No Place to Go (2000)

Unfortunately for him, German auteur Oskar Roehler (Agnes and His Brothers, The Elementary Particles) was born to egomaniacal communist writers who wanted nothing to do with him, so he was essentially brought up by his grandparents. While Roehler’s father was a novelist and literary editor who edited works by important West German literary figures like Günter Grass, his mother Gisela Elsner was a somewhat popular novelist who has been described as ‘Jelinek's older sister’ and was a member of the once-prestigious leftist post-WWII literary group Gruppe 47, to which Grass, Heinrich Böll, Ingeborg Bachmann, and various other German authors belonged. Among other things, Elsner, who was born into a wealthy family like so many other leftist literary types of her pedigree, is known for endorsing the destruction of bourgeois sexuality via group sex and orgies with her novel Berührungsverbot (1970). Depressed with the death of the GDR, falling of the Berlin War, and the realization that her materialist messiah Lenin’s dream would never be realized, Elsner committed suicide in 1992. With his first feature-length film Die Unberührbare (2000) aka No Place to Go aka The Unforgiven aka Hanna Flanders, Roehler did what probably no other filmmaker has done in history by depicting the last days leading up to his mother Elsner’s suicide. Shot in a black-and-white noir-ish style reminiscent of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s penultimate film Veronika Voss (1982) and, to a lesser extent, David Lynch’s Eraserhead (1977), No Place to Go makes for a sort of celluloid obituary/suicide letter for the 68er-Bewegung generation and counter-culture movement in general. In its moody and melancholy depiction of the glorious fall of the so-called ‘Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart’, No Place to Go also makes for a much needed celluloid counterpoint to Wolfgang Becker’s sentimentalist swill Good Bye, Lenin! (2003), which essentially took a hopelessly goofy Hollywood approach to the dissolving of the GDR. As can be expected from a man whose mother abandoned him at the age of three, Roehler did not take a sentimental approach to depicting his mother in No Place to Go, but instead portrays her as a walking and talking anachronism and hopeless hypocrite whose Leninist political persuasion was in stark contrast to her affinity for expensive Christian Dior coats and aesthetically repugnant wigs. The atmospheric and intentionally aimless story of an over-the-hill leftist dame that becomes suicidal after coming to the realization that, regarding the German people and reunification, “They're not fighting for truth in the spirit of Lenin, they're fighting for candy bars,” No Place to Go is, if nothing else, one of the most intimately unflattering depictions of a communist intellectual. 

 As a once popular West German far-left writer who once dreamed of emigrating to East Germany but has just witnessed the fall of the Berlin Wall and the almost unanimous joy among both West and East Germans, Hanna Flanders (Hannelore Elsner)—a sort of would-be-literary-diva and retarded femme fatale who fails at conning men but unquestionably dresses the part—has certainly seen better days and is contemplating suicide. After all, the GDR was the only place still publishing her pretentious bolshy novels, so she has also lost her sole source of income. Since she is considering offing herself, Hanna decides to relocate from her apartment in Munich to post-communist East Berlin where she plans to stay with her East Berlin mentor Joachim (Michael Gwisdek), who always promised her a place to stay if she ever arrived in the city. Before meeting with her dear marxist mentor in East Berlin, Hanna Flanders goes to West Berlin to visit her ex-speed-addict writer son Viktor (Lars Rudolph) who she has not seen in over three years and who used to provide her with drugs in the past. Ultimately, the reunion proves to be a pathetic disaster, with the mother unsuccessfully attempting to buy speed from her son who is withdrawing from drugs and does not take kindly to hearing his mother asking to do so such an unsavory thing. Of course, Hanna’s’s encounter with Joachim is no less disappointing, as he not only decides to not let her stay with him, but is also celebrating the fall of the Berlin Wall and who tells his old ‘true believer’ student that, “times have changed dramatically,” which is a rather bitter pill for the novelist to swallow.  Luckily, Hanna manages to secure a dilapidated old commie style apartment from an admirer. When Hanna goes to a local bar, she bumps into a drunken stranger named Dieter (Bernd Stempel), who states, “I’ve read all of your books. I liked your last one the best. The one about your sister committing suicide and how that happened…it was a really moving portrait of how barbaric interpersonal relationships can be.” Dieter also reveals that he is a teacher who teaches, “German and history…A fateful combo,” and taught some of her novels in school, which she takes as a great compliment. Of course, when the drunken Dieter begins groping Hanna, she freaks out, so the teacher verbally berates her like she is old trash, yelling, “Hey, you’re a real bitch, you know? You should be happy that anyone even wants to touch you anymore! Look at you, you old bag!…You, with those sagging tits. Hanna Flanders…wrote nothing but shit in the last 20 years!,” which naturally rather depresses the novelist. After failing to fall asleep and stating to herself, “What a nightmare! A nightmare. Now I can’t even fall asleep,” while walking around her Lynchian apartment like the bride of Frankenstein, Hanna wanders around East Berlin and runs into a happy young lady, who invites her to stay with her family, which she does. Of course, the family Hanna is staying with is celebrating the death of the GDR and when she remarks to them regarding her admiration of the dissolved nation, “For me, your communism here in the East was the perfect world. I had a lot of trouble with life in the West, since returning from England. And I often thought of moving to East Berlin…Now it’s all collapsed and it’s as if I too have fallen apart,” she is looked at as if she is a deluded moron. Indeed, Hanna finally has to admit regarding her disconcerting meeting with the happy East German family, “They're completely different people. I have no relation to them. I don't stand a chance there.” 

 More desperate than ever, Hanna decides to visit her elderly bourgeois parents to ‘borrow’ some money so she can get back to Munich. While Hanna’s mother is a cold bitch, her father is a cowardly cuckold, but he at least gives her some money to get back to Munich. Determined to get her old apartment back, Hanna attempts to return her designer Christian Dior coat back to the story she bought it from for only half the price, but the employees of the store look at her like she is a common bum and refuse to buy back the item. Luckily, Hanna ends up randomly bumping into her ex-husband Bruno (Vadim Glowna), who is still in love with her and is more than willing to give her a place to stay. That night, it seems that both Hanna and Bruno are transported back to the magic of the late-1960s, but when the two attempt to make love, the ex-husband is too drunk and depressed to consummate coitus. The next day, Hanna wakes to find that Bruno is even more drunk and babbling about events from decades past if they were only yesterday, stating, “Hanna, what are you doing here? I thought you’d fallen asleep. I’m so furious. It’s so fucked. So fucked. I’m so angry, I could cut off my hand. Gudrun, Ingeborg, Rita, Ulrike…I can understand these girls so well. They knew what was going on. You have no idea how much I loved Gudrun. I loved that girl so much.” Indeed, Bruno’s extra flabby appearance and rampant alcoholism clearly indicate he has not gotten over the moronic death of Ingeborg Bachmann nor the dubious suicides of the Baader-Meinhof babes, but most importantly, he has not gotten over Hanna, who has her head so firmly inserted in her ass that she never was able to devote herself to him. Needless to say, Miss Monomaniac Hanna leaves Bruno for good after his drunken debauchery. Before long, Hanna finds herself randomly waking up in a hospital where she is told she overdosed on barbiturates. To top off everything else, the Doctor reveals to Hanna that due to her proclivity towards chain-smoking, she has developed vascular disease in her leg and that if she does not quit ASAP, she will most certainly lose her egg. Ultimately, Hanna agrees to go to rehab and quit smoking cold turkey, but considering the already fragile state of her mind, it proves to be a most grueling experience. Fed up with life and realizing her dreams of a commie utopia are gone forever, Hanna takes one final drag from a cigarette and falls to her death from a hospital window.  Indeed, it seems that the only thing that kept Hanna going in the first place was her dream of a Leninist utopia, so when all chances of that ever happening were dashed with the destruction of the Berlin Wall, she truly had nothing to live for and nothing to keep her going.  Ironically, in the end, she was no different from the many die hard National Socialists who committed self-slaughter during the mass suicides in 1945 Nazi Germany.

