Pedro Almodóvar | Matador / 1986

professional killers

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jesús Ferrero and Pedro Almodóvar (screenplay), Pedro Almodóvar (director) Matador / 1986

 

Perhaps it is best to begin talking about Pedro Almodóvar’s fascinating 1986 film Matador by describing what it is and isn’t. It is certainly not quite like anything seen in Hollywood movies, even if you strain to point to psychological criminal-horror films such as Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo and Psycho, although they certainly share the same closet with Almodóvar’s work. David Lynch’s Blue Velvet of the same year, moreover, shares some of the film’s DNA.

      But Lynch lacks much of Almodóvar’s sense of camp and humor, and certainly does not share the Spanish director’s nostalgia for technicolor films of the 1950s, nor his colorful style. And no one is able to create such a psychosexual soap opera that includes obsessions with murder and sex involving an absolute crazy cast of secondary figures all equally obsessed with other issues.

     The film appears to be centered upon two individuals, the first of which is Diego (Nacho Martínez) a major bullfighter of national importance who was maimed by a bull and now walks with a limp. Since his mishap he has begun a school to each young would-be matador’s, including the beautiful young man Ángel (a young Antonio Banderas). The second central figure is María (Assumpta Serna), a lawyer who, unbeknownst to Diego, has been a long-time aficionado of his work, but presumed that he had retired after his accident from the art of “killing.”

 

     From almost the first moment of the film we realize that is precisely what these two figures, Diego and María, share. For Diego “the kill” has been transformed into a sexual obsession wherein he can enjoy sex only by watching films in which women are being strangled, stabbed, maimed, or destroyed in some other manner as in the slasher films he nightly watches such as Jesús Franco’s Bloody Moon (1981) to which we observe him masturbating early in the movie. To have sex with his girlfriend Eva (Eva Cobo), he requires her to play dead. As we discover later in the film, moreover, he has already killed off two of his female students, burying them in his own yard.

      María, as Almodóvar shows us in the earliest frames of the film, has intense sex with men whom she stabs with a sharply pointed hair pin in the back of their necks at the moment of orgasm, murdering them at the moment of their most intense pleasure, a bit like Latrodectus mactans (the Black Widow living in the Southern Hemisphere). The sex Almodóvar captures was apparently unsimulated, just as it looks to be.

     Although María has long been a fan of Diego’s, they meet only after a series of very strange events regarding Diego’s student Ángel.

     Ángel—the son of an absurdly cruel fanatically religious Roman Catholic mother Berta (Julieta Serrano), whose every move, it appears, is centered upon her bizarre view of religion— has remained a virgin despite the fact he is now in college studying agronomics. He takes classes with Diego without his mother’s knowledge, one day staying after to receive some advice from his mentor about how to seduce a woman, admitting that he has yet to have had sex.

 

     Diego also has vertigo, triggered when he looks up at clouds, but which is often accompanied by inexplainable psychic episodes. He has, indeed, seen María murder her last victim he what he describes as his dreams. While talking to Diego, Ángel experiences an episode, asking for water so that he might take his pill.

       Meanwhile, the two continue to discuss women, Diego using the metaphors of a bullfighter to describe how to approach women and manipulate them; it is pointless to describe Diego as a chauvinist since, as I have suggested, he prefers his women dead or dying. In the middle of their conversation, however, Diego asks Ángel, almost nonchalantly, whether or not he likes guys.

        The young man, clearly fearful of just such a possibility, immediately reacts that he is no fag, and becomes privately determined to prove it to Diego and to himself as he proceeds that very evening to attempt to rape Diego’s girlfriend, Eva, who happens to be a neighbor of Ángel and his mother. Ángel grabs Eva as she is walking home in the middle of a rain storm, clumsily pulls her up against a car, pulls out a knife, and quickly ejaculates—evidently, according to Eva’s later discussion with the police, on her legs, unable to even penetrate her before coming.

