14. SUBJECT TO SURVEILLABILITY: Ever feel like you’re being watched?
Decades before reality TV, live-streaming and The Truman Show, Paul Bartel’s surreal paranoia classic, The Secret Cinema, proved that someone is always watching.
Before he gave us the glorious, dystopian carnage of Death Race 2000 or Eating Raoul, Bartel cobbled together $5,000, snagged leftover black-and-white camera short-ends from commercial shoots (and rumor has it, a few softcore porno sets), shot this movie completely silent and dubbed it in post. Premiering at the 1966 London Film Festival and the 1967 New York Film Festival, it gained a true cult following when it double-billed in NYC theaters alongside Brian De Palma’s feature debut, Murder à la Mod.
Long before Peter Weir sent Jim Carrey sailing against the edge of a giant painted sky box, Bartel was digging around in the same psychological dumpster. But where The Truman Show is polished, wholesome and heartbreaking, The Secret Cinema is sleazy, surreal, absurd and wonderfully mean-spirited.
Amy Vane stars as Jane, our perpetually tortured heroine. (Side note: Vane, a former puppeteer and UCLA theater student, delivers an incredible performance in her only film role!) Everyone in her life pushes poor Jane to the brink of insanity: her boss Mr. Troppogrosso (Gordon Felio), her dismissive boyfriend (Philip Carlson), her duplicitous best friend (Connie Ellison), and the director (Barry Dennen), who captures every failure.
Every single person Jane interacts with—from her mother (Estelle Omens) down to random waitresses and nurses (Mimi Randolph)—is in on the joke. Bartel films it all with a slick, claustrophobic aesthetic. Because it was dubbed after being shot silent on short-film stock, the dialogue has an uncanny, dreamlike dislocation that only heightens Jane’s madness. It feels like a Twilight Zone episode directed by a guy who spent way too much time reading pulp paperbacks and hanging out in NYC underground theaters.
Bartel was so attached to this paranoid little gem that he remade it twenty years later, in 1986, as an episode of Steven Spielberg’s Amazing Stories (“Secret Cinema,” Season 1, Episode 20). Bartel even stepped in front of the camera that time to play Jane’s devious psychiatrist, Dr. Shreck. While the TV episode is fun, slick, and colorful, it lacks the raw, grimy magic of the 1966 original.
Rhino Entertainment released this on VHS back in the day paired with Bartel’s cheeky 1969 7-minute erotic short The Naughty Nurse. More recently, Criterion picked it up as a bonus feature on their Blu-ray/DVD releases of Eating Raoul. In 2017, the Academy Film Archive and The Film Foundation (funded by the George Lucas Family Foundation) fully restored the film, preserving Bartel’s micro-budget brilliance for future generations of cult movie weirdos.
You can find it on the Internet Archive.
