The Discipline Of DE is a short 16mm film directed by Gus Van Sant. It’s based on a story in “Exterminator!” by William Burroughs that at times reads like Buddhist noir:

DE is a way of doing. DE simply means doing whatever you do in the easiest most relaxed way you can manage which is also the quickest and most efficient way, as you will find as you advance in DE.You can start right now tidying up your flat, moving furniture or books, washing dishes, making tea, sorting papers. Don’t fumble, jerk, grab an object. Drop cool possessive fingers onto it like a gentle old cop making a soft arrest.”

Van Sant discusses the early stages of making the film:

This was my first film outside of my school projects, made in 1977 or so, and was the occasion that I was able to first meet William S. Burroughs, whose writing I much admired and who lived at the time in New York City. I wanted to get in touch with him to ask his permission to film this small story, and found him listed in the New York telephone book. I was under the impression that if I visited him and asked his permission in person that I would have more of a chance. And that may have been true—he did give me an okay—but also I was able to ask a few questions about the ideas in the story.

One of the things he said during our visit, not in the film or story, was, “Of course, when anyone knocks something over, or trips over something or breaks anything, they are at that moment thinking of someone they don’t like.”

...every time I knocked something over or tripped over anything I stopped to think, and I was always thinking of someone or some¬thing that I didn’t like. This was illuminating. Time and again, when I fumbled and broke something, there it was, I was thinking about some unfortunate incident in my past where I had been misjudged, ridiculed, or caught red-handed by someone, or when I stubbed my toe, I realized that I was thinking of a meeting in the future with someone about something that I didn’t want any¬thing to do with. So, the answer was possibly to not do too much moving around when things appear in your mind that could lead to someone or something that you don’t like. I haven’t mastered this one, however.

“Exterminator!” was published in 1973. A couple of years after its publication, Burroughs came to Boulder, Colorado to conduct a series of readings and workshops for the Jack Kerouac School Of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute. His concept of doing things easily fit in perfectly with the Dharma teachings of Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche. In an atmosphere dominated by Tibetan Buddhist iconography and terminology, Burroughs’ approach was refreshingly Western while still capturing the essence of Trungpa’s crazy wisdom, a Zen-like attitude, both rigorous and lighthearted.
 

 
The twin suicides of Jeremy Blake and Theresa Duncan a few years back was the closing chapter to a story that somehow managed to combine all the darker elements of Hollywood, Scientology and the New York art world:

Duncan and Blake formed a popular couple on the downtown New York and Venice, Calif., art scenes.  She was one of the first video game designers for girls, and his “digital paintings”—kaleidoscopic images shown on plasma screens—established him as a rising star on the circuit.  The couple descended into a paranoid spiral when the artists developed a consuming belief that government and religious organizations were conspiring against them.  She killed herself in 2007.  Blake found her body on the floor of their bedroom, and walked into the Atlantic Ocean a week later, ending his life.

Well, according to today’s Variety, Gus Van Sant and Bret Easton Ellis are now teaming up to give that story, naturally, a screenplay.  For source material, Van Sant (Milk) and Ellis (Less Than Zero) plan on using The Golden Suicides, Vanity Fair’s posthumous profile of Blake and Duncan.

It’s a moving portrait of two people very much in love—as well as a harrowing depiction of how draining and hermetic the pair found the creative process.  That their spiral downward came at a time when they were both poised for greater career success makes their twin suicides as tragic as it is haunting.

For abundant evidence of Duncan’s smarts and style, you can check out her still maintained website: TheWitOfTheStaircase.  Blake is probably best known for his cover art on Beck’s Sea Change, and the “colorful undulations” used during the opening credits of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Punch Drunk Love.

But Blake himself was also a filmmaker.  His Winchester trilogy, inspired by the story of Sarah Winchester and her family’s “Mystery House,” was shown at the San Francisco MOMA in ‘05.  Century 21, the trilogy’s final installment, attempts to “explore the sickness—and the sexiness—of American violence.” 

Thanks to Ubu, you can watch it below:

In Variety: Scribes Make Suicide Pact

In The Guardian: Gus Van Sant and Bret Easton Ellis Join Forces On Film

In Vanity Fair: The Golden Suicides

 
Gus Van Sant‘s experiment from ‘99 where he essentially served up a Xerox of Hitchcock’s Psycho has nothing on the ongoing cinematic “homaging” going down in Turkey.  Cinefamily goes so far as to declare the country,

the wild, wild Middle East of mondo macabro.  Here you find the outlying reaches of world exploitation, where the heroes are macho men who can beat you up with just their moustaches, and the copyright infringement flows as freely as the currents of the Bosphorus River.  From the wholesale plundering of battle footage from American sci-fi smash hits (with which to mash into their own space operas), to the endless cavalcade of scene-for-scene, shot-for-shot, unauthorized remakes (Turkish Exorcist, Turkish Death Wish, Turkish Young Frankenstein)—the bandits of Turkish cinema were unstoppable.  These films were lawless, shameless, and hilarious.  Infinite ambition and infinitesimal budgets lead to cheap remakes that resemble a high school theater version of Apocalypse Now; to make up for their poverty, these filmmakers upped the sadism, mayhem, and titillation to their tastes and our delight.

Well, thanks to YouTube, you can now watch Seytan—The Turkish Exorcist—in 14 soup-spewing installments.  I’m pretty sure they’re all posted, but if you can’t find ‘em all, even casual fans of William Friedkin’s Exorcist will have no trouble spotting the devil in Ms. G?ɬ