 Interestingly, despite the film’s already unflattering depiction of its lead, No Place to Go would later be described by auteur Oskar Roehler as a ‘romanticized’ view of his mother. Indeed, in a 2012 interview with the Deutsche Welle (DW) cultural magazine Arts.21, Roehler stated, “My mother really was a bad person who dreamed up a bunch of evil schemes” and “I felt as if I was being stabbed by needles again and again...The way my mother continued to judge me...my birth, my existence, and so on.” Ultimately, Roehler would later “exact revenge” against his mother by writing the autobiographical novel Herkunft (2012), which spans three generations of the director’s family (starting in the post-WWII era and concluding in the 1980s) and which the auteur later adapted into the epic 174-minute film Quellen des Lebens (2013) aka Sources of Life. While far from perfect and in many way a formative work, No Place to Go is certainly one of the more interesting and worthwhile German films of its mostly cinematically vacant zeitgeist. Indeed, a work that manages to cross Alexander Kluge’s Yesterday Girl (1966) with Fassbinder’s Veronika Voss with a little bit of Eraserhead (indeed, aside from featuring an eccentric protagonist with an even more eccentric head of hair, Roehler depicts post-Cold War Berlin in a similarly foreboding manner to Lynch's cult masterpiece) and campy hagsploitation (one can see Hanna Flanders as a sort of kraut commie equivalent to ‘Mommy Dearest’ meets Norma Desmond of Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950), albeit with a more intellectual, flat affect) thrown in for good measure, No Place to Go is one of the few German films of the 2000s that I would recommend to fellow cinephiles, especially those with an affinity for German New Cinema. A rare film where the viewer actually wishes for the protagonist’s suicide knowing that she wants nothing more than to disappear from the world, No Place to Go—for better or worse—is probably the most honest depiction of the disgruntled 68er-Bewegung mindset in an age where the fall of the Berlin Wall declared that dreams of a communist utopia were deader than Angela Merkel’s sex drive and no better person could have been better suited for directing the film than Oskar Roehler, the forsaken progeny of a commie ideologue who cared more about dead Judaic-Mongol mongrel marxist monster Lenin than her own son. That being said, I was almost surprised that No Place to Go did not conclude with the song “Ding Dong! The Witch Is Dead” from The Wizard of Oz (1939), as it is a work that was directed by a man who confessed on German TV that he cried with joy upon learning that his mother died.  An arthouse dramedy that destroys the commie celluloid mythos of Kluge and Straub, No Place to Go is a sort of nihilistic attempt at healing after generations of leftist lunacy in the Fatherland.  Of course, as Roehler demonstrated with his mundane mainstream effort Jew Suss: Rise and Fall (2010), he lacks the testicular fortitude to approach the Third Reich era without any sort of the same self-loathing typical of the original left-wing cultural-cuckold kraut, thus demonstrating that he was truly his marxist parents' son.

-Ty E

Coup de Grâce (1976)

After starting my recent obsession with Baal (1970) starring Rainer Werner Fassbinder, I felt it was about time I start watching more films directed by kraut master celluloid craftsman Volker Schlöndorff (Michael Kohlhaas - Der Rebell, The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum), with Coup de Grâce (1976) aka Der Fangschuß being the first film I decided to indulge in. Based on the 1939 novel of the same named written by Belgian-born French bisexual novelist Marguerite Yourcenar, Coup de Grâce was co-penned by and stars Schlöndorff’s then-wife Margarethe von Trotta and thus, as can be expected, features a glaring feminist leftist slant that is somewhat at odds with its source material. Indeed, while Yourcenar’s novel was intentionally apolitical and written from the perspective of a closested homosexual soldier named Erich von Lhomond, Schlöndorff’s Coup de Grâce treats the female character Sophie de Reval (not surprisingly played by von Trotta in all her degenerate blueblood glory)—a spoiled and salacious countess who becomes a Bolshevik because the German soldier she lives with is in love with her brother in what is ultimately a bitter and cold bizarre love triangle—is treated as a progressive woman and a true heroine. Although not politically correct nowadays, Coup de Grâce, like Schlöndorff’s other films Young Törless (1966) and The Tin Drum (1979), attempts to establish a dubious Reichian link between homosexuality and fascism/militarism, as if enjoying militaristic camaraderie and killing commies is a prerequisite for taking a dick in the ass. Set between 1919 and 1920 in Kratovice, Latvia, Coup de Grâce depicts the plague-like spreading of bolshevism across Eastern Europe and the destruction of the Baltic German aristocracy in a fashion that makes it clear that the writers and director have more sympathy for atheistic Asiatic hordes than their own ancestors. Indeed, a film that has the gall to depict a rather lecherous lady who betrays her friends and family and hook up with a Bolshevik Jewish intellectual and join the Reds against the waning Prussian aristocracy that she is also part of, Coup de Grâce is indubitably ethno-masochistic leftist swill, albeit strikingly stylized celluloid swill of the richly photographed black-and-white sort that reminds one that Schlöndorff has always been a master of his craft, but also a major moron when it comes to politics and history, as if he suffers from a sort of metaphysical Stockholm syndrome that has compelled him to spend his entire filmmaking career assembling Teutonic period pieces trashing his nation in tribute to his Franco-Jewish mentor Jean-Pierre Melville (of whom Coup de Grâce is not coincidentally dedicated to). A sort of ‘Teutonic Gone with the Wind’ (with a smidge of Doctor Zhivago thrown in for good measure) set at the end of a civilization about a hysterical woman who cannot have man she wants so she raises hell as an impotent and ultimately tragic last resort, Coup de Grâce is a bold and beautiful black-and-white with an aesthetic prowess comparable to Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950) yet with a one-dimensional thematic complexity (or lack thereof) akin to Spielberg’s epic agitprop piece Schindler’s List (1993). Indeed, had Coup de Grâce been more in the spirit of the great Baltic-German aristocrat Roman von Ungern-Sternberg, it might have be a masterpiece. 

 It is 1919 and the Bolshevik beast is beginning to spread like cancer into the Baltic, but thankfully some German Freikorps soldiers have landed there to protect a chateau that belongs to one of the soldier’s families. Indeed, the home is owned by the family of young Aryan aristocrat and unflinching patriot Konrad von Reval (Rüdiger Kirschstein), who has come back to protect his idealistic countess sister Sophie (Margarethe von Trotta) and eccentric old maid aunt Tante Praskovia (played by German Jewish cabaret performer Valeska Gert). Konrad has brought his childhood best friend and fellow aristocrat Erich von Lhomond (played by Matthias Habich, who would go on to star in mainstream WWII films like Enemy at the Gates (2001) and Downfall (2004)). Sophie is deeply in love with Erich, but little does she realize that her brother Konrad is also in love with him. Naturally, hardcore conservative Erich rebuffs the rather blatant and even desperate advances of Sophie. To complicate things further, Sophie is a good friend of a blond Jewish commie revolutionary named Grigori Loew (Franz Morak), who feeds the spoiled yet bored Contessa’s thirst for knowledge with copies of works by suicidal Austrian Expressionist poet Georg Trakl. Unfortunately, Sophie takes Grigori's advice after he gives her a copy of Trakl's Die Dichtungen with the following words inscribed, “Always follow the voice of your heart.”  A hyper horny single lady of childbearing age who wants to marry a man just like her brother, Sophie becomes a moody and broody succubus of hysteria and irrationalism.  As Erich soon learns, a Lithuanian sergeant recently raped Sophie and thus her sexuality seems all out of whack because of it.  Naturally, seeing the sorry state of her quasi-senile spinster aunt Tante every single day only further inspires Sophie's dedication to making Erich her man and she is willing to go to a number of self-destructive extremes to get him, even if it kills her.

