Prince was a lot of things: a genius, a control freak, a madman, a pervert, an enigmatic visionary. Based on those descriptors, you might assume he was also a great filmmaker, but it’s difficult to make a convincing case. Having already mastered the medium of pop music by the mid 1980s (an indisputable fact by the time he produced the album 1999), Prince was determined to get into pictures, threatening to drop his then-manager Robert Cavallo if he couldn’t land a starring role in a big-time Hollywood movie. That’s how 1984’s Purple Rain came to be, and that’s how Prince’s big-screen career is mostly widely and most fondly remembered. Purple Rain was a huge hit, mythologizing the broad bullet points of the Minneapolis musician’s life story in what’s essentially a feature-length music video about the vicious cycle of domestic abuse. It’s the closest Prince ever got to making a normal, functional movie and it’s still an MTV-addled brainscrambler, repurposing the relentless quick-edit montages of Adrian Lynne’s Flashdance to illustrate & promote its eponymous album by Prince & The Revolution. Unwilling to cede any creative control of his music or image, Prince was heavily involved in the writing of the screenplay and the sounds of his onscreen avatar The Kid’s rival bands, most notably Morris Day and the Time. As a result, everyone in the film dresses & sounds exactly like Prince, while he saves the best tunes for himself and the fictional crowds reject him as an underdog anyway, betraying an underlying self-doubt that drove him to be such a controlling perfectionist in the first place. It’s a narratively confused & confusing film as a result, but it’s undeniable as an 80s-era pop artifact, the undisputed pinnacle of Prince cinema. Then, things got really strange, inscrutibly so.

After the commercial success of Purple Rain, Warner Bros issued a blank check for Prince to produce whatever he wanted for a follow-up, which resulted in the 1986 headscratcher Under the Cherry Moon. Recently restored & re-released for its 40th Anniversary, Under the Cherry Moon is a Merchant Ivory-themed music video set in an alternate universe only Prince could dream up: one exclusively populated by chic babes and flamboyantly gay skirtchasers. Prince stars alongside The Time member Jerome Benton as a pair of Miamian expats who are explained to be brothers living on the French Riviera, but whose onscreen personae are only explainable if they are a closeted gay couple. Regardless, their financial well-being is hinged on their dual schemes to woo local heiresses as boytoy gigolos, a status that’s threatened when Prince accidentally falls in love with a playfully bratty Kristin Scott Thomas. An anachronistic period-piece tragicomedy, Under the Cherry Moon is gorgeous, corny, hip, sexy, and disastrously unfunny in equal measure. Like a lot of failed comedians of their time, Prince & Benton’s approach to humor appears to be entirely based on impersonating Eddie Murphy, to consistently clumsy results. Most failed comedians don’t have access to Prince’s library of all-timer pop tunes, though, and it’s near impossible to hate a film that’s scored by tracks like this one’s hit single, “Kiss.” Prince seemed to be aware that the music video was the visual medium he was best suited for, initially hiring frequent Madonna collaborator Mary Lambert to direct. The same refusal to collaborate that led him to writing & recording all of The Time’s songs himself also led to him taking the project over from Lambert, however, and he ended up with his first official directorial credit — a beautiful, confounding mess.

Prince’s total creative control as a self-designated auteur only tightened from there. The rest of his cinematic output was contained entirely within the sound-stage studio space of Paisley Park, where he made both his very best and his very worst pictures. 1987’s Sign o’ the Times finds Prince in peak form, doing what he does best: music. Ostensibly a live concert film, Sign o’ the Times marks the exact moment Prince retreated to the hermetic studio space of Paisley Park, where he could exert total control over every sound & image captured on record. After shooting some genuine live concert footage in Northern Europe that he found lacking in quality, Prince then reshot a majority of his band’s live show in his home studio, with performers miming their instruments to pre-recorded tracks for optimal sound quality. Once again, the result is more closely aligned with music video filmmaking than a traditional concert doc, so much so that when the footage switches to an actual music video interlude for the Sheena Easton collaboration “U Got the Look,” there’s no discernible break from reality. In this one instance, Prince’s megalomaniacal control over every aspect of production proves to work in his favor, resulting in one of the greatest concert films of all time, regardless of its flimsy definition of what a “concert” even is. Still, some of his control-freak tendencies show in concerning ways. The one standout sequence that doesn’t highlight Prince’s all-powerful awesomeness is a minutes-long drum solo by bandmate Sheila E, who goes full beast mode on a 360° Neil Peart kit. Later, Prince attempts to steal her thunder by having Sheila E indulge in a stage-front dance break so he can show off on that drum kit himself, as if to prove to the audience that he could hit the skins just as well as anyone, if it weren’t for the physical limitation of only having enough arms to play one instrument at a time. In that moment, you get the sense that Prince’s ideal version of playing in “a band” would be taking the stage alongside five or six of his exact clones, but I’m sure he’d also find a way to get overly competitive with parallel versions of himself if he could.

