Nice to Meet You, Please Don't Rape Me!

I am not exactly sure of the exact idiosyncratic socio-political Weltanschauung that South African auteur Aryan Kaganof (Ten Monologues from the Lives of the Serial Killers, Beyond Ultra Violence: Uneasy Listening by Merzbow) has assembled for himself over the years as testified by his thematically complex and ever-changing oeuvre, but I feel that I have found a kindred spirit of sorts in his films, namely because he clearly does what he wants artistically, no matter what the consequences may be. Indeed, with his lovingly titled work Nice to Meet You, Please Don't Rape Me! (1996), Kaganof caused such a spectacle at the Pan-African Film Festival in Ouagadougou—the largest and most important film festival on the dark continent—that about 900 of the spectators left the venue after being deeply offended by the film and its semi-surreal depiction of white-on-black homosexual forced entry. Advertised with the endlessly endearing tag-line, “From the country that gave you apartheid, now the world's first rape musical...,” Nice to Meet You, Please Don't Rape Me! aka Confession of a Yeoville Rapist is a fiercely fucked filmic farce of the patently politically incorrect and catchy musical sort that follows three professional multicultural rapists—a Negro, Jew (actually, Kaganof did not mean for this character to be of the Hebraic faith but most reviewers assume he is and I think the film works more effectively if looked at from that perspective), and Englishman—who have been ordered by a South African cabinet minister to bring total equality to the rainbow nation by overcoming ‘rape prejudice’ and transforming the country into a place full of equal opportunity rapists. Indeed, while a deeply and intrinsically South African work that was shot on location in Yeoville, Johannesburg between April 26 and 28 in 1994 during the three days of the first democratic election held in South Africa, which inevitably resulted in Nelson Mandela becoming the first black president of the country, Nice to Meet You, Please Don't Rape Me! is also relevant to Europe, America, and the rest of the ex-European colonies in that it depicts a world where all races and creeds are ‘equal’ in terms of spiritual slavery and metaphysical rape as carefully carried out by a homogenizing system run by international bankers and other globalist entities. Of course, whether they want to admit it or not, one of the first things most Americans think (aside from AIDS, Mandela, apartheid, etc.) when they hear the words ‘South Africa’ is rape and in Kaganof’s film, sexual pillaging is the country’s sole growth industry and everyone is in on it, including heebs, nig-nogs, and bitchy Brit twits. A disturbingly prophetic, if not singularly comedic, work, Nice to Meet you, Please Don't Rape Me! features a whacked-out world where rape has become all the rage in SA, yet Kaganof's depiction of human depravity seems rather tame when one considers the facts regarding contemporary South Africa and its epidemic rape problem.  Indeed, rape has gotten so bad in South Africa since the film's initial release two decades ago that a piece of untermensch filth actually raped two female paramedics in 2010 while they were attending to the wounds of a burnt toddler, which is a scenario that is as unbelievably absurd as those in Kaganof’s marvelously maniacal melodic musical. Powered by the devilishly catchy title theme song “Nice to Meet You, Please Don't Rape Me” as sung by a vicious vag-terrorizing trio, the film is nowhere near as ugly as it sounds and is quite arguably Kaganof’s most accessible work, as a playful piece that uses Hollywood genre conventions against themselves, ultimately not only 'reverse-raping' rape culture, but also the mass media (in interviews, Kaganof has described the campaign by mainstream liberals to censor dark realities in SA as “the new Stalinism”), globalization, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the pernicious philanthropy of white European liberals, and the sappy delusions of idealistic mainstream leftist morons who thought that Mandela would solve all of South Africa’s seemingly perennial problems. Originally planning to make a documentary on hatred against women in SA, Kaganof interviewed 15 rapists and 15 rape victims about their experiences, ultimately deciding that the nonfictional film format was too inadequate for getting his message across, thus siring something completely different, Nice to Meet You, Please Don't Rape Me!, which is quite arguably the only film that will make you ‘LOL’ at rape and South Africa’s total deluge into sub-barbarism. 

