The Satin Spider

 

If Swiss auteur Daniel Schmid (La Paloma, Shadow of Angels aka Schatten der Engel) attempted to direct a sub-high-camp lipstick lesbian-themed Nunsploitation flick, it might have resembled the decidedly decadent dandyish dyke-fest L'araignée de Satin AKA The Satin Spider (1984) directed by French auteur Jacques Baratier and starring Ingrid Caven (who was incidentally Schmid’s filmic diva/muse and Fassbinder’s ex-wife) and Catherine Jourdan (The Girl on a Motorcycle, Eden and After). Co-penned by French feminist filmmaker Catherine Breillat (Fat Girl, Anatomy of Hell) and based on the marginal 1921 proto-surrealist play Les Détraquées written by Pierre Palau and Polish-French neurologist Joseph Babinski revolving around the murder of a young girl at an all girls school by the principal and her accomplice, which alpha-surrealist André Breton referenced in his iconic novel Nadja (1928), The Satin Spider is a pleasantly politically incorrect combination of sensual Sapphic sleaze, wacky and wanton pop-psychology, macabre diva worship, pseudo-spiritual surrealism, Dietrich-esque teenage drag king debauchery, and other tastelessly tasteful things that is more likely to interest fans of high-camp European arthouse cinema and sadomasochistic Sapphic Gothic girls than art-antagonistic fans of Women in Prison films (WiP) and other forms of Euro-sleaze and exploitation cinema. Although virtually unknown today, The Satin Spider director Jacques Baratier won the Jury Prize at the 1958 Cannes Film Festival for his celluloid fable Goha (1958) starring Omar Sharif and would go on to director other notable avant-garde works like the campy and surreal sci-fi flick La poupée (1962) and the expressionistic gothic ‘game’ flick Piège (1970) starring Bulle Ogier and playwright/filmmaker Fernando Arrabal. Baratier’s penultimate work before his death in 2009 at the well past ripe age of 91 years old, The Satin Spider is clearly the work of a man who had to sacrifice some of his artistic vision for sex appeal so as to get more perverts into theaters, but one must respect an elderly old school auteur who has the gall to direct a femme fatale-filled film about lethal and lecherous lesbians. A perversely poetic and pathologically phantasmagorical work crammed with lurid, sordid, and sensually sacrilegious themes typical of filmmakers/writers like Alain Robbe-Grillet, Georges Bataille, Walerian Borowczyk, Jean Cocteau, and Fernando Arrabal, among countless others, that unquestionablly makes for the perfect double-feature with the abnormally good nunsploitation flick Killer Nun (1978) aka Suor Omicidi starring Anita Ekberg and Joe Dallesandro, but also makes for a bittersweet guilty pleasure for Werner Schroeter fans, The Satin Spider—a perverse period piece set in decadent France right after World War I centering around a kraut carpet-muncher-controlled French Catholic school for girls—brings reasonably superlative style, but not much substance, to lesbo pederasty, aberrant Catholic mysticism, morphine-inspired exorcisms, and molestation-based mental illness. 

 It is the early 1920s and Madame de Challens (Ingrid Caven) is the hot yet patently pernicious and perverted Aryan headmistress at the French Catholic Les Fauvettes School for Girls and she rather enjoys her job as it gives her the perfect cover for molesting beauteous young girls and converting them to the cock-less world of lipstick lesbianism. Solange (Catherine Jourdan) is the headmistress’ semi-butch lover and the gynocentric gym/ballet teacher of the school who sports a bleach blonde dude cut reminiscent of Mia Farrow from Rosemary's Baby (1968) and has an unhealthy addiction to morphine and satin fabric, the latter of which has turned her into a reckless kleptomaniac who cannot help but steal any and every piece of satin she spots in stores. Due to her debilitating satin sickness, Solange has been arrested many times, which has led her to be put under the observation of a perverted psychologist, who wallows in parading around the luscious lezzy in front of his quack soul-doctor friends. When an ebony-haired and large-eyed teenage debutante schoolgirl named Lucienne (Alexandra Sycluna), who lost her Iron Cross-decorated Teutonic father during the Great War and has never been mentally the same since, runs away from the Les Fauvettes School for Girls, she brings back a peculiar police inspector named Levron (Michel Albertini), who questions principal Challens about the dubious suicide of a young pupil who apparently threw herself down a well. A callous and calculating cold cunt ice queen in existentialist hell who lost her ‘great love’ long ago (she ritualistically places flowers in a vase next to a portrait of herself and her dead girlfriend), Challens wears her innate emotional brutality and bodacious bitchiness on her sleeve, so the inspector concludes she might be a girl-killer when she chalks up the suicide of the child to mere “bad luck.” 

 Things get rather risky in the already radically risqué world of The Satin Spider when a bizarre love triangle develops between principal Challens, gym teacher Solange, and pupil Lucienne, with the former two vying for the attention of the latter when not rubbing bushes with one another. While Challens is busy looking at pornographic portraits she has taken of her pupils, as well as attempting to get into the panties of as many said pupils as possible, Solange takes Lucienne to a magical island mansion via boat, where the two delight in decadent romance. After Lucienne dresses up in ancient knight armor, Solange declares the regalia to be the “perfect chastity belt” and proceeds to sexually “conquer” her “piece by piece.” Whilst molesting young lass Lucienne in a melancholy morphine haze, Solange confesses her satin fetish is the result of being raped on a train as a young girl by a man (also played by Michel Albertini) with satin gloves, who ultimately died when the train crashed and whose presence (she constantly dreams/daydreams of him) and sexual prowess has haunted her ever since. Meanwhile, the rest of the girls from the Les Fauvettes School make their way to the mansion on the ‘Island of Sand’ for a naughty night of nympho hedonism.  After Ingrid Caven as Challens gives one of her iconic diva cabaret performances in the merry yet melancholy vein of Schmid’s La Paloma (1974) and Fassbinder’s Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven (1975), a psychologist declares she has “an alarming urge for self-flagellation,” thus associating lesbianism with self-degradation. After Challens' charming camp act, a number of the schoolgirls put on male suits and slick back their hair, and as debauched drag queens, dance with other girls, eventually (de)evolving into an all out Sapphic orgy of the non-penetrating sort. The next day, Lucienne, who has a propensity for acting erratically and running away, disappears and inspector Levron smells foul play. As later revealed, a quack of a Catholic priest who has an unhealthy obsession with Thomas Aquinas performs an erotic exorcism on Lucienne while the girl lay nude on the altar. While assuming the exorcism was successful due to Lucienne's spastic snake-like movements that eventually result with the melodramatic collapse on the unclad girl, the lost lesbo soul was actually fed an overdose of morphine by Solange and has simply dropped dead. While in an opium-addled psychosis, Solange mistakes inspector Levron, who as an officer of the law has no problems groping the lunatic lezzy with his satin gloves, as the man who raped her long ago, but she is is in for a startling surprise when she is arrested for the murder of lovely fallen angel Lucienne. In the end, the Les Fauvettes School for Girls more resembles a lascivious loony bin for lipstick lesbians than a conserative place of Catholic studies. 

 In what upon superficial glance seems to a banal church scene during the first half of The Satin Spider, the school girls sing the symbolic song lyrics “husband of my soul” while with an icon of Jesus Christ superimposed in the background, thus assumedly insinuating that Catholicism breeds lesbianism while also making for the perfect cover for a cock-celibate crypto-carpet-muncher, thereupon making the film the inverse of the stereotypical homo priest pederasty. Like French auteur Alain Fleischer’s phantasmagorical surrealist Zoo zéro (1979), which also starred Catherine Jourdan, and Jean-Pierre Mocky’s absurdist horror flick Litan (1980), The Satin Spider is an idiosyncratic celluloid oddity that transcends the typically fine line between cultivated kitsch and cheesy Euro-sleaze, which also makes it a cinematic work with a very marginal audience. Aside from possibly its aberrantly amorous Sapphic sex scenes, The Satin Spider is also bound to offend lesbians, especially of the loony lipstick sort, as it portrays them as intemperate nymphomaniacs suffering from various forms of neurosis. For example, Solange became a Sappho sadist after being brutally raped, thus making her incapable of consummating coitus with men.

