Victoria Warmerdam | Korte Kuitspier (Short Calf Muscle) / 2019

the lovely gnome

by Douglas Messerli

 

Victoria Warmerdam (screenwriter and director) Korte Kuitspier (Short Calf Muscle) / 2019 [13 minutes]

Dutch director Victoria Warmerdam seems to offer up a wonderful absurdist-like comedy. Anders (Henry van Loon), a rather tall gay man, is visiting the doctor (Lucretia van der Vloot) because of a pain he has in his calf muscle. She reports that there is nothing wrong with his leg, although they see this problem quite often, she reports, in “his kind.”

     What possibly might she mean, he wonders. Has she somehow sensed he was a gay man? Even she suggests that she doesn’t mean to discriminate.

     He next visits a baker (Beppie Melissen), asking for a whole wholegrain loaf, sliced. She challenges him saying, “Are you sure you don’t what half, my small friend.”

     Has she run out of full loafs? No. Well, then he’d like a whole loaf please. She suggests we might prefer “a bag of cut mini currant buns?” No, just the whole loaf.

     She stares at him endlessly, with a smile pasted to her face.

     Eating lunch with his colleagues, one asks him how his physio therapist when, Anders commenting that it went fine. He received a small injury while running, he reports. He has a short calf muscle.

      That must be common his “his kind” another colleague responds. Anders is confused, announcing that his doctor also responded in that manner. Surely “The fact that I’m gay doesn’t relate to my physique, does it?”

      After a rather uncomfortable pause, one of his colleagues finally speaks up: “I think he was referring to the fact that you’re a gnome.

      Anders, just as any sane man might, laughs. But they don’t join him, the manager finally adding “Of course it doesn’t matter. We don’t mind at all.” Besides he’s a good worker and they get extra subsidies by having him on their team, just as they get for including Fatima (evidently of Middle Eastern birth) on their staff.

      Yet one of the colleagues even wants to carry the discussion further, now that they’ve brought up the subject. “I was wondering what it was really like to become invisible? Or is it a myth?”

      Anders pretends to go along with the joke, even pondering the issue of invisibility. But they want to know is it done consciously or is it metaphysical. And would he do it for them?

      Anders finally can only answer that he is not a gnome. When they persist, he mutters that he really doesn’t find their game-playing funny. “Short legs, short fuse,” one of his fellow workers comments.

     Back home, he confides with his lover Paul (Loes Schnepper) that it went on like that all day. “I can’t laugh about it anymore.” It just went on and on. “You should know when to stop.”

      But Paul wonders that he can’t take teasing anymore. But, this makes utterly so sense, Anders argues.

      Since when was this a problem with you, Paul seems astonished. But what can Paul possibly mean, answers the confused Anders. “Your figure, darling.”

      “I’ve never made a problem with the fact that you’re one of them, have I?”

      This time, Anders is clearly fed up. Must even his lover now carry on the ridiculous joke?

      Paul would have thought by this time his lover would simply have accepted the fact. That’s what made him attractive. Paul proclaims.

      “I’m not a mythical creature.”

      “No. You’re a lovely gnome.”

      If you thought it couldn’t get worse for Anders, his own parents confirm that he was adopted and that they knew this day would finally come, surprised, in fact, that it didn’t arise a lot sooner.

      But the film, once we realize the nature of this perverted absurdity, has nowhere else to go. Anders is flabbergasted and confused and simply can’t come to terms with the reality the others presume, reminding us not only of the ridiculousness of the prejudices imposed upon others including the LGBTQ community, but the strange beliefs of many MAGA supporters who have created absurdly fantastical lives for their political rivals.

      Yet, in the film gays seem to be easily accepted and assimilated. Being gay is not the problem, but looking different, in this case being “a legendary dwarfish creature supposed to guard the earth's treasures underground.” Even his parents confirm that their son is now a “double minority.”

