Amos Guttman | חימו מלך ירושלים (Himmo Melech Yerushalaim) (Himmo, King of Jerusalem) / 1987

taboo love

by Douglas Messerli

 

Yoram Kaniuk and Edna Mazia (screenplay, based on Kaniuk’s Himmo King of Jerusalem), Amos Guttman (director) חימו מלך ירושלים (Himmo Melech Yerushalaim) (Himmo, King of Jerusalem) / 1987

 

When Amos Guttman’s cinematic version of the beloved Israeli fiction Himmo King of Jerusalem was released in 1987, it was not treated at well by his county’s critics or audiences. Critic Gidi Orsher dismissed the film as being “pretentious,” and went even further in describing it as a “strain on the Israeli film industry. Nachman Ingber described it as a ““miserable, tiring, heavy, a boring and slow film in which nothing happens.” And Meir Schnitzer criticized the film for its “lack of plot” and “visual ugliness.” The film sold only 21,000 tickets in the theaters. Because of his previously gay, outsider works, Guttman had clearly made enemies, who were not about to praise the work of a gay man when it came to major issues of Israeli history and patriotism, particularly the revered subject of the 1948 Siege of Jerusalem when, despite the 1947 United Nations Partition Plan which signified Jerusalem as a corpus separatum (a separate body) to be administered by an international board of leaders, it became a battleground (among others) by Jewish and Arab militias in Mandatory Palestine, with later other Israeli and Transjordan forces joining in the fight.

    As Amir Kamier has reminded us in his excellent summary of Guttman’s films, the director held no myths about the 1948 siege. As Guttman himself commented, “I wasn’t interested in what things were actually like back then. In Himmo, I didn’t feel like I was hitting some kind of national nerve. For work purposes, I dropped the ‘the’ people always put before the year.” Guttman even altered the ending, the siege simply ending and the soldiers leaving the makeshift monastery hospital, the movie ending with the daughter of the monastery’s caretaker, a mute, wandering down the empty halls dressed in a patient’s operating gown, holding her own amputee doll, as Kamier describes it, “Guttman’s ironic way of saying that life has indeed resumed.

     The film did receive positive attention, however, from international critics and won prizes at the 1988 Toronto International Film Festival and the San Francisco International Film Festival, as well as being well-received in other such festival showings. But even in this country, Bernice Reynaud, writing in the Chicago Reader pontificated in what was otherwise basically a plot summary, “I do not share the admiration expressed by some of my colleagues (such as the London Times‘s David Robinson) for the film, being quite irritated by its heavy melodramatic aspects, Alona Kimhi’s performance as Hamutal, and the droning chords that gloomily punctuate the action.”

     If one can generalize that 1987 was certainly not an innovative year at the movies, for anyone to dismiss this film as being disinteresting because of its lack of plot decades after the major works of Michelangelo Antonioni and Federico Fellini, and just after the films Rainer Werner Fassbinder, so say nothing Warhol and numerous other outsider works and in the same year when filmmakers such as Pedro Almadóvar, Bruce Robinson, and Sergei Paradjanov released new works, suggests that either critics such as Schnitzer were either terrible ignorant of film history or were purposeful seeking for reasons to dismiss Guttman’s film.

     The film’s failure sadly led Guttman to cease filmmaking for some period after, until an outcry for his return to scene led him to make his last greatest work Amazing Grace. But, in fact, watching Himmo, King of Jerusalem I was not only moved by the film, but stunned by its beauty and arresting thematics.

      Certainly this film was different from all those that had come before it, when Guttman seemed content to mostly focus on outsider gay issues or in the case of Bar 51, the even more outré subject of incest. I suspect Israeli critics simply felt that they didn’t even have to truly deal with him as long as he kept to such subjects. But here he was entering of sacred ground, on more normative, particularly heterosexual and nationalist territory without necessarily bowing down with the deep respect they felt it deserved.

      Yet the book itself had always been oddly focused. The story is actually quite simple. A new nurse, Hamutal Horowitz, who has just lost her boyfriend in battle, arrives at the monastery where authorities have gathered soldiers too wounded to return to the front. Without proper supplies or even enough anesthesia, along with few rations, the survivors have been gathered here to basically suffer, some of them to die.

