FRIGGIN' IN THE RIGGIN': THE JOHN LANCASTER STORIES (Victor Ford, 1974)

'And so dreams tell stories, many stories. I am writing a story, if it could so be called, about the Mary Celeste. I am painting scenes from the story I'm writing. And I am dreaming about the Mary Celeste, the dreams feeding back into my writing and painting. A burst of fresh narrative: the Celestial Babies and the Azore Islands... digression and parentheses, other data seemingly unrelated to the saga of the Mary Celeste, now another flash of story... a long parenthesis. Stop. Change. Start. Should I tidy up, put things in rational sequential order? Mary Celeste data together? Flying dreams together? Land of the Dead dreams together? Packing dreams together? To do so would involve a return to the untenable position of an omniscient observer in a timeless vacuum. But the observer is observing other data, associations flashing backward and forward.' William Burroughs

'Lancaster's writing is shorn of all allusion; it lacks the melange of tastes present in even the most mediocre of fiction; when speaking of faraway places he conjures them as if by magic, with a complete lack of vision; and somehow (much like a politician whose inarticulacy speaks to some people of an honesty (as if only the literate can lie or steal)) this only seems to say to a large strand of the public that this mean speaks the truth. This paradox has contributed to him being one of the richest floggers of text in the tongue.' William Deresiewicz

'Give me credit for my dreams.' John Lancaster

'He was a man who wrote about how he had done what he had not done as if he had done. Then we found out that what he had done was not what he had said he had done and that what he had said he had done he had not done. Embarrassed, he set out to do exactly what he had said he had done exactly as he had said he had done it.' Tagline from 'Friggin' In The Riggin'' poster.

.... except now he was old, and ashamed, and the world had turned against him. John Lancaster had had it all except literary kudos. But so what? He was a successful author, a diarist of his own real-life seafaring adventures, who despite completely lacking critical adoration had something else, a kind of macho integrity; a streetwise candour carrying with it the weight of a stout-bellied but strong-armed silhouette of, if you squinted, a low-rent Hemingway. Even his lack of style was seen as evidence of his honesty; a fancier hand and a more delicate turn of phrase might suggest a piano-fingered intellectual, rather than the stubbier and tougher digits of this oaken presence (Oaken Presence incidentally being the name of his fifteenth book of autobiographical adventure, and also the name of one of the yachts at his home in Barbados, earned from shilling best-selling potboilers).

And then it emerged: the round-the-world trips, the Pole-to-Pole journeys, everything Lancaster had claimed to have done was false. He had been on some minor cruises, but he could barely steer a speedboat. His exposure caused a fracture, for even when his mass popularity waned, certain serious critics suddenly took an interest. 'Imagine finding out that James Patterson was a supercomputer, or that Martha Stewart's food was not real but made from hybrid plastics: it would be weird not to be a little curious about the hows and whys,' said Harold Bloom. Lancaster's response was a vow to learn how to navigate, and then perform every single feat he had laid claim to. He tried, failed, went mad.

Walker Percy's script shows a life dashed on the rocks, and with Ford's unsteady hand on the tiller, the film is everything and nothing. We see events as Lancaster told them; we see events as they were; we see events as he then set out to make them, after his exposure. This is not shown in a linear fashion, however, and the mixture of fact and fantasy, performed by four actors, muddies the metaphors enough for us to lose our way. In a film about (dis)honesty, we are never sure about which parts we can trust. As such, it serves as a corrosive antidote to the limpid idolatry of a regular biopic, most of which rest in a deep gutter of cause-and-effect (x was an addict/wifebeater because he was a genius/x was a genius because he was an addict/wifebeater; montages detailing the exact moment of incredible genius because all genius has to have an exact moment (which presents the paradox of biopics: this 'showing' drags the art and artist to mundane cliche, and yet we are expected to believe that what we see is unique).

As played in vastly differing styles in this one film by Rod Steiger, Alain Delon, John Cassavetes and Charles Aznavour, Lancaster is presented as a cubist portrait; a muscular bald neck here (Steiger), a cowardly twitch there (Cassavetes); a brave smooth nose in one place (Delon) obscuring a more honest and self-regarding schnoz elsewhere (Aznavour); all are possible facades, all are as hopelessly true as they are hopelessly false. His teary wife (Gena Rowlands) buys all of them, as long as it suits her.

