Ernst Johansen and Lasse Nielsen | La’ os være (Leave Us Alone) / 1975

childhood games of murder

by Douglas Messerli

 

Carsten Nielsen and Lasse Nielsen (screenplay), Ernst Johansen and Lasse Nielsen (directors) La’ os være (Leave Us Alone) / 1975

 

For those who have seen Lasse Nielsen’s and Ernst Johansen’s groundbreaking gay youth film Du er ikke alene (You Are Not Alone) (1978) and Nielsen’s several subsequent works on boy love such as Lek and the Waterboy (2010), Happy Birthday (2013), The Kite (2016), The Game (2017), and Tim and the Fluteboy (2018)—all works which represent the underage gay sex desire from an idealized perspective in which boy-on-boy sex is represented (although notably not portrayed in the films) as absolutely normal and a beautiful thing to witness—might be surprised if they were able to track down a rare copy of Nielsen’s and Johansen’s first feature film La’ os være (Leave Us Alone) of 1975, where the androgynous, long-haired innocents featured throughout Nielsen’s oeuvre are revealed to be potentially as culturally stratified, normatively dominated, and violent as the world of adults. If in almost all of Nielsen’s latter films the young correct for their elder’s blind selfishness and hatred of difference, in this film the young have already been infected by their parents and teachers.

      Leave Us Alone begins with a fairly positive message. Left alone during a teacher’s strike for higher wages, the students, male and female, of an urban “Children’s School”—obviously a governmentally run institution for children whose parents have died or are temporarily unable to care for them—meet to discuss what they are going to do, having been denied their annual summer trip to a student camp. Their decision and plans seem, at first, to be almost a model of what a group of those clearly abandoned by society, left to their own ingenuity, are able to accomplish. They organize and execute their plans fairly capably. Determining to escape to an uninhabited island not far from the Danish coast, the children borrow tents from a local public organization, they steal money from a local shop and carefully buy provisions for stay of a week or more, and they carefully gather small amounts of blankets and clothing from those who still live at home without drawing attention to their actions. They take a train to a small beachside embarkment, rent a boat, and arrive in their new paradise where the previously black-and-white film turns, almost as in The Wizard of Oz into somewhat muted color (the 70s faded-out browns, greens, and blues seem to deter any independent LGBTQ film of that decade from blooming into wondrous technicolor).

      Pilgrims to a new world, the band of mostly teenage males with two older females and a few young boys and girls—14 children named Martin, Meyer, Jens, Sven, Kenneth, Søren, Tine, Anja, Henrik, Svend, Bo, Helle, Hanne, and Bjørn (the given first names of all the actors)—set out on a pilgrimage to discover and establish their new tent kingdom. Some gather firewood, setting out plates and pots, while others erect the tents. One young man, obviously quoting an old wives’ tale he has heard from an adult, declares that it is always important to dig a large hole on any such outing, and taking up a spade begins to dig for the next several days. Another boy has brought along a radio, hearing the news that authorities believe the missing children have traveled to Sweden, when, in fact, they have traveled, so they believe, in the other direction.

      While there are some signs of the difficulties ahead—one young man declares they are missing a sack of bread, butter, and cheese—they seem to have done remarkably well on their own in setting up a camp similar to the ones they’ve been trained erect in their previous outings.

      One has brought a guitar which he begins to play, while another boy insists on tickling him with a long weed which ends, as in many a Nielsen film (see, for example, my review of The Kite) with them wrestling in what one recognizes is really an attempt to bring their bodies into touch with one another. Two of girls take off their blouses to sunbathe half-nakedly as they gigglingly read aloud a romance novel they’ve obviously purloined from one of their mothers. The girls cook up a stew which one young boy spoons out, unfortunately, in unequal portions. When night falls, the boys tell horror stories to each other, laughing at the macabre events; two boys crawl under the same blanket and strip off their underwear, obviously to cuddle up and masturbate together. A young boy cries out, frightened by the darkness, to be stilled by the gentle comforting of an older girl. This brave new world might almost be said to represent the domestic activities of a Danish version of Our Town.

      The very next morning, however, they discover that their boat has drifted off. They blame Henrik—as they had for the missing grocery sack—for having forgotten to properly tie it down. Although Henrik tries to swim out a ways to bring it back, the others recognize the dangers of trying to do so and pull him back, also perceiving the utter seriousness of the event. Several youths  hit and mock Henrik for his failure and one, forebodingly, hurls a small rock at him. He has suddenly become a kind of scapegoat for their growing problems.

