Rainer Werner Fassbinder | Der amerikanische Soldat (The American Soldier) / 1970

dance of death

by Douglas Messerli

Rainer Werner Fassbinder (screenwriter and director) Der amerikanische Soldat (The American Soldier) / 1970

 

As the third in a series of films using the tropes of American gangster films, Fassbinder’s Der amerikanische Soldat (The American Soldier) is the least narrative and the most abstract. Like the two other previous works, Love Is Colder Than Death and Gods of the Plague, the action, embedded in the underworld of Munich, involves tough-guy punks who, returning to that German city, look up their old friends (played by Fassbinder in the earliest film and Harry Baer in the second, and resurrected and again played by Fassbinder in The American Soldier) who vaguely reacclimate themselves to the city by visiting old haunts—bars and neighborhoods—and, after reestablishing a close relationship with their male friend that borders on a homoerotic if not utterly homosexual bonding, finding themselves facing the barrel of a gun. If that homoerotic bonding is missing from the third film—although The American Soldier ends with a far stranger homosexual situation that the first two—it is because the central character of the third film, Ricky (Karl Scheydt) is a loner who, although encountering some of the same figures who appear in the other two films, in particular the porn-seller Magdalena Fuller (Katrin Schaake in this version), doesn’t really sexually commit to anyone. In fact, one might argue, Ricky is not so much a character-as-type in this instance as he is a type-as-pretended character. For in The American Soldier is it clear that Fassbinder is less interested in any coherent narrative plot that in simply illuminating the archetypal figures underlying the whole series of loosely inter-connected films.

     But once set in motion, this dark angel, it is clear, has little room in his life for human interchange and, in particular, for anything that might resemble love. Even before he arrives, he attempts to ditch the talkative broad whom he has apparently picked up en route. When she doesn’t get the hint, he drives to an isolated location, parks the car, and drags her out onto the grass before taking out his gun and shooting her dead, this—the only time—in pretense; “they’re only blanks,” he manically laughs, driving off into the darkness.

 

    As soon has he checks to the hotel he orders a bottle of Ballantine (scotch)—his one apparent vice—delivered up soon after by the hot-to-trot hotel maid (played by the now well-known filmmaker Margarethe von Trotta), who in an almost campy pose positions herself to be awarded his impulsive kiss, before, just as impulsively, he brusquely orders her out of his room.  At a local bar, he re-counters his former lover (played by Fassbinder’s former wife, Ingrid Carven) singing “With My Tears.” But nothing from the past is stirred up between them, particularly after she reports that she is now happily married to the bartender. And soon after, tracking down his first victim, a beautiful if aging gypsy, palm-reading-gay boy (Uli Lommel)—who like the woman before him, attempts to lure the handsome American into his bed—Ricky promptly shoots him dead. Soon after, he plugs the pornographer who has steered him to the gypsy, as she returns home from an evening with her boyfriend, who is so startled by the point-blank shooting that he can only laugh, as he too is shot in the chest.

      The only sexual contact that Ricky has in this film is with a call-girl named Rosa von Paunheim (the moniker of another German filmmaker, and played by the transgender actor Elga Sorbas—born Holger Mischwitki)—a woman in cahoots with the crooked detectives—occurs with hardly any bodily movement while the jealous hotel maid sits on the corner of their bed relating a long story—oddly, a variation of the plot of Fassbinder’s yet-to-be filmed flick Ali: Fear Eats the Soul*; and even in that encounter Ricky seems to be performing as the passive partner, stretched out naked on the bed before Rosa even enters. Goodbye to the illusion that Americans are great lovers! 

    Later, we discover, Rosa grows to care for him, as she puts it, because he is “nice.” But if the murders of three individuals weren’t enough to prove that adjective to be absurd, his and her negotiation down the stairs to elude the suddenly-suiciding room maid (who has just received a call from her current boyfriend to tell her their relationship is kaput), should have wised up the dumb broad.

      A visit by Ricky to his obviously estranged mother and brother is creepy enough that any romantic notions we may have entertained about this man and his past are quickly dismissed. When he attempts to kiss his magisterially aloof mother (Eva Ingeborg Scholz), she turns her face away. Within the dimly lit house we discover a pin-ball machine over which hovers an over-wrought brother (Kurt Raab), who greets his clearly beloved sibling by rubbing his hand across his face, as he were a blind man. Ricky immediately wipes the gesture away as if he had been rubbed with blood instead of simply being touched.