 In a feeble and stereotypically female attempt to get Erich’s attention, Sophie begins screwing other soldiers, including a fellow named Franz von Aland (Frederik von Zichy), who is killed in front of the chateau only a little while after having a premonition of his own death and seeking carnal knowledge with the Countess. Sophie almost manages to get Erich to screw her after hatefully stating, “Responsibility and discipline! Everything else inside you is dead. You’re incapable of passion,” but their attempt at intercourse is ultimately interrupted. When a young soldier named Volkmar (Mathieu Carrière)—a man whose father is apparently gay and purportedly had sex with Rasputin—arrives at the chateau, Sophie starts a lurid love affair with him, which only proves to irritate Erich, but does not make him any more interested in her as a lover. When Erich slaps Sophie in the face at a Christmas party for whoring herself out to all the men there, Volkmar “demands satisfaction,” but the duel never happens. That same night, Erich makes a promise to Sophie that he will come back to her after a military mission and that they will start a new life together. When Erich sends Volkmar back to the chateau to report a message, the young gentleman caller proposes to Sophie but she declines, as she believes she will be getting with her true beloved. Hurt by the Countess’ rejection of marriage, Volkmar spitefully tells Sophie that Erich and her brother Konrad are gay lovers who apparently did more than just kill commies in Riga. Naturally, when Erich comes back to the chateau, Sophie calls him out on his homosexual affair with her brother. As a Bolshevik-brainwashed spoiled little girl with too much time on her hands who is quite open about her sympathy for the red and believes regarding her family and other Baltic-Germans, “The new era has no use for our tradition,” Sophie leaves the chateau permanently, hooks up with her Judeo-bolshevik friend Grigori, and becomes a communist terrorist. Meanwhile, Sophie’s brother Konrad is killed. When Erich and his soldiers capture a bunch of red terrorists hiding in a shack, they kill Grigori like a dog and capture Sophie. While Erich offers to save Sophie, she turns him down and treats him with disdain. Like all captured bolshy thugs, Sophie and her commie comrades are to be executed. As a special request, Sophie asks Erich to execute her in what can be seen as a final declaration of love from a desperate woman (as well as a sort of haunting revenge ensuring that Erich will always live with the fact he killed his gay lover's sister), which he does with the same sort of robotic apathy with which he has always treated her, not even looking at her when he puts a bullet in her brain. The End. 

 Maybe it’s just me, but I have always thought Margarethe von Trotta seemed like a disgruntled bitch and this certainly lends to her shockingly notable performance in Coup de Grâce where she proves she can do more than just take her clothes off like she did in Fassbinder’s Beware of a Holy Whore (1971). Indeed, I have also always chalked up women taking on a feminist Weltanschauung as a sign of bitter disappointment in men (namely fathers, lovers, etc.) and von Trotta’s character Sophie certainly fits this mold. Admittedly, I was rather shocked that I found myself feeling empathy for Sophie, which is certainly not something I can say of Vivien Leigh’s queen bitch character from Gone with the Wind (1939), thus leading me to suspect that under von Trotta’s hard feminist exterior lies a vulnerable woman who has built a wall around herself. While the seemingly immaculate direction of Coup de Grâce is owed to auteur Volker Schlöndorff’s mastery of the cinematic craft, the film is also clearly a von Trotta film. After all, after co-directing the quasi-pro-leftist-terrorist flick The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum (1975) with her then-hubby Schlöndorff, von Trotta would almost exclusively focus on hard yet hysterical female characters that traded in their femininity for far-left/feminist idealism. Luckily, since Schlöndorff is a much more competent director in comparison to von Trotta, Coup de Grâce manages to get its dubious message across without falling into aesthetic banality. If von Trotta’s surname is any indication of her ostensibly noble heritage, one can only assume that Coup de Grâce is a barely inconspicuously personal work co-written by and starring a woman fed up with not only men, but also her nation, culture, and people. After all, the Bolshevik revolution led to not only Germany’s loss of power of the Slavic lands, but also led to the circumstances from which would lead to the birth of National Socialism (indeed, it is no coincidence that National Socialist philosopher Alfred Rosenberg was a Baltic-German who witnessed the revolution firsthand). In its dedication to Jean-Pierre Grumbach and inclusion of degenerate kosher cabaret artist Valeska Gert as the kooky aunt of von Trotta’s character, not to mention its unflattering depiction of Prussian Junkers and ridiculous sympathy for aristocrat-exterminating Bolshevik thugs and Judaic Trotskyite conspirators, Coup de Grâce demonstrates a degree of unrivaled Teutonic philo-Semitism that is simply awe-inspiring and would be funny were it not for the fact that such exceedingly ethno-masochistic tendencies were representative of young educated Germans of that time. In some ways one of the more underrated works of German New Cinema, Coup de Grâce ultimately seems rather outmoded due to its reductionist approach to politics and history. That being said, Schlöndorff still has time to redeem himself by directing an objective von Ungern-Sternberg biopic, but that is about as likely as his ex-wife making a film that did not seem like it was directed by some nameless hack in Hollywood. 

-Ty E

Agnes and His Brothers

In contemporary Germany, it seems there are two types of filmmakers: Those culturally retarded and deracinated dilettantes that merely copy off of Hollywood and become money-grubbing artisan hacks like Tom Tykwer, and the oh-so few filmmakers who attempt to revive the auteurism of German New Cinema. Undoubtedly, Oskar Roehler (Suck My Dick, Jew Suss: Rise and Fall) is (or was) part of the second category as a filmmaker who was inspired by Rainer Werner Fassbinder's The Merchant of Four Seasons (1972) and Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974) at a young age, once stating regarding these films, “I was about 12 or 13, and after seeing those films, I would just walk through the park and think about them.” While I have not seen every single one of the director’s films (most of them do not have English subtitles), I think Agnes and His Brothers (2004) aka Agnes und seine Brüder is Roehler’s greatest and most ambitious work to date, though it is certainly no masterpiece. Unquestionably a not so inconspicuous take on Fassbinder’s avant-garde masterpiece In a Year of 13 Moons (1978), Agnes and His Brothers also centers around a melancholy tranny who did the unthinkable and cuts his penis off to appease a powerful and less than loving lover (this time instead of using a Jewish slumlord like in Fassbinder’s film, Roehler opted for an American Negro fashion designer). In fact, In A Year of 13 Moons star Volker Spengler was originally supposed to play the father of the lead character(s).  Of course, Roehler’s film is not a remake of In a Year of 13 Moons and is quite different in parts, namely in that it also focuses on the equally screwed up lives of the eponymous tranny’s two elder brothers. Additionally, Agnes and His Brothers displays its Hollywood influences due to its unwavering sentimentalism, use of played out pop rock music, and copout (semi)happy ending. The German answer to American Beauty (1999), albeit all the more morbid and scatological in its critique of the bourgeois, Agnes and His Brothers depicts a universally sexually debauched upper-middleclass where hatred, sexual perversion, and unhappiness are givens and where fathers are even more patently perverted than Woody Allen. Unquestionably, one of the most interesting and surprising aspects of Agnes and His Brothers is that is depicts the emotionally and sexually ruined middle-aged children of the counter-culture era, thus making a rare film that dares to laugh at the tragic, if not inevitable, results of far-leftist parents who refused to parent and thus sired individuals that are so screwed up that they have scat fetishes and have paid money to have their genitals chopped off. Stating his intent with the film as follows, “What interested me most was to show what things look like now in this country. I wanted to convey a mood, a basic feeling with a number of facets that can't be pinned down solely to one single relationship between two people,” auteur Roehler ultimately assembled a black post-counter-culture comedy nightmare with Agnes and His Brothers that offers good enough reason as to why the indigenous population of Germany is committing demographic suicide and how Teutonic auteur cinema itself is merely a platform for members of the bourgeois to bash themselves.

