Jean Rollin | Fascination / 1979

blood of an ox

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jean Rollin (screenwriter and director) Fascination / 1979

 

The films of Jean Rollin are an acquired taste that is particularly difficult for a cis gay man such as myself who doesn’t much like gore, vampire movies, or watching beautiful women engage in tasteful Sapphic sex. And although I do not necessarily demand heavy “action” in my films, neither do I appreciate characters wandering aimlessly around for an hour and twenty minutes, between scenes of soft porno, quick and unexpected violence, and images of women dipping their faces into human blood.

     Yet Rollins’ films are also, at moments, stunningly beautiful, almost artworks as they slowly shift, like the old and now lost photographic slides projected across screens, images in search of a narrative. The narrative one discovers, moreover, vaguely encompasses all sorts of interesting subjects, from issues of class struggle to confrontations between totally emancipated women facing off with men who believe at all times they are in control, able through their patriarchal rights to control a situation, only at the last moment realizing they have been permitted only in mockery and jest. Rollin’s films play out a bit like Sadeian philosophical texts as rewritten by women. And these are pleasures I can hardly resist.

 

     His 1979 film, Fascination, is perhaps one of the most revelatory of his works in this regard. The movie begins by combining both its central issues, a group of privileged aristocratic women dressed in white gowns and black capes, herded by their husbands into a slaughterhouse, with innards and blood strewn across the floor, as they are requested to drink glasses of ox-blood to as therapy for what the male doctors declare is female anemia. The year is 1905 and the country France, caught photographically in a belle-epoque moment we’ve never quite before imagined visiting, delicacy, grace, and beauty performed in the confines of an abattoir. This scene alone, with its numerous contradictions and social and political implications, is as surreal—the word often used in relation to Rollin’s images—as anything that might follow.

     Such absurd rituals and beliefs most naturally lead to equally absurd results—which Rollin stole evidently from a short tale title “Le Verre de sang” by Jean Lorrain—as over time the women gradually grow addicted to the blood, and quietly form their female cult in celebration of the blood-drinking activity, transforming it into a blood-letting event as well.

     Meanwhile, nearby in the wilds a group of individuals of a much different socio-economic level, brutal thieves, demand that their leader Marc (Jean-Pierre Lemaire) immediately share the golden ducats they have robbed. He insists that they will be worthless without transferring them into regular cash, and is planning to meet with a customer for the ducats in London. Rightfully, his fellow thieves don’t trust him and attempt to take the small briefcase from him, he, in reaction, kidnapping “la Femme Apache” (Myriam Watteau), the wife of one of the robbers, and attempting an escape.

      In a foretelling of later events, she proves far cleverer than he, however, and quickly escapes calling out to the others who join her on the chase. Having been grazed by one of their guns, Marc stumbles on until he reaches a chateau wherein he discovers two women, Elizabeth (Franca Maï) and Eva (former porn star Brigitte Lahaie) who claim to be servants, but are actually the owners of the estate, lovers who are planning for the annual gathering of their blood-loving friends, have sent all their servants off.

      For a long period thereafter, the three play out a wonderfully ridiculous cat-and-mouse game within the mansion, while outside the gang of thieves wait, ready to kill him. Within this domain, surrounded by plush rooms and the enormous beauty of the two women—whose shapely bodies Rollin reveals to us in an intense few moments of lesbian sex—feels utterly safe. He is certainly stronger than these frail beings, even if they demonstrate that they have long knives. He has a gun.

     Fortunately, Marc also has his own secret power, so unlike the males of Rollin’s 1982 masterwork The Living Dead Girl. Marc is a beautiful bond male, who, even in his smugness, is charming and sexually alluring. As a ruse in her attempt to keep him on in the chateau until the evening’s festivities, Eva seduces him, having sex with the intruder, invoking Elizabeth’s jealousy, and perhaps causing her to unintentionally fall in love with him. In a private moment Elizabeth tells Marc of her love for him.

