John Greyson | Pils Slip / 2003

evil did i slip / pils i did live

by Douglas Messerli

 

David Wall (composer), John Greyson (screenwriter and director) Pils Slip / 2003

 

This four and a half-minute work is a palindromic opera with music by David Wall as sung by Wall and Van Abrahams. The text is based on the palindrome, “No devil is as selfless as I lived on.”

     Inspired by the actions of the South African AIDS activist Zackie Achmat who refused to take his AIDS drugs in 2001 until the South African government made the drugs available to all South Africans; he was later nominated for the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize.

     Before this he had co-founded the National Coalition for Gay and Lesbian Equality in 1994, and as its director he demanded protections for gays and lesbians in the new South African Constitution, and facilitated the prosecution of cases that led to the decriminalization of sodomy and granting of equal status to same-sex partners in the immigration process.

      Diagnosed with AIDS in 1990, Achmat refused to take his antiretrovials until August 2003 when a national congress of TAC activists voted to urge him to begin treatment.

      In Greyson’s operatic version, the director reminds us first that “The last perfect palindromic minute of the Roman calendar occurred on February 20, 2002 at 8:02 pm. It was represented as  

2002.20/02.2002. The titles continue with the following statement: “On this day, at this minute, Zackie Achmat and Nathan Cameron smuggled the AIDS drug Blozole into South Africa.”

     The opera is then played out on spit screen where all that appears on the right side with David Wall singing, is played out in palindromic reverse on the left side where Van Abrahams performs—although the singers occasionally alternate sides.

      Greyson dramatically expresses, accordingly, Achmat’s dramatic empathy and involvement with the reverse of the still white-dominated heterosexual culture of South Africa, that nation’s suffering black and LGBTQ+ communities.

 

Los Angeles, December 27, 2023

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema (December 2023).