Boultenhouse, Charles

Charles Boultenhouse met Parker Tyler in 1945 when Boultenhouse moved to New York in order to attend Columbia University. Boultenhouse had, only a year earlier, read Tyler's The Hollywood Hallucination and had been deeply impressed by Tyler's creative and intelligent analysis of commercial film. Soon after their meeting the two men became lovers; they lived together for almost thirty years, until Tyler's death in 1974.

Before the 1940s Tyler had been best known as a poet and co-author, with Charles Henri Ford, of The Young and The Evil. Beginning with The Hollywood Hallucination, published in 1944, he came to be regarded as a pioneer in the new field of film criticism. Besides writing on commercial film, Tyler wrote several articles and books on the underground cinema emerging in the United States during the 1940s and `50s.

Under the influence of Tyler and the experimental filmmakers with whom the couple were friends, Boultenhouse, who was an aspiring poet, began making films. His explorations in a genre he called “poetic cinema” enjoyed some success and critical acclaim within the small but lively world of experimental film in New York. In the 1950s and 1960s the couple thrived: Tyler was an esteemed cultural critic and champion of the avant garde, and Boultenhouse a promising filmmaker. Their apartment on Charles Street regularly bustled with social and artistic activity.

Besides their accomplishments in cinema, both men worked in and wrote about other arts: Tyler continued to write poetry, art criticism, and biography, and Boultenhouse published several poems, translations, and film and dance reviews.

Their group of friends and colleagues included Stan Brakhage, Maya Deren, Willard Maas, Marie Menken, Lloyd Williams, Jonas Mekas, Amos Vogel, P. Adams Sitney, and Gregory Markopoulos from the world of experimental film; and poets, artists, and composers such as Marius Bewley, Lucia Dlugoszewski, Charles Henri Ford, Philip Lamantia, Leslie Powell, Ned Rorem, Donald Sutherland, Allen Tanner, and Pavel Tchelitchew.

Charles Boultenhouse (1926-c.1994)

Charles Thayer Boultenhouse was born in Boston Massachusetts in 1926. In 1944 Boultenhouse graduated from high school in Buffalo and moved to New York with the intention of attending Columbia University. Boultenhouse was introduced to the coeditors of View, Charles Henri Ford and Parker Tyler, when he went to visit an old friend from Buffalo who was managing editor at the magazine. Shortly thereafter Tyler and Boultenhouse began a relationship that lasted until Tyler's death almost thirty years later.

Charles Boultenhouse became interested in making films, through his relationship with Tyler and his friendship with the two experimental filmmakers Willard Maas and Marie Menken. The first film Boultenhouse made, Henry James' Memories of Old New York (1959), was based on James's autobiographical memoir “A Small Boy and Others.” Later the same year Boultenhouse completed Handwritten, a film of his own hand as he wrote Mallarme's A Throw of the Dice in the shape of a hand. In 1963 Boultenhouse wrote, produced, and directed Dionysius, which he described as a “free treatment of Euripides' The Bacchae.” It starred the dancers Louis Falco, Anna Duncan, and Nicolas Magallanes as Dionysius, Agave, and Pentheus respectively, and the experimental filmmakers Charles Levine, Willard Maas, Gregory Markopoulos, Marie Menken, Lloyd Williams and William Wood as the Chorus of Cameras. The film's score was by Teiji Ito.

Besides making films, Boultenhouse published some poetry, translations, and film and dance criticism. For some time during the 1960s he wrote the regular Film Chronicle for Kulchur. Boultenhouse supported himself by working at Brentanos; from 1953-1981 he held several positions-manager, buyer, Director of Operations-at the 5th Avenue store.

After Tyler's death in 1974, Boultenhouse became depressed and began to drink excessively. The drinking lead to a series of medical problems. By the early 1980s, his emotional and physical health began to improve. While he did not produce any new films, he regained some of his interests in his artistic pursuits: he got back in touch with his old friends in the film world, spoke at some film festivals showing his work, wrote several introductions for reprints of Tyler's books, and began to work on a biography of Tyler. This last project remained unfinished.

Parker Tyler (1904-1974)

Harrison Parker Tyler was born March 6, 1904 in New Orleans. Tyler arrived in New York at the age of 20 where, after brief flirtations with acting, dancing and drawing, he became a writer. He was soon known as a poet and book reviewer who assumed the self-stylized persona of The Beautiful Poet Parker Tyler; meanwhile he earned his living at a monotonous editorial position. Tyler read his modern poetry-his influences were Stein, Pound, Moore, Cummings, and Mallarmé-at Greenwich Village clubs like the Sam Johnson, and his poems were published in national periodicals alongside such poets as William Carlos Williams and Louis Zukofsky.

In 1928 Tyler began corresponding with Charles Henri Ford who edited and published the literary journal Blues. Ford moved to New York and the two became an infamous duo around town. In 1931 they co-wrote the novel The Young and Evil which portrayed the homosexual underground of Greenwich Village in which they lived. They could not find a publisher in the United States, so Ford journeyed to Paris where the book was eventually published by the Olympia Press in 1933. The book was banned and burned in the United States and England. Later, Tyler collaborated with Charles Henri Ford again: in the late forties they co-founded and co-edited View, a surrealist-inspired journal of arts and letters.

Tyler spent the late 1930s and early 1940s in Hollywood and began writing film criticism in 1940. Along with James Agee, Tyler was one of the first to devote serious criticism to the Hollywood commercial film. While Tyler remained the occasional poet, biographer, and art and literary critic, he became and remains best known for his critical examinations of film-Hollywood, foreign, and underground cinema. In his evaluation and interpretation of underground and experimental film Tyler brought an esthetic eye previously reserved for high or fine art; his creative and rigorous analysis uncovered the social, psychological, and sexual meanings hidden behind the images and conventions of commercial film; these readings of film were the groundwork for his provocative and insightful observations on American culture in general. Tyler wrote nine books on film subjects including Magic and Myth of the Movies (1947); The Three Faces of the Film (1960); Classics of the Foreign Film (1962); Sex Psyche Etcetera in the Film (1969); Underground Film, A Critical History (1970); Screening the Sexes: Homosexuality in the Movies (1972); and The Shadow of an Airplane Climbs the Empire State Building: A World Theory of Film (1972), and he regularly contributed reviews and articles to periodicals and journals such as Partisan Review, Sight and Sound, and Film Culture.

In addition to his work on film Tyler published five volumes of poetry, including the long surrealist poem The Granite Butterfly; several studies of artists such as Van Gogh, Renoir, and Carl Pickhardt; and a full length biography of the painter Pavel Tchelitchew, The Divine Comedy of Pavel Tchelitchew (1967).

Parker Tyler died at the age of 70 from prostate cancer.

From the guide to the Charles Boultenhouse and Parker Tyler papers, 1927-1994, (The New York Public Library. Manuscripts and Archives Division.)