"He was a scoundrel. He was a liar. He was a bullshit artist. He was a writer."-Sam Fuller on Balzac.With the passing of Sam Fuller last October, cinema lost a genuine eccentric: a writer-director of major motion pictures that were, by nature, B films with the flavor of tabloid reporting; a maverick stylist who had no identifiable style; manifestly pro-American, yet a prescient critic of his country's violence and racism; and finally, a "primitive" who was so ahead of his time he influenced directors as diverse as Martin Scorsese and Jean-Luc Godard, John Woo and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Wim Wenders and Quentin Tarantino. A born journalist who was a cub crime reporter by the age of 17, in WWII Hollywood's defiant one would be war correspondent and dog soldier in one. In other words, as Fuller's film biographer Adam Simon wrote, he is "possibly the last director to have really lived." With his perennial half-smoked stogie, his raspy voice, and his kinetic aphorisms-the most famous appearance of all three being in Godard's Pierrot le Fou where, like the raven, Sam quoth, "Film is like a battleground...Love, Hate, Action, Violence, Death. In one word: Emotion!"-Fuller was himself a cinematic character. But it was the mad wisdom of his cinema-the dizzying angles and raw close-ups, the fluid camera style that anticipates rather than follows the action, the brutal love and dreamlike violence-that earned him the moniker "Kino-fist." (The name "Kino-fist" was coined by Phil Hardy. Quotations by Fuller (top), Adam Simon, and Phil Hardy are from an article by Simon in the March Sight & Sound. Simon's documentary The Typewriter, the Rifle and the Movie Camera screens June 25.) Saturday May 16, 1998