      But it’s at this point when the film seems to truly fall apart. Comparing Anders’ second role as a minority figure having to do with his appearance takes the short movie down a very different avenue that is not at all the same as being sexually different.

       When the police finally take him down as a radicalized gnome, Warmerdam’s work strikes up the Staple Singers’ version of a song about black children facing discrimination, “Why (Am I Treated So Bad),” taking it down a truly illogical path.

       Like it or not, most gay people are able to live lives, if they so desire, without being perceived as being sexually different. That’s precisely why for so many years gays stayed, so to speak, in the closet, hid out, amongst themselves, invisible to the world at large.

      But being someone of color, unless of very light skin and with a desire to “pass” as a white, is not something a black man or woman, most Asian individuals, and many Hispanics can imagine. Despite Ralph Ellison’s social and cultural metaphor of “the invisible man,” people of color are hated by bigots precisely because of what they look like, not primarily for how they behave, even if their culture and traditions are occasionally different from caucasians. Being a gnome, if such beings were to exist, is not truly comparable with being a gay man. As one commentator observed, such a comparison is “boneheaded and insulting.” Yes, the discrimination, even if not mean or openly spoken, is absurd, something of which no truly intelligent human being should be capable. But when your skin color or size is “different” there is very little possibility of pretense or simply having failed to notice.

     It is why the biggest difficulty for most gay and bisexual individuals in “coming out,” expressing their differentness openly to others. One of the reasons that we LGBTQ+ individuals gather for Pride Days and other such occasions is to remind ourselves and others that we do still exist, that we are different even if we don’t look it. People of color don’t have that problem. The hatred heaped upon them is justified simply by their appearance, something of which they are reminded of every day of their lives.

     We can comprehend that Warmerdam’s film was well-intentioned; but unfortunately, it was not well thought out. This film really has no meaning for gay men and women, or, for that matter, black individuals, Native Americans, Asians, or many of those of American-Hispanic descent. It might mean something only to mythical gnomes, putti, or cupids.

 

Los Angeles, January 30, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (January 2025).

 

 

Wrik Mead | Hoolboom / 1999

we are the geography of all we know

by Douglas Messerli

 

Wrik Mead and Mike Hoolboom (screenwriters), Wrik Mead (director) Hoolboom / 1999

 

In 1999 Arts Toronto commissioned local filmmaker Wrik Mead to make a short film about his fellow gay filmmaker Michael Hoolboom, which Mead did working at points with the subject of his film.

    Hoolboom, born in 1959 just three years before Mead, is also a Toronto filmmaker and like Mead gay. He had made a substantial number of films by 1999, beginning in 1980. He first gained national attention for his filmmaking in 1986 with White Museum, but it wasn’t until Frank’s Cock in 1993 and Letter to Home in 1996 that he began to produce openly gay films. He freely admits, however, that his diagnosis of being HIV-positive in 1988 or ’89 gave what he describes as “new urgency” to his works, and his productions increased significantly after that period, all among with his now large body of work.

     By the time Mead worked with him on Hoolboom, the director had just released one of his major queer works, Panic Bodies (1998), which I discuss elsewhere in this volume.

      Mead’s film is not so a film about his friend as it muses on impressions of Hoolboom in relationship to issues of the body, self-awareness, and the art of filmmaking itself.

     The film begins with an almost ritualistic like act, a young naked man with a knife cutting open what appears to be a mummy. When he finishes cutting to open the other young man, covered with flowing blood—seemingly a mirror image of the boy—he sits up and hugs his savior whose body also begins the profusely bleed through what appear to be cuts and gashes.

      A man, dressed in protective gear, spray paints the word “responsibility” on the side of a wall.

    A narrator asks, “What if the revolution, you know the one that is going to be televised, the one that everyone’s been waiting for doesn’t involve the grip of communists at all, or the poor, the disenfranchised, the bearers of racial, sexual, and linguistic difference? What if the revolution begins closer to home? With our own limbs?” The voice wonders what if one day the hands were granted independence and decided they’d had enough of taking orders from nerve command central and decided to leave? He suggests that each of us might become our own Lincoln, granting emancipation to our various parts, letting them settle back into the world of independence. “We are, after all, the geography of all we know. Imperfect is our paradise.”