        Eventually, he apologizes as she pushes him away. When Eva turns to leave, she slips on the mud, falls, and cuts herself, blood oozing from the wound. We quickly discover that Ángel also cannot stand the sight of blood when he passes out.

        Later that evening at the dinner table Berta insists, as one of the rules of Ángel living at home, that he attend confession. Ángel agrees and even meets with the priest, but disappears before entering the confessional booth, hightailing it instead to the police to confess to his rape of Eva.

  

      Even the police detective (Eusebio Poncela) seems somewhat amused by the boy’s confession, the female police clerk, observing his beauty, snarling out a sexist comment, “some girls have all the luck.” When the police and his odd assistant visit Eva, her mother Pilar (Chus Lampreave) attempts to block not only their entry to the house but even their ability to speak with her, arguing perversely that her daughter often gets raped and can well take care of herself. Although the police pull the daughter, nonetheless, into the station, she refuses to press charges since Ángel did not truly penetrate her and if were to try again, she’d castrate him. Besides, she argues, she has her modeling auditions coming up and doesn’t have time to deal with this.

       In short, any shred of masculine power Ángel might have derived from the event, is completely erased. Watching the police chief pour over pictures of recent missing people, however, he adds to his confession by insisting that he has killed the two missing men—because they “came on to him”—and two women, fellow students of his, to whom, he observes, he was attracted.

       It is at this point that the police assign María as his lawyer, inevitably meeting up with the bullfighter with whom she has so very much in common.

       Much of the rest of the film consists of the various eccentric secondary figures, Eva and her mother; Ángel’s psychiatrist Julia (Carmen Maura), who quickly discovers that his vertigo has to do, in part, with deafness in one ear and who simultaneously falls in love with him; and the police chief himself, who, when he visits Diego reveals his homosexuality—as Almodóvar cinematically reveals—when he cannot take his eyes of their crotches and buttocks.

       Most of the rest of the film is taken up with the chase of the matador (in this case as much María as Diego) for the bull. Like the dance of the matador’s cape, it is a give-and-take, attack- and-run affair, as the two find themselves entwined with one another, unable to escape their fated meeting. Some of the most beautiful scenes in the film involve Diego on the chase, as María, very much like Madeline Elster in Hitchcock’s Vertigo—appears, disappears, and reappears while pretending to reject the man destined to destroy her just as she is destined to destroy him.

     Because of his psychic powers, Ángel does lead the police and his lawyer María to the buried women on Diego’s property. The detective is understandably doubtful that the boy could have buried them with in front of his window without Diego’s knowledge. And María now suddenly realizes that her beloved bullfighter is still active, the two finalizing the encounter they have been anticipating. Soon after, when Ángel’s mother rather angrily demeans her son for not being able to stand the sight of blood without fainting, angry because he’s never been able to participate in ritual flagellation, the detective becomes certain that the boy is truly innocent, and is merely protecting Diego because of his admiration of or even love for him.

 

      Eva, who has conveniently gone off for a while, returns to bollix up everything, returning to Diego’s house at the very moment María and he are speaking of their murderous cover-ups. She attempts to blackmail Diego with her knowledge, hoping—despite any logical explanation—to h  old onto him, despite the fact that she can surely see it would only end in her death. But like a woman believing she might convert a gay man to heterosexuality, Eva is convinced that she can “straighten up” an actual ladykiller, insisting she is still in love with him.

      When he rejects her again, he goes to the police at the very moment when Ángel admits to Julia that he is again having horrible visions about Diego and is terrified about his well-being. The septet, the detective and his trusty assistant in the front seat, and Eva, Ángel, and Julia in the back seat, speed in the direction the boy envisions they car to be traveling, Ángel simultaneously recounting Diego’s words to María, creating a scenario in which, for at least a few moments of his life, he plays out a romantic scene unlike any other between two women and a man:

 

eva: You hear them?

ángel:  Yes, she says [turning to Julia] “I’ve never been kissed like that.

