Dreamwood

Contrary to common belief, free-love-loving hippie nudist pagans were not born in late-1960s southern California but in fin-de-Siècle Germany during the late-1890s/early-1900s among Teutonic Art Nouveau artists like Karl Wilhelm Diefenbach and ‘Fidus’ (aka Hugo Reinhold Karl Johann Höppener), as well as the overlapping ‘Wandervogel’ youth movement, who promoted various forms of ‘Lebensreform’ (“life-reform”), including vegetarianism, nudism, natural medicine, communitarianism, sexual reform, and various other forms of pagan-inspired social reform. Indeed, it should be no surprise that German novelist Hermann Hesse—a favorite writer among American hippies during the late-1960s—was a proto-hippie of sorts who got involved with the Wandervogel movement in 1907 after seeing four longhaired goofy krauts sporting Jesus sandals walking through his village on their way to Ascona, Switzerland who ultimately cured him of his alcoholism using natural methods. Between 1895 and 1914, tens of thousands of Teutons left the Fatherland for America and some Wandervogel types landed in sunny Southern California where figures such as Saxony-born proto-hippie Bill Pester and husband and wife café owners John and Vera Richter imported their ‘Naturmensch’ and ‘Lebensreform’ philosophies, which were adopted by locals, including recently arrived Brooklyn-bred McJewish songwriter Eden Ahbez, whose song “Nature Boy”, which became a No. 1 hit for eight weeks in 1948 after it was recorded by Nat “King” Cole of all people, promoted the Teutonic weltanschauung. Indeed, the iconic image of tanned longhaired blond surfer dudes that people associated with California was a direct result of the Wandervogel movement, which would also ironically influence National Socialism due to its romanticism, nationalism, and paganism, so it is quite depressing that it would take on a completely degenerated form in America like the ‘new age’ counterculture cocksucker group the Radical Faeries, whose early poet James Broughton’s late-1960s/early-1970s films seem like the closest thing to a Fidus painting in celluloid form. 

 A proto-Beat poet descended from opulent bankers who actually shoved his cock inside of kosher film critic Pauline Kael (who, despite what some of her more queenish detractors have said, was a fag hag of sorts), even producing a mischling spawn that he would abandon before she was even born, Broughton, who once wrote regarding the importance of film in his life, “Cinema saved me from suicide when I was 32 by revealing to me a wondrous reality: the love between fellow artists,” first made a big wave in the cinema world with his 38-minute 35mm short The Pleasure Garden (1953)—a work filmed in England that features British filmmaker Lindsay Anderson—which was awarded a prize at the Cannes Film Festival by none other than Jean Cocteau. Today, Broughton is probably best remembered, if at all outside of gay academic circles, among cinephiles for his counterculture short The Bed (1968)—a work that asks and then answers the question, “What can happen to and on a bed?” that features cowboys sleeping with their boots on, dope-smoking beatniks, Mammy-like ‘diva’ negresses with mammoth mammary glands, and various people whose dangling genitals betray their general appearances—which, despite being a mere 22-minutes in length, is notable for featuring quite arguably the most nudity in a single film at the time of its release (unsurprisingly, Broughton had to have the film developed at a lab used by pornographers and other smut-peddlers). Somewhat in the aesthetic tradition of The Bed due to its outdoor wooded setting, various unclad longhaired hippie types, and paganistic counterculture-inspired spirit, Dreamwood (1972)—a sort of Jungian celluloid trance featuring a hodgepodge of various ancient myths—is most certainly Broughton’s magnum opus and a work that, despite featuring unclad dyke-like chicks and a cross-dressing longhaired bearded fellow that looks like a member of the drag troupe the Cockettes, is probably the closet a film has ever come to capturing the aesthetic and spirit of the Wandervogel movement, thus also making it probably the only cinematic work that would appeal to both old school hippies and völkisch neo-Nazis who worship Wotan. 

