Coming Apart

Ginsberg directed his first feature film, Coming Apart, in 1969. It starred Rip Torn as a mentally disturbed psychologist who secretly films his sexual encounters with women. Sally Kirkland, who was simultaneously filming Futz! at the time, also stars.^[2] The film was shot in a one-room, 15 ft × 17 ft (4.6 m × 5.2 m) apartment in Kips Bay Plaza, on a budget of $60,000. Shooting lasted three weeks.^[3] Ginsberg filmed the entire movie with one static camera setup, in a manner simulating a non-constructed "fake documentary" style, influenced by Jim McBride's David Holzman's Diary.^[4]: 86

Critical reception was mixed. Life reviewer Richard Schickel praised Torn's performance, Ginsberg's inventive use of camera and sound, and the "illuminating" portrayal of a schizophrenic breakdown.^[5] Critic Andrew Sarris gave it a less-favorable review, and the film was a commercial failure.^[3] The film later attained a cult following among critics and filmmakers.^[3]

In a 1999 volume of Film Comment, Ginsberg stated:

... 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.^[6]: 4

Subsequent work

In 1973, Ginsberg wrote and directed the satirical horror film The Werewolf of Washington starring Dean Stockwell.^[7] Eschewing the minimalism of his previous feature, Ginsberg demonstrated a more technically complex film style.^[8][9]

After a diagnosis of non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma in 1975, Ginsberg became depressed and withdrew from filmmaking.^[1] He returned to directing in 1999 and 2001, with the short films The City Below the Line and The Haloed Bird.^[3][6]: 6

After his final feature film, Ginsberg primarily made a living as a film editor,^[3] working on two Academy Award-winning documentaries, Down and Out in America and The Personals, among others.^[1] He edited both parts of the miniseries Fidel (2002) for director David Attwood.^[10][11]