 Rather surprisingly, the most politically correct book Images in the Dark: An Encyclopedia of Gay and Lesbian Film and Video (1994) gave The Satin Spider a reasonably favorable review, stating of the film, “this psychological suspense drama drips with lesbian sexuality…The plot revolves around the disappearance of a girl and the ensuing police investigation, but it is not the thriller aspect that will interest the viewer but rather its bold, sensuous depiction of women loving women.” Not surprisingly, my girlfriend, who is rampantly and unabashedly heterosexual, found seeing her hero Ingrid Caven groping young girls to be rather revolting and even grotesque, which I cannot blame her for, and one can only assume what the actress' homosexual ex-husband Rainer Werner Fassbinder would have thought about it had he seen the film. Personally, I enjoyed The Satin Spider simply because Caven stars in the film in such an atypical role, even if she essentially plays the role she always plays; herself, albeit with a lily-licking twist.  A gynocentric Gothic psychodrama dripping with Sapphic sensuality and sizzling diva juices, The Satin Spider is like the The Magdalene Sisters (2002) from pussy purgatory meets the retarded but more beauteous stepsister of Day of the Idiots (1981), even if it is not especially sexually explicit in its imagery as a Nunsploitation film like Walerian Borowczyk's Interno di un convento (1978) aka Behind Convent Walls, but it certainly made me think wounded diva Ingrid Caven should have taken on more seductively Sapphic roles during her acting career.

-Ty E

The Sudden Wealth of the Poor People of Kombach

In his revolutionary cineaste book Film as a Subversive Art (1974), American film critic Amos Vogel wrote regarding West German auteur Volker Schlöndorff’s subversive TV Movie The Sudden Wealth of the Poor People of Kombach (1971) aka Der plötzliche Reichtum der armen Leute von Kombach, “An excellent example of a particularly interesting new genre of young German cinema; bizarre, deadly serious variations on the reactionary German "Heimat" films of yore – those insufferable, sentimental "kitsch" prosodies to Fatherland, Soil, and Family. This fully realized work effectively upsets this tradition by recounting a tale of oppressed 19th-century German peasants who become rebels against the state out of poverty, revealing (instead of romanticizing) the brutal degradation of German rural life at the time. Particularly audacious is the presence of an itinerant Jew peddler as mastermind (!) of the conspiracy, predictably leading to (unfounded) charges of anti-semitism against a young director who has dared to reintroduce the Jew into German dramaturgy.” Indeed, being a Viennese-born Jew himself who got the hell of Austria after the Nazi Anschluß in 1938, Vogel most certainly had a special sensitivity regarding all things Jewish and German and his remark about the nationalistic Heimat film speaks loud and clear regarding his feelings toward Teutonic unity, so it should be no surprise that the films of Volker Schlöndorff (Young Törless, The Tin Drum)—an ethno-masochistic kraut and flagrant Francophile who has spent a good portion of his filmmaking career promoting feminism and far-left politics, as well as cinematically denigrating his own nation and people—would catch his fancy. Following in the anti-Heimat trend popular among West German far-leftist filmmakers, which began with Hunting Scenes from Bavaria (1969) aka Jagdszenen aus Niederbayern directed by Peter Fleischmann and including works like Nachtschatten (1972) aka Nightshade directed by Niklaus Schilling and Heart of Glass (1976) aka Herz aus Glas directed by Werner Herzog, The Sudden Wealth of the Poor People of Kombach essentially demystifies German history from a materialistic quasi-Marxist angle, depicting nineteenth-century Teutonic peasant life as innately miserable, hard work as evil (a false assumption undoubtedly inspired by Marx’s Jewish background as recognized by Oswald Spengler), and government and the state as being ruled by slave-driving proto-fascist sadists. Starring a number of important auteur filmmakers of German New Cinema, including Rainer Werner Fassbinder (The Marriage of Maria Braun, Querelle), Margarethe von Trotta (Rosa Luxemburg, Hannah Arendt), Reinhard Hauff (Knife in the Head, Stammheim - Die Baader-Meinhof-Gruppe vor Gericht), The Sudden Wealth of the Poor People of Kombach features an outmoded stoner-inspired Krautrock-like score, whiny men with horrendous hippie haircuts, and a cookie-cutter 68er-Bewegung message that was certainly made to appeal to even the most braindead of drug-addled degenerates belonging to the kraut counter-culture movement. The story of a junk-peddling Jew of the proto-Bolshevik variety who concocts a clever criminal conspiracy to rob a government carriage containing tax money in the forests of the Hessian hinterland and convinces a bunch of uneducated German peasant farmers, laborers, and soldiers to help him do the majority of the dirty work as any sensible chosenite would, The Sudden Wealth of the Poor People of Kombach is a sort of allegorical Trotskyite fairytale loosely based on a true story that ends in tragedy where the Germans ultimately die by the sword due to their affinity for Teutonic land and incapacity for deracinating themselves, but the rootless cosmopolitan Judaic manages to get away scot-free and make his way to America.

 It is Fall 1821 and while cutting the grass for some rich portly fellow and minding his own business, blond Aryan superman Jacob Geiz (Karl-Josef Cramer) is approached by a religious Jewish peddler named David Briel (Wolfgang Bächler) who calculatedly states, “Jacob, I know a way to help both of us if we can get some trusty people” and, like the devil himself, tells him of his criminal plot to rob a carriage carrying tax money through the Hessian forests. Jacob agrees and gets his farmer father Hans-Jacob (Georg Lehn), brother Heinrich (far-left filmmaker Reinhard Hauff), farmer friend Johannes Soldan (Harald Müller), as well as two laborers Ludwig Acker (Harry Owen) and Jost Wege and a soldier to join the outfit. While all men are poor and need the money, especially due to a rise in taxes, many of them have their own personal reasons for joining. For example, Heinrich Geiz had a baby out of wedlock with a gal named Sophie (Margarethe von Trotta), but cannot afford to pay for a wedding and the soldier is in a similar boat. The Geiz family is also more broke than usual due to a bad season for crops. As narrated by an off-screen Marxist-trained female narrator, the peasants "kept ignorant throughout the centuries, and they were unable to see the cause of their misery. Only emigration to the New World, poaching, or treasure hunting were seen as a way out of poverty,” and sophisticated Semite David Briel gives them hope by reading them a letter from a Jewish friend in America that absurdly reads, “America is the land of milk and honey. The cows are grazing on evergreen meadows. You find honey in hollow trees. You can have as many cattle as you want. You don’t have to get food from them, only in the winter. And the land is so good, you don’t need any fertilizer. You can grow anything every year after plowing it up, that’s enough. And it’s not like in Germany where they take away what little you’ve got in taxes and whatnot. Here the farmer is his own master. We eat more meat than you eat bread, and drink coffee and wine like you drink water. Milwaukee, 1821.” Of course, as time will tell, unlike the wandering Jew, the kraut proletarians have an innate incapacity from uprooting themselves from their land and immigrating to the lovely land of milk and honey. 

