Barbara Hammer | Audience / 1982

time capsule of lesbian film

by Douglas Messerli

 

Barbara Hammer (director) Audience / 1982

 

Long time lesbian filmmaker finally had three retrospectives in the early 1980s, in San Francisco, London, and Toronto. In 1982-1982, Hammer put together a series of interviews that she had made with audiences at those events, beginning with a simple questioning of the long line waiting to get into the San Francisco Roxie, mostly asking women and a few men what they expected to see inside.

     The answers were fairly predictable, if somewhat diverse. Some looked forward to being emotionally moved, others were looking for something sexy, others simply for entertainment. Several of these women had heard of Hammer or her work but had never seen her films in a time before the internet and the numerous LGBTQ film festivals of today. A few had seen her films in Germany, France, or elsewhere. One elderly gay man simply reported that he attended all such events but didn’t have a clue about what he was about to see, perhaps not even recognizing that he was talking to the director herself.

      But what is amazing about these encounters is the near unanimous excitement of being with so many fellow lesbians in one theater, and the film joyfully embraces that sort of raucousness. Even in San Francisco, it was still difficult to express same-sex feelings in public, and except for bars, private gatherings, and special occasions as these the coming together of so many various women of the same sex was not common. One can sense the thrill of the experience.

     Before the films began Hammer spoke, talking about how she wanted her audience to actually feel the sensation of the films, to share the emotional responses of the women within her films. She spoke of a desire for a tactile presence and a full emotional response. In Pools, she laughed, she wanted the women “to get wet.”

     In a discussion after the British showing, the women who gathered all clearly felt positive about what they had just witnessed, but were perhaps a little stunned by something which they claimed they had seldom experienced before on film. They were not so much shocked, but some of them a little offended of the actual display of a female vagina, fearful that it might border on pornography or that it might be used for other purposes by male viewers. There were even questions of whether or not males should be permitted to see her films, something Hammer and others strongly argued against since it was perhaps most necessary to educate males about the lesbian world so that they might comprehend that lesbians too participated in sex, enjoyed love, shared pleasure with each other. One woman strangely described pornography as an activity of looking at the self. But perhaps that was because she had seen mostly heterosexual porno which, of course, features the female body under the male gaze. The British audience were reserved and a bit frightened since as one woman explained, they were all rather hidden, poor, and forced to simply survive in always cold and damp clime of London. Yet the very notions that Hammer represented in her films had opened up new ways of seeing for the various lesbians of 1981 or ‘82 in London.

    On the other hand, in Montreal, the women, as one of them put it, were all beautiful, quite intelligent, and knowledgeable, mostly in awe of Hammer, cajoling her to move there to be with them. Drinks in hand, these women moved more freely around a much larger space and speaking in both French and English had a much more sophisticated notion of who they were and what Hammer’s films meant to them, almost entirely positive, although the issue of sexual imagery did again arise momentarily, which when I think back would have been still somewhat shocking in 1982, although gay male porno was well established and had begun to cross over to more serious gay cinema already by that time. But this Montreal group seemed quite aware of the difference between Hammer’s representation of the body and the way the body was represented in pornography. 

   Sally Jane Black, on the Letterboxd site, wrote a fascinating commentary that began with Hammer’s appearance at the San Francisco event, the first paragraph of which is worth sharing. At one point, one of the women identifies herself as an epidemiologist studying sexually transmitted diseases, whose first question she generally asks, she jokes, was “who did you sleep with last night?” Taken a bit aback, Hammer suggests that she would be more interested in knowing what disease she had and how to get rid of it, although she wasn’t shy about admitting that she had had wonderful sex the night before the event. Black summarizes my feelings as well:

 

“The epidemiologist who studied sexually transmitted diseases was on the cusp of her whole world being turned upside down, I suspect, given the date of this release. It's a powerful phenomenon to witness someone whose future you know is going to radically change in a short period of time documented before that change comes. It has a similar feeling to when you look back at media about pandemics now; it feels different than it did in its original context. When this came out, the full extent of the HIV/AIDS epidemic was not known nor even perhaps imagined. Her interview in this is brief and mostly irrelevant to my speculations; she charmingly engages with Hammer about sex and queer representation. It is very telling that she stated that the staff where she worked needed more education about queer experiences.”