 Agnes Tschirner (Martin Weiß) is a depressed tranny who never knew nor has even seen a picture of his/her mother, a purported a member of the Baader-Meinhof Gang who apparently took a fire extinguisher to the head while in Stammheim prison and allegedly later committed suicide after becoming penniless. The only thing Agnes knows about his/her long deceased mother is what was told to her by her burnout degenerate hippie father Günther (Vadim Glowna) while he was inebriated. Agnes has two brothers that are just as screwed up as her, if not more so, including Hans-Jörg (Moritz Bleibtreu) and Werner (Herbert Knaup), but neither of them have done anything so drastic as have their dicks chopped off. Hans-Jörg is a sex-addicted librarian and pathetic peeping tom who sneaks into female bathroom stalls at his work and masturbates while watching women defecate via a gloryhole. When it comes to women, Hans-Jörg is a pathetic joke who is constantly laughed at by the fairer sex, so he spends much of his free time attending sex addict anonymous meetings where he listens to people's stories about having love affairs with their dogs and whatnot. Undoubtedly, Werner, who is married and has two teenage sons, is the most strong and successful of the Tschirner brothers, but he is no less screwed up and his relative success seems compensate for his broken family life. Married to a blonde cougar named Signe (Katja Riemann) that no longer loves him and the father of an ambiguously gay amateur filmmaker son named Ralf (Tom Schilling) who his wife dedicates all his attention to, Werner has devoted himself to his career as a Herr Doktor and leader of the Green Party. Undoubtedly, the source of the Tschirner brothers' pathologies lies with their rich but seemingly half-retarded father Günther, who Hans-Jörg believes molested little brother Agnes. As indicated by a melancholy man named Heinz (Ralph Ferforth) that cries at the sight of the Tschirner brothers and slavishly does house work at the lapsed braindead hippie’s house, Günther is also probably gay, thus hinting that he may have in fact molested the son, or at the very least resented his children. 

 When Agnes is called “the scum of the earth” and kicked out of her apartment by her asshole workaholic boyfriend Rudi (Oliver Korittke), s/he moves in with her old and lonely fag hag friend Roxy (played by Fassbinder superstar Margit Carstensen) and soon learns from a receptionist at a hospital that there is something very wrong with her lab results, but s/he is too afraid to stay to talk with the doctor and find out exactly what the problem is. Meanwhile, Hans-Jörg, who has just been rebuffed by a chick he screwed who played him like a true cuckold pawn and talked him into painting her apartment, goes by his father’s homestead and mistakenly believes he sees his brother Agnes giving papa Günther blowjob. As for Werner, his son filmed him defecating on his piece of paper in his home office and his wife thinks it is quite hilarious. In terms of their dead sex life, wife Signe complains to her scat-fiend spouse, “Where is the casual relationship between your earnings and your toilet behavior? How can you even assume that I’d feel the ghost of eroticism, if I have to witness, if I have to witness you pressing out your secretions everyday?,” not to mention the fact she believes that her hubby is a schizophrenic. Eventually, Werner loses his cool and decides to destroy his wife’s bushes and son Ralf’s pot plants with a chainsaw. Needless to say, Signe leaves Werner and brings their sons with her. Meanwhile, Agnes learns that her great love Henry Preminger (played by Lee Daniels, the producer of Monster’s Ball (2001) and director of Precious: Based on the Novel "Push" by Sapphire (2009))—a famous gay American Negro fashion designer—is coming to town. After revisiting his ex-wife and children (!), Agnes borrows his dead mother’s wedding dress for his reunion with Henry. As the viewer discovers, Agnes cut off her cock for Henry, but this only repelled him. When Agnes runs into his ex-love and his entourage on the red carpet of a show, Henry pretends not to remember him, but agrees to come by his apartment for ‘German coffee’ after finally vaguely pretending to remember the tragic tranny. While Henry eventually reveals his undying life for Agnes when they are alone together, it is revealed that he cared more about his career than his relationship, hence why their relationship ultimately dissolved. Although Henry achieved the fame and fortune he always dreamed of, he more or less confesses he is unhappy to Agnes. Meanwhile, Hans-Jörg blows his father Günther’s brains away with a shotgun and proceeds to star in a porn flick after being offered the job from a dude named Manni Moneto (Martin Semmelrogge) from his sex addicts anonymous group. To his shock, H.J. falls in love with a porn star named Desiree (Suzan Anbeh), who consoles him after he has a freakout while filming a porn scene. Luckily for Werner, his son Ralf runs away, so Signe comes back home for his support. In the end, Agnes dies of the dubious illness (in one scene, blood seeps from her crotch, thus hinting its related to his/her sex change) she refused to ask the doctor about while remembering a rare happy moment when she was a little boy, patricidal fugitive Hans-Jörg heads eastward with his new lover Desiree, and Signe gets his wife back. 

 A Hollywood molested take on Fassbinder’s masterpiece In A Year of 13 Moons made for a socially dysfunctional, degenerate generation of Germans reared on MTV and Adam Sandler flicks and post-cultural liberal capitalism, Agnes and His Brothers has about as much aesthetic value as a car commercial, yet its scathing scat humor and callous critique of the post-Baader-Meinhof bourgeois ultimately makes it one of the most interesting and, dare I say, greatest Teutonic films of its zeitgeist. Featuring an ironic use of pop rock songs like “Happy Together” by The Turtles, Agnes and His Brothers, not unlike more recent Martin Scorsese flicks like Goodfellas (1990) and The Wolf of Wall Street (2013), is afraid to rise above the tragicomic despite its rather somber subject matter, as if the incapacity to mourn as has only grown worse in Germany since the end of the Second World War. To auteur Oskar Roehler’s credit, his intent was not to make Agnes and His Brothers too Bergman-esque in tone so as to appeal to Hollywood-lobotomized philistines, or as the director stated himself in an interview, “I didn't want to take the whole thing too seriously, however; I wanted to make it rather light and playful, so that it would be fun to watch. I used to be all too quick in making moralistic points, but unfortunately I always noticed this too late.” Roehler would follow up the film with the similarly themed but somewhat inferior work The Elementary Particles (2006) aka Atomised based on the French novel Les Particules élémentaires (1998) by Michel Houellebecq, but his work has only become all the more mainstream and, in turn, superficial, as time has passed. Like a Teutonic equivalent to what Todd Solondz has accomplished in terms of sardonically satirizing the culturally and sexually confused American Hebrews of New Jersey suburbia, Agnes and His Brothers is a patently pessimistic piece of hysterically humorous celluloid psychotherapy created in an age when the only thing one can do in the face of overwhelming social dysfunction is laugh it off. A postmodern mutation of Oedipus Rex set in German suburbia made in a time where a kosher culture-distorter like Sigmund Freud and his Frankfurt School disciples' ideas have defiled every aspect of bourgeois life (indeed, if the Hebraic psychoanalysts had any goal, it was that) and where neo-vaudevillian humor has even taken over a traditionally humorless nation like Germany, Agnes and His Brothers is ultimately an unhinged reminder where American (non)kultur has probably had a more deleterious effect on Germany than firebombs did in WWII. Undoubtedly, Roehler is no Fassbinder and not even a Schlingensief, but there is more truth in 5 minutes of Agnes and His Brothers than all the films of a deracinated Teutonic hack like Tom Tykwer combined. 

