Performance

For better or worse, if any film reflects the distinct and decidedly decadent zeitgeist of its time, especially in regard to art, kultur, and social trends, it is Performance directed by Donald Cammell (White of the Eye, Wild Side) and Nicholas Roeg (Don’t Look Now, Track 29). Admittedly, the first time I attempted to watch this stylish yet sleazy cult film, I felt it was nothing more than sleekly directed, photographed, and edited hippie excess and celluloid debris directed by two decadent and delirious drug-addled counter-culture filmmakers whose idea of an artistic statement was seeing how much superficial and stereotypical sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll they could fit into about 2 hours and thus use these pseudo-shocking ingredients as a means to make up for a convoluted, nonsensical story of the sensory-overloading sort. After all, what better gimmick for the “ultimate cinematic trip” than featuring Mick Jagger of The Rolling Stones in one of the lead roles in his debut screen appearance, not to mention the bold and beautiful German-Italian model/actress Anita Pallenberg (Dillinger Is Dead, Michael Kohlhaas - Der Rebell) – girlfriend of Brian Jones and later Keith Richards – as the sexy and sassy female lead. On that basis alone, Performance – a film where gangster-meets-rocker – was destined to be a ‘cult classic’ no matter how incompetently it was directed, but as I learned during my second-viewing of the cinematic work, it is more than just an expensive proto-music video. The film was directed by two first-time directors: Nicholas Roeg who previously worked as a cinematographer for films like The Masque of the Red Death (1964) and Fahrenheit 451 (1966), and Donald Cammell who was a child prodigy and society portrait painter who inevitably gave up the medium to become a filmmaker.
 

 In regard to questions as to who was the real ‘auteur’ behind Performance, Cammell thought the question was “just silly,” but did admit to the authors of Donald Cammell: A Life on the Wild Side by Rebecca Umland and Sam Umland (2006) while speaking quite narcissistically and characteristically in the third-person that “In truth Nic has been extremely embarrassed by all the attention he’s received for Performance over the years, but the fact is, Donald and Nic worked together, and Performance was the result of the special mixture of them both. It’s simply impossible to sort it all out.” Considering that Cammell’s film career never really took off (he only directed three more feature-length works before his suicide in 1996 after he did not get final-cut for his swansong Wild Side) after Performance, most film critics and theorists contend that it is essentially a Nicholas Roeg film due to his relatively illustrious and successful career as an idiosyncratic auteur filmmaker, but as Anita Pallenberg in Cammell's biography and crew members featured in the documentary Influence and Controversy: Making 'Performance' (2007) also vouch, the directing responsibilities were for the most part divided this way: one filmmaker dealing with the actors and the other with the technical aspects. On top of acting as the cinematographer, Roeg was in charge of the technical responsibilities while Cammell – who also wrote the script – dealt with the actors and the innumerable cultural references (literature, painting, filmmaking, etc.). If it says anything, Donald Cammell acted like a pompous dictator on the set of Performance despite being a novice filmmaker, as Anita Pallenberg remarked that the tragic auteur was "being very much a prima donna for a director who had no previous experience.  He was a very difficult director to work with" and "There was lots of banging and slamming doors, that sort of thing.  Sometimes he would get mad at the technical crew.  He thought they were working too slowly or something like that."  Whatever the true nature of the motley crew's work habits, it would take two years before Performance was to be released after its completion in 1968, in part due to Warner Bros dissatisfaction with the film.  Cammell's friend and longtime collaborator Frank Mazzola re-edited the film in 1970 (by then, Roeg gave up on the film and went to Australia to direct Walkabout), henceforth giving the film the fluid and fierce feel it has today and finally making it releasable in the studio's eye.

Featuring a corrupt cocktail of gay gangsters, tripping hitmen, reclusive rock stars, androgynous men and women, and an all-around semi-psychedelic essence of decadence, Performance – much like Kenneth Anger’s Lucifer Rising (1972), which incidentally features director Donald Cammell in the role of Osiris ‘the lord of death’ – is one of few cinematic works from its time to portray its era with more than the pathetic pretense of peace and love, but also with chaos, destruction, and dissolution of all things that once were, thus signaling Aleister Crowley's (who was like a surrogate uncle to Cammel as a young lad) prophecy of the Aeon of Horus. Essentially a film that is divided into two acts, Performance begins with the introduction of the character of Chas (James Fox) – a gangster ‘soldier’ in an East London gang modeled after the infamous real-life Kray twins led by a physically repugnant and exceedingly eccentric homosexual (Ronald "Ronnie" Kray was openly bisexual) named Harry Flowers (Johnny Shannon) – who intimidates people via violence and destruction so as to collect pay-offs for his boss. An archetypical man’s man of the stoic and unsentimental sort, Chas fancies his trade, most notably bringing absolute fear to his enemy's souls. Naturally, things take a turn for the worst when Chas decides to disobey his boss Mr. Flowers’s order not to get involved with Joey Maddocks (Anthony Valentine) – an archenemy of the somewhat sadistic paid street fighter sort whose business his boss plans to takeover – and he fails to follow orders. Not only does Chas throw his muscle against Maddocks, but he also ends up killing him. Needless to say, Flowers and his officers decide Chas is bad for their “terrific democratic organization” which knows not to mix business and personal vendettas, so they decide they must rid themselves of the ”ignorant boy…out-of-date boy.”

 Now a dual fugitive of the law and organized crime, Chas goes underground and into hiding and decides living with a wash-up rock star will be the last place his enemies would look to find him. Now calling himself “Johnny Dean” with the contrived 'artistic' occupation of being a “juggler,” Chas eventually finds himself at the basement apartment which is owned by an effete, degenerate rock star Turner (Mick Jagger) who has "lost his demon," thus essentially signaling the second and final chapter of Performance. At first, Chas only meets Turner’s lover Pherber (Anita Pallenberg) who gets every dime out of the crypto-gangster she can swindle, which – being a dead man walking - he is more than willing to pay. Despite paying an absurd amount for rent, Turner – who has an agile animosity for Chas – attempts to give the money back to the new tenant. Chas isn't exactly impressed with his landlord and his friends either, describing his new residence as “a right pisshole” filled with “long hair…beatniks…druggers..free love…forigners…you name it.” Despite his initial repellence toward the renegade rock star and his lurid and lecherous lifestyle, before he knows it, Chas is quite literally penetrating Pherber and eventually comes to feel a sort of odd metaphysical and even homoerotic connection to Turner. To quickly 'cure' the fag-bashing gangster of his manly ‘homophobic’ tendencies, Pherber and Turner drug Chas by tricking him into eating hallucinogenic mushrooms and digging deep into his seemingly impenetrable psyche, thus unleashing his inner femme. By way of dirty drugging, uninhibited and increasingly indulgent partaking of carnal knowledge and the overall narcotizing influence of his sin-sanctifying hippie landlord's influence, Chas is physically and mentally transformed thus thrusting him into a state somewhere in between hell and nirvana and hereafter inspiring him to sleep with a boyish French girl named Lucy (Michele Breton) – who happens to be the third person in Pherber and Turner’s pan-sexual ménage à trios – that he describes as a “bit underdeveloped…like a little boy” and becoming physically androgynous himself like Turner; both men eventually becoming one another's alter-egos.