      Yet soon after we see the young boys throwing small branches at one another, two in particular bonding as they leap about on a rope they have strung from a tree. The entire settlement joyfully waddles out to go bathing in the ocean waters. Several of the boys attempt, unsuccessfully, to fish; the girls boil up a nettle soup so that the young kids can add some nutrients to their diet. Later, the boys find eels and a fish in their nets, cutting off their heads, before they bring them back to the group.

      Clearly, however, the directors are setting up a situation that is moving into the territory of Peter Brook’s Lord of the Flies (1963). For soon after, Svend goes missing, his best friend asking the group if they’ve seen him, to which they nonchalantly respond with jokes that reveal their own feelings of entrapment such as “Maybe he caught the train out.”

      The evening meal is almost inedible, so some complain. Plates are broken, others impossible to clean. Their fecal matter is beginning to make their camp smell. A fight breaks out between one of the boys and Henrik, the two wrestling but this time, we recognize, not in a symbolic sexual joust, particularly when the other boy draws out a knife holding it over the conquered Henrik before he hurls, point down, in the ground nearby.

      Between one boy and girl a heterosexual relationship begins as the two kiss alone in a cover, only to be doused by another boy with water. When soon after the two wander together along the beach they suddenly encounter the drowned body of Svend. Together they try to revive him, without success, the two reporting back to the others what they’ve found. 

     Various of their members discuss death, attempting to explain to a younger child who cannot understand how God can find a body when it’s buried underground, what happens in death. Some consider the differences between burial and cremation. But the next day they place Svend’s body into the deep whole dug by one of their members. They follow the rituals of the society in which they were raised, tossing shovels full of soil over the dead boy, planting a handmade cross on the covered grave, and, in tears, tossing freshly picked wildflowers over the plot. One boy, obviously in love with Svend, runs off from the others to tear down the branch and leaf covered hut they had built together, collapsing into tears of grief. At another point he stands as a lone mourner at the grave, others trying to encourage him to join them, but he demanding for time alone with his loved one.

       The next morning the four boys in one tent begin by throwing everything inside out, and carefully dismantling their tent as they move away from the others. They might seem like outsiders unhappy with the normative society of the others, but in fact, we soon discover, these are the Alpha males moving away from the females, children, and those boys they consider weak or who are developing heterosexual and homosexual relationships

       While the maturing girls and boys of the original settlement discuss the possibilities of a communal society, a truly “communist” culture in which all are seen of equal stature and expected to help in the decision-making and governance—ideas which one of the girls had heard expressed in a lecture she once attended—the males of the new tribe create working bows and arrows, hunting down and shooting a pheasant. Identifying themselves with the Indians and white converts to the Dakota tribe in A Man Called Horse (1970), they ritualistically exchange blood, and commit to warrior behavior. In large sense, these are still teenage boys who, having not yet completely grown out of childhood, are merely still playing “cowboys and indians,” one of the enculturating tools used by the dominate culture of the day to define normative male behavior. While those of the original group appear to be shifting from childhood to boy-and-girlhood in the case of the very young, and from prepubescence to young adulthood—the boys of the tribe, like Peter Pan, refuse to grow up and, accordingly, have no ability to separate their fantasy world from the real world in which they unknowingly have been trapped on the island where it appears no one might ever come to their rescue. The film’s title, I would argue, reflects their sentiments. They no longer want anything to do with either their former world at the school or the newly developing society the others are working toward—if only they can survive. Despite their failure to create, upon their first attempt, a raft capable of transporting them back to the mainland, we believe, as one of them argues, that eventually the original group might be able to create a vessel seaworthy enough to transport them back to the “real” world with which they might share the questions and answers they have explored.

       Those of the tribe, however, know only how to play out their childhood war games, precisely how one of their members, Jens, previously reacted when one of the females had intentionally flirted with him by rubbing his thigh. His reaction was to tackle her, and tear open her blouse as if he were about to rape her, a response the very opposite of her signal for him to show her some attention and love. His was a reaction of a fear of sexuality the way he might later react homophobically if approached by a male. Rape, by definition, is a plundering, violating, or carrying away of someone as a warrior—precisely as these boys have come now to define themselves. Accordingly, when the innocent Henrik wanders into their now declared “territory,” they chase him down and capture him much like the boys run down Simon in Lord of the Flies. But here the boys are simply playing a game with no intention of killing their prey, despite the fact that they tie him up to a three and put a noose around his head. It is a symbol of their power which they have not yet intended to be actualized as a real sacrifice and death.