 

     These small revelations of the time in which Hammer’s film was made—several of which appear throughout this short documentary—are what make this work so significant. It is as if looking back into a world and time when the LGBTQ issues, our rights and concerns we now take for granted, were at best fuzzy, undefined and at worst seemed improbable. These women, mostly in their 20s and 30s in the film, now in their 60s and 70s, lived as outsiders in countries (US, England, and Canada) filled with citizens mostly disapproving and even disgusted by their behavior. Barbara Hammer, who in this film is an attractive woman, died in 2019 at the age of 80.

      Once again, Black nicely capsulizes those feelings:

 

“The impact of seeing queer women in 1981…enthused about a rare instance of cinematic representation cannot be understated. Today, we have the Internet to help us dig through the constantly expanding history of queer cinema, but in 1981, independent showings or other fringe events were possibly the only way to see a Barbara Hammer film. We get to see queer people in queer spaces (temporary or not) watching cinema made for them, then dissecting it, responding to it, feeling it. … What I see is the time capsule, the fragments of a world in between Stonewall and ACT UP. It evokes a deep yearning for moments of sorority with other lesbians, dykes, and queer people in general, something that the past year has denied so many of us. It shows the spirit of these spaces where being queer or a woman was being celebrated instead of derided or controlled. That feeling alone is worth watching for.”

 

Los Angeles, March 14, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (March 2024).

Rainer Werner Fassbinder | Querelle / 1982

killing softly with love

Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Burkhard Driest (screenplay, based on the novel by Jean Genet), Rainer Werner Fassbinder (director) Querelle / 1982

 

Totally by coincidence, I watched Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s last film, Querelle, on the 33rd anniversary of his 1982 death by a drug overdose. I had been putting off the viewing this film for a very long time, since, although I had never seen the entire film, I had previewed long clips, and wasn’t particularly pleased with what I saw. Yet, all the other Fassbinder films I had seen since were absolutely wonderful in my estimation. Like The New York Times critic, Vincent Canby, given the passages I’d observed, I was ready to declare his final work as a “mess,” a “detour” in the work of an important European filmmaker. Canby, a great admirer of Fassbinder films in general, found this work as a “humorless” and “witless” production.

     I guess I needed to see 25 other films before I could tackle the difficulties of this last work, released after Fassbinder’s death. Even in this most recent viewing, I recalled what I didn’t like about the portions I had previously viewed. Nobody in this film of exaggerated melodrama even pretends to be “acting,” their lines delivered as if the figures were performing a campy production on a high school stage, with sets designed by local cartoonists and lit by a host of gay “queens” of the old school, who one can almost hear shouting out to lighting crew: “rose red, deep-sea blue, meadowlark yellow, lemongrass green!” The costumes, as some critics complained, seem to have been stolen from the wardrobe of mediocre comic operettas of the 1930s. The plot meanders back and forth through the original Genet work, Querelle de Brest, as if the director had leafed through its pages, cut them out of the binding, and threw them into the air before readapting them to film. The work’s two songs was composed by the highly gifted Peer Raben, composer of many of Fassbinder’s scores, both won Razzie Awards for the worst songs of the year. Of particular disinterest is the corny rendition, sung by Jeanne Moreau, of the Oscar Wilde lyrics from “The Ballad of Reading Goal,” ''Each man kills the thing he loves ... dahdee-dah-dee-dah.''

     The questions the film version calls up are so numerous that one might actually produce a small pamphlet listing them. “Why do the two brothers of this work, Querelle (Brad Davis) and Robert (Hanno Pöschl) so simultaneously hate and love one another? Why does Querelle suddenly determine to kill his accomplice in a cocaine deal, and yet, at the last moment, lick the blood from his breast? Why does Querelle purposely loose his dice toss with Lysiane’s (Jeanne Moreau) husband, Nono (Günther Kaufmann), allowing himself to be fucked by him? And, given the situation, what do Lysiane and Nono see in one another, particularly given the fact that Nono is apparently gay, and Lysiane heterosexual? And why, given Querelle’s apparent love of gay sex, is he even attracted to Lysiane?