    In the meantime, the robbers, impatient for their money, shoot at the mansion—an activity the women must halt before the evening’s secretive events. Eva steals Marc’s satchel filled with gold and takes it outside to hand over to the gang. As they count the coins, the most brutal of them, husband to the female Marc had attempted to kidnap, forces Eva to strip and change dresses with his wife, before he himself enters into the stable into which he has locked her, to engage in sex.

      Hidden beneath the straw, however, is a huge scythe, which she draws out, killing her would-be rapist, his wife, and two others. The blood-letting that she has attempted to warn Marc about has begun.

      Marc, still believing that he is in control of the situation, now determines to stay the night and meet the mysterious guests the women have mentioned to him, without knowing that his remaining had been their intention all along.

      The Marchioness, Hélène (Fanny Magier), the woman in charge of the midnight affair, finally arrives with her serving women. Marc finds that he is also attracted to the powerful Marchioness,

and at first she and the other women appear to play innocent games with him such as blind man’s bluff. But as midnight approaches, they hint at the truth about the events they planned, even telling him that “no one survives our secret ceremonies.”

     Still unable to believe the truth, but now with some trepidation, Marc finally attempts flight, escaping to the stables. There Eva meets up with him in an attempt to hide him from the others. However, we are not sure whether she might actually be lying and intending to begin the night’s events by slaughtering him. Indeed, male-female relationships throughout this work are completely unpredictable and transient. Only the female relationships seem to be ones of permanence.

      Yet even that becomes questionable when Elizabeth suddenly shows up at the stable and shoots

Eva for her seeming betrayal. As Eva, severely wounded, stumbles back toward the chateau, the other women approach her on the bridge and quite literally drain the rest of the blood from her, an act to which Eva appears to almost willingly give herself up.

       Marc now imagines that he can flee with Elizabeth, reminding her that she has told him she loved him. But she denies any love of him as she shoots him as well, reporting back to the other women where they may find the male’s dead body.

       As critic Kevin Lyons, writing in the EOFFTV Review observes, there are several possible readings of the work. One might read it as “a Marxist sub-text, portraying the cloistered elite as (literally) blood sucking parasites feeding off the working masses whom they treat as nothing more than cattle.”

       But the important text here, I would argue as does Lyons, is the feminist one, in which the females finally consume the object of their oppression. Lyons posits that these women prove that they are able “to overcome the threat posed by Marc – the very epitome of masculine brutality”—although I suggest that he was never truly in power, as they took pleasure in the pretense of making him feel safe and comfortable in their arms before they laid him out for the kill. As Rollin suggests time and again, in his highly Romantic conception of love there is a much sexual titillation and fascination in the seduction as there is in the recognition that death is often the result.

 

Los Angeles, March 29, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March 2023).  

Lionel Soukaz and Guy Hocquenghem | Race d’Ep (Breed of Faggots) (aka The Homosexual Century) / 1979

interpreting the pictures

by Douglas Messerli

 

Lionel Soukaz and Guy Hocquenghem (directors) Race d’Ep (Breed of Faggots) (aka The Homosexual Century) / 1979

 

Lionel Soukaz and Guy Hocquenghem’s 1979 film Race d’Ep (the French street term for pederast, sometimes translated as “Breed of Faggots”) must have seemed a grand adventure in LGBTQ filmmaking in its day for its attempt to completely recontextualize gay film art by beginning with the photographs of Wilhelm von Gloeden’s Taormina boys, recreating their photographing through a fictional representation of von Gloeden with the narrative voice of his favorite model El Moro;  then proceeding to unlock the historical facts of the Berlin Weimar’s Republic’s grand introduction of the concept of homosexuality through the writings Karl Heinrich Ulrichs and the further research and popularization of what later would be come only part of the LGBTQ “rainbow” of sexual representation by Magnus Hirschfeld, along with the vast sexual openness of pre-Nazi Berlin whose history had yet been fully outlined.