             ’Til now, I’ve made love alone.” [turning toward Eva] “I love you more than my own

             death. Do you want to see me dead?”

eva: What does he answer?

ángel: “Yes, and for you to see me dead.”

     As the five reach their destination, an eclipse which had been promised for the day suddenly materializes, and they pause to observe it. Inside, María stabs Diego before pulling his head up to watch her take a gun, put into her mouth and pull the trigger. The five would-be saviors rush into the house too late, observing them sprawled out, naked, dead.

      The police detective comments: “It’s better this way. “I’ve never seen anyone look so happy.”

      What might be a tragedy in most films, in Almodóvar’s capable hands, becomes high camp comedy as beautifully presented as a full-color fashion spread.

 

Los Angeles, November 19, 2023

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (November 2023).

D. W. Griffith | The Planter's Wife / 1908

the conventional tomboy

by Douglas Messerli

 

D. W. Griffith (screenwriter and director) The Planter's Wife / 1908

 

D. W. Griffith’s 1908 short film The Planter’s Wife, is mostly a film that concerns heterosexual female infidelity, focusing on a woman living as a farmer’s wife with a child; she is absolutely bored with her life and close to depression. Still a young girl herself, a fact clearly made evident, if not through the acting of Claire McDowell who plays Mrs. John Holland nonetheless through the long synopsis provided by “Moving Picture World.” That synopsis describes her situation, “The wife’s sister is an innocent, good-natured tomboy who never for a moment [had] dreamed that her sister’s low spirits were due to anything else than ill-health; no more did John.” In 1908, it is apparent, low spirits (depression) was not considered an issue of health, and good health itself for farm wives was defined through the hard work of cooking, housecleaning, yard and farm duties, and caring for children that often wore them down even in their youths.

     As opposed to her daily life, Mrs. Holland has created a romantic fantasy with the help of a local, Tom Roland (Harry Solter), a mustachioed villain just a step up from the melodramas of the late 1890s and the amateur stage productions represented in movies such as Show Boat (1936). Griffith actually expands on the simple melodramatic tropes of the first few frames with a meeting up of the housewife and her lover by a nearby river that is far more sophisticated and moves this early film closer to German writer Theodor Fontaine’s 1895 fiction, Effi Briest, the latter work transformed precisely because of its brilliant melodramatic conventions into the 1974 film by Rainer Werner Fassbinder. 

      The husband, John Holland (Arthur V. Johnson, reputed to be Griffith’s favorite actor) is presented as a young, lean, boyish farmer, clueless about his wife’s condition, just as, so the synopsis has told us, is her sister Nellie (Florence Lawrence, in real life married to Solter with whom she established Victor Studios, later sold to Carl Laemmle to become University Film).

      It is Tomboy Nellie, Florence Lawrence, of course, who explains this film's appearance in this book, providing as she does the slightest of interest to LGBTQ viewers. When she discovers that her sister has run off with the rotter Roland, leaving her baby in the hands of the gentle John and herself, Nellie suddenly comes alive, pulling out her gun, putting on her chaps, and hefting herself quickly upon a horse as she races after the phaeton carrying Roland and her sister.

      A bit like the world of F. W. Murnau’s 1927 film Sunrise, the only route to freedom seems to be over a body of water, and the villain and his willing maiden beat Nellie to the boat. Nothing will stop Nellie, however, as she takes the boat owner by gunpoint and forces his to row after them, finally confronting her sister and her lover, demanding that Roland jump into the water and swim home, while she takes her unwilling sister back to her farmer’s cabin, only then revealing her actual identity.

     Startled by the revelation of her own sister being her abductor and now totally confused and frustrated in her emotions, Holland’s wife—as evidence of her lack of identity and importance only as a housewife, not even given a name—holds the gun to her sister, actually attempting to kill her as Roland returns home (all in front the baby I might add). Failing in her acts, she perceives the terrible mistakes she has made in hooking up to a violent outsider, and now willing to kill her beloved sister to escape with him.

