Jacques Demy | La Luxure (Lust) / 1962

the definition of lust

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jacques Demy (screenwriter and director) La Luxure (Lust) / 1962

 

As part of his longer omnibus film The Garden of Earthly Delights (with other films directed by Claude Chabrol, Jean-Luc Godard, and Roger Vadim) Demy’s short, Lust is an energetic comic explanation of one of the deadly sins, in French described as “la luxure” or lechery. According to the great French encyclopedic dictionary Larousse, lechery is defined as “The vice of those who abandon themselves to the pleasures of the flesh. Lechery is aroused by unbridled physical exuberance.” But to one of Demy’s two major characters, Bernard played Laurent Terzieff, as a young man studying his catechism he had only a vague notion of the meaning of the word.     

     As he tells his artist friend, Jacques played by a young Jean-Louis Trintignant, whom he meets in the street, a childhood friend of his had described it as meaning “luxury,” which to his childhood mind brought up images of naked women in fur coats and pearls siting near the fires of hell while munching on their equally heated meats. His goal of the day is to purchase a copy of  Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights, just to look up the images surround “luxure.”

      In so doing, he relates the full story of how, having just learned the word from a priest demanding his students learn the Seven Deadly Sins, he stopped after school to discuss it with his friend Paul, the one who convinced him it meant “luxury.” At home, soon after, dinner is served, his own mother unbelievably wrapped in furs as were the women in hell of his imagination. Having forgotten the bread, his mother exits, while Bernard queries his father about the meaning of lechery.

      The father roundly slaps in the face for even having uttered the word, and when the boy’s mother returns she is so aghast that she sends her son off without a bite to eat. The child sneaks into his parent’s room, steals the dictionary and returns to his room to read about the “pleasures of the flesh,” calling up images in his mind of the local butcher and in utter enjoyment in cutting up with great exuberance the pounds of meat set out before him.

      On one hand the story clearly mocks the French Catholic educational system which forces young boys to learn of certain words for their catechism with even permitting them to know what they mean or even utter them in their own homes, the parents also not yet aware the true meanings.

     But before, during, even after Bernard’s storying telling episode, his friend Jacques has been commenting on the beautiful women around him, and at every opportunity attempts to seduce them with silly lines such as “Caroline, my cousin. Fancy running into you here. My heart, my soul, my sister. Let’s commit the incest I’ve dreamed of since my mother’s breast,” etc. While Bernard leafs through the pages of the Bosch book, Jacques begins to see all the women about him utterly naked while wrapped in fur coats. Even as they part he again returns to his adolescent womanizing, serving throughout as the perfect example of what lechery is truly all about.    

      Demy’s short, meanwhile, stuffs more nudity into its few minutes that perhaps any other film ever made. And the relationship between Jacques and Bernard, with their youthful lingo (“Let’s split like the banana”) and puns is fully representative of the New Wave.

 

Los Angeles, November 28, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2022).

 

 

 

Cheryl Dunye | The Watermelon Woman / 1996 (Germany), 1997 (US)

the necessity of fiction

by Douglas Messerli

 

Cheryl Dunye (screenwriter and director) The Watermelon Woman / 1996 (Germany), 1997 (US)

 

Dunye portrays herself in this landmark film as a 25-year-old black lesbian woman working at a Philadelphia video store in the late 1990s with her best friend Tamara (Valarie Walker). The store seems to be the perfect hang-out of the lesbian woman with an openly gay owner, all of which reminds me a great deal of my own experiences in that city just a decade earlier, including my Giovanni Bookstore visits, an important gay bookstore mentioned in the film. I feel in this film that I almost fell into a world in which I once lived, days in which the owner of the bookstore might approach you to suggest what you were particularly looking for based on months of careful observation. They knew their customers and Philly might have been said to know their local neighborhood citizens.

 

   Although, of course, I was not part of the gay lesbian world upon which this film centers. I was not, as Cheryl is, involved in the African-American society in which suddenly she discovers, through film, a world in which she, as a developing young filmmaker identifies with in watching the film titled Plantation Memories, featuring the black actress Fae, known on screen as “The Watermelon Woman,” featuring her in a “mammy role” in which she pleads for the health and well-being of her white plantation “mistress.” For Cheryl, the role is so memorable in the manner of other great black “mammy characters” such as Hattie McDaniel, Butterfly McQueen, Louise Beavers, and others, to say nothing of figures such as Ethel Waters, Dorothy Dandridge, and the roles played early on by Eartha Kitt. 