 As Nice to Meet You, Please Don't Rape Me! reveals in an almost sadistically satirical fashion, sexual ravagement is a booming industry in South Africa and is only going to rise with a vengeance with the election of the first black president, so ‘progressive’ politicians seek to recruit professional rapist soldiers to diversify sexual sadism in the country to make it a true rainbow nation of colorful involuntary coitus. Indeed, a fellow that goes by the title ‘Cabinet Minister’ (Bill Curry) meets up with a three-man multicultural brigade of rapists at a restaurant and tells them that in South Africa, a rape occurs “every 83 seconds but that simply is not good enough” and that they need to make sure that at least one rape occurs every single minute. The Cabinet Minister then unleashes the following objective to his trio of rapists: “We have to take in cognizance the changing norms and values of society. Indeed, we have to be two steps ahead of the game…always have and always will […] What I’m saying to you is…your mandate for the future will be to rape everybody regardless of race, sex, creed, color, gender, sex preference, height, looks, qualifications…it simply doesn’t matter anymore. Continued funding for our organization by NGOs and the IMF will heavily rely on your total desire to overcome rape prejudice and to see to it that this country becomes a country of equal opportunity rapists.” Naturally, the revelation of ‘total rape’ brings total joy to the three special serial rapists and they leave the restaurant together singing the following lyrics in broad daylight like good little politically correct globalist cattle: “Well, we’ll rape you when you’re walking on the street…we’ll rape you when you’re trying to keep your seat..We’ll rape you when you’re trying to make a buck […] we’ll rape you when you’re playing your guitar…but I would not feel all afraid because everybody must get raped…everybody must get raped…everybody must get raped...everybody must get raped…everybody must get raped.”  Indeed, not only will these men rape an eclectic collection of individuals, but also rape each other, as diversified rape is akin to spiritual divinity in a multicultural land where a rampant rape culture trumps true social order and racial harmony.

 As Nice to Meet You, Please Don't Rape Me! progresses, one learns that the trinity of sexual terror might be in solidarity when it comes to indiscriminate rape, but they have little in common otherwise and even begin raping each other—both literally and metaphorically—in what can be described as a sort of metaphysical cannibalism. Going simply by the names Rapist #1 (Eric Miyeni), Rapist #2 (Matthew Oats), and Rapist #3 (Gustav Geldenhuys), the crooning rape soldiers are more like archetypes than real individuals. Indeed, Rapist #1 is a black, Rapist #2 is a white Englishman, and Rapist #3, who acts as the sort of unofficial leader of the group, is a SA Jew (it should be noted that many Jews played a prominent role in the anti-apartheid movement, with Marxist Jew Joe Slovo being a longtime friend/ally of Nelson Mandela who became the ‘Minister for Housing’ of Mandela's ‘democratic’ government in 1994). As depicted early on in the film, the terrible threesome abduct white women (which are actually white mannequins, as Kaganof opted for not using real women, so as to not ‘excite’ certain viewers with realistic portrayals of rape) at gunpoint and then proceed to ritualistically rape them as a militant and specially organized team. Indeed, after kidnapping a chick from her car at gunpoint in a parking garage, the merry melody-making men carry their inanimate victim to the rooftop of a gas station and Rapist #3 proceeds to symbolically cover his white victim's body with black tar (after all, with the end of apartheid, all South Africans are negroes now!) before he sexually savages her. The unhinged trinity also attend ‘rapist classes’ where they are taught by a ‘Feminist’ (Winnie Ryall) about what does and does not constitute rape. For a test in class, the rape students must answer ‘true’ or ‘false’ to the following scenarios: 1. Women who go to bars alone ask to be raped. 2. A woman who does not report a rape immediately after it happens is lying or has behaved unreasonably. 3. Prostitutes cannot be raped. Instead of turning his test paper in, Rapist #3 (who sits by himself, thus indicating his superior status over the other two rapists) hands the Feminist a paper with the sentence, “A cunt is a hole and a hole is nothing” written on it. A rather stern but fair professor, the Feminist also examines her pupils' flaccid penises to see if they have the proper tools for the job (she gives special attention to black Rapist #3’s pecker). One night, Rapist #3 forces Rapist #2 to get drunk on beer, telling him, “You gotta love your own people before you change the world […] One more for your ancestors,” as the seemingly ethno-masochistic English man begins to tear up after suffering a ‘psychological rape’ of sorts as a result of having guilt due to his nation's leading role in colonialism and whatnot. Meanwhile, black Rapist #1 ritualistically rapes a white woman that is bound to a chair while sporting a mask of an old white Afrikaner politician in a rather symbolic scene. During the last major scene of Nice to Meet You, Please Don't Rape Me!, black Rapist #1 forces Jewish Rapist #3 to brutally whip and bugger him at gunpoint. While being beaten, black Rapist #1 yells, “teach me manners…teach me etiquette…teach me respect…civilize me…teach me to speak mother fucking English.” Before taking a vanilla member in his pitch black nether-region, Rapist #1 pleads, “Give me what you think you’ve got to give me. Give me my freedom. Give it to me up the fucking ass.” In the end, black Rapist #3 metaphorically bulldozes the fourth wall and states directly to the viewer: “I know you all just want to be victims. You fucking thrive on it…committed to your own slavery.” Indeed, it is really the politically correct rapists who are the real slaves, as demonstrated by various scenes featured in the film of the threesome chained together naked.  Not only are they self-deluding victims of their own nation's troubled history, but they must carry the burden of the metaphoric chains of that history into a dubious future where collective rape and genocide is more likely than any sort of real reconciliation amongst the black majority and declining white minority. In their political and spiritual impotence, the rapists take out their angst and hatred on the most defenseless and innocent of victims via rape, thus ironically strengthening the system that enslaved them in the first place. 

