Rainer Werner Fassbinder | Der Stadtstreicher (The City Tramp) / 1966

the undesired man

by Douglas Messerli

 

Rainer Werner Fassbinder (screenwriter and director) Der Stadtstreicher (The City Tramp) / 1966

 

Fassbinder’s earliest short film, The City Tramp, immediately calls up references to Chaplin’s “tramp.” But this figure, played by Cristoph Roser, is not at all Chaplinesque in his appearance or behavior, and his drunken loutishness reminds me far more of the unnamed starving tramp of Knut Hamsun’s 1890 novel Hunger. Although Fassbinder himself connects his film to the French New Wave, in particular to Éric Rohmer’s Le Signe du lion (1962), which he described as having loved with it first appeared, this city tramp, like Hamsun’s figure, is a true loner who has none of the early society of Rohmer’s Pierre or even the later friendship of a figure like his Toto.

       Although there is nothing obviously homosexual about Roser’s character, one might even argue that he fits very nicely the image of the early version of the gay figures who are in the process of tortuously coming out such as in the 1940s films of Curtis Harrington and Kenneth Anger, individuals so isolated from the rest of society that they consider and symbolically undergo death.

 

        Fassbinder’s tramp is not only an outsider, but is a totally isolated drunk, who has absolutely no friends, the only individual who is even kind to him being a woman (played by later Fassbinder regular Irm Hermann) who he spontaneously accosts, asking if he might take a shower and kill himself in her bathroom, in a manner not dissimilar to his encounter with the figure in Hamsun’s book of Ylajali. Although she doesn’t permit him into her flat, after he sings he a strangely engaging song about how everything in Japan is so much smaller that elsewhere, she does eventually deliver him a sandwich.    

     The irony is that in Fassbinder’s short film, the Tramp is quite early on provided with the designated weapon, a gun he discovers on the street, the tool he needs to end his life. Similar to Hamsun’s unnamed journalist, however, he is at first too proud and determined to take advantage of it, and attempts to rid himself of the weapon, throwing into the trash. In a strange almost Kafka-like situation, however, the waitress who as observed him in her establishment illegally eating an apple he has pulled from his briefcase, discovers it and insists upon returning it to him, despite his attempts to reject it. And no matter how he would like to rid himself of the weapon, it keeps being returned to him with all of its potential of ending his life.

        In what might almost be perceived as a sexual comment, the Tramp tries to simply enter a public pissoir, but even there he is met with scorn (ironically by a man played by Fassbinder himself), sneered at, perhaps, even for his unattractiveness as a sexual being in a public loo. 

    And when he finally determines to kill himself, imagining, just as in the Anger film, his action as being connected to the martyrdom of Christ, the two men who have inexplicably been following him, suddenly steal the gun, taunt him, and mock him in what any gay might recognize as an incident of bullying. As he pretends to shoot them with his empty fingers, lying face down on the grass, we cannot but recognize the utter hopelessness of this societal outsider, not only a drunken misfit as this figure might first have been thought to be, but one among those, including gay men, who are dismissed by the society for not performing the roles expected of them—in this case enacting his own death.

      Roser’s figure ultimately, we perceive, is not just a derelict being, but an incompetent male who is not even welcome into the gay sexual underworld of the public bathrooms.

 

Los Angeles, January 6, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (January 2024).

Marine Levéel | La traction des poles (Magnetic Harvest) / 2019

the trials and tribulations of a pig farmer

by Douglas Messerli

 

Marine Levéel (screenwriter and director) La traction des poles (Magnetic Harvest) / 2019 [23 minutes]

 

It’s fascinating to compare a work such Mark Christopher’s 1995 short film Alkali, Iowa about a gay man in a US rural setting and Marine Levéel’s 2019 Magnetic Harvest, which concerns one of France’s New Rurals, also a gay man, in this case a pig farmer. Unlike in the days of Christopher’s film, where the gay men had to meet up from miles around at a local park on weekends to seek out one another’s company, in Levéel’s work, Mickaël (Gilles Vandeweerd) need only send out a cell-phone message to track down the nearest local gay man somewhere in the beautiful French country landscape, even if he’s sometimes beaten out by others who meet up with the messenger faster that he can get there.

 

    But then Mickaël has other things on his mind. As an organic farmer, who allows his pigs to range and feeds them natural foods, he is, at the moment, attempting to get certification from the authorities to describe his pork as organically raised. What’s more his best sirer and favorite hog, Roger, has gone missing.