     And a short while later, when Ricky turns up at Rosa’s apartment, we and she both realize that this “nice” man is about to wipe her out as well, a fate she accepts by hugging him close to her at the moment the gun explodes.

     Ricky, it appears, is neither straight nor gay, but sexless, a man who consumes people, like the steak from which he steals only one bite early in the film, in tiny increments. His hunger, apparently, is only for others to disappear—which perhaps explains the near empty streets of Fassbinder’s cinematic city.

      The evil cops realize that once they have set this destructive robot on its course there are no magic words (like “Gort! Klaatu barada nikto”) to stop him. The only way to shut him down is to track his whereabouts and shoot it out.

      Even Ricky’s mother is on her guard, sending out her own detectives to follow him on his travels. The scene in which Ricky stops by a roadside pay phone to call his friend Kurt, followed by the detective in the next booth, both presumably followed by the murder-minded authorities reminds me of a Lewis Allen noir I saw just the other day, Illegal, in which a judge (Edward G. Robinson) is being followed by a detective working for the prosecuting attorneys, both followed by the cops. No one trusts anyone to get the job done.

     In Fassbinder’s variation of this trope, Ricky is cornered in a long train station passageway by the police before the tables are turned by Ricky’s friend Franz just before they, in turn, are surprised by the appearance, at the other end of the dark passage by Ricky’s mother and brother. The rest is pure dance.

      Let me explain. First of all, as I think anyone reading my summary above would perceive, The American Soldier has very little of what might be described as “plot.” A thread perhaps—the murders of four individuals (five if you count the room maid) whom this passionless killer encounter—is all we have to go on. There’s no story because there’s nothing behind this humanoid hero. He’s just another, sort of, pretty face. How then, to explain The American Soldier? I argue that this seemingly incomprehensible film is one of the great German director’s most important works—a sort of Rosetta stone that reveals not so much Fassbinder’s meanings as it does his methods. The American Soldier simply doesn’t function as what we usually think of as a traditional movie, that is, a narrative that uses images to get its story across, a story that usually provides some sort of meaning or significance to our lives.

      Here there are all sorts of significant moments expressed. Individuals encounter one another and nearly devour each other in their stares. Even the old neighbor woman who recognizes Ricky and Franz stalking out their old home ground, greets them with disbelief, staring after their departure as if hinting at some deep secret. Ricky’s old lover, the bar singer, cannot keep her eyes off of him. The gypsy surveys Ricky’s body while slowly unveiling his own naked chest before a mirror. The room maid awaits his hugs as if she were undergoing a catatonic fit. Rosa rubs up against him as if she might set him afire. As I previously reported, his own brother cannot resist rubbing his hand across his face. For all of these figures, apparently, Ricky represents something highly totemic: he stands for something important in their lives—desire, love, fantastic sex, fulfillment, escape (Rosa is after all willing to run away with him)—about which the viewers remain clueless, as if the story behind their reactions had been erased.

     Indeed, Fassbinder, while using and exaggerating the standard and familiar tropes of gangster noirs and melodramatic domestic dramas of American cinema, such as the movie masterworks of Douglas Sirk, has wrenched them just enough out focus that in this film they suddenly appear to be slightly incomprehensible, fresh, and strange.

     Even the character’s simple gestures, their strides across open space, their stances in a room, their positioning in a chair, seem throughout this work to be radically askew, as if the film as suddenly skipped a few frames in its spool. Or, we might more correctly describe Fassbinder’s attention to his figures’ movements as being a thing of dance.

     In short, this entire work relies on a figure moving through space who encounters others who, instead of coherently speaking, can only gesture and dance. The whole piece, we suddenly perceive is one grand ballet, a stunning dance of death.

     The man who loves no one, who knows nothing but how to kill—quite obviously, death himself—requires every other figure to embrace him, as all of us ultimately must embrace our own mortality. And Fassbinder’s film can best be understood, accordingly, as a playing out of a gentleman caller with scythe in hand.

