Alice Guy Blaché | Cupid and the Comet / 1911

under the influence of a comet

by Douglas Messerli

 

Alice Guy Blaché (writer and director) Cupid and the Comet / 1911 || Difficult to Obtain

 

Alice Guy Blaché was one of the most noted directors, and the only known woman filmmaker, of early silent films. She worked for several years at Gaumont studios, doing a large number of remarkable films, many of them feminist in nature as well as demonstrating her fascination with gender reversals and cross-dressing.

 

     In 1907 Guy moved from France to the United States, and three years later, with her husband Herbert Blaché and George A. Magie, Guy founded the Solax Company, which moved into a then state-of-the-art studio in Fort Lee, New Jersey. The facility was said to have cost $100,000.

       As the central genius of the studio, Guy planned every detail of the making of films. Her films spanned a large range of melodramas, raucous comedies, historical dramas, socially concerned documentary-like works, and, in works such Year 2000 (1912), even sci-fi fantasies—in this case creating a world in which women ruled over their male subordinates. Among her hundreds of films made at Solex were Greater Love Hath No Man (1911), Across the Mexican Lines (1911), Two Little Rangers (1912), Parson Sue (1912), Fight in the Dark (1912), Falling Leaves (1912), A Man’s a Man (1912), Making an American Citizen (1912), The Strike (1912), A Comedy of Errors (1912), His Double (1912), Cousins of Sherlocko (1913), What Happened to Officer Henderson (1913), A House Divided (1913), and Matrimony’s Speed Limit (1913).

      Despite her creative talents and business acumen, however, the studio began to run into financial difficulties as much of the burgeoning US film industry moved west toward Los Angeles, turning away from the shorts she was producing to create feature films. In 1913 Guy’s husband took control of Solax, and throughout the period from 1915-1920 he and Alice worked on various features for hire.

      In 1918 Herbert abandoned his wife and family for an actress, ending in Guy divorcing him in 1920 and returning with her children to France. Unable to find work, she returned to the United States only to find that she was now shut out of the film industry she had helped to create with the production of nearly 1,000 short and feature films.

     A great many of her films are now lost, including Year 2000 which I mention above. Several of her shorts have been collected and reissued on DVD in Kino Classics 2-volume set, Alice Guy Blaché: The Gaumont Years and The Solax Years.

     Among the many of her films that have LGBTQ connections was the Solax-produced Cupid and the Comet (1911). The film exists in a restored version at Filmmuseum München in Munich Germany, but with two important resources lacking, budget and a body that permits easy travel, I cannot visit Munich to view it.

     What I describe below, accordingly, is a summary obtained from other sources, and I obviously can make no new insights about its relevance to LGBTQ issues without seeing it. But with its pairing of daughter and father cross-dressers and the gay priest’s marriage of the two boys, it certainly appears to be one of the most advanced visions of gay sexuality of the period.

      To celebrate the passing of Haley’s comet, an amateur astronomist attends a festive celebration. However, during his viewing of the group telescope, he discovers his daughter in the arms of a strange young man.

       He immediately breaks up the pair, brutally dragging his daughter home by her hair. But the young man returns to serenade the daughter from the garden below. At one point he attempts to climb up to her window, but the father reappears, again breaking up their would-be romance.

       Determined to keep the young couple apart, the father banishes his daughter to bed and, to be certain she not again attempt an escape, he steals her clothes taking them with him into his own bed.

       Just as insistent in eloping with her lover, the young girl steals what apparently are her father’s only set of clothes, and dressing in them, sneaks off with her young man to be married. The couple visit the house of a highly effeminate priest who understandably is wary about marrying two “boys,” but finally agrees to do so.

       The father, meanwhile, discovering his daughter’s absence, is forced to dress up in his daughter’s apparel to go on the chase of the missing couple. When he arrives at the priest’s house, just after the ceremony has been performed, he is lectured by the priest both for his rage and his very strange dressing habits. 

      The black and white silent film was released on June 21, 1911. 

 

Los Angeles, May 20, 2021

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

 

Jean Durand | Le Rembrandt de la rue Lepic (The Rembrandt in Rue Lepic) / 1911

the drag queen acquires a rembrandt

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jean Durand (screenwriter and director) Le Rembrandt de la rue Lepic (The Rembrandt in Rue Lepic) / 1911

 

Superficially another chase short from the French studio of Gaumont, Jean Durand’s The Rembrandt in Rue Lepic, perhaps intentionally but more likely with the associations culture has heaped upon issues over time, is a far deeper investigation to reality and simulacrum, and into the many issues surrounding the questions of reality and art.