Ultimately, Performance is about transformation and the unity of two individuals into one; Chas being the archetype for pure masculinity and Turner being a man in touch with both genders or as Pheber states, “man-and-female man,” as a dichotomy of sexual extremes. Unlike if the film were directed today, Chas’ testosterone-draining transformation is not portrayed as a purely positive thing as it inevitably leads to his assumed ruin because due to becoming more ‘in touch’ with his feminine side, he is drained of his masculine instincts thus rendering him inhibited and vulnerable in matters that would not have fazed him previously. Using a hardened gangster as the audacious anti-hero of Performance makes the trans-gender transfiguration all the more compelling. Written by Cammell, who despite being a lecherous ladies man who dated teenage girls while a middle-aged man, apparently dabbled in homosexuality (according to rumor, including with Mick Jagger during the making of the film), homosexuality is certainly a theme that runs throughout the entirety of Performance in various forms and guises; both subtle and self-evident. Aside from the obvious influences of Jorge Borges (especially in regard to identity crisis), the film also makes a number of references to beat queer junkie icon William S. Burroughs (Naked Lunch, The Wild Boys), including Turner's remark that, “nothing is true, everything is permitted” in reference to the novelist’s mythical attribution to Nizārī Muslim Hassan-i Sabbāh and fictional hashish-toking warriors.  Indeed, in Performance, "everything is permitted," but for a price most people are not willing to pay.  Both Chas and Turner pay that price only for it to to lead to their untimely descent.  Donald Cammel also extended his hand to Lucifer for a life of debauchery and (self)destruction, thereupon leading to his death via self-sacrifice in a manner not all that different than the character he wrote and directed for Performance; no doubt the forsaken artist's finest pursuance as a filmmaker.

-Ty E

Germany in Autumn

It has been my experience and that of everyone I know who has spoken on the subject of anthology films (especially those where a number of filmmakers contribute an individual segment to the film) that they are almost unanimously and without fail uneven and flawed films because at least one of the individualized celluloid 'petites vignettes' will be an inferior work, thus sticking out like a Polish philosopher while juxtaposed alongside cinematic greatness. This would explain why there are so many horror movies in this format as this unofficial rule of filmmaking/storytelling is almost irrelevant when dealing with a genre that is typically innately inferior, formulaic, and rarely artistic, not to mention the fact that it is much easier to digest 30, rather than 90 minutes, of cheap sex, violence, and murder. The first segment of Flesh and Fantasy (1943) directed by Julien Duvivier, "Le tentazioni del dottor Antonio" directed by Federico Fellini for Boccaccio '70 (1962). "Toby Dammit" directed by Federico Fellini for Spirits of the Dead (1968), “Superbia - The Pride” directed by Ulrike Ottinger for Seven Women, Seven Sins (1986), "Far From Yokohama" from Mystery Train (1989) directed by Jim Jarmusch “We Fuck Alone” directed by Gaspar Noé for Destricted (2006), and  “Les souffrances d'un oeuf meurtri” directed by Roland Lethem for anachronistic compilation Incarnation - Cinema Abattoir (1967 – 2007) are just a meager handful of the anthological cinematic miscreations that are part of cinema history. Undoubtedly, as far as I am concerned, the most uneven, one-sided, and cinematically handicapped multi-director film that I have seen is Germany in Autumn (1978) aka Deutschland im Herbst; a film that, despite being coordinated by critically-revered Frankfurt school legal counselor turned filmmaker Alexander Kluge, and featuring contributions from nine different German auteur filmmakers (Alf Brustellin, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Alexander Kluge, Maximiliane Mainka, Beate Mainka-Jellinghaus , Peter Schubert, Bernhard Sinkel, Hans Peter Cloos, Edgar Reitz, Katja Rupé, and Volker Schlöndorff), owes any artistic merit it may have to one filmmaker and naturally he is also the best known and seemingly least politically-motivated. The film centers around various filmmakers' responses to the death of prominent German businessman Hanns Martin Schleyer (a former officer of the SS and NSDAP member) and the dubious suicides of three imprisoned far-left terrorists (Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin and Jan-Carl Raspe of the Red Army Faction aka Baader-Meinhof Group) whose revolutionary guerrilla gang had him kidnapped and killed. Admittedly, a number of the filmmakers that contributed to Germany in Autumn I was not even familiar with upon first viewing the cinematic work and I believe that it is for good reason because aside from Fassbinder’s realist but unsurprisingly melodramatic segment – which is around 25-minutes, thus making up roughly ¼ of the total film – I could have never conceived of socio-politically active kraut auteurs making the murderous mayhem of a bunch of ethno-masochistic “New Left” (influenced by Mao, Fanon, Guevara, Frankfurt school, etc) neo-marxist terrorists seem so banal. Needless to say, this review is mainly going to be focused on Fassbinder's domestic debauchery, which is no surprise seeing that I am a fan of the Bavarian-born filmmaker’s relatively objective, thoughtful, and provocative treatment of the RAF and related leftist activists of the same zeitgeist in his previous film satirical melodrama Mother Küsters' Trip to Heaven (1975) and his later bodacious black comedy The Third Generation (1979) aka Die Dritte Generation.

Despite being designed with the ambitious objective of being an ostensibly politically-charged cinematic work of social and historical significance, Germany in Autumn – like many of Alexander Kluge’s cinematic works in general – is mostly a rather emotionally and aesthetically sterile experience, sort of like what one would expect the soul of a dead old Bolshevik to be like, but it does not start out that way. Beginning with Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s segment set in the German New Wave king’s actual Munich-based apartment, the filmmaker’s keen contribution to Germany in Autumn is surprisingly intimate and rather revealing, so much so that I was severely shocked by the artistically vapid remainder of the film with the structure of the work being like a head without a body. Featuring Fassbinder, his then-boyfriend Armin Meier (in one of his last screen performances before his suicide that same year), his mother Lilo Pempeit (who appeared in around half of the her son's films, usually in a minor role) and his ex-wife Ingrid Caven (who only ‘appears’ via telephone while talking to her homo ex-hubby), Germany in Autumn depicts the foredoomed filmmaker at his most naked; both literally and figuratively. Although seemingly a pure documentary of the filmmaker’s everyday life upon a superficial glance, the seriously saucy yet strikingly sentimental segment of the film is based on tightly scripted material, but that is not to say that the scenes are purely contrived without biographical basis as they do the parallel the erratic yet engrossing events of Fassbinder’s coke-fueled life in the fast lane. The segments of the filmmaker’s interaction with his beau boi Armin Meier - whose bulging bratwurst compensates for his congenitally blighted brain, in spite of his being a Lebensborn baby (somebody must have snuck a brownshirt into the program) - are especially telling, as he treats his ill-fated boyfriend as if his ignorance and lack of intelligence are so glaring that he cannot tell whether his opinions are real or the poorly performed product of sophomoric sarcasm, which is perfectly exemplified when the filmmaker asks him “You’re actually serious, aren’t you?” in regard to the live-in boyfriend's query as to whether or not the imprisoned Baader-Meinhof Group terrorist should be “shot” or “hanged.” When the manly and meaty moron (or at least that is how he is portrayed) Meier remarks that, “if they (RAF) don’t follow the law, the state doesn’t have to either,” furious Fassbinder – dressed preposterously in leather-fag apparel that can barely contain his unflatteringly flabby physique – lunges at and physically assaults his fairy flame who is wearing nothing but a bath towel. In another particularly telling scene, Meier brings home a random frail, four-eyed nerd from a local bar, under the pretense that the gangly gay geek didn't have a place to stay for the night. Fassbinder, initially intrigued, takes one glance at the blissfully sleeping fag, then erupts into a blind rage in which he demands that Armin immediately evict the anal intruder from the premises. Clearly emotionally stirred by Meier’s assumed lack of celibacy, Fassbinder curls into a ball on the floor, unleashing a pent up storm of tears, to which Armin responds by coddling him like a baby desperate for its mother's teat. By no means a physically handsome man, one can only assume that Meier – who is notably more hunky, masculine, and muscular than Fassbinder – constantly got the urge to cheat on his man with finer Aryan specimens. Naturally, when dealing with his mother Lilo Pempeit – a woman who left her son practically in the streets when he was still prepubescent – Fassbinder is much colder and matter-of-fact, so much so that he gets her to admit, “The best thing would be a kind of authoritarian ruler who is benevolent, and kind and orderly” as far as the sort of government she would like to see formed in Germany. In other words, Ms. Pempeit – a woman who lived through the Third Reich – would like to see another Uncle Adolf in charge, thereupon showing the political and philosophical divide between her epoch and that of the third generation.

