Derek Jarman | Art of Mirrors / 1973

three queer types

by Douglas Messerli

 

Derek Jarman (director) Art of Mirrors / 1973

 

Derek Jarman’s almost 6-minute film with 3 basically black and brown human figures presented in silhouette against a pea-green background and shot in super 8 mm, has been mentioned and praised by numerous commentators. And Jarman himself has argued that “This is only something that could only be done on a Super 8 camera, with its built-in meters and effects.” In fact, many critics have focused on the short film’s use of the specific super 8 camera loaded with Kodachrome (see, for example “brotherdeacon’s” short comment on Letterboxd).

     The same observer also argued for its allegorical elements, as well as its concerns with light and space, however, without elaborating just what the director’s use allegorical subject consisted of.  

     Other critics such as Swapnil Dhruv Bose in the British on-line site Far Out comments on the importance of the autobiographical elements of the work, quoting Jarman himself: “I suppose ostrich-like filmmakers often ignore their own lives, but I was brought up with a different set of aesthetics to filmmaking, those of the painter. Presumably, the painter would paint his immediate surroundings, and if he was going to paint a vase of flowers, it would be one at home. For a painter to concentrate on his own life or any other form of art is actually considered to be a raison d’être.”

     That essay continues with Jarman’s comparison with the standard expectations of art and film: “If a painter started to operate in the way a film director did, everyone would say the paintings were valueless. Witness the astronomical sums of money that are paid for van Gogh at the moment when someone is painting their own life. It seems very strange that in cinema this doesn’t really happen.”

      Bose closes with a quite powerful statement that “Art of Mirrors is a meditative work by Jarman which uses its abstractions to slowly pull us into a world where conventional systems of symbols and meanings lose their preassigned values,” without bothering to explain what those symbols and meanings might be or how their values might have been diverted.

      Brian Hoyle, writing in Senses of Cinema, describes the short as one of several, influenced by Kenneth Anger and others, that were staged and designed, relating to the queer tradition of Jean Cocteau and Pier Paolo Pasolini, too radical for some and yet too conventional for others.

     Even that imitative, unthinking chatterbox AI, at least upon one occasion in which I deigned to read its comments, somehow stumbled on to the idea that this short work was related to his queer concerns that have made him a central figure to the international “Queer New Wave.”

      But not one of these writers, repositories, and others I read have bothered to attempt to explain how this short film works as an allegory and still performs an autobiographical role in Jarman’s overall queer filmmaking.

      Everyone agrees that these figures, one by one, take up a mirror in an attempt to catch the light and flash it into the lens of the camera, a metaphor for film itself. Indeed, the power of the light, mirror, and lens is what begins this work, as Jarman shows us the embers of burnt wood that can result when light directed upon an object creates an intense enough heat to bring it into a conflagration, the final end, unfortunately, of many of the early nitrate movies. 

    The first figure, performed by Gerald Incandela, with a sad-faced clown-like decoration on a paperback placed over his head, holds the mirror in a position that portrays his prize somewhat as an orb, a powerful ball of light that he holds close to his head. The mirror here reminds us of its role as both the object of a Narcissus, something into which he seems to be staring or with which he is at least intensely engaged, but also as a dangerous treasure, somewhat like the wicked queen in Snow White, of which the possessor has no intention of surrendering.

       And, in that sense, the first figure is a kind of self-destructive fool, unwilling to share the mirror or what some might metaphorically describe as the “limelight.” As a queer figure, a Narcissus, he is involved with both the power and the beauty of what he observes; that is until the rather foppishly dressed male figure (Kevin Whitney) strolls horizontally into the balletic gathering holding a candle. He walks by Narcissus without even acknowledging his existence.

     Inexplicably he also holds a mirror, flashing it momentarily at the camera. But unlike the first figure, this dandy holds the mirror more like a flashlight at shoulder level, sharing it with both the camera and with us as the film’s audience. If Whitney also serves as a trope of a gay man, he is less a Narcissus than he is a kind of dapper self-promoter, a Wildean figure shining his light and image caught in the mirror into others to gain their attention as he gracefully strolls and stands his ground, devastating the Pierrot-like first figure while seemingly being ignored by the female diva in a feathered hat. The longer he strolls back and forth on his grand parade, the more our paper-bag Pierrot now pasted to the wall, begins to quite literally crumble until he falls to the floor, symbolically dead just as Narcissus ended up. He is no match to the sociable decadent who happily hands his mirror over to the patiently waiting queen (Luciana Martínez).

