‘Time of the Heathen’: Postwar Life and Death, an American Tale

Peter Kass’s “Time of the Heathen” is as much artifact as artwork. Symptomatizing both Cold War angst and the birth pangs of the New American Cinema, the movie premiered in late 1961 at the influential film society Cinema 16, where it received mixed reviews and dropped from sight.

Newly excavated and restored, Kass’s “psychological drama of guilt and violence” (as it was blurbed at the time) gets its first New York run at Film at Lincoln Center, through May 16.

An opening title sets the action four years after the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan. A gangly, odd-looking white man identified in the credits as Gaunt (John Heffernan) strides through a generic rural America, Bible in pocket — looking for what?

After being questioned by the police, he stumbles across a farmhouse, where we have just witnessed a white man named Ted (Stewart Heller) sexually assault and kill a Black woman, Marie (Ethel Ayler, later to play Clair Huxtable’s mother on “The Cosby Show”), who was a housekeeper for Ted’s father. A xenophobic ornery cuss, Pa (Orville Steward) returns and attempts to frame Gaunt, the haunted loner, who, his life in danger, flees with Marie’s similarly threatened young son, Jesse (Barry Collins), who is deaf and mute.

The mood is apocalyptic. (Kass’s title comes from a doomsday passage in the Book of Ezekiel.) Lejaren Hiller’s fanfare-rich score is alternately intrusive and supportive, but Ed Emshwiller’s sharp, inventive cinematography suggests the elemental, visual dramas of a 1920s silent film.

In a sense “Time of the Heathen” is two movies. The first is a manhunt. The second interrupts the narrative as the noose tightens around Gaunt and Jesse; with Hiller’s score increasingly atonal, Emshwiller (a pulp sci-fi illustrator who became an amateur filmmaker), uncorks a montage in which Gaunt’s tormented consciousness is represented by an assortment of trippy distortions and grim associations, including a bomb site over Hiroshima and images of starving Asian and African people.

Writing in Esquire, the critic Dwight Macdonald used “Time of the Heathen” as a cudgel against New American Cinema, which he considered pretentious and simple-minded. But the movement’s prime apostle, the Village Voice critic Jonas Mekas, praised the movie for its sincerity, anticipating Macdonald’s disapproval by provocatively linking it to such other so-called stupid films as Robert Frank’s “The Sin of Jesus” (which shared the bill with “Heathen” at Cinema 16), Jack Garfein’s Actor’s Studio production “Something Wild,” and his own protest film “Guns of the Trees.”

“Heathen” was recognized as a political statement. In late 1963, the weekly Los Angeles Sentinel announced that it had been picked up for distribution and, after being shown at a series of benefits for the N.A.A.C.P., would have a national rollout. Kass’s film was also released in Britain, paired with Andrei Tarkovsky’s antiwar “My Name Is Ivan,” but it never returned to New York. Nor did Kass make another feature.

Mekas’s enthusiasm notwithstanding, “Heathen” is less “stupid” than studied, with an academic feel that presages its makers’ subsequent careers. Hiller established a computer music facility at the University at Buffalo. Emshwiller made many experimental films and videos and served as a dean at California Institute of the Arts. Kass, who directed the 1964 theatrical production of Lorraine Hansberry’s “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window,” had a successful career as a teacher of acting at New York University.

Kass’s obituary in The New York Times called him notorious for his “fervid” approach. In its earnest intensity, “Heathen” offers proof.

Time of the Heathen

May 10-16, Film at Lincoln Center in Manhattan, www.filmlinc.org.