Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg

from being to have been

by Douglas Messerli

 

Donald Cammell (screenplay), Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg (directors) Performance / 1970

If you can say nothing else about the films of Nicolas Roeg—and, obviously, there is a great many things to be said—he is the only director I know of who cast films with two of the greatest music performers of the century, David Bowie in The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976) and Mick Jagger in the movie under review, Performance (1970). He also worked with singer Art Garfunkel in his Bad Timing of 1980. Clearly, he was able to draw in these larger-than-life figures through his sexually-obsessed, gender-bending scripts, as well as the visual excessiveness of his images.

       Certainly, one might be able to describe his Performance, which I first saw the year of its creation, as narratively experimental. Co-director and script-writer Donald Cammell was highly influenced, so he claimed, by the writings of Jorge Luis Borges—although watching this movie the other day, it took a great leap of imagination to perceive any possible relationships between this rather seedy look at a down-and-out British rock star, Turner (Jagger), and the master of linguistic conundrums. 

     I don’t actually remember my original reaction to this film, although it probably was closer to the confusion of critics of the day who saw it as a messy, but somewhat profound exploration into identity. So shocking did it seem in 1969 and 1970 that, purportedly, one wife of the Warner executive vomited upon seeing a preview of the film.

      Today, the rather campy vampings of Turner, his dominate female lover, Pherber (Anita Pallenberg), and their mutual girl-boy surrogate, Lucy (Michèle Breton), seem, in their hippie- l ike couplings, nearly as innocent as the creatures in orgy scenes of Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures (1963)—although later outtakes of the sex between Jagger and Pallenberg, then Keith Richards’ lover, were turned into a simi-porn-film. In the end, I’d compare the whole of Performance as having closer ties to Jim Sharman’s The Rocky Horror Picture Show than any other film of the time.

      But there is a very crucial difference: the object of Turner-Pherber-Lucy’s clearly perverse desires, Chas/Johnny Dean (James Fox) is anything but innocent. As a virulent intimidator of a gang headed by Harry Flowers (Johnny Shannon), Chas musses up the lives and bodies of nearly anyone who crosses Flowers, and is willing even to do the same for his former friend (and subtly implied former lover), Joey Maddocks (Anthony Valentine)—except that Flowers, a wise monster who believes that it is necessary to keep the personal separate from business, denies his hit-man the pleasure. When Chas, nonetheless, tries his methods of intimidation on his former friend/possible lover, Maddocks and his new friends retaliate, pouring red paint over the walls of Chas’ apartment and threatening him. Chas responds by shooting and killing Maddocks, and, as we all perceive now as necessary, rubbing the red paint into his hair as goes on the run.

      Overhearing a pub conversation, he picks up the rent for a departing black jazz musician and finds himself in the basement apartment of Turner’s drug-and-sex obsessed den. Although Chas, now Johnny Dean, claims he is a performer, a juggler by profession, he has no defense against the sexual and mind-shifting machinations of his new landlords, who, through the help of halogenic mushrooms, break down Chas macho personae, gradually transferring him from a failed sexual encounter with Pherber, to one with Lucy and, ultimately—although it’s never visually presented—with Turner. Chas quickly goes down the rabbit hole to turn into a kind of mirror image of the male-in-drag Jagger, until he is no longer clear about who he really is.

      There are some very clever lines along the way, one in which Chas challenges the rock-singer to imagine what he might look like when he is 50 (a vision of which challenges us all as Jagger has turned 74! (He was 47, almost 50 at the time of the film’s making). And the handsome James Fox, who had portrayed a character similar to that of Turner in Pinter’s sexually-laced The Servant (1963), is the nearly perfect figure for Chas.     

    Nonetheless, the plot gets lost along the way, as Chas stupidly (and amazingly innocently, particularly given his line of work) reveals his location, and Flower’s men come for him, Chas, in the ruckus being compelled to kill the man, Turner, who has clearly shorn his locks by giving him a female wig, which he now seems determined to wear even unto his death.

