Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger | The Red Shoes / 1948 [dance only]

moira shearer, robert helpmann, and léonide massine

by Douglas Messerli

 

Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger, and Keith Winter (screenplay, based on a story by Hans Christian Andersen), Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger (directors) The Red Shoes / 1948

 

When I first conceived of this series of short essays, I determined that, since I was most interested in how dance was used in film, I would not include cinematic representations of ballet. It would be as if I were to explore singing in film, and choose to include the many operas that have been committed to screen. Ballet transcription to film may be an interesting topic, but is not the one at hand.

     The more I wrote about the subject, however, I realized that I could not exclude Powell's and Pressburger's masterful The Red Shoes simply because it included real ballet dancers and had, at its center, a "real" ballet. The ballet, in this case, is completely integrated into the film, and the dancers are credible actors as well.

    Moreover, even though the great "Red Shoes Ballet" is a theatrical work that might just as easily have been performed on stage, so too is the whole a masterful piece of filmmaking, as Powell and Pressburger conjure up their highly artificed cinematic style, filled with lush and vibrant colors that parallel, at times, the works of Nicolas Ray and Douglas Sirk. Like those later films, The Red Shoes most definitely suggests what one has to admit is an exaggerated cinematic aesthetic that may or may not be related to ballet. In any case, The Red Shoes works as a piece of cinematic art before it serves to represent anything about dance.

     Having said that, the ballet, choreographed by Robert Helpmann and danced by three professional ballet dancers, Shearer, Helpmann and Massine, is surely the most balletic of my selections. But who can dismiss a work based on a tale in which, once the dancer has put her slippers on, she must dance in a frenzy unto death? The theme of the ballet is the same as that of the movie: despite her desire to live a normal life with composer Julian Craster (Marius Goring), Vicky Page (Shearer) cannot escape the imprisonment of Boris Lermontov's ballet except through death.

     At times sentimental, overly melodramatic, and fraught with a desire to mean more than it does, The Red Shoes is filled with brilliant dancing costumes and sets.

 

Los Angeles, September 9, 2011

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (September 2011).

 

Charles Walters | Easter Parade / 1948 [dance only]

ann miller

by Douglas Messerli

 

Sidney Sheldon, Frances Goodrich, and Albert Hackett (screenplay), Irving Berlin (songs and music), Charles Walters (director), Easter Parade / 1948

 

 Clad in a yellow dress cutaway in front—so that all can keep their eyes peeled on her long, shapely legs—with a longer, knee-high train in back, Ann Miller, hands in air, smile frozen upon her face, is kept busy “Shaking the Blues Away” in Easter Parade. The cascades of her coiled hear on the top of her head echoes her frilly black bustier and the drapes behind her, all intimating something so close to kitsch that it is hard to take her seriously.

     Yet how can she dance, tapping her feet out as fast as a speed typist. Reputedly, the taps were fabricated by the sound man in most of her films, but she moves her gams so well that we are certain that her toes perfectly match those clicks.

     Throughout the film she is mad at Don Hewes (Fred Astaire) and jealous of his attentions to his new partner, Hannah Brown (Judy Garland). So that jackhammer of a performance might almost be interpreted as nails driven into his coffin (Hewes sits in the audience), or, at least, a kind of passionate dance of revenge. But then, Miller always seems to be giving her all, if a little ungainly at times, stirring a storm up to the rafters.

 

Los Angeles, February 28, 2011

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (February 2011)

Busby Berkeley | The Gang's All Here / 1943 [dance only]

carmen miranda

by Douglas Messerli

 

Walter Bullock (screenplay, based on a story by Nancy Winter, George Root, Jr., and Tom Bridges), Leo Robin and Harry Warren (music and lyrics), Busby Berkeley (choreographer and director) The Gang’s All Here / 1943

 

At first glance, it may be hard to even imagine Carmen Miranda’s performance of “The Lady in the Tutti Frutti Hat” as being described as a dance. Although Miranda had long before proven that she can dance—or at least smartly wave her hips—in pieces such as “Chica Chica Book Chic” from A Night in Rio, in The Gang’s All Here’s “Tutti Frutti Hat” we see her mostly from the knees up, and the movements she makes are almost all in her hands and eyes. The piece might best be described as a kind of choreographed performance, yet that doesn’t really do justice to Busby Berkeley’s giddily absurd number, which TV Guide once described as “a male hairdresser’s acid trip.” And, in the end, I feel that if this isn’t dance—which the Random House Abridged Dictionary defines, in its first definition, as “to move one’s feet or hands, or both, rhythmically in time to music”—I don’t know what we might call it. As ridiculous, moreover, as this particular dance may be, it is certainly one of the most strange and original of dances ever performed on the screen.

