Alex Matraxia | Dream Factory / 2023

hot bodies in white and green light

by Douglas Messerli

 

Alex Matraxia (screenwriter and director) Dream Factory / 2023 [7 minutes]

 

British director Alex Matraxia’s very short work Deam Factory, which I saw the other day in the 2024 New York NewFest describes itself as an experimental film, but actually except for a few jump cuts, some repeated narrative elements, a moment presented almost in stop-time photography, and a few frames of gender confusion, there is not truly anything radically disjunctive, and its “exploration” of the erotics of cinema-going seems to be boiled down to three locations in the rather dowdy movie house: a young teen, a would-be Marlboro man (since when is possible or even desirable to smoke in a movie theater?) and another young man who sits beside him in the theater arena itself, a cowboy and a tough who meet up at the theater bathroom, and a blonde in drag who enters the arena before also appearing on the screen for an instant, potentially linking the act of theater going and experience of cinema itself.

      The teens rub their hands against one another and eventually turn to kiss. The cowboy watches the other tough piss before they join each other in a toilet stall. And the blonde in drag fixes her hair, strolls down the green-lit hall, enters the theater proper and shines brightly for an instant in the white light of the cinema projector itself.

      Matraxia’s film at moments is moody and visually beautiful, stirring up some mild sense, as Brian Fanelli wrote in Overlook, of  “violent and erotic undertone[s].” But I certainly can’t agree with this critic’s conclusions:

 

“Dream Factory says a lot without its characters speaking. This is one experimental short that highlights the historical importance movie theaters played as cruising sites. There’s no straightforward narrative here. Instead, the visuals, including the constant shot of film reels, do the talking.”

 

      For me, this short tries far too hard to do far too little. If one really wants to explore the erotics of gay theater, I’d suggest a trip back to early porn films such as Jack Deveau’s 1978 A Night at the Adonis or even Filipino director Mark V. Reyes 2005 short, Last Full Show.  

 

Los Angeles, October 17, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (October 2024).

James Whale | Frankenstein

rooting for the monster

by Douglas Messerli

 

Francis Edward Faragoh, Garrett Fort, Robert Florey (uncredited), and John Russell (uncredited) (screenplay, based on a play by Peggy Webling, based, in turn, on the novel by Mary Shelley, gathered by John L. Balderston), James Whale (director) Frankenstein / 1931

 

The other day I determined to watch Frankenstein and The Bride of Frankenstein again, films I had not seen since my childhood. I was far more impressed with James Whale’s filmmaking this time than I was as a rather snobbish child, when the horror genre little interested me.

      Of course, there is still a great deal of nonsense in Whale’s version of Frankenstein; the very idea that Baron Frankenstein (Frederick Kerr) who speaks like a blustery country Englishman should live in a Tyrolean village where the “peasants” celebrate his son’s wedding with Schuhplatter dances makes for some quite ridiculous moments.

     What I was also struck by this time was what a real scientific nerd Henry Frankenstein (Colin Clive) truly was (even his professors had thought he had gone too far), yet how quickly he turned against his own monster (the strangely handsome, at moments, Boris Karloff), even threatening his creation with his torch, while permitting his assistant Fritz (Dwight Frye) to actually torture him, leading the monster to kill his assailant.

     Despite the fact that Henry declares he must complete his work in privacy and see no one, he fairly readily allows Elizabeth (Mae Clarke), Victor (John Boles), and Dr. Waldman (Edward Van Sloan) into his old mill laboratory, inviting them to watch him perform the miraculous (and in this version, rather brief) resurrection of his stitched-together body parts.

      Also surprising to me was how few monster encounters appeared in the original film, as opposed to the several sightings by characters in The Bride of Frankenstein. Yet the one scene depicted is worth everything just for its black humor as he meets the little girl who gives the monster half of her flowers and shows him how, if you throw them into the lake, they will float. They each throw them, one by one, watching them gaily drift away. When they run out of flowers to toss into the lake, the joyful monster picks up the girl and tosses her into the water; evidently, she can’t swim. You might almost think that Mel Brooks wrote the scene.

 

     How the girl’s father immediately knows that the monster has killed her (or for that matter, that anyone has killed her) is somewhat inexplicable, as is the mass hysteria that overcomes the villagers. But by that time, after sensing that something is wrong, Henry’s bride-to-be is attacked by the monster, and Henry leads one of hunting parties in search of the beast, shouting to his men “Stay together men!” while ordering them, in the very next second, to break up into two groups.

      Even though the craggy hills look very much like a sound-stage, Whale creates stirring portraits in nearly all of his night scenes, and the chase, with the creature capturing his maker, Henry’s fall from the tower, and the mill’s being set afire certainly doesn’t disappoint in its excitement.

      Fire and light, indeed, seem to be subthemes throughout this work. The monster is kept the dark for days before he finally, and only briefly, is allowed to witness light, a very touching scene as Karloff slowly raises his hands in his pleasure of beneficent sun. As I already mentioned, both his creator and assistant control and torture the monster through his terror of fire. And it is fitting that, apparently at least, the monster is consumed by fire as well.

      Finally, Frankenstein’s monster seems to not have been given even the slightest of chances by human beings to be spiritually “brought into the light.” Endowed with a “bad” brain, he is doomed, as evidently many are in this German-like territory where hanging is a common occurrence, to die before he has even come to life. The purported murder of the monster, accordingly, is almost a kind of abortion, turning him into the most poignant figure of the film—despite his murder of two and attempted killing of others. Whale was a kind genius to make us root for the monster instead of those who attempt to free themselves of him.

 

Los Angeles, October 19, 2017

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2017).