     But it’s the fact that Cheryl accidently discovers through acquaintances and her own mother that Fae Richards was also a noted singer performing in the Philadelphia black clubs of the 1930s and 40s, and that she may have had a relationship with her white director, Martha Page that Cheryl begins to develop a near obsessive fascination with the unknown and culturally ignored black actress.

     Her continued research begins to create tensions between her far more immediately sexually focused lesbian friend, who is also disturbed when Cheryl becomes involved with a new white employee, Diana (Guinevere Turner), who appears to Tamara as a white wannabe black woman simply taking advantage of her friend’s passion for old films and the exploration of white/black relationships.

     Dunye takes this all into much more comic territory, if personally serious, as we see the relationship between Diana—who obviously quite wealthy, nonetheless wears chic dog collars and other slightly S&M paraphernalia—begins to develop a relationship with Dunye’s character, and as Dunye begins to explore a rather verboten lesbian film world where the relationship between “the Watermelon Woman” and her white director lover is not permitted to be fully explored, even in a New York City lesbian archive in which whose director is perfectly happy to throw open—quite literally—the boxes of a special film archive, but refuses to allow any permission to actually explore its contents.

     There, nonetheless, Dunye discovers a treasure trove of photographs which clearly document the relationship of her now unknown black acting idol with her white director. But a later visit with the director’s sister, deep into denial about her sister’s lesbianism, gets Cheryl thrown out of her house.

      From there it gets worse as her relationship with the everyday sexually focused Tamara begins to fray, and even Cheryl’s sexual involvement with the hot young Diana begins to fall apart as she grows increasingly obsessed with the obscure figure from the past.

      We begin to understand that any such outsider—in this case, a black, woman, lesbian, and intelligent pursuer of truth—has nearly impossible restrictions put upon her to discover the truth of racial and cultural history. Dunye treats this quite humorously and almost matter-of-factly, but we want to scream when she is ousted from CLIT, the Center for Lesbian Information and Technology or when Martha Page’s sister sends for her black maid to remove Cheryl from her house simply for restating the facts that have already been published in some publications.

     But it only gets worse when Cheryl discovers Fae’s later lover of 20-years long, a black woman after her failed film career and her notorious life in the Philadelphia clubs where she sang. June Walker (Cheryl Clarke) might suddenly have been the deep source of Fae’s life that she has been seeking. But when Dunye arrives at her Philadelphia door, a specially made supper treat in hand, she is met by her neighbor who tells her that June has just been admitted to the hospital with heart problems and hands over a folder filled with June’s own diatribe against the young researcher for daring to assert that Fae was a lover of the white woman Martha Page, a woman, after all, who had kept June's friend and lover of 20-years in the symbolic chains of “mammy roles” and a failed career as an aspiring black performer.

    At the very same moment, Cheryl’s relationships with Tamara and Diana have come apart, the ties with which she’s bound herself in every aspect of her life having become unwound, as if any possibility of even imagining love between the black and white worlds which she inhabits as being utterly impossible. The young researcher is forced to admit that all the ties she sought to bind have come undone, the forgottenness of the talented young actress who she so admired is seemingly destined to be just that, utterly forgotten because of layers of racial and cultural hate. It is enough to make any socially ware viewer of this film burst into tears.

     Such worlds and difficulties, in fact, do exist. But as the credits role and Cheryl recounts the actual history of the remarkably unknown black movie star, Fae Richards, we also get a new punch in the belly with the passing crawler: “Sometimes you have to create your own history. The Watermelon Woman is fiction.”

 

     What we might have suspected all along is true, and the tears, if you are all the sensitive kind as I am, flow down your face once again, as you realize that for such an outsider figure as Cheryl Dunye whitewashed history does not permit you anything more than an incredible fiction such as this film has just presented us.

      There was no “Watermelon Woman,” no Fae Richards, and the lovely Hollywood-like photographs we have seen were created on the small budget of the film as a solution to actually purchasing the rights to such actual black actor’s photos. But still, we comprehend the film’s remarkable truths. If this woman didn’t exist, dozens of others like her did. To talk about their existence as do writers such as Dunye, Adrienne Kennedy, Susan Lori-Parks, and so many other brilliant black woman, you have given no choice but to create fictions. When reality won’t permit the truth you have nothing to turn to by your own imagination.

      Even more terrifying is what might have been a footnote were it not for its brutal representation of the reality: among the budget items of support for this now culturally recognized film, was a small grant given to Dunye by the NEA in 1996 of $31,500. In June 14, Julia Duin wrote an article for the rightest-based The Washington Times quoting a Philadelphia City Paper review describing the sex scene between Cheryl and Diana as “the hottest dyke sex scene ever recorded on celluloid. Evidently that original reviewer, Jeannine DeLombard had never experienced Chantal Ackerman’s Je Tu Il Elle of 1974, which is perhaps why film history and  LGBTQ+ film history is particularly important.