    And then, out of the blue, he is faced with an apparent madman from the farm next door who suddenly appears with a large piece of machinery to water a field where no crops are supposed to be growing. The madman, it turns out, is his old friend Paul (Victor Fradet) who has been away for several years in New Zealand and has just returned, and the large crop water-feeder has only been employed as a joke to get Mika to recognize that he is back. Paul, whose farm clearly is raising produce instead of pigs, has a large number of machines which he produces from time to time to hone in on Mika just when he least expects it.

      The most unreasonable moment is just as he found a gay meet-up, Ricardo (Thomas Landbo) in a field of yellow rapeseed. Paul shows up in an outsized agricultural digger, sending Ricardo on the run and finding his friend stark naked staring back at him with the shock have having been found out.

    Worse yet, neighbors have purchased a large case of his sausages and pork ribs for a neighborhood barbecue, but not only mock the fact that his pork delicacies do not have the proper fat content that they prefer, but at one point picking up a long string of his hand-made sausages to play a game of limbo, men obscenely dipping under the sausage rope held by two others as if all of Mika’s hard work means absolutely nothing to them.

       Mickaël is so taken aback that he can’t even speak, but Paul, who has also shown up at the party and has just jealously questioned his friend about who his rapeseed partner was, grows angry by the others’ taunts, and attempts to put an end to their mockery. Both he and Mickaël are thrown out, metal stanchions locked in place behind them.

      Mika goes stumbling through the dark to find Paul without success. But suddenly Paul appears, again driving his huge tractor digger, crashing through their stanchions and proving to Mika that he is, in fact, not only willing to stand up for a friend but is also may be in love with him.

      Director Levéel, herself grew up in a small Normandy village and watched as a great many friends left while others stayed on or returned as “new rurals” to farm the land. In an interview with Jamie Lang in Variety she commented: “It’s hard work being a farmer and a lot of movies show that, but it’s not all harshness. I wanted to show something different, more contemporary. I made Magnetic Harvest a little like a fairy tale with its colorful scenes and romantic elements. I wanted to depict sensitive characters in a world where there is hope to change the views people have about rurals.”

      Like Christopher did for US audiences decades earlier, Levéel has reminded us that today’s farmers are far more diverse and contemporary on their views of how to live their lives than we city dwellers often imagine our rural counterparts to be.

 

Los Angeles, April 9, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 2023).

 

Shota Kalandadze | ‘კინო სინჯები' ფილმის თრეილერი (Making of Movies, aka Movie Making Of) / 2014

gay eroticism

by Douglas Messerli

 

Shota Kalandadze (director) ‘კინო სინჯები' ფილმის თრეილერი (Making of Movies, aka Movie Making Of) / 2014 / [42 minutes]

 

Georgian director Shota Kalandadze describes his role as a erotic artist. Much of his filmmaking involves erotic heterosexual scenes, some of them exclusively. But a great many of his films, particularly Making of Movies, involves numerous homoerotic, lesbian, and homosexual erotic scenes, in this film perhaps outnumbering the heterosexual sequences.

      This film, which is more often short in short segments throughout the internet, is in its 42-minute entirety on Vimeo titled Movie Making Of, a title which it’s hard to determine if it is simply a bad translation which retained the original linguistic structure of the Georgian or was an intentional attempt to rethink the structural meaning of the movie-making activity. Yet at other Vimeo and YouTube locations with selections from the film it is often rendered as Making of Movies.

      In any event, this film consists of numerous short segments of women and men in various erotic movements. When women are featured, they are mostly dancing, sometimes fully dressed and at other moments nude or partially unclothed. Men are also shown dancing sexually with women, and some moments even engaged in the early stages of sexual intercourse and, at one point, during intercourse itself.

      The women are often quite beautiful, but clearly have been chosen, as Kalandadze reveals in one segment, for their interesting faces rather than standard notions of beauty.

       The boys, on the other hand, which he shows sometimes alone, almost as in the Warhol screentests, and with other boys, are almost all hirsute and beautiful specimens of, as one of his short films describes them, “Georgian boys.”

       In many of these scenes they are simply engaged in sports-like activities, boxing, weight-lifting, etc. But in others, there is clearly a homoerotic charge between the couples and threesomes, particularly when the boys themselves begin to dance with one another.