      Unlike the other nurses, seasoned cynics and none of them very good looking, Hamutal is an almost angelic beauty, who quickly develops a personable relationship with the men in the ward to which she has been assigned, even agreeing, despite the disdain of her fellow nurses, to return after hours to play cards with the men.

 

     The men under her watch include, among others, Yoram (Icho Avital), Aaron (Shy Capon), Frangi (Amiram Gabriel), and Assa (Dov Navon), who have themselves, as soldiers, prisoners, and isolated men have often been forced to do, made close relationships with other males. In this case Frangi and Assa clearly have a kind of “homo-social” relationship in which Assa sits most of the time in Frangi’s bed and even at night laying close to him on his own cot, asks when he might sleep in his bed. Indeed, when Hamutal first arrives, they have taken over the head doctor’s desk, with Frangi, feet up on the desk greets her, Assa’s head suddenly appearing from below the desk as if he were providing the solder with a blow job. Actually he is engaged in an almost just as intimate act, drawing pictures, as if tattooing, on Frangi’s leg cast.

      Another couple nearby seem to have also developed a similarly “close” relationship, as they knit in their beds next to one another.

     Although, we these may not be sexual kinships—in fact, at one point later in the film, someone describes Assa as a eunuch, presumably from his war injuries—they have joined into homo-social units that certainly resemble gay couples.   

    Yet for most of the men, the sudden appearance of Hamutal awakens their remaining heterosexual desires, even if she is clearly untouchable to them, even after she moves in with them, or one should say particularly when she begins to sleep in the same room. The only one who does appreciate the new female in their midst is Assa, who may truly be gay and, in event, is now totally devoted to Frangi, which his question, "Are we in love with her?" reveals [emphasis mine].

      If the doctor (Yossi Graber) had not made it clear how unbearable things are in this makeshift clinic, which often seems more like an insane ward than a military hospital. And when she hears the screams of a patient from a floor above who is being operated on, it becomes even worse. As the soldiers claim, the doctor is attempting to keep a dead man alive.

      The suffering patient is Himmo Perach (Ofer Shikartsi), a former close friend of Frangi’s. When Hamutal is finally sent to look after him one night, she observes the reason for his suffering. The man is blind, and one arm and both his legs have been amputated (without sufficient anesthesia). And when they bring him to the ward in which the soldiers I have described are sleeping, he refuses to speak, only crying out continuously in the night “Shoot me, shoot me,” a desperate plea that someone might finish him off.

      It is Frangi, his former best friend who tells the nurse the others how in his day, Himmo truly was the “king of Jerusalem,” a male beauty with whom all the women fell in love. Three times in this film Frangi recounts his and Himmo’s close relationship, making in clear to us that Frangi was also in love with him.

     Despite her original horror of even looking at his body, Hamutal quite quickly also falls in love with the almost bodiless man. She sits at his bedside for long hours, except when his brother Marcos (Amos Lavi) comes to visit for short periods, which is nearly every day.

     In her new devotion to Himmo, however, the nurse begins to provide the other men only with the same kind of mediated attention that they have received from the previous nurses. They have lost their female icon even as, to protect him, she moves into the room, placing her palette on the floor next to Himmo’s bed. And with their loss of her, their constantly interrupted sleep, and even worse, the feeling that they can longer in their wounds claim special status, they rebel, insisting that they will return to the ward until either Himmo leaves or she can quiet him.

     Her presence, in fact, does calm and quiet the almost dead man. And Frangi now perceives her as being even more of an angel, but even more out of reach. Other soldiers in the ward taunt her by insisting that she should marry Himmo, actually creating a kind of Huppah (the traditional Jewish wedding canopy out of their crutches over which they have placed a bedspread.

 

      She leaves in anger but is ultimately even willing to go through with that if they leave Himmo be. Frangi puts a stop to their nonsense.

