Coming Apart has the kind of format and style that virtually guaranteed failure in finding distribution and a mainstream audience. We are conditioned by traditional film-making that use formal editing techniques and camera work to tell a story with a plot, a formal beginning and a formal ending and when a film goes against an accepted style, critics and audiences can't understand it. This entire film is the result of a hidden camera (in a piece of artwork) facing a couch and behind the couch, a wall-sized mirror that reflects his windows overlooking a Manhattan skyline. This device minimizes the inherent claustrophobia of just photographing a man sitting on his couch. It is never explained why he is doing this. The 60s was the decade of the grindhouse sexploitation film, the precursor to hardcore porn. They could be divided into three categories. The nudies, the ghoulies and the roughies. Coming Apart superficially resembles a sexploitation roughie--grim, moody, downbeat, shot in black & white featuring bizarre personalities and twisted sexuality. The roughies showed women being routinely slapped around, raped and verbally abused. But there are art-house and technically experimental film-making aspirations in Coming Apart that make it far more than a psycho-drama. The near static presentation could have been a filmed stage play. A young Sally Kirkland gives one of the most amazing performances I've ever seen. Her tirade at the end is hypnotic in its non-theatrical realism and ferocity. (I had to watch it several times.) Rip Torn is a master at brutal outbursts, the cold manipulation of women and a troubled, savagely tempered personality. He's perfect for the role of a psychiatrist who manipulates every woman who enters his sphere of orbit for his own uses, and not just for sex, but for some kind of perverse control and personal power. (Like in traditional sexploitation films, the men have sex with their underwear on.) Ginsburg says in the extras that the film was carefully scripted yet the dialogue sounds improvised and spontaneous. Sally tells Glassman that he "treats women like castrating women treat men." This one line is the key to the film. The lightbulb moment came to me about 20 minutes in. This movie foreshadowed, by over 30 years, the YouTube generation of millions of people at their computers recording themselves in a room with a video web-camera.

Alright, I take it back, some found footage is good.

Then again, not all found footage movies are this great.

New York psychiatrist Joe Glazer (Rip Torn) is going through a divorce and has taken on the name of Glassman and rented an apartment. There, he has a video camera behind a mirror that records his love life and his rambling speeches as he goes through an emotional collapse.

It also records his relationships with three women: his ex-mistress Monica (Vivica Lindfors, Creepshow),a former patient named Joann (Sally Kirkland) and Karen (Phoebe Dorin),the wife of one of his best friends.

Coming Apart was shot in a one-room, 15 × 17 foot apartment on a $60,000 budget. Director and writer Milton Moses Ginsberg filmed the entire movie with one static shot to look like a fake documentary. He would later tell Film Comment, "The film was about a psychiatrist encased in his own reflection, using a hidden camera to record his own disintegration. The film was also about the pleasures and price of promiscuity, and about the form and duration of cinema itself - or so I hoped. And to a degree that still embarrasses, it was about me. Appropriate, the title Coming Apart."

He followed this up with - incredibly - The Werewolf of Washington.

Rip Torn is on camera for this entire movie and he owns every single moment. While the single shot may limit some viewer's enjoyment, I found this riveting and a movie that I'd been yearning to watch.

I was walking down the street in New York in the late 60's and I passed a small movie theater, one of many at that time, and posted on the marquee was "Coming Apart" starring Rip Torn. I thought that was pretty funny so I went in. From the very beginning to the end I was mesmerized by the screen. In a small dark theater the beginning is very disturbing, and the monologues and dialogs that followed were no different. This portrait of a man and his thoughts or experiences is a dark and sometimes brutal portrayal of his enclosed existence, seeing that the only reference we have visually is his apartment. I don't know what was more disturbing, his relationships or his thoughts. The movie flows from darkness to his little girl neighbor to Sally Kirkland bouncing on his knee to the incident with the drag queen and everything else in between to fade out. When I left the theater I was exhausted and disorientated. It is almost forty years later, I've never seen the film again, and I'm still struck by it. Seeing that film at that time and living in New York then is probably why the film had such an affect on me.