      That last two lines seem to hint at the way the rest of his 5-minute film will progress. Suddenly the young man we saw in the first scene, appears with a camera madly spinning in various directions, alternating with a paintbrush in hand.

      A face suddenly looms up much as in a talking head documentary, the image of Hoolboom himself floating atop a picture we can only assume to be Hoolboom’s the group portrait from his elementary school days. “Quite by accident,” the head begins, “he uncovers the secret joy of disappearance.” He describes the figure of whom he is speaking almost like Woody Allen’s character Zelig, moving into rooms so that no one notices, wearing a wardrobe that blends in with everything around him. “Everywhere he goes no one takes notice.” He describes the hundreds of animals in the wild that in fear of alerting their prey, move without moving. “He’s like them, storing memories like others store rations in case of nuclear collapse.” “…It was not the end of the world, he figured, but its beginning.”

       Clearly the spoken metaphors of this quite different kind of testimony are about Hoolboom’s cinematic methods, his willingness to let his hands, his entire body take him where they might go in order to embrace thoroughly other beings and places in his films. No Hoolboom film presents his view, but assimilates in a remarkable chameleon-like manner the other about who and with whom he collaborating in his film presentation. There is less a Hoolboom “style” or even a particular “subject”—only a hand full of his numerous films are about LGBTQ life, although many feature gay men—than a cinematic assimilation of scene and person in an attempt to present the constantly shifting others of his oeuvre.

      Like the figure in the first image of the film, Hoolboom becomes the other and takes on his or her personal pains, sufferings, and even diseases. Hacking into subjects thought to be dead, he brings the “other” alive in a way that few filmmakers are able to. Time and again, his works are titled by the interviewee’s name, the subject his film explores, or the geographical location. Abstract words that seem to indicate one thing are transformed through his filmic searches to mean something different. Instead of forcing the figures to come to him, he moves ever so gradually toward them, imitating their manner so that his work becomes the subject, the other.

      This film, not so coincidentally is not like any other Mead film, but more like a film which Hoolboom himself, who co-wrote the script with Mead, might make. At our best, we are not beings in statis, but individuals defined by the territories we have explored, the “geography of all we know.”

 

Los Angeles, November 16, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2022).

Andrew Abrahams | Casualty / 1999

making waves

by Douglas Messerli

 

Andrew Abrahams (director) Casualty / 1999

 

Dance and LGBTQ filmmaking often go hand-in-hand. From the transformation of military exercises into dance in Claire Denis’ masterful Beau travail (1999), to representations of eager young gay dancers in works such as A Chorus Line (1985) and Billy Eliot (2000), biographical works of major dancer’s lives like Herbert Ross’ Nijinksy (1980), Ralph Fiennes’ The White Crow [on Nureyev] (2018) and Levin Aiken’s And Then We Danced [on the Georgian dancer Merab] (2019), movies about dance such as Alan Brown’s Five Dances (2013) to, finally, queer group dance celebrations such as those in The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), Macho Dancer (1988), and Deadman Walking (2017) dance and the queer experience have quite often shared the stage. But never until a few moments ago had I have ever seen a gay short film, only 5 minutes in this case, represent a gay dance under water!

      But that is precisely what director Andrew Abrahams presents to us in his 1999 work, Casualty.

   Featuring two underwater figures, Eric Newton and Hogan Vando, the movie shows first one approaching from stage left, reaching for a rose that suddenly appears to float before him; above we can see the reflection of a row of erect Cypress trees. He smells the rose as another male approaches from the right. The first embraces the other around the neck. Or is he chocking him? As the second pulls away, the first grabs his wrist, as he reciprocates. Or is he now grabbing the wrist of the first in order to pull away?