 In an interview conducted years after the release of Nice to Meet You, Please Don't Rape Me!, auteur Aryan Kaganof offered the following insights regarding his radical rape musical and the three actors that played the rapist leads: “I get letters from all three actors who are still to an extent dealing with the after effects of the openness with which they dealt with each other during the shooting. I think you can see that clearly in the final scene of the film in which the men are literally chained to each other: despite all the terrible stuff they have done to each other they still have to face the future together. It is a simple metaphor but I wanted it to be clear and I hope that South Africans get the opportunity to see the film. People have found the film extremely pessimistic… but for me it is about the insight that these people are bound together because of the appalling history that they share. So I see it as a hopeful film. Not a pleasant, but definitely an honest film.” Of course, it has been two decades since Nice to Meet You, Please Don't Rape Me! was created and rape, violent racial tensions, and government corruption have only got all the more ugly since the end of apartheid, especially for white Afrikaans, with the group Genocide Watch theorizing that recent attacks against white Boer farmers constitute early signs of an impending genocide against the dying Europid population. Indeed, aside from many whites being driven into abject poverty as a result of so-called ‘Employment Equity’ and ‘Black Economic Empowerment’ legislation, since 1994 when Mandela was elected as the first black president of South Africa, about 3,000 (out of a total 40,000) white farmers have been violently murdered by blacks, with a good percentage of these victims being raped and/or tortured before being killed, so it should be no surprise that many whites have opted for leaving the rainbow nation permanently. As for rape, sexual violence and child and infant rape (according to a 2001 report from the South African Police Service, children are the victims of 41 percent of all rapes in the country) in South Africa is now among the highest in the world, with an estimated 500,000 rapes occurring every single year, thus making Nice to Meet You, Please Don't Rape Me! seem like all the more of a strangely 'optimistic,' if not equally darkly prophetic, work in retrospect. Indeed, with the aesthetic plague of mainstream trash propaganda movies like Zulu (2013) featuring American negroes like Forest Whitaker portraying black South Africans, Nice to Meet You, Please Don't Rape Me! makes for a rare piece of honest and authentic South Africa cinema, which was Kaganof’s objective as a filmmaker as demonstrated by his remark regarding the film in an interview: “I wanted people not to see South Africa in the political correct way, like the political parties that say "here's the problem, here's the solution". I have made a film of questions, a document that can make the audience think around what rape might imply, without giving any absolute answer. It's difficult to watch. But whomever you might be I know you will laugh once in a while [...] Political correctness doesn't treat the fact that we are human and that our emotions and sexuality were formed before we were given a political consciousness.” An isolated piece of cinematic honesty in a psychologically plundered, Hollywoodized world drunk on spectacular delusion and p.c. puffery on worthless public figures and bogus philanthropic causes that merely obscure the real problems of South Africa, Kaganof's Nice to Meet You, Please Don't Rape Me! is a rare voice of sardonic sanity that reminds one that the post-apartheid rainbow nation is not the magic multicultural place that Clint Eastwood, Matt Damon, and Morgan Freeman cowardly led you believe it was in the repugnant work of sentimentalist celluloid swill that is Invictus (2009), but a sexually and socially sadistic real-life dystopia run by a small 'minority' of modern day slave-masters and inhabited by forsaken slaves of the mind and soul who will not rest until they have raped themselves into oblivion.