      Given a script that seems to have slipped out of Charles Ludlam’s Ridiculous Theater’s repertory, does any of this matter? Despite Canby’s serious-minded huffing, Fassbinder has actually created a quite comical send up of Genet’s hothouse sex story, creating a kind of gay fantasia in which everybody is desperate to fuck, suck, fight, rob, and kill one another. There is not a single figure in this work who isn’t hounded by sexual obsession, and the sweaty pretty boys of Fassbinder’s work are perfectly aware of their power, posing against the film’s absurd phallic pillars like models from Pierre & Gilles photographic paintings.* 

      Fassbinder, it is clear, has little interest in this film in plot or even a coherent story, but is simply interested in creating a theatrically charged stage to portray the passions of gay and bisexual love. No one else need apply. Even Lysiane seems to be a kind of drag queen, while at the other end, the closeted Lieutenant Seblon (Franco Nero) pours his heart out to a tape recorder, fantasizing himself in Querelle’s arms, a dream which, right out of fairy tales, eventually comes true.

 

    Expanding on the films of Kenneth Anger, Jack Smith, Andy Warhol, and even Genet himself, Fassbinder bid farewell to realism in this film, and moved instead to hyper-theatrical world that attempted to speak to the gay sensibility, not to its reality. In a sense, one can see the roots of this film in his earliest works such as Love Is Colder Than Death and The American Soldier where violence is portrayed in terms that are closer to kabuki and reveal the sensual dance of two males in each other’s arms. But by 1982, for Fassbinder, the dance had perhaps less to do with actual passion than with the comic routines of Chaplin and Keaton; love and death, always closely intertwined in Fassbinder’s vision, had become non-emotional issues—almost formal gestures—at which one could simply laugh, something that, to steal the lyrics of the Fox/Gimbel song sung by Roberta Flack, “kills one softly with love.”

 

*Pierre Commoy and Gilles Blanchard are French gay artists who since 1976 have created numerous works of photography and painting that represent purposely kitsch and exaggeratedly romantic portraits of gay and heterosexual figures. I’ve posted one of their works above.

 

Los Angeles, June 12, 2017

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2017).

Ernst Lubitsch | The Marriage Circle / 1924

appearing to be what they are not

by Douglas Messerli

 

Paul Bern (screenplay, based on a play by Lothar Schmidt), Ernst Lubitsch (director) The Marriage Circle / 1924

 

Given the fast pace, quick cuts, and risqué subjects of many of Ernst Lubitsch’s early Berlin silent films, his second American production, The Marriage Circle of 1924, seems almost to be slow-paced and somewhat prudish, furling out of a plot that, although in many ways is obviously inspired by the writing of Arthur Schnitzler, lacks the Austrian genius’ complexity and wit. The “marriage circle” of Lothar Schmidt’s play is a far more limited gathering of the hands than Schnitzler’s Reigen, and rather than focusing on the faithlessness of all involved, forces its erotic adventurers to rub up against the solid, stolid Brauns (Monte Blau and Florence Vidor), a newly married couple who are in obvious marital bliss.

     Some of the cinematic foot-dragging surely had to do with the fact that Lubitsch realized that he was no longer in Weimar Berlin, where audiences were eager for outré behavior, and used to the quick-witted, fast-moving farces for which he had become so noted. While these films might have played well in New York or, possibly, even Los Angeles, the vast Midwestern, New England, and Southern US audiences were perceived as being far more prudish, with the director perhaps even imagining them as a bit slow-minded when it came to his sudden cross-cuts and unpredictable entries and exits. Certainly Chaplin, in the movie that perhaps most influenced The Marriage Circle, had begun to challenge those assumptions in his A Woman of Paris of 1923, but it is clear that Lubitsch felt safer on American soil using more conservative dramatic techniques such as the long shot.

     That doesn’t mean that this brilliant silent work doesn’t have the energy of his earlier works—in fact, it many respects it is simply a refined and clearer vision of what would eventually be described as the “Lubistch touch.” And the almost complete absence of inter-title cards, helped to pave the way for the cinematic techniques of the “talkies.”

      The film begins with what what might described as the “naughty” couple, the coquettish and utterly selfish Mizzi (the marvelous Marie Prevost) and her justifiably irritated husband, Professor Stock (Adolphe Menjou), who has been so neglected that he can’t even find a pair of socks without a hole. In her morning dressing, Mizzi heaps his wrinkled clothes upon a chair, before tossing them haphazardly upon the bed; as he prepares to shave, she absconds with his mirror, preening her frizzy hair without giving her husband a thought. While she opens a drawer filled with nylons, in his drawer of the same cupboard there is nothing to be found but starched collars—not only a commentary of her neglect but, perhaps, his lack of sexual attentions to her. For Mizzi, clearly, is a woman of the flesh. With the help of her maids, she dresses in a snazzy, up-to-date, Klimt-inspired dress, ready to take on the world in her voyage around Vienna, while Stock, in frustration, returns to bed.

