Percy Aldon | Salmonberries / 1991

kotzebue

by Douglas Messerli

 

Percy Aldon and Felix Aldon (screenplay), Percy Aldon (director) Salmonberries / 1991

 

Like the German husband and wife team, the Aldon’s 1987 film, Bagdad Café, Salmonberries was also filmed primarily in the US in a world on the outskirts of the American society. The small Alaskan village of Kotzebue is a sorry mess of small houses and squalor where it is even hard to imagine any excitement outside of the electronic snowmobiles and the truly overheated and smelly Bingo Parlor run nightly by Bingo Chuck (Chuck Connors).

      Yet this village also contains, when “he” is working the mines, a young androgynous character named after the village, Kotzebue (k.d. lang) who claims a Russian heritage and, the greatest surprise of all, a small comfy library run by a German immigrant, Roswitha (Rosel Zech).

      At first, the young miner seemingly threatens the librarian but staying beyond closing time and demanding a book, although it is clear that “he” cannot even read. Roswitha is ready to call the local policeman, but somehow resists, even when the “boy” tosses several of her precious books to the floor in a kind of mad rage.

     But when he shows up again, she intuits his needs, particularly when he cuts down the sign greeting visitors to the village in order to make clear that he himself is Kotzebue, the town founded by the German Kotzebue, and drags it into the library. She brilliant recites an entire history of the Russian- German founder and his family, making it clear to the young “boy” that it has nothing at all to do with him.

     Furious for her dismissal once again, he brings in the wrap in which he was discovered as an abandoned child in the cold on which is scrawled the word: “Kotzebue.” Roswitha knows the history of abandoned Eskimo children, but none before have been so protected in order to survive, and clearly this child was intended to be delivered up to this very village. Moreover, in another yet stranger moment, the boy entirely strips and appears naked in the library stacks, revealing that he is actually a female by gender, even if he has primarily gone through his life so far as a young man.

    Roswitha realizes that this individual is desperate simply the learn who she is and why she has been given the name and location of where she lives, all questions that she cannot possibly answer.

    Despite her fear and distrust of the insistent library-goer, Roswitha, herself a town mystery, begins to find herself interested in the young androgyne, particularly when Kotzebue goes ice-fishing and brings her a large fresh salmon for dinner.

    What Kotzebue discovers her Roswitha’s home is even stranger perhaps that his itinerant life. All the walls of her bedroom are filled with shelves with various pink and yellowing colors of bottles filled with salmonberry jellies which she has preserved over the years. She explains that she at first attempted to give them away, but when she found no one interest, she began to date collect them, providing her room with a beautiful glow of gleaming pinkish hues to color the harsh white-and-dark blue landscape which dominates.

     She hands a bottle to Kotzebue, who begins to spoon them into her mouth, but suddenly falls into a deep sleep upon the bed, Roswitha, upon smelling the bottle, realizing that the berries have fermented, turning into a kind of alcohol that has simply forced the young miner to pass out. Hours later, Kotzebue awakens, still tottering after the drunken episode.

     On another occasion, Kotzebue, who is clearly developing a crush on the beautiful librarian, attempts to pick her up near the library to offer her a ride home. He offers her the backseat, but she stubbornly stands at the back of the machine as if she were sledding with dogs. Instead of taking her immediately home, Kotzebue takes her on a long ride through the truly beautiful natural world surrounding the dirty settlement. And she, it is clear, is lost in a kind of snowscape dream world which she has never before quite experienced.

     Before the day is over Roswitha, almost inexplicably, but perhaps simply because she has never before been able to share her story, tells Kotzebue the story of her life, how both she and her husband were born in Communist Eastern Germany, and, at first, were happy with the Communist occupation. But quickly both her mother, who realized that her world was now again closed off and delimited as it had been under Hitler, become unhappy in their lives. Roswitha marries a young man, and together they attempt to buy an escape, moving through an East German safe house into the West. But at the very last moment, they were challenged by the East German police, and her husband as shot and killed at the very instant she set foot in the West. Now alien and alone in the free Berlin, she left Germany permanently for the isolated world where she now exists.

     As Kotzebue attempts to start up the machine again so that they might return home, it explodes. Roswitha, angry for the young boy-girl’s negligence and stupidity takes off her shoes and begins to trek back in the cold snow to town. Kotzebue, apologizing, unhooks the carriage part of the mobile, takes up the rope and pulls the sled after her, attempting the encourage her to ride with herself as the beast bearing the sled back, but she, at first refuses, offering up the opportunity for the beautiful Bob Telson and k.d. lang theme song, “Barefoot,” sung evocatively by Lang—a work almost as impressive as Telson’s moving “Calling You,” with lyrics by dramatist/director Lee Breuer* from Bagdad Café.

