All of them stayed to the bitter end, through every single blessed credit. Not really to read today's usual catalogues of names, technicians, locations, caterers, composers, crews and so on, but because director/producer/cameraman Bill Macdonald has cannily interlarded his lists with additional footage, and even white-haired National Board of Review ladies sat through it all, devouring the outré with the best of us.

Not that this is a recommendation for Forbidden Photographs -- The Life and Work of Charles Gatewood,  which New-York premières September 12 at Cinema Village. But what the film undeniably is, is the proverbial something else for those who might care beyond paging or gawking through the subject anthropologist-photographer's work in book shops or art galleries. Then-Mayor Giuliani's foray into art, with its resultant Brooklyn Museum flap, served to underline that, from whatever angle, impartial critical judgement is rare.

Just so in this case, where an assessment of Gatewood as talent and personality, and of Macdonald's documentary as film, is inseparable from moral and emotional and well as critical reactions to the milieu of these forbidden photos. Moreover, since the latter are still shots, while the encompassing medium is moving (still frame after frame after frame combining through the retina's persistence of vision), in effect this is motion in the service of stasis. Thus, what ties together the unmoving black-and-whites are the commentaries -- often by Gatewood -- and the disconnected videoed scenes of underground clubs, parties, flats, streets and street fairs, desert festivals and so on, in New York City, San Francisco, Nevada and elsewhere.

Over thirty years and more, the subject's magazine contributions and books of photographs -- one with text by William S. Burroughs -- document a world of subculture "rites" and "rituals" foreign to, or unacknowledged by, the overwhelming majority: sadomasochism, bondage, fetishism, modern vampirism, self-proclaimed paganism and covens of bikers and outlaws and others. The most visually shocking of the images are those of body-piercing, -alteration, -mutilation, -enhancement, and vision-inducing feats far beyond the Sun Vow sequences of A Man Called Horse.

Included are interviews with, and additional narration by, among others "behavioral psychologist Daniel Lapin, Ph.D.," in an attempt to give "scientific" justification for the celebration of such shocking, repulsive to many, practices and people. He intones that "you learn something deep about yourself," and although the credentials and true credibility of talking heads/interviewees are debatable in numbers of films and TV programs, here such matters are insignificant alongside the undeniably real content.

Grainy, frequently underexposed, colors muted at the expense of garish red-purplish-pink spectra, Forbidden Photographs conveys a sense of the immediate, the unposed and non-rehearsed, even in studios. Such spontaneity comes about because Gatewood's subjects are admitted exhibitionists, and because the photographer is able to observe objectively, to get up close and almost personal, nearly but not quite a participant, although, as pointed out, in his position most others would be running dangerous risks.
He has photographed the rich and famous, too -- Burroughs, Bob Dylan, Herbert Gold -- and appraisals and encomiums of all the oeuvre are included. Equally interesting and puzzling, is his own persona. Resembling a mild, slight Mr. Peepers in leather fisherman's cap, his appearance is diametrically at variance both with the scenes he is permitted to capture and with the long, wild, substance-abuse existence he once led.

Questions of taste, of obscenity, of "social value" obviously have surrounded the talented Gatewood's career. Admitting the usual ephemerality of subcultures, he argues that as social phenomena they should be recorded; others add that this photographer himself is worthy of being so documented. Hence, this film.

What is presented is disturbing; whether titillating, painful, erotic, off-putting, offensive, fascinating, sick or nauseating, will vary depending on what the individual viewer brings to bear. After not very long, however, it all becomes repetitive and boring.