Charles Boultenhouse | Dionysius / 1964

the male gaze

by Douglas Messerli

 

Charles Boultenhouse (screenwriter and director) Dionysius / 1964

 

Charles Boultenhouse’s 1964 film is based on the story of Euripides’ The Bacchae of Dionysius and Pentheus, exploring it, primarily through experimental cinematic montage and dance, in order to uncover its homoerotic confrontation between the ruler of Thebes and the god Dionysius, known for his follower’s bacchanals of theater, wine, and ecstatic expression of sexuality.

      Hearing of King Pentheus’ disapproval of his hedonist celebrations, his banning of the rites in Thebes, and the order to his soldiers to arrest anyone found engaging in the bacchanal rituals, Dionysus travels to the city, hypnotizing Pentheus and suggesting he dress in women’s clothing; to get a better look at the women engaged in sexual activities, he proposes that he climb a tree in on mount Cithaeron where his female followers, the Maenads, perform their bacchic rituals.

     Several women, including Pentheus’ mother Agave and his aunts, gather, Pentheus spying on them. But spotting him, and mistaking him for a wild animal, Agave and others pull down the trapped “animal” from the tree and, driven by their Dionysian ecstasy become enraged by the intrusion, tearing his body apart, piece by piece in the process the Greeks describe as sparagmos.

     Returning to his palace, with her son’s head in hand, Agave proudly displays it to her father Cadmus, who is horrified at what he sees, as she, her ecstasy beginning to dissipate, is equally, driven with her entire family from the land, Cadmus and his wife Harmonia transformed into serpents.

     Boultenhouse, with his three major dancers, Louis Falco (Dionysius), Anna Duncan (Agave), and Nicholas Magallanes (Pentheus) presumes knowledge of the story—although he briefly relates it in English and French through the traditional form of Prologue, Agon, and Pathos—concentrating through his chorus of cameras (made up of fellow filmmakers Charles Levine, Willard Maas, Gregory Markopoulos, Marie Menken, Lloyd Williams, and William Wood) on the homoerotic relationship between Dionysus and Pentheus as the god hypnotizes the king partially through Pentheus’ own narcissism, as he stares at his own image in the mirror, and when he breaks the mirror through the beauty of the god through the form of the beautiful dancer who performs him.

     The director does not show Pentheus in the sexual thrall of Dionysus nor even represent the King in female costume, but establishes the homosexual interchange between them by a sort of visual antiphon, the cameras quickly cutting back and forth between the two intensely involved males while at the same time superimposing, again and again, the image of Dionysus in the glorious full flight of Falco’s leaps which certainly overwhelm the viewer as well as the now mesmerized King. Through his performances with the José Limon Company and his later own choreography one might describe Falco, who was just 22 at the time of this performance, as having brought sex back into modern ballet dance.

     Perhaps there can be no better summation of these ideas than Parker Tyler’s commentary of his companion’s film in his Screening the Sexes: Homosexuality in the Movies:

“This simple montage in Dionysius actually serves to accentuate the intimacy and dramatic impact of the narcissean element. The illusive mirror-identification between Dionysius as Male Master and Pentheus as Male Slave is thus greatly simplified and proportionately reinforced. I need not push the homosexual aspect of the spell cast by the orgiastic god: he literally forces this king, who denies and mocks his power, to assume the dress and female hair of one of the Bacchae. That homosexuality is inherent, in the eyes of the modernity, became clear in recent years from the stage production given the work by Richard Schechner. Schechner too (Boultenhouse made his film, in 1963, before the Performance Group did the play) eliminates the transvestite business between Pentheus and Dionysius that the original play specifies. Instead, in a phrase doing honor to the vocabulary of Allen Ginsberg, the god in Schechner’s production curtly orders Pentheus to accord him the service of fellatio—and the agonized Pentheus, though not in sight of the audience, tacitly obeys him after slowly crawling toward him along the ground.”

     In Boultenhouse’s work the seduction takes place simply in the focus on Falco’s body in a series of grand jetés performed over the anguished face and hungry eyes of Magallanes. We do not see Agave rip her convert son to death, but merely observe the entrails left in a corner of a few frames.

      The work ends in a version of the traditional satyr play, which often was a courser comedic version of the tragedies performed at the end of the Bacchic celebrations. For his version, Boultenhouse chose to parody Alain Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad, the 1961 film which would have been fresh on the minds of his 1964 viewers since it was released in the US just two years earlier. In this version, dancer/choreographer Flower Hujer enters again and again in different gowns as the two males, Eric Kelly and Fred Kimbrough, play cards instead of Nim, in a game that seems more like mind-reading than one of strategy, the command to “pick a card,” repeated over and over.

     While the males seem entirely engaged with one another, much like Dionysius and Pentheus, the female, in this case, clearly maintains dominance, as the taunting childlike voice (perhaps of Gregory Markopoulos) chants “Mommy’s got a secret,” suggesting that this female will not admit to either men whether or not she has previously met them or had an affair with either, the card players, meanwhile seeming gradually to become tired and bored of their private entertainment.

      Perhaps mommy’s “real” secret is that she “possesses” Dionysius, since Falco was currently a member of Hujer’s dance company.

      Underlying all this is the haunting music of Teiji Ito.

 

Los Angeles, March 18, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March 2022).