-Ty E

Transfigured Nights

Undoubtedly, in many ways, the Internet is a fucked tool of virtual socialization that has empowered collectives of crypto-perverts from all around the world to unite from the comfort of their living rooms in strengthening the social fabric of their sexual insanity. One of the creepiest yet equally pathetic subcultures I stumbled upon on the internet somewhat recently is so-called ‘masking’, which is a sort of cyber meta-cross-dressing that involves grown men, both gay and straight (and every in between), who take on human doll personas where they wear female masks, drag, and even fake tits and exhibit their foul fetishism for all the world to see via webcams. Although Channel 4's documentary Secrets of the Living Dolls caused a stir all over the internet and Twitter in early 2014 after 2.4 million viewers tuned in to watch the hermetic world of ‘female masking,’ New Zealand auteur David Blyth (Red Blooded American Girl, Ghost Bride) created an experimental documentary half a decade earlier, Transfigured Nights (2009), that offered a more subversive and dark, if not semi-campy, look at the disturbing cyber culture. Beginning his filmmaker career as the closest thing to a ‘Kiwi Buñuel’ with his avant-garde surrealist short Circadian Rhythms (1976) and his absurdist feature-length satire of suburbia Angel Mine (1976), Blyth would also be responsible for New Zealand’s first horror film, Death Warmed Up (1984) aka Death Warmed Over. After Death Warmed Up got some international attention (Alejandro Jodorowsky is a notable fan of the film!), Blyth made his way to Hollywood and directed a couple horror films before falling into the undignified world of television where he even directed episodes of Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. Not surprisingly, it was not until Blyth moved back to New Zealand that he would go back to his roots and once again direct provocative auteur pieces, including the patently perverse arthouse-splatter flick Wound (2010). Aside from Wound, Blyth also began directing a series of documentaries, including Our Oldest Soldier (2002), which is about the director’s WWII war hero grandfather, as well as a couple docs on sexual fetishism, which include the S&M/BDSM-themed work Bound for Pleasure (2002) and Transfigured Nights. An insightful and decidedly debasing document of mixed-up men ranging from Vietnam War veterans to white British Muslims who derive maximum ecstasy from emasculating and degrading themselves by wearing anime masks and fruity costumes for voyeurs across the globe via webcams, Transfigured Nights is a totally trying yet strangely rewarding document of Occidental decay that is scarier than any David Lynch film and ultimately reminds the viewer why Muslims are so eager to keep the Western influences out of their nations that they are willing to blow themselves up to accomplish such a goal. 

 With masker names like ‘Hog-Tied,' ‘More Rubber Sir,' and ‘Miss Piggy,' it is easy to see that the subjects of Transfigured Nights take their creepily contrived online personas rather seriously. The human train wrecks of Blyth’s film want to give you a private show, as it fuels their seemingly unquenchable thirst for exhibitionistic self-debasement and pseudo-self-glorification. ‘Mr. Jeffus’ is a virtual human pig who got into rubber and cross-dressing via his early interest in female gloves. With the emasculating encouragement of his equally rotund wife, Jeffus does female housework in high heels and a full-body leather suit. ‘Kuniko’ is a kinky creep who does not enjoy talking but wallows in wearing Japanese schoolgirl anime masks and tying plastic bag after plastic bag around his head, as if one bag is not enough. ‘More Rubber Sir’, who randomly discovered his fetish for rubber one day after trying on various wetsuits, is a crypto-queer who is too afraid of the commitment that goes with actually meeting real people in real-life person, so instead he gets on a webcam and shows off his coveted Israeli gasmask. ‘Michiko’ is from Hong Kong and believes it is “no fun to play male characters” because “girls get all the attention.” Although his family is ashamed of his peculiar proclivity towards wearing Japanese anime character masks, he sees what he does “as an art” and wears his costume as much as he can. ‘Hog-Tied’ is an ostensibly heterosexual American truck driver who has blown no less than $2,500-$3,000 on his rubber gear. At any given time, Hog-Tied wears upwards of seven layers of rubber and enjoys putting a vibrating egg in his panties while he wallows in his own personal hell of unhinged hedonism. The ‘Lady of the Mask’ does not like to talk, but s/he sure can wear a mask and wig and do it in a rather grotesque fashion that might even give a child a heart attack. Indeed, Lady of the Masks sports multiple masks at once, peeling each face off with the fury of a maniac chick that cannot decide on what ‘personality’ to wear that day. 

 Undoubtedly, ‘Deeba’ is one of the most disturbed figures of Transfigured Nights and he has no qualms about exposing his metal derangement. A 38-year-old British IT worker of partial gypsy extraction who as he states himself, “came to the Muslim faith, believe it or not, on 9/11,” Deeba states he has never derived pleasure from his penis and speculates that doctors may have ruined his genitals, as he remembers them fiddling with his member when he was a kid. A brazen burka fetishist, Deeba somehow believes that other Muslims will accept him despite the fact he is a tranny that gets a sick kick from posing in various elaborate female Islamic garments. To Deeba’s credit, s/he is not politically correct and matter-of-factly states, “I’ve often wondered if dyslexia and gender dysphoria are linked. Every single TS I know is dyslexic.” ‘Miss Piggy’ may be many things, but s/he is certainly not shy as a proud self-described “lifelong tranny” who loves to expose his/her shriveled up man-cunt for the world to see. An unmarried 65-year-old Vietnam War vet with no children, Miss Piggy confesses, “I was in the U.S. Army and went to Vietnam…I was a door gunner and paratrooper but not by choice.” Undoubtedly, it seems being in the army did little to toughen up Miss Piggy as s/he, “loves big hair and high, high heels.” Describing himself as, “part performance artist and part pure exhibitionist,” Miss Piggy believes masking, which he has done for over 30 years, is about, “recreating yourself as art…your own intimate canvas…and using that to escape from conformity.” Rather unfortunately, Miss Piggy concludes ‘her’ web cam performance by flashing her nasty bits. 