 

     When she finally does leave the room, he again rises to sort out his limited possibilities, doing his exercises along the parallel of the wall. Angry with his behavior, and being clearly a woman who must have the last word, she renters the room (in another of this director’s notorious door-focused scenes), while Stock has turned vertically against the wall, bending over to display—far more discretely perhaps than in the great dance scene of The Oyster Princess, but just as obviously—his bum.

      Mizzi is also the kind of woman who is not above bribing a taxi cab driver awaiting a paid customer, to steal away the ride. When the man who has hired the cab, Doctor Braun, discovers the cab about to pull away, he understandably complains; yet when he perceives the beauty of the thief, he gallantly is prepared to give it up. The brassy Mizzi offers to share the cab, wherein she begins a flirtatious series of events that ends up, in comic suspension, when she later discovers that the man in the cab just happens to be the husband of a woman friend she about to visit, Charlotte Braun.

     From his bedroom window Stock has observed his wife speed off with the stranger, and determines to visit a private detective to follow her, prove her infidelity, and procure a divorce.

     If the story lacks believability, it is in part because it is difficult to comprehend how these two such different women have come to be friends in the first place. Although the action of this work is set in Vienna, the Brauns purposely are played more as Americans than Europeans, with Charlotte carefully and tastefully dressed in a manner that might have been appropriate to her Victorian mother. She is found singing Grieg’s “I Love Thee Truly,” while the vixenish Mizzi mocks her friend’s bliss. Once Braun himself shows up in her friend’s house, obviously the subject of his wife’s devotion, it is clear that Mizzi can hardly control herself: as a compulsive vamp, she cannot stop until she has won the sexual attentions of her friend’s husband.

 

    Fortunately, for the sake of Lubitsch’s tale, the doctor is also a straight ace, deeply in love with his wife, and as the complications begin to pile up, he clumsily attempts to escape the coquette’s embraces, while merely getting caught up deeper and deeper into the coils of her plots. To perfectly balance the structural makeup of the characters, the playwright introduces a more comic, male version of Mizzi in the Doctor’s partner, Dr. Gustav Mueller (Creighton Hale), who is ready, at an appropriate moment, to sweep up Charlotte into his arms. Unlike Mizzi, however, Mueller is a piker, a boy-man who adores Braun’s wife with a puppy-love patience, taking advantage only when it appears to both Charlotte and him that Braun is cheating.

     The joy of this film centers upon the scheming of Mizzi, which, at moments, almost appears to pay off, providing, quite obviously, a surreptitious joy to its American audiences, particular since the story punishes only the lecher, the coquette, and her bored husband, while permitting the conventional, American-like pair to re-unite.

    As some critics have noted, however, it is clear that Lubitsch (and perhaps the playwright) still sought the last laugh by having Charlotte attempt to teach her husband a lesson, admitting her own. quite innocent. dalliances with Mueller. Fortunately, Braun, now a “putz,” cannot believe them, laughing at the absurdity of the truth behind his wife’s back. In the innocence of their rigid moral values, the possibility of extra-marital affairs and the failure of this couple’s relationship is unthinkable, while we are left to wonder, what about the “next time” when people and events appear to be what they are not. How will they react, moreover, if Braun is called to testify, as Professor Stock has promised, in the divorce proceedings?    

 

Los Angeles, June 19,2015

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2015).

John Madden | Shakespeare in Love / 1998

an historical-romantic, tragi-comical, post-modern, sentimental mystery

by Douglas Messerli

 

Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard (screenplay, based on a script by Marc Norman), John Madden (director) Shakespeare in Love / 1998

 

If Polonius were alive today—and he is by many other names—he might well describe Marc Norman’s and Tom Stoppard’s script in the manner with which I’ve titled this piece, for director John Madden seems, in his very busy narrative, to have wanted to include everything one could in one work about the young Will Shakespeare and his times.