     Berkeley has always defined his choreography as being made up of numerous of the same things, usually beautiful chorus girls, moving in visual patterns, which this piece demonstrates fully. Supposedly performed on a nightclub stage, “Tutti Frutti” begins with the arrival of an organ grinder and monkey, who pass through the audience of the club (representing the audience as well in the movie theater), allowing his monkey to jump to the top of a banana tree, whereupon we discover several other matching monkeys and banana trees. Beyond the trees lies an island strewn with the bodies of chorus girls lying, again in a vague pattern of banana-like curves. A cart approaches upon which Dorita (Carmen Miranda) sits singing about her propensity to wear high hats, which she will not remove for anyone, including the many men whom she meets. The hat, made up of bananas and other fruits is truly “tutti frutti” in all the meanings of that word, and, as if to carry the metaphor into its fullest realization, the women bring forth a series of other banana and fruit-laced “things,” including a xylophone made up of bananas, upon which Dorita performs, along with, obviously, outsized bananas, which they wave up in down in patterns that suggest not just the ocean but, you guessed it, sex itself.

     In case the audience misses this obvious reference, the girls put their own bodies, shot from Berkeley’s famed crane shots, on the line, linking them below the camera’s gaze into kaleidoscopic patterns of delicious flesh and fruits. As Dorita turns to go, the girls again run to the edge of the island to wave their monstrous bananas (censors insisted they could hold their bananas only from the waist, not from the hip) in slow motion imagery.

     Panning away, the camera returns us to the audience wherein a long row of organ grinders now retrieve the several monkeys, disappearing from sight.

     The whole event is so hilariously gay, in all senses of that word (part of Miranda’s song reads, “Some people say I dress too gay, But ev'ry day, I feel so gay; And when I'm gay, I dress that way, Is something wrong with that?”) that it clearly defined the “camp” sensibility long before Susan Sontag even began to write.

 

Los Angeles, June 8, 2011

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (June 2011).

Amos Guttman | חימו מלך ירושלים (Himmo Melech Yerushalaim) (Himmo, King of Jerusalem) / 1987

taboo love

by Douglas Messerli

 

Yoram Kaniuk and Edna Mazia (screenplay, based on Kaniuk’s Himmo King of Jerusalem), Amos Guttman (director) חימו מלך ירושלים (Himmo Melech Yerushalaim) (Himmo, King of Jerusalem) / 1987

 

When Amos Guttman’s cinematic version of the beloved Israeli fiction Himmo King of Jerusalem was released in 1987, it was not treated at well by his county’s critics or audiences. Critic Gidi Orsher dismissed the film as being “pretentious,” and went even further in describing it as a “strain on the Israeli film industry. Nachman Ingber described it as a ““miserable, tiring, heavy, a boring and slow film in which nothing happens.” And Meir Schnitzer criticized the film for its “lack of plot” and “visual ugliness.” The film sold only 21,000 tickets in the theaters. Because of his previously gay, outsider works, Guttman had clearly made enemies, who were not about to praise the work of a gay man when it came to major issues of Israeli history and patriotism, particularly the revered subject of the 1948 Siege of Jerusalem when, despite the 1947 United Nations Partition Plan which signified Jerusalem as a corpus separatum (a separate body) to be administered by an international board of leaders, it became a battleground (among others) by Jewish and Arab militias in Mandatory Palestine, with later other Israeli and Transjordan forces joining in the fight.

    As Amir Kamier has reminded us in his excellent summary of Guttman’s films, the director held no myths about the 1948 siege. As Guttman himself commented, “I wasn’t interested in what things were actually like back then. In Himmo, I didn’t feel like I was hitting some kind of national nerve. For work purposes, I dropped the ‘the’ people always put before the year.” Guttman even altered the ending, the siege simply ending and the soldiers leaving the makeshift monastery hospital, the movie ending with the daughter of the monastery’s caretaker, a mute, wandering down the empty halls dressed in a patient’s operating gown, holding her own amputee doll, as Kamier describes it, “Guttman’s ironic way of saying that life has indeed resumed.

