Stanley Jackson | Coronet at Night / 1963

understanding something

by Douglas Messerli

 

Stanley Jackson (screenplay, based on a story by Sinclair Ross, and director) Coronet at Night / 1963

 

The Canadian short film of 1963 Coronet at Night, based on a story by Sinclair Ross, ostensibly has nothing whatsoever to do with being gay and most certainly does not represent or even suggest anything that might represent sex.

     To put it simply, and this is a remarkably simple tale: a young farm boy Tom is sent to town—his father being intensely involved in mowing the hay in a year of a substantial bounty of his major crop—to hire a man to do the important job of hay-stooking, a process of setting the sheaves upright and shaking and packing their mix of wheat, barley, and oat leaves into an upright position so that they can properly dry out in the sun.

     If his hard-working father is a sometimes harsh disciplinarian, Tom’s mother is an obsessively religious woman who encourages her son to play the piano and to love music probably because he may use his talents in church. Happy to be free from their clutches for a day and allowed to skip school for the task, he journeys to find the small Saskatchewan, one-street prairie town nearly empty, with almost everyone at home to reap their crop.

      In the local drugstore where Tom spends the 30 cents his mother has given him for lunch on a chocolate malt, a man sits next to him, a pale-skinned blond, whose hands are smooth, obviously not someone worth hiring for the demanding farm work. But when the boy begins to talk with the stranger he discovers that the youth plays the coronet in a band, and it’s love at first sight—if more for the shiny instrument that the musician takes from its case than for the blond’s gentle smile. And, although the musician has never done any farm work, and probably plays in a jazz band rather than what Tom imagines is a marching band, the boy proudly brings his new-found friend home, while also recognizing that the newcomer is not at all the kind of man his father might have hired.

   

     Over the one night and one day that the musician lives in the bunk-house, spending the early evening with Tom in rapt attendance while playing several lovely trumpet tunes, Tom falls in love, this time with the player and not his instrument. He even plans to rise early to help teach the new worker how to “stook” before he leaves for school; and all day at school Tom is worried, hardly being able to wait to get home and check out his friend’s achievements.

     When he discovers the fields only partially finished, with most of the stooks still remaining parallel to the field, he knows the coronet player has failed, and when he reaches the house his father tells him, more gently than the boy might have expected, that the man tried hard but became winded and ill. The father is momentarily taking him back to town and suggests his son say goodbye, the musician suggesting that they may meet up again the next year. As Tom recognizes, however, his new love is about to leave his life forever, as the boy looks on in inconsolable sadness as the horse-cart with his father and the man retreat into the distance.

      He narrates, however, that his music-hating father still remembered that particular year of getting in the crop, and continued long after to occasionally wonder whatever happened to the coronet player.

      So this Truman Capote-like memory of a special day ends, the narrative having expressed a treasured memory of a young boy’s coming of age. Certainly, that is the way most early viewers, I am sure, will read it.

      By this time, however, my readers must realize that I will not leave that simple and blandly nice narrative alone. Even the most literal of viewers might grant me that this is not just a tale out of a child’s mental diary, but a statement of adulation and even love for a being who stands totally outside of his world representing ineffable desires for what he is not even yet know exists.

     The genre here is not merely another “coming-of-age” story—although even that now often connotes, in LGBTQ speak, the story of a young man or woman coming to terms with his or her sexuality or gender.

    More than any other work in this volume, this film shares in the genre I described in my comments about Shane, and bears some resemblances to other such “boy and his older male pal” works I pointed to in Billy and His Pal (1911) and Rebel without a Cause (1955), although the last two are far less innocent, simply because of the ages and gender of the characters involved.

     In Shane, however, the boy’s—and other family members’—admiration of the stranger who has come to work for them has only subtle tones of homoeroticism, while in director Stanley Jackson’s fable it is far more explicit.

     Forget the fact that when Tom asks the blond stranger early on in the story whether he had ever “stooked,” that in his Canadian-accented delivery of the Scottish-derived word it sounds eerily like he is asking “Have you ever stooped?” which means “to lower one's moral standards so far as to do something reprehensible” or, in basic Yiddish calls up a related question “Have you ever shutpped,” which asks if the man has ever had sexual intercourse. The trumpeter cracks a sly smile before answering “No, but I can learn,” the scene playing out a bit like one of the oldest of vaudeville skits.* But, as I’ve requested, I ask you just to ignore that aside.