     Once it is in her hands, however, she holds it out like a dazzling trinket, or a blazing piece of jewelry, pulling it back closer to her face as she moves laterally and vertically to the camera, the light shining in our faces as if it were a signal or sign as opposed to a treasure. Her action is not at all diffident as the second figure appeared to be, but a tool she uses in a dance of seduction. As she slowly slithers to the camera, one might compare her dance with Nazimova’s or even Rita Hayworth’s Salomé, her face as she approaches growing larger and larger until, like an elderly movie star of the ilk of Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard she suddenly disappears into the red frame/flame at film’s end.

     In relation to the two queer men, this female figure might as well be a transvestite queen using all the charms she holds to wow her audience as she slinks behind the bright reflection of the camera’s light into our lives.

     In the way in which I interpret this early work, produced just three years, however, before Jarman’s masterful Sebastiane, we can quite easily perceive how his short film is somewhat autobiographical and most certainly queer in its allegorical depiction of these three queer figures fascinated by and fixated on the reflection of the mirror and camera, the various visualizations of the self realized as a thing of beauty, power, influence, and finally a method of the cinematic transmutation of the real into an image larger than life.

 

Los Angeles, August 20, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (August 2025).

  

Akira Kamiki | Poente (Afterglow) / 2017

patience and love

by Douglas Messerli

 

Akira Kamiki (screenwriter and director) Poente (Afterglow) / 2017 [12 minutes]

 

It’s a beautiful bright day in São Paulo, but David (Pedro Bosnich) is worried. His severely depressed lover, Allen (Gustavo Haddad) who still lies in bed the afternoon has stopped going to therapy arguing it never works for long, and has also ceased taking his medications, both without telling him.

     Allen insists that he’s going to call his doctor, that they need to talk about this, but David refuses to return to therapy. Even Allen’s kisses cannot convince David.

     We can see that Allen is terribly frustrated as he puts his head to the wall. But instead of continuing to argue with David, he explains that he’s not going to try to convince him of anything; he just wants to know what is going on. David assures him that he’s not having a breakdown.

      When David finally does manage to crawl out of bed, he finds Allen cooking dinner for him, making a pasta that he particularly likes.

     He hands his lover a glass a water and comments, “It was hard getting out of bed today, uh?” He serves up the pasta, watching David slowly eat some of it.

     Asking if he’s taken shower today, Allen suggests they take one together, telling him that David’s clothes are all sweaty. David responds, “I don’t mind,” “But I do,” Allen gently counters him. And soon he has his friend in the shower, rubbing his back and his hair as he kisses him from behind.

     The very next frame shows Allen drying David’s feel off with a towel as he sits on the floor, David hulked up on the couch like a half-dead figure. Kissing his knee, Allen suggests that they get some sun.

      David says there’s no sun this afternoon, but before long Allen has pulled him out into the balcony, which is bathed in golden light. As they stare together at the dozens of high-rises surrounding them—something one is always aware of in that heavily populated city of São Paulo—David leans into Allen as his lover kisses him. The trees sway in the wind, the bell chime rings, and the two finally swing slowly in a hammock as the sun sets over the city.

     Brazilian director Akira Kamiki proves what we all know, but keep forgetting, that there is no more successful therapy for depression, no matter how long it lasts, than endless patience and love.

      Even the audience feels renewed in the afterglow of the men’s deep affection for one another.

 

Los Angeles, September 18, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2023). 

Gary Halvorson and Tom Cairns | The Exterminating Angel / 2017 [The Metropolitan Opera’s HD-live production]

the haunted house

by Douglas Messerli

Tom Cairns (libretto, based on Luis Buñuel’s film The Exterminating Angel), Thomas Adès (composer), Gary Halvorson (HD director) Tom Cairns (stage director) The Exterminating Angel / 2017 [The Metropolitan Opera’s HD-live production]

Let me begin admitting that my relationship to Luis Buñuel’s 1962 film, The Exterminating Angel, is rather intense. I taught the film, even before there was a restored version (the one I taught was grainy, badly lit, and with hard-to-read English-language credits) and even before that I had bought the rights to the script from Buñuel’s sons, and published it in English on my Green Integer press. I wrote a longish review of the film for my World Cinema Review in 2011.

     When the MET opera company announced that they were planning composer Thomas Adès’ new setting of the Buñuel work as an opera in their 2017-18 season, accordingly, I was obviously pleased and excited, and immediately ordered up tickets for the HD production.

      Unable to attend the opening day live broadcast (we had other opera commitments), we caught the Encore production of it at the Century City AMC theater yesterday afternoon.

       I had already read most of the previous reviews which argued, rightfully I believe, that this was the most adventuresome production of the new MET season. For the first time in years, Howard and I were less than impressed by the rest of their season (we have, perhaps seen too many Toscas, La Bohèmes, and Così Fan Tuttis, no matter how excellent these productions might be, to be motivated to attend yet again), although we will certainly attend some of the lesser known of their upcoming productions.