     The film did receive positive attention, however, from international critics and won prizes at the 1988 Toronto International Film Festival and the San Francisco International Film Festival, as well as being well-received in other such festival showings. But even in this country, Bernice Reynaud, writing in the Chicago Reader pontificated in what was otherwise basically a plot summary, “I do not share the admiration expressed by some of my colleagues (such as the London Times‘s David Robinson) for the film, being quite irritated by its heavy melodramatic aspects, Alona Kimhi’s performance as Hamutal, and the droning chords that gloomily punctuate the action.”

     If one can generalize that 1987 was certainly not an innovative year at the movies, for anyone to dismiss this film as being disinteresting because of its lack of plot decades after the major works of Michelangelo Antonioni and Federico Fellini, and just after the films Rainer Werner Fassbinder, so say nothing Warhol and numerous other outsider works and in the same year when filmmakers such as Pedro Almadóvar, Bruce Robinson, and Sergei Paradjanov released new works, suggests that either critics such as Schnitzer were either terrible ignorant of film history or were purposeful seeking for reasons to dismiss Guttman’s film.

     The film’s failure sadly led Guttman to cease filmmaking for some period after, until an outcry for his return to scene led him to make his last greatest work Amazing Grace. But, in fact, watching Himmo, King of Jerusalem I was not only moved by the film, but stunned by its beauty and arresting thematics.

      Certainly this film was different from all those that had come before it, when Guttman seemed content to mostly focus on outsider gay issues or in the case of Bar 51, the even more outré subject of incest. I suspect Israeli critics simply felt that they didn’t even have to truly deal with him as long as he kept to such subjects. But here he was entering of sacred ground, on more normative, particularly heterosexual and nationalist territory without necessarily bowing down with the deep respect they felt it deserved.

      Yet the book itself had always been oddly focused. The story is actually quite simple. A new nurse, Hamutal Horowitz, who has just lost her boyfriend in battle, arrives at the monastery where authorities have gathered soldiers too wounded to return to the front. Without proper supplies or even enough anesthesia, along with few rations, the survivors have been gathered here to basically suffer, some of them to die.

      Unlike the other nurses, seasoned cynics and none of them very good looking, Hamutal is an almost angelic beauty, who quickly develops a personable relationship with the men in the ward to which she has been assigned, even agreeing, despite the disdain of her fellow nurses, to return after hours to play cards with the men.

 

     The men under her watch include, among others, Yoram (Icho Avital), Aaron (Shy Capon), Frangi (Amiram Gabriel), and Assa (Dov Navon), who have themselves, as soldiers, prisoners, and isolated men have often been forced to do, made close relationships with other males. In this case Frangi and Assa clearly have a kind of “homo-social” relationship in which Assa sits most of the time in Frangi’s bed and even at night laying close to him on his own cot, asks when he might sleep in his bed. Indeed, when Hamutal first arrives, they have taken over the head doctor’s desk, with Frangi, feet up on the desk greets her, Assa’s head suddenly appearing from below the desk as if he were providing the solder with a blow job. Actually he is engaged in an almost just as intimate act, drawing pictures, as if tattooing, on Frangi’s leg cast.

      Another couple nearby seem to have also developed a similarly “close” relationship, as they knit in their beds next to one another.

     Although, we these may not be sexual kinships—in fact, at one point later in the film, someone describes Assa as a eunuch, presumably from his war injuries—they have joined into homo-social units that certainly resemble gay couples.   

    Yet for most of the men, the sudden appearance of Hamutal awakens their remaining heterosexual desires, even if she is clearly untouchable to them, even after she moves in with them, or one should say particularly when she begins to sleep in the same room. The only one who does appreciate the new female in their midst is Assa, who may truly be gay and, in event, is now totally devoted to Frangi, which his question, "Are we in love with her?" reveals [emphasis mine].

      If the doctor (Yossi Graber) had not made it clear how unbearable things are in this makeshift clinic, which often seems more like an insane ward than a military hospital. And when she hears the screams of a patient from a floor above who is being operated on, it becomes even worse. As the soldiers claim, the doctor is attempting to keep a dead man alive.