At one point, Cassavetes as Lancaster asks 'Is lying so wrong? Why? Who says?' At another, Steiger as Lancaster asks: 'Is a man without a dream any kind of man?' We see Aznavour as Lancaster ask 'surely it is more cowardly to tell the truth, with no risk of exposure? Doesn't a braver man build a bigger house of cards?' It is left to Delon, on the faux-deathbed, to say 'fiction is truth. Only liars think otherwise, and they're not worth my time.'

Friggin' In The Riggin': The John Lancaster Stories Directed by Vic Ford Produced by Bert Schneider Written by Vic Ford, Walker Percy Starring Rod Steiger, John Cassavetes, Charles Aznavour, Alain Delon, Gena Rowlands Warner Brothers 123 mins Release Date US: September 1974/ UK: March 1975 Tagline:'He was lying on seabeds; now he's lying on deathbeds.'

DOZENS OF JESUSES: THE BIGGER, TRUER LIFE OF LEXINGTON SAFFRON-DIGARD (Bob Williams, 1995)

'I said the Beatles were bigger than Jesus. Lexxie reckons he is Jesus. Dozens of Jesuses' John Lennon, 1975.

We find secondary evidence everywhere; we see it there, on the screen, the famous Beatle talking, in that famous voice, and saying things, but where are we? When are we? And most pertinently, Who? Appearances deceive; for, if you were to watch this document to Lexington Saffron-Digard, you might believe him to be one of the most notorious artists of his day; you would believe him to be, if you trusted the producers (and do we not, always), an enfant terrible who died only weeks after his difficult memory was pieced together here; he apparently expired of a coma overdose in 1995, but don't look through the archives of obituary fame and infamy: He is not there, and the latter part of this documentary, in contrary design, confronts us with a proposition as to why this is (besides the more probable: the people forgot; they grew bored; he didn't compel us to remeber, et cetera, et cetera): We are expected to hang our disbelief from the ceiling as fanciful decoration, and instead swallow a claim so big that, we must surely believe it, heartburn and all.

But first: if we take the narrative at face value, then, and this happens:

Saffron-Digard was 62 when he died, so the story goes, and left behind him a trail of carnage that perhaps might have made him a household name, had his fitful creativity matched it. Born John Saffron in Marseille in 1933, John's mother, (famed?) English starlet of stage and screen Joan Saffron, gave up her career to be a mother and raise her boy overseas. John never knew his father, but was soon taken with his stepfather, anarchist painter Jean Digard. At the outbreak of war in 1939, the celebrity family moved to New York, where young John went to art school with other rich refugees. We see interviews with many of the people whose bodies were subsequently touched by Digard, and are offered a compendium of quotes, a veritable billboard of taglines. 'His life and art swung from the deliciously peurile to the fabulously bland', says Andy Warhol, seen here in a genuine talking head appearance, whereas William Burroughs (appearing sideways, bust-like) describes him as 'a morality vacuum, sucking lizard-like the freshness from stony-broke sonnofabitches'.

Chronologically, then, if we are to follow this string... continuing with how, when at art school he grew disillusioned with the limitations of his mediums, and became obsessed with inventing a new primary color. He was vindicated when the Federation of American Gradings included his new tone 'Vari' alongside Red, Yellow and Blue in their Annual Completist Encyclopedia (the collated data of 'everything', the eighty-sixth edition of which in 1966 ran to twenty five thousand volumes, and by 2001 had hungrily expanded to almost twice that). The invention of a new primary colour hugely infected the fashion industry, and a loving montage of late sixties mods in various Vari outfits (including the timeless Vari-toned vest that Clint Eastwood wore in One Fun Gun (Segio Leone, 1968) acts as a triumphant pivot in the middle of the film.