 The conspirators make their first attempt at robbing the tax carriage on Christmas night 1821, but the snow causes them to fail. The men fail/abort attempting to pull off the robbery a number of other times as well, including after coming to the realization that there is no money inside the carriage, after spotting too many soldiers guarding the carriage, and getting stuck in a thick mist that blinds their vision, etc. Eventually, everyone decides to abandon the master plan, but they decide to give it another retry and finally succeed, acting rather humanely in the process, making the mistake of sparing the lives of the soldiers and the man driving the carriage. Much more clever than his goy kraut criminal compatriots, David Briel warns the German peasants not to go around spending the money right away as it will look suspicious to the authorities being that poor men do not have money to purchase expensive things, poetically preaching, “How beautiful is the world.  So they built a house, put in chairs and tables, and a kitchen with a fireplace where you can find coffee, milk and sugar and beautiful plates, and that's all of it for us!  It's just like a fairytale.  Just you beware.  Think of the golden ass!”, but they naturally do not take heed of the Hebrew's wise words. Heinrich has a large wedding with a grand feast, which makes everyone in Kombach suspicious. A Gestapo-esque judge named Richter Danz (Wilhelm Grasshoff) is brought in to solve the mystery of the tax carriage robbery and immediately assumes it was committed by peasants and puts a look out for any poor person spending big bucks. Danz also offers an award of 300 guilders to anyone who provides evidence leading to an arrest and after Jacob Geiz makes the inevitably fatal mistake of giving a couple coins to a starving elderly man, the old man pays back him back by immediately going to the judge for the award money and tattles on the young altruistic farmer. Eventually Jacob and his brother and father are arrested, but admit nothing to Danz. A perennial coward in the face of fear, Ludwig Acker soon turns himself in and confesses everything, thereupon incriminating all his comrades in the process. Before they can be tried and convicted, two of the men commit the unpardonable sin of suicide, one by hanging and the other by firearm. In order to end their lives with the last rites, repentant and in a state of grace, the men also confess where the bank robbery money is hidden, except for Heinrich, who fights with his brother and father, who attempt to get him to repent.  Heinrich also physically assaults the judge during the trial after being sentenced to death while cowardly friends and family watch in an exceedingly impotent fashion. When his wife Sophie tries to get him to repent, Heinrich proclaims like a true Marxist martyr that he refuses to because, “That’s how they break you.” In the end, the men are executed by being decapitated via sword, but before he “dies like a man” (as indicated by the narrator), Heinrich states, “Like my life will be torn, so must you be torn,”  thereupon figuratively spitting in the faces of his executioners.

 Out of all the characters featured in The Sudden Wealth of the Poor People of Kombach, only Jewish conman David Briel gets away, concluding regarding the whole ordeal, “The money made me free. The farmers couldn’t use the money because they only knew their land. When they touch the land, they know if it’s good for potatoes or corn. But when they touch money, they don’t know how to handle it. They can’t show it, because a poor man with money is suspect. And a farmer can’t go to another place, because his land won’t follow him and he fears what he doesn’t know. But I am free. I have no home or land to hold me. I got where I want to go. The New World is waiting for me. New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Mississippi, New Orleans, Florida, Buffalo, Arizona, Ohio, Texas, Arkansas…” Undoubtedly, judging by the character of David Briel, it would not be a stretch to conclude that Volker Schlöndorff is a groveling philo-Semite who seems to believe that Jews make the ultimate political revolutionaries due to their innate rootlessness and lack of attachment to German soil and culture, which is at least one thing I can agree with him on. Of course, it is easy to see why some critics found Schlöndorff and his work The Sudden Wealth of the Poor People of Kombach to be anti-Semitic as the film essentially makes the same argument as the Nazis regarding the subversive/criminal nature of Jews and their treachery towards host nations, the difference being that the director respects them for this as opposed to hating them. As Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who ironically has a cameo in The Sudden Wealth of the Poor People of Kombach, once infamously stated, “philosemities are anti-Semites who loves Jews,” which can certainly be said of Volker Schlöndorff and his ex-wife Margarethe von Trotta, whose works Rosa Luxemburg (1986), Rosenstrasse (2003), and Hannah Arendt (2012) are easily some of the most shabbos goy-esque cinematic works ever made. 

 As mentioned in The Sudden Wealth of the Poor People of Kombach, about 1/10 of the Hessian population left Germany in the nineteenth-century, a good percentage of which immigrated to the United States and shed their Teutonic identities forever. In fact, despite not being common knowledge, according to 2009 census studies, 50 million Americans (17.1% of the American population), myself included, are of German extraction, thus making them the largest ancestry group in the country, even ahead of the Scots-Irish. The fact that despite being the majority population, German Americans have fully assimilated into America and have all but totally disappeared in the white population just goes to show the deracinating power of the United States, thus one can argue that there is something distinctly Jewish about America, which is hinted at in The Sudden Wealth of the Poor People of Kombach and is further supported by the fact that America has the largest Hebraic population in the world and is the largest supporter of Israel. Of course, America is essentially a cultureless and materialistic nation with a mostly peasant collective. With The Sudden Wealth of the Poor People of Kombach, director Volker Schlöndorff, who undoubtedly has a materialistic Marxist view of history, reduces nationhood and religion to nothing more than slavery, presenting it as a sort of figurative ball-and-chain, completely ignoring the beauty of blood and soil, but also culture and tradition. In fact, The Sudden Wealth of the Poor People of Kombach depicts religious people as moronic and superstitious untermensch, on top of portraying peasants as savage wife-beaters and rapists. Of course, America has never produced a Martin Luther, Goethe, Nietzsche, Beethoven, Murnau, or even Herzog, as such a mongrelized ‘multicultural’ country lacks organic culture material to sire such greatness. As the Great Sicilian Baron Julius Evola once write, “America ... has created a 'civilization' that represents an exact contradiction of the ancient European tradition. It has introduced the religion of praxis and productivity; it has put the quest for profit, great industrial production, and mechanical, visible, and quantitative achievements over any other interest. It has generated a soulless greatness of a purely technological and collective nature, lacking any background of transcendence, inner light, and true spirituality. America has [built a society where] man becomes a mere instrument of production and material productivity within a conformist social conglomerate.” Taking the magical Baron’s quote into consideration, the greatest irony regarding Volker Schlöndorff and his filmmaking career is that, despite his worship of materialism and lifelong cinematic denigration of his German Fatherland, he could never have made a film like The Sudden Wealth of the Poor People of Kombach outside of Europe. Maybe it's my partial peasant blood talking, but it is also very doubtful that a peasant would direct a film like The Sudden Wealth of the Poor People of Kombach where their entire existence is reduced to miserable serfdom. After all, it is usually members of the bourgeois like Karl Marx himself, who never worked a single day in his life, that treats work as an unholy sin.  A sort of insipidly idealistic ‘red Robin Hood and his less than Merry Marxist Men’ in the bleeding heart anti-Heimat vein, The Sudden Wealth of the Poor People of Kombach is undoubtedly well crafted and even engrossing, if not for all the wrong reasons as a work that incriminates the Jew in its flagrant philo-Semitism, thus making it interesting to rightists as well as leftists.  If one learns anything from The Sudden Wealth of the Poor People of Kombach, it is that following the lead of a subversive Hebrew might lead to your destruction.

-Ty E

Mala Noche

Throughout his career, especially after his big mainstream success with Good Will Hunting (1997), American queer auteur Gus Van Sant (My Own Private Idaho, To Die For) has switched around from making uncompromising quasi-arthouse works like Elephant (2003) and Last Days (2005) to for-hire commercial swill like his senseless shot-for-shot remake of Hitchcock’s Psycho (1998) to celebrated LGBT propaganda flicks like Milk (2008), as if the filmmaker cannot decide whether he wants to be a serious cinematic artistic, wealthy household (homo) name, and/or foremost filmic propagandist of the mainstream gay community, which leads me to believe he lacks a certain testicular fortitude and sense of stern and serious Weltanschauung, thus I have never been able to truly respect him as a director, even if he has assembled a celluloid masterpiece or two. Undoubtedly, Van Sant’s first feature-length work Mala Noche (1986) aka Bad Night—a phantasmagorical poof piece shot on bold black-and-white celluloid—is far from a masterpiece, but it does give ample evidence that there was a time when the filmmaker was not cuckolded by Hollywood producers and had no problem offending the authoritarian abberosexuals of the mainstream gay left. Based on a semi-autobiographical 1977 novella of the same named written by Oregon-based pseudo-Beat writer Walt Curtis—a politically incorrect poof poet whose work has been compared to Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs—Mala Noche is the sub-sleazy celluloid story of a debauched convenience store clerk who has a rather peculiar weakness for brown illegal alien boys, most specifically two teenage Mexican fellows who are rather wary of gringo fags, but ultimately find the beatnik bitch boy to be an easy target for cash and shelter. Unquestionably racially and culturally ‘insensitive’ in tone when giving one of his many voice-over narrations, the would-be-poetic protagonist of Mala Noche has no problem admitting his sense of intellectual superiority over the boys, matter-of-factly stating such sordid things as, “Every street Mexican on Sixth will think he can stick it in me. Well, they’re wrong. But they never were too smart to begin with, or they wouldn’t be here.” The story of an unmanly masochist who derives decidedly dubious pleasure from having beaners stick their refried wieners in his man-taco, Mala Noche undoubtedly exposes the sort of warped xenophilia that inspires certain debauched individuals to become leftists and proponents of multiculturalism because, after all, it is much easier to fuck and/or get fucked by a dirty untermensch if you can pick one up off the street in your hometown. A queer film in the European sense in that it is not about some poor fellow ‘coming out’ nor some perverse pansy facing a good ol' fag-bashing, but instead, a work about a flagrantly faggy fellow who has nothing on his mind except criminally-inclined brown boys, Mala Noche is indubitably Van Sant’s celluloid equivalent to Kenneth Anger’s Fireworks (1947), Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Love is Colder than Death (1969), Rosa von Praunheim’s It Is Not the Homosexual Who Is Perverse, But the Society in Which He Lives (1971), and John Greyson’s Urinal (1988) aka Pissoir in that it is the director’s first big statement as an unabashedly gay filmmaker. 