-Ty E

The Gardener (1974)

Before there was William Friedkin’s The Guardian (1990), there was the rather obscure artsploitation horror-melodrama hybrid The Gardener (1974) aka Garden of Death aka Seeds of Evil directed by advertising director turned one-time auteur James H. Kay and starring counter-culture sex symbol Joe Dallesandro (Flesh, Blood for Dracula) in his first non-Warhol-related work. A somewhat campy (if not oftentimes unintentionally so) work that seems like it could have been directed by Curtis Harrington’s even more effeminate yet less talented little brother, The Gardener was such an abject commercial and critical failure upon its original release that director Kay would never again get the opportunity to direct another film (though he apparently got Tennessee Williams' blessing to adopt the playwright's one-act play The Gnädiges Fräulein (1966), but the film was never actually made for whatever reason). In fact, Kay’s nightmarish experience as a first-time director was chronicled in the documentary short The Distribution of Low Budget Films or The Gardener's Seeds of Evil Killed My Million Dollar Dream (1980), which was produced by the associate producer of The Gardener, Chalmer G. Kirkbride Jr., as his Master's Thesis in Public Relations at The American University in Washington, D.C. in 1980. The film also arguably destroyed the early career of Katharine Hepburn's niece Katharine Houghton, who previously received much critical acclaim starring alongside her aunt in Stanley Kramer’s rancid piece of pseudo-comedic melodramatic miscegenation propaganda Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967), even if her character in that film was more or less nothing more than a cipher. A work in the tired tradition of the old school Hollywood Woman’s Films disguised as a mystical supernatural horror flick, The Gardener is a sort of pseudo-counter-culture/tropic mod art flick that tells the oftentimes tedious and equally tasteless yet would-be-tasteful tale of a sexually repressed bourgeois housewife who becomes completely obsessed with her seemingly magical gardener, only to become intolerably hysterical and killing him in the end instead of simply engaging in the carnal pleasures she so pathetically longed for. A sort of modernist reworking of the Ancient Greek myth of the underworld goddess Persephone with vague shades of Pasolini’s Teorema (1968), The Gardener is a work that seems like it probably looked good on paper, but was ultimately executed (or more like excreted) in the worst possible way, as if everything that could have gone wrong did and then some. Indeed, it is one of those films that will probably only appeal to Joe Dallesandro completists and faithful fans of failed celluloid art. Apparently made to appeal to the undersexed appetites of middle-aged middleclass women, The Gardener never quite found its target audience and later had the title changed to Seeds of Evil (which directed Kay described as being “over-the-top”) by the crook distributor so it might wet the lips of the sort of degenerates that hung at 42nd street in NYC during the early 1970s. Filmed in exotic Puerto Rico (though it was originally suppose to be set in the hellhole know as Haiti), The Gardener is like The Last Movie of obscure American horror films, albeit nowhere as interesting as it might sound. Featuring Latin ‘spiritual negroes’ and token voodoo references, hyper horny housewives who channel their sexual energy into homicidal hysteria, blacks and mestizos with aristocratic German names, Little Joe bossing around old brown men around like a boss, and such marvelously mundane melodrama that is so ridiculous that it degenerates into low-camp comedy, The Gardener is one of those films that is so blatantly bad and pretentiously yet prosaically directed that it baffles the viewer to the point where they wonder how it was ever made in the first place. 