 Featuring an audio clip of Bela Lugosi yelling “pull the strings” from Ed Wood’s banally bizarre pro-transsexual docudrama-exploitation flick Glen or Glenda (1953), Transfigured Nights certainly has a sometimes humorous tone that manages to make the experience somewhat more palatable, though the entire experience as a whole is still nothing short of a sort of metaphysical molestation. Indeed, as someone who has read Richard von Krafft-Ebing's timeless tome Psychopathia Sexualis: eine Klinisch-Forensische Studie (1886) in its entirety, I still cannot wrap my head around how anyone could become sexually aroused by wearing an Asian cartoon character mask, but then again, we live in a decidedly depraved era where children’s films feature sexual innuendos and eroticize animated characters. Advertised with the tagline “Mondo Webcam,” Transfigured Nights is ultimately an aesthetically and thematically wayward work that blurs the line between exploitation and art cinema and that also manages to pay tribute to Gualtiero Jacopetti and Franco Prosperi but has more in common with a Werner Herzog doc when it comes to depicting the cold, hard truth about humanity's idiosyncrasies. An (anti)cinematic achievement of sorts in that auteur David Blyth managed to direct an entire film without having to even leave his computer, Transfigured Nights is cinéma vérité 2.0 as a strikingly singular low-budget work made in an age when any moron can make a movie and have it seen by simply uploading it to YouTube. Featuring an electronic score by Blyth's regular composer Jed Town that is certainly more fitting than the Schoenberg composition that the film may or may not have derived its name from, Transfigured Nights is an audio-visual nightmare in expressionistic webcam form that must be preserved at all costs in a time-capsule as evidence of the sort of social afflictions that popped up as the West was taking its last gasp. 

-Ty E

Baal (1970)

I have never been much of a Volker Schlöndorff (The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum, The Handmaid’s Tale) fan nor his mostly superficial and obscenely sentimental quasi-communist consumer-geared films, but one of his films, Baal (1970)—a modern reworking of kraut commie Bertolt Brecht’s 1923 play of the same name set in late-1960s Munich and starring a rather young leather-clad Rainer Werner Fassbinder as the eponymous antihero—has been at the top of my mental list of most-wanted films for some time. Rather unfortunately, Baal had been out of circulation for over 40 years because Bertolt Brecht’s kosher cunt of a widow Helene Weigel, who owned the rights to her dead shegetz hubby’s work, found Fassbinder’s performance “dreadful” and had the film immediately banned.  In fact, Weigel had the gall to state of Fassbinder's performance, “If he thinks that a leather jacket and a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth makes him like Brecht…!,” as if her bolshy beau Bert was some sort of handsome rebel as opposed to an archetypical pencil-necked, four-eyed Dinaric dork. Indeed, catching the premiere of Baal when it was screened for the first (and ultimately last) time on April 21, 1970 on West German television, Weigel wasted no time in calling the proper authorities on the very same night and used her legal authority to have the film stashed away in a vault indefinitely, as if the film had been adapted by naughty National Socialist Veit Harlan. While Weigel dropped dead the next year, it would not be until her daughter Barbara Schall-Brecht, who took over the rights to father’s work, came to the conclusion that Fassbinder is probably now more popular than her father and sent an e-mail to Juliane Lorenz—head of the Fassbinder’s Foundation—in 2011 reading, “The reputation of W. Fassbinder is indeed very big. I would now allow the film to be released on DVD.”  Flash forward to March 2014 and Baal—the virtual ‘Holy Grail of German New Cinema’—has finally been released to the general public, at least in Germany. Created when Fassbinder was only 24 and his first feature-length film Love Is Colder Than Death (1969) had just received a less than outstanding ovation at the Berlinale (sneering audience members accused Fassbinder and star Ulli Lommel of being “dilettantes”) Baal is, at least in my less than humble opinion, a true lost masterpiece and quite arguably the greatest and most artistically ambitious film Herr Schlöndorff ever directed. Indeed, shot for television on a meager budget of 160,000 German marks (which was less than half of what was typically spent on TV productions back then), Baal is a visceral vice-ridden piece of decidedly decadent avant-garde delirium where Brecht meets counter-culture meets anti-Heimat that demonstrates for once and all that Schlöndorff has more artistic integrity than most of his post-The Tin Drum (1969) works would indicate. A sort of artistic rebellion on Schlöndorff’s part, or as he described in Fassbinder's memorial essay It Doesn’t Pay To Be Nice: “I had just failed in MICHAEL KOHLHAAS with a large American production and wanted out of the structures of the movie industry. In protest, I filmed Baal with a 16mm handheld camera, almost entirely with nonprofessionals, without well-known actors,” Baal is a wildly poetic and even wicked work that manages to capture everything that was ‘great’ about the counter-culture generation, namely its supposed individualism and dedication to artistic experimentation. Starring Fassbinder as the eponymous lead in a role based on a play that his Danish filmmaker friend Christian Braad Thomsen summed up as being as follows, “Brecht’s portrait…is an astonishingly accurate picture of Fassbinder. Baal is a celebrated poet who does not feel at ease in polite society. He’s a loner, a wandering troubadour who prefers bars and the open sky to literary salons. He is strangely attractive to both men and women, who commit suicide because of him. His honesty can be brutal and cold and yet people like his company,” Baal is an eerily prophetic work featuring thee Teutonic wunderkind in a pre-fame performance as a sort of demonic dandy (hence the title of the film!) who, like the actor/auteur himself, died a lonely death that was nothing if not inevitable. 

 A late-expressionist work heavily influenced by the proto-Romantic Teutonic Sturm und Drang literary tradition, Brecht’s Baal (which was written in 1918 but did not make its theatrical debut until 1923) is notable for not only being the playwright’s first feature-length play but also a work created before the communist theatre practitioner developed the dramaturgical techniques of epic theatre that he is best known for, thus ultimately making for a more apolitical and intriguing work. Of course, Schlöndorff’s Baal is innately political as a penetrating piece of thematically and aesthetically subversive counter-culture iconoclasm that features everything from a mockery of Warhol’s Campbell's soup cans and proto-Nazisploitation elements (in one scene a topless stripper dances on stage while wearing a Nazi officer’s hat), but luckily it does not resort to the sentimental Hollywoodized leftist celluloid twaddle that would plague most of the director’s subsequent films. Shot by the director on a handheld 16mm camera with a foggy Maddin-esque lens (thus giving the film an ethereal and even otherworldly feel), Baal looks like no other Schlöndorff film that I have ever seen, as an avant-garde work with an ideally idiosyncratic aesthetic that falls somewhere between Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising (1964), Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider (1969), and Fassbinder’s very own Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980). Despite Schlöndorff’s surprisingly raw and striking direction, Fassbinder is undoubtedly the ‘secondary auteur’ of Baal, as his absurdist Artaudian acting antics are just as an important ingredient as the spacey camera work and quasi-oneiric tableaux. 

