Issue 7: Summer 2011
200 Motels: The Widescreen Erupts With Absurdities
200 Motels (1971) is a cinematic assault on the senses, a directorial collaboration between musician Frank Zappa (credited with characterisations) and filmmaker Tony Palmer (credited with visuals) which is best summarised by the voiceover heard early in the picture: “Touring can make you crazy, ladies and gentlemen. That is precisely what 200 Motels is all about”. Bar a few silent Super8 images taken while on tour, the film is entirely stage-bound, the action unfolding on sparsely decorated sets that never pretend to be anything other than exactly that. Lighting equipment, etc. is often visible. This is all captured on video cameras in a similar manner to a live television production.
Musical numbers, comedy skits, supposed recreations of real events and animated sequences unfold in a fashion which is post-modernistic in its mocking references to not only Zappa and the Mothers Of Invention themselves (“That's how he gets all his material! He starts being natural, friendly, good-natured, humorous – and then he rips us off”) but other musicians (“It's just as if Donovan himself had appeared on my very own TV with words of peace, love and eternal cosmic wisdom!”), the press (“this abnormal relationship will be great for the big story I'm going to write!”), and the filmmaking process at hand (“For a moment I would like to explain some of the things you will all be doing in this movie”). There was a 254-page script, a third of which Zappa claims was never filmed. Palmer rebuffs this statement as “nonsense”. The peculiar narrative was rendered more outlandish by the scenes being reshuffled in no particular linear order during editing. One wonders if this made any difference...
It was the first videotaped feature-length production to be given a commercial theatrical release and was lensed in Britain since the technology and the technicians in this field were ahead of their American counterparts. They shot on 2 inch Quadruplex equipment with scenes edited live to be further manipulated, cut up and re-arranged in post-production. The footage was transferred to 35mm with a method similar to the three-strip Technicolor of the 1930s and 1940s: the three different video components of red, green and blue were transferred separately to three different negatives and ultimately combined for the final result.
Transferring analogue video (which is rife with visual effects such as overlapping and solarisation) to celluloid film creates a disarmingly smeary visual texture. In the context of 200 Motels the process adds to rather than distracts from the surreal nature of the material: It's like watching a wholesome television situation comedy filtered through a drug-fuelled haze about life on the road - where motel after hotel, town after city after town, and countless eager groupies blend into a stream of consistent incoherency. The results are admirable – and enjoyable for those willing to indulge in the eccentricity – since 200 Motels lives up to the courage of its convictions by maintaining an outlandish momentum which lasts until the closing credits (unfolding, interestingly enough, over script and production pages from the shoot...!)
-Christopher O'Neill