     But what is most important about this film is that the Tomboy sister, a predecessor of many other female tomboy and male sissy characters in these early movies, in this film is the biggest supporter of the male heteronormative society in which she lives.

     Surely Nellie will never allow herself or be allowed to live a heterosexual life, unless she were to play out the absurd dreams of a cowwoman like Texas Guinan in her tomboy heterosexual fantasy The Night Rider (1920). Yet she supports the normative. 

      Of course, in some respects this allows the audiences of the day to feel totally comfortably about and even support women who in this period were increasingly representing themselves as figures who could not only survive without the help of males but often were able to overcome the paternalistic societies in which they lived without gender definition.. By kidnapping her sister and bringing her back to her senses and purportedly good health, Nellie succeeds in distracting her audiences and her fellow characters from having any fears about her own clearly queer behavior. The Holland baby will surely grow up loving his odd auntie Nellie as much as his own distracted mother and totally clueless farmer dad. 

 

Los Angeles, July 4, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2023).

 

Wallace McCutcheon | The Boy Detective, or the Abductors Foiled / 1908

a transgender first

by Douglas Messerli

 

Wallace McCutcheon (screenwriter and director) The Boy Detective, or the Abductors Foiled / 1908

 

This film begins with a newsboy, Swipesy, playing a sidewalk game of craps with his messenger-boyfriend, Swifty (Robert Harron). He not only wins all of Swifty’s cash, but is awarded a mean-looking revolver.

     But all the time he’s playing, we also observe that Swipesy seems on the alert as he watches a woman enter a store, followed by two men lurking nearby who later follow her home, Swipesy trailing behind the trio. The woman enters her house and the two men move on up the street, entering a saloon. Swipesy tries to enter, but soon is thrown out, as he peers through the window. 

     By coincidence the messenger boy is soon called, enters the saloon, and comes out with a message, which Swipesy convinces his friend to share with him. Not seen in the film, but provided fully in the “The Moving Picture World” synopsis, the message reads: “Dear Mary, Badly injured in auto accident. Come to hospital at once. Am sending a carriage for you. Ruth.”

     The clever Swipesy immediately comprehends what the message signifies, and rushes to the young lady to reveal the nefarious plot against her. Swipesy insists that the woman call the police and asks if he might borrow one of her dresses and a hat, intending to take the carriage in her place. The sight of the boy dressed in drag provides a great deal of humor to Mary and her maid, as it probably did, as well, to its 1908 audiences.

      But even in drag, Swipesy proves he’s the hero. As the published synopsis ends: 

   “The carriage is stopped on a lonely road by the would-be abductors, when the masquerading Swipesy leaps out and holds the infamous wretches at bay until the arrival of the police, with his newly acquired revolver, which proves to be a cigarette case in the shape of a gun. Snapping it open, he hands around cigarettes to the amusement of the police and the chagrin of the ruffians.”

      But director Wallace McCutcheon evidently has another surprise in store, focusing after the story on a close-up of Swipsey in his newsboy outfit, showing off the cigarette case-revolver. Swipsey, it turns out, is himself a woman in newsboy clothes, making him perhaps one of the first truly transgender figures of early LGBTQ cinema.

      Originally intended as a series—how nice it would have been to follow the adventures of this transgender figure years before Judith in D. W. Griffith’s Judith of Bethulia (1914), Lillian Travers of A Florida Enchantment of the same year, and Filibus in Mario Roncoroni’s 1915 epic—but only this 1908 episode was released.

 

Los Angeles, June 14, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2023).

 

Narren-Grappen (Jester’s Joke) / 1908

two for one

by Douglas Messerli

 

Narren-Grappen (Jester’s Joke) / 1908

 

The Netherlands film of 1908, Narren-Grappen (Jester’s Joke), does not name a director, so we have to presume whoever was behind this short film was the cinematographer who was also able to create some rather special effects that, as one commentator suggests, were 80 years ahead of their time. But then, Georges Méliès had delighted his audiences with some quite astounding visual wonders even earlier.

