Unknown filmmaker | Psychiatric Teaching Interview with Gay Teenager / 1969

the little gray men

by Douglas Messerli

 

Unknown filmmaker Psychiatric Teaching Interview with Gay Teenager / 1969

 

This interview with a truly troubled young New Orleans teenager is one of the most painful documents of the era I have encountered. That’s not to say that I haven’t seen more brutal attacks on young gay men or that I haven’t seen more troubling documented statements of tormented LGBTQ youths. The issue here is that the entire US psychiatric establishment has worked to make this young man feel that he is truly insignificant.

   His dreams are in gray, with men telling him what he should do. I presume his little gray men are the authorities themselves demanding that he join them. “They’d tell me to keep believing in them, that their way of doing things, that escaping through this was right.” But, as he admits, he has not at all been helped through their interventions with his sexual assimilation. In fact, these terrifying fantasy creatures have basically disappeared from his dreams.

      He seems to identify as a bisexual whose childhood encounter with a peer led to that young boy’s feeling he that he had been brought into sexual contact without permission: “One time on of the boys I had relations with decided that he hadn’t done so much on his part to provoke the incident.” Authorities were told, and the young teen, realizing that he is trapped into an impossible sexual scandal, raises enough money to leave town.

     His description of the situation, even though he sounds like he has been “calmed” by a heavy dose of drugs, sounds somewhat like the desperate elderly escapee Carrie Watts of Horton Foote’s A Trip to Bountiful, although his voyage is not into an imaginary world of the past, but a uncertain world of some future. Nonetheless, as in the Foote play his family, having heard from a close female friend of his intent to escape, he is “saved” by his mother and father, who apparently, like so many well-meaning heterosexually normative, and implicitly conservative parents seek out psychiatric treatment which today might be described as something close to sexual reorientation, in this case not occasioned by some fringe element but the approval of The American Psychiatric Association's perception of gay behavior as a medical abnormality that would not be altered until five years after this short tape.

      This young man seems to honestly admit that despite all the help he as received from “coming up here” to the hospital, his sexual desires have not altered, and he is still committed to his then unthinkable bisexual urges.  

      As several commentators to the YouTube reacted, they would like to know what happened to this calmly speaking, Southern-born US boy. But we now know it is the story of not one young man, but thousands like him.

 

Los Angeles, June 6, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (June 2024).

Michael Powell | Hotel Splendide / 1932

the little tin box

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ralph Smart (screenplay, based on a story by Philip MacDonald), Michael Powell (director) Hotel Splendide / 1932

 

This gang world little gem, Hotel Splendide, was a British “Quota quickie,” one of the movies made on the cheap to satisfy the 1927 law that 20% of all films released in Great Britain had to be shot at a British studio with a UK producer and with 75% of salary costs paid to British cast members. Since US distributors had now begun to take over British theaters, the US studios often financed such “British made” films which usually ran at about an hour in length and were perceived as films that might accompany a feature that was usually US backed. Sadly, 60% of the Quota quickie films have been lost.

     But Michael Powell’s film fortunately remains as a perfect example of the great filmmaker’s early works. Much of it doesn’t make sense. Indeed, we hardly get to know the company with whom Jerry Mason (Jerry Verno) is unhappily employed. He mocks the director and can’t abide his fellow employees. Fortunately, as in many a film of the 1930s, when financial fantasies were a requirement to find one’s way out of the morass of the Depression, Jerry discovers that he has suddenly inherited a seaside hotel in Speymouth. He quickly leaves his job and rushes off to his new life.

     But we have also just seen “Gentleman Charlie” (Edgar Norfolk) released from jail. Although he was found guilty of a robbery of pearls, the baubles themselves were never discovered, he having hidden them under a tree in Speymouth where our hero’s hotel now stands. Obviously, Charlie and his old partner are also on their way now to the hotel. There is only one man Charlie fears might stand in his way of recovering his treasure, fellow thief “Pussy Saunders” named for his affection for his black feline friend.

    The filmgoer almost immediately realizes that Charlie should have yet another man to fear, the awkwardly nouveau riche Jerry, who has already been told by this time by the former hotel manager, Joyce (Vera Sherborne), that the hotel is a failure and is deep in debt. At present there are only a few guests, an elderly deaf woman, Mrs. LeGrange (Anthony Holles) accompanied by a caretaker, and a brother Mr. Meek (Philip Morant) and sister, Miss Meek (Paddy Browne), posing as travelers.

      Jerry’s first act is to put up a flag to turn what really looks more like a boarding house into a real hotel, and the arrival soon after of Gentleman Charlie and his companion and various detectives seems to justify his meaningless act. While the whole the flag was being dug up, the workman discovered the little tin box and tossed it aside. And, of course, that box, discovered by various of the hotel guests, almost all of them posing as someone other than they are, grab up the box, put it away in the hotel safe, and seek to control its contents.

