Luis Hernández de la Peña | Gloria / 2015

the laundry needs to dry

by Douglas Messerli

 

Luis Hernández de la Peña (screenwriter and director) Gloria / 2015 [17 minutes]

 

Hernández de la Peña’s eloquent statement of highly sublimated difference begins quite simply with an empty Mexican bus, onto which the driver José María (Adrián Aguirre) jumps before beginning his daily route 59. The uncleaned Mexico City streets are still filthy with refuse, hours presumably before the streetcleaners will make their way down the avenues.

     Sound, the roar of the engines, the bang of the tires against pavement over which the bus moves forward into its daily routine, the driver’s own voice demanding his passengers move to the back, the screech of the brakes as the bus comes to its many stops, all are ringing in out ears even before we get to the credits, after which, at the end of his day, the driver’s manager settles up his pay, “You’re off tomorrow, right bum?”

      As the well-spoken director makes clear, sound is important to this memorable short film in which from the very beginning we don’t have any idea where the story might be going. At moments on his daily route of the drive, José María, seems interested in the woman’s cleavage which it catches in his mirror of one of his female riders, but mostly there is a calm acceptance of all the various types of individuals who enter his vehicle. And already, from the first moment of the film, the audience has already, without even knowing it, entered into a kind of voyage on which we have no idea where we are going or why. Yet anyone who has ridden public transportation realizes, it is also familiar, the roar of the traffic, the somewhat friendly driver, the basically bland but sometimes problematic fellow riders. Those of us who have often participated in the shared voyages of a daily bus ride, recognize the starts and stops of the early part of this film. And that is just what Hernández de la Peña was evidently attempting to capture:

“One of the things I wanted with Gloria was to try a narrative that resembled somehow the actual experience of remembering something. When you’ve been in a place or met someone and then had to remember it to tell someone else how it happened, you don’t typically have a photographic memory. You don’t even have to have a beginning and an end. Things just sort of jump into your mind and kind of flash with bits and pieces of images, sounds, and faces. You also don’t know the story of whom you’ve just met or where he or she is headed.”

    The director continues: “This is especially true in the beginning of Gloria where I tried to jump right into a story that is already happening. You suddenly find yourself inside a bus, parked in a very peculiar and unknown place, and you see a guy get in and start driving. And from there you start moving with the character and following him around through his day, taking in his world, and discovering things about him. It’s pretty similar to how things happen in our everyday experience.

      It’s also true that sound plays a very special part in the initial sequence. And it did in real life too. It almost became a character with its own dialogue and rhythm, and I think making it stand out helps you get into José’s mindset by the end of his shift.”

 

     But it is at the end of that driver’s shift were the movie truly begins. Or where the deep realization of how the story of our bus driver has only begun reaches our previously unreflective minds. We have seen the driver up until that moment as only as a city employee. But now, without any self-reflective sense of need for adjustment, he suddenly and in relationship to all others, simply flows into becoming someone else, as if the magic of Ovid’s Metamorphoses had come sprinkling down upon his very being.

     From bus central, José María goes directly to his small-town gay bar where, when offered something to eat, he simply refuses—“It will make me fart.”

   In the warrens behind the club’s bar, he encounters Victory (Sostenes Rojas), who is refusing to answer her ringing cellphone.

    Our former bus driver takes out a beautiful blue sequined dress from his bag, and almost immediately Victory recognizes it as one of his evidently numerous drag personas, Gloria, whom he has evidently rarely performed although she is deeply beloved. “You haven’t played her for centuries,” gushes the tough drag queen.

     José María carefully puts out his wig on a head dummy and asks Victory what her boyfriend Sergi has done this time to make her not accept his phone calls.

      She explains, with dramatic affair. Returning home, ready to take a shower, she discovered Sergi sleeping in her bed. “I said Fuck it! But okay. I’ll get into bed and tomorrow will be a new day.”

      “Anyway, I got into bed and I saw Sergi had on a huge stiff. …And so I couldn’t control myself so I gave him a blow job.”

       Our bus driver wonders what possibly might be wrong with that. “Don’t tell me Sergi doesn’t like blow jobs. Everyone likes them.”

       No, that wasn’t the problem, declares Victory, the problem was that Segi’s dick tasted of shit. She sent him to hell, she insists. It’s one thing for him to fuck “as many girls as we wants,” but “to stick it into other guys is being a whore.” Besides, she admits, her boyfriend never fucked her. For Sergi she was just a dick with titties.

