My review was written in March 1993 after a screening at MoMA in Manhattan.
Talent scouts looking through the New York underground for the next Jim Jarmusch or Beth & Scott B will likely pass on Joe Gibbons and Emily Breer's "The Genius". It's a tiresome, amateurish 16mm feature preeming at the Film Society of Lincoln Center and Museum of Modern Art's New Directors/New Films series.
Gibbons, progressing very little from his previous forays in th=e world of Super 8mm, stars as a goofball doctor of "Personality Stylngs", using various patients obviously in need of a shrink as guinea pigs for his experiments in personality transplants. Film's lo-tech sci-fi content is silly rather than funny, as he copies clients' personality on CDs and tries each one on himself, using portable equipment of his own invention. This gimmick allows Gibbons to ham it up, depressed in one scene, manic in the next.
He obsessively photographs himself with a video camera, and the video footage has been adequately transferred to 16mm (but is not likely to sustain a further blow-up to 35mm very well). Other scenes are shot in 16mm.
Technically the pic is a bit ragged, most notably in a dark night video sequence after Gibbons has ingested the personality of a psychopath. Though the film almost plays on the level of genre master Frank Henenlotter's New York nightmare fantasies ("Basket Case", "Brain Damage"), Gibbons' main agenda is to satirize the art establishment and types who frequent downtown galleries. Pointlessly prophetic is a subplot in which artist-bartender Kitty Church (Karen Finley) blows up paintings around town, naming her terrorist sefl "Eve of Destruction".
By film's end, Gibbons has adopted Church's personality and is expressing himself in a similar wish-fulfillment manner. In real life, he was briefly famous in 1978 for having stolen a painting at an Oakland Museum opening as a protest against the commercialization of art.
Gibbons and his collaborator Emily Breer (a former animator who came on "The Genius" project after principal photography as a film doctor) have not provided sharp writing, with many scenes seemingly crudely improvised. Acting is poor, especially Tony Conrad as an evil art gallery owner who drugs his stable of artists to cause them to overproduce assembly-line art.
Gibbons' attitude towards art is consistent with his filmmaking ethos: the soundtrack is extracts from the work of others, ranging from Earle Hagen's "Harlem Nocturne" and a John Zorn cover version of Ennio Morricone's jaunty "The Sicilian Clan" theme, to using Henry Mancini's "Breakfast at Tiffany's" to back a corny romantic interlude. Similarly, one of the most effective scenes relies on Breer intercutting clips from James Whale's "Bride of Frankenstein" on TV with the unimpressive live action.