       As for the première opera, we were of mixed minds. Adès’ music, despite the singer’s declarations of its preciseness, seemed more interesting because of its lyrical flights of sound, its often strange use of instruments, “slamming doors, clanging rocks, a rattle with bottle caps, cowbells, a salad bowl, some miniature violins and an ondes Martenot” (which sounds somewhat similar to the science fiction regular instrumentation for the Theremin). With Adès, himself, conducting the music often soars into romantic interludes between playful experimentation—that is when the music can truly be heard. Sometimes the orchestral score seemed quite overwhelmed by the constant voiced sentiments of the on-stage 15-member ensemble of quite brilliant singers, almost claustrophobically clustered together for the entire opera.

     The composer, in turn, gave them an equally wide vocal range, from the bass-baritone pleadings for rationality by Dr. Carlos Conde (Sir John Tomlinson) to the baritone voicings of Alberto Roc (Rod Gilfry) to the tenor intonations of the party’s host Edmundo De Nobile (Joseph Kaiser), the nervous and harried pronouncements of  countertenor Francisco De Ávila (Iestyn Davies), and finally to the super high ranges of the production’s mezzo-sopranos and super-sopranos (Alice Coote and Christine Rice in the former category) and Sophie Bevan as Beatriz, Amanda Echalaz (as the hostess, Lucía De Nobile) and, particularly the amazing Audrey Luna, who playing the opera-singer, Leticia Maynar, is asked to reach into the stratosphere for a A above high C, the very highest note ever achieved, apparently, on the MET stage. I have to admit, it’s almost out of hearing range, and sounds more like a high animal bark that a human musical expression—but I believe that may have been what the composer intended, and the fact that she could even accomplish it is quite amazing. This opera is clearly not for sissies, as all of the performers made clear during the brief intermission.
      But what they nearly all expressed, as well, is that Buñuel’s work is basically incomprehensible, that, as a surrealist masterwork, it is not really important to explain it, but to simply experience it.

       I would argue, and I have, that this is not quite true. First of all, I’d insist, this Buñuel work is not truly surrealist as much as it is allegorical and even symbolic. It has been perceived as many, including me, as a statement about the wealthy Spaniards in the time of Franco who simply could not act in the time of crisis. Thus, these wealthy individuals, despite their moral druthers, cannot even leave the party to which they were invited. Like so many of us, who attend grand events that perhaps we might like to have skipped, they have become imprisoned by their social whirl. And like the animals which the hostess has apparently employed to present an entertaining evening—three sheep and a somewhat terrifying bear—they quickly alternate, once they perceive their own trapped condition, between timidity and dangerous bestiality, turning upon one another and, finally, the host who has so very kindly invited them, ready to murder him in order to atone for their own inabilities to release themselves from the spell of their wealth and position. These people, as Leticia has been described, are Valkyries, warrior savages who will destroy the entire world in order to survive.

      In Buñuel’s original film, he makes it clear that these near savage beings, unlike the numerous workers they employ, who immediately recognize something bad is coming, walk like blind men into their own trap, unable to learn anything from history. The filmmaker immediately establishes this fact early in the work (and which Adès repeats in his opera), by having the very first scene when the group returns from the opera, play out yet again for a second time, as if in a kind of loop tape, making it clear that they have all emphatically chosen their destinies without even imaging that they might once more be playing out the past.

      Again, in the film, after they are finally magically released from their spell by returning to the beginning—the very positions in which they had stood and sat that very first night which spun them into their somnambulism for several weeks—they return to “normal” life, and determining to celebrate their salvation, attend a church service, from which, when it is time to leave, both the clergymen and congregants are once more unable to exit. Outside we vaguely see Franco’s henchmen rounding up and killing the locals as the clergy and their wealthy parishioners return to sit down in their pews to pray for their release from their own passivity.

       Unfortunately, Adès and his librettist, Tom Cairns, have jettisoned the important final scene, and focus instead on the haunted house aspects of the director’s drama, making it all seem like the whole was simply a magic spell, and heaping much of the evil of the entire group on the one gay (and incestuous) character, the hyperventilating, pill-popping Francisco (a role which The Guardian’s Observer particularly dismissed).  Even as the group makes the ever-so-slight perception that they are destined to repeat events time and again until they comprehend the significance of their behavior, Leticia sings a final aria that seems almost a dedication to a kind of spiritual afterlife (perhaps the composer’s suggestion of their final church-going event). Yet, it muddied the work, simply seeming to redeem their previous savage behaviors, so much so, that my companion Howard, who has never seen the film, whispered, “I don’t get it, did they all die?”

