Underground filmmaking pushed improvisation to its absolute outer limits

Evidence

In the film’s most lyrical sequence Bryan makes a solitary trek across the city—walking through Central Park, riding alone on an elevated train, floating across the icy Hudson on an apparently empty ferry. Although she mainly serves as a good-natured foil for the regressive, manic Mead (and, later, Jack Smith), Bryan has some outrageous scenes, dallying with a young white boy whom she flings around her colossal breasts as though he were a rag doll. Still, The Queen of Sheba belongs to the Atom Man. When Mead clambers out of a closed trunk—festooned with confetti, wearing diving flippers, licking a football, and rubbing up, dog-like, against the air—it’s to establish the outer limits of aimless, impulse behavior. An extended sequence of Mead going one-on-one with Smith in a bid for the camera’s attention is a crazed burlesque of queerness that takes improvisation to the end of its tether. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 424

Categorization

• DEFINE: Establishes what ‘aimless, impulse behavior’ and improvisation-taken-to-extremes looked like concretely in the New York underground.