      The result, as anyone with knowledge of the history of NEA funding might have expected, was immediate, with Chairman of the House Education and Workforce Committee’s United States House Education on Oversight and Investigations, Peter Hoekstra’s reactionary response, a letter written to then NEA chairwoman Jane Alexander, castigating Dunye’s films as evidence of “'the serious possibility that taxpayer money is being used to fund the production and distribution of patently offensive and possibly pornographic movies.” Because of this controversy, the NEA restructured its awards grants to provide monies only for specific, censororily approved projects, as opposed to granting outright to individuals and groups for open explorations. Yet again, tears of recognition rolled down my own my cheeks, having experienced previously, in a very personal manner, the Reagan years controversies of the NEA four, Karen Finley, Tim Miller, John Fleck, and Holly Hughes, all gay artists refused grants by Regan-appointed John Frohnmayer in June 1990, along with the rejection of support for the Robert Mapplethorpe show soon after. I was there, and involved, refusing to apply for a much-needed grant for my Sun & Moon press that next year in protest.

     Little by little, any expression of truth in the LGBTQ+ world required more and more fictional deception. The real research of truth was upended.

     We come away from Dunye’s film, however, with a sense of relief and belief, of possibility rather than embitterment. If Fae Richards didn’t actually exist, she most certainly should have and probably did if history had not erased so many individuals like her.

     This film is a profound extension of a hand from communities outside of Hollywood and even the more normative LGBTQ+ archives to embrace what probably really existed, demanding us to rethink our own notions of black, lesbian, female perspectives and of outsider art in general.

 

Los Angeles, July 6, 2024 | Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (July 2024).

Cylan Shaffer | Ljósið (The Light) / 2013

love flies off

by Douglas Messerli

 

Cylan Shaffer (screenwriter and director) Ljósið (The Light) / 2013 [10 minutes]

 

I have often argued for more gay dance films, and this film by Icelandic filmmaker Cylan Shaffer is a near perfect example of what I am seeking.

    Starring Brandon Coleman  and Barton Cowperthwaite, this dance drama involves a gay partner who, as in so many LGBTQ+ films is in half in flight from his own feelings and sexuality. Performed to the song “Varúð” by Sigur Rós, the two enter into a “loving and leaving” sense of reality, which as critic S. James Wegg describes it: “The notion of taking flight—as a super hero, abandoned purveyor of death or means to beginning life anew in a far-off place—gives this production enough wings to keep it high on viewers’ emotional planes far after these eagles land.”

      The film begins with an expression of pure sexual desire and search as Coleman amazingly lifts himself time and again from a groveling position in the sand to the arch of his body and a constant expression of sexual need. The first scene, as it might be described, ends with him putting his hands out from the underground cave or graffitied tunnel (Plato's cave) in which the work begins, calling out for a companion.

 

     But we quickly discover in this desert landscape that the lover, in fact, has literally flown off, take on in a plane which we now see as a destroyed old remnant of a plane. Whether this plane represents the dancer’s fears for his lovers exit or a memory of the facts we cannot determine. But just as suddenly, we observe a real plane in this desert landscape apparently ready for takeoff.

     Almost immediately the other dancer, clearly his lover of the past or present joins him as their lovingly intertwine in either memory of their love or attempt to maintain it, pushing together and pulling away from their own desires for one another.

 

    At moments, it appears as if the first lover is attempting not only to hold on to the man he loves, but assist him in his survival, as if the plane’s decay has been foretold. They almost fight to maintain their relationship, but despite their acrobatic attempts, the flight and separation seems inevitable. And if it does not actually end actually in death it closes clearly in a symbolic death of the “passenger,” moving away into new spaces. Even rushing back to the fallen lover cannot save their intense relationship.

 

     This film, somewhat oddly, reminds me of another film dance movie, although it seldom gets described as such: the Dutch film by Roeland Kerbosch, For a Lost Soldier (1992).

 

Los Angeles, July 6, 2024 | Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog.

Paul Terry | The Jolly Rounders / 1923

 claiming her man

by Douglas Messerli

 

Paul Terry (writer and cartoonist) The Jolly Rounders / 1923

 

Sometimes one has to wonder why or how even the most imaginative of cartoonists chose the subjects they did. Paul Terry’s 1923 six-and-a-half-minute cartoon The Jolly Rounders is the perfect example. Evidently meant to be one of his spoofs of Aesop’s Fables, this work features a happy Hippo—daddy to an even dozen of little hippos and husband to a strict, home-ruling wife—who has stayed out late one night to drink with his friend.