     The second swimmer now has the rose in hand, lifting it to his nose as if to smell it. But in the very next instant, we see the rose floating in the water alone, the swimmers both having gone their separate ways. As the accompanying description of this short asks on the Open Eye Pictures site, where it can be seen for free, “Comfort or conflict? A gift or deception? ...This mythic and dreamlike piece highlights the unraveling of an intimate relationship.”

      This water dance reminds me a great deal of the dance in artist Robert Longo’s performance piece, Empire, in which one cannot tell whether the two male dancers are engaged in a series of loving embraces or are wrestling in mortal combat.

      Abrahams’ work was an official selection of the Planet Out Short Movie Awards, the Breck Film Festival that occurs annually in Breckinridge, Colorado, and the Queens Museum of Art Film Series.

       The film was later included with nine other gay dance works in Courts mais Gay: Tome 3, released in France in May 2002.

 

Los Angeles, December 28, 2020

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

Broderick Fox | Love, Death, & Cars / 1999

BEST FRIENDS

by Douglas Messerli

 

Broderick Fox (screenwriter and director) Love, Death, & Cars / 1999

 

This short film begins with Max (John Fairlie) and Haley (Michelle Beauchamp) arriving late to Max’s friend Kyle’s (Larry Sullivan) book reading in Los Angeles. Indeed, he’s already finished, promising to read only one more short work, not really a poem or a story, but a kind of brief memory of his and a friend’s trip to the Grand Canyon, a journey never completed, but during which he discovered what love was.

       Kyle is delighted to see Max, who introduces him to Haley, who Kyle discovers—evidently for the first time—is Max’s companion. A dark tension immediately is expressed about their relationship, with Max, evidently surprised by the short work, telling Kyle to leave his life out of his writing, Kyle arguing that it was also his life.

       What we already suspect, with the help of quick images of flashbacks of the two beautiful boys, the hot golden sun, and Max’s red Cadillac Le Mans is that on that Grand Canyon trip, as they later describe it, is that Max kissed Kyle: “we screwed around and everything’s been screwed up since.”

       We immediately grasp that Kyle, who moved off to New York, is gay, and Max, despite his loving relationship with Haley, is now a medical doctor, still having difficulties regarding his gay and bisexual feelings.

        What this reunion accomplishes by the bringing of the two back together, is that Haley, incognizant of their previous relationship, invites Kyle to stay with them. Quickly, however, she figures out what his bothering her lover and insists that he take up Kyle’s suggestion to make the trip they never accomplished to the Grand Canyon.

        Kyle evidently has an interview regarding his new book on a local TV station, and Max, now a photographer, is opening a new show. But in the midst of the opening, Max gets a call: Kyle has passed out on the air. He rushes to the hospital to find Kyle basically all right; yet he tells him his previous cancer has returned and he doesn’t have long to live, the reason evidently for his return to Los Angeles and his visit to Max.

        The trip to the Grand Canyon, obviously, must be repeated if the two are to sort out their emotional and sexual problems. But Max is still terrified that he might lose Haley in the process.

         What Broderick Fox’s well-directed short makes clear is that Max has indeed loved Kyle from their high school days, comparing every woman he meets with his friend. Yet when he met Haley he felt truly comfortable with her and in love, a sign I might suggest of his true bisexuality, but a situation not fully explored—if often assumed—in those earlier days of LGBTQ cinema. When he finally admits his love, but demands of Kyle to tell him what he wants of him, the solution suddenly appears to be quite simple. Kyle simply wants his continued friendship. They once again turn away from their destination both returning to the doctors in their lives, having finally been able to lay their fears to rest. They can remain best friends without sexuality being the central issue. And Max, perhaps, can finally recognize and admit to Haley his bisexuality and his love for her.

        I find this film one of the most honest portrayals of bisexuality I’ve seen. Too bad, however, that the gay boy has to once more get sick, with death on the horizon. Couldn’t they have come to terms with these issues without killing off another queer?

 

Los Angeles, August 29, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (August 2022).