Harry Kümel | Daughters of Darkness / 1971

the inevitable demise of the virgin bride

by Douglas Messerli

 

Pierre Drouot, Jean Ferry, Harry Kümel, Manfred R. Köhler, and Joseph Amiel (screenplay), Harry Kümel (director) Daughters of Darkness / 1971

 

The fascinating, quite elegant, and intelligent horror film Daughters of Darkness has long been established as a lesbian vampire movie, which it most certainly is. But oddly enough, and perhaps predictably, it has not been perceived by either critics nor its audiences as being what it fully is, a camp vision of the evils of homosexuality in general, male gay sex as well as lesbianism, played out as a general attack of the heteronormative majority represented here by the poor clueless, fairly unintelligent, and quite passive new Swedish bride, Valerie Chilton (Danielle Quimet).

      Valerie’s husband, Stefan (John Karlen), instead, generally has been perceived as a typical misogynistic heterosexual or even bisexual male who like so many macho husbands occasionally and without warning beats his wife into a rape-like submission, forcing the shocked bride, in this instance, to leave and eventually seek the empowerment that comes with the seemingly feminist powers that the lesbian vampire Countess Elizabeth Báthory (played by the always memorable Delphine Seyrig) and her lover Ilona (Andrea Rau) embrace.

      The film encourages us to side with the lesbian vampire figure simply because she has the power to free herself and Valerie from the entrapment of heterosexual marriage and to offer her seemingly sexual equality. But, in fact, the Countess is far more hierarchical than even the sexist Stefan, willing to give up her slave-lover Ilona, ordering her to seduce Stefan in order to cause Valerie to realize the sexual promiscuity of her husband.

     Although the film almost comically plays out Ilona’s death through a series of accidental slippages and wrong movements (the Wikipedia description recounts the literal series of events: “Stefan teases Ilona in the bathroom, and attempts to pull her into the shower. The two get into a tussle and slip and fall, causing Ilona to slash her hand on a razor before fatally falling on top of it.”) one cannot discount—nor should we ignore the mesmeric powers of the Countess, who just one night earlier had totally hypnotized Stefan with her tales of her female ancestor torturing dozens of females, a subject about which, apparently, Stefan is utterly engaged.

      In short, the Countess is perfectly willing to give up one slave for the possibility of gaining another, in this case Valerie. And, of course, once she has gained control of Valerie, the Countess must surely get rid of Stefan as well. His death is played out once again rather comically, representing several awkward movements as its cause (Wikipedia: “Valerie, under Elizabeth's spell, refuses to leave with Stefan. A violent fight ensues, during which Stefan's wrists are slashed by a broken bowl. As Stefan bleeds to death, Elizabeth and Valerie drink the blood pouring from his wounds.”)

     Somehow most critics have failed to imagine that the Countess who appears in some instances to travel large distances in a matter of seconds, is not directly involved or at least has no magical abilities, which is contrary to the tale in general. But, in this case, it is Valerie who attacks Stefan, along with the Countess attempting to smother him with the bowl just before it breaks. We don’t even need hypnotic powers to explain that they killed him purposely. And once again, the Countess knows precisely where and how to quickly get rid of a corpse.

       What follows, a mad rush by the two of them to escape the country before the sun rises, which ends in both of the deaths, Valerie seemingly being reborn into new life, but with the voice and mannerisms of the Countess, suggesting that the Countess still reigns within, Valerie providing only a body with which to entice other such women as herself.

    But let us go back to the other side of the film which generally is brushed over with hasty explanations by the critics, who obviously display some discomfort in exploring Stefan and his past.

       Stefan, who has just married Valerie as the movie opens, begins early in the film by admitting that he does not truly love her. She, passive of always, agreeing that perhaps she does not truly love him either, although her actions belie the truth that she is madly in love with the handsome young man. Nonetheless, both rather gamely argue that in not loving one another, they have the perfect relationship, obviously never having to be jealous of one another’s behavior. Yet, of course, jealousy is immediately what Valerie displays, particularly as in the empty bar of the grand hotel on the Ostend, Belgium seafront where they are staying before the supposed visit to Stefan’s mother in England, the Countess, the only other guest in the winter-time hotel, seduces her husband her gory tales.

