Milton Moses Ginsberg, unconventional filmmaker, dies at 85
The First Art Newspaper on the Net    Established in 1996 Monday, November 25, 2024


Milton Moses Ginsberg, unconventional filmmaker, dies at 85
Milton Ginsberg wrote and directed “Coming Apart” (1969).

by Richard Sandomir



NEW YORK (NYT NEWS SERVICE).- Milton Moses Ginsberg, who directed two ambitious but eccentric films before falling into obscurity, one about the meltdown of a psychiatrist and the other about a press aide in a Nixon-like administration who becomes a murderous werewolf, died on May 23 in his apartment in Manhattan. He was 85.

The cause was cancer, said his wife, Nina Ginsberg.

Milton Ginsberg, a film editor determined to make his own movies, wrote and directed “Coming Apart” (1969), a raw black-and-white film that used a single, almost entirely static camera to document the loveless trysts and psychological disintegration of a psychiatrist, played by Rip Torn, who surreptitiously records his encounters with a camera inside a mirrored box.

“Coming Apart” received mixed reviews, at best. But the one that devastated Ginsberg was from The Village Voice’s Andrew Sarris, who wrote that “if everybody in the cast had refused to strip for action or inaction, ‘Coming Apart’ would have crumbled commercially into a half-baked amateur movie incapable of selling enough tickets to fill a phone booth.”

Ginsberg blamed that review for the film’s box-office failure.

“That was it,” he told The New York Times in 1998, adding: “I had done everything I wanted to do. And nothing happened.”

He followed “Coming Apart” in 1973 with another low-budget film: “The Werewolf of Washington,” a campy political parody inspired by the classic horror film “The Wolf Man” (1941), which terrified Ginsberg as a boy, and by President Richard M. Nixon, who terrified him as a man.

In Ginsberg’s film, released more than a year into the Watergate scandal, Dean Stockwell plays an assistant press secretary who turns into a werewolf at inopportune moments, like when he’s bowling with the president, and murders characters based on Katharine Graham, the publisher of The Washington Post, and Martha Mitchell, the outspoken wife of Attorney General John N. Mitchell.

“The film isn’t advertised as a documentary,” syndicated columnist Nicholas von Hoffman wrote, “but when you think about what’s been going on around this town, you couldn’t tell it from the plot.”

In 1975, after Ginsberg received a diagnosis of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, he fell into a depression that lifted only after he met and married Nina Posnansky, a painter, in 1983. She and his brother, Arthur, survive him.




After the commercial failure of his feature films, Ginsberg returned to film editing. He worked on various projects, including the Oscar-winning documentaries “Down and Out in America” (1986), about unemployed and homeless people left behind in the economy, which was directed by actress Lee Grant, and “The Personals” (1998), about a group of older people in a theater group.

He was in limbo, he wrote in Film Comment in 1999, for having made “Coming Apart,” which he wryly called “murder on an audience.”

“So if oblivion is what you crave, for both yourself and your movie, follow me!” he added.

Ginsberg never made another feature, but in recent years he finished several short video essays, among them “Kron: Along the Avenue of Time” (2011), a phantasmagorical exploration of his life taken through a microscopic journey into intricate watch movements.

Milton Moses Ginsberg was born on Sept. 22, 1935, in the Bronx. His father, Elias, was a cutter in the garment district, and his mother, Fannie (Weis) Ginsberg, was a homemaker.

After graduating from the Bronx High School of Science, Ginsberg received a bachelor’s degree in literature from Columbia University. Italian films like Fellini’s “La Dolce Vita” (1960) inspired him to make movies, but in the 1960s he worked instead as a film editor at NBC News, held a production job with documentarians Albert and David Maysles, and was an assistant at “Candid Camera,” the popular television series that used concealed cameras to capture people in various situations, which he said influenced the furtive recording of the psychiatrist’s guests in “Coming Apart.”

Ginsberg’s disappointment at the response to his features was eased somewhat when the Museum of Modern Art screened “Coming Apart” in 1998. But he was too pained by its reception nearly 30 years before to watch it; he did not enter the theater until it ended, when he spoke to the audience. MoMA has shown it a few times since.