Beginning with a bedridden broad named Dorothy Burrows (Tanny McDonald) suffering from an intolerable bout of hysteria and then randomly dropping dead after a nurse brings her some tropical orchids, The Gardener immediately establishes a tone of innate ineptitude as far as horror and melodrama is concerned. Indeed, it takes a rather skilled director to make pretty flowers seem horrifying, yet would-be-auteur James H. Kay does not even seem competent enough to direct a credit card commercial, as a man who simply cannot decide whether he wants to be George Cukor, Federico Fellini, or Mario Bava, though his directing style more resembles that of Herschell Gordon Lewis à la Suburban Roulette (1968) on Valium. After non-babe Burrows drops dead in the hospital, her two catty/horny bourgeois housewife friends, Ellen Bennett (Katharine Houghton) and Helena Boardman (Rita Gam), meetup and chat like teenage girls about their dead friend’s handsome and mysterious gardener Carl (Joe Dallesandro). Ultimately, Ellen—a properly trained housewife if there ever was one who certainly looks but does not dare touch when it comes to muscle men that get her panties all wet—takes home the wild long-haired wonder mensch Carl, who looks like a gay prostitute as a fellow wears nothing but a pair of butt-tight brown corduroys (notably, Dallesandro was forced to wear a ton of brown tanning make-up over his skin to make him look more 'exotic' for the role, thus his trademark 'Little Joe' tattoo is covered up). While the wife a rich and domineering, if not hopelessly dumb, fellow named John (James Congdon), Ellen cannot help but keep her longing eyes on super cocky Carl and his cock. Indeed, while Ellen may be in physical paradise, she is in metaphysical hell as the emotionally neglected and childless wife of a bourgeois brute husband. Naturally, John becomes immediately jealous of Carl, even though it takes a number of days before he even actually meets his exotic employee face-to-face, but when he finally does, his irrational hatred only grows all the more. Of course, while Ellen does not ask her pseudo-hunk hubby for much, she refuses to get rid of her meta-pretty pet gardener. Luckily for Ellen, John's golf friend talks him out of firing Carl, absurdly stating, “You know John, we have a pretty good life here…sometimes I think it’s too good. Not enough big worries…so occasionally when the little ones come along they get out of proportion. Now you’ve got a gardener you personally dislike…so what, you don’t have to like your gardener…as long as he does a good job and your wife’s happy, forget it. What you need is some kids to absorb some of that excess energy.” Meanwhile, Carl begins taking control of the social structure of the house in a rather elusive and cryptic fashion, even attempting to fire an old servant named Ralph (Roberto Negron), who he later has poisoned via his pernicious plants.  As Ellen's friend Helena states of Carl, “He gets straight to work, doesn’t he?,” and, indeed, soon he will be getting busy being the Don Juan of Puerto Rico, though all the boobeoise broads are too scared to touch him.

 As The Gardener slowly progresses, flower king Carl begins to work his magic around the entire Bennett home, thus striking total fear into every single one of the brown servants, who are naturally closer to the natural world.  When a superstitious negro servant named Liza, who is no novice to voodoo, attempts to warn Ellen that Carl is a wicked witch doctor of sorts, the horny housewife patronizingly replies, “Carl is not a witch doctor […] Carl has a very unusual talent that some people don’t understand, that’s all” as if the maid is some sort of retarded child that is afraid of an imaginary monster in the closet. When Ellen decides to go against Liza's warning and wears some magical glowing flowers given to her by Carl as part of her costume at a bacchanalian ‘Gods of Mythology’ party, she becomes seemingly possessed and even injures her husband John with the costume despite the fact he is wearing armor. One darkly romantic night not long after the party, Carl seduces Ellen and kisses her near the swimming pool (where she oftentimes voyeuristically watches him swim naked) and she instantly faints, thus demonstrating the mysterious Gardener's super sexual power over her. After her niece Jane randomly disappears and she witnesses a plant killing a poor kitty cat, Ellen becomes suspicious of Carl and his hermetic plant powers, complaining to Helena that, “something horrible involving Carl,” to which her friend replies, “I told you, its sex…Only you’re so damn stiff you won’t admit to yourself you feel it. That’s why you nerves are shot.” Not surprisingly, Ellen decides to get rid of Carl and Helena gladly takes him on as an employee/sex object. Meanwhile, Ellen and Helena do some research on Carl’s previous employers and discover that most of the women who he used to work for are either dead or crazy. Ostensibly concerned for her friends welfare (but also because she is jealous that she now owns Carl), Ellen goes to check up on Helena and finds her friend entangled in plants and seeming like she has just been gang banged by an entire army platoon. In a horrendous would-be-homage to Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), Ellen attempts to slice up the plants that have entangled her friend in organic bondage, but it kills Helena as her veins are connected to the viridiplantae. Of course, from there, Ellen, who is suffering from homicidal hysteria at this point (she seems more pissed off about the fact that Helena got down and dirty with Carl than the fact that Carl is an evil supernatural entity of sorts), goes to hunt down Carl and when she finds him, she shoots him, but he runs away and his clothes magically get lost somewhere on the way. Ultimately, Carl morphs into a tree and Ellen continues shooting him. Not satisfied he is dead, Ellen decides to cover the tree with gasoline and set it on fire. Indeed, it seems that Ellen’s sexual repression got the best of her and her irrational burning of Carl did little to extinguish her unquenchable sexual appetite. 

