A Happy Birthday for The Kids of Kane

By RICHARD CORLISS

Fifty years ago last week, Hollywood was the home of the avant garde. RKO released an experimental film made by a 25-year-old novice who didn't know the rules, didn't care when his studio elders said, "You can't do that!" Outrageous, iconoclastic, with warning shadows and baroque camera angles, Citizen Kane told future moviemakers that anything was possible. If you were Orson Welles.

Alas, a career full of lost skirmishes with the moguls proved that even Welles couldn't shake Hollywood free of its romantic realism. It held then; it holds today. Except that now the old glamour has atrophied into formula: boy's adventures and ghost stories and lady-in-distress thrillers. When was the last time a Hollywood picture moved anyone to exclaim, "Well, I've never seen that before!"? Perhaps surprise is not on the menu of today's moviegoers. They want reassurance, domestic fairy tales come true, not the astonishment that Jean Cocteau demanded of art.

So all hail the American fringies, those young filmmakers who make something different out of next to nothing. These fine artists must also be slick salesmen. They scrounge for five, six, seven years to get funding -- because it's harder to raise money for a $90,000 no-star feature than it is for a $90 million Schwarzenepic -- and then scrape at the doors of independent distributors. They should win an Irving Thalberg award just for persistence.

But you shouldn't go to a movie just because a director tried hard. There are plenty of independent films whose ambitions point only toward conventional storytelling. It happens that there are four new movies aiming higher, farther, stranger. And they won't be mistaken for Home Alone or even The Long Walk Home. Call them off-Hollywood movies, because they have sworn off Hollywood.

With POISON, Todd Haynes has people swearing at him -- the right people, if you're looking for notoriety. Donald Wildmon, head of the right-wing American Family Association, has condemned Haynes' film for its "porno scenes of homosexuals." And the Advocate, a gay biweekly, has reported that the campaign against Poison was stoked by White House chief of staff John Sununu in hopes of embarrassing John Frohnmayer, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, which helped fund the film.

Haynes dines on controversy. His previous picture was the rough, wickedly funny Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, a sort of Valley of the Dolls (but with real dolls) that was suppressed by the Carpenter family. Poison is a more somber affair. The shock comes not from any graphic sex, for there is none, but from the pristine virtuosity of Haynes' craft. In three interlocking stories inspired by Jean Genet, this homoerotic Intolerance details the . toxicity of prejudice, fear and disease, as played out in a tumid hothouse of forbidden sexual longing. A scientist who turns leprous when he drinks a sex potion; a prisoner who finds brief orgasmic release, and pays for it; a child who kills his abusive father -- all are outcasts, poison to society. Only the child escapes, jumping from a window and soaring into his idea of heaven: oblivion.

Anonymity would be death to the heavenly creatures on parade in PARIS IS BURNING, Jennie Livingston's thrilling documentary. They are the gentlemen of the Harlem drag balls. They wear frocks to die for; they vogue on the floor like Madonna dancers. A few have passed beyond show biz. A frail baby-voiced blond named Venus Xtravaganza says, "I wanna be a rich, pampered white woman," as she curls up in a tacky bedroom furnished only by her dreams.

Livingston could have settled for the ethnographic camp of the ball contests: a gay Pumping Iron, drenched in primping irony. Instead she found eloquent people with a fine sense of their flair and vulnerability. Paris Is Burning is a bijou hit in New York City and will be elsewhere, as audiences realize that the voguers are camera-worthy not because of their flamboyance but because of their home-truth humanity. As one of them says, "You've left a mark on the world if you just get through it."

Nobody will get through BEGOTTEN without being marked. In this nightmare classic by Edmund Elias Merhige, a godlike thing dies giving birth to a womanly thing, who gives birth to a quivering messiah thing; then the local villager things ravage and bury them, and the earth renews itself on their corpses. It is as if a druidical cult had re-enacted, for real, three Bible stories -- creation, the Nativity and Jesus' torture and death on Golgotha -- and some demented genius were there to film it. No names, no dialogue, no compromises, no exit. No apologies either, for Begotten is a spectacular one- of-a-kind (you wouldn't want there to be two), filmed in speckled chiaroscuro so that each image is a seductive mystery, a Rorschach test for the adventurous eye.

In WATER AND POWER, Pat O'Neill takes us even deeper into post-narrative. His is an abstract film in a rush -- a universe of images in 57 hurtling minutes. He can't wait for the moon to rise; with time-lapse photography he Frisbees it into the sky. He tells the history of Western expansion in one minute, with subtitles and sound effects. And he isn't satisfied with man or nature. Flames of neon lick the clouds; an electric fan helps cool the desert.

The subject is familiar from Chinatown: Los Angeles has its water piped in from afar; the archetypal modern city is built on the theft of age-old resources. Godfrey Reggio's Koyaanisqatsi (1983) had the same doomsday message dressed in high-tech style. That movie was serious fun, but O'Neill's is bolder, more disciplined. Every shot has a lure and a meaning; the film's shapely silhouette is easy to trace. Gorgeous and zippy, Water and Power is an intoxicant without a hangover.

None of these films are Citizen Kane -- what is? -- but they come close to the spirit and intent of that eternally young masterpiece. They treat film technique as a living language; they taunt, dazzle, delight. Best of all, they seem ready to spawn a receptive audience. On a spring afternoon in Manhattan, hundreds of smart-setters crowd the lobbies of the Film Forum and the Angelika, downtown temples of alternative film. Poison and Paris Is Burning are sold out hours in advance. The atmosphere is festive, with the feeling that something good might happen inside. The movies, all movies, could use a transfusion of hope.