      This 5.41-minute work features a female trickster, the Jester of the title, who with a puff of her cigarette can seemingly produce objects and even a dog.

       Finally, however, she lays aside her cigarette and, by performing a cartwheel, turns her entire body into a spinning gyre, even, at the end of her exercises, spinning about her own face.

 

     With simply a wave of her hand, moreover, she also creates a Pierrot and his Columbine. But in this case the Pierrot seems, at first, indifferent to the beauty of the female; that is, until the Jester pulls yet a second Pierrot out of the first, suggesting that the male was totally self-satisfied with another male within. Now both clowns, seated on either side of Columbine, begin to court her, attempting to hold her hand, but instead discovering that hand to be the other male’s.

 

    Soon they begin to quarrel and battle—the two of them suddenly outfitted with boxing gloves—over the female prize. At first they do more hugging but slugging, but gradually trick one another to achieve solid blows upon their cheeks. But soon in their sparring they merge bodies once again, the now single male shyly trying to claim Columbine as his prize. The Jester forces him to disappear through a slat in the bench upon with the three had previously sat.

     The Jester now clearly has other plans for her female creation, sitting down beside her on the bench and inching closer and closer, before, as the two stand, magically ridding the scene of the bench and collapsing her now treasured Columbine into a small box.

     In a new space, signified by a reddish tint she pours out Columbine from the box, twirls her around a couple of times and realizes she is not happy with the way her new woman friend is dressed. With another wave of her hand, she puts a long gown upon the girl and twirls her around for a moment as the new Columbine is also transformed into her earlier guise. The Jester seems absolutely pleased with the results, now having two female companions in one.

Los Angeles, April 16, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 2022).

Georges Méliès | Eclipse de Soleil en pleine Lune (Eclipse: Courtship of the Sun and Moon / 1907

hot sex

by Douglas Messerli

 

Georges Méliès (screenwriter and director) Eclipse de Soleil en pleine Lune (Eclipse: Courtship of the Sun and Moon / 1907

 

Georges Méliès’ 1907 black-and-white short, Eclipse: Courtship of the Sun and Moon, like so many other early films which might interpreted as LBGTQ films, is a territory openly up for question.

      The narrative of this early film is quite simple: a teacher (Méliès himself) of rather prankish students is attempting to describe to the naughty boys what they are about to witness, the alignment of the sun and moon into an eclipse.

  

    The teacher describes these planetary bodies’ alignment on his chalk board in a rather prudish coming together with a dotted line, as he, his assistants, and students rush up to the observatory tower to watch the event.

      Méliès might have presented the coupling in quite traditional heterosexual terms, the sun obviously being male, and the moon presented as a woman.

      But in a remarkable shift, the director portrays the sexually hot sun predictably, while casting the moon as a quite effeminate man. Their brief “affair” is presented with an amazing sense of camp, with the tongue-licking flirtations and pleasures they are both about to enjoy. Indeed, the moon reminds one a bit of the campiest version of gay actor Nathan Lane’s performances.

    The two enjoyable partners engage in the hottest of sexual encounters before they move off in opposite directions, the moon clearly sad to be leaving his lover. After which, the stars and other planets, seemingly represented as women—yet appear on the small screen I was watching mostly as men in drag—catapult over each other in a shower of falling stars that so shocks the pedant that he falls from his tower into a rain barrel below, only to be retrieved by his raucous students.

     The entire work is a satire from beginning to end, first mocking the pedagogical role of the Master of Science, and then laughing at the sexual roles that the film itself projects to us—before, finally, tumbling all scientific knowledge into a slop-pail, as if to suggest sex is better.

