Flaming Ears

Indeed, there might not be a lot of cyber-dyke films floating around in semen-sanitized cinematic cesspools in the world, but one thing you can count on with these curiously and even creepily carnal celluloid works, aside from featuring some of the most aesthetically displeasing leafless and lecherous lesbian ladies, is some of the most wonderfully weird and decisively deranged cinematic scenarios ever captured on celluloid and the Austrian film Flaming Ears (1992) aka Rote Ohren fetzen durch Asche is certainly no exception to this rule. Co-directed by A. Hans Scheirl of Dandy Dust (1998) infamy, as well as fellow cunt-licking compatriots Ursula Puerrer and Dietmar Schipek, all of whom appear in this delightfully depraved dystopian dyke celluloid nachtmahr as some sort of s/he-miss-creation 'character' of sorts, Flaming Ears is a fiercely frenzied and freakish feast for the eyes and ears from the morally adverse and positively perverse perspective of three Sapphic sickos. Shot on surprisingly strikingly Super 8 film stock and blown up to 16mm, it is a film that has an exceedingly erratic and eccentric essence all its own, although Flaming Ears does owe much to German lesbian auteuress Ulrike Ottinger (Madame X: An Absolute Ruler, Freak Orlando) who undoubtedly acted as a spiritual mother of sorts for the film with her uncompromising works of lovingly lewd lezzy libertinism of the actively avant-garde yet equally terribly trashy kind. Described in an interview by co-director Scheirl as being about “female lone warriors, and they try to live their lives as intensely as possible and thus collide with each other somehow. lt's a matter of life and death. And love” and her cunning linguist queer compeer Puerrer as “Sheroes, fighters! Surrealistic figures, sex, violence - perpetrators in general. Always women, and they concentrate on themselves and on their greed,” Flaming Ears is certainly a crass yet curiously charming celluloid oddity – a sort of lesbian equivalent to William S. Burroughs' seemingly unfilmable novel The Wild Boys: A Book of the Dead (1971) – about lubricous and sometimes lethal lezzy fantasies run amok and a mentally-ravaging romance film for the raging and rampaging rug munchers from hell. 

 For as long as I can remember, when it came to criminally-inclined, crude, cretinous and otherwise combative women, they tended to be bodacious bull-dykes of the ostensibly born-brazen persuasion. If one were to look into the deep unconscious and most wild dreams of these balls-to-the-wall butch ballbusters of the lady-licking variety, it might resemble the Sapphic sadomasochistic surrealism of Flaming Ears, albeit of the austere Austrian aberrosexual Aryaness variety. In fact, co-auteur A. Hans Scheirl described the film as being, "contrary to the psychological cinema, where actors tell stories, we depict inner states with cinematic means." Set in the unforeseeable future in the year 2700 – the "year of the toads" – in the fantastic dystopian dyke city of “Asche”; a realm darker both visually and thematically than either of Joel Schumacher's unabashedly pansified, homoerotic Batman flicks, Flaming Ears is the type of intensely intemperate and preposterously wacked-out work of abnormal yet audacious celluloid artistry that could have only been assembled by individuals so depraved, so uninhibited, and so penetratingly perverse that to call the film ‘contrived’ and or ‘weird for weird’s sake’ would be a display of gross ignorance that would be akin to labeling Tarantino a cinematic artist and Herbert Achternbusch a sentimentalist. Almost as impenetrable as the most esoteric high-camp works of Werner Schroeter (Eika Katappa, Day of the Idiots) and queer junky alpha-Beat writer William S. Burroughs’ final trilogy of novels “The Red Night Trilogy,” Flaming Ears is a work of exceedingly sordid cinematic artistry that takes no prisoners, sort of in the same spirit as a lustful serial killer amidst a national murdering spree. Essentially, centering around three mentally unstable lesbos with the kind of  commanding will power that only people with serious pathologies display, including Valley (Ursula Puerrer); a “fighting diva” of the particularly perverse pyromaniac persuasion who sports a pseudo-cock-and-balls that dangle from her crotch, Spy (Susana Helmayr); a comic book artist and the most ‘ladylike’ (I use this term extremely loosely) of three, and Nun (A. Hans Scheirl); an Aryan alien with an unhealthy fetish for reptiles, Flaming Ears is not held together by a deeply discernible plot or subplots, aside from lunatic lesbian rivalries that initially sparked with the burning of a comicbook-printing factory, but its original and sometimes aesthetically odious hodgepodge of archaic yet visually arresting stop-motion animation, amateur Nekes-esque special effects, and sickening, senseless, and sardonic scenarios of sexual skankery. Needless to say, if you find the early films of John Waters, Andy Warhol, and Paul Morrissey to be too degrading, stay quite clear of those frisky, feral, and fecund-free Flaming Ears. 

 With ridiculous lines of dapper diesel dyke romanticism like “the revolution of love is bloody” (surely, a period pun!), “my honey is a scumbag sheer lunacy,” and “I just love to fondle the jewels of your fantasies,” Flaming Ears is surely a work that is out of this world – both literally and figuratively – but with lines like, “good to have a girlfriend with humor,” it is a cinematic work of psychosexual sadism that is not a totally alien affair. Despite every logical signal to the contrary, co-director Ursula Puerrer stated of her character in the film, “I am Volley. As simple as that. And Volley loves precision, ease, aggression, devotion and wit. I live in a special world, and I walk through the so-called world heavily armed.” Indeed, I have no doubt that Flaming Ears is a cinematic depiction of Puerrer and the other two lady-lad directors' most flagrant and fiendish female-flesh-fondling fantasies, hence the film's profoundly poles apart persuasion. Like an unholy marriage between Jack Smith's Normal Love (1963), Steven F. Arnold's Luminous Procuress (1971), Slava Tsukerman’s Liquid Sky (1982) and Richard Elfman’s Forbidden Zone (1982), except on an even lower budget as directed by Ulrike Ottinger and Monika Treut while intoxicated on a merry mix of mescaline and methamphetamines, Flaming Ears is ultimately only really comparable to co-director A. Hans Scheirl’s subsequent and sole solo feature-length cinematic effort Dandy Dust (1998); an overwhelmingly wacky, morally wretched, and aesthetically insane work that arguably makes her previous work seem tame by comparison.  Featuring surreal rollerskating, debauched god's pissing from the sky, raunchy reptile-based gluttony, sexual fetishism for furniture, dashing dyke dancing, prideful displays of penis envy, carpet-munching martyrdom, and vicious displays of lesbo-on-lesbo hate crimes, Flaming Ears makes for a jolly old good time in a dystopian cyber-dyke wasteland.  As co-director Dietmar Schipek stated at the end of an interview: "Film is risk and danger. I like to expose myself to danger. The viewer, by the way, as well. Because only under exceptional conditions can you produce unconditional films. Only when utter dedication can be felt, will the film have transformed into reality, and leaving the cinema will become a lasting discovery: 'What is actually happening to oneself?'" I do not know about other people who have watched Flaming Ears, but it brought me to the epiphany that I would never want to live under a futuristic fascist lesbian dictatorship under any circumstances.

-Ty E