 Walt (Tim Streeter) is a wanton gay store clerk that lives in a Portland, Oregon ghetto who intentionally seeks to lead a wild life, especially of the pseudo-sexual outlaw sort and lately he has a foul fetish for seemingly underage illegal immigrant Mexican boys of the ostensibly heterosexual variety. While Walt probably only makes minimum wage at his less than prestigious dead-end job, he certainly makes enough money to sweet talk a young and desperate anti-gay Mexican boy into sleeping with him. After running into two young and fresh immigrants from Mexico named Johnny Alonzo (Doug Cooeyate, who is actually an American Indian in real-life) and Roberto Pepper (Ray Monge), he becomes instantly infatuated with the former but will settle for the latter boy because at least he is willing to fuck (but not suck) for cash.  After Walt and his female friend Betty (Nyla McCarthy) convince the two cholos-in-training to eat dinner with them, things take a sexual route when the poof Portlander offers Johnny $15 to have sex with him, but the macho Mexican rightfully declines. Looking to satisfy his undying desire for the seemingly unobtainable exotic primitive, Walt settles for less than homely homeboy Roberto, who ultimately reams him in the rectum in a manner the gringo finds uniquely uncomfortable and steals $10 from him. Throughout Mala Noche, Walt narrates his dubious feelings, stating regarding his short experience with spic sodomy and the theft of his money, “They need money…Johnny and him. I hope they got it. Though I was upset that I’d been fucked, violated and lost the money too…for a few moments, thinking about it, in the morning of the Mexicans gloating over having fucked the gringo puto and got his money too…talking about it and laughing, my ass was sore. And the more I think about it, the more I know I asked for a reckless evening.” And, indeed, Walt undoubtedly got everything that was cumming to him and he was lucky he did not get his throat slit, so naturally he does not let up in his dangerous desire for obtaining Johnny and whilst pitying himself, confesses like a true cock-sucking cuckold, “Maybe when they're making love they can think about Roberto having fucked me. Roberto's cock fucks Johnny, fucked me. That's about as close to Johnny as I'll ever get.” Despite worshiping their bodies, Walt has no problem belittling the boys in his own mind, stating of his lustful attraction to them, “The look on his face is pure ecstasy…incredible, beautiful, turned off face of an ignorant Mexican teenager.” Since they seem obsessed with cars, Walt humors the Mex-boys by teaching them to drive in a feeble attempt to get in their pants. To his decided heart-stricken dismay, Walt can never get Johnny alone without one of his friends being around as the uneducated Mexican is at least wise enough to know that the sodomite store clerk is a weirdo white boy with only one thing on his mind. Eventually wonder-boy Johnny disappears, which severely saddens lovelorn Walt, but he develops a pseudo-romantic and ultimately sexually unfulfilling relationship with Roberto, who apparently has a tendency to “use his cock as a weapon” and act like a “macho fucking prick.” One day while giving Roberto’s driving lesson, Walt tells the Latino lad “you drive like you fuck” after the automobile-challenged boy crashes his car. Not unsurprisingly, Mexican boys like playing around with deadly weapons as proud proponents of machismo and on one rather unfortunate night after a cop shows up to Walt’s apartment after one of the female apartment tenants absurdly complains “a guy who makes Son of Sam look like Tweety Bird” was stalking her, Roberto is killed by the policeman by ‘accident’ after seeing the illegal alien brandishing a pistol. While slightly saddened by Roberto’s death, he still has his mind on Johnny and when the boy finally turns up, he learns that teen had departed, but managed to make his way back to Portland in no more than two weeks. In the end, Walt never gets any closer to Johnny. When seeing Johnny standing on a city sidewalk by chance one day, the store clerk yells “come down to the store and talk to me some time, alright?”, but the boy does not even acknowledge him, thus ushering in a rather anticlimactic end to a mostly aimless movie. 

 A lavishly directed low-budget flick with a lackluster story featuring totally unsympathetic characters of the crooked would-be-cool sort, especially in regard to the miscegenation-celebrating poofer protagonist, Mala Noche ultimately makes for a marginally redeeming work in that it makes no preposterous attempts to glorify nor propagandize a certain real-life gay man’s lifestyle, but instead portrays him as a pathetic and pretentious beatnik prick who goes to absurd lengths to obtain an underage Mexican boy’s prick. Considering the total browning of America since Mala Noche was released over a ¼ of a century ago, it is doubtful a film so brazen and ridiculously racially-charged would be made today, so it should be no surprise that some people (most specifically, some of the ‘enlightened’ reviewers at imdb.com) have described the work as racist. Indeed, in its depiction of a homo horndog who longs for immature Mestizo dongs and its oftentimes unflattering depiction of said Mestizos acting like nitwitted petty criminals who have nil respect for American laws and customs, Mala Noche is certainly a softcore artsploitation flick and a rare queer cult flick, which is indubitably one of the cinematic work's greatest appeals, which also can be certainly said of director Gus Van Sant’s later works My Own Private Idaho (1991) and Elephant (2003) as well. Undoubtedly, what ruins Mala Noche in part is stupid and vapid ‘exploitation apologist’ remarks from the lead character like, “I don't want to interfere with their lives. A gringo like me has an easy life. A privileged life. And just because I see someone attractive like Johnny it doesn't mean I should be able to have him, to buy him or whatever, just because he's hungry and on the street. Desperate, good-looking. That wasn't my intention exactly, but it could be misunderstood that way,” when, in reality, the protagonist’s sole desire is defiling and being defiled by Mestizo meat and using every dubious and groveling tactic to do so. In fact, slavish protagonist Walt even goes so far as confessing, “The plan is simple. I go to his room at midnight. He opens the door, sees that I want him that badly. I lay down at his feet like a dog. Or rather at the feet of Roberto and him. And after an hour or so when none of us know what to do anymore, I get up and I leave. My point is being made, that I want to see him badly, right? And that must mean something. How many gringos have acted that dramatically toward him ever? And whether or not he can respond in any meaningful way doesn't matter. He would think of it as a dramatic, macho act,” thus admitting to his innate masochism and desire to be degraded by someone he openly sees as his intellectual inferior.  A laughably failed attempt at fetishizing Mestizo machismo and romanticizing the magical ‘noble savage’ who illegally crawled and climbed his way to the USA from south of the border, Mala Noche ultimately makes for a sometimes unintentionally engrossing account of a discernibly degenerate dude that digs socially and sexually degrading himself and teaching two border-jumpers how proletarian poet poofs get down in the land of the homos and depraved.