       Yet, as we recall, this boy has stood all along for the true fool and outsider among them, and their behavior, even if symbolic, apes their inner hatred for him. If there is any true “weakling” of this tale it is the almost totally isolated and guilty-feeling Henrik, who has seemingly caused the severance from their pasts.

       As they sit crunching on their barbecued pheasant, one of them points out that if Henrik were to fall to sleep he might accidently strangle himself, the leader, chewing away on the sweet meat of the bird, suggesting that if anyone wants to go check on him he’s not stopping them. The boy goes back into the woods to see how their captive is only to find out Henrik is indeed dead.

       The others, similarly, have finally begin to check out what might have happened to their Henrik, calling out his name and finally discovering him tied to the tree, strangled by the noose. Moments later they stand on the hill overlook the outlaw tribe with the intentions clearly to call out their horrible deeds. The “Indians” quickly scatter, but Martin chases after Jens, running him down and challenging him to a fight, no wrestling match this time but a real fight to determine who might actually be the superior. Martin has the cause of right on his side, but he is not as strong as the young warrior, and is soon struggling to catch his breath and wrestle down his foe. In the very last frame of this now terrifying movie, we see Martin pick up a large rock about to smash it against Jens’ head as we hear the boy who was Svend’s lover call out in horror “Martin!”

       Violence apparently has won, like a virus taken over these innocents destroying them all in its wake. Any possible rescue from what has now become a hell of bigotry and hate, with two boys dead and possibly a third about to be, no longer has any meaning. Their worlds have already crumbled. There is no longer any young girl or boy on this island. And each being is suddenly more alone than he or she could ever have imagined.

      One of the brief commentaries on this film—I’ve been unable to uncover any full reviews in English—describes these “unformed young people” being stranded on an island “no civilizing adult presence to restrain them.” I’d argue, the problem is that these developing young folks did alas precisely bring their missing parents’ and teachers’ ideas with them, which is what ultimately destroyed them. It’s little wonder that in Neilsen’s future films the children find a way around all the received ideas with which their parents and institutions attempt to civilize them.

 

Los Angeles, April 8, 2021

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

Michael Haneke | Das weisse Band—Eine deutsche Kindergeschichte (The White Ribbon) / 2009

little atrocities

by Douglas Messerli

 

Michael Haneke (screenwriter and director) Das weisse Band—Eine deutsche Kindergeschichte (The White Ribbon) / 2009

 

In the small German village of Eichwald just before the outbreak of World War I the people appear to be God-fearing and hard-working citizens, obeying both the economic rule of the local Baron (Ulrich Tukur) and the religious values presented to them by their pastor (Burghart Klaußner). Through their families and school teacher (Christian Friedel), the children have been taught humility, purity, and, above all, obedience. Although Eichwald is a poor village, it is, on the surface, a model German community.

      As the School Teacher narrates, however, a series of events that begin to happen that brings everything into question. It starts with a small wire being struck between the gate to the Doctor's house, which throws him, killing his horse as he returns home from his medical rounds. The Doctor, himself, we soon discover has recently lost his wife, and is forced to rely heavily on the neighborhood midwife (Susanne Lothar) for the care of his older daughter, Anna and his young son, Karli. The Midwife's son, Kurti, represents another burden since he suffers from Down Syndrome.

     This purposeful attempt on the life of the Doctor—who survives with a broken collarbone and arm, but is forced to spend weeks in a hospital in a neighboring town—causes pain and fear within the family and general consternation throughout the community. Yet no one is able to explain who might have done the act, nor can the wire be found soon after the event.

     A short while later, an older working woman is killed on the Baron's property when a rotten floor gives way. The bereaved family, particularly the elder son, are convinced that the accident has been a result of carelessness on the part of the rich landowner, and the son "revenges" his mother's death on the day of the harvest celebration by destroying most of the cabbages in one of the Baron's plots. His crime, in turn, forces the family into near-starvation when the Baron refuses to further employ them.