       Finally, a Jewish State is declared, and Jerusalem freed. Food, supplies, and even champagne arrive, which the soldiers, rather than drinking, pour in celebration over their heads. The doctor and his staff plan a celebratory party which only Frangi refuses to attend. But Assa, who has joined the party, is still disruptive as he tires of their everyday dance music, demanding that they play Bach. He takes up a rifle to challenge the heteronormative control, but, despite his anger particularly of Hamutal for seemingly pulling Frangi even temporarily away from him, allows her to disarm him.

      Realizing that without her attentions, Himmo will simply to left to die, the beautiful nurse once more attends to her charge, giving a shot that will provide him with what he has been seeking, a way out of the pain and suffering of his life. And in finally permitting him to die, the nurse has finally herself chosen life over death. 

      The sad departure of the soldiers, wherein finally even the tentative homo-social relationships they have made but finally be abandoned, brought tears to my eyes. These men, as Yardenne Greenspan observes, writing about the book upon which the movie is based, commenting on both the various shifts in gender relationships and their own fears and realizations about their returns:

 

“The book also interrogates the gender dynamic between the lonely, agitated, and masculine soldiers, searching for bits of their male pride as they tease and leer at a young woman in a white nurse’s uniform. She embodies the quintessential fantasy of compassionate, merciful, tender femininity, while also being on the other side of an invisible wall—the wall of the unblemished; of those who will proceed to the post-war world without a handicap, in a world still too young and ignorant to have a decent understanding of disability or PTSD.

     … And it is through this lens more than any other that the hospital patients see Himmo. As he lies nearly motionless for days on end, his body refusing to die, never speaking save for an incessant crying of “Shoot me…shoot me…,” he serves as a frightening mirror of their own shattered hopes and dreams. As they joke about him and torment him, taking miniscule comfort in being the stronger ones, the ones who will come out alive, they shiver inwardly, battling against the small voice inside of them, telling them that though they may survive this war, the young state will not revere them as heroes but will soon forget about them, turning its attention to the able-bodied, the beautiful, the next generation of men sent to shatter their bodies and futures in the name of nationhood.”  

 

     Frangi hugs Assa, the latter perhaps facing in 1948 even a more difficult time finding someone with whom he can move on with in his future life. But Frangi too will miss the man who drew flowers upon his leg, and kept him warm in the long, terrifying nights.

     Hamutal watches from parapet high above, realizing finally that she has escaped from harm’s way when so many others have not. She is blessed, still beautiful, full bodied, and able to move on, but with a new world of empathy and comprehension about life and death that she can bring to the new nation.

     There has been nothing pretentious or ugly about this work; and for those who dare to listen to what its characters have to say, there is most clearly a deep narrative that expresses their fears and loves. The musical score by Ilan Virtzberg, moreover, is utterly haunting.

     The more of Guttman’s work I see, the more I admire his filmmaking.

 

Los Angeles, September 15, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (September 2024).

Manu Roma | Anónimo (Anonymous) / 2021 [documentary]

rules, rituals, and resistance

by Douglas Messerli

 

Michael Rojas and Manu Roma (screenplay), Manu Roma (director) Anónimo (Anonymous) / 2021 [19 minutes] [documentary]

 

Spanish director Manu Roma’s short documentary on cruising doesn’t show us any sexual action or, in fact, any terribly serious cruising, the camera simply watching one elderly man walk a notorious Barcelona beach, another young man wander the famed Parc de Montjuïc, and another middle-age fellow enter and exit the men’s rooms near the Arena.

     Yet here we get a fairly broad notion of what cruising is all about. For the older man, who describes the he gradually had to learn the rules of cruising by observing others, the beach and the nearby sea wall and underpass seems to be the perfect location since at all hours of the day men regularly gather there, participating in nearly every sort of sexual act from engaging in openly nude sex on the beach, joining in mutual masturbation in the various water lee ways, or simply sharing others as voyeurs in the tunnel and elsewhere all the various goings-on.