Now self-isolated in the cavernous dungeons of Paisley Park, Prince returned to narrative filmmaking in the early 1990s, kicking off the decade with an instantly ignored & forgotten sequel to Purple Rain. Graffiti Bridge once again stars Prince as The Kid, professionally competing against his funky-unc nemesis Morris Day. Instead of riding his superhero motorcycle around the streets of Minneapolis, however, Prince is now trapped on a skyless sound stage, which is designed & lit in a way that suggests that all four Ninja Turtles are hanging around somewhere nearby, always just barely cropped out of the frame. Plot-wise, Graffiti Bridge makes its audience nostalgic for the relative coherence of Purple Rain, which at least includes narrative details like events and consequences among its more Princely abstract poetics. While Prince is still somehow struggling to convince crowds that his band (now The New Power Generation) is better than The Time, the years-long rivalry is interrupted by the intrusion of an ironically named muse, Aura (the auraless Ingrid Chavez). Aura reads bad poetry to no one in particular under an unconvincing bridge prop leftover from a Muppet Show set. Later, she’s hit by a speeding jeep, and an ambulance scrapes her body off the street, leaving behind her two pop-superstar suitors to call a truce because they’re both sad to see her go. Apparently, she was an angel sacrificed by God to inspire said truce, like a second, sexy coming of Jesus Christ. That non-story just about accounts for the majority of the runtime, give or take the expected music video interludes that mercifully interrupt this supernatural love triangle melodrama (and occasionally feature always-welcome industry luminaries George Clinton & Mavis Staples). The biggest creative leap Graffiti Bridge makes in Prince Cinema is allowing its characters to break into song in full movie-musical fantasy sequences, instead of restricting the song & dance numbers to diegetic stage acts. Otherwise, it finds Prince recoiling into an increasingly private sphere where no one can tell him “No” loud enough to inspire him to refine his ideas in a second draft. Like all first-draft poetry, it sucks.

Prince’s reclusive cinematic output at least got more entertainingly bizarre in 1994’s 3 Chains o’ Gold, even if qualifiers like “good” or “coherent” would be laughably generous. In this case, the muse-du-jour for his Pepe Le Pew romantic antics is short-time spouse Mayte Garcia, whom he met and courted at her mother’s suggestion while she was still a teenager. Alarmingly, 3 Chains o’ Gold includes even younger footage of Mayte as a small child appearing on a segment of the 1970s variety show That’s Incredible!, showing off her prodigal skills as a belly dancer. Prince watches a VHS recording of that performance with a Videodrome-style unseemly fixation and as a result finds himself psychically connected to the now-adult Matye, characterized onscreen as an Egyptian princess fleeing a violent regime change. You can tell 3 Chains o’ Gold was a straight-to-video affair as soon as Princess Matya is introduced during a nude game of lesbian grabass with her bathing handmaidens, intercut with images of her royal father’s nearby assassination. Meanwhile, in Paisley Park, Prince is going through a tough-as-nails hardcore rap phase in a string of music videos for songs with titles like “Sexy MF”. The two destined lovers meet in the US, have a brief soul-shattering affair, then quickly find trouble as the nonstop orgies of Prince’s more routine sex life call back to him like a siren song. Like Sign o’ the Times, 3 Chains o’ Gold finds Prince finally excelling at cinematic language because he’s fully given into the idea that all he’s making are long-form music videos. Only, the songs aren’t as good this time around, and the self-contained self-mythology has gotten so inscrutable to outsiders that it plays like Prince’s version of a Dianetics video. He makes the full transition from pop singer to compounded cult leader in the final minutes of the video, when he literally buries the Prince persona in the ground and resurrects himself as The Symbol — an idol to be worshipped for the endless cosmic power of his sexual charisma. It’s neither good nor coherent, but it is admirably insane.

Those five titles account for Prince’s filmography as listed on Wikipedia, a convenient reference point for audiences outside the Paisley Park cult. Prince’s official filmography gets much more unwieldy when you refer to the bottomless archives of The Prince Vault, which has separate pages listing titles of various TV movies, documentaries, and concert broadcasts Prince produced alongside his more widely distributed works. The most instructive page on the site, for me, is the subcategory of “Unreleased Movies and Documentaries“, which lists a dozen or so projects that were abandoned at various stages of production. It’s in Prince’s unreleased work that I believe he reached his final form as a filmmaker. No longer satisfied with the amount of control he could exert as a writer, director, producer, star, and composer, he eventually discovered a way he could also act as his movies’ sole audience member, so that they could be properly watched & appreciated by the only person who would know how to fully understand them. The stubborn assuredness in vision that Prince demonstrated as an artist allowed him to create some stunning cinematic objects — some great (Purple Rain, Sign o’ the Times), some merely bewildering (Under the Cherry Moon, 3 Chains o’ Gold). The way that same stubbornness got in the way of his ability to delegate & collaborate also cornered him in the lifeless, hermetic world of Graffiti Bridge, though, which I struggle to see as anything other than an elaborate embarrassment. The man was a one-of-a-kind genius, which made for some great art and some frustratingly overworked mediocrities. In either case, I’m surprisingly sad there’s not more of it around to puzzle through.

-Brandon Ledet