     The always cogent and down-to-earth José María wonders how she know it was another guy. “Cause it could have been a woman. Woman have asses too.”

   And so he calms Victory’s dilemma, as she finally she realizes the situation. “Do you think I overreacted?” she wonders. The bus driver expresses the obvious: “What I think is you have to relax for the show.”

    Once more, in his on-line interview with Devin Karambelas, the director cogently explains his character:

 

“One thing that’s pretty cool about José as a character is the fact that, to a great extent, he’s a fulfilled person. He has managed to combine the different aspects of his personality—even those that might appear irreconcilable—in a way that feels extremely natural, almost ordinary. It feels like he has created a personal set of principles and mechanisms that help him deal with his everyday and hold on to what he holds dear. I believe his props—especially the dress—are part of these mechanisms.”

 

      The floorshow has already begun with dancing girls (or boys as girls). We see the marvelous

José María giving a blow job to Victory of calm her down.

       And just as suddenly, in her sparkling blue dress, José María is on stage performing “El Favor De La Soledad,” this in a translation different from that of Luis Hernández de la Peña’s film:

 

Soledad, la única que viene

When everyone walks away

The one only one whom I can cry

That doesn't rebuke me once

Lets me take out everything, ah!

Soledad, sé que por un tiempo

I stay away from you

And I broke my promise not to be unhappy

And now I'm here crying

For having loved him so much

 

……….

 

Loneliness, loneliness, loneliness

Do me a favor. I swear

Make him feel what I am feeling

Loneliness, loneliness, loneliness

Do me a favor I swear

And let him know that I adore him

Loneliness!

 

     What most US citizens and perhaps those of other countries don’t realize is that José María is imitating and referencing the Mexican icon, the “Supreme Diva of Mexican Pop,” Gloria Trevi. Throughout her career she has also been perceived as a LGBT icon (she’s been the Mexican LGBT Parade Queen at least two times), and many of her songs make powerful gay statements. As the director reveals in his interview, “Trevi is particularly famous for having been in prison almost five years, after a sex scandal in which she was accused of corrupting minors. I thought her troubling life and her dark and multi-layered story would make an interesting inspiration for José María in his particular context.”

    Knowing what we now do and what we’ve seen so far in the film, we realize that on this particular night, that our young Mexican bus driver hero, who as Hernández de la Peña describes as “an individual who can’t be accurately defined as gay or transvestite or bisexual, and yet has managed to live his own way inside a very tight and judging society,” on this particular night is feeling a loneliness that perhaps even his drag other can’t quite fully express. The song is sung with such a sense of urgency that we know this man is at the edge, the audience—including me, who dropped a few tears—touched by her performance.

     But when he’s finished and packed up again, he leaves, telling the club’s owner, Xaviera (Fernando García Ortega) that he’s done, she paying him, with the exception a few nicer words such as “honey,” just as the bus manger as done earlier in this film. He looks back at the crazy scene to which he has just performed before he exits.

      He walks the dark streets of the small town back to his own home, where his children and wife are now asleep.

      As he undresses, his wife asks “How are you?”

     José María answers the only way he can possibly express it: “Good. Go to sleep.” He puts his blue dress into the laundry basket, obviously needing special attention.

      “Who did you play today?” his wife asks.

      “Gloria.”

      She turns over, turning on the bedside lamp, perhaps a bit troubled. “It’s been a while since you played Gloria.” Out of view, he sits on the bed, she asking, “You wanna fuck?”

      As he rises in the morning his two children, daughter and son, are watching a kind of Mexican cowboy dancer. His wife is ready to take the laundry to the roof, but he insists he will take it there instead, walking up several long flights of stairs, the heavy basket on his shoulder in the position of so many women of the day, as he moves up to the entanglement of private rooftop drying places, what one may describe as a strange kind of laundry prison. He finds their tiny rooftop drying allotment and begins to pin up with close pins the fresh laundry, a white frock and his own blue Gloria dress, it’s pearl-like pop-bead spangles hanging from it.

     The camera pans over the top of his head showing us this small city’s other prison-like structures, row after row of them. There is no escape, so it appears. The screen goes black as the credits rise. 

     Like the works of Julian Hernández, Robert Fiesco, and many others, Luis Hernández de la Peña’s short film reminds us yet again of how significant contemporary Mexican LGBTQ filmmaking is.

 

Los Angeles, August 21, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema (August 2024).

