IMDb - 8.7/10 (7 votes)
This is what Fred Camper, the critic who supervised the Criterion edition of Brakhage's works, says about Maclaine:
Rating
* * * *
A Masterpiece
Christopher Maclaine, a beat poet of the 1940s and '50s living in San Francisco, made only four films in his lifetime; the first and longest two — The End (1953), which is 35 minutes, and the 14-minute The Man Who Invented Gold (1957) — present the profoundest challenge to viewer identification I know of. Avoiding the extreme (though brilliant) conceptual anticinema of such filmmakers as Maurice Lemaître, Maclaine tells stories based in social reality but in a manner so profoundly fragmented, so unnerving, as to give even viewers who've seen the works many times a series of perceptual shocks. Among the greatest films I've ever seen, these twin fables of doom and redemption are also unlike any others I know. After perhaps 20 viewings of The End over the past 30 years, I feel as if I'm only beginning to understand its greatness.
Yet Maclaine and his films have received scant recognition. According to the films' sole distributor, in the past decade The End has been rented twice for Chicago screenings and the other three haven't been rented for showings at all. Chicago Filmmakers' screening of Maclaine's complete works (Friday night only) could include some Chicago premieres. Maclaine isn't discussed in most standard film histories — no surprise, given their scant treatment of experimental work — but he doesn't even come up in most histories of avant-garde filmmaking. And of the two books on beat filmmaking that I know, one doesn't mention him at all and the other gives him less than half a page, mostly quoting the filmmaker Stan Brakhage and styling his name incorrectly, as Brakhage does, as "MacLaine."
[...]
The End certainly has a center: six stories of people on the last day of their lives. Most are about to commit suicide, or some metaphorical equivalent, but the mushroom cloud with which the film begins and ends reminds us that, as Maclaine's voice intones on the sound track, we await "the grand suicide of the human race" — his conceit is that his characters have reached the end of their personal ropes the day before a nuclear holocaust.Throughout the film he compares the dehumanizing effects of mass culture to the dehumanizing effects of personal despair, weaving these two threads together until the mannequins he films in store windows, the anonymous people he films on the street, and his characters all seem variations on the same half-living, half-dead persona.[...[The film's stories are told in six numbered sections, with Maclaine serving as narrator. Much of the editing is radically disjunctive, subverting the usual mode of narrative filmmaking in which characters inhabit continuous spaces we're encouraged to enter, a universe disrupted only by the occasional dream sequence or other cutaway. The End constantly pulls the rug out from under us, but the editing is less intended to alienate the viewer than to reinforce the film's push-pull dynamic. A shot may establish some empathy as the narrator tells us the character's pathetic story, yet time and again a cut to a seemingly unrelated object breaks whatever connection Maclaine has established.
[ Christopher Maclaine - Mad Genius ]
I have to thank a wonderful guy who keeps selling me these amazing rarities at a very, VERY reasonable price... and so should you, as I'll keep sharing them as soon as I get them (more will follow!)VIDEO: [DIVX] 704x480(*) 24bpp 23,976 fps 1000,0 kbps (122,1 kbyte/s)
AUDIO: [MP3] 48000 Hz, 2 ch, 16 bit (0x10), ratio: 20000->192000 (160,0 kbit)
(*)The movie was intentionally NOT resized; a good player (e.g. MPlayer) will resize it automatically by reading the mpeg4 aspect header, but users of other players should resize it to 4:3 manually.
Christopher Maclaine - The End (1953 - 35min - beat-experimental).avi 
) but it looks very interesting so I'll give it a try.
