Shota Kalandadze | Associations with Wagner’s Music / 2006

work-out

by Douglas Messerli

 

Shota Kalandadze (screenwriter and director) Associations with Wagner’s Music / 2006 [5 minutes]

 

It is hardly surprising that the self-described eroticist, Georgian director Shota Kalandadze’s appropriation of the music of Richard Wagner, Associations with Wagner’s Music, employs its short 5 minutes mostly displaying homoerotic images, primarily of young sports figures boxing and participating in a mass Judo session and, most significantly displaying their mostly nude bodies in the shower.

 

    Relying primarily on selections from Wagner’s Ring cycle, Kalandadze begins with boxers, gradually scrolling up his images so that they reveal, bit by bit, a man showering with other men standing by the ready next to him.

      Eventually the scroll produces a female image, her breast shining in the sunlight of a window as she is transformed from a black-and-white figure to one in color, a massive Judo gathering following which suggests not so much eroticism as it does the programmed calisthenics of sports marathons, particularly those of Hitler and other fascist regimes. But these Judo performers are anything but uniform in their movements, and even this scene turns erotic as some men decide to strip off their shirts and begin their own regimen of set-ups.

 

    The upward scroll of the film clips returns us to the shower room for an even more slightly revealing homoerotic scene, which gradually reveals a smile upon the composer’s imposed face.

 

Los Angeles, January 19, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (January 2024).