Synopsis
Experimental documentary by Tobe Hooper and collaborators.
1966 Directed by Tobe Hooper
Experimental documentary by Tobe Hooper and collaborators.
Erudite masterpiece. Bridges the gap between Hooper's architectural concerns and the narrative manifestation of these ideas, but, Jesus, who could have known that Hooper's documentary years were spent creating stuff that would look at home in the midst of Michael Snow's work. This is a total sum of the possibilities of the filmmaking form - including multiple people-following tricks he'd later expand upon in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and, boldly, uses many techniques he would never use again - Hooper was only rarely as focused on light as he is here. Down Friday Street is a Hooper dictionary, a lexicon for the uninitiated and a reworking, often a redefining for the already-familiar. But, of course, as with all Hooper's…
I try not to be too hyperbolic about a short documentary that is as shaggy, messy, thematically undefined, and unassiduously untempered, aesthetically, as all of Hooper’s other work. But if you are looking for that connecting line between the curiously precise classicalist concerns of Hooper’s slapstick period piece The Heisters and the New Wave, timely-concerned vérité phase begun with Eggshells, this might just be the film for you. Houses Also Die, you can call it, and if it’s not in Hooper’s vocabulary to mount a discourse on race and social behavior, then we can at least expect the same introverted, phobic interests in mood, zones, the ghostly aspects of change and time; experimental techniques melded with his governing interest in…
rushing through dazzling night life, waking up to beautiful daylight. a stroll through summerbreeze as the morningdew glistens. abandoned homes on the corner of the street, people walking by.
you can't help but notice how the walls have been overtaken by flora. step closer and look inside. map out the intricacies of every room, the things left behind. odd, sometimes creepy, decoration. every nail sticking out of the creaky woodwork. the crooked frames. it's not the prettiest sight.
noise builds up as a presence is encroaching. bulldozers. ready to mow it down and turn it into yet another parking lot or mall, most likely both. havens for consumption, that's all they want there to be. [x]
Hooper's obligatory 'how did they start' short, sandwiched between a throwaway cosplay folly, Eggshells and a Peter Paul & Mary doc. Hard to say if I'd be as enamoured of this minus the Chainsaw hindsight, it's precisely the way the two co-inform that makes this a not negligible early hauntology text. The conservation of houses as a form of death-knell for their destruction, how spaces preserve history and are inhabited by energies extraneous to the human and the material, the spiders in the cracks, both real and metaphorical, the layer of grime and ectoplasm on the shiny chandeliers. There's a masterful fluidity in the edit that prefigures the dread-gauze of windmill-generator-defunct cars etc of Chainsaw's old farm world-building, with incessant pre-Franco crash-zooming into ostensibly nothing repurposed microcosmically as everything. Filigree as mimesis of the inborn evil. As an urban portrait of that from which Sally & co sought escapism, it bleakly signals how the rot had already set in.
An obvious prologue to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Most anyone else with this material would focus entirely on the idea of capitalism encroaching on what we know, tearing it down to make room for profit generating concrete giants. A rose-tinted tragedy, the death of our traditions, etc. Hooper takes it a step further. Even prior to the intrusion, the outward docility of the home masks an inner violence. There are spiders in the woodwork, crooked nails, splintered boards. Inside the home is a killer prepared to fight back, and when threatened it will do just that.
The old way... with a sledge! You see, that way's better. They die better that way.
Well, how come? I thought the gun was better.
Oh, no. With the new way, people were put out of jobs.
Did you do that?
Look. I was the killer!
165/200
"He catches cars, the silhouettes of men in telephone booths, signs for everything from parking to live nude girls, and ugly fluorescent-lit hallways. As in the later Eggshells, he vacillates between stillness, the natural world, sped-up time, the excitement of an urban environment, and the promise of life represented by people in urban environments. There is a sense, produced by the busy sound design (insistent dripping sounds, traffic, a beeping electronic device) in concert with incongruous images like empty streets and a spider eating a bug in its web—of impending dread. A voice on a loudspeaker encourages people to take cover. It’s as if the film were meant to be a warning about what to do in the event of nuclear war, down to the air raid siren that plays over kids in their 20s nonchalantly walking and riding bikes down the streets."
It’s becoming apparent to me that Tobe Hooper was a very phobic director. The man could find something to fear in everything, and in Down Friday Street he finds a terrifying war taking place in an abandoned house set for demolition. He introduces us at first to the bustling world of Austin, Texas, an industrial hell scale through his lens, a place of cold metal and noise. This is quickly replaced by the seemingly serene visage of the aforementioned house. But as Hooper goes further into its depths we see nature reclaiming its walls. Hooper portrays this through filthy puddles and spiders stalking their pray. He gives us no reprieve, splicing in footage of bulldozers ravaging forests, wood burning, smoke…
Really interesting little short film with some fantastic editing and cinematography. The exploration of cityscapes erasing the grandeur of nature and history-lined (implied to almost be haunted) homes as well as the evocation of the constant dread and ironic precarity that are birthed by 20th century "progress" (usually achieved through war) are really interesting; the city is presented as overwhelming, but the film's decision to sideline its as a structure and only dizzily gloss over its facades suggests that there is a minuteness in meaning and history underneath its imposing appearance. Certain images and editorial decisions reminded me of John Smith's equally excellent short of "Blight" (mainly the ones that literally and figuratively dismantle a house into the labyrinthine series…
striking undeniable beauty - beauty in (briefly) sneaking a glimpse into the malevolence that exists beyond our peripheral vision. the ominous house - the spider biding in the dark - the nail that draw blood - the root that seems to take hold of us as we tear down the soil of our bed; exchanging green for another green (it's all for the greater good we claim). the sound design is the obvious cue that we’re witnessing horror but you can't convince me that even if you change the music to something upbeat that you don't feel chills down your spine as the same images play over. and play over it does, we see for what it is now.
Do you see? Hoopers blue velvet, from the idyllic stretches of a street harboring memory’s (hooper is constantly showing us a space and showing us that WE as humans impose upon it), into the nightmarish, monolith blur of machine based capitalist expansion, tearing our houses down (I couldn’t help but think it looks like my grandmothers house), and turning our domain of idyllic suburbia into the capitalist hellscape of now. A work which gains a lot from living in modern times, a prophet piece, and a precursor to chainsaw. But as with all of hoopers great works, he makes it very known that the cracks in our idyllic paradise have always been there. It was built to support spiders.
Toberhole Bonus Short: Tobe Hooper
Early short experimental film from Tobe Hooper that has a real air of menace to it. Any part of this could be b-roll footage from Texas Chain Saw Massacre.