      Previously, on a quick day trip to Bruges, Valerie has been equally confused and troubled by the interest Stefan has taken in the death of a young girl, one of several recently drained of blood, obviously the work of the Countess and her “secretary” Ilona.

      Stefan has told her that, although his aristocratic British mother remains in England, he has been living for most of his youth in the US, having met Valerie on his travels through Europe. She is quite apparently, given her obviously plebian roots, terrified of meeting his notoriously disapproving mater, and begs him to call her explaining his visit or even travel without her to his mother to tell her of their marriage before she joins him on a visit. Stefan seems to be reticent to do so.

      When he does finally call his mother, at Valerie’s insistence, we discover, in one of the most humorous moments in the film, the person at the other end of phone is a totally effeminate, elderly gay man, hardly able to imagine what “they” might do with a female bride were her son to bother to bring her “home.”

      Many who write about this film do not even mention this crucial piece of information, and those who do write of it generally ascribe it to one of the reasons why Stefan, who they perceive as bisexual, is so confused and conflicted about his sexual desires and perhaps even drawn to his interest in female torture, seemingly arguing for a current lover relationship between Stefan and the elderly queen.

      Critic Cait Kennedy, for example, observes: “Valerie’s new husband Stefan is perhaps grappling with misogyny and self-loathing of his own. It is revealed in the film that the elusive “mother-in-law” that Stefan does not want Valerie to meet is actually a flamboyant (coded as gay) man. While the details of their relationship are somewhat concealed, it is very clear that Valerie presents a threat to an arrangement enjoyed by Stefan. In many ways, his relationship with “Mother” mirrors the relationship between Bathory and the women she surrounds herself with. In Stefan, this manifests in sadism and physical abuse and assault directed at Valerie and later at Bathory’s secretary.”

     While this reviewer is quite correct in observing the extremes of Stefan’s behavior, the movie doesn’t fully support the idea that Stefan has a current sexual relationship with “Mother.” If Stefan has been away for all these years in the US, presuming he is not simply lying to Valerie, then perhaps as in most “aristocratic” families he has simply been sent away at an early age by his “mother” to get an education, and has recently been touring the continent before his return home.

      Let us imagine that this “mother” played that actual role to a young boy who was raised from a babe, possibly as a young sexual plaything by a homosexual queen. Mightn’t he have learned to be suspicious and even hateful toward woman, even being told the stories of the Countess’ earlier ancestor, while later discovering his own heterosexual tendencies? In short, might that not better explain the confused and conflicted adult we perceive Stefan to be?

      Valerie, in short, is a victim of Stefan’s confused desires as much as she is of the Countess’ equally mixed desires (she wants not only Valerie’s body but her life-blood; he wants a sense of normality that given his childhood experiences he knows is impossible which results in alternating love and hate of the female sex), providing a sort of absurdist double attack on the bourgeoise notions of sexuality symbolized by the virgin bride.

      But this is not real horror film. We know from the beginning that the Marlene Dietrich-like Countess and her Louise Brooks look-alike lover Ilona (the film’s director Kümel openly admits he made up his central characters to resemble the movie stars) are vampires and have been busy only recently in nearby Bruges. And knowing this, we are hardly surprised that the vampire gets her new lover and does away with the male who might stand in her way. As in most vampire myths, we also suspect—even though in this case in the car crash the Countess is thrown from the car and impaled through the heart by a nearby tree branch—that she, or in this case Valerie as a kind of front, will return to life. And despite all the serious posturing, screams, shouts of horror, and seeming bizarre situations of the film, we must recognize this work as more of a gestural spoof of the genre than an attempt to truly frighten its audience.

      Six years earlier Ronald Tavel had already begun describing his plays and some of the films he was doing with Andy Warhol as representing a “theatre of the ridiculous,” and by the time Kümel’s Daughters of Darkness was released, Charles Ludlam had already begun his own notion of the Theatre of the Ridiculous on New York City stages.