     By the end of Performance it is hard to know what the movie’s intentions truly are: perhaps to reveal that we all daily “perform” our identities, that there is little difference between the violence of men with fists and guns and between men and women with intelligently shifting values? It’s hard to tell. And, by film’s end, it doesn’t seem to truly matter, since nearly everyone is living in another reality or are now or soon to be dead.

     Surely, there is something fascinating here about various notions of “power” and their influence upon who we perceive ourselves to be. But then all of these folks can, by the last credit, only be perceived to have “been”—perhaps.

 

Los Angeles, April 12, 2017

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 2017).

 

Eric Leven | Stanley Stellar: Here for This Reason / 2019 [documentary]

my secret love

by Douglas Messerli

 

Eric Leven (screenwriter and director) Stanley Stellar: Here for This Reason / 2019 [15 minutes] [documentary]

 

Stanley Stellar, the subject of this short documentary, had been filming gay figures for over 40 years when director Eric Leven’s film was shot in 2019.

    He explores that although he grew up in a very creative family in New York, and knew that he contained within himself a “difference,” he knew little about what being gay meant. He only knew, he explains, what the media told him. But he did sense that behind the windows of Christopher Street apartments and others in the Village that gay life was going on. And we witnessed in the 1960s a sense of gay experience on the streets.  

   The picture of the Cristopher Street bookshop below, for example, was manned for many years by the noted photographer and filmmaker Avery Willard, which as I mentioned elsewhere in these volumes, I visited often when I lived in New York City.

     As he begins to take us through his archive, he is briefly distracted by an entire file drawer devoted to men with “tattoos,” something he didn’t see very often in the media. But on Fire Island having encounter an ex-navy man with extensive tattoos, he felt the need to go up to him and ask if he might take his picture. And he take, obviously, a great many tattooed men, something not usually featured in photos of the period.

    In some instances his subjects would also reveal other secrets of their body. And, as he admits, he was also the part of that other secret society: the society of gay men, many of whom were still closeted. We didn’t have a visual history, he argues, so I found nothing wrong with being a gay photographer.

   On Sundays he would walk down Christopher Street, and like so many others squeeze through the whole in the wall to enter the new gay playland of the Hudson piers. The piers became a private gay world where gay men could get to know one another and see each other on parade.

    The cops knew about, but didn’t really care. And if you wanted to have sex with someone you could always find some obscure corner and lose yourself in a fantasy world.

     Stellar also talks about another somewhat unknown phenomenon that happened in the late 1970s when gay men were no longer forced just into bars (mostly mafia run) and basements but were now beginning to manage their own spaces such as the “Firehouse,” an old engine house that was rented out on weekends by gays for dancing and music. “It was music that was making us a tribe. And that was glorious.”

     He talks about Gay Pride Day, and his being there with his camera. If Stellar is sometimes

vague concerning details of how it came to be, he does provide a lovely insight as he photographs and watches young men standing on the corners and talking who he suddenly realizes are men he’s long seen in the dark of gay bars but now appear as transfigured beings in the light of the day, as if the secret world of his past and been opened up to the rest of society.

     But suddenly the 70s are ended. And there in the newspapers are strange reports of diseases happening to gay men. At first it was like some science fiction thing, but then got more and more frightening all the time. At the same time, he bought a new camera that permitted him a square format that resulted in far richer pictures.

     And he begin recording photographs of gay people simply because nobody any longer knew how long anyone would live. He wanted to record men with AIDS now, because it was a death sentence and he wanted to capture them before they died. In one case, he recalls a pretty boys asking if he could bring his boyfriend over to shoot both of them. Nobody knows except the boyfriend that he has AIDS, and Stellar realizes that he is consciously bringing his beautiful friend to have photographed as a couple before the end. He recalls that he spent most of 1980s photographing couples, realizing that he was there for that reason.

 

    “I would shoot somebody and then be invited to his memorial service two months later.”