    That is, however, until death himself is shot down, whirling out a dance of death even more grand that what he has offered others. Spinning, twirling, bending, and, falling, collapsing, finally death itself is taken down; and suddenly, in its vacuum, can finally be tamed, mounted if you like, sexually ravaged in a way that death previously, in its utter disinterest in the human race, could never enact. The long five-minute sequence which shows Ricky von Rezzori’s** little brother mounting his elder’s body, pulling it upon him, rolling over it again and again, not only reveals what is a clearly a horrifying transgressive lust (pederastic, incestual and necrophiliac all at once)—all vaguely smiled-upon in voyeuristic contemplation by their mother—is simultaneously, strangely, a highly redemptive act—the first real act that doesn’t have to do with shooting a gun. In a film deprived of human interactions, this final series of heaving sexual excess—the very opposite of Ricky’s and Rosa’s coupling—has, if nothing else, to do (half of it at least) with the living instead of the dead. If it is, quite obviously, a non-generative act, it nonetheless is a dance of primal urgency, a performance of undefinable, unspeakable and unquenchable desire that Ricky as Death’s messenger, could never comprehend***

 

Los Angeles, October 17, 2014

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2014).

    

*Of the reviews and essays I’ve read, the critic who has noticed this recounting of later movie’s plot has been Jim Clark, who has written extensively, and often brilliantly on Fassbinder’s films on the internet. http://jclarmedia.com/fassbinder/fassbinder06.html

**Van Rezzori, Clark reminds us, was also the name of the wealthy patroness, who bankrolls the character’s voyage to Peru in Fassbinder’s 1971 film, Rio das Mortes, a fact which suggests, along with the reference cited above that Fassbinder was working on several future works at the same time he was writing and producing the four films and one TV feature of the 1970s.

***Fassbinder’s film, in fact, had an enormous impact on American art, through the director’s friendship with artist Robert Longo, who borrowed not only the specific image of “The American Soldier” from the filmmaker, but used similar images of gesturally dancing figures through the paintings and performances of the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s.

     Longo, also a good friend of Howard’s and mine (Howard curated a show titled Robert Longo at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1989, and wrote the first published essay on Longo in our Sun & Moon: A Journal of Literature & Art in the Fall of 1979, which featured a reproduction of his “The American Soldier” on the cover), has readily admitted to Fassbinder’s—as well as Goddard, Coppola and other filmmaker’s—influence upon his work. I have written about performances that play out interests in violence and love.

 

Arturo Ripstein | El lugar sin limites (Hell without Limits, aka The Place without Limits) / 1978

a spiral into to death

by Douglas Messerli

 

José Donoso, with José Emilio Pacheco, Manuel Puig and Arturo Ripstein (screenplay based on Donoso’s fiction), Arturo Ripstein (director) El lugar sin limites (Hell without Limits, aka The Place without Limits) / 1978

 

Based on the fiction Hell Has No Limits by Chilean writer José Donoso—a book published in English by my own Sun & Moon and Green Integer presses—Arturo Ripstein’s El lugar sin limites, although fairly faithful to the Donoso book (and one cannot imagine a more illustrious group of screenplay writers), moves at a slower pace, and, in its necessary visual literal recreation of the book’s world, loses many of psychological dimensions and surrealist-like transitions of the fiction. And, of course, the film has lost nearly all of Donoso’s linguistic patterns, brilliantly recreated in the English of Suzanne Jill Levine’s translation. I’ll point to a single example to make my case. In the final, brutal beating of the central character, La Manuela (Roberto Cobo), which results in the transvestite’s death, the original book presents the scene as a kind of perverse, almost sado-masochistic murder that encompasses the entire hell of La Manuela:

“Before he could move, the men burst through the bushes and fell upon him like hungry animals. Octavio, or maybe Pancho first, started lashing at him with fists…perhaps it wasn’t them, but other men who had pierced the thicket and found him and thrown themselves upon him, their hot bodies writhing, gasping over la Manuela who could no longer scream, their heavy, stiff bodies, the three of them one sticky mass squirming like some fantastic, three-headed animal with multiple limbs, wounded and seething, the three fused there in the grass by vomit and heat and pain, looking for the one to blame, punishing him, her, them, shuddering gratifications, excruciating confusion, la Manuela’s frail body resists no more, breaks under the strain, can’t even moan from the pain, hot mouths, hot hands, slavering, hard bodies wounding his, bodies that howl and insult and grope, that monster of three tortuous bodies, breaking and tearing and raking and probing, until nothing is left and now la Manuela scarcely sees, scarcely hears, scarcely feels, sees, no, doesn’t see, and they escape through the blackberry bushes and she left alone by the river that separates her from the vineyards where Don Alejo waits, benevolent.”