      Moving on to a sort of collage of not very deeply explored notions of US, particularly California, hippiedom and free sexual attitudes of the 1960s before finally presenting, in what is perhaps the most narratively interesting of its four parts, a long night trek through Paris by a gay man pretending to show the gay sites of the city to a self-declared straight American business man who is, in fact, more interested in simply hooking up for gay sex, this is a somewhat self-mocking response to the French intellectualization of gay sex and politics.

      With its assertion of the theories of Michael Foucault and its political activist position, along with the badges it wore for having been outrageously censored by French bourgeois society, Hocquenghem’s and Soukaz’s work is almost smug in its determination to rewrite a history of those, as Hocquenghem puts it, “belonging to another world, another History.”

       And indeed, given that only a year before LGBTQ audiences had suffered through Ron Peck’s tortured voyage through British pubs Nighthawks, the nightmarish and thwarted sexual delights of the Turkish prisons in Alan Parker’s Midnight Express, and the tittering sexual hoots of transgender pretense of Édouard Molinaro La Cage aux Folles, La Race d’Ep! most certainly did appear to be an intellectual celebration of a “homosexual century” that certainly the Anglo-speaking world had not yet assimilated.

       Broken into four parts—"1890, Le Temps de la Pose,” (von Gloeden played by René Schérer)  “1930, Le Troisième Sexe,” “1960, Sweet Sixteen in the Sixties,” “1980, Royal Opéra,” the last named after the bar in which our gay hero picks up his handsome US businessman, the work as a whole appears to lionize pre-World War II German and Sicilian, and 1960s US sexuality as opposed to the intellectually-laden French response shown in part 4. And perhaps with good reason given that when Race d’Ep was released in France it was classified as a pornographic film and given an X rating.

     Roland Barthes, Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, Marguerite Duras, Simone de Beauvoir, Patrice Chéreau, and Cahiers du Cinéma, among others, signed a petition in defense of the film, opposing its persecution and censorship by the government. Foucault himself wrote the Minister of Culture and Communication, J. Philippe Lecat:

 

                The Cinema Censorship board has recommended an X rating for

                the film titled RACE D’EP. This decision is based on the content of

                the second short film which makes up the whole of the film.

                This documentary actually rests on historical research that I have

                been able to certify the seriousness and interest of. It seems strange

                that a film on homosexuality should be penalized for attempting to

                retrace persecutions that the Nazi regime was responsible for.

                Strange, and maybe worrisome. Many, I think would not understand.

                Moreover, pornography starts with exploitation, for the purposes of

                commercial sexual misery. It is paradoxical to class as pornographic

                a film whose purpose is only to speak out against such misery.

                I beg you Mr. Minister to please accept this expression of my very

                high consideration.

 

      Today, in retrospect the film seems somewhat tame in its visual images, but certainly was sexually explicit, particularly in its first section, compared with other films of its time. We can now see, however, that underground US directors had explored some far more radical territory by this date; German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder had taken us for more than a decade through the effects of the Weimer Republic and the Nazi extinction of people, cultural values, and intellectual openness on contemporary sexual life; Danish directors Lasse Nielsen and Bent Petersen had begun to investigate in a far less purient and salacious manner than von Gloeden’s images beauty and aesthetic challenges of male youth;  and others were exploring by 1979 territory that was perhaps far more inclusive. If nothing else, the film’s seemingly blind adoration of von Gloeden’s kitsch representations of his pedophilic desires, its refusal to explore the underlying breakdown of all social order in the Weimar Republic that helped to permit Hitler’s rise, and Soukaz and Hocquenghem’s celebration of  the often complete silliness and political apathetic values of 1960s hippiedom now seem rather embarrassing.

      Still, this film must be honored by the LGBTQ community if nothing else for its attempt to assert and valorize an historical record of queer life beginning with photography transformed through the medium of film.