-Ty E

Chinese Roulette

German New Cinema master auteur Rainer Werner Fassbinder (The Marriage of Maria Braun, Querelle) died before he ever got the opportunity to direct a film in Hollywood, which at various points during his career he admitted he wanted to do, yet he did a direct couple films that seemed contrived and slick enough to have been assembled in Tinseltown, including Despair (1978) and Lili Marleen (1981), but indubitably the ill-fated filmmaker’s tragicomedic gothic psychological thriller Chinese Roulette (1976) aka Chinesisches Roulette radiates this manufactured studio essence the most, as if Alfred Hitchcock was forty years younger and had stopped in Germany to direct an international work with an all-star European cast. And, indeed, considering it was Fassbinder’s first international co-production and most expensive film up until that point (at an estimated DEM 1,100,000), Chinese Roulette was indisputable proof that the director, unlike many German filmmakers of his generation, was more than willing to make cinematic works that were not just accessible to Germans and other Europeans, pretentious cinephiles, and idealistic left-wingers. Admittedly, when I first saw Chinese Roulette—a work with a seemingly marketed running time under 90 minutes, cutting edge music by German electronic group Kraftwerk, and a tightly scripted and conspicuously contrived storyline—I felt it was not much more than a neatly assembled celluloid novelty directed by an arthouse filmmaker who wanted to try his lot at creating a somewhat mainstream thriller that would give him a larger audience and my opinion has not changed much since subsequent viewings, even if the work has grown on me since then and I believe that despite the film's formulaic thriller structure, it is probably far too nihilistic and misanthropic for the everyday filmgoer to appreciate. Shot in a small castle owned by cinematographer Michael Ballhaus (The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, Goodfellas) located in Stockach in Unterfranken, Germany and co-produced by Michael Fengler (who previously co-directed Why Does Herr R. Run Amok? (1970) with Fassbinder) and Franco-Swiss auteur Barbet Schroeder (General Idi Amin Dada: A Self Portrait, Maîtresse) and starring French arthouse divas, including Jean-Luc Godard’s muse Anna Karina and Macha Méril (Godard’s A Married Woman (1964) aka Une femme mariée, Buñuel’s Belle de jour (1967)), Chinese Roulette is a sort of anti-bourgeois thriller clearly made with the bourgeois in mind as a sort of acidic aesthetic attack on the upper-middle class by taking them to task on their lives of lies and luxury, especially where it hurts most; the traditional institutions of family and marriage. Centering around a seemingly unloved yet spoiled crippled little girl who essentially unleashes an elaborate game of emotional terrorism against her philandering parents, Chinese Roulette shows what happens when a wife and husband and their extramarital lovers are unwittingly forced to stay together under one roof while their sole child plays ‘mind games’ with them that eventually erupts into attempted murder during a psychodramatic game of Chinese Roulette which more resembles Russian Roulette in the end.

Ariane (Margit Carstensen) and Gerhard Christ (Alexander Allerson) are a wealthy Munich couple that plan to spend their weekends on opposite ends of Europe, as the wife claims to be going to Milan, Italy while the husband plans to stay in Oslo, Norway. Of course, both Ariane and Gerhard are lying and having extramarital affairs, so things get a little strange when they both make the unwitting mistake of taking their secret lovers to their shared country home, Traunitz castle. The Christs have a 12-year-old crippled daughter named Angela (played Andrea Schober, who also starred in Fassbinder's The Merchant of the Four Seasons (1972) as a little girl who had the misfortune of witnessing her mother's infidelities) who, despite still playing with dolls, is a rather clever and even cold and callous girl who especially hates her mother Ariane, who seems to hate her deluded daughter even more. When Gerhard and his French hairdresser mistress Irene Cartis (Anna Karina) run into Ariane and her boyfriend Kolbe (Ulli Lommel), who works for her husband, at Traunitz castle by what seems to initially be happenstance, they handle the situation rather well and decide to carry on the weekend getaway as a fucked foursome. The castle is run by a bitchy housekeeper named Kast (Brigitte Mira) who absurdly describes people that cut her off while driving as “fascists” and her sexually-confused, dildo-hiding dilettante writer son Gabriel (Volker Spengler). Although a virtual slave whose life essentially consists of groveling like a dog for her servants, Kast has nothing but sheer and utter contempt for the Christ family and her opportunistic son Gabriel hopes to exploit Gerhard’s work connection so he can get a writing deal. Later it is revealed that the Christ’s daughter Angela designed the elaborate plan to get her parents and their lovers all under the same roof and literally caught with their pants down (Gabriel initially walks in on his wife Ariane and his employee/her lover Kolbe on the floor in embrace) while engaged in mutual infidelities. Of course, things do not really get bad until Angela makes an unsuspected arrival to Traunitz castle with her mute nanny (Macha Méril), whose name is also Traunitz.

 After rhetorically asking Gabriel “Would you want to sleep with a cripple?”, Angela also confesses to the servant boy, “Do you know how long Daddy has been cheating on Mother with that woman?...Eleven years. And do you know what happened 11 years ago? I fell ill 11 years ago. It’s as simple as that. Everything is simple. Life itself is simple. I learned that from Traunitz,” thus revealing that she believes she is responsible for the dissolution of her parent’s marriage and the reason she believes her mother hates her, further adding, “In their hearts, they blame me for their messed-up lives.” And, indeed, Angela seems to be right because while outside, her mother Ariane picks up a gun and locks her daughter's head in the crosshairs from an upstairs window, which naturally disturbs Gerhard, Kolbe, and Irene, the latter of whom pull the gun away from the little girl target. Naturally, Angela makes various attempts to play her parents and their lovers against one another, but terroristic tension does not reach its boiling point until the cruel cripple convinces everyone at the Traunitz castle to play a game of ‘Chinese Roulette’, a devilishly psychology-driven and self-incriminating game were players divide into two teams, where one group tries to guess what each individual member the other group is thinking of by asking questions like, “In the Third Reich, what would the person have been?,” which is inevitably the last question asked during the game.  Angela ultimately decides the members of each team, with her mother Ariane, Kast, Kolbe, and Irene on the first team (which is clearly comprised of the people she hates most) and herself, her father Gehard, Traunitz, and Gabriel on the other team. Of course, Angela’s team has picked her own mother as the member of the other team who her group is describing. In terms of what writers might have invented the person, Gerhard picks Goethe, Gabriel picks Nietzsche, Angela picks Oscar Wilde, and Traunitz picks the best of all with Satanic National Socialist horror writer Hanns Heinz Ewers. When asked “What would this person be in the Third Reich?,” Angela’s answer is a “Commandant of the concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen.” When Ariane finally realizes her daughter has compared her to a Jew-gassing death camp commandant, she flips out, tells her she is “a horror.  A dirty, revolting little beast,” picks up a pistol, and shoots Traunitz (who she knows is her daughter’s only friend and, as the film hints, possibly her lesbian lover). It is subsequently revealed Traunitz is ok and that she received nothing more than a superficial flesh wound. During the postgame wrap, Gabriel states to Angela, “You knew something like this would happen, didn’t you?...But you wanted her to shoot you.” Clearly irked, Angela responds to Gabriel by telling him that she has known for two years that he is a hack writer who has plagiarized everything he has ever written. In the last scene before the credits roll, a second shot is heard outside the house, but the shooter and victim are left up to the viewer’s imagination in what is Fassbinder’s psychological attack against the viewer.  Undoubtedly, in Chinese Roulette, no one wins and everyone loses; it is just a matter of how much each individual loses, especially in regard to their civility and sanity.