 Before watching Dreamwood, I had no idea that it was directed by a man that banged Hebraic hag Pauline Kael, abandoned his wife and children at age 61 to get with a 26-year-old homo heeb homewrecker, and was a member of the dreaded Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence (SPI) whose alpha-vulgarian members dress up in radically repugnant low-camp nun drag getups mocking the Catholic Church (rather unfortunately, British auteur Derek Jarman is one of their ‘saints’). Indeed, aside from a moment of camp or two, Dreamwood seems to channel the neo-pagan romanticism that inspired the likes of Fidus, Jung, and Hesse. Originally intended as a variation on the Theseus myth, the film alludes to several classic myths, including Hippolytus, Apollo, Sisyphus, and Narcissus, but as P. Adams Sitney wrote in his groundbreaking work Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde, 1943-2000 (2002) regarding these mythical references, “…these allusions become witty intrusions into the otherwise thoroughly personalized vision; they are, in fact, the only vestiges of the ironic self-mockery which abounds in all of Broughton’s earlier films. As a total work, DREAMWOOD occupies the space between the trance film and the mythopoeic cinema, much as Mayan Deren’s RITUAL IN TRANSFIGURED TIME had, but from the retrospective rather than the anticipatory position.” Like Cocteau meets post-Wandervogel counterculture drunk on Jung and naked Riefenstahl-esque bodies, Dreamwood arguably comes closer to any film in conjuring up a truly organic American folk spirit, even if it is totally imaginary and only existed in the director’s own mind. The esoteric story of a young ‘Nature Boy’-like poet who leaves the technocratic world behind and sails to a mystical forest where he must go through four initiations before his Jungian “anima” (the feminine inner personality of the male) is united with his body in a “sacred marriage” that is “blessed by sun and moon,” Dreamworld is a somewhat healthy reminder that hermetic knowledge can have a much greater influence on a person’s artistic creativity than any sort of psychedelic drug.  Indeed, despite being directed by a gay over-the-hill hippie, Broughton's film would more or less be perfectly understood by the followers of eccentric Chilean sage Miguel Serrano, who was not only a comrade of Jung and Hesse, but whose brand of ‘Esoteric Hitlerism’ is Jungian to the core

 As auteur Broughton narrates at the beginning of the film, “Somewhere there is a forest, somewhere at the center of the world, there is a forest of the dream, a sacred wood, a grove of initiation. Somewhere there is what has always been, the treasure hard to obtain, the lair of the great goddess, the bed of the ultimate rapture.” This exceedingly enchanted magical forest is called ‘Dreamwood’ and after enduring a spiritual crisis in his tower that results in him ‘throwing away’ his truly angelic ‘anima’ as portrayed by a beauteous brunette broad who resembles a sort of pagan princess, a poet travels there by sailboat with his doppelganger during a night sea journey. Indeed, the Poet hates the modern world and after seeing his anima appear in a post-industrial landscape, he cannot seem to get her out of his head. When the Poet sees the anima appear in a Wandervogel-esque poster of himself hanging on the inside wall of his shabby tower, he freaks out, tears up the poster, and throws the pieces out of his humble abode, but when they hit the ground, they turn into the living anima, who is abducted and escorted away in a car by two elderly old farts of the seemingly sinister sort known as the ‘First Parents.’ The Poet decides to follow his anima and sails to an island overnight with the help of a doppelganger-like dude. Upon arriving at the seemingly barren island, the Poet climbs a rocky mountain where he soon encounters an old wench known as the ‘Helpful Crone’ who gives him a bracelet and axe like some helpful character out of one of the various The Legend of Zelda video-games. The Poet uses the axe to chop up the mirror, furniture, and creepy body of a revoltingly effete, materialistic, and narcissistic tranny known as the ‘Terrible Mother-Father’ who tries to hold him back in his spiritual quest by offering him fancy jewelry and other spiritually worthless material trinkets (Broughton was known to have serious mommy issues as is especially apparent in his 1948 film Mother's Day). From there, the Poet begins to enter the forest, but before he can receive complete entry, he must strip in front of ‘Mother Superior’—a rather manly and seemingly brazenly bitchy nun whose rather rough face betrays her feminine body—who also strips. After the nun strips and tosses her nun garb over the Poet’s head, he finally awakes in the forest and prepares for his four initiations. 