       This film seems to work far more effectively as seen functioning as a “ridiculous theater,” a work which like Ludlam’s plays that is highly referential to other films, not only in its vampire themes and the lookalike Dietrich and Brooks figures, but through the performance of actor Delphine Seyrig herself, bringing up the issues from Seyrig’s character in Alain Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad of memory and reality through not only the Countess’ remembrances of her own bloodthirsty ancestor, but by this hotel clerk’s (Paul Esser) recognition of the Countess as having arrived at the very same hotel when he was still a young bellboy decades earlier, looking precisely as she does today.

      The references to Brooks are very much part of Resnais’ 1961 film, in which we observe Seyrig as a kind of Brooks-like beauty, positioning herself in various divans and beds; that earlier film, moreover, itself calls us various literary works and film figures, one critic, Thomas Beltzer, comparing it with Adolfo Bioy Casares’s The Invention of Morel, a fiction, published in 1940, that was itself influenced by H. G. Wells’ The Island of Dr. Moreau. In The Invention of Morel, a fugitive entrapped on an island, falls in love with a woman, Faustine, controlled, it appears by a tennis player, Morel. As in Robbe-Grillet’s script of Last Year in Marienbad, when the fugitive attempts to speak to Faustine, she does not react, and the many other tourists around him seem not to notice him. Ultimately, he discovers that the figures he is seeing are holograms created from the original beings, now destroyed, trapped in an eternal mechanical reality that is repeated again and again.

     Bioy Casares has, in turn, admitted that his character Faustine was based on the actress Louise Brooks, who, as he put it, “vanished too early from the movies.”

     By seeing the 1971 film through this lens instead of that of the all-too common lesbian vampire franchise, we can truly recognize the comedy of Daughters of Darkness and comprehend its undermining of its heterosexual tropes as the truly gay Stefan and the wholly lesbian vampire Countess close in on the traditionally minded straight virgin. If the Countess would not have completely killed her off, certainly Stefan’s queenly mother would have found a shelf on which to store her corpse. In this film, heterosexuality doesn’t have a chance.

 

Los Angeles, October 6, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2023).

Douglas Messerli | Terror of Love / 2022 [essay]

terror of love

by Douglas Messerli

 

The most popular of all stories is the “coming of age” work. We are all fascinated and destined—one might argue almost structured by our DNA relating to the survival of our species—to be committed to narrative structures that tell us about how a young person of 16-20 comes to terms with the world, her or his gender, sexuality, cultural values, and the significance of the surrounding world. Only such stories reveal whether or not we will survive not only as a species, but also as individual cultures, families, and smaller social units. If that moment when the young person near adulthood is a challenging and engaging one with positive consequences, or if that sudden encounter with a world larger than the self, family, and school peers is smooth and pleasant we can be hopeful for a new generation of individuals; if we read of severe trauma, perceive that a majority of individuals are faced with fear, terror, or possible disintegration we might imagine that the next generation will be facing difficulties which may infect the society as a whole.

      Even when we are not reading such narratives for what they mean for our children, adults often read them to compare their own memories of those very moments they too abruptly were forced to come to terms with who they were and what they believed, whether different or similar to their parents and families. Have things over time become better or worse for young people at that age; or is the story always basically the same?

      In truth, we must recognize, it can never be the same. For each being is original in how they adapt and each individual is forced to adapt differently depending upon the values and the openness or closed-mindedness of those around him or her, whether we are talking about their local communities or—if they have gone to college or moved away from where they were raised—the new communities in which they must now attempt to integrate themselves. No matter how many points of similarity we might find between our own lives, each story is inevitably a different one—which also makes these tales, thousands of them in existence, so utterly fascinating and maintains our interest in them.