     Any card-caring gay man would nonetheless recognize the new man in town as a homosexual simply because of the clues the writer provides us: the man is fair-haired, pale, smooth-bodied, and sickly, in short, a faggot from the city who has none of the rough and experienced look and mannerisms of Prairie boys and girls his age. Furthermore, he can beautifully play his instrument, which translates easily in gay camp lingo as suggesting that he is more than sexually adequate.

     What young Tom immediately sees in this man, enough to want to bring him home to meet his mother and father, is the kind of being he recognizes that he too may grow up to be. The child’s gaze of the man playing the trumpet signifies his absolute pleasure in being momentarily exposed to a new world that he has never before imagined, a world in which he desires to live, even if he subliminally recognizes that is not yet possible.

     Just as in Shane, moreover, Tom’s parents seem also altered by the stranger’s visitation. Without the bodily sexual potions Terence Stamp brings the family in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Teorema (1968), the blond boy of Coronet at Night brings the boy’s mother the pleasure of his music and his father something in the stranger’s gentle demeanor that forces the young Tom to recognize “That something had happened. I knew my father had understood something.” Metaphorically speaking, we wonder whether perhaps Tom actually might have brought home a man he loves who they can also love and accept, someone not in the present, but in the boy’s future perhaps.

     I realize many will believe my reading of this film to be prurient. I don’t see it that way, but I do comprehend their response.

     I can only say that it came with no great surprise, however— having written the above I chose to do a little research about the man who wrote the original story on which this short is based—to uncover significant corroboration of my reading. 

     Sinclair Ross, born in Saskatchewan in 1908 worked as a banker for The Union Bank of Canada most of his life, while also writing stories and novels, the most famous of which, For Me and My House (1941) became a Canadian literary classic, establishing a model for Canadian prairie fiction.

      After Ross died in 1996, biographer Keath Fraser revealed in a study of the novelist, As For Me and My Body: A Memoir of Sinclair Ross (1997) that the author had been a closeted homosexual.

 

*The acting in this scene alone makes me wish the director would have listed the names of his actors in the credits.

 

Los Angeles, December 9, 2020

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

Kon Ichikawa | 雪之丞変化 Yukinojo henge (An Actor’s Revenge) / 1963

loving yukinojo

by Douglas Messerli

 

Nato Wada (writer, based on a film by Daisuke Itō and Teinosuke Kinugasa), Kon Ichikawa (director) 雪之丞変化 Yukinojo henge (An Actor’s Revenge) / 1963

 

Film historians report that after a string of financially unsuccessful films—films that, however, were often critically acclaimed—Ichikawa was assigned to remake Yukinojo henge (An Actor’s Revenge), based on an older novel by Otokichi Mikami and previously made as three-part serial by Teinosuke Kinugasa in 1935 and 1936, starring Kazuo Hasegawa. Critic Donald Richie humorously describes the task to be “like asking Buñuel to remake Stella Dallas.” Yet Ichikawa, working with his wife and life-long collaborator, Natto Wada as the screenwriter, brilliantly rose to the occasion, even employing the original actor, in his 300th movie role, in the lead role of the Kabuki female impersonator Yukinojo and in the role of her secret admirer and the film’s narrative commentator, the thief Yamitaro.

     With the use of highly saturated colors and a score that—despite the film’s setting in the Tokugawa period of Japanese history (1603-1867)—employs romantic theme music of the 1950s melodramas as well as contemporary jazz, Ichikawa creates a work that might easily be compared with the films of American directors of the 1950s such as Douglas Sirk and Nicholas Ray.

      During the midst of her performance in Edo, Yukinojo catches a glimpse in the audience of the wealthy merchant Kawaguchiya, accompanied by the corrupt magistrate Sansai Dobe and Dobe’s daughter Namiji, the mistress of the powerful shogun. The two men, along with another merchant, Hiromiya, have been responsible for her father’s and mother’s deaths, the facts of which have been kept alive in Yukinojo’s mind by her manager-mentor. After all these years, it is now time for revenge.