     Eventually, as her feet nearly freeze she allows herself to be sledded back to the town by Kotzebue, greeted with great mockery. Instead of immediately returning home, even then, Roswitha joins with an indigenous group of women who together perform tribal songs.

     The event, however, has caused a serious breach between the two women, and Roswitha has clearly cut her ties with the young woman whose only possible way to find identity has been through the knowledge and research of the librarian.

     It is now October 3, 1990 (I remember the day well, since I sat at my favorite Frankfurt restaurant on that day, sharing a table with a skeptical German journalist). Even in Alaska, sleeping on a couch at Bingo Chuck’s house, whose wife Noayak (Jane Lind) helps out in the library, Kotzebue catches the news of the German reunification on TV. And soon after, she enters the house when Bingo Chuck is downstairs at the Bingo parlor, to rob him. He returns, catching her in the act, as she pulls out a knife and threatens him. He is not so appalled by the robbery as he is by the fact that she is wearing a necklace of turquoise beads.

     Soon after, Kotzebue knocks on Roswitha’s door with an envelope in hand: two return plane tickets to Germany. It is her gift to the woman who now can return home to find the grave, if there is one, of her lover, a voyage on which Kotzebue intends to accompany her.

     The movie now shifts to Berlin, a modern day world that is almost as different to Roswitha as it is to the total stranger to any urban society, let along one that does not even speak her language.

   Yet, just as previously Roswitha seemed to intuit Kotzebue’s needs, so does the ex-miner now perceive that Roswitha needs to find her husband’s grave. Yet Roswitha is more than leery to contact her brother, given that she realizes it was probably he who reported their attempt to escape, causing her husband’s death.

     Together the two women explore the 1990 world of Berlin, at one point Roswitha also noticing Kotzebue’s necklace, which she recognizes as Eskimo in origin, Noayak also processing just such a pair of beads. At a party later that evening, as the German’s celebrate and dance, Kotzebue stands up on a game machine announcing that she is an Eskimo. The Germans, momentarily confused, all laugh eventually, declaring themselves to also be Eskimos, obviously not comprehending the true significance of Kotzebue’s discovery, since the necklace was included in the container in which she was discovered as a baby.

    Roswitha eventually finds the address and meets up with her brother. She forgives him, in a cold manner, knowing that he believed in the East Berlin Communist system and did not want to lose his sister. And he explains that he was able to place her husband’s body in a cemetery and provide him with a decent burial. The wife, meanwhile, hurries to make a grand dinner, but once Roswitha is provided with the burial location, she and Kotzebue make a quick escape.

      They find the gravesite covered over with leaves, which she removes to see the grave. But before she leaves, she recovers it with leaves as if it is better hidden in a past to which she can no longer return.

     Back in the hotel room, finally, as they chat, they find a moment of deep rapport, Kotzebue discovering a moment to attempt to deliver a serious kiss. But Roswitha immediately backs off. In a series of half-hearted refusals, she attempts to convey that such a relationship is not for her, that she is not ready for such a relationship, or simply that she needs more time.

      By the end, Kotzebue simply explains that she cannot remain in Germany any longer, and the two return to Alaska.

      There they immediately hook up with Noayak, and confront Bingo Chuck. The truth is obvious to Noayak, who recalls his occasional travels years before to indigenous villages. At first, Chuck will not admit to the incidents because of his embarrassment of his past, but finally admits to having sex with young Eskimo women, awarding them just such necklaces as a prize. We now realize that Kotzebue’s mother, having become pregnant, was forced

to kill her baby, and instead wrapped her up with beads and a name to where she should be returned. Kotzebue is not the child’s name but the location to where she should be sent if found.

     We see in the new few frames the young miner sitting in the cold landscape thinking all she has discovered through. And we already know to whose door she is headed after. She knocks once again on Roswitha’s door. Perhaps this time the woman is ready to love the other with whom both have discovered the sad truths of their lives.

     Although this film is truly very loosely constructed, in the end I find it far more believable and moving that even the wonderful and unexpected female bonding of Bagdad Café. In both cases unlikely couples from entirely different cultures come together in an unexpected manner, bringing new meaning to both women’s lives. In Bagdad Café it remains just a deep female bonding; Jasmin will likely marry the artist Rudi Cox. But in Salmonberries there is at least the possibility of a lesbian love affair.

 

*I have a rather interesting acquaintance with both Percy Aldon and Bob Telson, having met them through my friend Lee Breuer and spent several long hours with them as they attempted to pitch a stage version of Bagdad Café to a group of New York investors in Breuer’s Mabou Mines studio.

 

Los Angeles, May 25, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (May 2026).