During a candid interview towards the middle of Germany in Autumn, in what is indubitably one of the best examples in film history of someone who fits the “True Believer” archetype as outlined by the book of the same name written by German-American social writer Eric Hoffer – who essentially argued that political extremists rarely opt for adopting a more moderate political persuasion after shedding a previous one, but instead one that is just as, if not more, extreme – Horst Mahler, a lawyer by trade who became one of the founding members of the Red Army Faction and arguably the spiritual ‘Rebbe” (as he certainly looks like one in Germany in Autumn) of the group, states in justification for the coldblooded murder of ‘capitalist pigs’ that revolutionaries have, “disgust at the fact that we had fascism, state-sponsored fascist murder, the fascist extermination of other people, and that this had social cause which continue today” in West Germany. Although originally a member of the magical Maoist faith, Mahler would later have a change of heart and shift to the far-right despite being of partial Jewish ancestry, thereupon eventually resulting in his founding of the “Society for the Rehabilitation of Those persecuted for Refutation of the Holocaust” and repeated arrests for ‘Volksverhetzung’ ("incitement of popular hatred") and 'holocaust denial.' Mahler now has the distinct honor of serving a 12-year prison sentence for refuting the official events of the holocaust due to his unkosher, pro-Hitler rhetoric. Whatever one thinks of Mahler’s political views, one has to admit – whether on the left or right – that Germany is not the ‘democracy’ it claims to be, ironically using Nazi-style authoritarian anti-freedom-of-speech tactics against pro-Nazi sentiments. It should be noted that Germany in Autumn was assembled at a time when the Fatherland had yet to be considered a ‘stable’ democracy of sorts, hence the hollow dreams of certainly leftist filmmakers that a Marxist utopia could still be realized in post-war Germany.  As a liberal democracy, modern Germany offers its citizenry the right to freedom of prostitution and partaking in said bought flesh, cultural vapidness (when was the last time Germany produced a great filmmaker, let alone philosopher, novelist, painter, or composer?!), colonization from hostile elements from the continental south and east, generational indigenous population decline, the hegemony of Americanization and globalization, and a Fatherland without fathers and without a future.  As much as I think the L'enfant terrible 'rock star' terrorists of the RAF were deluded nihilists (of the sort described by Albert Camus in his seminal 1951 work The Rebel aka L'Homme révolté)  of the ethno-masochistic bend, at least they proved to be a generation of quasi-Faustian, foolhardy, if not foolish Germans with blood pumping through their veins. Unfortunately, I cannot say the same about most of their spiritual compatriots who contributed to Germany in Autumn; a work that is more symbiotic of the early stage of a Spenglerian "Winter" – the final, twilight stage of civilization where spiritual creativity is totally devitalized, everyday life is a grueling experience, and atheistic materialistic cosmopolitanism reigns – than that of a rich cinematic harvest.

-Ty E

The Last Woman

 Although I cannot remember my exact age at the time (I assume that I was no older than 12) nor even the name of the film (it seemed he had an erotic interest in his daughter), I remember distinctly the first time I saw the fat froggy bastard Gérard Depardieu in a movie and I was completely astounded by his bloated pomposity and patent pretentiousness despite his rather rotund frame and flabby physique, but had I known about his long career prior to that role maybe I would have understood his overblown (and by then blown) ego. Of course, although always terribly tumescent and at least partially plump, there actually was a time when the name Gérard Depardieu was not totally the source of ridicule and disdain as notably demonstrated with his strikingly macho and marvelously misogynistic performance in the X-rated Italian-French flick La Dernière femme (1976) aka The Last Woman aka L'ultima donna directed by Italian auteur Marco Ferreri (Dillinger Is Dead aka Dillinger è morto, Tales of Ordinary Madness) – a filmmaker known for his oftentimes mirthful yet misanthropic and mordant films – being one of the best examples. Maybe it was the fact that I watched a version of the film dubbed in German, but in La Dernière femme Depardieu seems all MAN (at least until the last couple of minutes) and brazenly and unabashedly so. In short, seemingly non-French, which is quite the feat for a crouton actor unless you’re Eddie Constantine (who being born Edward Constantinowsky to a Russian father and Polish mother was not actually a true blue butterfingers). Of course, being a sexually potent mensch in his prime in spiritually-castrated post-war Europa, especially France of all places, the crude yet charming character Depardieu plays in La Dernière femme – directed by a clownish cine-magician of misery – is decisively doomed to fail, thus the real question when watching the film is how, when, and why. The single father of a blond baby boy, Gerard (Gérard Depardieu) quite literally has his hands full in between working to provide for his son and changing the little lad's reeking diapers, so he does not have a lot of time to search for a woman and possible pseudo-mother, so (un)luckily, one very beautiful lady named Valerie (played by buxom brunette Italian actress Ornella Muti; a woman with a Neapolitan father and Estonian mother) practically falls into his lap, but little does he realize that things are about to get much harder than dealing with the delight of infant droppings on a day-to-day basis. 

 Vaguely Cavallone-esque in nature, especially in spirit and most certainly during the last couple minutes of the film, La Dernière femme might be named Man, Woman, and Baby (not that title 'The Last Woman' does not do the job), if for the sake of its sardonic mundanity, but certainly no title could possibly articulate the complete and utter psychological degeneration of protagonist Gerard at the whim of what he sees as nothing more than a pathologically addicting walking-and-talking biological flesh wound. Opening with a straining sourpuss score at the site of a somber and sterile industrial plant that the ‘every-man’ engineer hero happens to work at, we are immediately introduced to gutsy and gracious Gerard who – due to his exaggeratedly extroverted personality and belligerently boastful behavior – is in stark contrast to his spiritless surroundings. Seemingly a man who refuses to take shit nor gruff off of anyone, Gerard soon confronts one of the bigwigs at his work site – threatening him to “get out of here or I’ll kick your ass” – despite not even knowing the man nor whether he could be fired because of his bold yet bellicose actions. Little does Gerard know that soon-to-be-inamorata Valerie has already assumed the role of surrogate mother to his infant son. When he comes to the daycare center where his little boy stays during the daytime, he finds the babe crying as Valerie somewhat curiously attempts to get the little lad to sup on her remarkably ample teat. Initially scared of Gerard and his devilish yet philistinic charm, Valerie finds him to be a natural protector when he comforts her after a large German shepherd randomly claws at a window. Gerard gives Valerie a ride at her request and on the way back they run into the luscious lady’s lover – a 50+-year-old man of wealth. In front of the elder yet more elegant man, Gerard has the gall to say to Valerie: “Choose – Tunisia, or home with me.” Of course, she chooses her gallant blond knight in shining armor on a motorcycle and the rest is history. Before he even knows her name, Gerard has invited Valerie into his apartment, undresses her (in front of his infant son, no less), mounts her like a champ, and his damning addiction to the precariously carnal is in full swing. Needless to say, for the remainder of La Dernière femme, Valerie – assuming the role of both mother and wife as a sort of mousy femme fatale who has the 'nefarious' plan of wanting a family as opposed to material wealth thus breaking completely with convention in regard to the timeless female archetype – never leaves the apartment, at least for any lengthy period of time, thereupon eventually draining – quite literally and figuratively - Gerard of his formerly virile and vehement manhood.