      A naïve tourist couple (Clément Mégé and Berthe Dagmar) dining in a French brasserie, are sold a painting by a street artist, a real Rembrandt so the seller insists, for the price of 35 francs. So coarse are these wealthy consumers than the male buyer sits the Rembrandt, face up, on a nearby chair while he consumes his dinner.

      An Englishwoman, inexplicably a man dressed in drag, enters the brasserie, orders up an absinthe, and without the diners noticing, sits down on the chair where the buyer has placed his Rembrandt, the painting being so freshly made, that its image sticks to her skirt. The waiters refuse to serve her, perhaps because they notice she is in drag, and a fight between the women and the servers follows, the buyer realizing that his “new” painting has been inadvertently “stolen” by her dress. She clearly has no idea what has happened.

 

     Mad chaos ensues for the next 5 minutes as the woman, the others on the chase, speeds through a lobby of a hotel, knocking over everyone and others, even those just entering. A moment later she races into a room where a group of a different kind of painters are working on a wall, destroying their artful work as well.

      She next enters, through the wall, what seems to be a private dining room, followed by all the angered others, crawling out through a small window to leap through a nearby roof, crashing through the ceiling to join a man in bed, the now dozens of others soon falling into the room after the miscreant and now sexual pervert.

      She next climbs a wall to reach a small balcony and enters a Paris townhouse through its open doors, the increasing posse—suggesting that nearly all of Paris has joined in on the chase—behind her, the men and women helping each other onto the balcony before following her. Inside, where another artistic occasion is taking place, a salon vocal concert, further destruction ensues, with chairs, tables, bookcases, and all else being torn asunder.

       We see the villain back on the balcony pondering what move to make next. She leaps, the dozens of other leaping lemmings following her lead.

        They land at a grocers, destroying that place as well, but finally catch the Rembrandt robber and haul her into a serious arts gallery where, after cutting away the patch on her dress, the gallerist declares the painting—prepare yourself!— to be a forgery! “It is not an original!”

        As a commentator on the Letterboxd site, whose moniker is “Cineanalyst,” nicely summarizes: “So, we have copies of copies and a conflation of drag, if not gender overall, with art forgery.” Even the film, in its constant destruction of set after set, deconstructs itself, revealing the walls, ceilings, furniture, and other objects to be only imitations, a pretend world of light flickering in the dark.

        Yet the most fascinating question of the film remains a total mystery. Why would an English drag queen walk into a Paris brasserie in the middle of the day to order an absinthe? It’s clear that she wanted the attention, but was not expecting the kind of following she immediately amassed—nor the citizens’ determination to so thoroughly question her sexual authenticity. No wonder the British have always thought of the French as being absolutely mad.

 

Los Angeles, June 21, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2023).

Faustine Crespy | Famille nucléaire (Nuclear Family) / 2020

the plastic-covered ghost

by Douglas Messerli

 

Faustine Crespy (screenwriter and director) Famille nucléaire (Nuclear Family) / 2020 [19 minutes)

 

Every summer Adèle (Catherine Grosjean) takes her son Jules (Louka Minnella) and his younger brother to a French nudist camp where she sits about naked, mostly drinking and demanding the attention of her son of Jules, now 18-years-old, and not at all as his age so comfortable about nudity, particularly given that he is gay.

     The film begins with Jules giving blood at a small trailer located on the local beach, as a handsome young man, Karim (Syrus Shahidi) queries him about any diseases and sexual activity, all the questions answered in the negative, which makes it clear that so far it has been a most uneventful summer for Jules.

     Part of his problem is that he is, in fact, the caretaker for both his mother and his 6-yeaar-old young brother. He cooks, looks after his brother and tries to ignore the endlessly sexual glances and comments of his nearly shameless mother, who would clearly take him into her bed if only she could. When the brother Tom (Lohen Van Houtte) asks if he might taste her beer, Adèle is ready to pass him her glass, and it is only Jules’ intrusion stops her from providing a pre-adolescent with alcohol. She complains that her elder son is just like his father, who obviously has left her and the boys—given what we’ve already observed of her behavior, with good reason. The big-breasted, heavy assed woman gets mad and storms off, leaving Jules, once more, to care for Tom alone.