After Vari, things grew harder for Saffron-Digard. His ambitions caused his subsequent life to be an unsatisfying one, and his dreams only grew larger. Dozens of Jesuses doesn't disappoint, lingering on never before seen video of Saffron-Digard in action during these times. We see the derring-do of the time he covered Manhattan Island in red paint thrown from five hundred Red Baron style biplanes in his 'live art show' Paint The Town Red (1969), a stunt which granted infamy, and we also witness the building and firing of an oversized handgun for Shoot The Moon (1972). The pistol, three hundred feet high, managed to down an orbiting satellite, to the delight of a roaring audience and the consternation of NASA.

Subsequent art shows were increasingly extreme, but got him less attention: His carving of his initials into the sun using laser technology in LSD (1973) was deemed a failure when no-one noticed, and it wasn't until his retooled muse came up with Invisible (1985) a show at the Museum of Modern Art, that he regained some credibility in critical circles. The show featured three walls of a room, containing a chair, a table and a TV. Digard sat in the chair, in a shirt that was the same colour as the walls. He stayed there, completely still, for months, until he grew faint and vague to the eye, for the minor camouflage combined with the lack of movement rendered him almost unseeable. 'I didn't become like a stick insect, or a chameleon. There was no magic, just a performance of the concept that we are visible through our actions. If we are inactive, we disappear, forgotten' said Digard himself, on leaving the room.

And so we get to the final, thrusting claim of the film, the twist which casts doubts over the entire enterprise: that this fidgeting prankster, in an age of impossible visibility, performed the greatest vanish of all: He not only disappeared from view, but he managed to eradicate all memory of his life from the collective consciousness. No mean feat: even the most minor of artists leaves a bloody tooth or a layer of skin in someone's basement. But Saffron-Digard managed it: To erase himself. The last scene of the documentary involves Williams himself explaining how a strange man came to him one day, saying that he was Saffron-Digard, and that this meant nothing to anybody on the planet, due to a 'humungous sleight of hand'.

'He was sickly. Ill. He knocked on my door in New York. He told me he was dying, and that he wanted someone to document his life. He gave me a scrapbook and a reel of film, and left.'

The reel contained the period footage that appears in this film: The filmed interviews with Warhol, Lennon, Burroughs and Onassis that provide the testimonies about Saffron-Digard's character. But they were the only evidence that Williams found about the artist's existence. Says Williams in the film: 'I realised then that this documentary was not to be a recap of a minor artist life, but the single proof of his existence. Somehow, he had managed to make us forget all of his stunts, with some kind of cosmic will. Obscurity is one thing. But to make us believe he never existed.... that's quite something else.'

Williams had several phone conversations with the artist, including one in which Saffron-Digard, when asked by Williams why he wanted a film made, said 'It ain't a good trick if the audience don't clap'. As Williams pieced together footage, he heard more and more from his subject, right up until his death. 'Part of we wonders if his death was just another evasion' Williams says. He only man at Saffron-Digard's funeral. His headstone bears the Baudelaire line, oft plagiarised: 'My dear brothers, never forget, when you hear the progress of enlightenment vaunted, that the devil's best trick is to persuade you that he doesn't exist'. And so, things come to pass.

What of the artefact, the testimony? The film has since been treated with suspicion: some see it as a grand prank, an invention of a fake hero; others as a work of wondrous fiction. But there are those who suspect that there may be a certain integrity in the work- individuals have come forward claiming to remember the day Manhattan was painted red, bemused that no-one else remembers, or neighbours who knew Digard, models who claim a child was fathered by him. A small band of Digardians claim his stunt as the biggest in the history of performance, and priase his act of wiping himself from history, rendering his own biography fictional, something which was later unproved to be false, over and over.1

But ultimately, we ask ourselves: Was Saffron-Digard's best trick that he convinced the world that he existed in order to convince them that he didn't exist, in order to then convince them that he did? Or not?

Who knows.

Dozens of Jesuses: The Bigger, Truer Life of Lexington Saffron Digard Directed by Bob Williams Produced by David Lynch Music by David Boeddinghaus Sony Pictures Release Date US: March 1995, UK: March 1995 Tagline: 'The Man That Time Forgot'

1. One extreme group of Digardians, calling themselves 'Anonymiads', have even started eliminating all evidence of their own existence: Deleting Social Security numbers, social networking profiles, burning photographs, and are believed to be so widespread that entire towns are threatened with disappearing from the map.