      He cautiously returns home, believing he might have escaped his wife’s wrath only to discover her waiting in the next room with a rolling pin in hand, which she uses violently when he finally tiptoes in, tossing him and seemingly everything he possesses out of the house.

      So far the stereotype of a wife who keeps her man in his place makes total sense. But when his friend suggests he dress up as a vamp to make her jealous, it is difficult to see the logic. Is the possibility of seeing him with another woman supposed to make her any less determined to maintain a strictly kept house?

      What the men immediately do when our Hippo friend puts on a dress, however, is truly quite hilarious and, given the effect of drag of men in the films of the 1920s is perhaps predictable. Not only is our beleaguered hero attracted to his friend in drag, the friend suddenly feels clearly drawn to his formerly straight companion.

     The two accordingly head to the Hippo’s home where his several children, playing in the front yard spot them and run into the house to report, “Hey ma, here comes pa with a bimbo.” In the front yard they put on a show wherein they suddenly seem to find each other so attractive that they kiss, kiss again, and move into a long smooching clinch. If this is merely a demonstration to the missus, they certainly seem to enjoy it, as they quickly step into a taxi and speed away, the angry wife racing after them with the rolling pin on the ready.

      As she finally becomes exhausted she falls to the ground in tears, the taxi stopping and her husband coming closer to console her. But the jealousy hasn’t, as he puts it, quite set in, and she’s ready to pick up her weapon once again.

     Suddenly she’s back on the chase, the friend having rushed back into the taxi and her husband racing after it with his wife directly behind. When the vampish friend finally falls from the vehicle she jumps upon him beating him endlessly for his gender deceit—if she even recognizes it as such. Homosexuality or drag behavior is not forgiven in the slightest in her case. But she does accept her husband back into her arms, kissing and hugging him as the children dance in a circle around the happy heterosexual couple.

     Here we see what seems to understood as just punishment for a gender confusion no matter how short-lived. What I’d like to see is how these two men react to each other when they again meet up. Will they giggle at the silly wiles, feel deeply embarrassed for their abnormal behavior, or wish, at least for a moment or two, they might have a companion a little less violent with whom to enjoy the night.

 

Los Angeles, September 13, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2023).

Donald Crisp | Panjola / 1923 [Difficult to obtain]

lust for gold

by Douglas Messerli

 

Charles Logue (screenplay, based on the novel by Cynthia Stockley), Donald Crisp (director) Panjola / 1923 [Difficult to obtain]

 

Panjola, the 1923 silent film based on the novel by Cynthia Stockley and directed by Donald Crisp, is not precisely a “lost” film. One copy apparently remains in the hands of a private collector. But it appears to be unavailable to the anyone who might simply wish to see it. One can only hope that in the future the film might be restored and made available to the general public.

     The drama is described on the IMBd site as follows:

 

“The adventures of a beautiful gallant girl, Flavia Desmond (Anna Q. Nilsson), who goes into the African veldt of the Rhodesian gold fields to save the soul of a man, Lundi Druro (James Kirkwood), who had saved hers. Disguised as a man, she fought against men charged with the lust of gold and the black curse of Africa. Ponjola [is] the strong drink of the strange and glamorous country.”

 

     The 70-minute film is mentioned on LGBTQ lists obviously for its cross-dressing hero, Flavia Desmond, and because of the exoticism of its location. There were numerous films, almost amounting to a sub-genre of cross-dressing films where women, dressed as men, attempt, not always successfully, to save the body and soul of their male lover. Other examples include Sidney Franklin’s Beverly of Graustark (1926) and the Australian film Rangle River (1936), or even earlier in the character of the Wandering Gypsy Girl in The Student of Prague (1913), although in the last example she simply follows him about trying to save him without masquerading as a male.  

     The full cast is listed as follows:

 

Anna Q. Nilsson as Lady Flavia Desmond

James Kirkwood as Lune Druro

Tully Marshall as Count Blauhimel

Joseph Kilgour as Conrad Lypiatt

Bernard Randall as Eric Luff

Ruth Clifford as Gay Lypiatt

Claire Du Brey as Luchia Luff

Claire McDowell as Mrs. Hope

Charles Ray as Native Tribesman

Eddie Sturgis as Native Tribesman (credited as Edwin Sturges)

Olive Borden as Native Girl (uncredited)

 

Los Angeles, April 15, 2021

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

Luiz de Barros | Augusto Anibal Quer Casar (Augusto Anibal Wants to Get Married) / 1923

the bride in the sky

by Douglas Messerli

 

Vittorio Verga (screenplay), Luiz de Barros (director) Augusto Anibal Quer Casar (Augusto Anibal Wants to Get Married) / 1923 [Lost film]

Luiz de Barros (1893-1982) was one of the major Brazilian filmmakers of the silent era who  continued to work after the shift to sound, producing from 1914 to the late 1970s over 80 works of cinema. He was known for his complete control of nearly all aspects of his films.