 It should be noted that Gérard Depardieu gives the 'performance' of a lifetime in La Dernière femme that more than exceedingly eclipses his role as the sexually potent commie lead in Bernardo Bertolucci’s less than epic sociopolitical saga 1900 (1976) aka Novecento. Totally disrobed for an abounding portion of the film despite his already somewhat flabby physique, even in the presence of at least three beauteous women at once –  Depardieu even flaunts a full and genuine erection in a couple scenes, thereupon making the unpredictable (but nonetheless foreshadowed) conclusion of La Dernière femme all the more perniciously potent and penetrating, if not positively paralyzing. That being said, it should be no surprise to viewers of the film that La Dernière femme was banned virtually everywhere outside of debauched post-war Europe, including the U.S., upon its initial release and remains virtually impossible to find today in any official format despite the fact that Depardieu was nominated for best actor for his performance in the film at the César Award ceremony in 1977 (which he later won for his roles in Jean-Paul Rappeneau's Cyrano de Bergerac and François Truffaut's The Last Metro).  I am sure that many people went to see La Dernière femme expecting to get some sort of perverse masturbation aid, thus making director Marco Ferreri's capricious choice ending for the film all the more provocative in retrospect.  If any auteur filmmaker had the intrinsic ability to make his audience members simultaneously laugh, cry, get-off, and become stick to their stomach, it was indubitably ferocious yet funny Ferreri; the delightful 'Duce Supremo' of deranged yet debonair exercises in celluloid cynicism.

-Ty E

Opfergang

I hate to admit it, but despite wanting and expecting to discover a rapturous experience with German auteur Veit Harlan’s National Socialist arthouse melodrama Opfergang (1944) aka The Great Sacrifice aka Rite of Sacrifice, I merely witnessed what I found to be semi-surreal high-schlock of the superficially sorrowful and surprisingly sybaritic sort and certainly not the neglected Nazi-era cinematic masterpiece I was led to believe it would be by both nazis and anti-nazis alike. Admittedly, I tend to procrastinate when it comes to first seeing films that are regarded as masterpieces, seemingly personal, and/or otherwise significant in some way, in part due to my deep cinephile dread that I will be consumed with chagrin by what was supposed to be 'life-altering' cinematic work and I can honestly say that Opfergang fulfilled all of my fears about the potential of being greatly disappointed by a major motion-picture. With quasi-Nietzschean themes, beauteous blonde beastesses, Nazi ‘camp’ aesthetics, mystical völkisch imagery, a bizarre Nordic love triangle, and being directed by Veit "the baroque fascist" Harlan – the infamous director of the melodramatic Jew-baiting flick Jud Süß (1940) aka Jew Süss and the homoerotic-themed pro-gay post-war work Different from You and Me (1957) aka Anders als du und ich aka Bewildered Youth – it came as quite a shock to me that not only would I list not Opfergang on a list of my top 100 favorite films, but I would not even regard it as one of the greatest films of German cinema history and apparently I am not alone in that sentiment. In fact, Veit Harlan’s own son Thomas Harlan (Torre Bela, Wundkanal) – a filmmaker and author, as well as a rabid anti-nazi who publicly denounced and denigrated his father throughout his terribly troubled life – described Opfergang as a “kitsch melodrama” that merely succeeded in “creating artificial sentiment and lending it..credibility” in the documentary Harlan – In the Shadow of Jew Süss (2008) directed by Felix Moeller. 

 Of course, not everyone was disenchanted with the film as Nazi minister of propaganda Joseph Goebbels – who essentially had total control over what films were made and screened in Germany – regarded Opfergang as a highly personal possession thereupon causing the delay of the film's release, although it did have a limited run in a small selection of movie theaters, in part due to the scarcity and expensiveness of color film stock. In the documentary Christoph Schlingensief und seine Filme (2005) aka Christoph Schlingensief and His Films, prematurely deceased modern German filmmaker and absurdist Renaissance man Christoph Schlingensief (Menu total, The 120 Days of Bottrop) – who created a freeform scatological remake of Harlan’s film entitled Mutters Maske (1988) that sardonically satirizes a number of scenes from Harlan's film – also believed that German New Wave master Rainer Werner Fassbinder was more influenced by Opfergang than he was by Danish-German Douglas Sirk’s popular 1950s Hollywood melodramas (e.g. All That Heaven Allows, Written on the Wind). Indeed, although an anti-climatic experience for me in general, I would be lying if I did not admit that Opfergang's keen kaleidoscope of calming and chilling colors did not have a nice trance-inducing effect on me, but these moments of ecstasy – not unlike the sort featured in The Red Shoes (1948) directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger and the Crowleyite shorts of cine-magickian Kenneth Anger (Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome, Invocation of My Demon Brother) – were abruptly broken by sand bar characters, redundant dialogue, and the sort of abhorrent aristocratic degeneracy and excess that debauched Italian blueblood auteur Luchino Visconti (The Leopard, The Damned) would do much better and more honestly.

Opfergang centers around a positively posh and prissy protagonist Albrecht Froben (played by Harlan regular Carl Raddatz), the less than homely heir of a wealthy shipping company based in Hamburg, Germany. Honestly, I already knew the film was inherently tainted when introduced to the character of Herr Froben, a man who – despite his wealth and prestige – is certainly no charming gentlemen, hero, nor scholar, let alone a dashing Aryan Übermensch of the racially pure sort but the radically repellant Mr. Raddatz; a rat-faced fellow with a thick little Richard mustache, hence why grisly Goebbels probably could identify with the character.  After all, if it were not for their power and prestige, neither of these men would have been able choose from the frisky and foxy Freyja of their wildest, Teutonic dreams.  Also, like the little Döktor, fab Froben has a keen weakness for the ladies, especially when it comes to Nordic buxom blondes that look like they could have given him quite the beating, so naturally both men became Aryan adulterers; indubitably a mortal sin in the Fatherland. Despite his rather frail frame, Albrecht is an anti-intellectual and worldly adventurer of sorts who has traveled to the former German Afrikan colonies and Japan, which has given him a new lease on life of ceasing the moment and whatnot. Although Froben is married to a seemingly introverted, intelligent, stoic beauty named Octavia (played by Irene von Meyendorff aka Baroness Irene Isabella Margarete Pauline Caecila von Meyendorff) who his oddball orientalist cousin Matthias is semi-secretly madly in love with (he has an out-of-place portrait of the dame in his room of oriental knickknacks) and whose Latin name he finds to be quite annoying, to his dismay but also delight, he discovers that he is really in love with an extroverted Swiss miss of the extraordinarily and similarly extroverted and adventurous sort.  Unfortunately for Albrecht, the love of his life is terminally ill, on top of the fact that he has a faithful wife.