 

     In the film, La Manuela is chased through the streets of Estación El Olivo by Pancho (Gonzalo Vega) and his brother-in-law, Octavio (Julián Pastor) in Pancho’s red truck, simply grabbed, beaten, and left for dead, with Don Alejo declaring the news that the body is a corpse. The dramatic intensity, the entwining of hate, fear, and love, has been completely obliterated.

      Despite the good intentions of Ripstein’s film, including the fact that as early as 1978 a director would dare to take up the story of a flamenco-dancing transvestite and his daughter trapped in the outpost of the Chilean countryside, the basically realist pretentions of the film sever most of the supple links in the original between present and past, between the inner and outer worlds of its figures, and transforms it into a slow-moving portrait of its central figure on the day of his death. Indeed, except for a central scene describing how La Manuela has arrived in this no-man’s land and bore a child with then whorehouse owner, La Japonesa (Lucha Villa), this movie is located in the present, as Pancho drives into town after an absence of about a year and honks his horn to announce his arrival, whereas in the book that event occurs the night before La Manuela awakens, when she is unsure whether she has dreamt it or not.       

      That may seem like only a minor difference, but the lack of specific knowledge, the inability to know the reality of one’s own life, is at the very center of this work. Few in this emptying village, in fact, will even face the reality that their beloved Don Alejo, who owns most of the place, is not attempting to return the electric power, which mysteriously has been turned off, but is trying to buy up anything he does not own. The film suggests that if he succeeds he will sell it back to others for a higher price, but the fiction offers a more logical conclusion: that he will tear it down to expand his vineyards. Only Octavio and Pancho seem to realize the truth, while La Manuela’s daughter, the smart manager of the whorehouse, is blind to Don Alejo’s evil intentions—and, at both film’s and fiction’s end—still believes that Manuela will return home in a day or so, without realizing that in a few days, she too will be metaphorically dead, stripped of her home and income.

         Nonetheless, Ripstein’s work does succeed in recounting the arch of events which begin with La Manuela’s fears about reencountering the violent Pancho, and, throughout the day, the spiral down, like the dance itself, into her death. Throughout, Pancho is seen as a kind of brute animal, a married man who leaves his wife to the shanty while he roams about the countryside, whoring. Yet the handsome truck-driver, we suspect, has his own secrets. Forced as a child to play with Don Alejo’s daughter, a girl of his own age, and almost seen as an adopted son by Don Alejo’s now insane wife, Pancho has been torn between events that might have blossomed into an adult relationship with the girl while at the same time, playing dolls with her, he is described as a “sissy.” The film omits this tension, but it makes it clear, nonetheless, that Pancho, despite his macho demeanor, is a man of inner tensions, a man, in fact, obsessed with La Manuela, and intent on revisiting her that evening.

 

     So too is La Manuela obsessed with Pancho, despite her fears scurrying about throughout the day to find enough red thread to mend the flamenco dress he had torn off her body months before. Indeed nearly everyone in this work might be said to be attracted to or caught up in Pancho’s animal magnetism. La Manuela’s Japonesita (Ana Martin) attempts to masturbate him and later flirts with and is nearly raped by him at the whorehouse. Octavio, selling his gas station to Don Alejo, attempts to help out his brother-in-law by giving him most of his money to pay off the red truck which Don Alejo has helped Pancho to purchase. Don Alejo, although disgusted with Pancho’s behavior (he had hoped he might get an education and become an important figure) still hopes to control the young man.

      In such a hot-house environment, every relationship is a dangerous one, and, if boundaries are strict they are necessarily surreptitiously crossed. Of course, that is La Manuela’s specialty, waiting until her customers are drunk and happy before appearing in her red dress to dance a ridiculously inept flamenco. She survives in their laughter, playfully teasing them by her very outrageousness, which frees them, perhaps, to escape—at least temporarily—from their sexual identities.

      In hiding when Pancho and Octavio arrive, La Manuela observes Pancho’s abuse of Japnesita, and in an attempt, in part, to save her, suddenly appears to dance. Once more it seems to work, the laughter and mockery turning gradually into infatuation, resulting in a deep kiss between the two men. Octavio’s sudden appearance, after having sex with another of the whores, however, changes everything.  Observing the kiss, he accuses Pancho of being a “faggot,” a role that Pancho, in his personal homophobic hell, cannot accept. He has no choice, accordingly, but to destroy the object of his infatuation.

     Don Alejo and his brand of “patronage,” finally, has helped to create this vengeful world in which apparently no one can truly face the truth that they all exist in a hell without limits, which ultimately will destroy everyone.