 

    We see Jules frustratedly changing shirts as he plans to go out for the night, no mother still in sight, Tom at least safely in his room. He tells their neighbor to keep an eye on Tom, telling her brother that their mother surely must be nearby if there’s any problem.

     Tom goes in search of Karim, who he is told is on his break. His substitute, however, points over further on the beach where Karim in resting, apparently asleep. Tom sits down in a spot nearby. When Karim finally notices Tom, he invites him over as a friend. And before long he’s made a date for that night to celebrate Karim’s last evening at the resort.

      By the time he returns Tom is at the neighbor’s sharing her son’s tent. Adèle is still not to be found, and Jules, his little brother in hand goes in search of his mother. When he finally spots her she is in the non-nude part of the beach attempting to find Jules through Karim’s co-worker. Jules does not attempt to intrude for fear of being connected with the mad woman, appearing nude where least expected. They beg her to get up since she needs to be dressed on that part of the beach.

     Jules sends Tom to retrieve her. Back in the cabin Jules dresses her and put the fully drunken woman to bed. And even then she grabs him and tries to tell him how loved he is. She would surely pull him down into her bed if possible.

      What she has done is make him late for his appointment. He races the beach, but Karim finally grows impatiently with his lateness and leaves without him. Jules lays down in the sand in front of the blood trailer, only to see an image of what looks to be his mother wrapped in plastic come again in an attempt to reclaim him, almost like a ghost, which she herself claims to be—a woman long out of her prime who has never been able to except the consequences of aging.

      She sits down beside him and takes out a cigarette. Jules finally says what he should perhaps have stated long again: “You have to leave me alone, Mum.”

       Adèle finally answers rationally, “I know.”

       But, as she attempts to touch his cheek yet again, he pulls away, gets up, and walks off in tears, his plastic-wrapped ghost waddling behind him.

       Jules has lost perhaps his chance to experience his first love, and she has most definitely lost her son. The nuclear family has long before collapsed.

 

Los Angeles, December 11, 2023

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (December 2023).

Francis Boggs ? | The Pasha's Daughter / 1911

behind the veil

by Douglas Messerli

Lloyd Longergan ? (screenplay), Francis Boggs ? (director) The Pasha’s Daughter / 1911

 

We do not know the director of the Thanhouser Company’s production of the 13.49-minute film from 1911, The Pasha’s Daughter. The internet film site Fandor attributes the work to Francis Boggs (director of the 1908 film version of The Count of Monte Cristo), whereas other sources suggest it probably is the work of Barry O’Neil or Lucius J. Henderson. The most likely scenarist of the film is Lloyd Lonergan, a long-time newspaper reporter who may have written about the real event upon which this short was based. The male leads are played by William Garwood and William Russell, presumably Garwood acting as the American traveler Jack and Russell performing as the Turkish Pasha.

      Jack is touring Turkey by train when he encounters the Pasha who, seated in his train car, suddenly finds himself without his billfold to pay for his ticket; Jack quickly comes to the rescue, paying for the older man’s fare.

      In appreciation of his kindness the Pasha invites him to his home for the night. While the Pasha enjoys his hookah, Jack follows the servant to his designated room, returning soon after to enjoy the company of the Pasha.

      Suddenly and quite inexplicably soldiers arrive to denounce the Pasha as being a conspirator against the government, and soon after they arrest Jack as well.

      In prison at one point Jack overpowers a guard and attempts to escape, but is immediately caught by another guard and returned to the cell. Soon after, seeing a blanket laying on his bed, it gets the idea of how to escape. Applying his pocketknife to the molding of cell window, he is able to pry loose one bar, and, having tied up the parts of the blanket into a long rope, slips through the window and drops to freedom.

       He is quickly met by another guard but is able to overpower him before climbing a second wall to drop into the courtyard of the Pasha’s palace.

       A few minutes earlier we observed the Pasha’s daughter and other women of the harem waiting in the garden to meet with the Pasha, who evidently has been freed of the conspiracy charges. Now Jack encounters the daughter alone, explaining to her his situation and begging for help.

      The daughter, Murana, calls her servant and insists that he prepare Jack for escape. Meanwhile other guards enter the courtyard quizzing both the daughter and her manservant if they have seen the young American. Her face hidden behind her veil, she shakes her head “no” as does her servant.