     Through his stunningly beautiful black and white landscapes, which help to distance us from the period and view his film from a more objective perspective, Haneke ultimately takes us into the homes of some of these "good folk," where we see them almost as August Sanders-like photographs come to life. The Pastor, for example, is shown to be a strict autocrat at home, severely beating his children for arriving late for dinner and, as further punishment, forcing his two eldest children to wear white ribbons as signs to remind them of purity and faith. When he discerns that his eldest boy, Martin, has been masturbating, he ties the child's hands to the bed each night. Arriving at the school for Confirmation lessons, he discovers the children loudly playing with others and forces his daughter, Klara, to stand at the back of the room, her face turned away from him as he berates them for their actions, a sermon which ends with her collapse.

     When the seemingly "kindly" Doctor returns home we quickly discern that he and the Midwife have been engaged in a long-time affair in which he verbally abuses her, while he is also sexually abusing his teenage daughter.

     Surely the adult abuse of these children is somehow related to the events occurring throughout the community.

    And still more "little atrocities" occur: the Baron's barn burns, his son, Sigi, goes missing and is found tied up naked to a tree where he has been badly beaten. As the pampered son of the Baron—and a target for that very reason—Sigi is surely also seen by the perpetrators as being what today we would describe as a homosexual or gay child, foretold in another instance when the Steward's son steals Sigi’s flute, eventually throwing it into the river, and, in return, is beaten by the Steward.

      In another home a baby, left beside an open window in the cold winter night, has grown ill. The peasant whose wife has died on the Manor commits suicide.

      At the Pastor's home, Klara, recovering from her breakdown, kills her father's pet bird by running a scissors through its mouth and guts.

     These acts of hate, punishment, and revenge affect even the innocent love of the School Teacher and the young nanny, Eva, working at the Manor. After Sigi's abduction, Eva is fired, even though she has been hired only to care for the baby, and the young woman is forced to return home where "they will never understand." Later, the School Teacher's attempt to ask for her father for her hand in marriage ends abysmally with the Father demanding that he wait another year before asking again.

     Meanwhile, the "little atrocities" grow into near murder as the Midwife's retarded son is found beaten, his eyes gouged, an act that nearly blinds him. To the community, particularly to the already abused children, he represents an emblem of their own so-called sins and degeneration, for which the Pastor has made children wear the white ribbons of the film’s title.

     As critic Ian Johnston observes in his review of the film in Bright Lights Film Journal, the white ribbons the Pastor’s children are forced to wear are echoed in various other ways throughout the film:

 

“The white ribbon of the title also gathers other associations in the film. There are the ties used to bind Martin’s hands at night in a bid to stop him from masturbating, a symbol of the oppressive constraints placed on natural behaviour. There is also the white bandage wrapped around the injured Karli’s eyes that simultaneously marks a society’s scapegoating of one of its weaker members (reminding us of the Nazis’ later treatment of the mentally impaired) and symbolizes that society’s blindness to its own true nature. The shaming white ribbons worn on Martin and Klara’s arms project associations into the Nazi future, both the Nazis’ armbands and the badges of shame (yellow for Jews, pink for homosexuals, purple for Jehovah’s Witnesses, etc.) used in the camps.”

 

     The Baroness reveals to her husband that she has fallen in love, on her temporary escape from Eichwald to Italy, with another man. She wants to take the children out of what she perceives as a world of distorted values.

     On June 28, 1914, in the very midst of all these inexplicable happenings, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria is killed by a Serbian nationalist, and by September of that year Germany  outlines its intents and plans for War.

     In an attempt to visit his beloved Eva, the School Teacher borrows the Baron's bicycle, but before he can even leave the yard he is met by the Midwife, who demands that she be given the bicycle; she knows, she insists, who is the guilty party behind all these atrocities, and is on her way to the nearby town to report it to the authorities. Dumbstruck, the Teacher permits her to take it away, but as an afterthought he checks her house, which she has boarded up and locked. Has she left her young son there alone? Upon exploring a back window, he discovers the children from several families gathered, trying to call in to Kurti, who has apparently been the source of his mother's misinformation.

     Suddenly, the School Teacher remembers that these same children had gathered at the Doctor's directly after his accident. One of his students had previously revealed a horrible "dream" about Kurti. Are the children themselves guilty of these horrendous acts? The children in the film suddenly remind us of the monstrous children of the 1960 film Village of the Damned, directed by Anglo-German Rolf Willa.

     The Doctor, the teacher soon discovers, has also just left the village, taking along his two children. When he attempts to query Martin and Klara, they offer him no information. A talk with their father ends in the Pastor's explosive dismissal of the Teacher, assuring him imprisonment if he dares to tell his fears to anyone else.

