The Secret Cinema
One of several independent films made by Paul Bartel before he began directing films in Hollywood in the late Sixties (including Death Race 2000 for Roger Corman), The Secret Cinema operates in the zone where the cinema merges with the fantasies, the sexuality, and the psychological reality of its subjects - and its objects. Subtitled “A Paranoid Fantasy,” it concerns a young girl's inability to differentiate between illusion and reality, manifested in a fear that her life is being secretly filmed and screened at local movie theaters. “When I was making it,” Bartel comments, “I thought of The Secret Cinema simply as funny, never realizing how cruel it was. I now believe that the film is really about sex, from a pre-adolescent point of view: that conspiracy of adults that everyone (but the child) is in on...and which ends in the discovery of himself as a sexual subject and/or object.”
In a different manner from David Holzman's Diary, The Secret Cinema presents a similar paradox, “promising a world where such a thing as all-pervasive cinema is possible, where existing is equivalent with performing, where ‘life' can be directly transformed into ‘art'....” (Sharon Kern, Chicago Art Institute) (JB)