In Opfergang, the ill-fated and tediously tangled love triangle is sparked one Sunday afternoon by happenstance while the character Albrecht is visiting his cousin Matthias (Franz Schafheitlin) at his home on the Elbe. Supervised by Octavia’s elderly and somewhat nihilistic intellectual father, Senator Froben (Otto Treßler ) in what is described by one of the guests as “our spiritual hors d’oeuvre before the Sunday roast,” Albrecht seems quite blasé by the supremely sedentary even which is given a Chopin score by way of Octavia cultivated chops and personal obsession; pianoforte. Albrecht eventually loses it and almost commits the lace curtain sin of 'verbal assault' when Senator Froben reads what he describes as “Dionysian dithyramb by Nietzsche” and “Nietzsche’s death premonition, one of the deepest poems ever written,” which – in fact – is an abridged version of the tragic Anti-Christ’s poem The Sun Sinks aka Die Sonnie sinkt. Albrecht agrees with his fellow guests that the poem is “very beautiful,” but also feels that “it’s terrible” as he finds it rather passive, pessimistic, and dreary for his tastes and opens a curtain to a serene and scenic lake outside that almost has a celestial and ethereal essence to it, thereupon asking the rhetorical question of his cultured compatriots, “Can someone tell me why you’re sitting here every Sunday feeling gloomy?” Finally fed up with talking about philosophical matters for three hours on a sunny Sunday and listening to the written words of a tragic German genius who conceived the poem shortly before he went mad, Albrecht – a man of action and few words (and, in turn a spiritual 'National Socialist') – decides to practice Carpe diem and subsequently goes rowing in the seemingly sublime lake, henceforth discovering an au naturel Swedish ‘mermaid’ symbolically clinging on to the end of his tiny dinghy, Älskling Flodéen (played by Harlan’s real-life wife Kristina Söderbaum); the woman that will – for better or worse – irrevocably change his life forever.

Although described as a film with various subtle National Socialist themes, most specifically the virtues of selfless death and sacrifice – which is symbolized by Albrecht’s acceptance of Äls’ illness and subsequent death, as well  as his commitment to staying with the mismatched wife he does not love – Opfergang is more a cinematic work of curiously creamy and cosmopolitan crème de la crème society than a cinematic work innately equipped with a nasty and nefarious expression of Nazi ideology. In fact, with its prominence of an unfaithful philandering posh protagonist, wealthy yet hedonistic families and bastard children (Äls has a fatherless daughter), colonialist cosmopolitan characters (Albrecht is an active member of German Colonial Association and his cousin Matthias a bookish orientalist), and glaring glorification of the anachronistic German aristocracy (NS was supposedly a vehemently völkisch ‘people’s movement’ glorifying personal merit over inborn and unearned class distinctions), Opfergang hardly seems like the sort of film that would have been enjoyed by the everyday brownshirt Wehrmacht soldier or worker after arriving home from the drudgery of civil service and cracking open a bottle of Krombacher Brauerei, but the sort of cinematic vision that would have been designed for the delight of high-ranking National Socialist party leaders and officials, thus making it no surprise that Joseph Goebbels – who knew the tide of war had changed and his end was very likely near – wanted to keep the film for himself so that no other people aside from the Führer himself could so thoroughly and perceptively identify with the film.

 As explained by his elderly children in Harlan – In the Shadow of Jew Süss, Veit Harlan idolized and worshiped his wife Kristina Söderbaum’s beauty, even if she was ‘sacrificed’ in a number of his films, including Opfergang; a work that most certainly seems like a tribute to the lead actress’ penetrating pulchritude, if not annoying and seemingly adolescent-like acting. Incidentally, Harlan’s first wife, Dora Gerson, a Jewish actress and cabaret singer, perished in Auschwitz with her family, not to mention the fact that two of the filmmaker’s daughters would marry Jewish men, one of which converted to the Hebraic faith and inevitably committed suicide in 1989.  Harlan's niece Christiane Susanne Harlan would also ironically marry Stanley Kubrick (2001: A Space Odyssey, Eyes Wide Shut); arguably the greatest Jewish filmmaker who ever lived. Thus, it goes without saying that Veit Harlan has a number of Jewish grandchildren and great-grandchildren, among various other non-Aryan ethnicities as depicted in Felix Moeller’s documentary.   Of course, with the sort of familial degeneracy featured in Opfergang, it seems only fitting that Veit Harlan's family's future turned out the way it did. Needless to say, Harlan ultimately sacrificed his own progeny's ability to lead a normal life with his legacy as a blacklisted filmmaker, most specifically because of Jew Süss, which is a shame because if Opfergang was as half as decent as I expected it would be, it might have been worth it.  Of course, not all sacrifices are sanctified.

-Ty E

Un©ut

Long before being described by Hebraic Canadian film producer Robert Lantos (eXistenZ, Barney's Version) as, to paraphrase, a “fascist, stormtrooper, apartheid supporter, homophobic anti-Semitic terrorist regime supporter” and as someone, “whose fascist agenda is to impose their views on others” due to his withdrawing his documentary short Covered (2009) from the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) festival to protest the festival's preliminary City-to-City Spotlight on the city of Tel Aviv, Israel because of the Gaza War and the expansion of settlements, Toronto-based John Greyson was already proving to be a bad goy with the release of his feature-length film Un©ut (1997); a gentle agitprop piece of positively perverse cinema that makes its case against circumcision, censorship, and copyright laws, as well as pointing at the political impotence of cuckold and closet-queen Pierre Trudeau (the 15th Prime Minister of Canada from April 20, 1968 to June 4, 1979, and again from March 3, 1980 to June 30, 1984) with a bit of goofy yet grotesque Michael Jackson-mania thrown in for good measure. Part-documentary, part-docudrama, part-cinema-essay, part-sardonic-surrealist-satire and all flamingly gay with a superficially sordid subplot featuring a bizarre buggerer love triangle to boot, Un©ut is an outlandish odyssey of the obscenely unclassifiable sort that makes for one of the most ambitious, if not afflicting, independent pomo homo sociopolitical projects ever assembled. Like a distinctly disconcerting marriage of misfits between Nickelodeon SNICK shows and PBS’ Reading Rainbow episodes from the early-1990s with the films of sweet-and-sour Sapphic mischling auteress Ulrike Ottinger (Freak Orlando, Johanna D'Arc of Mongolia) and Byzantine British buttboy Derek Jarman (Sebastiane, The Last of England), Un©ut is a seemingly unexpurgated expression of Canadian auteur John Greyson’s grating gray matter that – much like his previous works Pissoir (1988) aka Urinal and Zero Patience (1993) – forces the viewer to partake in the filmmaker’s ferine yet frolicsomely framed fetishes and oftentimes preposterously yet positively penetrating political propaganda. That being said, what makes Un©ut especially effective, preeminently as a work of filmic art, is that Greyson offers a full-force assault of downright diacritic, if not periodically deluded, vision with a film that spits bittersweet, vehement venom at the viewer. In short, Un©ut reminds the viewer why sanitized sodomite Hollywood films like Far from Heaven (2002) and Brokeback Mountain (2005) are made, because Greyson does not play nice but he certainly plays for keeps. 