     Local gossip, meanwhile, tells a terrible tale of the Doctor's and Midwife's ugly relationship, an affair, the locals claim, that began far before his wife's death, and which bore the son they both tried to abort, the retarded Kurti.

     Here, the story comes to a conclusion. The War has been declared, and the Teacher is inducted. The voice of an old School Teacher who has been telling this story, now a tailor, has never seen Eva again. He has no real evidence, moreover, of who may have committed all these acts so long in the past.

     In a sense, it doesn't matter. Everyone in this small village has in some way been involved in each of these "little atrocities" almost as preparations for the German and Austrian actions of the greater atrocities of both World Wars, but particularly in Hitler’s regime. Eichwald was simply a microcosm of the culture's transformation of good and kind people into fearful and hateful ones.

 

Los Angeles, January 3, 2010

Reprinted from Green Integer Blog (January 2010), World Cinema Review (2010) and Reading Films: My International Cinema (Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2012).

Rafael Thomaseto | Próprio (Self) / 2020

where is love?

by Douglas Messerli

 

Rachel Ancelevicz and Rafael Thomaseto (screenplay), Rafael Thomaseto (director) Próprio (Self) / 2020 [14 minutes]

 

This film by Brazilian director Rafael Thomaseto features a young 16-year-old, who like so many teenagers everywhere is made to feel isolated and different, particularly if you are a closeted homosexual, in a world in which his peers lie and brag about their numerous female conquests and mock those like the central character of this film, Fernando (Jota Barletta), who is unable to find someone of his age who might fulfill his sexual desires and yet undesiring of the girls with whom their friends expect him to sexually engage.

    Unfortunately for many teens and even younger boys who have personally recognized their sexual difference, they are forced, particularly in our digital age, to seek out older boys and men on line, often with unfortunate results.

    That is precisely what happens to Fernando, who makes a date in the local park with a man named Edson (Theodora Cochrane).

    Edson is handsome enough to engage the young Fernando, and at first seems genial, perhaps the perfect person to introduce someone like the young experienced teen into gay sexuality. But the minute the boy has led him to a forested path and begins to demonstrate his eagerness, the testosterone level obviously rises in the older partner and without any of the romantic gestures of Fernando in mind, Edson forces him up against a tree, pulls down his pants, and brutally fucks the young man who has not yet even experienced anal sex.

     Any of us who have been fucked (I personally found it comfortable to serve as both bottom and top) have had to experience those first pains of the anus being opened wide enough to accept a penis. But generally, that first, maybe second, and third time, we engaged with someone who was gentle enough to explain the process and go slowly, also engaging in foreplay which helps ready am anal virgin for what comes next.

      Edson, obviously without empathy or a fig of thoughtfulness, gets right to business, literally torturing the first-timer. And, in some respects, one might describe his sexual encounter with the boy as a kind of rape.

      The director, in his synopsis, suggests that it is “a traumatic episode that will undoubtedly haunt Fernando the rest of his life,” a statement that seems somewhat overwrought since when one actually decides to enter into sex as a gay individual, one expects and even fears some unpleasant surprises, some possible pain, with the faith that further experiences will surely be more enjoyable. The presumption seems to be that Fernando was completely unaware that anal sex is painful at first. Yet the young man, self-described, as a “sporty twink,” would have been totally unprepared and unaware of what was possible. And while there is no question that the young adult he meets is cruel and insensitive, interested only in fulfilling his own needs, I can’t imagine that in todays world of available porn and online messaging, that a neophyte might not have suspected that there was also some danger in his suddenly hooking up with an unknown man.

     Most certainly, Fernando was unnecessarily hurt, severely disappointed with what he dreamed would be a sexual thrill, but that it might affect him the rest of his life as trauma seems to read the character as a far weaker being that Barletta plays him.

     I might add, moreover, that young women, unfortunately, have long had to imagine that their first sexual experience, given the despicable behavior of the male gender, might be other than they expected.

     Even more importantly, if Fernando is actually that traumatized, what is goal of this film? Is it simply a warning for young teens not to try out sex with someone they don’t know, someone older than them? Is there no other dimension to this movie other than a statement of the dangers of a pre-arranged meeting on-line with an unknown party?