 Beginning with Fassbinder as Baal strolling down a dirt trail with a sort of discernible defiant swag that tells you he does not give a shit about anyone as a The Doors-esque psychedelic rock song composed by Klaus Doldinger (Das Boot, The Neverending Story) with lyrics like, “To the bloated vultures Baal squints up, as they circle high above a corpse called Baal, sometimes Baal plays dead, vultures land to eat, Baal dines in silence on vulture meat” plays triumphantly in the background, Baal immediately lets the viewer know they are in store for unadulterated kraut counter-counter angst and anarchy. Baal is a born anarchist and sexual outlaw who proudly proclaims the following personal Weltanschauung, “You have to let out the beast, let him out into the sunlight.” In a scene that looks sort of like it could have been taken from Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971), Baal goes to a bourgeois party at an art salon in tribute to his poetry, but he has nil interest in being published and is just there to eat the fine cuisine, even telling admirers that he lives on ’64 Sewer Street’ (he actually lives in an ancient attic that looks like something out of a Slavic horror film) and couldn't careless about being published. With kitschy modern art in the form of an Adolf Hitler stamp collage and crappy Warhol-esque Campbell's soup can paintings on the wall, Baal is not exactly digging the vibe of the place and when a rather rotund gentleman (Walter Sedlmayr) patronizingly remarks, “Ladies and gentlemen, I admit I am shocked to find such a man living in such modest circumstances. I discovered this maestro as an employee in my office. I’m not scared to say it’s a scandal for our town, to have such luminaries working for a daily wage." After being told by some young dork that his poetry is ‘Homeric’ and that he is a “precursor of the European poetry messiah,” Baal proceeds to hit on a chick named Emilie (Miriam Spoerri), who also happens to be the wife of Mech (Günther Neutze), the owner of the art salon and the man who planned to publish the impoverished poet's work. Needless to say Baal ruins his chances of getting published, but as tells the character played by Sedlmayr, “I can’t help it if you ply me with wine. Must I swallow your nonsense so I can fill my belly?” and at least Emilie comes to see him later that night at his favorite seedy bar where he reads degenerate scatological poetry to truckers. Indeed, with a certain deranged glee, Baal reads the following grotesque lines to his prole follows: “Orge said to me the dearest place on Earth for him was always the latrine. A place where one is content with stars above, and dung below. A place of humility, where you realize that you’re just a man who can’t keep anything. There you recognize what you are, a man who’s munching on the latrine.” A born sadist who worships sexual deviance, Baal tortures Emilie by forcing her to kiss a Negro trucker (played by Günther Kaufmann, whom Fassbinder first met on the set of Baal and with whom he soon started a torrid one-sided romance) and when his young friend Johannes (Marian Seidowsky) brings his 17-year-old virgin girlfriend Johanna (Irmgard Paulis) to the bar, the poet begins persecuting the unsuspecting young girl. Naturally, being a proud defiler, Baal, who previously told his friend to not take away the virginity of his young girlfriend, steals Johanna from Johannes and deflowers the naïve young girl. The next day Baal learns from two chicks that he is about to have a threesome with that Johanna committed suicide by jumping into a river. Not one to cry over spilt milk, Baal soon acquires a new sex object named Sophie (Margarethe von Trotta) who he actually professes his love to and soon impregnates. Of course, being a debauched bisexual, Baal eventually throws her away for a man.

 Reasonably impoverished, Baal ironically begins working as a woodcutter, going from a man whose words could have been printed on paper derived from the very same wood he cuts down had he not intentionally burned all his bridges and screwed up his publishing deal with Mech. One day while reasonably drunk on Schnapps (which is the dipsomaniac antihero’s drug of choice) and a nasty dose of narcissism, Baal rather rudely plays with the corpse of a man named Teddy who was killed after a tree ostensibly fell on him, though the other woodcutters have their suspicions and the pernicious poet is soon out of his job. Now joined by his Jesus-like comrade Ekart (played by Sigi Graue, who previously starred in films directed by Kluge and Syberberg), Baal ditches pregnant Sophie, who is still in love with the sadistic scribbler despite his physically and emotionally abusive behavior against her. Ekart offers to help Sophie, but Baal ultimately rules, thus leaving the little lady in the lurch. Like two drunk pervert prophets, Ekart and Baal, who are a sort of a Teutonic Rimbaud and Verlaine, roam the countryside, with the latter eventually raping the girlfriend (played by Werner Schroeter superstar Carla Egerer). Later, when Baal and Ekart go back to their favorite bar where Sophie now works as a waitress, things take a terribly tragic turn for the worst. After catching Ekart and Sophie kissing, Baal attacks his comrade as he declares his quasi-homoerotic love (with Ekart proclaiming, “am I not your lover?”). Needless to say, jealous Baal kills Ekart by cowardly stabbing him in the gut just before Sophie attempts to break the two men apart. A fugitive murderer with his best friend’s blood covering his clothes, Baal once again heads to the woods where he falls ill from what seems to be a metaphysical affliction. While dying a dubious and pathetic death, Baal is mocked by the prole woodcutters he once worked with. When the woodcutters find Baal’s corpse in a bush outside, one states, “Gone to the dogs. That’s really something. Going out to die like that. Hats off!,” in a scene of pure tragicomedy. 

In his Fassbinder memorial essay It Doesn’t Pay to Be Nice, Volker Schlöndorff wrote regarding the star of Baal: “It isn’t easy for me to write about RWF, because he always was a challenge to me. Even physically. I eat and drink in moderation, never took drugs, and before writing this, I climbed over the fence of a sports field to run my 4000 meters. We could not have been more different from one another.” Indeed, while watching Baal, you can easily see that Fassbinder’s domineering attitude and brazen persona have hijacked Herr Schlöndorff’s production. Ironically, despite Fassbinder’s clear physical and spiritual dominance over Baal, the actor/director partly agreed to star in the film as a means to learn how to direct, as well as to teach the members of his Anti-Theater (antiteater) to learn how to work on a film set, or as Schlöndorff wrote: “Almost all the supporting parts were played by people of his group. I took over his cameraman, Dietrich Lohmann, and even a few members of his crew. He wanted to turn them into professionals and asked me to hire them. As paid help, so to speak. Now I understood much better what he had in mind, for most of them didn’t have a clue, not about acting or about filmmaking.” Although Fassbinder would later have a small role in Schlöndorff’s made-for-TV anti-Heimat film Der plötzliche Reichtum der armen Leute von Kombach (1971) aka The Sudden Wealth of the Poor People of Kombach, the two would not work together again until nearly ten years later when they both collaborated on the omnibus film Deutschland im Herbst (1978) aka Germany in Autumn, with the elder director stating of his experience working with real-life Baal on the terrorism-themed film: “Together with Margarethe, I had been the one who had visited prisons, joined Red Help and committees on solitary confinement, etc. But it was he who felt persecuted and acted it out in the movie. At the time, I found this rather unpolitical and egocentric. Later I understood that having spent ten years living on the edge of German law, he knew more about persecution and antisocial behavior in the sense of Genet than I did with my highly respectable protest attitude.” Indeed, despite the ostensibly ‘edgy’ and ‘revolutionary’ nature of most of Schlöndorff’s German films, I have always found most of them rather tame, conspicuously contrived, and calculatingly formulaic, hence why he went on to work in Hollywood. As a hopeless hater of dork Bolshevik Brecht and a sometimes detractor of Schlöndorff, I can say without the slightest bit of hesitation that I think Baal is a lost masterpiece that is actually deserving of its reputation, but I must admit that I think Fassbinder is owed the greatest debt in terms of the spirit and overall integrity of the work. A film that makes the perfect double feature along with Kamikaze 1989 (1982), which featured the auteur in his last screen appearance in which he put on more than a little bit of weight, Baal is a sort of announcement of Fassbinder’s belligerent blitzkrieg-like arrival in the cinema world and just like the eponymous antihero, the filmmaker would leave this world just as abruptly as he arrived, but not without leaving a couple bodies behind (to Fassbinder’s credit, while Baal only inspired one suicide, he inspired at least two). Featuring countless highly quotable lines like, “Jesus loved evil” and “I see the world in a mild light. It is the excrement of dear God,” as spoken by Fassbinder’s girlish lips, Baal is Brecht with an actual soul, which is certainly no small achievement. Indeed, compare Fassbinder’s performance to that of David Bowie in Alan Clarke’s BBC-produced Baal (1982) and you will witness the difference between visceral untamed genius and carefully choreographed neo-dandy dilettantism.  While Fassbinder might be long dead, the world is just catching up with his work and there is probably no better introduction to the auteur's marvelous and seductive, if not unflattering, persona than in Baal—the greatest film you have never seen and easily one of the most important works of German New Cinema.