      Our guide to this location finds it perfect for him, a married man who visits the site with some regularity, because it is safe from police observation since it is in an out-of-the way location seldom visited by anyone other than the cruisers themselves. He observes that, in fact, he has seen several policemen, in and out of uniform, visit the place, evidently seeking the sexual fulfillment of the other cruisers and knowing that this is a place where their presence will be noted only by like-minded men.

 

    The younger man who prefers the wooded, winding paths of the Montjuïc prefers it simply because of its rituals. Here one does not directly approach another male, but stands about, often pretending disinterest so as not to attract the attention of possible public visitors. After a while, one gets to know the regular cruisers, some of them disinterested in those with whom they’ve previously had sex, others quite willing for another go. Some nights, in the search of a sexual partner, it takes hours, time going amazing quickly. On other nights, our guide to the park tells us, you’d think that half of the male population of Barcelona had gathered there, and he need only spend a short while before finding someone willing to engage in sex.

      By far the most fascinating of our guides is the handsome middle-aged cruiser who prefers the bathrooms precisely because of the danger, the possibility that the person next to whom you are standing is a heterosexual not at all interested in gay sex, or, at other times, perfectly willing to join in on a masturbatory session. Here the rules of strict, in some respects. You begin my partially exposing yourself, with just a slight erection. If the man shows interest, you reveal a little more, masturbate into a more obvious erection. On one occasion, he notes, there were 6 or 7 men having sex together; fortunately no one intruded to break up their fun.

      This last anonymous cruiser, has a gay lover, who knows of his actions. The bathroom cruiser argues that his love involves loyalty, not changing his sexual behavior, which is, he insists, what makes gay life different and far more of a challenge to the heteronormativity by which the dominant culture attempts to proscribe behavior. Being gay, he asserts, is a challenge to the majority who attempt to wipe out all possible access to alternative sexual acts. He takes it almost as a challenge to seek out the riskiest kind of sexual behavior, public sex in places where he purposely endangers his own safety. It is not even the sex, the final ejaculation that he most enjoys, but the search, the act of cruising itself. The park is too predictable, the isolated beach too easy. For him, the ability to seek out sex in open public locations is a personal statement of his determination to maintain complete sexual freedom, notwithstanding the numerous delimitations that heterosexual society attempts to enforce.

       Although nothing really happens in Roma’s work, a neophyte certainly gets a basic explanation of the various kinds of gay cruising spots (sans street, car, or bar cruising). The only major thing this film fails to explain is the source of such intense sexual desire, the enormous pull of the cruising spots for those that seek them out day by day, night by night: in short, the addiction that such activities creates for the individuals involved. Sex, I would argue is more addictive than any drug—and often more pleasurable and alluring since it involves another human being, bringing equal pleasure to that other.     

 

Los Angeles, September 15, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (September 2024).  

Richard Wallace | Starvation Blues / 1925

cold art

by Douglas Messerli

 

Stan Laurel, Sherbourne Shields, Frank Terry, H.M. Walker, and Richard Wallace (screenplay), Richard Wallace (director) Starvation Blues / 1925

 

From 1918 to 1963, Australian born comedian Clyde Cook performed in at least 110 feature and short films playing mostly comic roles or, in the later talkies, a cockney figure. His famed mustache and rubbery facial expressions along with his frail stature brought him great popularity. His further acrobatic skills meant that he was perfect for the second banana or the fall guy, or in the LGBTQ films in which appeared, the “much put-upon queer boy” as in The Dude Wrangler (1930, playing “Pinkey Fripp) or feminized husband as in What’s the World Coming Two? (1926, in which he acted as “the Blushing Groom”).

      British comedian Syd Crossley played in an equal number of films, sometimes with the same directors and actors with whom Cook worked. Because of his height he often played the first comic or in authoritative roles such as constables and ungainly butlers.

      In Richard Wallace’s 1925 comic short (he replaced director James W. Horne, for reasons unknown) the two work together in a string of skits with them performing as a pair of hoboes caught in the severely cold weather of Chicago, the two attempting to survive as street musicians, Cook playing a gigantic tuba and Crossley a portable organ. The moment the two try to set up for a performance they are chased away by an unsympathetic cop, and much of the film is devoted to a cat and mouse game between the two and the policeman who is determined to closed down their only source of income.