      The boys are presented half dressed, partially naked, and fully naked, in several scenes a point made of their bouncing cocks, particularly during exercises and dance.

      

     Although dance is the major motif of this film, since almost all the scenes are filmed in a small house with art of the walls, art itself becomes a major theme along, of course, with the music that we sometimes hear along with the dances.

     Most sequences are in black-and-white, but some suddenly appear in color.

     Seduction, of female and male and male on male is also an important theme of these unrelated sequences.

      If one truly sees these short and longer pieces as sequences from a would-be film in the process of being shot, one would have to suggest that there is no narrative spine to the work, the theme, if you can describe it as such, being Georgia culture and beauty, with a particular emphasis on dance, music, and the physical specimens that are represented, young and older (the latter particularly in some scenes with the women).

       The sequences, in their varied nature, nonetheless act almost as a lure as they move into more and more sexual content without ever veering from their voyeuristic nature into pure pornography. The subject—at least in this particular work—is eroticism, not sexuality as such.

       In other films, Kalandadze blurs those barriers by bringing in transgender figures and far more sexual scenarios.

 

Los Angeles, January 6, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (January 2024)

 

Buster Keaton and, uncredited, Roscoe Arbuckle (as William Goodrich) | Sherlock, Jr. / 1924

into the picture

by Douglas Messerli

 

Clyde Bruckman, Jean Havez, and Joseph A. Mitchell (screenplay), Buster Keaton and William Goodrich [Roscoe Arbuckle, uncredited (directo) Sherlock, Jr. / 1924

 

Long before Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985), in which an actor, bored with the role he is playing on film, escapes into the real world, Buster Keaton’s young film projectionist (Keaton himself), falls asleep and, in his dream, attempts to enter the film, playing the role that in real life he is studying for, that of a detective.

 

     Since he is in a dream, the film he enters at first is much like a surrealist nightmare, a collage of a garden, an urban street, a mountain cliff, a jungle of lions, and a desert, all of which endanger the projectionist’s existence as he moves fluidly from scene to scene (to assure perfect continuity, the cameraman and technical director used surveying instruments to figure out the precise position where the actor was required to stand in order to move on to the next scene).

     Finally—after the actual characters, now resembling the projectionist’s girlfriend (Kathryn McGuire), her father (Joe Keaton), the evil “local sheik” (Ward Crane), and other figures—regain control of the story, they call for Sherlock, Jr., the would-be detective projectionist to solve the theft of the heroine’s pearls.

    Earlier in the surrounding story the projectionist himself has wrongly been accused of stealing the father’s watch, which was actually pawned by the local sheik; so the crazy series of adventures our hero now undergoes—involving a motorcycle which loses its driver (leaving Keaton speeding down the street on a wheel and handlebars), a train top escape via a water tank tube (wherein Keaton actually broke his neck without knowing it), and a car that when it accidentally enters a river miraculously becomes a boat (long before the famous scene in the series on James Bond)—allow him the possibility, at least imaginatively, to redeem himself. Certainly, Keaton never worked harder on screen to please us.

     In between Keaton takes himself and Sherlock’s assistant Gillette, into dozens of terrifying encounters and escapes, performed with such magic that the film still baffles special effect directors today. Poisons, sword-blades, and a billiard game with an explosive 13 ball follow.

     Of course, the cinema-bound projectionist wins the day, returning the pearls to the girl’s father, and is awarded the love of the girl herself.

     In real life, however, just as in so many of Keaton’s films, it is really the girl who saves the man. While the projectionist dreams, the girl has visited the pawn shop to discover that it was not the projectionist who pawned her father’s watch but her other suitor.

     The projectionist awakens to her visit, and is able to use the final scene of the film he is showing to romantically instruct him on how to romance his sweetheart.

      Keaton’s amazing recognition of cinema as being a strange mix of absurd narrative constructions with, nonetheless, true restorative realities to its audience, was way ahead of its time. Keaton’s always hapless heroes may have little control of their lives, but through the magic of movies regain control over the worlds in which they live, allowing them, so to speak, to get back into the picture.