-Ty E

King of Comics

I have never been a comic book fan and never understood the appeal of reading glorified picture books nor have I ever had any interest in comic book film adaptions, but I do like the campy dark horror-comedy Killer Condom (1996) aka Kondom des Grauens, which was based on 1987 work of the same name written by kraut queer comic book artist Ralf König. Despite being an unrepentant homo with a pathological propensity for drawing massive monster members, König is easily the most famous and commercially successful comic book artist working in Germany today, so it should be no surprise that foremost Teutonic gay agitator and fag-fascist filmmaker Rosa von Praunheim (Army of Lovers or Revolt of the Perverts, Neurosia: 50 Years of Perversity) would direct a documentary about the comic king. Indeed, König des Comics - Ralf König (2012) aka Der König des Comics über und mit Ralf König aka King of Comics is just another one of many examples as to why von Praunheim is the greatest aberrosexual anthropologist-sociologist ethnology documentarian who has ever lived, as the documentary digs deep into the life and work of Ralf König, a man who went from being a meager peasant woodworker to being one of the most controversial and politically incorrect comic book artists of his zeitgeist and a rare gay artist who actually managed to crossover into the mainstream in a mostly non-affirmative-action-based fashion. Simultaneously a man who worships and fetishizes the bronze bungholes of brown men from foreign southern lands and depicts Muslims as the most primitively-minded yet decidedly dangerous philistines in the world, König is depicted as an equal opportunity offender in King of Comics, though his allegiance to quasi-hermetic homo sects in the Fatherland, especially Munich, cannot be denied. Taking cocksucker clichés to such extremes that his work manages to parody everything from the erotic caricatures of Tom of Finland to the mainstream homogenized fagdom typical of American suburban sodomite sitcoms like Will & Grace, König managed to catch the attention of the heterosexual mainstream, with his comics Der bewegte Mann (1987) and Pretty Baby (1988) being adapted into the popular award-winning German comedy Der bewegte Mann (1994) aka The Most Desired Man aka Maybe ... Maybe Not directed by Sönke Wortmann and starring Til Schweiger and Katja Riemann. Seeming like the typical gay story aside from the subject’s success at comic arts, King of Comics tells the story of a strange boy from a small village who did not ‘find himself’ until moving to the big city, being sexually used and abused by older men, dressing in drag, developing a dubious taste for dark meat, and eventually becoming a married member of the buggery bourgeois. 

 Swiss dentist René Krummenacher (who co-directed the S&M-themed documentary The Pierce File (2002) and acted as cinematographer of the von Praunheim doc Phooey, Rosa (2002)) has been a Ralf König fan for 26 years and credits the comic artist for helping him to come to terms with his homosexuality. With the help of von Praunheim, Krummenacher is finally going to get to meet his hero and luckily for him, König is no ‘spiritual queen’ with airs of anal-retentive arrogance, but a rather humble fellow who has a giant portrait of a cow hanging on his apartment wall. Indeed, growing up in the small town of Soest in North Rhine-Westphalia, West Germany, König even dated a chick when he was a teenager but when he failed to assert himself on her, he had to confess to his lady friend that he liked boys and not girls. Only managing to graduate middle school, König worked a banal job as a ‘joiner’ (a type of low-level carpenter) for eight grueling hours each day, which enabled him to develop a sort of ‘cerebral cinema’ in his mind where he would dream up comic scenarios while at work that he would ultimately bring to life in comic book form. After meeting a comic book publisher who found him ‘sexy,’ König published what he describes as ‘adolescent scribbles,’ which were really nothing more than crude homo erotica with comedic undertones.  With Rosa von Praunheim’s book Sex und Karriere (1978) aka Sex and Career as his gay bible and after attending a fag festival with his fat fag hag friend where he was quasi-raped, König finally came out of the closet in 1979, even leaving a note out at his workspace letting his heterosexual prole coworkers know that he is a proud poof.  To the scribbler's surprise, none of his comrades at work confronted him about his homosexuality, thus leading König to come to the conclusion that the heteros were more afraid of him than he was of them.

 As King of Comics candidly reveals, although initially disgusted by effeminate queens and drag queens, König began dressing in drag himself after entering the homo underworld, which he does on occasion to this day. Meanwhile, despite lacking a high school education, König was accepted into Kunstakademie Düsseldorf art academy in 1981 and managed to publish three full-length comics in a single year while attending school. Finding Düsseldorf boring, König decided to go to Munich where he became a gay celebrity and started becoming politically active in poof power groups. König also became active in indulging in brown men, namely a fellow who he simply describes as ‘The Brazilian’ and who, not unlike Rainer Werner Fassbinder with his brown boy toys Günther Kaufmann and El Hedi ben Salem, he blew all his money on with lavish vacations and whatnot to appease his swarthy but apparently sexually virile schwarze mensch. While becoming accepted as a mainstream figure, the comic artist could not stomach the fact a hit film based on his work, The Most Desired Man, catered mostly to heterosexual audiences and made a mockery of gaydom. With a growing hetero audience, as well as the growing homo-hating Muslim population in Germany, König began making politically incorrect comics mocking the Prophet Mohammad as well as those white liberals that were too afraid to acknowledge the fact that people who force their women to wear towels over their heads might have a hard time playing nice in a liberal democracy where prostitution is legal. Now living the life of a bourgeois housewife with his young boy toy Olaf Gabriel, König downplays his talents to Krummenacher, who he sells three large paintings. 

 During the beginning of King of Comics, auteur Rosa von Praunheim asks a heterosexual comic fan,“Can Ralf König comics make you gay?,” to which the man jokingly replies “yeah.” Personally, after watching the documentary, I believe that if it were not for the comic artist’s more obsessively detailed drawings of men’s rectums and his natural tendency toward bizarre pro-gay messages, one would think König was a heterosexual mocking homo kultur in a fashion not unlike American animated shows like South Park and Family Guy, albeit taken to a more perversely pornographic and unwaveringly debauched degree that would certainly baffle American viewers. Although I am far from a comic connoisseur, I think König's aesthetic seems like Robert Crumb meets Matt Groening with a slightly and quasi-sarcastic influence from Tom of Finland. As a German heterosexual comic bookstore owner named Bert Henning states regarding König’s work, “He’s definitely on the right track in that his comics, probably without intention, are very cinematic.” While I cannot say I have seen any other König film adaptations, Killer Condom—a deranged dark comedy with special-effects work done by arthouse-splatter auteur Jörg Buttgereit about a gay twink-loving wop cop police detective who goes on a mission to uncover the dubious origins of ravenous rubbers after losing a testicle via a carnivorous condom—is certainly a rather raunchy and patently politically incorrect (albeit with a taken-on pro-gay message at the end) work that is bound to offend more gay than straight viewers. During King of Comics, director von Praunheim, who is well known in Germany for his audaciously annoying and arrogant approach to AIDS activism, seems somewhat irked by König’s Killer Condom as he interpreted it as an anti-condom film, but luckily the comic artist makes no apologies for his work. Of course, as a man who made a comic in tribute to his friend who died of AIDS-related complications, König has probably done his part in the gay cancer campaign. Indeed, König has created comics about racially pure ‘right-wing homophobe’ terriers, a gay molestation of Goldilocks and the Three Bears featuring a tranny hair-hat negress as Goldilocks and three fat hairy men as ‘bears’, a moronic and ostensibly heterosexual muscle-bound Spanish construction worker who likes rim-jobs named ‘Ramon’, and a gerontophiliac Platonic dialogue between a geezer-like Plato and a monstrously hung Narcissus, so there is no doubt that the comic artist has done his part as a cocksucking culture-distorter who has defiled the mainstream, with von Praunheim’s King of Comics being an interesting and equally incriminating introduction to his wayward world. 

-Ty E