by Douglas Messerli
Shota Kalandadze (screenwriter and director) Associations
with Wagner’s Music / 2006 [5
minutes]
It is hardly surprising that the
self-described eroticist, Georgian director Shota Kalandadze’s appropriation of
the music of Richard Wagner, Associations with Wagner’s Music, employs
its short 5 minutes mostly displaying homoerotic images, primarily of young
sports figures boxing and participating in a mass Judo session and, most
significantly displaying their mostly nude bodies in the shower.
Relying primarily on selections from Wagner’s Ring cycle, Kalandadze
begins with boxers, gradually scrolling up his images so that they reveal, bit
by bit, a man showering with other men standing by the ready next to him.
Eventually the scroll produces a female image, her breast shining in the
sunlight of a window as she is transformed from a black-and-white figure to one
in color, a massive Judo gathering following which suggests not so much
eroticism as it does the programmed calisthenics of sports marathons,
particularly those of Hitler and other fascist regimes. But these Judo
performers are anything but uniform in their movements, and even this scene
turns erotic as some men decide to strip off their shirts and begin their own
regimen of set-ups.
The upward scroll of the film clips returns us to the shower room for an
even more slightly revealing homoerotic scene, which gradually reveals a smile
upon the composer’s imposed face.
Los Angeles, January 19, 2024
Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog
(January 2024).
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