      These boys from 1907 were played out in more detail in Jean Vigo’s Zero for Conduct. Yet we know, given their age, they are more awed by the actual male-upon-male (in this case) sexual conduct than any lecture that they have had to endure.

      Méliès’ studio did regularly feature women as well as males, even if it might not have been fashionable for women to perform. If we are to believe Martin Scorsese’s Hugo, Méliès’ wife was very involved in his film productions.

      Yet here, not for the first time, the director chose to portray “Dainty Diana” not in the traditional way, surely for the satire and perhaps even mockery of the event. If we cannot perceive that, however, we are surely blind to the representation of gays on the screen I’d argue. You may not like the effeminate moon, but there he is, obviously being fucked by a lusty sun, and very sad when it’s over.

 

Los Angeles, January 13, 2020

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (January 2020).

Alice Guy Blaché | Les résultats du féminisme (The Consequences of Feminism) / 1906

seeing love from both sides now

by Douglas Messerli

 

Alice Guy Blaché (screenwriter and director) Les résultats du féminisme (The Consequences of Feminism) / 1906

 

It’s fascinating to realize that a year before Georges Méliès was shooting the still rather crude, cartoon-like The Courtship of the Sun & Moon, Alice Guy released a sophisticated and clever satire in which she skewered male paternalistic notions of empowerment by imagining a reversal of male/female stereotypical roles as representing The Consequences of Feminism (1906). Playing on the male terror emanating from the growing female empowerment, Guy showed her opponents what life might look like in the future if women treated their companions as males had throughout the centuries, suggesting that gender roles were not in-born but were a result of acculturation and basic received attitudes about sexuality.

 

     The result is a stunning early statement that might have forced any thoughtful viewer to question his or her assumptions about gender and some of the attending mannerisms we assume are products of sexual orientation.

      In Guy’s view males now dominated by women sit around the room, as they do in the first scene of this 6.45-minute polemical film, sewing flowers on hats. The men move effeminately, hands stretched forward, and moving in steps that might almost remind one of dance. These males have long hair, a couple of them wearing flowers amidst their curls.

      A woman enters the millinery shop, apparently in search of a new hat. The shop manager goes in search of an appropriate hatbox, while she checks out the workers, pinching one of their cheeks.

     When she finally selects a hat, the manager choses one of the young men to deliver it, he first stopping to smear a bit of cream on his face before mincing out into the world.

      Immediately after, we observe the same gentleman walking down the street, past the café where a woman sits drinking at an outdoor table. Seeing the man, she stands, going over to him and attempts to get a kiss. Another who observes her untoward action breaks up the masher’s attempts, offering to escort the helpless man away. But the new women is little better than the first, as she, convincing him to join her on a park bench, tries equally to force her affections upon him. As he struggles anew, two other men walking by, seeing what is occurring, run from the scene, clearly afraid of getting involved and being attacked by such a “masher” themselves.

       At home we see a man busy on the sewing machine while his male maid is ironing. The two work blissfully together, the maid finally finishing up her chores while his wife seems to be not so patiently waiting for him on a nearby lounging chair, drinking and smoking. She stands, goes to get something, and knocks over the small table before returning to her seat. The maid quickly picks it up, and puts it in its proper place before putting away the folded items. He kisses his boss goodbye gently on the forehead, the sewer fondly throwing him back a kiss with an extended hand and limp wrist.

 

     The sewing man, now alone, takes up a photograph and kisses it, impatient evidently for his companion or lover to return home. The woman we have seen flirting in the previous scene soon enters and kisses him, leading him to the couch for more kisses as she gets on her knees in seeming adoration of her housebound lover. Apparently, she is asking him to leave his home to join her for sex in a nearby hotel, for he pauses in some regret for leaving his domestic world behind, she convincing him to wrote a note, which he does before throwing several goodbye kisses at the room before exiting.

        In the very next scene, he sits on a bed, she before him attempting to make love to him. He literally swoons in the process, she proceeding to undress him as he faints in reaction to her lust. As the camera’s shutter closes she rushes to bring her lover some smelling salts.