     Jerry Mason is clever enough to himself open up its contents, allowing him, in the end, enough money to support his new inheritance.

    In the meantime, we are treated to a camp delight as one by one we discover some of the males appearing in drag, including Miss Meek, and to watch the male duo of thieves readily agree to share one of the hotel’s narrow beds.

     Gradually, the cat leads them all—accompanied by Gounod’s “Funeral March of the Marionettes” (popularly known as the theme music for the TV series Alfred Hitchcock Presents)— to Splendide hotel room number 7, wherein sits Pussy Saunders, who has successfully appeared in drag as Mrs. LeGrange throughout. Even the British Film Institute, describes this film as a campy film.

     After working at a desk job, director Michael Powell had himself gone to work with his hotel-owning father at the Voile d’Or at Cap Ferrat near Monte Carlo. Despite the “Quota” dismissal, accordingly, Powell sought out to make a serious film comedy, with himself appearing as the gang member’s bugging device engineer, Marconi.

 

Los Angeles, June 6, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (June 2024).

Barbara Willis Sweete and Bartlett Sher | Le contes d’Hoffmann (The Tales of Hoffmann) / 2015 [The Metropolitan HD-Live production]

love and tears

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jacques Offenbach (music), Jules Barbier (libretto, based on his and Michel Carré’s play, based on tales by E. T. A. Hoffman), Bartlett Sher (director), Barbara Willis Sweete (film director), Le contes d’Hoffmann (The Tales of Hoffmann) / 2015 [The Metropolitan HD-Live production]

 

Jacques Offenbach’s operatic repertory favorite, Le contes d’Hoffmann is a true mish-mash of musical and theatrical offerings: comic opera numbers such as "Il était une fois à la cour d'Eisenach” (a number that might have been at home in the Broadway musical Cabaret, replacing that musical’s number “Messkite”); drinking songs in the manner of Verdi and Wagner; comic novelty numbers such as Olympia’s “Les oiseaux dans la charmille” and the servant Frantz’s insistence on his singing, dancing talent, “Jour et nuit je me mets en quatre”; all mixed up with stunning operatic arias of love and longing such as "C’est un chanson d’amour."

     Divided into three distinct "tales," Offenbach’s work functions as a baggy monster, with the vague and often fragile interconnective link insisting that the stories all represent the poet’s failed loves; yet productions have, at times, lopped off an act or, at other times, added another. The opera, moreover, sometimes effortlessly, at other times rather clumsily, shifts between realism, fantasy, and literary autobiography while delving into the grotesque. Particularly, under Bartlett Sher’s Metropolitan Opera direction the work seems nearly always teetering on the edge of a Kafka-like nightmare tinged with a Berlin-cabaret sexuality that borders also on camp (Sher insists his sources were Austrian, but they seem much closer, to my way of thinking, to the Berlin of the 1920s.).

      For all this, nonetheless, the Le contes d’Hoffmann survives, perhaps simply because it does encompass so much that other operas of the day might have thrown overboard. Whether conceiving as woman as an innocent, an artiste, or as a courtesan, what Offenbach’s Hoffmann reveals, in the end, is that no fulfilling liaison can be consummated as long as the writer-artist is wed to his art. Time and again Hoffmann loses his mind, at no time more evident than when he puts on Coppélius’ rose-colored glasses to become enchanted with the wind-up doll Olympia (not so very different, indeed, from Lubitsch’s “doll” described in my essay on his Die Puppe (The Doll), a film from 1919—except that in Hoffmann’s fiction, she has no human equivalent, despite the fact that the real human Erin Morley brilliantly imitates her robotic actions. 

      Hoffmann (the charming and energetic Vittorio Grigolo) falls in love with a fellow artist, the singer Antonia (Hibla Gerzmava), only to discover that her very profession may result in her death. Like a would-be controlling fiancée (today we would describe him as unliberated sexist), Hoffmann is forced to demand, as has her father, Crespel (David Pittsinger), that she give up her career, a choice that can only leave her in such frustration that she is almost immediately tempted to challenge the men in her life by channeling the voice of her mother, a former primma dona inflicted with the same illness. Antonia can no more give up her role as an artist than can Hoffmann.