     If so, we might as well put this movie in the same bin as the 1950s and 60s US films Boys, Beware! In actuality, the film ends with Fernando turning to a gentle encounter with another kind of animal, a horse he obviously has cared for or ridden previously on a nearby ranch, suggesting to me that the character recognizes how to heal, is quite resilient and understands that not all gay men with whom he might anonymously meet up are violent and insensitive. I guess the question is: does his masturbatory acts just previous to his encounter with the horse hint at a memory of that violent moment in the woods or a future in which a sexual partner will involve him more fully in the romance of love-making.

     Perhaps the real problem is that today young boys are made to feel that it is necessary to engage in sex at 16 or 17 in order to define themselves as socially fit. Although at the very same age, I wish there was someone there to encourage me to take advantage of my hormonal urges. I was far more innocent than is Fernando when I did finally have my first gay sexual encounters.

     In short, the signatory statement by Rafael Thomaseto appears to undercut the depth of his own insights as represented in his short film.

 

Los Angeles, July 20, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (July 2025).

Chantal Akerman | Je tu il elle (I you he she) / 1975

hunger and thirst

by Douglas Messerli

 

Chantal Akerman (screenwriter and director) Je tu il elle (I you he she) / 1975

 

Chantal Akerman’s death by suicide in October 2015, led me to revisit many of her films and to watch new ones, among them Je tu il elle of 1975. This film begins with a kind of reverse creation myth, as the filmed figure and narrator (Akerman herself) describes her activities for six days, as she pulls her furniture out of the small, narrow apartment she has apparently just moved into, writes a long letter—presumably to the “tu” (perhaps the film viewers themselves) of the film’s title—after which she crosses much of it out, lays her manuscript in an inexplicable manner across the floor, and almost manically spoons from a bag of sugar. At times, the narrative voice runs ahead of the visual actions; at other moments it lags behind, creating tension. As she lies on the mattress nude for days at a time, that first week gradually expanding to nearly a month, what becomes apparent is that this woman is completely self-destructive. She waits, so the narrative voice proclaims, for something to happen which, except for a passerby staring into her window, never comes.

    Finally, completely disenchanted with the life she has chosen—one presumably of freedom and independence—the character, Julie, abandons her cramped space and takes to the road, catching a ride with a lonely trucker with red hair, but is otherwise nearly a Marlon Brando look-alike (Niels Arestrup).

     He says very little but suggests she may want to take a nap in his bunk. Later they visit a local bar where a TV set blares out American series’ such as Cannon, whose characters, strangely, spout aphorisms such as “a child of fear is the father of evil.”

    The two continue of their voyage in silence, stopping by another truck stop for dinner. Back in the truck he instructs her with quite specific details on how to jack him off, which she does successfully. He opens up to her and tells a sad tale of how, with children and the long hours of his job, his sex life with his wife has waned, leaving him with nothing but quick pick-ups along his route and endless yearnings.

      In short, the truck driver relates his own anti-creation tale, one that shall surely lead, like Julie’s own apartment isolation, to disappointment. Certainly, this man’s idea of sexual gratification—entirely self-centered—offers nothing to the world. Akerman frames the encounter so that we do not even see Julie while she is pleasuring him, her existence having been wiped out in the act.

     In the third act of this film, Julie returns to her lesbian lover (Claire Wauthion), who tells her that she cannot spend the night, yet she feeds Julie who is now ravenously hungry and thirsty, clearly suggesting her sexual desires as well. Critic Michael Koresky, writing for the Criterion DVD, argues that their following ten-minute engagement in sex is nearly sexless, representing a “complete dissociation, from narrative, from body, from life.” The New York Times critic Janet Maslin—in what has to be one of the most disinterested reviews ever written—describes it as an athletic tussle.

     I found the long act to be one of the most graphically loving sex scenes I have ever witnessed; the women seemed to me to be passionate in each other’s embrace, this last scene representing a true fulfillment of the hunger and thirst that Julie had imposed upon herself. Presumably, she will remain with the woman she had mistakenly left. It is clear that, at last, Julie has returned home to someone with whom she can create a life.

      The closing score reconfirms this with a lovely French song, suggesting one should “kiss whom you please.”

 

Los Angeles, July 10, 2016

Reprinted from Hyperallegic Weekend (August 13, 2016).

