device that has been left on in the background.
Alan Rudolph’s other genre films include by the gory psycho film Barn of the Naked Dead/Terror Circus/Nightmare Circus (1973), Endangered Species (1982) about the cattle mutilation phenomenon, the duo of quasi-futuristic film noir thrillers, Trouble in Mind (1986) and Equinox (1992), the appealing afterlife romance Made in Heaven (1987) and the Kurt Vonnegut adaptation Breakfast of Champions (1999).
Full film available here