      There is also clear evidence in that last section that the directors were quite aware of their  perhaps purposeful naiveté in the first three sections of their film. As critic Greg Youmans has intelligently argued: 

 

“The film is an artifact of the conflicted, transitional moment that was the late 1970s. Schérer has written that Soukaz’s films express both the exuberance of the aprèsmai generation (Hocquenghem’s term for those who came of age after May 1968) and the “glaciation of sensibilities and human relationships” that was to follow, during what Felíx Guattari referred to as les années d’hiver (“the years of winter”).  Perhaps then we are right to think of Soukaz’s films, Race d’Ep included, as autumnal in both their historical conjuncture and their political concerns. In them, we can sense the waning of the halcyon, early-1970s days of gay liberation and the mounting chill as the commercialization and assimilation of gay life sets in (though something far more chilling was on the horizon). In his 1977 book La Dérive homosexuelle (“The Homosexual Drift”), Hocquenghem expressed profound concern over what was becoming of the gay revolution in the face of a late-1970s “movement of closure which is founding new sexual bourgeoisies.”

       We feel the contradictions of the era most clearly in the fourth and final part of the film. Here Hocquenghem plays a gay man who, while hanging out in a bar with his friends, decides to cruise an attractive blond foreigner who has wandered in off the street to buy cigarettes. As we watch their encounter, we hear two competing, retrospective accounts of what transpired that night. The off-camera voice corresponding to the blond man is that of a straight-identified American businessman who somehow took a wrong turn and ended up spending the night talking and walking, but no more, with a French gay guy. By contrast, the off-camera voice corresponding to Hocquenghem’s character is that of a queen (“folle”) telling a tall tale of sexual conquest over the phone to a friend the next day. But only the American’s version of events seems to correspond to what we actually see happening on the screen.”

     In fact, the clearly closeted “American” is amused by but basically disinterested in the tour and lecture of his intellectual friend—and by extension the intellectualization of Hocquenghem’s own views of gay sexuality—when he was truly seeking out simply a way to get fucked while pretending innocence.

     So very many times during the tour of the city’s dark shadows, its Tuileries cursing spots, and the dark tunnel through which queer tour guide takes him, the bar pickup might simply have turned toward his “client” and kissed him, put his hand to cock, and proceeded to give the poor man what he was really seeking. But the evening, almost comically, ends up in talk only, the American—quite ironically performed by the popular French porn star Piotr Stanislas—without any of the spontaneous sexual gratification that the movie otherwise seems to validate.

      That realization forces us to reconsider the entire movie. Youmans nicely summarizes the questions that come immediately to mind, if Race d’Ep is arguing for a new history of the queer experience who gets to tell that history and what does it include?: certainly this film alone has basically left out female, transgender, and other, undermined, sexual beings.

 

“As we watch Hocquenghem’s character struggle with his conflicted, self-designated role of porte-parole (“spokesperson”) for the gay community, a structuring logic of the film falls into place. From Gloeden to Hirschfeld to Hocquenghem, the film traces a historical lineage of privileged, cis-gendered gay white men who play the role of patron-doctor-writer-activist on behalf of more marginalized queer subjects. In its historical and narrative arc, Race d’Ep seems to testify to the passing of this paternalistic dynamic. Perhaps the film suggests that a more pluralistic time is at hand, in terms of who gets to speak as and on behalf of queer subjects. But it also suggests the dawning of a more banal era, as queer relationships rooted in differences of age, race, gender, and

class are pushed to the margins by a mainstreaming movement anxious to present affirming images of gay citizenship and relationships not riven by imbalances of power and knowledge.”

    In the first section El Moro—a boy, it is important to remember who was von Gloeden’s lover since he was 14—keeps describing himself and his beautiful friends as crude, innocent, stupid, and unable to comprehend how their “master” was attempting to transform them into works of great art. He suggests the fact that none of them were paid when von Gloeden began selling his often pornographic postcards was justifiable since the “foreigner” gave them money when they married or celebrated other events. The fact that von Gloeden was kind to women makes him a hero among their mothers and even fathers, who enthusiastically encourage their young boys to work with him. And after all, El Moro proclaims, he brought tourists to Taormina who contributed to the economy.