 You know a film is a mess when its own director states of it, “Actually, I think THE GARDENER is a brilliant concept that was never quite realized. I could remake that film and it would be a brilliant film,” as James H. Kay matter-of-factly stated in the documentary The Distribution of Low Budget Films or The Gardener's Seeds of Evil Killed My Million Dollar Dream. As revealed in the same doc, The Gardener cost $800,000 to make but would only recover $50,000, with the sleazebag distributor apparently taking the money and running, thus leaving producer Chalmer G. Kirkbride Jr. (and his elderly father, who paid for a good chunk of the film) broke. Indeed, I have to agree with Kay, as The Gardener had all the ingredients to be an offbeat cult horror masterpiece, thus making it all the more of a celluloid tragedy that the film falls short on so many levels (with Dallesandro's lack of height not being one of them).  For those interested in The Gardener and its troubled history, you can learn everything you could ever want to know about the film by checking out the out-of-print dvd release put out by the now-defunct cult label Subversive Cinema, which, among other things, features the first and sole full-length commentary track ever given by Joe Dallesandro, who reveals he has a hard time remembering a lot of aspects of the film (though he confesses to gambling a lot while working on the production), but he does tell his life story. Indeed, Dallesandro decided to star in The Gardener on the recommendation of his mentor Paul Morrissey in the hope that it would enable him to break into the mainstream and get away from doing arthouse films with the Warhol crowd. Admittedly, while I found The Gardener to be nothing short of an agonizing experience the first time I saw the film, it has turned into a guilty pleasure of sorts for me, as a work that only gets better on subsequent viewings. Instead of ominously orgasmic orchids, the film ultimately features an unintentional satire of the dreaded Woman’s Film and the fact that the work features Little Joe as a human-tree hybrid does not hurt, even if his acting is a bit ‘wooden.’ If nothing else, The Gardener certainly offers an overall more enjoyable experience than similar works of the same celluloid species like The Kirlian Witness (1979) and Friedkin's The Guardian. 

-Ty E

Rosakinder

As a man who has spent virtually his entire filmmaking career demonically prodding and probing the subjects of his films, especially his oftentimes depraved documentaries, Rosa von Praunheim (I Am My Own Woman, Neurosia: 50 Years of Perversity) has been long overdue for the same treatment for some time and in the documentary Rosakinder (2012) aka Rosa’s Children aka Pink Children, not one, but five very different filmmakers do just that. Indeed, directed by five of von Praunheim’s former students from the Film & Television Academy (HFF) in Potsdam, the document presents a rare vulnerable and sentimental von Praunheim who becomes an object of love, hate, and ridicule. Made in tribute to the sod senior citizen’s 70th anniversary, Rosakinder, which was commissioned by WDR and ARTE, is an experimental film of sorts in that each of the five directors (Chris Kraus, Axel Ranisch, Robert Thalheim, Tom Tykwer, and Julia von Heinz) involved directed a short which appears in the documentary regarding their typically troubled relationships with Herr von Praunheim. Indeed, believe it or not, the Hollywoodized MTV-addled hack who directed Run Lola Run (2008), Tom Tykwer, regards von Praunheim as his greatest mentor, even if his films have about as much in common with his ex-professor’s as the blockbuster celluloid bile of Michael Bay have to do with the works of Ingmar Bergman. As one learns while watching Rosakinder, von Praunheim taught his students to, among other things, hate their fathers, make serious gay films even if they are heterosexual and, most importantly, to make honest and passionate films yet, as each filmmaker’s respective short demonstrates, the pink kraut queen’s influence did not exactly have a positive influence on his mostly heterosexual and hopelessly normal pupils. While watching the documentary, you don’t learn that von Praunheim is the loveable old fag next door, but a seasoned master of dealing out misery and ridicule to his friends and pupils alike. Of course, as a man who openly admits he was quite relieved when nemesis Rainer Werner Fassbinder tragically dropped dead, von Praunheim does not pretend to play nice in the doc, but he does seem to be a bit confused and out of his element as a flaming old fairy surrounded by much younger heterosexuals. Indeed, as Deutschland’s number #1 queer agitator who has quite arguably pissed off more people than any other German filmmaker in history (including Veit Harlan!), it almost seems silly that a group of mostly heterosexual bourgeois filmmakers are paying tribute to him, as if the mensch who directed It Is Not the Homosexual Who Is Perverse, But the Society in Which He Lives (1971) aka Nicht der Homosexuelle ist pervers, sondern die Situation, in der er lebt has somehow become respectable and is not the same man who filmed himself having sex with his sod friends in front of film students when he was teaching a class in San Francisco during the 1970s. In Rosakinder, it is von Praunheim that is lovingly roasted and for that reason alone, the documentary makes for mandatory viewing for anyone that has ever wanted to beat the shit out of the pink Teutonic poof. 