       And, of course, for any child who discovers that he or she no longer shares his or her parents’ or communities’ religious beliefs, political views, racial attitudes, or social customs, coming to terms with that fact will be far more problematic than in the case where the individual simply acquiesces to the status quo, even while realizing a myriad of subtle personal differences. Indeed, it is to those big differences to which we generally look when engaging in such literature. A story about a young person who grew up in a wonderfully loving family whose child can find nothing major with which he or she disagrees is not at all interesting if we are truly engaged in something beyond self-confirmation. Generally, we look to see how a person of 16 to even 20 deals with the acceptance and expression of those differences in answering the questions I expressed in the first paragraph. If our sons and daughters cannot find it within themselves to accept the differences they feel within or cannot find a way to tell others of what their personal values truly are, we might naturally feel that something is wrong, that our children have been subject to a too narrow-minded an emphatic upbringing and, even more importantly, a single-mindedness of the broader culture.

      And if our offspring cannot truly accept what they feel within themselves or cannot tell others about those differences they likely will never feel happy or be able to function in the society as a whole being for they will have denied or canceled out that self simply by being unable to speak it.  Even if every parent might wish that their children grew up to share most of their own values, anyone with imagination cannot believe that will be the case unless one has decided to raise automatons instead of human beings.

    How we, as members of a larger society, might help these frightened individuals come to terms with their own thoughts and emotions becomes a question which always arises when reading several such narratives—which may also explain why some people simply dislike this generally popular genre.

    No matter how accepted they may or may not be by their own parents or schoolfriends, on the other hand, LGBTQ children, simply by definition of their having been born as a minority in a generally heterosexual, gender-conforming society must naturally face these “transitions” quite differently from everyone else. While evaluating the same issues with regard to religion, race, politics, and social customs as all of their friends, they must also deal with the question of their sexuality that for their peers is taken for granted—another kink in the already complicated series of knots to untie before they can comprehend who they are.

   Even more frightening, often for young people of this age the coming to terms with sexuality immediately involves not just themselves but someone else, another person to whom they have been attracted or with whom they have explored sex who has helped them realize their own sexual difference. In coming to terms with their own private story they are also, in other words, often telling the story of someone else who may have greater or lesser confusion, fear, or even terror of these issues with which they have come to terms.

     Coming of age suddenly becomes a far more serious problem than simply defining oneself. What might even self-acceptance say about the other, who may be dealing with the same issues in the very same school or nearby family? And what if the other is not of the same age? What if the other is significantly younger or older than the 16–20-year-old forced to suddenly answer to his or her identity. Or, as is often the case, what if that other were also of another race, religion, political party, or practiced very different social customs? Occasionally, such a young person coming of age might even have to face the problem of the other being someone in her or his own family.

     If straights have wondered, accordingly, why queer filmmakers and storytellers write so many stories about “coming out”—the phrase generally used to describe an LGBTQ individual’s coming to realize and finally accept sexual feelings different from most of his or her friends—one need only imagine the complexity of the situation for these young folk. As a sub-theme of the vast “coming of age” narratives, the “coming out” tale or movie explains to the homosexual, bisexual, transsexual, transgender, or simply questioning individual what it means to be sexually different and the numerous consequences that may entail.

      As I have documented in these volumes of My Queer Cinema when artists first begin to explore these subjects on film the typical “coming out” story not only was required to be somewhat coded and dream-like since any film about sexuality and all films about non-heterosexual behavior were outlawed, but was often filled with images of guilt and a sense of hopelessness. The few filmmakers who dared to express such feelings on celluloid—independent movie makers such as Curtis Harrington, Kenneth Anger, Jacques Demy, Gregory J. Markopoulos, James Broughton, and others—might have been described as dangerous to themselves and the society since their films often ended in defeat and death. Is it any wonder that that those others might have been able to properly “read” them they also perceived that the films might have been (and often were) confiscated or refused to be shown in public theaters? These pioneers were symbolically opening up their own lives for others to inspect and evaluate.

      By 1987 the young characters of British director Robert Tonge’s Two of Us who struck out on their own seemed full of self-acceptance and fearless about the adventures they might meet, and by the late 1990s the “coming out” films such as Get Real and Edge of Seventeen (both 1998) which inaugurated the second wave of such US films, seemed like honest appraisals of the difficulties their heroes had to meet while offering a far more positive belief in acceptance and personally coming to terms with the sexual differences than in the works of the earlier generation. Get Real even attempted to speak of the consequences the hero’s self-acceptance had upon others still unable to make the leap. 