“It was like nothing I’d ever seen,” Laurence Kardish, the former longtime senior curator of MoMA’s film department, who had seen “Coming Apart” during its original release, said by phone. “It was very explicit and very raw and struck me as an essential New York film, showing a New Yorker’s enthusiasm for self-examination.”

When “Coming Apart” was released on video in 2000, an article in The Chicago Tribune called it “stylistically audacious.” And in 2011, the Brooklyn Academy of Music screened both of Ginsberg’s films. After its associate curator, Jacob Perlin, moved to Metrograph, the repertory theater on the Lower East Side, where he is now the artistic and programming director, he held a 50th-anniversary screening of “Coming Apart” in 2019. Restorations of both of Ginsberg’s movies have been completed by the film company Kino Lorber.

The belated acceptance of his films offered some redemption to Ginsberg.

“In 2011, Milton said that he’s had two afterlives,” Perlin, who became friends with Ginsberg, said by phone. “When MoMA showed ‘Coming Apart,’ and 2011, when I showed both his films.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.










Today's News

June 14, 2021

Parties settle in legal fight over Robert Indiana's legacy

Sotheby's to offer rare physical Cryptopunk artworks

Sotheby's and Jay Chou collaborate to present "Contemporary Curated Asia"

UK government slams students for ditching 'colonial' queen portrait

Phillips Hong Kong Spring Auctions realise US$122 million with four white glove sales

New exhibition examines the seismic creative revolution of New York City in the 1980s

The inaugural Helsinki Biennial opens to the public

Kunstmuseum Den Haag opens 'CoBrA and Chaissac - Kindred Spirits'

Julians Park and Six Private Collections: Live achieves £4,107,063

Galerie Bene Taschen opens an exhibition of photographs by Joseph Rodriguez

Ugo Rondinone "your age and my age and the age of the rainbow" on view at Belvedere Museum

Exhibition of recent ceramics by Elisa D'Arrigo opens at The Elizabeth Harris Gallery

Sotheby's to offer an exceptional private collection of works by Degas, Renoir and Redon

One for the books, as Heritage Auctions' rare books event hits a record-setting $2.7 million

Hockney painting to headline Phillips' New York Evening Sale of 20th Century and Contemporary Art

Wayne Thiebaud landscape to be offered in Phillips' Evening Sale of 20th Century & Contemporary Art

Phillips to offer Matthew Wong's Field in a Dream in New York Evening Sale

Sonoma Valley Museum of Art opens two new exhibitions

Happy World: On a Cloud arrives at Newfields

Monumental flag installation outside the Women's Museum celebrates voting rights

World premiere exhibition traces fantasy illustration through five centuries

Milton Moses Ginsberg, unconventional filmmaker, dies at 85

On a Kentucky riverbank, a path to remembrance

A trailblazing female conductor is still alone on the trail




Museums, Exhibits, Artists, Milestones, Digital Art, Architecture, Photography,
Photographers, Special Photos, Special Reports, Featured Stories, Auctions, Art Fairs,
Anecdotes, Art Quiz, Education, Mythology, 3D Images, Last Week, .

 



Founder:
Ignacio Villarreal
(1941 - 2019)
Editor & Publisher: Jose Villarreal
Art Director: Juan José Sepúlveda Ramírez
Writer: Ofelia Zurbia Betancourt

Attorneys
Truck Accident Attorneys
Accident Attorneys
Houston Dentist
Abogado de accidentes
สล็อต
สล็อตเว็บตรง
Motorcycle Accident Lawyer

Royalville Communications, Inc
produces:

ignaciovillarreal.org juncodelavega.com facundocabral-elfinal.org
Founder's Site. Hommage
to a Mexican poet.
Hommage
       

The First Art Newspaper on the Net. The Best Versions Of Ave Maria Song Junco de la Vega Site Ignacio Villarreal Site Parroquia Natividad del Señor
Tell a Friend
Dear User, please complete the form below in order to recommend the Artdaily newsletter to someone you know.
Please complete all fields marked *.
Sending Mail
Sending Successful