      Throughout all of this we are made aware of just how impossible it is to survive in the freezing weather of the huge city located on the edge of the cold waters of Lake Michigan. Starvation is always near, yet the two manage endlessly to make us laugh. At one point Crossley, observing a wealthy man with a stuffed wallet of bills, has grown so hungry that he decides to follow and pickpocket the gent. But as he stands behind the gentleman on a streetcorner, signaling back to Cook of his intentions, the man moves on, a policeman replacing him. According when Crossley carefully slides his hand into a pocket, it is the into the policeman’s pants. No matter how Cook attempts to signal him of his horrible mistake, he does not catch on until it is predictably too late, and the two are once again set of the run from the law. One might almost imagine that the only way these hoboes resist being frozen—although at one point Cook actually does turn into a human icicle—is in their constant calisthenics caused by the cops. The image in one frame of the frozen Cook, the confused policeman, and the tuba which the impossible tall Crossley is supposedly hiding underneath them both creates a quite surreal vision.

      At another point they come upon the café coat check girl who has just been stood up outside the church by a café dandy who has promised to marry her. The boys take on this nearly frozen body in an attempt to cheer her up.

      In between their predictably failing efforts to survive, the movie takes us inside the popular café, also patrolled by a policeman determined to ferret out any dining “wets,” those patrons hiding a bottle of booze under the table.

      The film, in fact, begins with a view of the busy café filled with customers, the owner pushing his hands up in despair as the enforcement agent enters his establishment. A dancer spinning round almost like a Turkish dervish is just finishing her act, and if you look quickly you can spot the famous female impersonator of the day, Frederick Kovert (in this film performing as he sometimes does under the name Frederick Ko Vert).

       The café, which evidently welcomed local musical talents such as Cook and Crossley is immediately closed down, which is why the musicians have been forced back into the street. But later, when the café finally reopens, they return as the band.

        Scheduled to perform his famous “The Dance of the Seven Casabas”—perhaps one of the numbers Kovert danced on his long traveling tours in Mexico—he suddenly has a temper fit, pulling off his dress and wig as he moves away to dramatically pout in a tizzy. Cook goes on for him in the same dress, performing with one large ball which he moves about his body but gradually gets attached under the dress to his behind, the image creating the sexual pun that “he has a ball in his butt.”

 

      The owners, however, are delighted with the performance, noting that he has the same legs as “Pavlova—a right one and a left one”—putting Kovert into further melodramatic despair, and causing him instead of returning one of the helium-filled balls, to toss back a lamp globe, hitting Cook in the head, which results in a series of dizzying falls throughout the rest of his maniacal dance.

       Once more the cop lurks about trying to spot any “wets,” which ends, of course, in him discovering Cook in the midst of a dance; meanwhile the dandy, returned to the café, slugs the cop, all of which ends once more in the closure of the warm café.

       Cook and Crossley are forced into the local mission for the night, just to warm up even if it means setting on fire both their feet and heads.

        Why Kovert played such a frustrated artist in this work is not explained, but perhaps it gives us an insight into the great female impersonator himself as we witness him half in and out of his female persona.

 

Los Angeles, June 23, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2022).

F. W. Murnau | Herr Tartüff (Tartuffe) / 1925

enlightened nightmares

by Douglas Messerli

 

Carl Mayer (screenplay, based on the play by Molière), F. W. Murnau (director) Herr Tartüff (Tartuffe) / 1925

 

Director F. W. Murnau always recognized a good play which he might adapt to the screen, and Moliere’s Tartuffe from 1925 was clearly one of them, as was his next work for cinema, Faust. I use the word “cinema” here more emphatically than I usually mean it, for Murnau’s filmmaking, from the very beginning, was not only an attempt to take dreaming into the everyday lives of movie audiences, but to uplift them; to put their subconscious joys and fears into a near delirious mix of imagination and spiritual uplift.