   Unable to write and, apparently, sexually unstimulated, the young, lonely Will (Joseph Fiennes) in London is having a difficult time of it, shifting between acting and writing, while having to appease the theater owner’s commitments and the actors’—particularly in the instance of Richard Burbage (Martin Clunes)—vanity. Promises are made and broken, producers are tortured for non-payment, and behind-the-curtain deals are made, while the government, in the form of The Master of the Revels, Edward Tilney (Simon Callow) threatens to close down all theaters. 

     Although he has a vague idea for a comedy, Romeo and Ethel, the Pirate’s Daughter, Shakespeare can find no words to express it. Fortunately, his friendly-rival, Christopher “Kit” Marlowe (Rupert Everett), suggests that he make it an Italian story, with a love interest of a young girl from a warring family with a brother named Mercutio. His pirate story, in short, has begun to shape up into what we now know as Romeo and Juliet—if only he had a young Romeo or Juliet to inspire him to write:

     Shakespeare finds both in the daughter of a wealthy businessman, Viola de Lesseps (Gwenyth Paltrow), who comes to him dressed as a male, Thomas Kent, hoping to play the lead. Smitten with theater and with Shakespeare’s writing, Viola cannot appear on stage as a woman, so must win over the playwright as a man, which she immediately does with her convincing acting. Yet at the very moment of charming him, after he demands that she remove her hat that hides her golden curls, she rushes off, with the charmed Shakespeare on the chase. 

    Always with Elizabethan theater, and particularly with Shakespeare, given the demand that only males perform in the theater, the very issue of drag creates a slight frisson for LGBTQ+ audiences, and particularly in this case, where Will believes he is in love with a boy who actually is a female in male drag, it appears the film might move toward a gay romp. Alas, Norman and Stoppard, along with Madden’s direction takes us into total heteronormative territory as quickly as possible, despite the fact that in this instance it is because Viola is not a male that they must keep their love a deep secret.

      Will’s chase leads to the home of Lord and Lady de Lesseps, who are about to the marry off their daughter to the crude and money hungry, yet royally-connected Lord Wessex (Colin Firth). In search of the young actor Kent, Shakespeare interlopes upon the party, in a dance coming face to face with the beautiful Viola, thunderously falling in love. Threated by the jealous Wessex, the playwright gives his name as Kit Marlowe, thus unintentionally threatening the other’s life, which later becomes a major element of the plot when Marlowe is killed in a bar, with the young Will believing he was the cause.

     By the time the story has gone this far, there are so many avenues down which the authors’ take the plot that it’s hard to know how to untie their knotted entwinements. It hardly matters that at moments their story is filled with sophomoric humor that one might encounter in Airplane! or any number of bad-boy bromances (at one moment, for example, Shakespeare is seen drinking from a cup inscribed with the words “Souvenir of Stratford-Upon-Avon), while at other moments the film presents itself as a witty commentary on Shakespeare’s time; the central story follows much of the plot of Romeo and Juliet without the Capulets (although there are plenty of sword fights), interweaving the fictional affair offstage of Will and Viola with the onstage tragic love tale of Shakespeare’s lovers. The next generation’s popular playwright, John Webster, makes a cameo as a nasty boy actor (Joe Roberts), while the highly esteemed actor Burbage finally comes round to help out Shakespeare by allowing him to use his theater.

      Married off to Wessex, Viola nonetheless escapes to watch the play, in which, when news spreads that the male-Juliet is ill, she suddenly discovers herself again acting, this time playing out on stage what the couple has been exploring in the wings. Even Queen Elizabeth (in the form of the magisterial acting of Judi Dench) enters the scene to save the day and award Shakespeare the money from an earlier wager that theater can somehow be true to life.

      If the film seems to be a grand pastiche, it would appear that the authors’ have gotten their point across. For the charm of this work is that, despite its declarations for realist theater, it is a post-modern mish-mash that works against most realist conventions, tossing numerous anachronisms, illogical plot developments, snippets of lines from other Shakespeare and Elizabethan dramas, ridiculous skits with dogs, and the shit and slops of the London streets all into the same pot. That it all somehow works, coming together to provide its audience with a truly wry lark, as theater producer Philip Henslowe (Geoffrey Rush) keeps insisting, is a mystery.

    

Los Angeles, June 13, 2015

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2015).