      Insisting that Jack smoke the hookah, the servant tells him the only way to escape is to dress like one of the harem women, providing him with a costume. Presumably, he is convinced that the only way he can get the young Jack into female custom is to drug him, but after a few puffs of the hookhah, Jack laughingly accepts the challenge, dressing in a gown and hiding his face behind the traditional veil. (With the incidents of a young American being arrested and locked away in a Turkish prison along with his use of drugs, one might almost imagine this film to be the precursor of Midnight Express of 1978.)

      Murana reappears to check on him, he thanking her for her help. When he pleads to see her face, and she offers him a view, he is stunned by her beauty and begs her to escape with him so that they might marry, an odd marriage proposal given that he is dressed in female garb. 

     The daughter tells him she cannot join him but perhaps will meet him some time in the future, presenting him with a flower, he, in turn, gifting her with his calling card on which is printed his address so that if she ever reaches the US she know where to find him. They kiss and he escapes.

       A year later Jack and his mother, back in the US, are standing in the living room when the Pasha’s daughter, now dressed in western clothing, is ushered in, she telling him that since she has now arrived in the new world, she is ready to marry.

       He is intrigued, but doesn’t quite recognize the beauty, and she turns as if to leave, looking back toward him for a moment as she holds up the lace overlay of her dress to mask the lower part of her face. Suddenly he realizes it is Murana and rushes to embrace her, introducing her to his mother who apparently has heard a great deal about the young woman he met in Turkey.

      At least to this “reader” of the film, his inability to recognize her, despite the fact that she previously revealed her face, suggests that he is more interested in the erotic allure of the woman than the actual flesh and bones being. It appears that the veil that once saved him is what attracted the young Jack to the Pasha’s daughter as well. If you read this as a coded message—and I don’t believe it was intended to be one—you might argue that Jack appears to prefer things that hidden to what is openly revealed.

      This film survives in the archives of The Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

 

Los Angeles, April 28, 2021

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

Renato Turnes | O Amigo do Meu Tio (My Uncle's Friend) / 2021

loving chulé

by Douglas Messerli

 

Renato Turnes (screenwriter and director) O Amigo do Meu Tio (My Uncle's Friend) / 2021 [8 minutes]

 

Based on the fact that as a child, Brazilian director Renato Turnes’ father bought a 1980s state-of-the art cam-recorder, one might have imagined Turnes’ investigation into those films captured when he was a young boy, shot particularly on birthdays, would reveal a world of issues hinted at in his remarkable comment, “Being a gay child is dangerous.”

    But although I waited for the evidence about which we all know, but seldom get the opportunity to see on film, his father’s recordings reveal simply a child disinterested in most of his father’s major joys, football, street-car racing, automotive stunts, and the gatherings of his father’s and uncle’s macho “gang.” 

    Clearly, his son’s disinterest in continuing with the childhood football game he has caught on film, the chubby boy’s disdain of the automotive feats, and his general attempt to hide from his father’s camera was a disappointment to the father, although that is never revealed on the camera itself. The father, instead, seems loving and attentive to his son, trying to bring him out of the cocoon of his own bed-tent, his hiding behind the masks of raised shirts and pajamas in order to bring him out to the attention of his beloved camera.

     But it is only when we watch the recordings of one of his uncle’s congregations of his best friends, all eating around the table as if appearing in a special photographically framed session of half-naked men holding Christ, in this case the “dangerous” young gay boy, by the painter Marsden Hartley. The adult narrator describes the situation: “Do you also feel, as I did, that mixture of attraction, fear and impossibility that a menacing gathering of virile men provokes in a small gay child?”

 

     We don’t see any other boys at the table, but apparently there were others, because afterwards, we are told, the men took the children on motorcycle rides. The young Renato describes his own irresistible attraction to his uncle’s friend Chulé, who determines to take the boy on the motorcycle adventure. “He started his motorcycle engine, and since I wasn’t brave enough to hug him tightly, he turned to me and said, ‘If you don’t hold on tight, you might fall.’” He continues, “I still feel his red Marlboro breath from that sentence, spoken with the assertiveness of an adult who entertains children.” Perhaps reading in just a little to the older man’s comments, but with a nonetheless convincing childhood memory, Turnes asserts, “He didn’t have to speak like that, I wouldn’t have listened to him anyway.” Does that mean, he didn’t hold tight, that his was still afraid to given in to his childhood sexual desires? It doesn’t matter. It was January 10, 1988, and even the young Renato already knew it was dangerous to be a gay child.