Stéphane Marti | Le Veau D'or / 2002

the devil's bargain 

by Douglas Messerli

 

Stéphane Marti (director) Le Veau D'or / 2002 [15 minutes]

  

Generally, when viewing a film by Stéphane Marti it is not something that you can talk about as much as you simply experience. You recognize at the same moment, however, that it is not merely your perception of the work that is central to his art but the experiences / images of camera, the photographer, and the models / actors who themselves appear not quite to know what secrets they are revealing in their fetish-like actions. They are both enactors of the ritual gestures of the film and subjects of it who finally in their interchange in a work such as Le Veau D'or reject the photographer while still embracing the film camera. It short, it is a complex interchange involved with all, a past evidenced by the carefully curated objects revealed throughout the short film, a present that is completely indeterminate, and a future of what you finally of make the images you witness and what you might carry of them through your own life.

     As Michel Amarger has written: 

 

“Marti plays with the proximity of his subjects to one another, composing plastic variations in choreography. The tradition of his predecessors is incessantly evoked; first and foremost, that of Michel Journiac, who frequently works with the changing identities of his subjects, from object to actor. Like Journiac, Stéphane Marti celebrates rituals surrounding desire and death. Eros and Thanatos suffuse a mythology interwoven with themes of antiquity, unbridled sexuality, and traditions of cinema.”

 

    Just as the white model (Losio) paints the black man’s finger’s red, so does the black model paint black and red rectangles on the feet and hands of the white boy, and two luxuriate in a kind of exotic world filled with votive-like object such as sacred skulls, crucifixes, dried flowers, Monique Delvincourt fragmented mirrors, and Louboutin high heels, black and red also.

      Their encounters with each other are both sexless and highly homoerotic as they dress up, paint one another, and basically play at being various other selves which seem finally too personal for the presence of the Marcel Mazé’s constantly clicking camera. It is as if the mysterious performances that they have invoked gradually become sexual and private, of which the film’s viewer can only glimpse through the interstices of the continually shifting frames of the video, film, and photographic images of objects, bodies, and music which sensuously come to a sort of orgasm as the two paint one another with white, red, and black bars almost as if skin color and blood equally have rubbed off upon the other in their unseen sexual encounter.

     Desire here is intertwined with interactions of race, gender, and cultural experience that ultimately cannot fully be comprehended but merely observed.

 

Los Angeles, December 30, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (December 2022).

Amy Gebhardt | Look Sharp / 2006

evidence of what doesn’t exist

by Douglas Messerli

 

Amy Gebhardt (screenwriter and director) Look Sharp / 2006 [9 minutes]

 

Australian director Amy Gebhardt creates a tough series of sequences as photographer Jo (Rhondda Findleton) spends the night in bed with her subjects in the Melbourne of the 1970s, drinking a great deal and fucking as a three-some mostly just to keep them close and to put the boys as ease for the actual photos she wants.

     Like all such manipulative but also brave and challenging female photographers such as Nan Goldin, Diane Arbus, and Carol Jerrems, Jo has gotten two grungy but good looking Sharpie gang members into her bed, hoping to push their somewhat bisexual sharing of heterosexual sex just a little further, to challenge their macho defenses just enough so that she might capture the two men in a tender moment together which might hint at their homosexual “allowances,” if not tendencies beneath their layers of self-protection.

     It is a dangerous task. At any moment the men, Jason and Darren (Charlie Garber and David Lyons) are ready to explode with the recognition of what she is asking them to perform and the fact that she is manipulating them into the situation with which they feel intrigued but obviously also uncomfortable. Violence is most certainly a possibility, as it is always with on the edges of society concerning sex.

      As the Gay Celluloid reviewer nicely summarized this work:

 

“Filmed over two days in an urban squalor set reminiscent of Derek Jarman's The Last of England, here writer and director Amy Gebhardt has added many a neat touch, with the bedsit now akin to a boxing ring, one that finds David Lyons as Darren / Des hitting out when forced into a corner. In short and behind all of the 4-Xs of the piece, lies the issue of repressed feelings, with Jo…. determined to edge ever closer to the truth beneath the macho exterior of hard-as-nails gang member Des and here cue Lyons in an emotionally to the core performance.”

     If Look Sharp does not reach the artistic merit of its mentors, it certainly pushes the limits of the normally nicely contained short LGBTQ cinema works, introducing a far grittier energy into short gay cinema, even while Gebhardt’s characters are not necessarily gay and are most certainly permanently closeted to admitting and expressing it. Yet here is the evidence to which Jason and Darren will most certainly never admit.

 

Los Angeles, April 18, 2023 / Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 2023).