      Now in a bar, several women are occupied reading newspapers, while others gather in conversations at nearby tables. A pioneer-like woman, toting a gun enters to be greeted heartily by the others, a woman pouring her out a drink and pounding her back with a sense of camaraderie.

       A man enters with a laundry basket filled with freshly washed linen, some of the women reaching it to pull out items and tossing them about the room, making fun of his confusion and distress. He rushes out horror-stricken by the chaos.

      Another man, leading two small children goes up to a woman in the corner, obviously pleading with her to return home instead of spending the night in the bar. She chases him off.

    We observe other men, also holding children passing by, fearful of intruding upon the all- female domain. The bartender closes the bar door to prevent further male entry into their sacred space.

      The camera switches to a spot outside the bar where our busy female masher is sitting at a café table enjoying a drink. Bit by bit a parade of perambulators and attending older children steered by males wander the streets. One man with children at his side recognizes the drinker and pleads with her to return home with him, an offer she rejects while seemingly put to shame by the others of his kind who surround and support his entreaties, scolding the woman for her treatment of her husband and her children.

       At that very moment, the insurrection seems to grow as back at the bar we see a man enter and scold the women, demanding that they all should return to their homes and families. Again, they quickly rout him out. But the next moment a league of males enter the bar, pulling the woman out, many of them up-righting and pushing their wives in the direction of home, while the ringleaders grab up some bottles and hail their new triumph.

       The victory, of course, is precisely what women were attempting to achieve in 1906 living under the same conditions that Guy’s fictitious men were being forced to endure.*

       If there was any one director who attempted early on to understand the “other” it was Guy, who as I write elsewhere in these pages, explored notions of the double and the “other” in several of her films. In The Consequences of Femininity, she was positing a “feminist” society that behaved just as the paternalistic male society had for centuries, a force that ruled over and controlled the “other,” in this case the opposite sex, in order to make a specific point. You can be certain that while this work is most definitely a satire demonstrating the evils of generations of male rule, she is simultaneously arguing against a feminism that behaves in the very same manner.

        If time and again in Guy’s work women prove themselves just as powerful as men, they are clever enough to share their prowess without denigrating their husbands or lovers. Guy encourages both, through the symbolic act of cross dressing, to feel what it was like to temporarily live as the other, or, as in this film, to explore what he feels like to live under such patriarchal—or matriarchal—domination. Guy seemed always to be seeking empathy on both sides of whatever divide people perceived, whether it be sexual, political, or cultural.

     The clever housewife of her short film A Comedy of Errors manages to punish her presumptuous neighbor for believing her window kisses thrown out to her departing husband were meant for him by gradually stripping him of most of his clothing accessories: his hat, umbrella, and coat, awarding them as gifts to her husband as surprise birthday gifts; but when her husband begins to behave equally badly, suspecting her of having a secret affair, she just as suddenly allows the neighbor to reclaim his possessions, leaving her husband with the tattered hat, a broken umbrella, and a weather-worn cloak with which he began the morning.    

       Interestingly, Guy’s tale is retold, within a slightly different context, in Richard Wallace’s 1926 film What’s the World Coming To?, in which husbands and wives also reverse their traditional roles, the men again being depicted as sissified dandies.

 

*The usually reliable commentator on silent films, particularly those featuring and directed by women, who goes under the moniker of “popegrutch,” wonders how the director found so many male actors capable of representing what reads today as an openly “gay society”:

          

 “The...thing that stands out about this movie is all of the signals the men put out regarding sexuality, which a modern audience reads as their being “flaming” or openly gay. Gay men existed at this time, of course, but they were far less open, even in liberal France, and again it’s hard to know how much we are “reading backward” when we interpret their behavior in this manner. Obviously, Guy was making them as feminine as possible to show her future dystopia in which men and women have traded places. Did she hire female impersonators as actors? That would make the longer hair and obvious facility with feminine roles more logical. Certainly, there were cabarets by 1906 in which this sort of thing went on, but I don’t know whether Guy would have had access. It’s possible that she used wigs and directed “straight” male actors until she got what she wanted.”