      Many of the moviegoers of 1924 apparently did not find this movie as funny as other Keaton works, and although the film made a profit, it was far less successful than most of his previous creations. Perhaps, in demonstrating many of the tricks of moviemaking, or, at least, exploring them on screen, Keaton distracted audiences of the day simply seeking mindless entertainment. The problem, of course, still exists today. Really fine films often fail at the box office, while mindless blockbusters rake in millions. Over the years, however, sophisticated audiences have come to perceive just how much of a genius Keaton was. This movie is one of several of his that have been added to the National Film Registry.

     I should add that the score of this silent film as captured on the Kino DVD I viewed, was composed and performed by the Club Foot Orchestra; with the score’s references to the Jazz era in which the film was created and, at one point, even to the scores of the James Bond movies, it was near perfect, and greatly added to the film’s general delights.

 

Los Angeles, August 6, 2017

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (August 2017).

Tyler Reeves | It's Still Your Bed / 2019

how to keep the boy down on the farm

by Douglas Messerli

 

Tyler Reeves (screenwriter and director) It’s Still Your Bed / 2019 [17 minutes]

 

Imagine his surprise when college boy David (Damian Joseph Quinn) returns home to the family farm to find that his hard-working father has taken on a hired hand, Brent (Cooper Stone) who now sleeps in his old bedroom. David will have to sleep a futon next to his old bed, while the farm hand sleeps nearby.

 

     It’s clearly a problem with David until he actually catches a glimpse of the friendly hunk, who even offers to switch beds: hence the title. But David wouldn’t think of it, and indeed can’t think about much of anything except that he has to resist the temptation to leap into bed with his new roommate, who parades about half-dressed, masturbates (under the covers) late one night, and even is willing to play a duo video game with the former farm boy while grabbing for popcorn out of the bowl that sits on David’s lap. The game gets out of hand as the two young men begin to wrestle with one another and, for one long moment, both contemplating to consummate that which they desire; but since neither is sure of the other’s sexual orientation, they both resist.

      Brent seems to be working out fine as a farmer, and David’s father is impressed with his abilities, but David can only attempt to distract himself from their shared dinner conversations by calling up his college friend, Steven, who is now dating a girl he’s taken off to Phoenix, both planning to show up to visit David on his farm in another day or so.

      Even David’s old girlfriend Emily, when she spots Brent at work, knowing David is gay teases her friend about actually being able to sleep in the same room with such a “hot” beauty. David resists explaining to her that it only results in sleepless nights of frustration. Even the Kleenex in which Brent has wiped up his middle-of-the-night cum is missing in the morning from the spot on the floor where he threw it. David might possibly have enjoyed just the smell of it, an opportunity which I gather in the original cut he had, since I’ve just seen a trailer for the movie which shows him doing precisely that.

      When Steven does finally decide to show up, it’s with his girlfriend Vanessa, and he announces it will be only a few hours. His greatest excitement seems to be his ability to share some new “weed” they’ve acquired. Even more frustrated than usual, David invites Brent along to the isolated spot where he probably hid out with friends in high school.

      The talk between the three is superficial, consisting mostly of a discussion of how big the fish were in a local pond where evidently David and Steven once swam and got scared off. When David describes the fish being as big as a microwave. Brent, who evidently is from a state bordering the Mississippi river, is not impressed, showing them a picture of a paddlefish on his cellphone which they pass around mightily impressed. When it finally reaches David, he attempts to enlarge the view only to accidentally click on a picture of a young man in red shorts for an instant, obviously an image from Grindr or some other gay site.

        While Vanessa and Steven talk on, deciding they’d like to possibly get something to eat, David gently begins to stroke the back of Brent’s hand. When the visitors ask if they’d like to join them, both bow out with a headache and an early rising the next morning as their excuses. They head off back to the farmhouse, quietly entering to find David’s father asleep on the couch. They tiptoe back to the bedroom and once inside they grab hold of one another stripping off each other’s clothes in pure lust.

        This is not a very profound film, and we suspect that their relationship may end up as the “how I spent my summer” variety. Yet we’d like to imagine that, like HD in Mark Christopher’s Heartland, Brent may have found a way to keep the boy down on the farm after he’s seen gay Paree.

 

Los Angeles, September 3, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2021).

Daithí Ó. Cinnéide | Eadrainn Féin (Between Us) / 2016

exploring gender

by Douglas Messerli

 

Daithí Ó. Cinnéide (screenplay and director) Eadrainn Féin (Between Us) / 2016 [11 minutes]

 

This gay short film by Irish director Daithí Ó. Cinnéide is one of the very few gay films, and even a smaller number of works on transgender issues written and acted in Gaelic. Between Us is also one of the few gentle comic works on the subject, making it a very rare kind of work in LGBTQ+ cinematic canon.