 Upon entering the forest, the Poet is violently attacked by a gang of jolly yet violent unclad children in a scene that is reminiscent of Louis Malle's dark Lewis Carroll-esque fantasy flick Black Moon (1975), but that does not stop him. The Poet also encounters stunning naked nymphs bathing in a stream so he does the same and soon he encounters Artemis, but he makes the mistake of attempting to touch her and is subsequently nearly drowned after she dunks him under the water. After awakening from his near drowning, the Poet finds himself lying on a rock outside the forest again and he soon reenters, but not before whipping a leather-clad S&M she-bitch dominatrix named ‘Hippolyta’ with her own whip and then throwing it at her. In the forest, the Poet soon encounters Alchemina, who emerges from a rock with a gigantic sunflower in her hand and plays various games with him, including robbing him of his clothes. Ultimately, Alchemina leads the Poet to lecherous wench Lilith who is aided by two equally unclad homos sporting goofy face makeup. 

While Lilith’s man-slaves hold the Poet down, she mercilessly fucks him as a foggy haze engulfs his body. After being carnally manhandled to the point of losing consciousness, the Poet once again awakens outside of the forest and attempts to reenter it but his progress is temporarily deterred by a ‘woodsman’ that resembles a hippie lumberjack who is the protagonist's virtual doppelganger, albeit slightly more masculine. Although initially attempting to brutally beat the Poet, the rugged Woodsman soon realizes that he is his brother and then leads him through the forest where both men magically lose their clothes somewhere on the way. The Woodsman takes the Poet to a somewhat rocky area with dead trees where he encounters a creepy looking bitch with a translucent serial killer-esque mask covered in proto-Gothic bone jewelry named ‘Old Queen Hecate.’ Somewhat reluctantly, the Poet literally enters Hecate’s cunt (!) during an inverse birth scenario and subsequently awakes deep in the forest aka ‘Green Chapel’ reborn. To consummate his love affair with the forest and the Goddess Mother Nature, the Poet disrobes and begins quite literally fucking the ground to the point of spilling his seed inside the soil in a scenario that would anticipate the ‘ecosexuality’ hardcore flicks of Semitic Sapphic porn star Annie Sprinkle, but not before blessing it with his urine and feces(!) in a completely unsimulated scene of scatological proportions. By fucking Mother Nature, he is finally able to accept his ‘anima,’ which enters his body in a “sacred marriage” that is blessed by the sun and moon as depicted in the following shot of the film where they enter his chest. 

 Unquestionably, avant-garde film historian P. Adams Sitney probably paid Broughton’s Dreamwood the greatest tribute when he wrote that, “No single film in the whole of the American avant-garde comes as close as this one to the source of the trance film, Cocteau's Le Sang d'un Poète.” Of course, in its graphic depiction of the poet protagonist urinating and defecating on the ground of a forest before sticking his cock into it, Broughton’s film could be renamed The Poop and Piss of a Poet as a work that certainly reflects the “if it feels good, do it” counterculture libertine pseudo-philosophy that was quite vogue at the time the work was made. It is interesting to note that while Broughton’s work and brand of spirituality have been fairly forgotten, even with the rise of gay power bullshit, cine-magician Kenneth Anger—another west coast filmmaker who personally received support from Jean Cocteau—and his Thelema-themed films seem to have only become all the more popular over the past couple of decades. Somewhat recently, a couple queer documentarians did Broughton a great disservice with the superlatively sentimental poof-power hagiography Big Joy: The Adventures of James Broughton (2013), which is less about the filmmaker’s films than about why he is a homo hero because he abandoned his wife and kids at 61 to start a lurid love affair with a nice 26-year-old Jewish boy named Joel Singer. Notably, the decidedly deluded doc makes no reference to Broughton’s magnum opus Dreamwood and instead dwells on lesser works like Devotions (1983) featuring elderly queer couples naked in bed with their pet dog and a leather-fag couple having a romantic night out on the town, as well as the filmmaker frolicking around gaily with his much younger and assumedly more depraved boy toy Singer (who co-directed the film, as well as two of Broughton's later works, including Song of the Godbody (1977) and Scattered Remains (1988)).  If you're interested in seeing the best of celluloid hippie homo hermeticism or, more importantly, want to see the sort of film that Fidus might have directed had he been a filmmaker instead of a painter, Dreamwood is nothing short of mandatory viewing and certainly a work that needs to be salvaged from obscurity before it is forever regulated to the celluloid trash heap of history like so many other American avant-garde works.

-Ty E