 While undoubtedly one of auteur Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s least personal and least autobiographical works, Chinese Roulette reveals a good deal about the director’s sometimes sinister, sadomasochistic, and Svengali trickster character. In fact, Fassbinder was known to play Chinese Roulette with his friend and asked/answered questions no less provocative and malicious than those of the characters in his film. It should be noted that Chinese Roulette was the last film Fassbinder collaborated with Ulli Lommel on before the actor completely changed trades and permanently moved to the United States where directed two films for Andy Warhol before starting his dwindling career as a maker of direct-to-DVD z-grade horror flicks. Lommel was apparently dating Anna Karina at the time and managed to get her to star in Chinese Roulette, thus depicting the actor-turned-director at his ‘romantic playboy’ prime, before he became the butt of jokes to impotent fanboys and gorehounds who have never actually seen his films. Despite its modern soundtrack (Kraftwerk’s “Radioactivity” was a new single when the film was released), beauteous sets, mathematical camera angles, and contrived and precisely constructed storyline, Chinese Roulette is a brazenly brutal work of unrelenting doom and gloom and was ultimately hated by West German audiences upon it its initial release, which is no surprise considering it is a blatantly bourgeois work that shows no mercy in malevolently assaulting the psyche of the bourgeois viewer. 

 As a man born into a cultivated but unloving Bavarian bourgeois family whose father essentially wanted nothing to do with him and whose mother had more interest in her young boyfriend than her son, Fassbinder certainly seems to side with the character of Angela in Chinese Roulette, whose hopeless undying desire for love and affection propels her into baiting her mother into trying to kill her so as to put her out of her own misery. Undoubtedly, virtually every character in Chinese Roulette is dead inside and learns nothing from their nearly-deadly game of Chinese Roulette, thus demonstrating Fassbinder's disillusionment with not only the nuclear family and bourgeois values, but post-cultural consumer-based Occidental society in general, which has only degenerated all the more since the film’s release. Fitting somewhere in the writings of Harold Pinter and the films Mommie Dearest (1981) and Ingmar Bergman’s Smiles of a Summer Night (1955), Chinese Roulette is a sort of more hot than hokey hagsploitation flick where the hag is a miserable MILF and connoisseur of Haute couture, thus making the film an all the more bittersweet tortuous celluloid treat to swallow. Seamlessly mixing high-camp with high-class, Fassbinder demonstrates his destructive disdain for all facets of bourgeois life with Chinese Roulette, a film about an unhinged unmother whose disdain for her sole child Angela Christ ultimately results in the second spawning of a 13-year-old antichrist who, being a seemingly suicidal cripple who is unlikely to reproduce, acts as the final genetic line of the family, just like the director himself (who was himself a sole child and a homosexual who never reproduced).  Arguably the greatest director of nihilistically naked and hysterical cinematic melodramas who has ever lived, as well as a perniciously possessive poof whose actions led to the death of 2 of his 3 great loves (one of them, Armin Meier, who later committed suicide, appears in an uncredited role in Chinese Roulette as a gas station attendant), Fassbinder more than likely possessed the inner-child of a little attention-deprived girl and with Chinese Roulette he undoubtedly traps the viewer into his world of menacing mind games, but, I for one, must admit I enjoyed playing and will pray that I never have a pissed cripple for a daughter.  While Chinese Roulette is easily one of Fassbinder's most fundamentally formulaic and concisely constructed works that certainly proved he could do more with less in terms of assembling a thriller than the average Hollywood for-hire hack director, the film also demonstrates that he was an absurdly audience-antagonistic man whose works would have easily offended the morals of the American filmgoer, thus it is probably for the better that he never made it to the corporate Hollywood studio system, even if he would have indubitably done damage worth noticing.

-Ty E

Even Dwarfs Started Small

While my appreciation for Bavarian auteur Werner Herzog (Nosferatu the Vampyre, My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done?) has somewhat waned in recent years, I still revere him for being a man who has directed some of my absolute favorite films and documentaries and with the possible exception of the wildly idiosyncratic celluloid portrait of Teutonized Americana, Stroszek (1977), his aberrant absurdist black-horror-comedy dystopian flick Even Dwarfs Started Small (1970) aka Auch Zwerge haben klein angefangen is the reason why the adventurer auteur will always have my respect. In fact, I would go so far as saying that next to Even Dwarfs Started Small, Herzog’s most popular works like Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972), The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1974), and Fitzcarraldo (1982) seem like slightly above-average action flicks for jaded hippie stoners who listened to one too many overly long krautrock songs. Not unsurprisingly (at least to me), Herzog himself admitted that compared to Even Dwarfs Started Small, his work Aguirre “looks like kindergarten,” even if the former film features grown adults who are for the most part shorter than kindergarteners.  A gritty and sometimes grating Cinéma vérité-like black-and-white flick filmed on the Canary Islands, at Lanzarote, a desolate and seemingly dead area that was deforested and turned into an island desert of sorts by various volcanoes throughout the 1700s and 1800s, Even Dwarfs Started Small follows a motley crew of crazed kraut midgets who escape an institution and wreak havoc and start a nonsensical rebellion against the director and guard of the institution, stirring a micro-apocalypse of sorts that results in dead pigs and chickens, the torture of blind midgets with goggles, and the destruction of every organic and manmade object in sight. Apparently banned upon its release in West Germany, Even Dwarfs Started Small also apparently inspired death threats from supposed ‘white supremacists’ (or at least that is how Herzog described them), but the director ultimately faced the most hatred from members of the far-left, namely the 1968 German student movement (aka 68er-Bewegung), or as Herzog described it himself, “Some of the fiercest opposition I had against this film was from the dogmatic left, which believed that this film depicted…was somehow ridiculing and depicting the world revolution, which was failing and which was ending in destruction and catastrophes…and they were the fiercest opponents and at the same time racists.” Additionally, Even Dwarfs Started Small also proved that Herzog was not willing to play nice as a representative of German New Cinema and refused to utilize cinema to disseminate Trotskyite/Marxist like far-left propagandist like Alexander Kluge, Volker Schlöndorff, Helma Sanders-Brahms, and Margarethe von Trotta, whose oftentimes politically pedantic films are bound to inspire banality in those who do not subscribe to such outmoded and instrinsically idealistic politics. As Thomas Elsaesser wrote in his comprehensive work New German Cinema: A History (1989): “Not all film-makers agree with this interpretation of a film’s function. Even Dwarfs Started Small, for instance, was Herzog’s way of representing his isolation after the 1960 Oberhausen Festival. The film issued a challenge to the German Left about what Herzog saw as the impossibility of combining political revolution with radical subjectivity.” In other words, Herzog was an uncompromising individualist and lone wolf among calculating cultural collectivists and red-flag-wavers and Even Dwarfs Started Small was proof that he was, with the exception of fellow Bavarian auteur Herbert Achternbusch (whose story Herzog adapted into the film Heart of Glass (1976) aka Herz aus Glas), quite possibly the most intrinsically iconoclastic kraut filmmaker of his generation. 