     And finally, after nearly giving up on love, the writer seeks love in the arms of a wicked courtesan, Giulietta (Christine Rice) only to lose his reflection and, almost, his soul. Hoffmann’s absurd love does end in the death of Giulietta’s equally lied-to boyfriend, Schlémil (David Crawford). And even though, in killing her lover, he obtains the key to her boudoir, he is saved by the fact that she literally leaves him in the lurch, gondolaing off without him. As the police arrive, he is, once more, saved by the only one who truly loves him—and whom he, unknowingly, truly loves, his male friend Niklausse, secretly his "female" muse. If the device of the male friend/female muse offers a slightly homoerotic tinge to the opera, in the end it truly doesn’t matter since the muse, obviously, is an aspect of his own being, just as the three women with whom he falls in love are all elements of the one woman imagines as his divine partner, the Mozart diva, Stella, who literally ignores him, and whom he, in his drunken state, no longer even recognizes. Ultimately, the opera suggests that true artists can only find satisfaction in themselves—along with copious amounts of beer and wine! But, of course, it very does matter, since these figures represent various gender opportunities to the suffering artist, permitting to experiment with all sexual forms of love.

      Accordingly, Sher has skewered his production away from the simplistic Hoffmann, who, despite his fascinating tales, remains a vague actor in the stories of his own life. For Sher, the writer E.T.A. Hoffmann is a stand-in for Offenbach himself. And, from this perspective, the opera does indeed reveal a great deal about the situation of the actual artist, a German Jew, well loved by French society, but obviously made to also feel always as an outsider. The several Jewish references (at times almost anti-Semitic, particularly in the legend of Kleinzach) signify the kind of dual reality which the composer faced, wherein at one moment he laughs with his audience as he tells the story, but by work’s end tragically becomes the mocked figure himself, taking on the tallit almost as a protective garment against the taunts of his failures in love and life.

     It also helps to clarify the inexplicable evil of the four-headed villain of the piece, who appears as Lindorf, Coppélius, Dr. Miracle, and Daspertutto (all played by the noted baritone Thomas Hampson). Why, we ask, are these villains, so similar in some respects, all out to steal, murder, and abuse Hoffmann’s would-be loved ones. There is no explanation of course for such evil, such seemingly in-bred hate—except perhaps for the successful insider’s detestation of all who represent something different and new to his culture. Such hate clearly leads to what Nicklausse / the Muse observes as a "loss of love and tears," but it will never be able to entirely destroy true art.

 

Los Angeles, February 1, 2015

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (February 2015).

David Weissman | Song from an Angel / 1988

song and dance man

by Douglas Messerli

 

David Weissman (director) Song from an Angel / 1988 [4 minutes]

 

This incredibly moving short film is dedicated to and performed by San Francisco musical performer Rodney Price. Price was a founding member of the Angels of Light, a San Francisco theatrical troupe that, as the introductory note explains, “for over a decade dazzled audiences with their musical extravaganzas.” In 1987, Price was diagnosed with AIDS.

     Sitting in a wheelchair and dressed in the indignity of a hospital gown, Price sings music based on Kurt Weill’s “One Life to Live,” with lyrics by Janice Sukaitis. The piece, retitled “Less Time Than You,” is a truly remarkable declaration to his friends to stop speaking of him as being already dead and simply take him out to dinner, give him a deep hug, or even something deeper as a gesture of love. With a ghostly appearance, but a wonderfully playful presence, Price sings and even taps from his wheel chair to a piano accompaniment by Scrumbly Kodewyn and moving lyrics such as those I’ve chosen below:

 

There’s an element of doom and desperation

when I’m the subject of the conversation.

Locals agree, I’ll never see

my washboard stomach or my derriere,

my youthful abundant head of hair.

 

 

….

 

I start the day every morning

inspiring angels like you.

You say I’m thinner,

take me to dinner

because I’ve got less time than you.

….

Don’t feel that you’ve got to cure me

I just need someone to drive

and keep the car running smoothly,

bring me flowers, they keep me alive!

 

     This may be one of the most remarkable short films about AIDS victims ever made; the zany attitude the dying man conveys speaks to the thousands of brave victims which hung on to their talents, entertaining us until the very last moment of their gifted lives.* 

      Song from an Angel is an absolutely memorable warble of death, something once you see it you can never forget. This angel, Price, who Weissman’s film so beautifully memorializes, is someone any of us would surely have wanted know while he was living, to have, to kiss, and to hold near. This man’s joy of living is so palpable that it hurts just to watch. Song from an Angel is a little masterpiece to the terrible AIDS era.

*Weissman wrote me in response to this essay several comments that must be included in this discussion.

 

“That was one of the most challenging and inspiring experiences of my life really. Rodney came directly to the shoot from the hospital where he'd been semi-comatose for over a week. I was afraid he'd die mid-performance. But never have I experienced such a profound manifestation of ‘The show must go on.’” 

    Price died on August 15, 1988, at the age of 38, just two weeks after he was filmed in this performance which Weissman was not sure he could recreate given his condition. As Price himself expressed it in the San Francisco Chronicle obituary essay about his performance: “It’s amazing the kind of adrenaline you get. I guess, that’s the ‘old trouper’ kind of thing, y’know. You never lose it.” Price made certain that the film was dedicated to “Beaver Bauer, without whose love and support my life could never be complete.”