      The suffering patient is Himmo Perach (Ofer Shikartsi), a former close friend of Frangi’s. When Hamutal is finally sent to look after him one night, she observes the reason for his suffering. The man is blind, and one arm and both his legs have been amputated (without sufficient anesthesia). And when they bring him to the ward in which the soldiers I have described are sleeping, he refuses to speak, only crying out continuously in the night “Shoot me, shoot me,” a desperate plea that someone might finish him off.

      It is Frangi, his former best friend who tells the nurse the others how in his day, Himmo truly was the “king of Jerusalem,” a male beauty with whom all the women fell in love. Three times in this film Frangi recounts his and Himmo’s close relationship, making in clear to us that Frangi was also in love with him.

     Despite her original horror of even looking at his body, Hamutal quite quickly also falls in love with the almost bodiless man. She sits at his bedside for long hours, except when his brother Marcos (Amos Lavi) comes to visit for short periods, which is nearly every day.

     In her new devotion to Himmo, however, the nurse begins to provide the other men only with the same kind of mediated attention that they have received from the previous nurses. They have lost their female icon even as, to protect him, she moves into the room, placing her palette on the floor next to Himmo’s bed. And with their loss of her, their constantly interrupted sleep, and even worse, the feeling that they can longer in their wounds claim special status, they rebel, insisting that they will return to the ward until either Himmo leaves or she can quiet him.

     Her presence, in fact, does calm and quiet the almost dead man. And Frangi now perceives her as being even more of an angel, but even more out of reach. Other soldiers in the ward taunt her by insisting that she should marry Himmo, actually creating a kind of Huppah (the traditional Jewish wedding canopy out of their crutches over which they have placed a bedspread.

 

      She leaves in anger but is ultimately even willing to go through with that if they leave Himmo be. Frangi puts a stop to their nonsense.

       Finally, a Jewish State is declared, and Jerusalem freed. Food, supplies, and even champagne arrive, which the soldiers, rather than drinking, pour in celebration over their heads. The doctor and his staff plan a celebratory party which only Frangi refuses to attend. But Assa, who has joined the party, is still disruptive as he tires of their everyday dance music, demanding that they play Bach. He takes up a rifle to challenge the heteronormative control, but, despite his anger particularly of Hamutal for seemingly pulling Frangi even temporarily away from him, allows her to disarm him.

      Realizing that without her attentions, Himmo will simply to left to die, the beautiful nurse once more attends to her charge, giving a shot that will provide him with what he has been seeking, a way out of the pain and suffering of his life. And in finally permitting him to die, the nurse has finally herself chosen life over death. 

      The sad departure of the soldiers, wherein finally even the tentative homo-social relationships they have made but finally be abandoned, brought tears to my eyes. These men, as Yardenne Greenspan observes, writing about the book upon which the movie is based, commenting on both the various shifts in gender relationships and their own fears and realizations about their returns:

 

“The book also interrogates the gender dynamic between the lonely, agitated, and masculine soldiers, searching for bits of their male pride as they tease and leer at a young woman in a white nurse’s uniform. She embodies the quintessential fantasy of compassionate, merciful, tender femininity, while also being on the other side of an invisible wall—the wall of the unblemished; of those who will proceed to the post-war world without a handicap, in a world still too young and ignorant to have a decent understanding of disability or PTSD.

     … And it is through this lens more than any other that the hospital patients see Himmo. As he lies nearly motionless for days on end, his body refusing to die, never speaking save for an incessant crying of “Shoot me…shoot me…,” he serves as a frightening mirror of their own shattered hopes and dreams. As they joke about him and torment him, taking miniscule comfort in being the stronger ones, the ones who will come out alive, they shiver inwardly, battling against the small voice inside of them, telling them that though they may survive this war, the young state will not revere them as heroes but will soon forget about them, turning its attention to the able-bodied, the beautiful, the next generation of men sent to shatter their bodies and futures in the name of nationhood.”  

 

     Frangi hugs Assa, the latter perhaps facing in 1948 even a more difficult time finding someone with whom he can move on with in his future life. But Frangi too will miss the man who drew flowers upon his leg, and kept him warm in the long, terrifying nights.

     Hamutal watches from parapet high above, realizing finally that she has escaped from harm’s way when so many others have not. She is blessed, still beautiful, full bodied, and able to move on, but with a new world of empathy and comprehension about life and death that she can bring to the new nation.