 With its entire cast of German midgets, it should be no surprise that Even Dwarfs Started Small was heavily influenced by the truly carnivalesque American Pre-Code horror flick Freaks (1932), but as Werner Herzog stated himself, he found Todd Browning’s depiction of malevolent and malicious midgets to be a tad bit politically correct in its seemingly reluctant use of little people (to Browning's credit, Freaks ultimately ruined his filmmaking career). Essentially plot-less in structure, the film follows an agitated army of deleterious and sometimes deadly dwarves that, assumedly due to much time spent locked up in a dubious institution, go unrelentingly wild and reckless once unleashed, ultimately becoming more barbaric and inhumane toward their former captors, thus demonstrating the truism that a slave is oftentimes much more cruel than his master once the tables are turned. Although lacking in leadership structure, one could argue that the leader of the rebel runts is a micro-man around 2 ½ feet tall named Hombré (Helmut Döring, who later appeared in Herzog’s 1974 film The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser), a fiendishly funny fellow whose smile is more sinister than that of Conrad Veidt in the Hollywood silent masterpiece The Man Who Laughs (1928). Of course, as demonstrated by a scene where he fails to climb up a bed to have sex with a female dwarf that bears a striking resemblance to Anne Frank, the other dwarves have a hard time respecting Hombré’s authority because, after all, he is the smallest member and most mentally unhinged of his rebel group. Not unsurprisingly considering his failure with real-life erotic pursuits, Hombré also has a problem keeping his eyes off of 1930s Spanish pornography, stating to himself pathologically whilst looking at the nubile Latin babes, “Yeah, yeah, pretty girl!...Lovely tits!” The archenemy of the deranged dwarves as a fellow named ‘The President’ (played by Pepi Hermine, who also played the president in Robert Downey Sr.’s supremely sardonic sociopolitical satire Putney Swope (1969)), who has traded roles with his patients/prisoners and has been locked inside the institution by the rebels and has another dwarf named Pepi (Gerd Gickel) bound to a chair. The President makes serious threats of killing Pepi if he is not let free, but his pleas and threats are met upon deaf ears by the innately irrational rebels, who only increase their tedious terror and cold carnage. One of the larger dwarfs, a film noir mobster-like fellow named ‘Territory’ (Gerhard Maerz) rides around the institution on a motorcycle and eventually rigs a truck to run around tediously in circles while his compatriots use it as a makeshift playground of sorts. After having a mock religious feast, the midgets start smashing plates, including hurling them at the spinning truck. Meanwhile, the rebels kill a gigantic pig and torture blind midgets with futuristic goggles, who are assumedly employees of the President. Like mad berserkers attempting a sort of anarchic baptism by fire, the rebels also set a number of potted plants on fire and attack them, thus demonstrating with each violent attack, their ecstasy for chaos and destruction only grows larger. Amongst all the needless destruction of flowers and trees, the instincts of farm animals are subverted by man’s destruction, including baby piglets who attempt to nurse from their dead mother and chickens who try to cannibalize each other. With his pint-sized pals following behind him, Territory mocks Christ’s crucifixion by walking around with a cross with a live monkey tied to it. In the end, Hombré almost laughs himself to death while watching a large camel defecating. When the President finally escapes from the institution, he is so wacked out of his own mind that he attempts to bark orders at an inanimate tree, thus demonstrating that all forms of order and structure have been subverted and turned meaningless. 

 In its depiction of literal midgets with a need to overthrow authority despite having an incapacity for establishing order themselves and who become more senselessly sadistic than their captors, Even Dwarfs Started Small, whether auteur Herzog’s intention or not, ultimately acts as an audacious absurdist allegory for the 1968 German student movement who, while attempting in vain to create a commie utopia of sorts, almost plunged West Germany into chaos and spawned moronic terrorist groups like Baader-Meinhof Group. Indeed, as Herzog’s film demonstrates, these spoiled and self-absorbed ‘mental midgets’ of the far-left were not inspired by serious societal reform, but senseless and nihilistic destruction, as well as a petty and pernicious desire for power that they were willing to achieve through any means possible. Considering the public outcry to Even Dwarfs Started Small from the supposed ‘progressive’ German far-left, it seems that Herzog was totally on point in his depiction of political rebels as small savages with an innate incapacity for self-control and discipline whose actions reflected a certain derangement of the post-WWII German mind and a visceral and irrational chaos in the Teutonic collective unconscious. Sociopolitical considerations aside, Even Dwarfs Started Small is a merrily macabre masterpiece in terms of aesthetics alone, as a nightmarishly surreal piece of chilling yet comical celluloid slapstick and a foully flavorsome fever dream from post-Hitler Hades where reality has became more deranging and devastating than any dream. It should be noted that director Werner Herzog has stated often that he rarely dreams during sleep and felt a strong fear that his nation would plunge into chaos, thus one could argue that, with the Sapphic cinematic freak shows of Ulrike Ottinger like Freak Orlando (1981) and Dorian Gray in the Mirror of the Yellow Press (1984), Even Dwarfs Started Small acts as the most unpleasantly pure and audacious unadulterated depiction of post-WWII Aryan neurosis and nihilism ever captured on celluloid. Going on to influence American aberrant-garde arthouse flicks like Harmony Korine’s Gummo (1997) and Crispin Glover’s What Is It? (2005), Even Dwarfs Started Small inevitably foretold the apocalyptic atmosphere that would eventually reach not only the rest of the Occident, but also the United States and the rest of the extra-European ex-colonies. Indeed, if there ever was a film that was made to prepare one for a very tangible doomsday and laugh in the process, it is undoubtedly Even Dwarfs Started Small, a work which director Werner Herzog even had to admit, “Yes it is, but it’s the darkest of comedies you can imagine…yeah, I find it very funny…something of it is very, very funny, but at the same time, I feel my stomach ache when I start to laugh.” As a work that was only his second fictional feature-length work, Even Dwarfs Started Small which he directed while in his late-20s, Herzog was somehow able to reconcile barren and brutal yet breathtaking landscapes that fall somewhere in between the world of Michelangelo Antonioni (L'Avventura, Eclipse) and Dutch Renaissance painters Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Bruegel the Elder with a cast of characters too weird and sinister for Fellini Satyricon (1969), as well as deranged diacritic artfulness that totally transcends Browning’s Freaks (1932) and a surreal satirical tone that would probably even shock Luis Buñuel, so I will always have a special affection for the wacky Bavarian auteur, even if he is, rather inexplicably, a staunch Steven Spielberg apologist. 

-Ty E

The Einstein of Sex

Undoubtedly, out of the many good, bad, and ugly films directed by queer kraut agitpropagandist Rosa von Praunheim (Army of Lovers or Revolt of the Perverts, Neurosia: 50 Years of Perversity), the debauched director’s pseudo-docudrama The Einstein of Sex: Life and Work of Dr. M. Hirschfeld (1999) aka Der Einstein des Sex—a work depicting the life and times of pioneering Jewish German sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld—is one of the Berlin-based filmmaker's most deathly serious yet aesthetically and cinematically flaccid works. Sort of like a lurid and lecherous Lifetime movie with a couple softcore sex scenes and semi-grotesque genital-mutilating surgery scenes, The Einstein of Sex is quite possibly the most absurd tribute to a ridiculous figure ever made, as von Praunheim’s sort of perverse poof tribute to a leftist Hebrew subversive who, while exceedingly gay in the extra-effeminate sort of way and dedicating his life to legalizing homosexuality in the Fatherland, had a rather banal sex life and seemed more interested in coldly examining the warped genitals of hermaphrodites and collecting ancient dildos, or at least one would assume after viewing this desperately debauched yet stupidly serious docudrama. Had National Socialist Germany won the Second World War, it is very doubtful that people would know the name Magnus Hirschfeld today for obvious reasons, but since the Occident has drastically degenerated into a gigantic Weimar Republic of sorts as a whole, he is now revered as a Sodomite God among certain curious circles like the so-called 'queer community' and has been described as “the first advocate for homosexual and transgender rights” due to his special affection for fags. Herr Hirschfeld also has a minor connection to cinema history in that he co-wrote and had a cameo in the silent flick Different From The Others (1919) aka Anders als die Andern, a work revered today for being one of the first films to feature a positive depiction of homosexuals and that would act as the basic plot inspiration for Victim (1961) starring Dirk Bogarde, which has the grand distinction of being the first film to feature the word “homosexual.” A seemingly senseless piece of scatological sentimentalism, mindless homo Heeb worship, and childish condemnation of fag-bashing National Socialists who had the audacity to destroy Hirschfeld’s sexual ‘research’ institute, burn his books, and force the good doctor into exile, The Einstein of Sex is just as innately idiotic in its message as the films of celluloid Shoah saint S. Spielberg, but what makes von Praunheim’s film different is that it is so amateurishly directed and curiously nonsensical in its construction that it is ultimately a work of accidental queersploitation. In fact, considering that it is essentially a work of fiction where von Praunheim totally invented events, incidents, and motivations regarding the life and work Hirschfeld, The Einstein of Sex is not much more reliable as a work of history regarding its subject then Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS (1975) is regarding the reality of Nazi concentration camps. 