 

Los Angeles, May 13, 2013

Reprinted from International Cinema Review (May 2013).

Carlos Hugo Christensen | A Intrusa (The Intruder) / 1979

brotherly love

by Douglas Messerli

 

Carlos Hugo Christensen, Ubirajara Raffo Constant, and Orígenes Lessa (screenplay, based on the story “La intrusa” by Jorge Luis Borges), Carlos Hugo Christensen (director) A Intrusa (The Intruder) / 1979

 

Quite by accident I came across an English language-subtitled version of Carlo Hugo Christensen’s 1979 film, A Intrusa, based on a short story by Jorge Luis Borges, “La intrusa.”

     The story, written earlier but published finally in 1966, concerns two gaucho brothers living in the 1890s upon the Argentine pampas (filmed in Uruguaiana, Rio Grande do Su, Brazil on the Eastern side of Uruguay bordering Argentina). In the Borges story, the two blond Nilsen brothers, Christian (José de Abreu) and Eduardo (Arlindo Barreto), who mostly trade horses, cure hides, and raise sheep and cocks—a couple of the latter which during the course of the film they enter into a local cockfight, the first of which Christian wins in the scene that introduces this film.

     The brothers also regularly take advantage of the local brothel, as well as occasionally working for others as cattle rustlers. Both the brothers are known throughout the community for their bad tempers, and keep others away from their own small spread.

      In short, these brothers outwardly project the behavior and mores of those surrounding them, but at home show another side of themselves consisting of great affection and tenderness for one another. As critics have noted, the film and story present these figures in a kind of Jekyll and Hyde relationship, representing to the outside world a dangerous force which is utterly ameliorated within their home.

     Evidently in the Borges story and certainly in Christensen’s cinematic version, there is also something a bit “queer” about their fraternal relationship within the confines of their own ranch. We sense this almost from the first moments of the film when returning home after the cockfight they strip naked and mock-fight, much like the cocks they’ve just witnessed, before they crawl into bed with one another.

      But we know that in this macho world we must also be somewhat careful in how we evaluate that relationship. As the critic Herbert J. Brant notes, in Hispanic culture the choice of a female sexual partner does not necessarily mean “that the male character is, by definition, exclusively and permanently heterosexual.” Women, in the highly patriarchal society of the day, were even less than objects. They were useful as housekeepers and a source of release for the male sexual drive, but, as with the woman in this story, Juliana (María Zilda Bethlem), they could also be bought and sold.

      The purchase of Juliana by Eduardo evidently serves a double purpose as obtaining a cook and housecleaner as well as providing him with heterosexual release. But her arrival also represents the “intruder” of both Borges’ and Christensen’s work. To make certain the viewer immediately recognizes the significance of her entrance, the director has waited to announce the major credits of the film, including its title, cast, and other film crew the 18 long minutes of film-time it has taken to get to this point.

       It is immediately apparent that the Eduardo’s new woman serves as a terrible break in the intimate world of the two brothers upon which both have so long depended. And the handsome Christian, observing the newcomer’s arrival is clearly caught off guard and frustrated. He takes off early the next morning on his way to the brothel, but finds along the way a beautiful young girl whom he offers a ride on his horse into town, where this time he loses the cockfight with the rooster he has carried with him.

      He does not have sex with the girl, perceiving that quite clearly she is a virgin, which, later on, when goaded by another local, João Iberra (Fernando de Almeida) a few days later that he has now deflowered the virgin, results in Christian calling for a duel between Iberra and himself.

       Christian gruesomely severs his opponents’ hand, but also receives some wounds which are salved by the brothel owner before he is sent back to his brother.

       Realizing the source of Christian’s recent problems, Eduardo now offers to share Juliana with his brother, and the two alternate, using her, we quickly discern, less as a source of satisfaction than as a kind of sexual conduit between themselves. Although there is nothing outwardly homosexual in their behavior, we cannot help but perceive that their rather brutal efforts of love-making have less to do with their gratification of male-female sex than with each of the brothers finding a communal source upon which to express their fraternal desires. I have chosen that preposition carefully since we later discover that Juliana basically does not serve the brothers as a connection of the male penis to the female vagina but rather as what one might describe as vessel in which to deposit the sperm as a kind of offering for the fraternal other. In a sense, to the brother’s way of thinking Juliana remains as a kind of virgin to which they offer up their sperm as a kind of shared blessing, which explains Christian’s “acquisition” of a young virgin and his battle with the man who steals her virginity.