 Originally intending to realize Un©ut as a mere 20-minute-length short film and focusing solely on circumcision and Pierre Trudeau, Greyson’s original script was rejected by the Canadian Film centre and he reacted by creating The Making of Monster (1991) – a musical short that was in part inspired by the filmmaker’s reading of works by German marxist poet/playwright Bertolt Brecht and various far-left Frankfurt School theorists, as well as abstaining from creating Norman Jewison-esque “feel-good liberal” works – thereupon leaving his campy cock-cutting flick in limbo for a number of years. To paraphrase, Greyson himself described the original script for Un©ut as “not all that good,” so luckily his temporary misfortune during pre-production worked for the better. A feature-length flick that dabbles in homoerotic ‘anti-Semitism,’ a mixed-medium aesthetic featuring the mangling and mongrelization of Michael Jackson songs/portraits, the taunting and terrorism of technocratic copyright police, and photoshopping of vintage nude photos of Dutch and Mestizo twinks, among various other intensely and insanely idiosyncratic aesthetic and thematic ingredients, Un©ut is an aberrant audio-visual experience that is not soon to be forgotten by the viewer; whether one wants to or not. Centering around three central characters, Peter Cort (Matthew Ferguson) – an extremely effete researcher writing on a book on circumcision tentatively titled The Psychosexual Meanings of Circumcision and The Foreskin, Peter Koosens (Michael Achtman) – Cort’s ½ Jewish typist assistant who has an unhealthy obsession with Pierre Trudeau, and Peter Denham (Damon D'Oliveira) – a hack video artist who directs works featuring deranged Jackson Five song remixes. On top of the petty problems the three perverted Peters face with their rather ridiculous romance, they ultimately encounter aesthetic terrorism from the state after they are arrested by an ogre-like operatic police officer for copyright infringement, brought to trial that is set to an excruciating rendition of La Habanera, and sent to a farm-side bootcamp – no doubt a deeply distressing nightmare for any full-fledged vagitarian – where they are forced to binge eat McDonalds Big Macs and fries, defecate aside one another in barnyard stables, and sleep in open fields like cattle. Somewhat disharmoniously juxtaposed with the narrative melodrama of the three individual peculiar Petes is documentary footage of various real-life artists discussing their problems with copyright issues and stock footage of Trudeau acting like a jolly queen. Needless to say – with its inclusion of an edited photo of MJ with a bushy beaver and bosoms (apparently taken from the 82nd contestant in the 1984 "Miss Nude World" contest) and uncountable images of cut and uncut cocks of all lengths and girths – Un©ut seems to be an unabashedly uncensored work as advertised in the film's pun-ridden title. 

 What makes Un©ut especially diverting and bizarrely controversial is Greyson’s attack on the Talmudic traditions of the Jewish Brisk, most notably in a scene where the character Peter Cort nonchalantly reads the following excerpt from his book-in-progress: “The ritual of the Jewish Brisk is likewise permeated with homoeroticism.” During this matter-of-factually stated yet strikingly side-splitting scene, pedomorphic boy poindexter cites how during the Jewish religious male circumcision ceremony of ‘mezizah,’ the infant-ravaging Rebbe sucks the blood off of the almost-kosher baby cock with his mouth after removing the foreskin. Cort also remarks about how certain seemingly homo Hebrews grab each other’s mangled members and ritualistically recite “take hold of my shaft, my circumcision" in tribute to another bugger-like Brisk tradition. Considering director Greyson’s recent anti-Israeli action in the past couple of years, including his membership in the “Queers Against Israeli Apartheid” group, his participation in the Freedom Flotilla II (a peaceful flotilla that was designed to break the maritime blockade of the Gaza Strip by Israel by sailing to Gaza on 5 July 2011 that ultimately never took place), and his withdrawing of his own works at film festivals tied with the Jewish state, it is quite doubtful that unlike many artists of his particular pedigree, he is far from a full-fledged Philo-Semite of the gregarious, groveling sort, which is is quite a noble sentiment to have in a nation that has partially criminalized freedom of speech (Section 13(1) of the Canadian Human Rights Act) especially for certain circumcised Canadians.  As stated in Un©ut, around 85% of American infant boys are circumcised each year at a cost of 1/2 a billion dollars (in 1997) for supposedly hygienic purposes in a nation that has the largest Judaic population in the world (despite only making up 2.2% of the general population as of 2008).  That being said, one would not be far off to argue that the peculiar phenomenon of male genital mutilation in the United States of America makes for a great, if not particularly perturbing, metaphor.

Albeit an acutely awry, at times tawdry and annoying (Greyson's incessant inclusion of bizarre communication between characters via silent finger-tapping on various flat surfaces, as if to mimic typing on a typewriter – a thoroughly beaten-to-death and aggravating feature of the film that appears while the characters are engaging in everything from effeminately flirting to fighting), and fortuitously aesthetically dissonant film, Greyson's Un©ut is also a sophisticated piece of sociopolitically-conscious camp that dares to go where few other filmmakers, especially gay cultural marxist Canadians have the audacity to tread.  A virtual gay Guy Maddin genre-bending homophilic flick, Un©ut makes for an especially significant entry in Greyson's filmography and probably the only quirky queer flick that would be of educational value to heterosexual couples expecting a baby boy.

-Ty E

Urinal

If a gay man afflicted with high-functioning autism and an unhealthy proclivity towards bath salts, Adderall, and Microsoft Paint directed a thematically and aesthetically frenzied, freeform video-art, butt-dart project about his love of semen-covered toilet bowls in tearooms and tiny Chinese men and a loathing for law and order and historical reality, it would probably resemble Canadian aberrosexual auteur John Greyson’s decidedly demented debut feature-length Pissoir (1988) aka Urinal; a curiously confused attack on Toronto police for their crackdown on heated homo sex in public restrooms that is simultaneously a work of homoerotic historical fantasy fiction, queer rights documentary, and excessively eccentric cinematic essay. Like a mystifying mix between Frank Ripploh’s Taxi zum Klo (1980), Ulrike Ottinger’s Dorian Gray im Spiegel der Boulevardpresse (1984) aka Dorian Gray in the Mirror of the Yellow Press, and Rosa von Praunheim’s Anita – Tänze des Lasters (1987) aka Anita: Dances of Vice, minus the perverse Teutonic persuasion and anything resembling professional production values, Urinal is a discombobulating and unconventional work of unrivaled neo-Uranian unbalance, hermetic homophile psychobabble, hysterical gay activism, and an unofficial ‘outing’ of various unvocal and ambiguously gay artists/intellectuals figures of the early 20th century. Needless to say, despite its determined agenda to the contrary, Urinal does a great disservice to debauched dick-suckers everywhere as it portrays homosexuals as hyper-horny whores who do anything to hump and/or be humped, including the risk of exhibiting such bestial and deplorable deeds in front of minors, so naturally Greyson’s morally gray work makes for an unintentionally and idiosyncratically mirthful experience. 

 In an interview in the book The View From Here: Conversations with Gay and Lesbian Filmmakers (2007) written by Montreal-based film critic Matthew Hays, Urinal auteur John Greyson stated the following about his first fecal feature: “The film is a response to emerging theories of sexuality from the 1970s. The shadow of Foucault hangs heavily over that piece, his expansive notion of social history being vital to understanding the social construction of a particular phenomenon. Thus, we dug up these six very unwilling, not openly gay, activist figures from our past—like Sergei Eisenstein and Yukio Mishima—to deliver various forms of discourse on the phenomenon of sexuality and public toilets…The wonderful thing about Urinal was that I didn’t have a clue what I was doing. I just went in and did it, going where angels fear to tread. If I’d know what I was getting myself into, I’m not sure I would have run with it.” Considering French philosopher Michel Foucault was a sadomasochistic sodomite and arguably, a sociopath that was infected with AIDS who intentionally squirted his virulent juices into unknowing twinks' gaping holes while engaging in leather-fag orgies, thereupon spreading ‘gay cancer’ around to countless unsuspecting frog fellows and that director John Greyson would go on to direct a fiend-friendly film such as Zero Patience (1993) – a merry and seemingly maniacal musical about AIDS with a subplot about a rather ridiculous romance between famed British explorer Sir Richard Francis Burton and a ghost – one has no reason to suspect that Urinal is a rational expression of so-called “LGBT” activism, but then again, that is why the film is so irresistibly beguiling and unwittingly frolicsome as a sort of conspicuously convoluted expression of pathological perversity and queer quackery of the most delightfully deranged kind.  In short, I cannot think of a single anti-gay activist or crusading Christian evangelist who has created a more detrimental depiction of homosexuality than those portrayed in Greyson's Urinal, but of course, with 'cissexual'-ambivalent works like Tom Kalin's Swoon (1992), Michael Stock's Prince in Hell (1993) aka Prinz in Hölleland, Cheryl Dunye's The Watermelon Woman (1996), A. Hans Scheirl's Dandy Dust (1998), A Home at the End of the World (2004), and Rosa von Praunheim's Your Heart in My Head (2005) aka Dein Herz in meinem Hirn, who needs homo-hating hogs like Hagee when you have so many self-destructive auteur filmmmakers?!

Beginning on June 28, 1937, Urinal gets started with the title introduction, “…They all began arriving, one after the other on that Friday afternoon. Dorian Gray was first, then Frida Kahlo from Mexico and Langston Hughes, and then Yukio Mishima, all with forged letters of invitation signed with our names, inviting them to some conference or other. When Sergei Eisenstein arrived, we were all in the garden, trying to make the best of it. Frida was painting a portrait of Dorian Gray…” (From the unpublished memoirs of Florence Wyle). Upon arriving at the gardenside location, Eisenstein slaps his fellow sodomite Soviet supporter Langston Hughes a high-five and bisexual unibrow painter Kahlo expresses her severance of ties with Judeo-Bolshevik revolutionary Leon Trotsky. Needless to say, Urinal would be a socialist sod's wet dream had the film not featured bitch-turned-butch Jap novelist/nationalist Yukio Mishima as one of the most important and interesting lead characters. Things start to get notably weirder and nonsensical when the old school artists of the film receive an audio-message dated half a century later on June 28, 1987 declaring “happy lesbian and gay pride day everyone” and apologizing for bringing them to the same location under false pretenses. Apparently, somehow these ‘outstanding’ gay figures of yesteryear are needed to help battle a bugger-based “crisis” where hundreds of gays in Ontario, Canada are being arrested each year by fat fascist pig police offers for publicly sucking cock through bathroom stall glory holes and squatting and defecating on more things than just toilets. Throughout Urinal, each of the six dead gay artists (Sergei Eisenstein, Frances Loring, Yukio Mishima, Florence Wyle, Frida Kahlo, and Langston Hughes) gives a personal video-art report, including such salaciously titled works as A Guided Tour of Toronto’s Hottest Tearooms by Sergei Eisenstein, A Survey of Small Town Washroom Busts in Ontario by Langston Hughes, The Policing of Washroom Sex In Toronto by Florence Wyle, and The Policing of Sexuality In Society by Frida Kahlo. Juxtaposed with farcical fictional footage of the historical homo heroes is footage of candid but strikingly less carnal interviews with real-life public perverts who have been busted for busting loads in public commodes and semen-stain steamrooms, including an extremely epicene Chinese-Canadian man whose insistence on wearing a variety of retarded masks during the interviews does little to hide his oriental eyes, as well as an unmistakably mundane middle-aged civil servant whose former career centered around watching small children. Of course, whether gay or straight, I doubt any parent would want this tearoom termite to be whacking off in front of their six-year old cub scout in a place specifically designated for the excretion of human waste.

Is your washroom breeding Bolsheviks? Probably not, but it is probably spawning STD spreaders or at least one would assume so after watching John Greyson’s Urinal; an unbelievably micro-epic undertaking of the insanely unsanitary scatological and illogical kind that oftentimes seems like a collection of unrelated aborted film projects due to its daunting and discordant mix of video and film stock, and fantasy fiction and matter-of-fact reality. As a work of gay gladiatorial activism, Urinal is ass-uredly an abject failure, unless the director’s main objective was to offend and obfuscate, but as a postmodern play-on-potty piece of the most uniquely unhinged variety, it certainly warrants a serious viewing by any crackpot cinephile and/or fanatical fan of crude celluloid camp. As a softcore Yukio Mishima junkie myself, I found Urinal to be especially enthralling yet preposterous as I doubt the tragic Japanese novelist would have had a sexual interest in a sorry sod like Sergei Eisenstein, let alone would he have appreciated being characterized by an effete freak with a boyish physique as he is portrayed by a fellow of Filipino (a delicacy of Dahmer and Murnau no doubt, but hardly a preferred pedigree for the master of pen and sword) extraction named David Gonzales, but, then again, that was undoubtedly one of John Greyson's most pressing and personal agendas; demystifying and reinventing the closeted-gay figure to his notably lewd liking. A ludicrously lurid yet at the same time asininely academic excursion into homophiliac eso-terrorism, Urinal is indeed a work that must be seen to believed and I mean that for uncountable reasons, but if you just need one, watch it for the torridly traumatizing toilet humor fun.  Featuring condoms being unwrapped over crucifixes, childish chink twinks in flamboyant children's Halloween masks, Dorian Gray as a gay oriental, 'Sir Gay' Eisenstein as a feces-fetishizing bathroom interloper, and Langston Hughes' as a buggerer of revolutionary bolshevik filmmakers, among various other sensually vexing yet strikingly sardonic scenarios, Urinal is indubitably a keen kitsch work that even eclipses the perverted poofer pomposity of Rosa von Praunheim's films, which says a lot considering the German filmmaker has a special affinity for fudge-packing neo-nazis, elderly Eastern German trannies, Jewish socialist sexologist sausage jockeys, and cock-chowing, anal assassin cannibals.

-Ty E

Fox and His Friends

 Undoubtedly one of master Neuer Deutscher Film auteur Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s most accessible and least thematically intricate films, Fox and His Friends (1975) aka Faustrecht der Freiheit – which also stars the usually fleshly filmmaker in the lead title and rather robust role – also happens to be one of his most immaculate and personal works. Created during the middle period of his filmmaking career, which is also often regarded as his most ‘inner’ time as a film director, Fox and His Friends was the first film in which Fassbinder portrayed an overtly homosexual love story (despite the fact that his innate gayness was a driving influence behind his artful and audaciously naked melodramas), but also a cinematic work that would cause criticism and outrage due to its less than flattering portrayal of gay subcultures, especially of the hyper-anal-retentive bourgeois bugger sort. Created in dedication ‘for Armin and all the others,’Armin being Armin Meier – Fassbinder’s uneducated orphan (he was a Lebensborn baby sired by the Nazi SS) lover – Fox and His Friends is an intelligent yet highly intimate indictment of opulent homos and how one gay proletarian is eaten up and spit out by a sassy sect of positively pompous, prissy, and pretentious pansies of the particularly posturing sort. Ironically, Fassbinder’s Aryan Übermensch boy toy Armin Meier (who later himself was featured in subsequent Fass-bande films like Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven, Fear of Fear, Satan’s Brew, etc.) – who was constantly belittled and bemeaned by the German filmmaker due to his lack of refinement – would meet a grizzly end in 1978 that was startlingly similar to that of the protagonist (ironically played by Fassbinder himself) of Fox and His Friends. Not surprisingly, Fassbinder would direct another film in tribute to Meier, In a Year of Thirteen Moons (1978) aka In einem Jahr mit 13 Monden, which like Fox and His Friends, is also quite boldly bleak and intensely personal, but aside from the fact that the protagonist is an orphan, has a proclivity towards peckers and commits suicide, the transvestite/nullo character Erwin/Elvira's (played by Volker Spengler) life bears little resemblance to that of the ill-starred man it was dedicated to. The fact that Fox and His Friends was created a couple of years before Meier’s death with a strikingly slenderized Fassbinder playing the role of the lead Franz Bieberkopf aka "Fox, the Talking Head" makes the film all the more eerie, especially considering that the filmmaker figuratively walks in the shabby shoes of an exploited and degraded character he knew all too well yet subsequently gave the real mensch Meier hell, thereupon leading to his cinematically prophesized demise. Knowing Fassbinder’s quasi-incestuous relationship with his group of actors, I do not think it would be a stretch to speculate that Fassbinder forecasted and even helped provoke Meier’s premature demise, as well as his own in 1982, as it most certainly had to have crossed his mind as so vividly prognosticated in Fox and His Friends; a work about fair-weather fag friends and the bloodsucking emotional and financial brutality they beget.

Fox and His Friends begins with the introduction of charming yet uncultured carny Franz Bieberkopf – best known in the carnival trade as "Fox, the Talking Head" – and his even more captivating boyfriend Klaus (Karl Scheydt), the criminally-inclined carnival owner. Unfortunately for Fox, his beautiful beau is arrested for tax fraud while in the middle of one of his theatrical carny routines, so now jobless and sexless, Fox – a man of very little means and no others trades – decides to buy a lottery ticket in an overtly obsessed manner that is quite similar to that of the child protagonist from Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (1971) directed by Mel Stuart. Also, like the fantasy musical penned by Roald Dahl, Fox magically buys the winning ticket, but with money he swindled out of a portly florist named 'Fatty' Schmidt (Peter Kern), thereupon winning 500,000 German marks in the process; much to his delight and child-like amazement, he soon has reasonably rich and refined Francophile, antique fetishist homosexuals swooning over him but the oftentimes crude and careless ragbag-turned-rich carney conman ultimately proves to be no match for the bombastic bourgeois buggerers' cunning and conspiring ways. Initially rejected by la-di-da lace-curtain cocksucker Eugene (Peter Chatel) and his euphuistic entourage of sharply dressed sodomites, largely due to his indelicate humdrum demeanor, Fox is soon accepted when his prospective paramour realizes the seemingly base carny boy has just become independently wealthy. Although the exceedingly egoistical Eugene already has a personal twink of his own named Philip (Harry Baer of Fassbinder’s Jail Bait aka Wildwechsel, The Third Generation aka Die dritte Generation) who is notably more pretty and polished than wild Fox, he cannot help but like the curious carny chap for his newly acquired capital and proletarian penis, although he would never have the gall and genuineness to admit so. Indeed, Fox may be a sub-literate with a decided disdain for high-camp, French restaurants, and first edition copies of Oscar Wilde and Lord Byron's works, but he is not so blind as to be somewhat aware of Eugene’s vainglorious and even villainous intentions. As far as his sexual prowess is concerned, Fox – to the complete and utter offense of posh and prissy Eugene – states quite proudly that, “I am proletarian; they are more potent.” Of course, Eugene – being a born materialist of the money-massaging and maliciously machinating sort – is less concerned with the size of Fox’s cornholer than his cash wad and he is willing to use a variety of certainly corrupt, clandestine, and calculating methods to get it when all his inamorato wants in return is mere love and affection; two things the would-be-rich bitch has an incapacity for giving. Before he knows it, Fox is ‘investing’ in Eugene’s and his father’s business, buying an overpriced apartment and useless antiques, and paying for lavish vacations for the two, yet Eugene remains an unwavering ingrate of the most prim parasitic sort, henceforth resulting in heartbreak and even a heart attack for the lapsed carney, which his fleeting lover barely notices. Naturally, things take a turn for the worst when Fox is prescribed valium.

In the documentary Die Nacht der Regisseure (1995) aka Night of Filmmakers directed by Edgar Reitz and produced for BFI TV, Fassbinder super starlet Hanna Schygulla (The Marriage of Maria Braun, Lili Marleen) states regarding the filmmaker who launched her career prominent German actress of the New German Cinema : “But I’ve got to say he made some very powerful films without me…Now when I see the films from a distance I like some of them very much. For example, Fox, the Talking Head. Back when I saw it I thought, 'Oh well, he did a nice job of fashioning himself in the role of the victim.' I see it all differently today through his death.” And, indeed, it is hard to imagine watching Fox and His Friends today without considering the highly personal context in which it was made, especially in regard to Fassbinder's scandalous and tragic love life. It should also be noted that Fassbinder’s star-crossed Moroccan lover El Hedi ben Salem (Welt am Draht aka World on a Wire, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul) – who also committed self-slaughter in a fit of desperation like Armin Meier – also makes a most fitting appearance in Fox and His Friends as an Arab hustler, which the character Eugene treats with the most despicable disdainfulness despite his desire to be buggered by the brown chap.  In Rosa von Praunheim's exceedingly enlightening documentary Fassbinder's Women (2000) aka Fassbinder Was the Only One for Me: The Willing Victims of Rainer Werner F. it is revealed that – not unlike pop-art-con-artist Andy Warhol – Fassbinder had a tendency for building up downtrodden people, especially in regard to his lovers El Hedi ben Salem and Armin Meier, only to throw them away when he got tired of them, thereupon putting these individuals in an even worse situation than they originally started with, ultimately culminating in their tragic suicides.  Of course, unlike Warhol, Fassbinder had enough intelligence, sensitivity, empathy, and integrity to channel these character flaws into his film, especially in regard to Fox and His Friends and In a Year of Thirteen Moons.  Like the protagonists of his films The Merchant of Four Seasons (1971), Fox and His Friends (1975), and The Marriage of Maria Braun (1978), the German New Wave auteur would inevitably learn that personal success does not always lead to eternal happiness, hence Fassbinder's lonely demise by way of extremely likely subconscious suicide in a manner not all that dissimilar from the protagonist of Fox and His Friends.  That being said, if there is any filmmaker who can be described as 'dying for his art,' it is indubitably Rainer Werner Fassbinder; a man whose decisively debauched and destructive personal life was eclipsed by his only slightly more melodramatic films.

-Ty E