      Ulrichs and Hirschfeld persistently described gays and lesbians as being members of a “third sex” instead of arguing that they were simply males and females who preferred sexual encounters with their same gender, and thus still presenting them as outsiders to the normality of heterosexual sex and desire. The movie recounts how Hirschfeld publicly examined and even operated on some of his hermaphroditic patients almost, one imagines, as the Nazis later did (although one must admit with more interest in their own well-being, including helping those who sought full gender transformation). There is a sense in these scenes of his noted Sex Institute as being almost a kind of giant freak show, freely open to other open-minded men of medicine.

       And finally, if nothing else we tire of the endless sunny male and female hippies tripping in the sun to the music of the time in the background. The directors almost have fun with the viewer as they continually click on and just as quickly click off images of male nudes, playing games with their viewers’ prurient desires as opposed to what are otherwise rather boring images of lithe young beings laying around partially clothed in the sensual warmth of their own self-adoration.

        If photography and film, as they argue, is at the heart of what we have left of LGBTQ history— since so many of the voices of gay men, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgender individuals have been quieted through societal rejection, arrestment, imprisonment, and death—who took those pictures? And who helps us to interpret them? That may be at heart why I have described this book as simply “my” queer cinema. It is simply an invitation to share what I have observed and not a statement of how everyone else should interpret what I’ve witnessed and commented upon.

 

Los Angeles, November 14, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2021).

Ulrike Ottinger | Bildnis einer Trinkerin (Ticket of No Return) / 1979

toasting goodbye to herself

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ulrike Ottinger (screenwriter and director) Bildnis einer Trinkerin (Ticket of No Return) / 1979

 

German director Ulrike Ottinger’s second feature film, and the first of her renowned “Berlin Trilogy,” begins with a narrator’s voice (Ottinger herself) reciting these lines as the heroine, named by the pronoun “She” only (Ottinger’s former lover, Tabea Blumenschein), comes clattering in high heels across marble floors and down a metal stairway dressed in a swirling red gown:

“She, a woman of exquisite beauty, of classical dignity and harmonious Raphaelesque proportions, a woman, created like no other to be Medea, Madonna, Beatrice, Iphigenia, Aspasia, decided one sunny winter day to leave La Rotonda…

     She purchased a ticket of no return to Berlin-Tegel. She wanted to forget her past, or rather to abandon it like a condemned house. She wanted to concentrate all her energies on one thing, something all her own. To follow her own destiny at last was her only desire. Berlin, a city in which she was a complete stranger, seemed just the place to indulge her passion undisturbed. Her passion was alcohol, she lived to drink and drank to live, the life of a drunkard. Her resolve to live out a narcissistic, pessimistic cult of solitude strengthened during her flight until it reached the level at which it could be lived.

     The time was ripe to put her plans into action.”

 

     Most commentators have noted that what follows is what would describe as an endless Berlin pub crawl—including visits, however, to some of the most chic bars, private clubs, lesbian bars, and any other place that might sell liquor, particularly cognac by the glass—along with a fabulous fashion show featuring Blaumenschein’s own designs. The slow spiral of this woman intentionally  and determinedly seeking death through alcohol is observed with through the endlessly patience camera lens that Ottinger has made so famous, along with the hilariously statistical and

sociological jabber of three women dressed in houndstooth frocks named Social Question (Monika von Cube), Accurate Statistics (Orpha Termin), and Common Sense (Magdalena Montezuma) who follow her, apparently by accident, pontificating on various issues relating to women who drink, alcoholics in general, homosexuality, particularly lesbianism, and any other subject that might cling to the enigmatic “She.” They serve both as chorus and reminders of the traditional values by which She might be judged.