 As described at the beginning of Rosakinder, Rosa von Praunheim has been flaunting himself in front of the camera for 70 years “and this camera shows a sex-obsessed man-eater with colorful hats who shoots scandalous films and does gay stuff. But this camera shows nothing of what the people see who perhaps know him best, fear him most, and love him unconditionally: his children.” After detailing how they met the filmmaker and presenting a short film in (anti)tribute to him, all five filmmaker conclude the documentary by singing von Praunheim’s favorite Christmas song (“O Tannenbaum” aka “O Christmas Tree”) while sporting goofy costumes that the director picked out specifically for them. Indeed, at the end of the doc, one sees the man who directed Run Lola Run sporting an aesthetically repugnant hyena clitoris outfit. Tom Tykwer met von Praunheim in 1988 while working in a movie theater and screening the filmmaker’s documentary Überleben in New York (1989) aka Survival in New York and they have apparently been best buds ever since. Filmmaker Chris Kraus (Shattered Glass, Vier Minuten aka 4 Minutes) details how he wanted to beat von Praunheim’s ass around the time they first met and how he is shocked that no one has ever given the A Virus Knows no Morals (1985) director a good beating. Probably because she is a semi-attractive woman, Julia von Heinz (Was am Ende zählt, Hanna’s Journey) was constantly told by von Praunheim that her films were phony and Hollywood-like. Bearded beta-male Robert Thalheim (Netto, Westkind) was in constant fear of the gay professor because he thought his teacher would think he was too ‘bourgeois.’ Undoubtedly, the youngest of the group, Axel Ranisch (Heavy Girls aka Dicke Mädchen, Reuber)—a considerably swarthy and morbidly obese gay boi who loves to get naked in his own films—has the most love for von Praunheim, as his professor helped him to come out of the closet and not feel ashamed about making films were he exposes his unclad fat flab for the entire world to see. Not surprisingly, by the end of Rosakinder, von Praunheim says to all 5 filmmakers, “I see you as human beings and as friends. But if we take Axel, for example…In terms of my work, I naturally feel a closer proximity to what he does,” thus demonstrating the cocksucker credo that all fags must stick together and that the director probably should have started his own pink film school.

 During the beginning of Rosakinder, filmmaker Chris Kraus states that von Praunheim is, “the godfather of lousy taste, of lousy craftsmanship.” Despite Kraus’ less than flattering remarks regarding his teacher’s oeuvre, he was responsible for co-penning von Praunheim’s awful agitprop-docudrama The Einstein of Sex: Life and Work of Dr. M. Hirschfeld (1999) aka Der Einstein des Sex. As Kraus—a middle-aged man who says rather childish things like, “I hate fathers. I hate authority. I hate paternal authority” despite the fact that he is himself a father—mentions during the doc, he sees von Praunheim as a father figure, even though he is a flagrant fairy. In fact, there is a chance that Kraus and von Praunheim might be related as the former’s SS Sturmbannführer grandfather may have boned the latter’s biological mother. Indeed, the two worked together on the documentary Two Mothers (2007) aka Meine Mütter - Spurensuche in Riga after von Praunheim learned he was adopted in 2000 and wanted to find out who his real parents were. Claiming he already has a large enough burden in terms of collective guilt regarding the holocaust, von Praunheim opts for not discovering whether or not Kraus’ Sturmbannführer grandfather was also his father. Undoubtedly, what all the five filmmakers of Rosakinder have in common is that they are products of the post-nationalist, postmodern ethno-masochistic disease that has transformed Germany into a cultural graveyard inhabited by dead souls who seem to know nothing about their own country’s rich cultural and cinematic history, with the meticulously stylized yet ultimately soulless films of Tom Tykwer reflecting the height of this perturbing culturally apocalyptic phenomenon. Even von Praunheim seems to realize this as demonstrated by his typically scatological remarks regarding his student’s films, “It’s like a baby that’s had a poo and loves his pile of poo. It’s all steamy, and the baby beams with joy. It was the same with the students’ films too; they were like their little poos. And when you took away their joy, they hated you.” In other words, none of these pampered filmmakers have anything to say and are merely parroting the cosmopolitan post-Auschwitz bullshit they have been spoon-fed since birth.  