Derek Jarman and Paul Humfress | Sebastiane / 1976

splendor in the sun

by Douglas Messerli

 

Derek Jarman and Paul Humfress (screenwriters and directors) Sebastiane / 1976

 

Surely the only soft gay porn in which the characters speak Latin, Derek Jarman’s 1976 film, Sebastiane, is like no other movie ever made. This work begins with a long orgy scene in Diocletian’s court that might have come out of a film by Fellini, and then shifts, throughout the rest of the film to long Pasolini-like images and story. And while the hilarious orgy dance itself that might have choreographed by Busby Berkeley performed in front of an audience that includes at least 3 Rocky Horror Film alumni, the whole is a product only of the imaginations Jarman and his co-director Paul Humfress.

      This is not your mother’s Christian saint, despite small bows to church history. Yes, Sebastiane (Leonardo Treviglio) here is also a captain of the Praetorian Guards, but unlike the saint’s hagiography, Diocletian does not personally order his death, and the handsome Christian youth is most definitely not a figure who converts others. His major action in this work is to attempt to dissuade the Roman emperor from killing his two current boy bedmates, the second of who, Diocletian claims, tried to set his bed afire (perhaps a metaphor for eager sex). His interference does not save the boy and gets Sebastiane, in the first act of his endless acts of martyrdom, sent off to a desert garrison headed by the hunky ruddy-faced Severus (Barney James), who, stuck out in the middle of nowhere with no battles to fight, simply wants the beautiful young man to share his bed now and then, a pleasure which time and again Sebastiane refuses.

      It’s not that the eventual saint is against homosexual dalliances. As one of the favorites of Diocletian he must surely have also had to share his bed; and his relationship to his friend Justin (Richard Warwick) comes very close to being sexual while presumably chaste—even his fellow soldiers describe Justin as a Sebastiane-lover—and, finally, there is that blue-eyed mysterious young Leopard Boy (Gerald Incandela) who shows up as a vision while Sebastiane is bound and staked out naked in the desert sands; although he expresses his love in semi-natural terms, as is his wont—nearly everything he speaks is about the sun and water—even he declares he loves this boy, whom he has only glimpsed as in a feverish dream, and whom Justin cannot even imagine exists.

       Besides what else is there to do in this desert, heated-up outpost but to wander around naked or in cod pieces, eying the other eight soldiers with whom you’re daily sharing your lives? One of their group, the least beautiful of them, wants nothing more than to return to Rome and get himself a female whore. Another young boy seemingly resists all attempted assaults. But the others, particularly Adrian (Ken Hicks) and Anthony (Janusz Romanov), spend most of their days, when not being forced by Severus to play out mock battles and enter into wrestling matches, to put it simply, kiss, make-out, and fuck. Indeed, Jarman’s and Humfress’ depictions of their tender love- making is the closest this film gets to the truly spiritual, as one of the pair is even allowed to get an on-camera erection. And almost all of these thin and muscled soldiers spend most of their days in the splendor in the sun, a bit like a gathering of gay magazine models, either in pastel c-strings or naked, entertaining both the voyeur Severus and the audience itself. I think anyone who likes the male body, man or woman, might enjoy just staring at the screen.

      Yet Jarman knows well the entire genre of gay film-making, spending long periods with S&M scenes in which Severus, the continually spurned lover, finds new ways to torture the boy he so admires. There’s whipping, hanging, binding, and staking enough for any S&M admirer (of which I’m not). But this is, if you recall, a supposed rendition of the martyrdom of a saint.

       Finally, after a particularly frustrating night alone while drinking, Severus orders up the famed scene of arrows being flung through the air into Sebastiane’s body. It can hardly be a surprise that this scene of a naked beauty being put to death by other naked beauties attracted nearly every Renaissance painter. Only Christ and Sebastian might have been painted naked, or at least, semi-naked, a titillation for both Renaissance men and women. If in the saint’s story Sebastian survived all the slings and arrows, and he was ultimately killed with cudgels, Jarman and Humfress know a good image when they see one and end their Sebastiane’s life with an arrow through his neck, the whore-loving rascal organizing and overseeing a death which he has long been wishing for, particularly since it is now a war between the beauty and the beast.

      One can well understand why this film was so controversial in its gay and unauthorized telling of a Christian believer who had attempted to stop Diocletian from his endless murder of the converted. How Jarman even cleared the British censors is beyond me. While the US was tittering over The Boys in the Band’s tame row-line dancing, Sebastiane presented its hero in a wild dance to the sun and body that Ted Shawn and Ruth St. Denis might have died for.

      Yet, for all of its languishing over male buttocks and genitals, there is something very pure about Jarman’s and Humfress’s work. In their simple celebration of the male body we do come to a kind of testament to the human bodies that God chose us to inhabit, with all of its appendages and beckoning entries. Eyes, nipples, noses, and yes penises, buttocks, and any other orifice is explored here, not in titillation (although these directors are not against that, and certainly Severus is not appalled by all their sexual exploration), but in a kind of expression of the sacredness of human life. We know that in the killing of Sebastian that Severus and the others who are charged to carry out the act, have certainly lost something of their own sacred existence in that act.