     There has been nothing pretentious or ugly about this work; and for those who dare to listen to what its characters have to say, there is most clearly a deep narrative that expresses their fears and loves. The musical score by Ilan Virtzberg, moreover, is utterly haunting.

     The more of Guttman’s work I see, the more I admire his filmmaking.

 

Los Angeles, September 15, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (September 2024).

Manu Roma | Anónimo (Anonymous) / 2021 [documentary]

rules, rituals, and resistance

by Douglas Messerli

 

Michael Rojas and Manu Roma (screenplay), Manu Roma (director) Anónimo (Anonymous) / 2021 [19 minutes] [documentary]

 

Spanish director Manu Roma’s short documentary on cruising doesn’t show us any sexual action or, in fact, any terribly serious cruising, the camera simply watching one elderly man walk a notorious Barcelona beach, another young man wander the famed Parc de Montjuïc, and another middle-age fellow enter and exit the men’s rooms near the Arena.

     Yet here we get a fairly broad notion of what cruising is all about. For the older man, who describes the he gradually had to learn the rules of cruising by observing others, the beach and the nearby sea wall and underpass seems to be the perfect location since at all hours of the day men regularly gather there, participating in nearly every sort of sexual act from engaging in openly nude sex on the beach, joining in mutual masturbation in the various water lee ways, or simply sharing others as voyeurs in the tunnel and elsewhere all the various goings-on.

      Our guide to this location finds it perfect for him, a married man who visits the site with some regularity, because it is safe from police observation since it is in an out-of-the way location seldom visited by anyone other than the cruisers themselves. He observes that, in fact, he has seen several policemen, in and out of uniform, visit the place, evidently seeking the sexual fulfillment of the other cruisers and knowing that this is a place where their presence will be noted only by like-minded men.

 

    The younger man who prefers the wooded, winding paths of the Montjuïc prefers it simply because of its rituals. Here one does not directly approach another male, but stands about, often pretending disinterest so as not to attract the attention of possible public visitors. After a while, one gets to know the regular cruisers, some of them disinterested in those with whom they’ve previously had sex, others quite willing for another go. Some nights, in the search of a sexual partner, it takes hours, time going amazing quickly. On other nights, our guide to the park tells us, you’d think that half of the male population of Barcelona had gathered there, and he need only spend a short while before finding someone willing to engage in sex.

      By far the most fascinating of our guides is the handsome middle-aged cruiser who prefers the bathrooms precisely because of the danger, the possibility that the person next to whom you are standing is a heterosexual not at all interested in gay sex, or, at other times, perfectly willing to join in on a masturbatory session. Here the rules of strict, in some respects. You begin my partially exposing yourself, with just a slight erection. If the man shows interest, you reveal a little more, masturbate into a more obvious erection. On one occasion, he notes, there were 6 or 7 men having sex together; fortunately no one intruded to break up their fun.

      This last anonymous cruiser, has a gay lover, who knows of his actions. The bathroom cruiser argues that his love involves loyalty, not changing his sexual behavior, which is, he insists, what makes gay life different and far more of a challenge to the heteronormativity by which the dominant culture attempts to proscribe behavior. Being gay, he asserts, is a challenge to the majority who attempt to wipe out all possible access to alternative sexual acts. He takes it almost as a challenge to seek out the riskiest kind of sexual behavior, public sex in places where he purposely endangers his own safety. It is not even the sex, the final ejaculation that he most enjoys, but the search, the act of cruising itself. The park is too predictable, the isolated beach too easy. For him, the ability to seek out sex in open public locations is a personal statement of his determination to maintain complete sexual freedom, notwithstanding the numerous delimitations that heterosexual society attempts to enforce.

       Although nothing really happens in Roma’s work, a neophyte certainly gets a basic explanation of the various kinds of gay cruising spots (sans street, car, or bar cruising). The only major thing this film fails to explain is the source of such intense sexual desire, the enormous pull of the cruising spots for those that seek them out day by day, night by night: in short, the addiction that such activities creates for the individuals involved. Sex, I would argue is more addictive than any drug—and often more pleasurable and alluring since it involves another human being, bringing equal pleasure to that other.     

 

Los Angeles, September 15, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (September 2024).