 

     It is clear from the very first scene that the beautiful Namiji has fallen in love with Yukinojo—the fact of which, given Kazuo Hasegawa’s advanced age and his retention of the mannerisms and dress of a woman throughout the film, merely accentuates the theatricality and artificiality of the work. Combined with the introduction into the film of Yamitaro, a charming thief from whose attempted robbery and murder Yukinojo escapes—and who comes to admire and perhaps even love Yuinojo—along with Yukinojo’s repeated run-ins with Yamitaro’s competitor, the woman thief Ohatsu, who ultimately declares she too has fallen in love with Yukinojo—An Actor’s Revenge might be dismissed as a strange black sex comedy ahead of its time were it not for the Hasegawa’s brilliant acting and Ichikawa’s refusal to permit what we would now describe as post-modern intrusions to alter the focus of his larger- than-life historical adventure: the destruction of the evil men who destroy anyone in stands in the way of their greed and lust for power.

     Through repeated gestures of servility to these proud men, several swordfights, wile, stealth, and outright lies, Yukinojo gains entry to their houses and is a given a modicum of trust which permits her to carefully weave hearsay and rumor into a net of consequences in which each man is ultimately trapped, as they turn against one another and, particularly in the case of Sansai Dobe, destroy themselves.

     Unfortunately, the delicate Namiji, a woman—unlike Yukinojo (a man behaving as a woman) or Ohatsu (a woman with the physical prowess and unchecked confidence of a man)—finds herself trapped in the net as well, and as her innocence is betrayed, dies. Yukinojo leaves the theater, disappearing from sight and, eventually, we are told, even from memory.

      In telling her story, however, Ichikawa has clearly created a legend that explores the complex issues of human sexuality more thoroughly than most films of the day.

 

Los Angeles, March 26, 2008

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March 2008).

Drew De Pinto | Compton's '22 / 2023 [documentary]

trying to unbury the truth

by Douglas Messerli

 

Drew De Pinto (director) Compton's '22 / 2023 [17 minutes] [documentary]

 

As with all landmark incidents, an attending mythology has arisen regarding the events at Stonewall at 53 Christopher Street in New York City’s Greenwich Village on June 28, 1969 in the early morning hours when the police raided the bar for the first time without giving notice.

     Legend now has it that the raid, which supposedly was based on the fact that the bar was illegally serving liquor, was actually about the fact that the bar’s owner, four Mafioso members of the Genovese family, has been trading stolen bonds.

      This raid was different, however, in nearly all respects, since when a butch lesbian was taken away in handcuffs, the gay, lesbians, trans, and drag queens that frequented the bar began to fight back, particularly the transsexual and lesbian patrons, who eventual surrounded the police so that they were forced back inside the bar while large crowds began to grow on the outside. For the first time in memory, the LGBTQ+ fought back and refused to be cowed by police control. The riots continued sporadically over the next two days because of bad weather, but on July 2nd broke out again, continuing through the next day. By October or December of that year the bar has closed down, not to be reopened until the 1990s.

       The anger of the local LGBTQ+ community was noted in all the newspapers, and a transformation began to occur, making it clear to authorities that patrons of the several gay bars in the Village and elsewhere were no longer passive fairies, drinking and dancing the evenings away for pleasure, but were serious about their sacred shrines and were violently angry both by the mafioso control of the bars and the police actions. Something had radically changed, and eventually would help in altering the attitudes of the entire LGBTQ+ communities across the nation. Gays, lesbians, bisexuals, transsexuals and others of their kind now represented begin to speak with a strong voice, no longer closeted, that eventually began to express itself in annual gay pride parades, in politics, and in the marketplace. The small event at the little Christopher Street bar had, so to speak, broken the proverbial “camel’s back,” creating a new voice for the LGBTQ community not only throughout the US, but in other countries as well.

      Yet, of course, we all know that wasn’t the complete truth. I was there at that very moment, having left New York City to return to the University of Wisconsin only a couple of weeks earlier, and I can say that I easily moved between Julius’, where I often ate dinner, a block away from Stonewall, occasionally stopping at Stonewall (a bar I didn’t find particularly welcoming) on my way to my favorite large bar on Christopher Street across the highway from the Christopher Street Piers, Badlands.* That bar, a spacious one, had an even larger backroom which, at late hours, opened up so for any denizens who might enjoy a huge gay public orgy. I remained there several nights until the back room opened.

      I’ve read since that visitors to Stonewall were first greeted by bouncers at the door, who also attempted to sell tickets, only two allowed, for drinks. But I remember no bouncers or tickets. It was simply too small for my taste and didn’t have the pretty preppy looking boys I sought out—although if I’d have known that my artist friend Tommy Lanigan-Schmidt hung out there, I might have stayed.