    If Gay Pride had always been a day of meeting friends, we all became aware that there were fewer and fewer of them.

     The 80s became a time of health awareness, gay men were creating art groups and making art related to health. And together with lesbians who appeared in support more and more younger people were coming out in support. Gay life changed. And then Gay Pride exploded. It wasn’t just me and my friends but miles and miles of people come to express their pride and support of gay men and women. Now it became suddenly a day to celebrate. You didn’t hide it from your friends anymore. You could march down 5th Avenue and feel like you are a valid human being, freed of that guilt and negativity.

     “I’m an old guy now,” he concludes; and the young don’t seem to be caught as I was in the collective past, trapped our years of shame. “Now at this point in my life if I try to think of what we all share, it’s a uniqueness and a strength; it a beautiful, wonderful uniqueness that deserves to be honored, that we deserve to honor each other, we deserve to love each other,” without being a secret.

     If Stellar sometimes says the obvious, he pictures provide us with a history that would have otherwise never have been known.

 

Los Angeles, December 11, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (December 2025).

Christian Petzold | Barbara / 2012

standing up to the wild winds

by Douglas Messerli

 

Christian Petzold and Haun Farocki (screenplay), Christian Petzold (director) Barbara / 2012

 

One of the wonders of Christian Petzold’s films is how he takes quite simple stories and spins them into psychological and moral fables, his 2012 film Barbara being a case in point. Barbara (Nina Hoss), punished by the East German police, the Stasi, for applying to leave the country, is forced to resign her post in one of East Berlin’s best hospitals, the Charité, and to move to an isolated Baltic provincial clinic.

    There she is put under the supervision of the chief physician of the Pediatric ward, André Reiser (Ronald Zehrfeld), who it is clear from the earliest scenes, provides information to the Stasi, including spying on his new charge. But from those first scenes we also recognized that Reiser is, at heart, a good man and a highly caring physician, who we perceive is intrigued and attracted to the resistant and somewhat mysterious Barbara.

     Barbara has reasons for her mysteries. In love with a West German, Jörg (Mark Waschke), she is planning an escape to the West, and, in visiting and outlying restaurant, receives a package of foreign currency so that she can pay her way to freedom when the time comes. That adventure, which leads to a late-night return to her newly assigned apartment, ends in a visit from the Stasi head (Rainer Bock) and his associates, including a woman who strip-searches the doctor.

 

    Meanwhile, despite her cold demeanor toward him, Reiser is impressed by the new surgeon’s abilities, particularly after a young girl, Stella (Jasna Fritzi Bauer), have attempted to escape from a labor camp, is brought in by the Stasi. Reiser, who has encountered the young rebel three times

before, diagnoses her simply as a malingerer, but Barbara, demanding the police release the girl, quickly perceives the young patient as perhaps suffering from meningitis, which, after tests, proves to be true. The child is also pregnant, and wants to have the baby, but knows that in East Germany it will inevitably be aborted.

     Barbara nurses the child to health, reading passages from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. To her, again impressing the head physician with her caring ways; Barbara, in turn, grows increasingly impressed by Reiser, who, without the proper facilities, has nonetheless built his own in-house laboratory to prevent long delays when blood and serum is sent to other labs for analysis. Indeed, despite her justified fears of the kindly doctor—Barbara observes him watching her from his car several times—she begins to grudgingly admire his methods. But her mood again shifts when Stella, having healed, is suddenly returned, against her pleas, to the labor camp.

     Interludes in the woods with her lover Jörg and an overnight meeting with him in an Interhotel (a guest spot for non-East German tourists)—despite a rather unpleasant glimpse into what her life might be like in the West—make clear, however, that Barbara is determined to escape. Another late show-up to her apartment (she has been unburying the money she has previously hidden) results in another visit from the Stasi and another strip-search. Her escape is planned for the next weekend.