     Using images from visual art and combining them with detailed realistic settings, yet unafraid of theatrical tropes and melodramatic scenes, Murnau—a gay man who, if he’d lived beyond 1931, might have produced radically gay-oriented, even campy films worthy of James Whale, Rainer Werner Fassbinder and others—turned Molière’s classic on its head, so to speak, revealing the hypocrisy in all of society instead of just its religiously-inclined central figure.

     Today, in fact, this film has even more significance than it might have at its original showing. It represents, after all, a figure of amazing power—a man who could transform the happily married and clearly bourgeois Orgon (Werner Krauss) into a penitent who, upon his return home wants to remove every object of luxury, including his beautiful wife, Elmire (Lil Dagover), from his house.

      Although Orgon's and Tartuffe's relationship is not at what one might describe as gay—certainly is not sexual—it is most certainly a queer relationship, and even more obviously a perverse one. And one cannot help but wondering moreover what has happened between these two men in Orgon's long absence from home that brought him so fully to fall under the spell of the unattractive Tartuffe that he is suddenly willing to give up his heterosexual relationship and his personal wealth only to wait literally hand and foot on the religious zealot. It almost reminds one of the cult-like followers of men such as Jim Jones, Ted Haggard, Eddie Long, Marshall Herff Applewhite, and others who were involved with homosexual relationships with some of their cult or church followers or whose beliefs involved a struggle with their own homosexual desires—although Tartuffe himself seems, in his interest in Tartuffe's wife's cleavage, fully heterosexual. 

 

     One by one, the wonderful Emil Jannings—one of Murnau’s favorite actors—reveals himself as a complete fraud, despite the small booklet of his spiritual prescriptions pasted almost always in this film to his face. Never was an actor more obscured from the busy work of the camera than in this picture. Gluttony, Lust, Greed, Sloth, Wrath, Envy, and Pride are, one-by-one, trotted out to reveal the vile nature of the man to whom Orgon has sacrificed his former life. This film is a kind a Faust in fomentation, a satiric version of the black contagion of his later villain.

      To save her husband from his new “religious mania,” Elmire dons her best dress and attempts, quite successfully, to arouse Tartuffe’s not-so-very-hidden passions. Yet even what he might easily observe before his very eyes is overlooked by Orgon, apparently unable any longer to see the truth—always a wobbly thing in Murnau’s movies.

     The hero of this story is actually Orgon’s now unbeloved grandson, who having discredited himself by becoming an actor, returns home to find that the house has been taken over by Orgon’s equally hypocritical housekeeper (the wonderful cabaret singer Rosa Valetti), who with a wink of the eye reveals both her hate and obsequious love of her master, who is now about to leave her his entire fortune. The scene in which he writes his will while she pretends to dust and clear up his desk, watching him with wide-eyed worry and pleasure, is one of the many charming moments of this movie.

      Murnau, from his childhood on, was characterized by his friends as a dreamer, a man who almost daily described to his brother the intense nightmares and dreams he had had the night before. Films, art, and theater were clearly manifestations of his desire to return to those sometimes pleasant tales and nightmares he experienced in his sleep. In this film the “actor” (André Mattoni), who quickly deduces what is going on and, donning a costume out of his stock, becomes a mustachioed film-producer, this time by showing the film-within-the-film of Tartuffe revealing the perfidy of both the “saintly” Tartuffe and Ogron’s housekeeper at the very same moment.

      If Orgon’s wife almost disappears from the film, it nonetheless is clear that the handsome young grandson, a mirror we might say of Murnau himself, takes center-stage, resurrecting the chaos around him, and moving through the film-within-a-film his fictional characters and his real uncle back into social order—an outsider gay man, somewhat ironically, restoring heteronormative reality. Just so for Murnau does the light and dark of cinema return meaning to everyday life.

      As film critic Tristan Ettleman writes:

 

"The frame story hammers the point home a bit too clearly, but nevertheless, it’s a fun bit of metafictional business with technical significance. André Mattoni’s grandson addresses the camera directly with an intertitle, at one point, asking the audience if they had seen what just took place. It’s a fun gag, and in this point, Tartuffe illustrates the power of cinema itself."

 

Los Angeles, November 10, 2019

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2019).