 

 

 

Konrad Wolf | Sonnensucher (Sun Seekers) / 1958, released 1972

learning to smile

by Douglas Messerli

 

Karol George Egel and Paul Wiens (screenplay), Konrad Wolf (director) Sonnensucher (Sun Seekers) / 1958, released 1972

 

By a fluke of Netflix fulfillment, I watched East German director Konrad Wolf’s Sun Seekers on the 87th anniversary of his birth. Celebratory as that may seem, however, only one of my film guides, Ephraim Katz’s The Film Encyclopedia, even mentions Wolf, and none of my several video guides gives an entry to Sonnensucher, despite the high reputation and importance of this film to East German and even Russian cinema.

      Spawned in the early years of the Khrushchev Thaw, Wolf’s film, espousing as it does the goals of Socialism and the Communist Party, seemed assured of release. But because of the film’s honesty about the conditions it explores in the East German-Soviet shared uranium mines of Wismut and its open presentation of the ideological differences of some of the Soviet and German workers in the camp, it aroused controversy and was shown to the entire Politburo. Although some changes were demanded, overall, the political leaders praised the film, and it was authorized to be released on October 5th, 1958. At the last moment, however, the Soviet embassy in Berlin intervened to ban the work, perhaps fearful of its documentation of the Soviet’s struggles in the international arms race and its negative presentation of the party boss, Weihrauch. By the time the film was finally released in 1972, the topical issues of the work had lost their potency, although the movie had continued to gain an underground reputation among East German filmmakers. In 1975, Wolf received the Society for German-Soviet Friendship’s Art Prize for this film and his 1968 work, I Was Nineteen.

      Seeing this masterwork so many years after its creation, I was still struck by its powerful revelations and the honesty—despite its seemingly naïve arguments that the motivation of the German-Soviet mines were to protect the world from the American monopoly and the outbreak of World War III—about life in this militarized outpost, which, at times, almost reminds one of a town out of the American wild west.

      But the high quality of Wolf’s black-and-white images, particularly those set deep within the mines are what particularly stand out, which, along with cinematographer-composer Joachim Werzlau’s score—which alternates between modernist fanfares and unexpected jazz interludes—are what makes this film so significant.

      The make-up of Wismut workers, misled Germans who unaware of working conditions and the level of environmental damage, were drawn there by the high wages and promises of a better life; and the outcasts sent there, former SS officers, ineffective or haunted Russian military leaders, and German prostitutes, had predetermined the explosive events the film outlines. The film begins with a none-too-innocent, but reluctant country girl, Lotte Luz (Ulrike Germer), escaping from the arms of a local, none-too-attractive farmer, her aunt (presumably) shouting at her for being a whore and slut. The girl, learning now to hate all men, escapes to Berlin into the arms of Emmi (Manja Behrens), an overage prostitute who was evidently a friend of Lotte’s mother before her death. Although Emmi attempts to send the girl home, Lotte refuses, determined to make a better life through hard work.

    In a local Berlin bar, Emmi meets up with an old friend, Jupp König, whom she has hidden from the SS as the two worked in the circus, and who now is on leave from Wismut. Lotte also meets a young man with whom she hesitantly dances until a fight breaks out between Jupp and others, and the police are called. Both women, now arrested and lectured to by East European social workers, are sent to Wismut, where, at least Emmi looks forward to re-encountering Jupp.

     As the two women become acclimated to the wild life of Wismut, we also begin to uncover the pulls and tensions taking place among the males. One of the major pit bosses, the one-armed Franz Beier (Günther Simon) first spots Lotte and orders her to his home where, presumably, he will engage her in sex. But when she shows up and resists, he admires her spirit. When asked whether she is a good girl or a whore, Lotte replies she doesn’t care, to which Beier praises her. She must seek the most of out of life, obtain, like himself, the highest of positions, he asserts; and, most importantly, she learn how to smile. He frees her, untouched.

     Beier, we quickly discover, is a man of contradictory pulls. On one hand he is an authoritative boss, almost puritan when it comes to sexual matters and demanding that his workers endure the harsh conditions of the mines without many rewards. On the other hand, he stands up to the Russian heads in his attempts to improve mine conditions and clean up the environment in which they work. Such demands mean a lesser output in uranium ore, and given a limited amount of time to achieve the changes upon which he insists are perhaps impossible to achieve.

     Soon the young miner Gunther (Willi Schrade) also spots Lotte and almost immediately falls for her. At one dance, he and the Soviet engineer Sergei (Viktor Avidushko) vie for Lotte’s attentions, with Gunther, certainly the courser and less suave of the two, winning out. But we soon recognize, despite her passive acceptance of Gunther’s marriage proposal, that Lotte is more attracted to the handsome Sergei, who has lost his wife, the same age as Lotte at the time of their marriage, in a savage attack by the German SS.