 

Los Angeles, June 4, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (June 2024).

 

Nans Laborde-Jourdàa | Boléro / 2023

dionysus

by Douglas Messerli

 

Nans Laborde-Jourdàa (screenwriter and director) Boléro / 2023 [17 minutes]

 

Dancer Fran (real life dancer François Chaignaud) has returned unexpectedly to small hometown in the Pyrenees. We see him first either in a rehearsal or a performance of a new work Boléro, which commentator Mike Kennedy in Letterboxd as nicely summarized: “bare chested and wearing a costume of a long skirt made up of multiple layers of rainbow coloured tulle, with long red fingernails, long curly [red] hair and white makeup.”

 

     In the next frame he is sitting in his mother’s (Muriel Laborde-Jourdàa) car attempting to get a motor to turn over, she yelling for him to stop, fearful that he’ll flood the engine. She has made a phone call to Fran’s sister (Mellie Laborde-Jourdàa), who soon shows up to drive his mother to work, Fran wandering off instead of joining them.

      In real life Chaignaud describes himself as a dance artist whose choreographed works “criss-cross the confluences between erotic dance and operetta, hooping, drag and cabaret shows, as well as the 20th century avant-garde choreographic modernism, with influences ranging from François Malkovsky to Isadora Duncan.” And it is into the realm of erotic surrealism in which this short film now proceeds.

      Almost as under a sexual spell—a word in characterizes much of what follows—Fran first wanders through a nearby wilderness where, from the look of it, obviously lovers, primarily gay lovers, go to have elicit sex. There are numerous condoms spread throughout wilderness, filled and empty. But no one is visiting the spot in the middle of the day, and Fran moves on to a small stream that runs through the area.

      Soon after he has found his way into the center of the town and makes his way into the local grocery market. There he is recognized by a couple of teenagers, who claim that he studied athletics with one of their father’s; they want a photograph.

     Observing a rough gay man entering the nearby toilet, Fran soon follows, but the young man is leaving almost as he arrives. Instead he meets up with an older man. Asking if he comes to this toilet regular, Fran explains that he hasn’t been there for years, the man also telling him of the woods in which we’ve already seen Fran.

    The dancer recognizes him as a former beloved teacher with whom he and apparently many another gay student had sex. The teacher does not recognize him, Fran joking that he must have had quite a “harem” back in those days. The teacher asks if they mightn’t “warm up” together in the stall, to where, in fact, Fran immediately retreats, but locking the door. The former teacher becomes confused as he observes Fran removing his shows, socks, and all other items of clothing. He goes to the next stall, attempting to catch a glimpse of what is going on, as we observed Fran’s feet going into dance positions, his long hands waving their bright-red fingernails as he begins the rhythmic sounds of what is clearly his choreography of Boléro.

      The teacher himself seems to enter a sort of sexual trance as we hear him rhythmically masturbating to the dancer’s audible movements. Soon a couple of younger gay men enter the bathroom quickly becoming aware of the sounds. One of them lifts up the other to the top of the stall so that he can observe what’s going on, and he too soon begins masturbating.

      The music for Ravel’s famous composition can now be heard.

 

    A woman evidently in charge of the toilets also enters, fascinated by what is happening, and she is soon joined by numerous others, male and female, who begin to perspire in suddenly “hot” room, fanning themselves as discover themselves spellbound, unable to move. Males and females both lean their heads together obviously opening themselves up to all sorts of sexual possibilities.

       As a rhythmic pattern begins to be established by dancer’s feet, members of the group begin to breathe deeply, heaving in what can only be described as a sexual heat. Finally, an authoritative black woman enters and brakes open the stall door, the others crowding around her to find the dancer having passed out in exhaustion.

       They gather the dancer up, lifting his entire body into a horizontal position upon their shoulders as they parade him through the town and into the nearby countryside. Almost like a miracle whether they go, people are suddenly seen engaging in sex, two women at the grocery check-out line, three male soccer players engaging in sex in the middle of the field as another two head off, arms around one another, into the showers. 

      As they pass through the streets it appears as if chaos as occurred everywhere. Outside the city, a woman sits on the ground a tree with two men, the trio seem exhausted from a sexual encounter.

The crowd moves quick into a small wooded area almost falling into a kind of frenzy as the camera looking back into the two catches the images of several of the village buildings on fire, smoke pouring from them. Desire and lust have clearly created chaos for these small-town folk as they worship their new sexual deity.

      Laborde-Jourdàa’s 17-minute film was awarded the Queer Palm for short film in the 2023 Cannes Film Festival.

 

Los Angeles, June 4, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema (June 2024).