 

      Frankly, I’ve grown a little tired of the continued attempts to correct for our misconceptions of gay history, presuming that such so-called “effeminate” or affected behavior and the recognition of their signifying homosexuality was simply not possible in the early part of the century.  Perhaps it’s time to remind ourselves that as early as the 1910s figures such as Magnus Hirschfeld had already written extensively on his observations of gay individuals and in 1914 produced an important study Die Homosexualität des Mannes und des Weibes (“The Homosexuality of Men & Women”). He would fight, with other scientists such as Franz Joseph von Bülow, Eduard Oberg, and Max Spohr against paragraph 175 of the German Penal Code, which defined homosexual activity as a criminal act, believing that homosexuality was one of many natural and normal sexual behaviors. Hirschfeld would go on to found in 1919 the famous Berlin Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute of Sexual Research). By that time Berlin had already established itself as a hotbed for male and female homosexual bars and other gathering places, as well as providing numerous private home-gatherings for sexually adventurous males and females.

       Even earlier, Oscar Wilde had felt comfortable enough in France to move there after his British imprisonment.

       In 1927 Henry Gauthier-Villars, known better by his pseudonym Willy and for his marriage to the writer Colette, had written a rather scandalous and disapproving work, The Third Sex, outlining the history of gay life in major European cities from the turn of the century forward.

      And there are numerous other examples of documentation of an extensive gay culture in Europe and elsewhere from the 1890s on, despite its social and legal restrictions.

      Even the word “gay”—which we are constantly reminded by some blinkered historians did not generally come to mean a man who had sex with other men until the 1950s—had long before taken on those connotations. When Cary Grant, dressed in a woman’s feathery nightgown in the 1938 comedy Bringing Up Baby was asked why he was dressed like that, in ad-libbing the line “I’ve just gone gay!” the actor most definitely did not mean that he’d suddenly grown very happy. Indeed, the word in various polari or polare languages (used by actors, day-laborers, gypsies, etc) had long before shifted that word from its 19th century references to a female prostitute, a man who slept with numerous women, or even its slightly later verbal signification (“gay it”) to have sex, to mean a man who was not only sexually active but who had sex with other men as well. By the 1920s a “gey cat” meant a homosexual boy, and “gay boy” soon after signified a homosexual male. In many European countries the word “blue” was another signifier for a gay man, again quite the opposite of being very happy.

      Working with actors and theater folk, certainly Alice Guy would have well known where to find the kind of actors she was looking for to portray what we can describe as “gay”-like beings, robbed of their pejorative masculinity.

      We might note that the strict bifurcation between homosexuality and heterosexuality was almost meaningless for many centuries. Sexuality was simply not conceived as an “either/or” activity.

      Finally, My Queer Cinema had its impetus in disproving the notion that homosexuality was seldom expressed or difficult to express in positive terms until after the 1960s. Once the first filmmaker determined that heterosexual desire was something of interest to depict on the screen, so did it become immediately necessary to represent the “other,” which cinema did mostly negatively but in a multitude of cases engagingly and interestingly, even if coded, despite the attempt of the normative society to censor, ban, and destroy all images and narrative representations of the experiences of what we now describe as the LGBTQ community. It has long been my contention that homosexuality in filmmaking became enormously powerful and interesting because it needed to express itself in new, different, and queer ways that stood out from the increasingly tired and bland expressions of love and sex depicted in normative filmmaking. Gay sex was best when it was conceived of as being wrong or “dirty.” You almost always knew that if something went sexually awry in commercial films it was because it had found itself quite nicely through the experience a different kind of sexual desire.

 

Los Angeles, May 21, 2021

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog and World Cinema Review (May 2021).