      One might have imagined, accordingly, that by the next century, some 30 years after Stonewall, such a genre might even have seemed unnecessary, or at least not of as great significance for the LGBTQ community.

      But in fact, the genre has not only continued but as grown to be even more popular. In story after story, we continue to read just how difficult it is still for young 16-20 year-olds and even individuals who haven’t been able come to terms with their sexuality until later in their lives to personally face themselves, their peers, and, in particular, their families with the truth.

       A pattern seems to have been set which no matter how openly accepted LGBTQ individuals are by the society at large, and despite the embracement by many countries of gay marriage and a feeling that such formerly sacred institutions such as gay bars, homosexual sex clubs, and large gatherings of exclusively LGBTQ individuals feel less relevant today than they once did, it is still extraordinarily difficult for task many young people to fully accept their sexuality.

      For a long while now I have wanted understand why. Why do films such as Danish director Christian Tafdrup’s Awakening (2008), German-Czech director Marcus Schwenzel’s Brotherly Love (2009), Spanish director Venci Kostov’s The Son (2012), and French director Olivier Lallart’s Fag (2019)—all variations of “coming out” stories with dark consequences and generally with sad endings—still exist? There seems to be a disconnect between the general cultural view of the LGBTQ experience and the feelings of youths still locked within smaller social units of family, school, and antiquated sexual laws.

      In this essay, accordingly, I explore, almost at random, six short films from several different cultures that were released during the past years when I have writing on queer cinema, 2014-2020, in order to further explore these concerns.

 

Los Angeles, January 5, 2022

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema (January 2022).

 

Martin Reinhard | Svans / 2016

dropping the soap

by Douglas Messerli

 

Troels Linde Andersen (screenplay, based on an idea by Patrick Helledie), Martin Reinhard (director) Svans / 2016 [18 minutes]

 

The title of Danish director Martin Reinhard’s 2016 short film means “faggot” or “fag,” which connects it in many ways with Olivier Lallart’s Fag (2019), on which I have previously written. Both films explore the lives of 16- or 17-year-old schoolboys, in this case one of whom is openly gay and the other who is a popular sports enthusiast who hangs out with his like-minded friends, who, although not using the denigrative term “fag,” nonetheless mock and dismisses the gay boy Alexander (Mikkel Albinussen Møller).

     The film begins with a recreation of the kind of homoerotic locker room behavior of many young high school boys, in this case one of their group running in to photograph his showering buddies, which turns quickly in a towel fight, in which the towel is snapped against another boy’s wet bottom, a kind of game that braves sexual imitation which the fighters know to be safe since their fellow battlers are equally heterosexual. Yet even this early in the film a gay observer might recognize that one of their group, Axel (Jonatan Tulested)—in his somewhat amused observation of the roughhousing and in his clear determination to stand slight apart from any participation—represents a kind of “outsider” to this very group, interrupted perhaps by his buddy as simply being a little quieter and enigmatic, without fully realizing that he might be nervous to involve himself, particularly as a voyeur. The line is always a very thin one: when does the group leader in his seemingly objective reserve and apparent maturity become the group pariah, an alien where he previously helped to define them. Once more it is the role played by John Dixon in Get Real and Esteban in Lallart’s Fag.   

     Our suspicions about this attractive blond-haired boy are quickly confirmed as we observe in the very next scene Axel calling in to Alexander to open up his window so that he might crawl in and passionately fuck the school queer. The two have evidently been sexually involved for some time, and Alexander attempts to encourage him to stay for breakfast, his mother apparently having no difficulties with having a gay son. And as often happens in films in which one partner is open while the other is still closeted, Alexander subtly attempts to encourage his friend to realize that if he admits to being gay, his world will not end.

      But that is precisely Alexander’s fear, that if he were to reveal the truth to his buddies, he would lose not only their friendship, but his role in the social circle that is the envy of many of their schoolmates.