      And, in large part, Jarman’s “gay” film is not simply about homosexual lust, but about the power of sex of any kind: transgender (as in the film’s first scene), lesbian (Diocletian’s wife has her own favorites), and, perhaps too shocking for many, man-boy love. It’s a bit strange, but perhaps appropriate that in casting his figures in Latin, Jarman is restating that these loves are those that can still speak their names—at least in English. What is there left to do but to observe and watch?

 

Los Angeles, July 6, 2018

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2018).

 

Hong Khaou | Summer / 2006

wicked and good

by Douglas Messerli

 

Hong Khaou (screenwriter and director) Summer / 2006 [9 minutes]

 

British, Cambodian-born director Hong Khaou’s Summer chooses the path taken dozens of times before by LGBTQ directors, but his vision of the genre is fairly sophisticated.

     Two longtime friends, Leung (Peter Peralta) and Will (Jay Brown) are wandering the woods of Hampstead Heath in London on the look for botanical finds for a school class project in which Leung is enrolled.

     Like most schoolboy adolescent friends they roughhouse, push and pull against one another, and spend a great deal of time talking about heterosexual sex. Leung probes his friend to discover if he has had sex with his girlfriend, discovering that indeed he has had oral sex, curious, of course, to find out what it felt like. Will replies: “wicked”* and “good.”

     Will wonders if Leung has had any experience and he readily admits he hasn’t been fellated yet. “Don’t you want to?” Of course, Leung reacts, “You gonna to show me?” which receives the expected groans and disdainful reactions.

      But Leung seems to take it a little further beginning his next sentence with, “Umm, I was thinking, you wanna....,” Will immediately interrupting with “Give you a blow job? Come on...” And they walk on laughing, Will in search of a range of taller trees that his mother has mentioned where special leaves slowly fall to the ground. But Leung seems to want to continue....  “Have you ever thought about...,” but the fluttering of leaf to the ground sends Will on the run to catch it, both boys wrestling as they make the attempt for the leaf and others. When Will finally catches one, Leung demands it and they begin to wrestle more seriously, Will finally actually hitting his friend somewhat violently before Leung responds, jumping on him before suddenly bending in for a kiss.

     Will roughly extricates himself, shouting out, “What the fuck you doing you queer,” but quickly pulling his words back into the subject of “the leaf,” “You canna have my leaf. You’ve got to get your own leaf.”

      Leung walks away down a path, but Will follows tossing small stones at him until Leung turns back to what now seems like his former friend: “What’s your fuckin’ problem. All I did was kiss you.”

        “Nothin’ serious then,” Will mocks. “What do you want me to say? You have such soft lips.”

        Leung again turns to say, “Fuck you,” Will challenging him yet again with, “I bet you wanna do that.” And Will body-butts him again, Leung walking away and alone sitting on a hillock now in tears.

        Soon his buddy joins him, the two sitting next to one another in silence.

      Will breaks the silence. “I’m not gay. I didn’t know you felt that way about me.” He pauses to continue in his meaningful / meaningless chatter: “There are a lot of other people out there. I’m sure you’ll find someone you fancy, right?’

      What we have just observed is an important genre, a sort of sub-genre of the “coming out” film which I labelled—in my entry about another British film, Dear Friend of 2011 along with several others in this genre—the “daring friends” genre, suggesting that, while it is often one of the boys and girls who first admits the hidden feelings, it is presumed to be shared simply because of the long-time relationship. Here we have evidence of that when Will asks Leung, “How long have you known you were gay?” with Leung parroting back the question, and Will’s fervent response, “I’m not.”

    Leung’s very next inevitable question insinuates the real problem of a friend who claims to be innocent of any sexual feelings he may have aroused in the other: “Does anyone else know?”

     The other’s response, in this instance, is equivocal and comic, permitting Will to maintain his promise of still being his “mate”: “I haven’t told my dad.”

      Will: “Are you going to?”

      Leung: “When he dies I will.”

    Often such revelations gradually result in a shifting or even ending of the relationship. And on occasion it results in an admission of shared feelings. But nothing after can truly ever be the same for either since it generally becomes impossible for the other to comprehend what these unwanted feelings are and why the former friend feels them; or such an admission forces the other to come terms with his or her own sexuality before being fully ready. And generally, it represents in both young people and sometimes older people a rather daring con-fusion or mixing of two different roles that others play in one’s life: friend and lover. One person can perhaps perform both roles, but it is extremely difficult to play both roles to someone simultaneously.

 

*In today’s youth jargon “wicked” means many things, mostly pleasant, close to the 1950s and 60s word, “cool.”

 

Los Angeles, May 10, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (May 2022).