      One of the major problems of Wolf’s film is that, while centering much his attention on the often strong-minded Lotte, throughout much of movie she necessarily appears passive. Despite her instincts at survival, she is also a young country girl without the wisdom of knowing how to improve her condition in the world, of the shifting power-playing males in which she has been thrust. Sergei may attract her, but Gunther, at least, has offered her marriage and a true house. He even obtains a marriage license, but instead of returning home where she has planned a celebration, he gets drunk, carousing with another woman.

      Outraged by his brutal return, in which he pulls down a new painting of a mountain goat (a creature, it is suggested, that she resembles) she has just purchased, Lotte leaves him only to become once more involved with the older Beier. This time he offers her a larger and better home, a life far better superior as the pit boss’s wife, and she accepts. At the same time, however, Beier’s life is changing for the worst. The workers, dissatisfied with his seeming disinterest in their welfare begin to rebel, the wily Jupp—who has now married his Emmi—intelligently defending the boss. Tired of their ineffectual party leader, Weihrauch (Erich Franz), the miners demand Jupp take on that position. 

     The Russians and East European leaders, moreover, are fed up with the slowness of Beier’s “improvements” and his lack of uranium production, forcing Sergei to play the mediator—since he speaks both Russian and German—to be mediator between Beier, with whom he often seems to detest, and party leaders. Wolf effectively presents these discussions in both languages, in Russian (without translation) and German (with English subtitles). Although the audience can generally glean the substance of these talks, accordingly, we are put in very much the same position as the German workers and Beier who cannot always entirely comprehend what they are being accused of.

     Beier’s problems become even more complex as he arrives home to discover Lotte packing her suitcases. She is pregnant, she declares, and the child is not his son. Once again, Beier, despite his sometimes offensive manner, reveals himself as a man of some honor, as he insists she unpack and stay: he will welcome the child into his own home. Suddenly a smile spreads over the mostly glum face of the girl. In a real sense, Lotte and her friend Emmi are the only ones who have truly found the “sun” which the others so desperately seek.

      Finally, almost finished with mine improvements, Beier oversees the miner activities at the very moment with the new cables, obviously defective, catch fire. He orders one part of the mine to be exploded in order to put out the fire, but in so doing entraps himself, Sergei and two others in a closed-off pocket. Although a team of rescuers attempt to reach them, Beier, who has been hurt in the explosion, is in a fever, finally revealing to Sergei that it was his battalion that murdered Sergei’s wife. Sergei’s answer, that he has known that all along, is perhaps one of the most devastating revelations of Wolf’s film. We can now comprehend just how painful all those mediating conversations must have been to him, and it explains his often outward impatience with the former SS soldier. But the fact that Sergei has continued to work with Beier obviously reveals both men’s commitment to the higher ideal of their cause.

     Rescuers arrive, but too late for Beier, who has died soon after his confession. The last scene of the film portrays Sergei leaving the camp, as Lotte, child in hand, kisses him goodbye—almost passionately in comparison with her tentative love-making throughout the rest of the film.

     As she moves back to the city of Wismut, her small son behind her, the sun, for one of the first times in this film, is truly shining.

 

Los Angeles, October 21, 2012

Reprinted from International Cinema Review (October 2012).    

 

Peter Glushanok | Appalachian Spring /1958 [performance of the 1944 ballet by Martha Graham and Aaron Copland]

love, guilt, and consolation

by Douglas Messerli

 

Martha Graham and Aaron Copland Appalachian Spring / 1994, film version directed and filmed by Peter Glushanok / 1958 

 

I have seen the film version of Martha Graham's and Aaron Copland's great collaboration several times, and in 2002 I watched it again, this time taking notes on the associations and feelings the music and dance brought to mind. The reader should understand my comments not as a literal description of the dance's events, but as my immediate interpretations of what I thought I saw. Another viewing might produce yet other such emotions.

      In a sense, the work, which so brilliantly expresses the heartland and seemingly captures the sense of Appalachia, was itself a kind of accident. Commissioned by Graham and the Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge Foundation to write a work for dance for Graham's company, Copland drew on Shaker songs and the kind of American idiom that he had already expressed so brilliantly in his ballet "Rodeo" of 1942.