      It does not take the brothers long to comprehend that in sharing the passive Juliana they are further creating a kind friction between the deep bonds they feel toward one another, and before long they determine to sell her to the brothel owner, who buys the woman for far less than they have suggested.

         If that might seem to release the sexual frustrations that the brothers face, it creates even more serious problems when both make excuses for trips into the local outpost, intending once there an opportunity to visit the brothel to fuck the girl. When they both accidentally encounter each other there they realize that in lying to one another they have broken their bond even further, and, accordingly, determine to buy her back at the higher price they had originally asked.

       Thus far, Christensen had kept fairly close to Borges’ tale, although capturing its subtleties in visual terms instead of literary words certainly has helped make the master’s subtle sexual implications far more obvious. But by taking the logic of their relationship a bit further, and playing out a sexual reunion with Juliana in their house wherein both brothers, laying on opposites sides of her quite obviously grope and lust after each other’s body, using the female’s skin simply as a receptacle to deposit their sperm, Christensen brought Borges’ subtleties into a new light. Borges was so infuriated that he threatened to demand that the film be censored at a time when censorship was increasingly used to silence artists of all kinds. Christensen, himself, had had to leave his homeland of Argentina for his early sexually-transgressive films.

 

       As Brant observes: “Borges, naturally, is very clever about how he insinuates the growing mutual love between the brothers. Unlike Christensen, Borges never portrays any sexual situation involving the brothers or Juliana and he certainly never directly indicates what the relationship between the brothers might suggest. But on the other hand, Borges does insinuate that the love between the Nilsens is the kind of love between men that surpasses the love between a man and a woman. A Biblical citation, indicated only by the chapter and verse designation “2 Reyes, I, 26” is the curious epigraph to the story.”*

      That reference to 2 Reyes appears in my Bible in the 2nd book of Samuel in which King David laments the death of his dear friend Jonathan**:

 

             How are the mighty fallen in the midst of the battle!

             O Jonathan, thou was slain in thine high places.

             I am distressed for thee, my brother Jonathan: very

             pleasant hast thou been unto me: thy love to me was

             wonderful, passing the love of women.

 

Certainly, as applied to the Borges story, that epigraph seems to confirm the sexual implications of the brotherly love between the Nilsens. Yet, as Brant and other scholars have suggested, Borges, upon of hearing Christensen’s scene (being blind at that time, he could not have seen it) he had what might be described as a kind of “homosexual panic,” a dread fear that he and his story might suggest that he, himself, was homosexual.***

      Although Borges had not gone as far in his story (written in 1941), Christensen logically expands through a more contemporary presentation of what might have happened to the Nilsens upon Juliana’s return.

      Even the brothers realize in that sexual encounter with one another over the body of Juliana, that the walls, so to speak, must now fall, and they grasp hands in the recognition of what has occurred between them.

      While Christian is out, Eduardo kills the woman, wrapping her in a carpet—in what might be seen as misogynistic reversal of Cleopatra’s introduction of herself to Cesar—which he loads into the back of one of their carts. Asking Christian to join him in a delivery to one of the clients Eduardo steers the cart in what the younger brother finally realizes, in the wrong direction, at which point the elder admits what he has done, now suggesting that they leave her in their cart so that the vultures might finish off the remains of her body.

      As the brothers climb down from the cart to take their horses back to their ranch, they briefly come together with open pampas revealing a beautiful sunset behind them as they intensely hug one another, surely now ready to express their love in a far more direct manner.

      Like this director’s stunning 1967 film, The Boy and the Wind, A Intrusa helps to solidify Christensen’s reputation for creating profoundly complex sexual texts which require his viewers to question their own preconceived views of what sexual couplings might signify. I can only hope that Criterion, Kino, or some other film group restores these two films offering new subtitles as well as releasing other cinematic works of this great Argentinian/Brasilian director’s oeuvre.

 

*Herbert J. Brant, “Borges’ Homosexual Panic: Christensen’s Film Version of ‘La intrusa’,” presented as a paper at the Northeast Modern Language Association Convention in April, 1996).

**Readers of My Queer Cinema might also like to consider this passage in conjunction with my discussion above of Saul Femm’s discussion of the relationship between David and Jonathan in James Whale’s The Old Dark House.

***At least one scholar has speculated that Borges might have been raped as a child or a young man.

 

 

Los Angeles, September 7, 2020

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2020) and My Queer Cinema blog (September 2020).