      Of course, in the end, these people are all dead, even if they feel that they have freed themselves. But since they will never learn from history, they and their ilk will time and again bond in their refusal to challenge the horrific authoritarians in their midst. And that, obviously, has great meaning today in the US and other countries. While those of us who sense there is something terrible going on and might bail ship, these types of men and women will not be able to truly challenge the dictators who arise from amongst our midst again and again. By the time of his film, we must recall, the atheist, Communist-leaning Buñuel had almost abandoned his more aesthetic surrealist experiments for the far more socially oriented studies such as The Young and the Damned and Robinson Crusoe. Yet the group he explores in this work became the center of his later studies in the class warfare and satire of Belle de Jour, Tristana, and That Obscure Object of Desire. The surrealist had become a social commentator.

     That is not to dismiss Adès significant work. This opera, if nothing else, just because of its complex web of ideas and his musical genius certainly does deserve to become part of the standard operatic repertory. Like John Adams’ Nixon in China, also a problematic and not entirely satisfying work, the opera’s very conceptual perplexities are also part of its significance, its challenge to audiences who truly care about serious contemporary opera. And I almost wept tears of joy by the end of the opera, which is perhaps one of the grueling and splendid of ensemble pieces one can imagine. Hopefully, we can look forward to later productions that might more simply clarify the somewhat muddied implications of the current production.

 
Los Angeles, November 30, 2017

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (November 2017).

 

 

Gustavo Kawashita and Thais Lima | One Last Order / 2019

the secret admirer

by Douglas Messerli

 

Gustavo Kawashita and Allan Seehausen (screenplay), Gustavo Kawashita and Thais Lima (directors) One Last Order / 2019 [17 minutes]

 

Every day Jongin (Kyungseon Yoo) dines in the same coffee house, staying on for a while to study. Every day, as well, anonymous short letters appear on his tray, and finally Jongin attempts to solve the riddle as to who his secret admirer might be.

   I wish I could share the enthusiasm of the directors and writers of this short and quite insubstantial work, but it seems obvious from the beginning. And apparently, at least at first, it appears that Jongin doesn’t care whether or not his admirer is a male or female, which takes some of the energy away from this supposed gay comedy.

    The messages appear to usually come in the form of a short haiku-like poem, the first, for example, reading:

 

                The most beautiful,

                most heartwarming

                most comfortable

                the most loving shape

                that humans can make.

                The smiling you,

                the gazing me.

                We’re both happy.

    It’s clear that Jongin appreciates these short epistles, and this one, appearing on a post-it, he even attaches to his computer. “Who could it be?” he wonders to himself. Is it the female barista? (Angelica Moreno). “No, I don’t think she likes to read.” But she is always smiling, he recalls.

    Is it the male barista, Kyungsoo (Minki Shim). He thinks he saw him reading, but “was it a mangwha or a magazine?”

    You get the idea. Most of the film is taken up with the quite pointless search, Jongin later wondering whether, in fact, it might be the bossy barista (Seulgi Lee). But since he has saved all of his previous messages, he finally takes them out and attempts to analyze their contents, writing

in his notebook: “Things I know about the secret admirer.”

     Finally, overhearing a conversation between the two female baristas about how “pretty” their male counterpart Kyungsoo is, Jongin determines that it is not the male, and returns all the messages back on the tray as he prepares to leave the establishment, declaring “I think I misunderstood everything.”

      The first barista, who notices the returned messages, insists that he not give up, arguing that the person that sent him the messages, “didn’t give up.”

      Does she know who wrote the messages, asks Jongin, going further by wondering aloud if she herself wrote the short poems. “It wasn’t me,” she admits, “It’s someone you already know. Just think about it a little.”

      He looks over to see Kyungsoo reading a book. And suddenly all the “subtle” moments (which, I’d argue, were not very subtle) of the film regards his encounters with the male barista comes back to him, the few seconds longer than usual in Kyungsoo which he holds onto the credit card while it remains in Jongin’s grasp, the friendly smiles, the little glances the male barista keeps making towards the student. 

      Jongin quickly writes a response on one of the post-it papers and tells the first female barista to give it to the writer. The message reads, “Can we meet tomorrow?”

      Yet as the movie moves into its final frames we see Kyungsoo waiting, long after the time Jongin usually arrives. He checks the time, serves a last customer, and cleans up after her. The two other female baristas announce they are leaving a bit early for “a girl’s night out party,” asking Kyungsoo if he can clean up and close the place up.

     Finally, as Kyungsoo is in the final stages of closing, we see feet walking down the staircase of the below ground café. You guessed it. It’s Jongin requesting “one last order.”

      This South Korean shortie is close to being an Asian boylove film, and has all of the genre’s oversweet cuteness. So saccharin is this cinematic cinnamon bon-bon that it might as well be served along with the coffee.

 

Los Angeles, August 20, 2025 | Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (August 2025).