    The years pass as the father’s cam-recorder reveals. The boy’s pet dog Dolly has her babies on camera, and the young Renato grows up to be a handsome young man in a tuxedo. As we glimpse a picture of a much older Dolly, the narrator describes that “Chulé was the first person in their life who died of AIDS. He died in 1990. And I followed his departure from a distance, the sad news I heard of in the adults’ conversations.” The most important comment is this short film is the narrator’s penultimate comment, “I love you Chulé,” his father shown in a blackened image of a man photographing the world around him. As we observe the 1993 short clip of the boy in his tuxedo, the narrator comments, “I remember that handsome man, his deep voice, his cliché[ed] rascal ways, the smell of his sweaty beer, and I can’t help feel the presence of the virus, the first sensual experience I remember.”

      What doesn’t get said is that this film was recorded at time in which, although we know Chulé might have been infected by a woman, by a drug transfusion, or any other of several other possibilities, that it is likely, given the year of 1988, the disease was passed on by his sexual relationship with another man. Was it Renato’s uncle? Another of his uncle’s “gang?” We have no answer, but this short film brings up all these issues, and puts us into a world where Renato’s father might never have imagined his cam-recorder might ever take him, into a heart of darkness that included, without his knowledge, his very own son.

 

Los Angeles, December 10, 2023

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (December 2023).

Daniel Nolasco | Netuno (Neptune) / 2017

the beast in us

by Douglas Messerli

 

Daniel Nolasco (screenwriter and director) Netuno (Neptune) / 2017 [18 minutes]

 

Neptune is the last of the short films which make up Brazilian director Daniel Nolasco’s trilogy about far removed planetary worlds, Uranus (2013), Pluto (2015), and Neptune (2017).

     Neptune, who in classical mythology was the brother of Jupiter and Pluto, is basically perceived as the god of both the freshwaters and the oceans, and for Sandro (Norval Berbari), an older man who swims regularly at a local athletic club, Maricon (Leandro José), in fact, first appears pulling himself out of the pool, as just such a god, a much younger man to whom the older reticent male is immediately attracted.

     The two come to recognize each other, but as Sandro’s desire grows more and more intense, Maricon becomes seemingly proportionately oblivious to him. Only once, when Sandro stops his swim because something has entered his eye, does Maricon even seem to acknowledge his presence, blowing gently into his eye to remove whatever might have entered it.

     Yet Sando’s passion grows stronger. He steals a porno tape and watches it. He masturbates for long hours in the shower while conjuring up visions of the younger man. And at one point when he enters a sauna either at the club or in his imagination where a group of young men, including Maricon, are engaged in a small sexual orgy, he watches intensely as a voyeur, replacing Maricon when he gets up and leaves. Even in this instant, obviously, his desires for Maricon are unfulfilled.

     Throughout, director Nolasco intimates that his “hero” is becoming a predatory beast, a macho Brazilian man on the prowl for his prey. And in the manner of Nolasco’s apparent mentor, Portuguese director João Pedro Rodrigues, he takes this short film as it proceeds into more and more dangerous territory as Sandro finally breaks into Sandro’s house, lays down in his bed, and turns Maricon’s pillow into a fetish.

      Overhearing that Maricon has been invited to a party, Sandro attends it as well, watching intensely as the object of his obsession dances with another man. At one moment, however, Maricon turns, his gaze for the first time seeming to engage Sandro’s as the younger man strips off his shirt. Suddenly, the shy older man gets up his nerve to move forward toward Maricon, crossing the floor to engage him in a dance of sexual lust; but at that very moment, Maricon and his dance companion embrace in their own version of what Sandro might have imagined to be finally his fulfillment of sexual desire.

 

    In a surreal-like final scene, we see the desolate Sandro walking down the railroad tracks to suddenly be faced with two men, one dressed in a leather suit, the other in an S&M tableau, held in a collar as he bends over like a growling dog, the iconic representatives of the fetishist world, revealing, perhaps, the self-punishing universe into which Sandro has spun out-of-control for his unquenched desires.

 

Los Angeles, December 10, 2023

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (December 2023).