      But over most of the year in 1969, I attended the Village bars (the Ramrod and others included) almost every night and never once encountered a police raid. Moreover, by 1969, most the bars I attended were no longer filled with closeted or what we described as “nervous nellies.” We were all out and proud long before the Stonewall riots. In the Village, particularly, but throughout New York, a good-looking young man of 21 or 22 such as I was, could easily fall under the delusion that nearly everyone was gay, and there seemed absolutely no need to hide my sexual identity. Men lined up at the Grand Central Station urinals to jack off with other men. The toilets in the subway system were nearly all filled with men enjoying gay sex. The bathrooms in Central Park were equally filled with gay stranglers as was the public bathroom in Washington Square Park. And you truly could go to the Sloane House YMCA for any kind of gay sex.

     The idea, accordingly, that everything changed after the Stonewall riots is pure nonsense. If anything, in some respects, the public outing of the vast community only made it more conservative, helped along in the late 1970s and early 1980s, of course, with the beginning of the AIDS crisis. The celebratory Gay Pride Days soon became something for more necessarily political. But much of the joy of open sex had disappeared.

      My point is not to argue that the Stonewall riots were not an important turning point in LGBTQ+ history, but that not all the changes it caused were positive, and that not everything so radically changed from what had been occurring in Village when I arrived in 1969 for some years previous—although I must say that I arrived in the City at a particularly fortuitous moment. And by the time I had reinstalled myself in Madison, Wisconsin gays in that community were ready to establish one of the first Gay Literation Groups, at whose very first meeting I met my husband of today, 55 years later, Howard N. Fox.

     This lengthy preface, however, is simply to make the point that not everything began with Stonewall. A full three years prior to the Stonewall events, transgender sex workers and drag queens revolted against police violence at Compton’s Cafeteria in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district, the subject of Drew De Pinto’s 2023 short documentary, Compton’s 22.

     One of the interviewees describes the fact that many of the figures who used to visit Compton’s were true outsiders, most of them transsexuals, a great number of whom, having been already rejected by their own families, perceive the group that gathered at Compton’s as their family. “If you hurt one of us, you hurt us all,” she concludes. 

      Another describes the situation of the day, pointing out that no one knew in those days about transsexuals or transgender people. “We were known as queens, or the girls. We were very proud to be known as queens, because we were queens. We were queens of the street.

        We had to walk the streets. That was our turf.”

      The cafeteria, Compton’s—filled with not only drag queens but with gay guys and straight people who had come there simply to gawk—was their favorite hangout.

     “We went there to gossip and describe what we did, that we were still alive. We survived the night.” 

     Since it was open 24 hours, most of the queens gathered at Compton’s at around 6:00 in the morning, but they went there anytime they wanted to eat, breakfast, lunch, or dinner.

    Unfortunately, De Pinto evidently felt the need to interrupt his now elderly queens and their memories of the event, with discussions by current transgender performers such as Matthew Zheng who performs in Beijing Opera drag, as well as contemporary queer observers and interpreters.

    One can well understand that through this approach De Pinto is attempting to put the early streetwalker’s and drag artist’s actions in context, but for me it breaks the more important historical approach that is of most interest. With all the coverage of contemporary transsexual and transgender experiences of which we now almost daily read, do we truly need to begin all over again by putting the original actors within a contemporary context?

      Part of the reason that De Pinto alternates his narrative with the old and new, moreover, is that he has been forced to use VHS tapes made by historians Susan Stryker and Victor Silverman. His goal was surely to get out of the TV set and into the spirit of the actual period. But again, the colorful representations of current drag performers seem at odds with what film is actually trying to tell us. Do I really need these contemporary visitations to imagine how the habitants of Compton’s paraded their wares as they entered the cafeteria? Certainly, I don’t need a current transsexual to present a rather tame and mediocre dance to comprehend how, as one of the early figures describes it, they were often joined by beautiful boys to simply party.

      Finally, the original figures get down to real business again by describing the dangers of the street, noting that there were murders all the time. They couldn’t complain to the police since they themselves were against the law in wearing female attire. Moreover, the police, as she points out, simply didn’t care. Indeed some of the police force, in an attempt at humiliation, beat up the “girls” with nightsticks and fists.

     And eventually, one of the queens begins to bring up the actual subject, suggesting that despite their general ostracization they did recognize themselves as part of the gay community in the Tenderloin, when we decided to fight back.