     Yet Copland had no idea what to title his piece, and even upon its delivery to Graham it was still titled, according the composer, "Ballet for Martha." It was only as the piece was readied to be performed that Graham christened it, after a few lines in The Bridge by Hart Crane in which Crane describes the "spring" as referring to water instead of a season. Yet, Copland reportedly laughed, everyone applauds me for so aptly expressing the sensibility of Spring in Appalachia.

    Moreover, the original outline of script, described as a kind of gender conflict between men's and women's work, featured not only a Pioneer mother, but an Indian Girl, a Fugitive, and a Citizen. In the end the story was winnowed down to the simple outline published in the preface to the Boosey & Hawkes score:

 

                    A pioneer celebration in spring around a newly-built farmhouse

                    in the Pennsylvania hills in the early part of the last century. The

                    bride-to-be and the young farmer-husband enact the emotions, joyful

                    and apprehensive, their new domestic partnership invites. An older

                    neighbor suggests sorrow and then the rocky confidence of experience.

                    A revivalist and his followers remind the new householders of the

                    strange and terrible aspects of human fate. At the end the couple are

                    left quiet and strong in their new house.

 

It seemed to me that instead of the more European concept of "Love, Death, and Transfiguration," the tenor of Graham and Copland's more innocent and emphatically American fable is "Love, Guilt, and Consolation."

Here are my notes:

Into the yard of a newly built home, wonderfully represented by Isamu Noguchi's open walls with a porch-like structure on which sits a kind of rocking chair shaped like a butter churn, come the figures of the dance, first The Preacher (played in the original by Merce Cunningham and in the film version I saw by Bertram Ross), then the Pioneer Woman (Matt Tumey in the film version), and the Wife (Martha Graham in both the original and, at the age of 62, in the film). Four women (Worshippers) follow, who clap and dance joyfully, frolic, and, at moments, gesture prayer.

     A flute, oboe, and clarinet dominate this early passage, and when the flute reaches its highest note, The Husband (Graham's favorite, Erik Hawkins in the original and Stuart Hodes in the film version) enters, lovingly stroking the side of his new house, as he moves forward in pony-like and proud struts and leaps.

     The couple walk to each and move backwards, seemingly to reveal the history of their love, which is, through their various posturings, made somewhat ambiguous at times, with moments of fear revealed among their steady pleasure in one another.

  Now The Preacher kicks up a kind of ruckus, with the Worshippers following behind him as acolytes reveling in what one might describes as is a kind of spiritual square dance, in which he also leaps, bends, grovels, stands, and lifts.

     The Pioneer Woman comes forward expressing her own sorrows and delights, while the Husband quietly ponders his new life. The Wife turns to win the attention of her Husband, simultaneously demonstrating her own new fears and worries, and yet flirting joyfully with a kind of awkward hesitation.

     At one point she takes up the baby of the Pioneer Woman, kneeling, entreating her husband. Is it a desire for a family or her fear for the responsibilities it will mean, the commitments and sacrifice? Clearly, it is both.

     Although the storyline does not describe it as such, there seems to be also a tension between the two women, almost as if the Husband has previously known the Pioneer Woman and they been somehow involved.

      But now the Preacher comes forward into the center, as the couple join him, turning to stare in opposite directions before they enter the church for the plain but joyous ceremony, which ends in the couple stretching, spinning in joy, leaping in the wonderment of it all. The shaker hymn, "'Tis a gift to be simple, 'tis a gift to be free," dominates the spirit of the occasion.

     Here the music changes, the Preacher suddenly becoming agitated, spinning forward almost in a kind of dervish, tearing at the air, renting his hair, damning, cursing, accusing, praying. What is their sin? What horror is he describing to them? Is it an actual or imagined transgression.

     The Pioneer Woman comes forward as if to plead for the Preacher to cease, the Husband standing up, turned away in refusal of the sermon. So the Preacher gradually shifts from his violent gesturing, moving forward in a lighter tone and tune.  The husband embraces the world, returning to his wife, while his wife dances a more agitated dance, focusing on her chair-rocker-milking stool as if she were reevaluating her situation. Again. the Husband returns to her, as they repeat some of their earlier dances of joy, reiterating and repeating their testaments of love while Copland's score returns to "'Tis a gift to be simple," ending in a long bassoon chord.

      The Wife turns from her former fears to a sense of relinquishment, resolution, consolation, as the couple kiss away their fears and embrace. The community moves off, the Preacher wishing them peace as he leaves. Husband and Wife now stand alone in their new domain.

 

Los Angeles, March 3, 2002

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (March 2002).