      His 1923 Augusto Anibal Quer Casar (Augusto Anibal Wants to Get Married) was the first film for the popular Brazilian singer who appeared as the central character in several of de Barros’ films in the 1920s, before he turned to singing roles only in the next decade. Over the years Anibal performed in 15 pictures.

      In his premiere work he played a character intent upon marrying a young woman named Yara Jordão, following her in his car before she slips away to join her other women friends. Noticing that she is now in the company the other beauties, he follows them to the Gávea beach, where he has an accident, being thrown from the car, and resulting in a concussion. Suddenly he sees all of the female bathers as dancing nymphs and attempts to join them in their romps, evidently proposing to marry each of them.

      When they return to the city, the girls decide to take revenge upon him for his seeming marriage “mania,” and they pay a transvestite named Darwin to pretend to marry him.

      Once they are falsely “married,” Darwin escapes, while “her” still slightly brain-damaged husband Anibal speeds off to the sea, flying away in a seaplane in an attempt to find his bride in the sky.

      I might add that the above represents the first English language description of the plot, which I translated from an obscure Portuguese-language source.

      This now lost film is recognized as the first portrayal of an LGBTQ character in Brazilian cinema history.

 

Los Angeles, March 30, 2021

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

 

 

Saleh Saadi | Borekas / 2020

the reconciliation

by Douglas Messerli

 

Saleh Saadi (screenwriter and director) Borekas / 2020 [15 minutes]

 

A young son (Anan Abu-Jaber) has returned home for a visit in Palestine from where he now lives in Munich. The father (Yussuf Abu-Warda), a taxicab driver, is insistent on driving his son to the airport. On the way they stop for borekas (a puff pastry stuffed with cheese or potatoes) and croissants.

     But when they return to the car, it won’t start. The son is furious, claiming that he’ll call a taxi since he can’t dare be late and they always delay him at the airport. But his father reassures him he’ll call a mechanic friend who will immediately fix it.

 

     So begins what might appear to be a movie of father/son confrontation. As the reviewer from Film Carnage, writing simply as Rebecca, nicely puts it:

 

“Borekas hits upon a theme that any, and probably every, queer person can relate to, the struggle to come out. More specifically, worrying so much about what someone might think, or whether it will ruin your relationship, that it starts to create a distance on its own. How having that fear causes you to subconsciously push that person away to try and avoid conflict. It’s a sad truth and it’s dealt with in a subtle and graceful way here by Saleh Saadi.”

 

     Yet this short gem is not a coming out film, but a work of reconciliation, as the angry son, determined to get to the airport without his father, finally needs to come to terms with the fact that his father has suddenly, after two weeks of basically silence during his son’s visit, a desperate desire just to talk.

      When the mechanic can’t fix the car, a taxi from the company whom the father works for is called for. But in that short time, the father finally is able to admit that the anger and distance his son feels is not entirely of his son’s own making; and both apologize for their enforced distance.

     Amazingly gracefully for such a short film, the elder reveals that he has been surprised by a comment his son made at the dinner table, that he was moving into an apartment with his friend Christoph. Everyone else in the family seemed to know, but he was confused about the fact and later consulted is wife, who explained the situation—obviously that his son and Christoph are gay lovers. Moreover, the father has discovered that although his son seems only to like texting, his wife communicates with her son on Skype nearly every day.

 

    The implications are simply, but profound. He realizes that because of his own pride, inability to communicate, or whatever, he has lost touch with his child, and he wants him back into his life. In a short stand-off that resolves with both men holding back tears (along with the viewer, I might add), the father suggesting he too might communicate with him from time to time on Skype, and the son himself might wish every once in a while to call to his father.

       As the two wait for the taxi to arrive, they open up a range of emotional communications that have been refused by both of them for years. Nothing is said about the son’s sexuality. The father has frankly simply had to accept it. But it is now clear that over the borekas the two have reestablished a relationship that has been on hold for some long time.

       Although this is Palestine director Saleh Saadi’s first film, given the depth of acting and the various cinematic perspectives he is already a professional talent from whom we can hope to see further films.

 

Los Angeles, July 5, 2024 | Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog.