Deux

Being literally beaten and urinated on as a child by other children, growing up in a defeated nation that had been reduced to ruins and rubble, blaming himself for the suicide of his Polish grandma (when he was only 13-year-old) and later his teenage male lover, the death of his boyfriend Marcello from AIDS, losing his movie muse Magdalena Montezuma at the height of his film career to cancer (which he would inevitably lose a battle to later in his life), facing public ridicule by ex-lovers (i.e. Rosa von Praunheim), and being relatively rejected in his homeland for being too much of an “art cunt,” Werner Schroeter (Eika Katappa, Palermo oder Wolfsburg) – the most decidedly dandy and exceedingly eccentric filmmaker of the German New Wave – was certainly a terribly tortured man, which he made no lie of considering he is well known for wearing signature all-black outfits throughout his entire life, so naturally his cinematic autobiography and penultimate work (This Night (2008) aka Nuit de chien being his final film), Deux (2002) aka Two, is a hyper hysterical and harrowing yet hypnotic cinematic work that made me seriously wonder whether or not the filmmaker’s premature death at the age of 65 was not for the best because at least now we know he no longer suffers. A daringly discordant, deranging, debasing and esoteric movie memoir with two transexualized female protagonists, identical twin sisters (both played by Isabelle Huppert, who the director wrote the roles specifically for), Deux would mark Schroeter’s return to film after over a decade break in what is seemingly his most impenetrable and personal work; a work of horrific high-camp grotesquery in the spirit of one of the director’s favorite poetic novels Les Chants de Maldoror aka The Songs of Maldoror written by the mysterious Uruguayan-born French poet who went by the pseudonym Comte de Lautréamont (real name Isidore Lucien Ducasse). On top of featuring off-screen narration of verses from literary libertine de Lautréamont's iconoclastic and quasi-satanic proto-surrealist novel by an unseen male narrator, Deux features incessant images of old school sailors that would substitute for Schroeter’s aborted dream film project of cinematically adapting French fag/criminal writer Jean Genet’s novel Querelle de Brest (1953), which would end in treachery when the director’s friend, Rainer Werner Fassbinder – who did not think much of the work, apparently describing it as a, "third-rate police story" – ended up directing it, thus souring the two filmmakers' friendship. Featuring obfuscated anecdotes from Schroeter’s own life (which is a mystery in and of itself), including the self-slaughter of his lover via hanging, Deux is a decisively deranged and daunting celluloid daydream where one has the feeling that the filmmaker told himself throughout the production of the work, “It's my film and I can cry if I want to.”

 Inverting the sex of the characters for Deux, Schroeter seemingly follows in the footsteps of his ill-fated friend Fassbinder’s film The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972) aka Die Bitteren Tränen der Petra von Kant – a work based on the auter’s failed romantic relationship with black Bavarian Günther Kaufmann, except with lesbians substituting for gay men – but the decidedly decadent auteur has never made a lie about the fact that his films are byproducts of his failed love affairs and if it were not for the fact that he was a singular filmmaker whose cinematic career is unparalleled, one would assume he had a failed life, at least judging by his celluloid autobiography; a work riddled with sex, death, and self-destruction of the cultivated kitschy and sometimes tragicomedic sort. Centering around two identical twins separated at birth who know of neither's existence, Deux seems to be a combination of Poe-esque ‘fear of the doppelgänger’ and Jungian ideas like the shadow aspect (unconscious aspect of the personality that the conscious ego does not recognize) and the anima (feminine inner personality in the unconscious of the male, which Schroeter seemed rather conscious of), thus the murderous conclusion acts as a sort of complete idiosyncratic “individuation.” The fact that both of the twins, Magdalena and Maria (both played by Huppert), never physically age (whether playing a 5-year-old or a 50-year-old version of the character) and that the events in their lives become quite indistinguishable and all the more indecipherable as the film progresses only make it all more clear that Deux is a torrid trip throughout Schroeter’s totally tortured and terrified unconscious and oftentimes irrational mind, thus making him more of a ‘German’ filmmaker than he would ever want to admit, at least in the dark romantic sense where the auteur gazes into the abyss and the abyss gazes back. Like the twins of sin, sordidness, and sorrow, their seemingly manic mother Anna (Bulle Ogier), who likely fornicated with a sailor and spawned two heirs that were irreparably severed and brought up by separate adoptive families, longs for maternal love and a lasting romantic relationship (their failure with both seems interconnected), but all three ladies are accursed matrons of misery and isolation-based misanthropy with a propensity for damningly destructive love affairs and emotional and physical violence. Maria is the more extroverted of the two as someone who actively pursues ‘revolutionary’ politics and her love of music via debauched opera and cabaret, thus symbolizing Schroeter’s identity as an artist (or his self-created ‘persona’) while Magdalena – a successful school girl turned low-spirited lesbian with a disdain for men – is the director (who, indeed, like the character, attended international boarding schools) as his truest and most unflatteringly personal self, so naturally when the two finally collide physically at the conclusion through their intrinsic metaphysical bond, there are deplorable, if not entirely inevitable consequences. That ‘Magdalena’ is Schroeter’s most personal self becomes all the more clear with the cinematic recreation of the filmmaker’s tragic real-life coming-of-age love affair, which the director described as follows in the documentary Mondo Lux : The Visual Universe of Werner Schroeter (2011) directed by Elfi Mikesch (cinematographer of Deux), “Siegfried was the first man I really loved, but he hanged himself. He was 16, and I was 13 or 14.” Despite the rather ambiguous conclusion (as well as the film as a whole) of Deux, Werner Schroeter will undoubtedly be remembered as the 'artist' (outside persona), albeit one whose highly inner and intimate yet fuddled blood and tears stain every frame he ever shot of celluloid. Deux is indubitably Schroeter at the height of his hyper hermetic yet particularly personalized artistry in a considerably compelling and compulsively concocted celluloid work of daunting and deranging fragmentation where byproducts of love and death act as a fierce form of all-consuming cognitive dissonance and despair, thus it should be no surprise that the filmmaker once also stated in Mondo Lux, “harmony does not exist unless you work hard to create it.” 

Featuring hundreds of distinct tableaux ranging from quite literally killer kitsch, including Isabelle Huppert dressed in Soviet regalia standing on a battlefield with hundreds of dead naked corpses, to gross-out absurdity, including Huppert being violently attacked by a fox, coupled with a meticulously dismembered (non)narrative that is intentionally impossible to follow in terms of both chronology (skipping in between the years 2000, 1955, 1977, 1963, 1993, 1981, etc. without warning or reason) and plot, Deux makes for Werner Schroeter’s celluloid magnum opus of melancholy in the macabre tradition of the Grand Guignol and German romanticism, albeit in a highly deracinated, dissonance-driven form. A work of cultivated and complex despair and dispiriting decay that makes concessions to no one except Werner Schroeter himself, Deux, a depiction of debilitating delirium in celluloid form, is the thing that dead dreams are made of. A cinematic work I cannot even recommend to the most courageous of cinephiles, Deux is a totally trying test in terror and torment sprinkled with Schroeter’s apparent disdain for the Zionist state of Israel and goofy Japanese tourists, love of Dutch painters like Rembrandt and Vincent van Gogh, antinatalism, radical politics and sex, the semen of seamen, megalomaniacal divas, and lifelong obsession with opera. With the debauched, deadbeat mother featured in Deux telling someone on a public telephone that, “We must murder all pregnant women…We must kill all the children before they’re born. We must take this hunt to all the world. We must! We Must!,” in a most heated, hysterical, and flagrantly fanatical fashion, one can only guess the source of Schroeter’s reckless weltschmerz, but considering he was born 7 April 1945 – literally a month and a day before Germany’s unconditional surrender during the Second World War – thus literally coming of age in apocalyptic Teutonic year zero, it is no surprise that his cinematic swansong, This Night (2008) aka Nuit de chien, is about the death of a nation and a people in one night. And so it would follow that Schroeter became a rootless cosmopolitan of sorts, but as Deux demonstrates, there is no getting away from home, no matter where one runs. Who knows, maybe if Germany had won the war, Schroeter might have grown up to be a hyper heterosexual following in the footsteps of Veit Harlan – a true purveyor of aristocratic National Socialist kitsch – but instead he realized what his friend Fassbinder prophesied as having, “a place in the history of film that I would describe in literature as somewhere between Novalis, Lautréamont, and Louis-Ferdinand Céline," which is no small accomplishment, with Deux being his “Les Chants de Maldoror”; an inexplicable and uncategorizable work of aesthetic anarchy and unwavering idiosyncrasy that will prove to perplex both cinephiles and auteur filmmakers for generations to come. 

-Ty E

Paradise: Love

Austria’s answer to Harmony Korine (of course, he’s been around much longer), Austrian aberrant-garde arthouse auteur Ulrich Seidl (Animal Love aka Tierische Liebe, Import/Export) has made a career out of creating curious cinéma vérité and ridiculously raunchy realist works of the trashy tragicomedic sort about the less than flattering aspects and individuals of his post-Nazi nation, but with his more recent films, he has taken his countrymen out of his country, thereupon depicting a globalized world of exploiters and the exploited and slaves and masters ripe with eccentricity and absurdity. With Import/Export (2009) – a work about a Ukrainian nurse who goes to the West to find a better life and an Austrian man who heads to Eastern Europe to attempt the same thing – Seidl quasi-pornographically demonstrates in a highly intimate and indelicate manner that both ends of Europe have degenerated into vapid, culture-less cuckolds of capitalism, albeit with the German-speaking world being in a superior, if not more culturally senile and stale, situation where they can buy down-and-out Slavs for pennies. Naturally, Seidl takes things further with Paradise: Love (2012) aka Paradies: Liebe – the first chapter in the filmmaker’s “Paradise Trilogy” (three films that focus on three different women from the same family) which was co-written by the filmmaker’s seemingly equally cynical and salacious wife Veronika Franz, someone who has indubitably added a feminine touch to these cinematic works – as he finally travels to the dark continent, most specifically Kenya, a place where apparently lonely and sexually repressed European women go to patronize young black bucks who are young enough to be their sensual sweethearts, but for a price that literally could support a whole family. An innately anti-erotic realist tale in an exotic land about the pros, but mostly cons of globalization, multiculturalism, and so-called post-colonialism, Paradise: Love is a uniquely ugly film ironically set at a beautiful beach resort about our miserably materialist times where bought flesh of the foreigner kind makes for a seedy substitute for organic love of the domestic kind. A potent antidote to the creepy ‘cougar’ craze that somewhat recently molested the Occidental world via the always horny and sexually dysfunctional folks in hollyweird, as well the recent phenomenon of young African Negroes swindling extremely lonely, desperate, and naïve European women out of their money with hollow promises of love and exotic primitive potency, Paradise: Love is a radical and risqué reminder as to why the nonwhite world no longer respects its now-impotent and dwindling ex-masters, even if a rather dubious 'relationship' is still in place, albeit in a determinedly degenerating way. 

 Contemporary Austria is certainly not the world Uncle Adolf envisioned, as mongoloid Aryan dudes with Down syndrome can be seen riding around in bumper cars at amusement parks and 50-year-old Nordic mothers see Kenya – an East African land of Negroes – as the perfect place to take a vacation, or at least protagonist Teresa (Margarethe Tiesel) of Seidl’s Paradise: Love does.  After all, with all the young men in Austria being seemingly retarded, what is a lonely and lascivious lady supposed to do?! Spurred by a desperate and deep-seated desire to be loved and desired, Teresa cannot help but be flattered when young Kenyan men approach her romantically on her immediate arrival, even if she does not believe they find her sexually attractive and all considering she is somewhat overweight and certainly past her prime in terms of attractiveness, but those blonde goldilocks are virtual gold on the dark continent as they are the sign of a wealthy tourist looking for the ultimate erotic Negro experience. As Teresa learns upon arriving in Kenyan, the most important words for a foreigner to learn is the Swahili phrase, “Hakuna Matata” (literally "There are no worries," but more akin to “no problem” in American English), yet the vacation proves to be nothing but problems of the lonely and heartbroken sort as the less than fresh Fräulein confuses prostitution with a genuine relationship and love with fleeting lust. Indeed, Kenya has some slick playas who know a thing or two about how to hustle a horny and romantically hopeless European women into thinking they actually have started a serious relationship of mutual affection, because instead of being blunt gigolos who bugger old babes for an upfront fee, the hustlers merely ask for financial support for family members. After being hassled by a number of brothers whose aggressive hustling methods throw her into a state of hysteria, Teresa finally meets a more mellow and mild-mannered young man named Munga (Peter Kazungu), who despite being married, inevitably cons the Austrian woman into supporting his whole family, but things naturally take a turn for the worse when the charismatic Kenyan’s ‘hustle and flow’ is revealed, thereupon leading to heartbreak of the humiliating sort for the aged Aryaness and a couple blows to the brotha's grill. Unlike her three blonde friends – who know what they are paying for and have no qualms about doing so – Teresa is looking for a little more than a virile brotha’ with a big black bush-beater, thus her impenetrable loneliness and age-based lack of self-esteem is all the more compounded by her sordid and steamy but ultimately senseless sabbatical. Naturally, the absurdity of Teresa’s quest for love reaches its peak when her friends give her a birthday present in the form of a jolly and bestially gyrating Negro in his birthday suit who shakes his dick for dollars, or as one of lecherous lady’s says quite jubilantly, “He is all yours, from head to dick,” in what amounts to a determinedly daunting and debasing scenario that is probably the most patently pitiable scene in Paradise Love; a film that reminds the viewer that the death of the west will probably not be through genocide, but suicide via materialism and moral and cultural devaluation brought about by capitalism and globalization. Indeed, the flesh-flaunting Kenyan’s body is all Teresa’s, “from head to dick” for a couple minutes, but his heart and soul remain somewhere else. 

 Undoubtedly, Paradise: Love is not the first film of its kind and certainly not the last, but it is undoubtedly the best and most authentic of its kind, especially in context with contemporary times. While Alberto Cavallone’s Le salamandre (1969) depicted the patronizing and inevitably tragic master-slave dynamic between a racially mixed black-white couple, Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974) portrayed the forlorn future of a 60-year-old German widow and an illiterate Moroccan in his late-30s, Werner Schroeter’s Palermo oder Wolfsburg (1980) revealed the deplorable consequences of a lost-in-translation, 'give and take' miscegenation-based relationship, and Laurent Cantet’s Heading South (2005) presented sexual tourism as a necessity in a deteriorating third world society where sexually and romantically desperate woman are able to buy young boy toys they could not purchase elsewhere, Paradise: Love manages to pick up on all these taboos themes that have become all the more relevant in our increasingly globalized world where social alienation and isolation is rampant, but executed in a minimalistic and understated manner that is neither preachy nor pretentious but plainly penetrating in a cultural pessimist sort of way that recalls Schopenhauer and Cioran. In fact, throughout Paradise: Love, protagonist Teresa attempts at various times during her trip to contact her adult daughter via telephone but receives no response, thus her sorrowful solitude is not merely the result of a lack of sexual and romantic affection, but an all-encompassing heartache and melancholy sparked by the fundamental structure of society itself where everything has a price, but nothing has any intrinsic value, hence people's confusion between sex and love in the modern world. In a sense, Paradise: Love is the cinematic adversary of Age of Consent (1969) directed by Michael Powell and starring James Mason – a film about an old artist (Mason) who is fatigued by the soulless hustle and bustle of NYC, so he goes to Australia and eventually finds inspiration in the fair-skinned and fecund form of a vulnerable and voluptuous teenage girl (played by a very young and shapely Helen Mirren in her first major role) in what becomes a relatively innocent relationship – as while Seidl’s film is a positively pessimistic work that offers no solace from sorrowfulness aside from contrasting scenery and blacker-than-a-Kenyan dark comedy, the older film promises hope for the hopeless. Although not Seidl’s greatest cinematic effort, Paradise: Love is quite unmistakably one of the director's most accessible works, thus making it a more than worthy introduction for naïve virgins of Austrian cinematic nihilism and negativity of the strikingly compelling, if not corrupting, sort. 

-Ty E

Ludwig - Requiem for a Virgin King

Although he had directed a number of films before, the majority of which being experimental documentaries, Hans-Jürgen Syberberg – probably the only filmmaker of 'German New Cinema' to describe himself as being, “conservative in a Prussian sense, of the classic school, without chewing gum and pinball, not for nothing raised in the age of Stalin,” – would first make his cinematic declaration against the cosmopolitan liberalism popular among his filmic compatriots, as well as his one-man war against Hollywood with Ludwig - Requiem für einen jungfräulichen König (1972) aka Ludwig - Requiem for a Virgin King; the first film in the radical auteur’s ‘Germany Trilogy’ of Teutonic myths. An unrelenting blitzkrieg against the Fourth Wall of theatre and a tight Teutonic tsunami of hermetic and operatic tableaux centering around the myths and mystique of 19th century King Ludwig II of Bavaria aka “The Swan King” aka “The Fairy-Tale King” aka “Mad King Ludwig,” Ludwig - Requiem for a Virgin King was described by cinematic soldier Syberberg as, “a declaration of war against the dominant forms of the cinema of dialogue and the entertainment film in the tradition of Hollywood and its colonies…It was also a declaration of war against psychological dribble, plots based on gags and action, the philosophy of continuity editing and its shot/countershot technique, its metaphysics of the automobile and the gun, its excitement of opening and closing doors, and its melodramas based on sex and crime, in short, against the domination of narrative cinema in principle.” Ironically, Syberberg – who came-of-age in communist East Germany, thus becoming untainted by the deleterious effects of American cultural homogenization – began his lifelong passion of synthesizing theatre and film at the age of 17-years-old when Marxist playwright/poet Bertolt Brecht gave him the opportunity to film some of the far-left stage director's Berliner Ensemble productions. Syberberg would go on to be what is probably the only filmmaker in the world to turn cinema into “Gesamtkunstwerk” (a “total work of art” in the Wagnerian sense which strives to include all artistic mediums) with Ludwig - Requiem for a Virgin King – a 140-minute film epic featuring an innately abstract and arcane synthesis of elements of Germanic myth, cinema, theatre, opera, poetry, documentary, musical, and metaphysics – but it would be with his 442-minute cinematic epic Hitler: A Film from Germany (1977) aka Hitler - ein Film aus Deutschland that the German filmmaker would inspire leftist Jewess Susan Sontag (who once infamously wrote, "The white race is the cancer of human history," to the glee of her racial compatriots and ethno-masochistic white liberals everywhere) of all people to write he had created, “one of the great works of art of the twentieth century,” as an 'aristocratic postmodernist' of sorts who, “belongs to the race of creators like Wagner, Artaud, Céline, the late Joyce, whose work annihilates other work.” Essentially, the film Syberberg needed to make so he could experiment with ideas he would take to ‘Spenglerian’ proportions with Hitler: A Film from Germany – arguably the most thoughtful, insightful, and eclectic approach by anyone, kraut or otherwise, in accessing Adolf Hitler’s place in German history – Ludwig - Requiem for a Virgin King is also a masterpiece in its own right as a work that makes Luchino Visconti’s 235-minute depiction of the Mad King, Ludwig (1972) starring Helmut Berger in the lead role, seem like it was directed by a for-hire hack in Hollywood who was solely hypnotized by his subject’s homosexuality and royal costumes.

A man who once famously stated, “I wish to remain an eternal enigma to myself and to others,” Ludwig II of Bavaria (25 August 1845 – 13 June 1886) is a man now better remembered today through myths than reality, not least of all due to all the extravagant castles he built around Bavaria (through which tourist revenue has partially enabled the state to be the richest in Germany), his financial support of Richard Wagner, dubious sexuality and sanity, and mysterious death. Like with all the other films in Syberberg's Germany trilogy, Ludwig - Requiem for a Virgin King meticulously massages, mutilates, and molests its subject from the perspective of a ‘pomo classicist.’ Beginning with a prophecy from Lola Montez (played by Fassbinder’s ex-wife Ingrid Caven) – mistress of Ludwig II’s grandfather – that due to incest and unruly masses of proletarians, among other things, that, “King Ludwig has no chance,” Ludwig - Requiem for a Virgin King establishes from the very beginning that the “King of Kitsch” lived a terribly troubled and ultimately tragic life plagued by social isolation (aside from his servant ‘lackeys’ and favorite artists), rotten teeth, and family treachery. A funny fellow of rather refined taste who loves, “the mountains, the forest air, horses...Richard Wagner…Edgar Allan Poe…Friedrich Schiller…the night, the mystic and inexplicable” and “believes in the immortality of the soul,” Ludwig II (played by Fassbinder’s right-hand man Harry Baer, who mutinied against his master when he decided to work with Syberberg) would seem like a happy-go-lucky monarch were it not for his subsequent remark describing his hatred for pollution caused by English industry, so-called ‘progress,’ the Prussian empire, nationalism, socialism, and last, but certainly not least, “mass meetings of people.” In short, Ludwig II is a reluctant ruler who has nil interest in Realpolitik and his royal duties, thus he escapes into a fantasy world of compulsive castle building, the more than generous financial support of his favorite composer Richard Wagner, among other royally blessed artists, and wandering like a child through the night like a phantom in a fairytale. Naturally, his fellow royals were more than a bit concerned over his abandonment of his kingly duties, incessant borrowing and spending of monarch money as a loyal but loony art patron, and his selling of the Kingdom to Germany for a hefty sum so he could finance fantastic castles, so, as Syberberg more than subtly hints at in Ludwig - Requiem for a Virgin King, Ludwig II was likely assassinated by his own people and possibly his own uncle Luitpold who later maintained the regency. As stated by Ludwig II’s detractor Graf Holnstein (played by Fassbinder’s one-time boy toy, black Bavarian Günther Kaufmann), the Kitsch King once, “gave an opera singer expensive jewelry and didn’t even sleep with her,” which is certainly the sign of a less than sane man, at least among more masculine and power-driven men who seek to conquer and gain power and not waste money on art of all things. As Syberberg wrote, “My Ludwig film begins with the first E-flat major chords of the Rhinegold and ends with the conclusion of the Götterdämmerung, in whose last ray of light little Ludwig, old and bearded, steps out of the mist of Erda’s grotto as a sadly smiling child. The myth of the Nibelungs presents the frame for my film. In the film the interrelations between allusions to Ludwig and to Wagner shuttle back and forth, creating an inextricable associative deepening of an epic cosmos in which we can recognize ourselves and perhaps celebrate ourselves in the tragic mode. For the theme is the destruction of a utopia in the face of a person looking for a lost or artificial paradise.” 

Oftentimes labeled a filmmaker of German New Cinema, Hans-Jürgen Syberberg is indubitably the only German filmmaker of his generation to not only embrace his nation’s rich (yet now taboo) cultural legacy, but also a rather idiosyncratic blend of ‘Prussian conservatism’ that somehow manages to reconcile Richard Wagner and Karl May with the likes of cosmopolitan ‘leftist’ German cultural prodcers like of Bertolt Brecht and Werner Schroeter. In fact, during the second, more apocalyptic and anachronistic second half of Ludwig - Requiem for a Virgin King, the character of Richard Wagner (who is played by two different actors of different genders, the female portrayal being the composer’s Jungian ‘anima’ of sorts) as played by actress Anette Tirier (who appeared in both Schroeter’s Der Tod der Maria Malibran aka The Death of Maria Malibran and Tag der Idioten aka Day of the Idiots) makes the culturally insightful statement (people forget that like Hitler, Wagner was a rebel despite how he is perceived nowadays as an archaic racist), “Save me from these old women with their cream cakes and moneybags. I have belonged to youth and revolution since 1848. I succeeded against the philistines, with my own theatre and 6-hour performances, in forming a 19th century musical underground…Only when Niki de St. Phalle, Jim Dine, Werner Schroeter, Magdalena Montezuma and Ernst Fuchs produce the “The Ring” will I be free again.” Of course, Syberberg was the only one who made any serious attempt to make the 19th century rebel genius “free again” with, among various other films, his 255-minute epic Parsifal (1983) – an epic and aesthetically ‘Nazified’ postmodern adaptation of the composer’s opera with the Grail being represented by Bayreuth Theatre – but as the audacious extra-avant-garde auteur depicted in Hitler: A Film from Germany with Uncle Adolf's allegorical rise from Richard Wagner’s grave, it would be next to impossible to rehabilitate Ludwig II’s favorite artist, as well as any other element of pre-1933 German history, after the defeat of the Third Reich in 1945. As the man who metaphysically inspired Hitler, who wrote in his infamous autobiography "Mein Kampf," "At the age of twelve, I saw ... the first opera of my life, Lohengrin. In one instant I was addicted. My youthful enthusiasm for the Bayreuth Master knew no bounds," Richard Wagner’s legacy will forever be tainted by its association with its innate influence of National Socialism, despite the fact that his most loyal patron, King Ludwig II of Bavaria – the “Perfect Wagnerite” who vehemently despised politics, nationalism, socialism and especially, “mass meetings of people” – funded the composer so he could create a complex, if not totally imaginary and mystical, utopia where realpolitik and real people were nowhere to be found as esoterically depicted in Syberberg’s Ludwig - Requiem for a Virgin King.

Indubitably, the most truly Teutonic filmmaker and artist of his generation and uniquely unabashedly so, Hans-Jürgen Syberberg was essentially the ideological adversary of far-left Frankfurt school auteur Alexander Kluge – one of 26 signatories to the Oberhausen Manifesto of 1962, which marked the launch of the New German Cinema against ‘Papa’s Kino’ and the deep cultural traditions of the Fatherland, so it is no surprise that the Wagnerian auteur would write, “Yes, this land has become brutal and materialistic. Tolerance has degenerated into denunciation, and mediocrity into cultural conformity. Cinema is misunderstood as a practiced mass art, as the fast-food stand of show business—cinema as the smallest common multiple of the leisure industry. Why? For an entire generation, Germany’s children learned the statistics of Auschwitz, the virtues of revolution, no matter how misunderstood, from an admittedly puny German tradition without the courage of its convictions, which they promptly “demystified” as hero worship…An intrinsic morality was born (or what they regarded as one), the bulwark of a new rationality; for feelings and ideals lead to disaster, so they had been told.” Of course, whereas Alexander Kluge's films mark the height of sterile and soulless rationality and an intrinsic loathing of national identity as especially reflected by him and his fellow far-left filmic compatriots (including would-be-Frenchman Volker Schlöndorff and the master of melodramatic group psychotherapy Rainer Werner Fassbinder) omnibus film Germany in Autumn (1978) – an ethno-masochistic cinematic work Syberberg described as being, “without a concept…without aesthetic, metaphysical control and responsibility” – Ludwig - Requiem for a Virgin King announced the rebirth of German myths and irrationalism, or as the only “master of celluloid Gesamtkunstwerk” concluded himself upon completing in German trilogy, “If my films Ludwig, Requiem for a Virgin King and Karl May can be understood as positive mythologizings of history through the devices of cinema, and filtered through the intellectual controls of irony and pathos, for our glory and for use as a response to the reality of our days, what can we do with a historical subject like Hitler? That was the question from the very outset, before making this last film. This epitome of our deepest guilt and reflection of our vast grief and turning away from the face of a man such as we understand him, and nevertheless accepting here too the title as a motto for all three films of my trilogy: in search of paradise lost here as well?” Of course, Syberberg was the only filmmaker of his generation to truly face Hitler and the troubled history of his fractured Fatherland, so it should be no surprise that the most famous and successful director of German New Cinema, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, would list Ludwig - Requiem for a Virgin King as one of the “The Least Important” films of the movement in a 1981 “Hitlist of German Films” because while he merely ‘cinematically reacted’ to the more painful periods of Teutonic history with positively pessimistic, naked melodramas, but never went to the trouble of deciphering Aryans myths and their historical influence, the director of Hitler: A Film from Germany brazenly basked in it and accepted his fate as a child of Ludwig II, Richard Wagner, Karl May, and – last but not least – Adolf Hitler.

 Near the conclusion of Ludwig - Requiem for a Virgin King, protagonist Ludwig II sits in a state of aggravated perennial melancholy in his royal chamber, which resembles a sort of apocalyptic Teutonic purgatory featuring nude Nordic succubi holding torches and candles, after learning of Richard Wagner's death as flame-toned contemporary documentary footage of tourists visiting one of his castles is screened in the background, in what is probably the most potent allegory in the film for The Fairy Tale King’s legacy as a long obfuscated historical myth that has degenerated to the point where it makes for one of Bavaria’s best selling products. Francis Parker Yockey – a Euro-American far-right neo-Spenglerian intellectual and revolutionary – once wrote in his short political tract Enemy of Europe (1953) that if Europe did not unify under a "Prussian-ethical Future" (the sort “Prussian conservative” Syberberg would probably support), then, “the Europe of 2050 will be essentially the same as that of 1950, viz. a museum to be looted by barbarians, a historical curiosity for sightseers from the colonies; an odd assortment of operetta-states; a reservoir of human material standing at the disposal of Washington and Moscow; a loan market for New York financiers; a great beggars' colony, bowing and scraping before the American tourists.” Of course, as recent history has proven, Ludwig II, Syberberg, and Yockey’s nightmare has become more than a dystopian nightmare of slavery to a culturally and racially mongrelized former colony (United States) with a scant history, malignant multiculturalism, Hollywood cultural hegemony, indigenous population decline, and authoritarian politically correctness in what is now a cultural graveyard with virtually no potential for rebirth. Syberberg warned Germany with Ludwig - Requiem for a Virgin King and his subsequent cinematic works, but it seems everyone was too busy atoning to Judea and the rest of the aggressive and unforgiving Tschandala for the sins of their grandfathers to take notice.

 
 Of course, Syberberg would later write regarding the art of his anti-nationalistic nation that it is, "filthy and sick... in praise of cowardice and treason, of criminals, whores, of hate, ugliness, of lies and crimes and all that is unnatural."  As for his reasoning, Syberberg revealed that not all Germans have passive, dead souls when he wrote, "The Jewish interpretation of the world followed upon the Christian, just as the Christian one followed Roman and Greek culture. So now Jewish analyses, images, definitions of art, science, sociology, literature, politics, the information media, dominate. Marx and Freud are the pillars that mark the road from East to West. Neither are imaginable without Jewishness. Their systems are defined by it. The axis USA-Israel guarantees the parameters. That is the way people think now, the way they feel, act and disseminate information. We live in the Jewish epoch of European cultural history. And we can only wait, at the pinnacle of our technological power, for our last judgment at the edge of the apocalypse…. So that's the way it looks, for all of us, suffocating in unprecedented technological prosperity, without spirit, without meaning... Those who want to have good careers go along with Jews and leftists [and] the race of superior men [Rasse der Herrenmenschen] has been seduced, the land of poets and thinkers has become the fat booty of corruption, of business, of lazy comfort."  After all, in what other kind of sick, Semitic world would Roland Emmerich be the world's most famous German director and Steven Spielberg the most famous of all?!  Something tells me that after watching clips from Spielberg's Lincoln (2012), the superstar of Shoah business has never seen Ludwig - Requiem for a Virgin King, but I guess one should not expect anything less from a man who has gotten rich on destroying national film industries, appealing to grade school children, and reinventing Occidental history where the Second World War resembles a story from Brothers Grimm fairy-tales.  That being said, maybe Syberberg has exaggerated the death of German myths.

-Ty E

Christiane F. – Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo

While American’s Generation X has the softcore suburban sentimentalist angst-comedies of John Hughes, including Weird Science (1985) and The Breakfast Club (1985), as well as some more radical, working-class come-of-age flicks like Over the Edge (1979), The Wanderers (1979), and River's Edge (1986), West Germany's Gen X had the much grittier and unglamorous work, Christiane F. – Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo (1981) aka Christiane F. – We Children from Bahnhof Zoo aka Christiane F.; a relatively low-budget and decidedly depressing piece of unsentimental realist melodrama about a damaged and barely-teenage junky girl who, like her discernibly dirty and mentally-ungifted boyfriend and equally inebriated and physically emaciated friends, sells her body to buy heroin, among other undignified things. Directed by then-unknown German filmmaker Uli Edel (Last Exit to Brooklyn, Der Baader Meinhof Komplex) – who replaced the original director Roland Klick (Deadlock, Supermarkt) after he was fired by producer Bernd Eichinger (co-scriptwriter/producer of the 2004 Hitler epic Downfall aka Der Untergang) during pre-production – and based on the ghostwritten autobiography (journalists wrote the book using two months worth of candid audio-recording interviews with the junior junky) of German 'outsider celebrity' Christiane F. (born Vera Christiane Felscherinow), Christiane F. earned an instant cult following among West German youth, but also shocked older audiences into realizing that virtual children were living a lurid libertine lifestyle where they were pathetically and pathologically peddling their flesh on a day-to-day basis just so they would not have to endure opiate withdraw. The film was released not long after a heroin epidemic hit Western and Central Europe during the mid-1970s, thus making it one of the first, if not the first, junky melodrama to unsettle the ever so stoic Teutonic soul, although gritty pseudo-cinéma vérité coming-of-age flicks like Klaus Lemke's Rocker (1972) and Uwe Frießner's The End of the Rainbow (1979) aka Das Ende des Regenbogens were nothing new in Germany. Featuring a concert performance (which was actually filmed in New York City) and musical score by post-Ziggy Stardust David Bowie, Christiane F. – not unlike fellow kraut auteur Eckhart Schmidt’s Der Fan (1982) aka The Fan starring Désirée Nosbusch – ironically, to some extent, glorifies the same superficial and pseudo-spiritual rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle it rather relentlessly condemns, so it should be no surprise that both the character and the real-life Christiane F. would go on to become a ‘rebel role model’ and degenerate celebrity in the Fatherland. Needless to say, seeing your boyfriend being penetrated by a posh poof is probably not a particularly pleasant way for a little lady to remember the coming-of-age of her womanhood, but everyone knows that no one can stop a young and naïve teenage girl from making irrational sacrifices for her first boy toy in the name of idealistic young love and that certainly holds true in the pussy-pawning, toilet-bowl-clenching, vomit-friendly world of Christiane F. 

 The year is 1975 and 12-year-old Christiane Felscherinow (Natja Brunckhorst) lives in a cramped Western Berlin condo unit with her little sister and single mother who is always at work. With no real father figure around, Christiane latches on to worshipping glam rock messiah David Bowie; an androgynous fellow who is quite pretty for a boy despite being well into his thirties. When she discovers ‘Sound,’ a new disco in the city center with the unbeatable reputation of being, “the most modern discothèque in Europe,” Christiane, despite being not old enough to gain legal entry, gets all dolled up with lecherous lipstick and super high-heels, and manages to get into the virtual rock utopia with an older friend from school who is a regular at the club. As fate would have it, Christiane meets the her soon-to-be-boyfriend Detlef (Thomas Haustein) – a seemingly half-braindead degenerate who has an affinity for popping pills and tripping on LSD – and his curious crew of exceedingly gulky and gangly teenage losers who commit petty robberies while high on who knows what mind-altering chemical substances. When neo-dandy rocker god David Bowie comes to the Fatherland, it proves to be an extra special night for Christiane as she meets her virtual doppelganger Babsi (Christiane Reichelt) and rather reluctantly tries heroin for the first time by insufflating it, so as to see what her junky beau Detlef feels like and thus getting one step closer to full-blown junkydom. Before she knows it, Christiane is equally hooked on heroin as she is in love with Detlef, despite the fact he prostitutes himself to a suavely dressed sodomite who has an unhealthy obsession with Tom of Finland drawings and looks like one of the corrupt capitalist cocksuckers from Fassbinder's Fox and His Friends (1975). Christiane rarely comes home to her mother’s condo and instead squats with Detlef at a junky friend’s dilapidated apartment that is covered and trash and dirty syringes. The lanky girl and her corrupted comrades also become regulars of the Bahnhof Zoo scene – a superlatively seedy subway station where sex and drugs are regularly sold – because Christiane also needs to peddle her flesh to unconventionally ugly brown men to maintain her habit or at least so she wouldn't suffer the heated horrors of "H" withdraw. As she learns while trying to kick heroin addiction with her gay-for-pay boyfriend – opiate withdraw is a dreadful thing that makes one dream of death just to stop the pain – but the terrible twosome somehow manages to get through it, only to relapse not long after they have detoxed. Pawning her personal belongings (including the precious David Bowie album her beau bought her), stealing from her family, and losing all her dignity and a number of friends to drug overdoses are just a couple of the things Christiane must go through during her life as a juvenile junky, but it only when she walks in on her dick-peddling boyfriend Detlef being savagely manhandled by a major queen that she seems to come to her senses. Needless to say, Christiane F. has come a long way in a mere two years as someone who began as an innocent David Bowie fan and turned into teenage junky who sold her soul and body for more than just rock ‘n’ roll. 

 Although Christiane F. – Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo concludes with a postscript revealing that Christiane finally got straight and clean, the real-life teenage junky never really got over her heroin addiction and has served various prison sentences and is still in German newspaper headlines from time-to-time for drug-related arrests, though she did have a marginal musical career in the 1980s under the band name Sentimentale Jugend (with her then-boyfriend Alexander Hacke of the popular German industrial group Einstürzende Neubauten) and would also star in the German cult muzak movie Decoder (1984) directed by Muscha and also starring FM Einheit (also a member of Einstürzende Neubauten) and American avant-garde artist William “Bill” Rice (Manhattan Love Suicides, Coffee and Cigarettes) and featuring a cameo from Junky guru William S. Burroughs. Natja Brunckhorst, who played the title role in Christiane F., unlike most of the other teen actors in the film, would go on to have a marginal acting career, including appearing in German New Cinema auteur Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s final film Querelle (1982) and playing secondary roles in popular German films like The Princess and the Warrior (2000) directed by Tom Tykwer (Run Lola Run), but never again having the success and popularity she did with her first role as West Germany’s most iconic teenage junky. Director Uli Edel would go on to portray 1950s Brooklyn junky shemales in the Hollywood production Last Exit to Brooklyn (1989); a delightfully debauched cinematic adaptation of Hubert Selby Jr.’s novel of the same name, but not to the same grueling and grimy extent as in Christiane F.; probably the only film featuring David Bowie that radically depicts to the viewer that being drug-addled, destitute, and half-dead is not exactly a good thing, not to mention being the only quasi-“After School Special” that is actually intentionally entertaining and reasonably effective in its de-glorifying of the teenage street junky lifestyle, even if it did inspire a couple kraut teens to get hip to what lifelong junky novelist William S. Burrough’s called “Cocteau’s kick.” 

-Ty E

The Color of Pomegranates

Admittedly, I have next to nil interest in Armenian culture and history, yet after just viewing The Color of Pomegranates (1968) – a strikingly singular ‘Soviet’ avant-garde film of the seemingly inconspicuous ‘high-camp’ persuasion that aggressively, abstractly, and positively poetically depicts the life and poems of Armenian mystical troubadour Sayat-Nova aka “King of Song” (born Harutyun Sayatyan 14 June 1712, Tiflis – died 22 September 1795, Haghpat), a secular Christian known for his romantic expressionism and lyricism who was ordained as a priest in 1759 by the Armenian Apostolic Church and brutally slain in 1795 at a monastery by the invading army of Mohammad Khan Qajar, the Shah of Iran, for stoically refusing to denounce Christianity and convert to Islam – I can honestly say it is one of the most organic depictions of a national kultur ever captured on celluloid, albeit oftentimes hermetically and homoerotically so, so it is all the more ironic that it was created in an anti-nationalist communist dictatorship where “Socialist realism” (slave-morality driven works glorifying the ‘proletariat’) were en vogue and the only style of filmmaking sanctioned by the state. Directed by Sergei Parajanov (Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, Ashik Kerib) – A Georgian-born bisexual of ‘wise blood’ who originally started as a professional filmmaker of “Socialist realist” works in 1954, but later disowned any work he created before 1964, describing them as simply, “garbage” – The Color of Pomegranates is oftentimes regarded as the filmmaker’s cinematic masterpiece; yet due to its highly cultivated depiction of a national kultur, a romantic viewing of archaic Christianity and an enduring race of an ancient people, the film would inevitably inflame the authoritarian Soviet censor, thus resulting in the film being banned more than one time. Originally titled “Sayat Nova” after the title character, The Color of Pomegranates was assembled by Parajanov under meager conditions with a virtually nonexistent budget in 1968, but was immediately banned for its being perceived as ‘inflammatory,’ so the dedicated director reedited the footage and renamed it under its current title, only for it to be banned again in 1969. The cut of The Color of Pomegranates that exists today – Parajanov’s ‘director’s cut’ – on DVD (via Kino) that was first officially released in 1992 is the banned second cut under the present title. Soviet documentarian/cinematographer Mikhail Vartanov – a personal friend of Parajanov’s who spent his life defending his comrade and who directed the banned documentary The Color of Armenian Land (1969); a now mostly lost work, in part about the making of The Color of Pomegranates, that got the filmmaker on the KGB’s blacklist – would write quite eloquently in 1969 regarding the Armenian arthouse flick, “Besides the film language suggested by Griffith and Eisenstein, the world cinema has not discovered anything revolutionarily new until The Color of Pomegranates ..." Indeed, forget the acid-addled auteur pieces of self-glorifying occultnik and would-be-messiah Alejandro Jodorowsky, persecuted poofter Parajanov is the real deal and he did not have to rape a woman to get that way, or as film critic Alexei Korotyukov wrote, “Paradjanov made films not about how things are, but how they would have been had he been God,” whereas Mr. El Topo is merely the false messiah. 

 If any film provides ample evidence that historically, homosexuals get a kick out of subverting the regimes they live under – whether it be of the political right or left, or individualist or collectivist – The Color of Pomegranates, as well as virtually all of Parajanov’s cinematic works created after 1964, makes for a potent and poetic yet pleasantly peculiar example. A virtual ‘fag fascist’ in the eyes of Soviet censors due to his unrepentant ancestor-worship and respect for religion and the perennial nature of certain cultures and customs (despite the materialist communist fallacy that all people are ‘malleable’ material that can be molded into anything, especially after the eradication of their culture, religion, and castes), and lack of pontificating in regard to the perceived ‘nobility’ of penniless proletarians, Parajanov probably left his Soviet overlords in a state of complete and utter stupefaction with The Color of Pomegranates; a keenly culturally conscious yet mostly metaphysical celluloid work that is probably the greatest expression of the Armenian (or any other racial/ethnic/cultural group) collective unconscious ever cinematically concocted, despite the fact the director once admitted in a speech in Minsk that he doubted the contemporary Armenian public would understand it, but that they, “are going to this picture as to a holiday.” Indeed, an opiate-like celluloid oneiric of the sometimes vaguely ominous but always otherworldly and aesthetically rapturous, The Color of Pomegranates is a rare piece of cinematic art where none of the meticulously (yet rather unnoticeably minimalist) tableaux go to waste in a work that follows Sayat-Nova aka King of Song as he comes-of-age, discovers and falls in love with the female form, falls in love with a woman, and enters a monastery for what will be eternity after dying in an ‘anti-biopic’ of a person, as well as a people, told through aesthetic-driven esoteric rituals, glances, gestures, and pure poetry. Starring Paradjanov's very versatile muse Sofiko Chiaureli in no less than six of the roles, both male and female, including Sayat Nova as a youth, the poet’s lover, muse, and mime, as well as the ‘Angel of Resurrection,’ The Color of Pomegranates is a work featuring archetypes as ‘characters’ and in which the ‘color of pomegranates’ is symbolic of blood (which is featured in the film quite prominently) – the innate and perennial soul of people and a people’s memories – a color that ‘Red’ communists ironically wear as their official uniform, but for which they know nothing. As film critic Frank Williams wrote in the book World Film Directors Volume 2: 1945-1985 (1988), Paradjanov celebrates the survival of the Armenian people under relentless and unwavering waves of oppression (with the Armenian Genocide of 1915–1916 being relatively recent), writing, "There are specific images that are highly charged — blood-red juice spilling from a cut pomegranate into a cloth and forming a stain in the shape of the boundaries of the ancient Kingdom of Armenia; dyers lifting hanks of wool out of vats in the colours of the national flag, and so on."

Ironically, while the Soviet Union – a real-life dystopia rooted in class warfare and genocide that no one will miss – is gone, Sergei Parajanov’s films, like the culture he depicts in The Color of Pomegranates, will live on, if only cinematically so, which is good enough for me. Apparently, a longer cut of the film exists somewhere in the vaults of Armenfilm (an Armenian film studio in Yerevan), so until it is unearthed (if it is ever unearthed), the current cut of The Color of Pomegranates will work just fine as one of the most idiosyncratic works of cinema history that redefined film as an artistic medium and what it is capable of. Arrested in 1973 on dubious charges of rape, homosexuality and bribery for which he served 4 years of a 5 year sentence, and again in 1982 for bribery for which he spent less than a year in jail, Parajanov finally was able to direct two more cinematic masterpieces –The Legend of the Suram Fortress (1984) and Ashik Kerib (1988) before his death from lung cancer in his homeland of Armenia on July 20, 1990 at age 66, thus leaving behind the uncompleted film The Confession. With such prestigious filmmakers like François Truffaut, Luis Buñuel, Federico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Andrei Tarkovsky (who was a personal friend) coming to his aid during times of persecution and influencing modern ‘arthouse’ auteur filmmakers like Theo Angelopoulos, Béla Tarr and Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Parajanov will certainly be one of the least forgotten ancestors of his people as not only the greatest Armenian filmmaker to live (sorry Atom Egoyan!), but also one of the greatest cine-magicians to have ever lived, with The Color of Pomegranates being his finest performance. As the Armenian equivalent of German auteuress’ Ulrike Ottinger’s kraut-dyke-freak masterpiece Freak Orlando (1981) – a work of hermetic tableaux where the lead actress plays at least five different characters – except featuring the obsessive attention to aesthetic details and archetypical religious symbols of Kenneth Anger's Crowleyite masterwork Lucifer Rising (1972), The Color of Pomegranates is a rare cinematic work that reminds one that ancient alien cultures, including archaic Christian ones, can be aesthetically and sexually subversive, with auteur Sergei Parajanov himself being the modern-day Sayat Nova; a romantic Georgian-Armenian poet and mystic plagued by Soviet savagery (as opposed to the Islamic sort faced by his predecessor) who managed to create rather refined and transcendental pulchritude in a completely compromised climate of aesthetic banality and barbarism.

-Ty E

Frankenhooker

Although his almost accidentally ‘avant-garde’ black comedy horror flick Basket Case (1982) will always be my favorite film by probably the only true cinematic heir of classic 42nd Street Grindhouse exploitation flicks from the 1960s and 1970s, Frank Henenlotter (Brain Damage, Bad Biology) probably was most successful with his malformed marriage between bodacious ‘body horror’ and putrid postmodern slapstick and lunatic low-camp with his consciously and exceedingly exploitative and semitically eccentric anti-tribute to both James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931) and Bride of Frankenstein (1935), Frankenhooker (1990). While Whale’s films are cultivated works of high-camp Gothic eloquence, Henenlotter’s Frankenhooker – a seedy and equally satirical work that manages to cinematically synthesize the cultural cynicism, misanthropic trashiness, and absurdist bodily dismemberment of Andy Milligan (The Body Beneath, Fleshpot on 42nd Street), the urban grittiness and social alienation of Abel Ferrara (Ms. 45, Fear City), and the Yiddish vaudevillian slapstick of the Marx Brothers (Duck Soup, A Night at the Opera) – is the sort of aberrant apocalyptic (albeit hardly serious) cinematic work of racial, moral, and cultural chaos that brings credence to American horror master H.P. Lovecraft’s words regarding New York City: “The organic things -Italo-Semitico-Mongoloid- inhabiting that awful cesspool could not by any stretch of the imagination be call’d human. They were monstrous and nebulous adumbrations of the pithecanthropoid and amoebal; vaguely moulded from some stinking viscous slime of earth’s corruption, and slithering and oozing in and on the filthy streets or in and out of windows and doorways in a fashion suggestive of nothing but infesting worms or deep-sea unnamabilities. They -or the degenerate gelatinous fermentation of which they were composed- seem’d to ooze, seep and trickle thro’ the gaping cracks in the horrible houses… and I thought of some avenue of Cyclopean and unwholesome vats, crammed to the vomiting-point with gangrenous vileness, and about to burst and innundate the world in one leprous cataclysm of semi-fluid rottenness.” Indeed, with its Hispanic bohunk pimps with multicultural army of female fleshpeddling crack whores, physically grotesque and morbidly obese Der Stürmer-esque caricatures of Jewish Johns and crackheads, race/gender-hustling ‘special interest’ groups entitled H.O.O.K.E.R. (Hold Onto Our Knowledge of Equal Rights), nefarious Negro pimps who tell people to ‘Do the Right Thing’ (undeniably an attack on Spike Lee’s irrationality-inspiring 1989 film of the same name), near-elderly, crusty-cunt strippers, post-industrial urban decay and sickening ‘street trash’ (it is no coincidence that the star of Henenlotter’s film made his debut in the 1987 horror/black comedy Street Trash), Unabomber paranoia and acute autism of the lead protagonist, and the most nasally nauseating accents in human history, the unwavering degeneracy and proletarian decadence of the NYC featured in Frankenhooker pales in terms of its all-around horrifying persuasion than the one Lovecraft wrote about during the early Twentieth Century. Needless to say, if there was any worse era for one to be resembled after being run over with a remote control tractor with the body parts of drug-addicted hookers and reanimated via crack by a quack doctor, it is the zany zeitgeist featured in Frankenhooker. 

 Having a beauteous, albeit big-boned, fiancée (former Penthouse Pet Patty Mullen in an absurd fat suit), neurotic novice mad scientist Jeffrey Franken (James Lorinz) has everything a nefarious nerd from New Jersey could ever dream of, so when his girlfriend is gutted and grinded up in a freak lawnmower accident, he gets right to work reassembling and reanimating her postmortem body in a maniacal manner that would put emotionally vacant psychopath Herbert West of Re-Animator (1985) to shame. A crackpot genius of refined taste, Jeffrey engages in trephination via an electronic drill whenever he needs some intellectual inspiration to literally penetrate his brain. One night after a couple moments of insightful and orgasmic trepanning, jaded Jeff takes a trip to the more sleazy side of NYC’s sidewalks to see if any of the voluptuous crack-addicted prostitutes will make for good limbs for his female Frankenstein bride project, but instead he discovers the wild wonders of crack rocks, which will prove to be the missing ingredient to put his finishing touches on his reanimating and electrifying elixir. Jeffrey makes the rather wise decision of buying the marvelous miracle drug in a slimy bathroom with Star of David graffiti drawn on doors of the bathroom stalls from a drug-dealing macho meathead of a pimp named Zorro (Joseph Gonzalez); a muscleman misogynist who makes all of his girls wear “Z” trademark emblem (which he also sports like a retarded rapper on a gold chain) on their arms, which were carved in. Jeffrey also makes a business arrangement of sorts with Zorro, in which he sets up a huge hotel ‘party’ for the next night with Zorro's entire crew of crack whores, so he has a large selection of body parts to pick from for his dead fiancée. Needless to say, being a nervous nerd, Jeffrey chickens out like a true cuckold during his big night with the girls, but one of the predatory prostitutes discovers the mini would-be-mad-scientist’s stash of crack-laced reanimation potion, thus inspiring all the girls to smoke the rocks while ignoring their gentle John’s warnings. By happenstance, Jeffrey manages to get all the bodies parts, albeit mismatched, but beautiful biological material nonetheless when the girls' bodies explode after smoking the demented doc’s special blend. Jeffrey manages to bring his fiancée back to life, but little did he suspect that she would be a severely slutty and salacious ‘Frankenhooker’ (also played by Patty Mullen) whose sexual magnetism makes men explode in more ways than one.  Apparently, Jeffrey did not take in consideration that all personalities of the dead hookers whose dismembered bodies he used for his Miss Modern Prometheus would be blended in with his lady loves, thus resulting in a severely schizo she-bitch held together with stitches who has sexual itches she must scratch, but not without a monetary and ultimately murderous return. When Zorro discovers his trademark “Z” logo on the undead prostitute's arm, he begins to investigate, thus ending in a final showdown between Jeffrey and his beloved Frankenhooker and the Latin pimp. 

 Concluding with a castrating surprise ending that would make any fan of ‘body horror’ feel like a born-again eunuch, Frankenhooker is a curiously crude yet clever low-camp classic of black comedy horror in an easily digestible, if not deleterious, form that – in its sardonic treatment of societal ills – is the squalid celluloid equivalent of dismembered Sour Patch kids candy laced with Adderall with a pinch of passé punk aesthetic asininity. If one could argue that aberrant-garde auteur Frank Henenlotter has a distinctive talent as a filmmaker, its is taking the 42nd Street celluloid exploitation trash of yesteryear in making it more palatable to more discerning audiences by adding a biting bit of debasing irony, as well as pumping up the volume on aesthetic and thematic vulgarity, yet at the same time refraining from totally mindlessly wallowing filth for an intolerable period of time like his fiendish filmic forefathers did. If you ever dreamed of seeing Elvira as the flesh-peddling bimbo bride of Frankenstein, but with same sort of sassy and ‘sexy’ attitude that Ms. Peterson is known and loved for (albeit to a less refined but more topless degree), Frankenhooker is indubitably your next best bet as a bodacious and even morally belligerent work of black comedy body horror that makes the unhinged world of crack-addicted hookers and whores of the typical Zionist American politician’s wet dream for anti-Anglo American into a semite-unsafe iconoclastic nightmare where hookers literally bust balls and dismember bodies, especially of obese hook-nosed fellows, everywhere between their gated New Jersey homes in suburbia and the cultural chaos they help stir up in cesspools of NYC that, “by any stretch of the imagination be call’d human.” 

-Ty E

Wise Blood

 It must be a sick joke of sorts for a serious actor to be best known as the voice of a killer doll, but such is the case for eccentric character actor Brad Dourif (Blue Velvet, The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans); a talented man who always feared being typecast as a player of disturbed and deranged characters, yet made the career mistake of getting involved with the Child's Play horror franchise (with the original 1988 Child's Play being the only film where the actor did more than just providing his voice, acting as Chucky's human progenitor, serial killer Charles Lee Ray). Indeed, although Dourif is rarely known for playing lead roles, especially in famous films, he does play the anomalous anti-hero in John Huston’s (but credited as “Jhon Huston”) fiercely farcical celluloid ‘low comedy’ Wise Blood (1979), a relatively faithful adaptation of Flannery O'Connor’s 1952 Southern Gothic novel of the same name. Criticized throughout her career for concocting so-called ‘grotesque’ characters, Wise Blood was a literary work that had this claim leveled at it and Huston’s idiosyncratic and iconoclastic film is no different as an ostensibly heretical yet strangely holy work that portrays the American Deep South as a place populated by two people: charlatan Christian preachers of the bastardized protestant persuasion who always have some master scam and the everyday philistine citizens that embrace these con men of Christ. Technically an American-West German production (Der Ketzer or Die Weisheit des Blutes in Krautland and Le Malin in France) and filmed mainly in and around Macon, Georgia, the Deep Fried South featured in Wise Blood is the sort of sordid and unsophisticated degenerate dead civilization that Baltimore anti-Christ/wordsmith H.L. Mencken wrote about where medieval metaphysics is the norm, so certainly things turn strange for a community of unreformed Confederates when a disillusioned ex-G.I. returns to the Bible Belt and radically rebels against his upbringing, thus becoming a nihilistic preacher who starts a ‘Church of Truth without Christ’ (and without a brick and mortar church) where, “the deaf don't hear, the blind don't see, the lame don't walk, the dumb don't talk, and the dead stay that way,” and proudly and petulantly proclaims in a peeved manner, “I don’t believe in anything” and that, “sin is a trick on niggers.” Of course, being a passionate pessimist and subversive skeptic in "The Sahara of the Bozart" (as Mencken called it) is bound to drive one crazy or so the perturbed protagonist of Wise Blood finds out as he does everything in his means to subconsciously crucify himself. 

 A man with a very large and in charge chip on his shoulder, Hazel Motes (Brad Dourif) – an ex-soldier who apparently earned the Purple Heart for his service in the Second World War, but is disappointed to discover his family home in Tennessee is abandoned – immediately begins to develop an all-consuming bout of megalomania when he arrives at a small Southern town via train. After a taxi driver remarks that he looks like a preacher due to his 'preacher hat' and curious brand of charisma, Motes ‘finds his calling’ on the path of the godless as an absurdly agitated and antagonistic anti-Christ proletarian prophet who dedicates his life to discrediting the word of God and his only bastard son.  Luckily, Motes does not have to look hard to find his first disciple, Enoch Emory (Dan Shor) – a half-retarded zookeeper who hates and verbally taunts a monkey in the zoo because, “he acts like he thinks he’s as good as me or you,” – obsessively follows him around upon first meeting him because he, “don’t know nobody” and no one will have, “nothin’ to with him.” Of course, Hazel is not exactly the most handsome nor humble man, so he finds himself sleeping with obese Southern Belles from hell, which result in nightmares about how he misspent his youth as the grandson of a carny huckster preacher (ironically played by lifelong atheist, director John Huston). Intelligent yet uneducated and charismatic yet anti-social, mad Motes is on a futile campaign against crooks of Christ that starts with a debunking of pseudo-blind preacher named Asa Hawks' (Harry Dean Stanton) supposed blinding via lime and defiling his bastard daughter Sabbath Lily (Amy Wright) after he moves into the same boarding house in which they live. Of course, Hazel becomes turned off when he discovers that Lily is a lecherous nymphomaniac who was deflowered a long time ago because after concluding that she was born a bastard and would be going to hell as a result, she decided might as well engage in her fair share of sins of the flesh. After Hazel reveals that Hawks did not have enough gall to actually blind himself, he leaves town, thus leaving his daughter Lily in the carnal care of the nihilist prophet. Meanwhile, dullard boy wonder Enoch Emory steals a mummified shrunken dwarf from a display case in a degenerate museum because he is convinced it will make for a stupendous ‘baby Jesus-like’ prophet icon for Hazel’s church. In a scene parodying the famous ‘Madonna and Child’ icon, Lily cradles the dried up dwarf in her arms as if it is her baby while a blanket is draped over her head, which inflames Hazel, who smashes the mummy to pieces and throws it out the window. When a local conman named Hoover Shoats (Ned Betty) – who initially tries to go into business with the ‘Church of Truth without Christ’ but the anti-priest (who is not interested in cash but spreading the gospel of the godless) turns him down – starts a rip-off of Hazel’s church entitled “The Holy Church of Christ Without Christ” featuring a drunk wino modeled after Hazel as the pseudo-religion's prophet, the young godless preacher is quite enraged, murderously so. One night, Hazel follows the rag-to-riches derelict in his car (which is just like Hazel’s) and runs him off the road, orders him to strip, and then violently murders the man by running him over multiple times. Needless to say, Hazel, despite his spiritual iconoclasm, is a ‘true believer’ and maybe the only truly ‘religious’ man in town (aside from Enoch). On top of killing a bum and having his beloved car destroyed by a sinister yet hospitable police officer, Hazel becomes withdrawn like a monk and does what Asa Hawks never had the gall to do – blinding himself via lime and living as a self-flagellating sinner, thus discovering ‘humility’ for the first time in his life. 

 Oddly enough, director John Huston disagreed with the ‘meaning’ of the ending of his own film Wise Blood. While star Brad Dourif and most other viewers of the film tend to agree that unholy heretic Hazel finally “finds God” in the end, albeit in an exceedingly grotesque way, stern atheist John Huston apparently disagreed with this interpretation, but in the end, it is without question that the the anti-priest inevitably adopts a life of asceticism and abstinence where all worldly pleasures of the flesh, including the ability to see, are fully revoked in a most unwavering manner. As the now-blind Hazel tells his landlady, “You can’t see,” but he indubitably seems to believe he can as a lapsed nihilist. Of course, anyone who has ever met an atheist ‘true believer’ sort – the type of close-minded individual who genuinely believes they know the truth and has a pathological, almost perverse drive to proselytize to everyone about it, especially happy Christians, because they want everyone to be just as miserable as they are as a godless prophet with the key to the universe – one could argue that John Huston cannot see the world outside the narrow lenses of his orthodox anti-religious religion of self-satisfied atheism, but he surely made a sardonically spiritual film with Wise Blood; a work more holy and theological than his religious epic The Bible: In the Beginning (1966), a cinematic work that depicted the first 22 chapters of the Book of Genesis. Very possibly the only worthwhile ‘Southern Gothic’ film of its time and certainly one of the most overlooked works of John Huston’s long and cinematically fruitful career, especially considering the auteur was already over 70-years-old when he directed it. I guess Huston had some of that ‘Wise Blood’ – an instinctive worldly knowledge and weltanschauung of what direction to take to take in one’s life that does not need spiritual nor emotional guidance – that rhapsodic retard Enoch Emory spoke of, but I am sure the unbelieving atheistic auteur would have fervently denied it. 

-Ty E