Don’t know who Rocky Schenck is? You should. The film director William Friedkin (The French Connection, The Exorcist) collects Rocky's work and wrote the introduction to his new collection of fine art photography, The Recurring Dream. Rocky not only makes hauntingly beautiful hand-tinted photographs, he also makes films, music videos, and has worked with Adele, Francis Bean Cobain, Robert Plant, Ray Bradbury, Ellen DeGeneres, Willie Nelson, B.B. King, T-Bone Burnett, Nicole Kidman, Stevie Nicks, Patti
LaBelle, Dionne Warwick, and John Prine. He says that many of these luminaries come across his work, feel an emotional connection to him, and reach out to collaborate.
Rocky Schenck has lived and worked in Hollywood since he left the University of North Texas years ago, but his childhood in Texas and his family's artistic heritage informs his work. The author John Berendt (Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil: A Savannah Story) describes Schenck’s photographs as stills “taken from a movie that exists not on film but rather in one’s memory, with all the fuzziness typical of remembered impressions.” Schenck has talked to many media outlets about how he approaches his art and how he reflects on his ties to Texas. We've compiled some of the most interesting insights into his life and process to celebrate the publication of The Recurring Dream.
Don't miss Rocky Schenck's book signing and artist reception at The Wittliff Collections in San Marcos on Sunday, October 2nd. More information here. He'll also have an exhibition opening at the Fahey Klein Gallery in Los Angeles on Thursday, October 20th.
On growing up in Texas and his family's artistic heritage:
"I grew up rather isolated on a ranch outside of Dripping Springs, Texas, where I spent much of my childhood painting landscapes and watching old films on TV before and after school. I became obsessed. I decided I wanted to be a filmmaker, and I started writing, directing, and photographing little movies. My Dad bought me a twin lens Yashica stills camera, and I learned photography while shooting stills on the sets of my little epics.
My early films and photographs were all in black and white as I attempted to duplicate the look of the vintage films I saw on TV. I never had formal training as a photographer or a filmmaker. I also loved to draw when I was a child, so my parents enrolled me in an oil painting class. My ancestors were classically trained artists who moved from Europe to Texas in the 1850's, and I was a big admirer of their work. I suppose I wanted to learn how to paint in the rather romantic style of their paintings. I started selling my little landscapes around age thirteen.
— From a piece in KYKYLYKY; interview by Jan Walaker
Inside the Artist's Studio
With the new series Bates Motel airing on A&E this spring, Hitchcock's seminal film Psycho is re-emerging in popular culture. The show follows a young Norman Bates and his mother in a 'contemporary prequel' to the horrific Psycho story. David Greven's Psycho-Sexual charts canonical Hitchcock films as precursors to 1970s New Hollywood films like Dressed to Kill (De Palma), Cruising (Friedkin) and Taxi Driver (Scorsese). Get your DVD players ready, because David Greven gives us some 'must see' viewing and insightful commentary to accompany his new book.
'The Essential Cold War Hitchcock'
by David Greven
Alfred Hitchcock directed, according to IMDB, 67 titles (including episodes for his anthology TV series). Narrowing down a list of the “essential” Hitchcock is an impossible task given how substantive the director’s body of work remains. So, here is a list of films that are particularly germane to the questions I raise in my book Psycho-Sexual. My thesis in this book is that Hitchcock’s films from the Cold War era onward thematize an emergent form of American masculinity that will prove to be crucial to several directors of the 1970s (in a period usually called the New Hollywood) and beyond. This Hitchcockian masculinity is defined by a tendency toward voyeurism, a push-pull attraction to the homoerotic, and an attitude toward sexuality that can be best described as pornographic. The current fascinations with surveillance in our culture—the spycam-sensibility of the present, the fears over identity theft—have their roots in the Cold War paranoia Hitchcock depicted.
Rope (1948). Two young men, lovers who share a swanky New York City apartment, kill one of their friends and stuff his body into a long, rectangular chest. They then host a dinner party, serving food on the chest with the dead body in it; the guests include the dead man’s father and the killers' former headmaster, Rupert Cadell (James Stewart). Hitchcock’s film is an acute analysis of homophobia, masculinity, women’s ambiguous relationship to gay subculture, fascist ideology, and the director’s own career-long fascination with food-sex-death imagery.
Strangers on a Train (1951) and I Confess (1953). This pair of films thematizes the “open secret” of homosexuality, simultaneously unspeakable and nearly explicit. In Strangers, Bruno Anthony’s desire to kill for Guy Haines, and to have Guy kill his father, emerges as an allegory for homosexual courtship. In I Confess, the priest (Montgomery Clift) bound by the secrecy of the Catholic confessional, is hounded by the murderer, who confesses to the priest but then proceeds to hound him for his own crime. In a culture that increasingly viewed relationships between men as suspect, these two films show a culture of repression at its breaking point.