      Another seemingly abused child, Mario, who has attempted suicide, brings Barbara and Reiser together yet again. After a visit to the child by friends, who report that Mario speaks only of the food he is eating, while saying nothing about what brought him to the hospital, Barbara becomes convinced that Mario may be suffering from brain damage. Barbara seeks out, on his day off, the head doctor, only to find him caring for the wife of the Stasi leader. The woman is evidently dying from cancer, an incident that both angers Barbara while simultaneously forcing her to recognize Reiser’s deep humanity. The situation is, in fact, at the heart of this film, which is very much about the tensions between duty and personal freedoms. And soon after, Reiser tells her of his own history, wherein he reveals that he too once worked at a prestigious East German hospital, but after the accidental blinding of two babies (the attending nurse caring from them within a prenatal unit, mistook Celsius for a Fahrenheit setting), he was sent to the provinces, the incident covered up only if he promised to keep an eye on others for the Stasi. Barbara does not quite know whether or not to believe his story, but, if it is so, we realize that he is in a position not so very different from her own. A luncheon where Reiser cooks up a ratatouille while speaking to her about a Chekov story reveals his intelligence and social capabilities.

      Determined to operate on Mario, he asks Barbara to serve as the as the anesthesiologist on the very same night she is scheduled to escape. When she equivocates, he challenges her, “Don’t you want to be there?” which forces her to choose, quite obviously, between her moral responsibility as a doctor and her personal well-being.

     Nonetheless, Barbara prepares as if she were still planning to escape and, when, soon after, Stella, having again escaped from the work camp appears at her doorstep, the doctor takes her to beach where, on schedule, the life-raft shows up to ferry her across the straits to Denmark.

     Suddenly attaching a note to Stella’s body, Barbara places the girl in the tiny raft as it sails off, she turning back, clearly, to join Reiser in his operation and—most probably—in his attempts to make meaning in his life.

     Although her exchange with Stella might not have been expected, we have known all along that despite her quiet determination to find a new life away from the dire political conditions of her current life, that Barbara’s curt dismissal of those around her (even on the first day at work, she chooses to sit at a lunch table apart from all of her peers), that it was only a ruse to hide her own emotional sympathies. As she has, throughout Petzold’s beautiful film, stood up time and again, bicycle in hand, to the strong gales of the Baltic wind, so will Barbara continue to be a strong force in this isolated community, perhaps even helping the gentle Reiser eventually free himself from the ugly dictates of the Stasi.

 

Los Angeles, August 13, 2015

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (August 2015).

Mike Archibald | My Thoughts Exactly / 2022

two men in need of love

by Douglas Messerli

 

Mike Archibald (screenwriter and director) My Thoughts Exactly / 2022 [18 minutes]

 

A voice begins this moving short film by speaking about his memories of his lover, Jim, obviously now dead, his dreams about him and their shared love of Stanley Park in Vancouver, Canada.

    The movie then proceeds with what seems to be its primary narrative as Nav (Ishan Sandhu), a University of British Columbia graduate of East Indian heritage who is about to undergo his first day at what he hopes would be a temporary job at a company named Sales Solutions, which begins in the lobby waiting for a slow elevator to take him to the eighth floor. In Archibald’s caring work, even the Security Guard (Ranjit Samra) comes alive as a character, guessing accurately where Nav is heading. When the elevator arrives, the guard wishes him good luck, almost under his breath adding, “You’ll need it.”

    The interviewer, Lance (Nathaniel Vossen) is already on the phone mouthing a bit of subtle homophobia about a man with a pink shirt as Nav arrives. And even before they can begin, Lance, ready to test them out, gives Nav a new name, Steve, explaining that if they go with ethic names their numbers will “tank.”

     Typical of a man with his kind of unperceived racism, Lance insists that if they get to know him they’ll find he’s one of the least racist persons around; but we already seriously doubt that. Particularly since he’s convinced that everyone else is racist and that perhaps it might change in 15 to 20 years.