     In her private weave of a drunken fashion show (which The New Times critic Janet Maslin deemed the film to be) both the actor, who is the constant center of almost every scene, and the director force us to confront a vision of woman who certainly in 1979 but even today is seldom represented. And indeed feminist critics have commented extensively on how Ottinger’s focus on her well-dressed “trinker,” pulls to the essence of the woman behind the unknowable being while in its over-the-top excesses, her loutish behavior, her almost other worldly fashion statements, and her utter silence removes her from the standard “male gaze.” As the unnamed commentator for the highly intelligent “Make Mine Criterion” blog nicely summarizes these views [which I quote at length]:

 

“Miriam Hansen maintains that the overriding objective of Ticket of No Return is to disentangle visual pleasure from cinema’s patriarchal hold and Ottinger does so by leaping into the contradictory image of the fabulously adorned Drinker. Exquisitely dressed and beautifully made-up, the Drinker could easily become an object of cinematic fascination, captured by film’s presumptive male gaze as theorized by Laura Mulvey, however the Drinker is too excessive and too unwieldy for such containment. Her outfits are too outlandish, her silence is too deafening, and her devotion to alcohol is too unconventional to be merely contained in a frame of soft-focus and then wondered at. Hansen observes that fashion has consistently been the domain of women, having been excluded from other avenues of artistic expression, but the Drinker’s en vogue style crosses over from art to fetish, revealing by its intensity the repressive power of that beauty and then turning it back on the viewer like a force for resistance. Blumenschien’s costuming confronts the camera’s gaze and by its monochromatic grandeur and stunning architecture, refuses its objectification.

     The Drinker’s iconoclastic aura is not limited to her dress. She drinks to excess, mugs and gesticulates, smashes glasses, has little time for men and befriends unconventional women. Most obviously, she finds a drinking buddy in a homeless woman (Lutze) with whom she shares her refreshments, her clothing, her hotel room, and even her bath. Nina Hagen’s cameo as a bar’s  singer and fellow drinker is also notable, as Hagen had made a splash less than a year earlier with her debut studio album and sparked a media uproar shortly before the film’s release when she explicitly demonstrated female masturbation positions on an Austrian talk show and got into a heated debate with various other panelists. Ottinger’s purposeful resistance to convention spills over from her lead character and into the film’s broader construction, creating an aesthetic that Angela McRobbie calls ‘lesbian punk anti-realism.’

      Ottinger creates a world around the Drinker that is as plainly artificial as her appearance, being full of surrealist flair and self-conscious distanciation. The Drinker’s presence causes travelers’ suitcases to spring open, an airport PA system requests “Reality, please,” and a well-dressed little person (Paul Gaulet) who ushers in moments of unreal fancy. The film proceeds episodically, prizing aesthetics over individuals, emphasizing cinematic space over time, celebrating scenes over their connections, and exploring fantasy. The Drinker smashes plates with Wolf Vostell and Eddie Constantine, crashes a feast of bratwurst and sauerkraut held by alpine yodellers, and disrupts a cruise on the inland waters of Berlin aboard the MS Moby Dick. These and other scenes stand as isolated tableaux alongside various fantasies of the Drinker in which she imagines herself in a number of unconventional roles: as a manly cab driver, a Shakespearean actor, a lip-synched advertising executive, a speedway daredevil. These flamboyant, unpredictable, and often disconnected moments eschew the lulling force of continuity and logic and dismantle the classical Hollywood infrastructure that enables cinema’s male gaze.”

 

     Throughout the film, men and women turn away from the beautifully dressed drunken beauty, waiters and bartenders comment on the rudeness of her sullen silence, and managers of restaurants and boat lines shuffle her off. She exists in a no-man’s-land of her own desire, unwanted, almost untouchable, nearly unfeeling.

      Yet despite herself, she still has a substantial effect on some of the people whose path she crosses. Wherever she goes, men’s suitcases suddenly pop open, spilling their contents to the floor. A dwarf appears and reappears throughout the film, bearing her trays of food, a portrait of himself, and other gifts, all of which She receives without any comments. But most importantly She seems attracted to and actually interested in a homeless person (Lutze), whose trolley the cab that takes her from the airport into the city destroyed, and whom later she invites in to share her drinks in an upscale restaurant before both are thrown out form throwing and breaking glasses.