      The young hero of this work, Uinsionn (Cian Ó Baoill) lives alone with his father in a small farming community in a Gaeltacht, one of the regions of Donegal, Galway, Kerry, Mayo, Cork, Waterford, and Meath in Ireland where the Gaelic language is still predominant, and, in this case, where every move of every individual is most carefully watched. 

     We first witness Uinsionn on a morning when, dressed for school, he quickly downs a glass a milk and is about to run to the shared car-ride to school before his father Mick (John Keane), sitting across from him at the table, loudly clears his throat, forcing the boy to come back for his apple.

      The father begins his daily chores, which seems to consist of racking the hay in his barn and lugging heavy sacks of horse manure from a van, work with which Uinsionn, when returned from school, helps him.

 

      The next morning, Mick is again at the breakfast table reading his newspaper as he calls for his son to get dressed for school. Uinsionn shows up, quickly grabbing his apple, the boy dressed in a short skirt, disappearing to catch the ride to school. Mick looks as if he’s seen a ghost, while the boys in the car look on aghast, now knowing quite how to respond.

        Out with the cows, Mick attempts to call a neighbor friend, Patricia, but can’t reach her. When his son returns home, Mick is waiting, asking if it is a joke, a kind of trick. But Uinsionn dismisses him and hurries off into his room, leaving his father to worry alone.

        The next morning as the boy waits, again in a skirt, no car shows up. He gets out his bicycle and makes his own way to school.

         Mick goes about his chores, but his heart is not in it. And when his son finally returns home from school he determines to confront him. But when he sees Uinsionn, he realizes that he’s been slugged in the eye, his clothes have been torn.

      Mick enters his room, and without saying anything, hands him a bag of ice. Somewhat begrudgingly, he puts it up to his eye. Meanwhile, we observe Mick on the computer checking out articles about “transgender.” He tries a call to his neighbor Patricia once again, but she declares she’s too busy at the moment. Obviously, Mick is seeking out the advice of a woman, having lost his wife in the past year.

         Later, Mick is hanging out the laundry, where he finds a lipstick container in one of his son’s pockets. But at that every moment, Uinsionn calls for his father; it’s time to the football game on TV. They watch it together, involved as they have both been obviously many a time.

         When the phone rings, this time it is Patricia calling him, asking why hasn’t she heard “it” from him instead of through the neighbors. When he asks, “what story,” she replies, “Uinsionn. And you said it wasn’t important.” But this time it is Mick who can’t be bothered by her gossip and challenges her for accusing him for allowing his son to go around as a “freak.” And this time he hangs up on her.

          When the boy again retreats to his room, Mick insists they have to talk. Asking him to come out, he reminds him that the house is his as well. But Uinsionn insists that they live in two different worlds.

          Mick argues that he didn’t seem to feel that a few days earlier. But the boy seems angry, claiming there is nothing to talk about with him except football. “I thought you liked football?”

          “I do,” responds Uinsionn, “but football isn’t everything.”

          “I didn’t know you so unhappy.”

          “Well, there are a lot of things you didn’t know about me.”

          “You can say that again. When you came down the other morning, I didn’t recognize you.”

          “That’s the first time I recognized myself.”

          All Mick can do through the closed door between them, is remind the boy that he is his father, now and forever.

 

         When his son returns to the living room, his father has put on another TV station, imagining that his son might prefer it, but Uinsionn insists he put the match back on.

           After a few moments, he turns to his son and wonders: “Is Uinsionn still your name?

           The boy looks puzzled. “What?”

           “People change their names sometimes, like Suzy or Margaret.”

           A smile creeps over his son’s face. “Where did you hear that?”

           “I was on Google earlier today.”

           Uinsionn openly smiles as the credits begin their scroll.

          This lovely attempt at communication between father and son facing an almost inconceivable gap is truly heartening, made perhaps a bit more comic since its clear that Uinsionn is not totally committed to a gender change but is simply exploring the territory, testing the waters so to speak. Whether or not he goes further, he at least knows now that he still has his father’s love and his help in whatever direction he might seek out. A black eye means little when you have the love of the parent waiting at home. 

 

Los Angeles, September 24, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2023).