     The job consists of calling up customers, real and potential to convince them to renew their subscriptions, generally through assumptions. They don’t ask their customers to subscribe, they “assume” their readiness for an extension of their subscriptions: “I’m going to put you down for a six-month extension,” thus convincing their customers that they sales pitch is actually representative of their own desires, an old trick which this company has perfected.

    Nav at his job alternates with the sad figure behind the voice, Raymond (Robert L. Duncan) who at a loss in his now lonely world, imagines his choices for the day, writing his statements down and them setting the sheets afire over the urn of ashes sitting on his table, dropping the pieces of burning paper into the urn in a symbolic attempt to communicate with his beloved friend.

     Meanwhile Nav “nails” his very first call, Lance congratulating him on his “accent.”

     We watch Ray dress for his daily walk.

    Nav’s second customer is more problematic. She is a dying old woman named Jane, now, she jokingly adds through her heavy coughs, reduced to making conversation with a sales person on the phone. As he attempts to put her down for a six-month extension, she explains that it’s been a long hard day, in a long hard year, and a difficult life that’s almost over. She tells the young 24-year-old marketeer that he’s going to suffer, Nav interrupting her to explain that he has suffered, with a quick cinematic cut to Ray sitting on the bed alone, hands over his face. Jane suggests that perhaps Nav is suffering right now working on his job as a salesman.

     Suddenly we see Lance, behind Nav, closing down the conversation and demanding “Steve” take off his headset. Lance is furious that his salesman is having a “heart to heart” talk with a woman who clearly is not interested in a subscription. Lance wants to know why he didn’t immediately get off the phone. “I thought I had a winner on my hands, a winner.”

     Nav/Steve realizes immediately that any emotions he might feel for anyone or anything will have to be checked at the door in this job, and even though Lance is willing to give “Steve” another chance, Nav stands, puts down his headphones and heads out the door, declaring “I won’t do this.”

     “Turns out Steve has a strong mind of his own. So it’s goodbye, Steve. What are you gonna do now?”

     “I think I’m going to go for a stroll in the park,” Nav responds.

     As Nav returns to the lobby, he jokes to the Security Guard, “That’s it for me, is that a record?”

     The guard laughs, “Not quite kid.”

     Stanley Park, in case you haven’t guessed, is also a gay cruising spot. And Nav, it appears, is now a jobless, lonely, gay man. There among the joggers, the elderly odd cruisers, Nav meets Raymond, staring off into the distance.

     Seeing the man tear up, he asks if everything is all right, the man responding that he’s just having a little reminiscence.

     After just a few more niceties, Nav explains that he’s been through a difficult morning, and takes the hand of the slightly startled older man, Raymond, wondering if he might be interested in taking a nearby small path.

     Ray stares down the path, perhaps remembering his own times with Jim or just the fear of now suddenly meeting up with a young man so unexpectedly. He answers: “Maybe not. A lot of memories lying down this path.”

      “Good ones, I hope.”

      “Why, yes,” Ray replies. “Let’s just say I’d like to break new grass.”

      Nav chuckles at the idiom, as they hold hands and walk away on a “brief expedition.”

      “Is this new ground?” Nav asks. When Ray agrees, Nav takes out a piece of newspaper and spreads it across the ground, Ray asking is that for “his” use or his new friend’s, Nav replying, “Mine. Is that okay?” Obviously his intentions are to engage in fellatio.

       They gently kiss, relieving both of their painful tensions of the day. As they continue to kiss, we can see them pulling in the other, their need for love, for sharing, however momentarily, in a world that seems tense and lonely. They exchange names, something that rarely happens in such meet-ups, and in the quiet of the beautiful park they make love.

       This short work seems like a well-spring of maturity, clarity, and truth in a world of pouting, shouting, desperate young men, boys, and women. These two gentle men, brought by accident together on this day, realize that they have found what they are seeking, if only temporarily, in one another: some quiet moments in which another being displays their love for the other. That is the essence of such events, isn’t it?

 

Los Angeles, December 11, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (December 2025).