   Given that She has absolutely no communication save the hand signals of demanding drinks with anyone else, her relationship with Lutze, along with, as noted above, her eventual sharing her own clothing, a bath, and even her bed is puzzling and fascinating both. Obviously Ottinger is hinting at a kind of lesbian relationship   that persists even between drunkards, reinforced by the woman’s later visit to a lesbian bar and her immediate friendship with performer Nina Hagen. But just as often the loyal Lutze wanders off, at one point with a man, and She seems to momentarily forget about her friend’s existence. Moreover, nothing quite explains the wealthy woman’s attraction to a figure completely removed from her status as a woman of exquisite beauty, of classical dignity and harmonious Raphaelesque proportions, a woman, created like no other to be Medea, Madonna, Beatrice, Iphigenia, Aspasia, although some of those figures themselves represent direct opposites.      

     But it is that relationship, more than anything other than her endless desire for alcohol that most fully defines the enigmatic beauty. And while She says almost nothing, Lutze is constantly giggling, gurgling, and talking, although not often very coherently.

      What the critics who I have read seem to have forgotten is one of Ottinger’s last phrases of her introductory commentary about her nameless Drinker: “Her resolve to live out a narcissistic, pessimistic cult of solitude strengthened during her flight until it reached the level at which it could be lived.”

     Hansen’s description of the beautiful alcoholic as reminding us of the historical figure of the Dandy: “The Drinker like the Dandy, is at the same time artist and artifice, using her body as the surface of her art.” And certainly the inferred connection she makes with Oscar Wilde signifies even more in the context of the last of Ottinger’s “Berlin Trilogy” installments, Dorian Gray in the Mirror of the Yellow Press. But She is not merely a dandy, a stylish alcoholic out to do herself in like the numerous 1890 drinkers of absinthe, but is a female reincarnation of Narcissus.

    In this case Narcissus looks not simply into the waters around her, the only available mirror for the classic beauty, but into the drinks she shallows down that invoke her self-absorption. Throughout the film, Ottinger shows her figure peering into mirrors sometimes enjoying but just as often disappointed by what She sees there, beauty that can never itself be fully enjoyed, a vision of endless unfulfillment.

      As with the original Narcissus, She also has her own Echo in Lutze. If you recall your Ovid, Echo was an extremely talkative goddess admired for her voice and song, so talkative in fact that after she lied to Juno about her husband Jupiter, she was punished, rendered unable to say anything but repeat and complete others’ sentences. In love with the hunter Narcissus, she could not fully tell him of her love, but only mimic his sentences, forcing her eventually to rush into his arms, in response to which the appalled Narcissus, immediately rejected her. Alone and without love, Echo eventually wasted away, leaving only the remnants of her voice repeating those words of others.      

    Ottinger does not present Lutze as a literal Echo. She does in fact form her own sentences, but most of them are simple utterances framed by the focus of her life, “Madam.” And her comments also often trail off into gibberish and laughter. Lutze does not rush into Madam arms, no is she entirely rejected, although ultimately this Narcissus becomes so engaged with herself that she utterly ignores her Echo, despite her attempts to help her up when she falls on the subways stairs into a kind of death that intensely reminds one of the subway death of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Fox and His Friends (1975) character Franz Bieberkopf, another kind of Narcissus.      

     Just as I argue for Franz, that it may all be simply a drug-induced nightmare since “little else has been real in [his] life,” so does the fallen woman of Ottinger’s film finally pull herself up as the morning crowds rush in and ends her life far more fittingly by cramming her well-swathed body into a small mirror-covered cubicle, the kind you might find in a carnival “hall of mirrors,” where we catch only brief glimpses of her as her stiletto heels punch into and crack the glass-covered floor upon which she proceeds into the complete embracement of her own being.

 

Los Angeles, November 26, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2022).