    Accordingly, in August 1966, by the day the police determined to raid Compton’s and take all the girls to jail, “we were just fed up.”

    “We screamed at the police, telling them to stop harassing us. There were tables turned over and sugar shakers flying through the glass windows and doors. Then there was a lot of fighting and people being thrown into paddy wagons.”

     One of them picked up a rock to throw at the police, who cursed her, “you damn little faggot.”

     Another adds, “Although we were the gutter girls, we had pride too.”

     “It felt good that this transformation had happened,” concludes one the original figures.

     None of the newspapers carried information about any of the events, however, and the acts of these brave women were almost entirely forgotten.

    In the work, unfortunately, their voices are almost again drowned out by the contemporary performers singing songs, making unrelated comments, and roiling about on the floor as if they were performing in Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures, along with the insertion of footage from a contemporary protest against the GEO company that is now located in the spot where the original Compton’s used to stand.

      De Pinto, finally, attempts to justify his approach by speaking of the need, particularly for the trans community, to know its history and what proceeded their own difficult battles. But I would still argue that a purer presentation of these transsexuals’ lives and statements might have provided a better record of their achievements.

 

*That bar was closed, so Rob Frydlewicz has reported, when two individuals where shot and killed there in the winter of 1981.

 

Los Angeles, September 8, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (September 2024).

     

Marco T. Alves | Te Perdi no Metrô (I Lost You in the Subway) / 2017

waiting

by Douglas Messerli

 

Marco T. Alves (screenwriter and director) Te Perdi no Metrô (I Lost You in the Subway) / 2017 [3 minutes]

 

This very short lesbian film, featuring Thairiny Tiburcio and Nana Pereiira, is a tone poem about love lost and found again, using the São Paulo, Brazil subway system as a metaphor for the relationship. As the film description puts it: “Emotions and sensations in a delirious, feverish and ardent rhythm of a love that still burns. In the subway of São Paulo, the seasons change, but not the feeling. The wagon has left, but are the doors closed for her?”

     The two women apparently meet up, but quickly find themselves separated as one of the pair waits outside the subway for the eventual return of the other.

      Subway cars go flashing by, escalators full of riders move up and down with endless regularity, and the lights flash endlessly, but the missing partner does not show up.

      Finally, a car rounds the bend, stops, the doors opening up, revealing the missing other, the waiting woman speaking: “I knew you would return.”

      It’s a visually stimulating film without, however, much substance, the empty poetry of losing love on the subway not able to carry this short Brazilian film much beyond its title.

 

Los Angeles, September 8, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (September 2024).

Pao Zanki | Take Me Out / 2019 [animated short film]

and afterwords he drove him home

by Douglas Messerli

 

Pao Zanki (animator) Take Me Out / 2019 [4.30 minutes] [animated short film]

 

Los Angeles-based Pao Zanki (who prefers the designation of “they”) has created an animated film in Take Me Out that represents a pop-cute rendition of The Smiths’ and Morrissey’s “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out.”

     Below are the lyrics of the first few stanzas if you need reminding of that wonderful 1992 release.

 

Take me out tonight

Where there's music and there's people

Who are young and alive

 

Driving in your car

I never, never want to go home

Because I haven't got one anymore

 

Take me out tonight

Because I want to see people

And I want to see light

 

Driving in your car

Oh, please don't drop me home

Because it’s not my home, it’s their home

And I'm welcome no more

 

And if a double-decker bus

Crashes into us

To die by your side

Is such a heavenly way to die

 

 

   Zanki, creating two very young boys to signify their take on the story, show one boy calling for the other, as they race away in his car to a party filled with booze, a couple of drunks already laying face down on the grass in the yard. The elder boy gets the younger one a beer, and they sit together a moment on the couch, certainly in the mood for live, but as in The Smith’s song “…then a strange fear gripped me and I just couldn't ask.” The younger boy does, however, manage to whisper into the elder’s ear, and they quickly leave the party, driving off into the countryside in the older boy’s car. The joy of the younger boy’s face certainly represents the feelings of the original song’s “Oh, take me anywhere. I don't care, I don't care, I don't care.”

      The younger one shows the other boy his favorite spot, where they sit on the grass and finally, as the sun slowly rises, manage to sneak in a final kiss.

       This is definitely a Hallmark Cards version, I’m afraid, of Morrissey’s far darker original, a song about the now without any concern for a future.

 

Los Angeles, September 8, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (September 2024).