      When, however, upon hearing that an attractive girl has broken up with her boyfriend, and the others encourage Axel to pursue her, reality comes a bit too close. When he doesn’t immediately take up their suggestion, they remind him that he and the girl, Simone (Emma B. Marott), had been attracted to one another years earlier and wonder what has happened to him now; has he, they joke, sworn off girls, has he turned gay? His failure to answer means multitudes to young men and women who are hypersensitive to what every word and glance might mean to their lives.

      And later in the day, as they stand in what appears to be a student gathering spot near the campus, he meets up with Simone, walking away with her and the others as he catches Alexander’s slightly nervous glare. The openly gay boy knows that having fallen in love with a popular sports player he may at any time lose out in the pull of social pressures Axel’s peers enforce.  

     Yet the next night Axel shows up again to Alexander’s house, but this time instead of “crawling in and out the window,” as his friend has accused him of doing, he rings the doorbell and his happily greeted by his lover’s mother. This time he stays through the night and shares breakfast, the two of them even sharing a goodbye kiss in the doorway.

       At that very moment, however, a voice calls out his name from across the street, a friend who just as suddenly realizes what he is witnessing and quickly goes cycling off. Terrified (that word again), Axel suddenly accuses Alexander of having known the other boy was there, of setting him up for an “outing” that he has not yet sought. And he slugs his friend in response several times before himself running off to ponder his next move.

       As anyone who has been in a position where it matters knows (admittedly I was never in such a position as a youth performing, somewhat unknowingly, the role of the outsider gay boy) by the time Axel reaches the school everyone will have been told that he is not only gay but is involved with the school “fag.” Axel is so confused by the situation that he appears to have turned into a version of Oz’s Tin Man, a being who can no longer move and, because of his actions against the boy he loves, no longer has even a heart.

       Coming upon him, Simone wakes him up from reverie, suggesting they’ll both be late to school as she jokes about what everyone will think when they show up together, she being, evidently, the only one who has not yet be told the truth.

        Just as he feared, no one will speak to him in the school hall. All seemingly turn away from him they moment he’s spotted. The showers, obviously, loom up like a nightmare (the director does not explain why Axel takes a shower without first working out in the gym or joining the others in a game of soccer). Once more, none of his former friends even acknowledge his presence.  

      As in walks into the shower room, they all turn away from him and, on cue, drop their bars of soap, bending in unison with butts facing him as if to taunt him about their availability. Understandably, he is speechless.

      But Denmark is after all a Scandinavian country, long known for its open acceptance of most sexual activities. In 1964, as a young man in Copenhagen, I noted that nearly every newsstand featured all sorts of sexually explicit porn magazines, including some, which would surely be banned today, of underage boys. One by one his friends pass by him, to give his shoulder a squeeze to reassure him that his being gay doesn’t matter and means nothing to them. He will still remain their friend.

      For a citizen of the US, it all seems a bit unbelievable, something cooked up to reassure those fearful about coming out that everything will be just fine if they only admit it to themselves. Yet something quite similar occurred in the far more sophisticated feature film of 1995 Sebastian (När alla vet) (When Everyone Knows) by Swedish director Svend Wam, so hopefully it’s true. The fears that rendered Aksel immobile were all of his own imagination—at least with regard to his Danish school chums. Had I only seen a film like this in 1964 I might have taken up the offer of some of my Norwegian schoolmates and joined them in their dorm room beds. But would I have been able to return for a final year of US high school after that?

      In this instance, accordingly, we do perceive that a great deal of the problems encountered by young 16-20 year old boys has to do with their fears instead of the classroom of 2016. Yet other films do not seem to posit that reality.

      Yet even the still loved Aksel must attempt to repair his relationship with Alexander who has suffered the most for Aksel’s selfish fears. When a crisis occurred, Aksel was clearly more concerned with how it would affect him rather than what it might mean for his lover. Does this Tin Man, even now that he’s been reoiled, truly have a heart?

 

Los Angeles, January 4, 2022

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (January 2022).