 In Rosa von Praunheim’s mind, Magnus Hirschfeld developed his affinity for championing sexual perversion after his father, who was a respected physician, congratulated him as a prepubescent boy for drawing pictures of wild animals having sex. When Hirschfeld (played by Friedel von Wangenheim, who co-wrote the film, in what would be his first and last film role) came of age and went to school for medicine to become a physician, he was absolutely offended by the fact that his professor would describe a pederast as a degenerate, so he tells his friend that he wants to become a sort of Bolshevik of medicine and that together, “We can change everything. We can change this university. We can change the whole world.” Hirschfeld’s friend thinks he’s deranged so their friendship ends, but luckily he meets a disgraced Austrian aristocrat named Baron von Teschenberg (Gerd Lukas Storzer) who caused a scandal when he was caught giving a blowjob to a soldier and was disinherited by his family, so he becomes the doc’s loyal assistant. Meanwhile, Hirschfeld starts the Scientific Humanitarian Committee to defend the rights of homos, trannies, and other sexual misfits and drafts a petition to overturn Paragraph 175 to legalize homosexuality, ultimately managing to get over 5000 people to sign it, including Hermann Hesse, Rainer Maria Rilke, Albert Einstein, Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Gerhart Hauptmann and countless others, but the law is never overturned in the physician's lifetime. Hirschfeld also passively butts heads with masculine homosexual activist Adolf Brand (played by blond-haired German Jew Ben Becker) who has nothing but sheer and utter disdain for effeminate gays and glorifies the masculine homo-heroism of ancient Greeks, telling the Yiddish doc regarding his poof patients and overall efforts, “Those creatures are neither man nor woman, and you lump such wretched stepchildren of nature together with these blossoming, glorious boys. We don’t need a doctor who spends his time in brothels and privies examining the underpants of Jews with three anuses.” Of course, being a sodomite socialist Semite, Hirschfeld has a very different view on things and will do anything to deracinate and subvert traditional German society, as exemplified in his diagnosis of a pansy patient, “Congratulations. As you suspected, you are clearly same-sex inclined. I prescribe repeated visits to the Adonis Dance Club. There you’ll meet others like yourself. Fall in love, be happy. Stay away from public toilets, limit the amount of intercourse and avoid depraved people.” Despite devoting his life to Hirschfeld, Baron von Teschenberg is incapable of getting the doctor to have a sexual/romantic relationship with him, so after being blackmailed by a hustler, he decides to commit suicide. 

 Throughout The Einstein of Sex, Dr. Hirschfeld becomes involved in various forms of queer quackery, including transplanting ‘heterosexual testicles’ bought on the black market to homosexual men in the hopes of changing their sexual orientation. Of course, in Rosa von Praunheim’s mind such scientific stupidity is somewhat successful as demonstrated by a young colon-choker’s remarks after receiving hetero-testicles that, “My body now longs for a woman, but my soul still cries out for a man.” With the wraith of Wotan brewing in the collective unconscious of Deutschland, Hirschfeld is beaten by evil anti-Semites and has his work described as “Jewish Pig Asshole-Intellectualism” by a young man attending one of his lectures. Meanwhile, after untying a string wrapped around a tranny named Dorchen’s dick (Tima die Göttliche), he obtains a homo housewife of sorts in the form of said Transman, whose job is to clean and maintain his new Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute for Sexual Research) building in Berlin. Although well past middle-aged, Hirschfeld finally fucks more than just antique toys and begins a sadomasochistic sexual relationship with a young follower named Karl Giese (Olaf Drauschke). To the sheer and utter heartbreak of kosher twink Giese, Hirschfeld leaves the Institute for Sexual Research and travels abroad, where he starts a sexual relationship with a young oriental twinkie. From the comfort of movie theaters, Hirschfeld watches newsreels of the National Socialist takeover, the destruction of his sex institute, and the burning of his books. In the end, Giese commits suicide, Dorchen disappears, the Institute for Sexual Research is destroyed, and Hirschfeld takes exile in Paris, France where he tries in vain to start a new sex institute and dies a rich and fat man. 

 While Hirschfeld’s cocksucking campaign died with the rise and rule of National Socialism in Germany from 1933-1945, the debauched doctor’s work ultimately paid-off in the long run as demonstrated by the simple fact that a film like The Einstein of Sex could be made in Germany, not to mention the fact that a good percentage of post-WWII filmmakers, including Rosa von Praunheim, but also Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Werner Schroeter, Ulrike Ottinger, Monika Treut, Jochen Hick, Frank Ripploh and countless others, are/were homosexuals/lesbians. Not only was the anti-homo-sex provision Paragraph 175 abolished entirely in 1988 (where it was fully revoked in 1994 after the German reunification) in Germany and the legalization of gay prostitution, among other aberrant things, in the Fatherland since Hirschfeld's death, but the physician's ideas of a “third sex” and collective gay effeminacy have essentially become the norm in not only Germany/Europe, but also North America as well, where ‘gay’ has turned into a MTV-fabricated prepackaged pseudo-culture that revolves around such worthless garbage as Lady Gaga, Will & Grace, raunchy race-mixing, cultural Marxism, victim politics, and bourgeois gay marriage. As The Einstein of Sex one-dimensionally depicts, Adolf Brand—a Stirnerite anarchist who published the masculine homosexual periodical Der Eigene (“The Own”), which promoted völkisch artists like Fidus (Hugo Reinhold Karl Johann Höppener) and nationalist/proto-nazi writers like Hans Blüher, as well as the founder of the Wandervogel-like Gemeinschaft der Eigenen (GdE), which promoted German unity and a sort of warrior creed of Sparta—promoted a form of gaydom that is virtually not existent today which valued and championed masculinity, heroism, and the resurrection of the Germanic Männerbund that totally rejected Hirschfeld's view of the gay male as a third sex, but even went so far as arguing that homosexual men were more masculine. Of course, Rosa von Praunheim portrays Adolf Brand in a negative light in The Einstein of Sex, depicting him as an abhorrent anti-Semitic megalomaniac, but in reality he represented a distinct culturally German view of homosexuality whereas Hirschfeld represented a leftist Jewish view that has gone on to dominate the Occident world as a result of Germany’s defeat during the Second World War. It is worth noting that Otto Weininger, an Austrian Jewish philosopher, who would go on to influence Ludwig Wittgenstein and Hans Blüher, argued in his once-highly influential work Geschlecht und Charakter (1903) aka Sex and Character that Jewishness and femininity are one in the same, thus making Hirschfeld’s view an alien creed that has subverted gay, as well as heterosexual, European culture and turned it into a putrid pile of poofer degeneracy. Of course, Weininger's theories do not seem that out of line when one looks at popular figures like Woody Allen, Jerry Seinfeld, Steven Spielberg, and Richard Simmons, and see that the Jewish race is severely lacking in testosterone. 

 Indeed, Hirschfeld was the ‘Einstein of Sex’ in that while today many German sexologists, like Adolf Brand, have been largely forgotten, the Hebraic physician has been sainted by Philo-Semitic sodomites and his ideas, like those of fellow perverted Judaic Freud, have entered and flourished in the mainstream of society, even if the name Magnus Hirschfeld is, quite thankfully, not exactly a household name. Undoubtedly, The Einstein of Sex is Rosa von Praunheim’s most Philo-Semitic and politically correct work to date as a piece of absurdly aesthetically repellant and conspicuously kitschy pseudo-docudrama with a nauseating sentimental score, shockingly wooden acting, and prosaic direction that is only marginally saved from total worthlessness as a cinematic by work by its handful of scenes of accidental comical relief involving Hirschfeld screwing his sex toy antiques, Nazi violence, and the when good gay doctor is attacked by the character Adolf Brand, who states such eloquent things as, “Love between men is love between heroes. Down with sissies, fairies, nellies and queens.” Undoubtedly, von Praunheim should stick to directing warped agitprop documentaries and aberrant-garde camp comedies as The Einstein of Sex feels like it was directed by an autistic psychopath trying in vain to mimic genuine human emotion.  If I did not know better, I would have thought someone cut director Rosa von Praunheim's balls off just like Hirschfeld did to his patients as The Einstein of Sex lacks more testicular fortitude than a gang of Indian eunuchs.

-Ty E