Voodoo Auteurism:

Film Stills and Photography

Larry Johnson’s suite of six photographs Untitled (Movie Stars on Clouds) (1983) imagines identical, sweetly elegiac credit sequences for two of Hollywood’s most fatally iconic films, Rebel Without a Cause (1955) and The Misfits (1961). On fluffy white clouds adrift over Technicolor blue skies, Johnson simply imposes the names of the stars in each of the films: James Dean, Sal Mineo, and Natalie Wood signify Rebel Without a Cause, and Montgomery Clift, Clark Gable, and Marilyn Monroe signify The Misfits. The series is arguably the most effective double entendre about the promise and the lie of cinematic immortality in contemporary art. (Only Andy Warhol’s faux-innocent silkscreens of movie stars occupy similar territory.) Dean died in a car crash, Mineo was stabbed to death, and Wood died by drowning—all violently fatal baptisms into legend. As for Gable and Monroe, The Misfits was their last film; Clift lingered on with increasingly apparent disabilities for three more.

While the cast of Rebel remains pretty much frozen in amber and emblematic of glittering youth, the stars of The Misfits are more like touchstones for the cruelty of illusion: all three had stayed much too long at the fair and the film shows each of them in an almost documentary state of naked disintegration. In Johnson’s photographs, it is assumed that we know the names and, more important, can supply the faces as well as an emotional tenor to those names. He further assumes that we carry within us those signifying freeze-frames that confirm the emotional weight of who these people were, that we invest in the myth of artifice that is the cinema’s greatest allure.