Tykwer—a rampant heterosexual who used to date Franka Potente, the star of his films Run Lola Run and The Princess and the Warrior—has deluded himself with so much politically correct bullshit that he claims that the decidedly depraved homo celluloid scat pieces of von Praunheim have had the most imperative influence on him as a filmmaker. Undoubtedly, Kraus is even more pathetic as he credits von Praunheim for helping him to hate his once-beloved Sturmbannführer opa, stating, “My grandfather and his brothers weren’t just Nazis. They weren’t just in the SS. They were part of the Holocaust” and “I often cry about my grandfather, who I dearly loved as a child. And that love almost made me a Nazi forever.” Ultimately, Rosakinder reminded me of the absurdity of mainstreaming homosexuality and shoving sodomy in everyone's face. After all, why should any majority have to ‘tolerate’ and ‘embrace’ the lifestyles of a minority that they, as heterosexuals, would otherwise find completely repugnant?! Indeed, whereas Tykwer probably would have learned more from Volker Schlöndorff and Julia von Heinz more from Helma Sanders-Brahms as film professors, they were all stuck with a college dropout like Rosa von Praunheim for what can only be described as dubious political reasons. After all, only a gay (and maybe black, Jewish, and/or transvestite) film professor could get away with telling his co-professor to go kill themselves by jumping out of a window as von Praunheim apparently once did (in fact, one of his colleagues even sued him). Indeed, von Praunheim is at his greatest as a filmmaker when he is at his most unrepentantly raunchiest, and the last place his ‘idiosyncratic’ brand of filmmaking needs to be is at a film school. 

-Ty E

Tally Brown, New York

I don’t know what it is about fags and loud, bossy, and belligerent fat chicks, but they seem to go together like puke and whisky. Of course, with the homo-homogenizing LGBT propaganda machine, it seems every cutesy ditz bitch in high school nowadays wants her own pet poof friend as demonstrated by recent trash pseudo-quirky queer teen comedies like G.B.F. (2013). Long before fags made for trendy accessories for heterosexual chicks, there existed depraved women know as fag hags—typically lecherous, masculine, and repugnant women of the morally retarded sort—who were in solidarity with homos, as kindred corroded spirits of sorts. Undoubtedly, probably no other filmmaker in cinema history has had such an affinity for the most repulsive and grotesque of fag hags than kraut aberrosexual agitator Rosa von Praunheim (Army of Lovers or Revolt of the Perverts, Your Heart in My Head), who got his start pushing vulgar old women into low-camp films when he opted for casting his own aunt as the dubious lover of a young hustler in his first feature Die Bettwurst (1970), which spawned the sequel Berliner Bettwurst (1973) and the short quasi-sequel Can I Be Your Bratwurst, Please? (1999). While Lotti Huber (Anita: Dances of Vice aka Anita – Tänze des Lasters, Affengeil)—an old Der Stürmer-worthy Jewess who was a cabaret dancer during the Weimar era—was arguably von Praunheim’s ‘greatest’ discovery in terms of wayward overweight women, American Jewess Tally Brown certainly held her own in terms of audacious anti-beauty as a degenerate diva of debauchery. Indeed, with his documentary Tally Brown, New York (1979), which offers a telling cinematic portrait of Tally, von Praunheim managed to receive the German Film Award in Silver for ‘Outstanding Non-Feature Film’ in 1979. To von Praunheim’s credit, Tally Brown, New York is a priceless work for those interested in underground cinema of the 1960s, as the eponymous subject starred in various films directed by Andy Warhol and Gregory J. Markopoulos. Indeed, appearing in the lost Warhol/Smith collaboration Batman Dracula (1964) and Markopoulos’ homosexualized feature-length Aeschylus adaptation The Illiac Passion (1967), Brown certainly solidified her place in cinema history, even if she does not seem to understand the magnitude of her contributions. A big woman that some might mistake as a big man in drag, Tally Brown was a classically trained singer who opted for a life of nocturnal debauchery instead of opera and decided to become what she described as the ‘white Billie Holiday,’ ultimately becoming one of the first 'white' jazz singers to perform at negro strip joints and degenerate venues in Las Vegas. In von Praunheim’s Tally Brown, New York, Brown discusses how much she loved working for the mafia, being a friend of tragic tranny Candy Darling, and smoking dope for over two decades without feeling the slightest inkling towards dependency. 

 Beginning with a shot of giant sign with the film’s title, Tally Brown, New York immediately lets the viewer know that they are about to encounter a star diva of sorts, but of course, being a Rosa von Praunheim film, it is not a woman that any heterosexual man would ever want to screw, even while they are drunk. In what is unquestionably a great way to make an introduction, Tally first appears in the documentary singing a cover of David Bowie’s hit song “Heroes”, but she changes up the lyrics a little bit and adds her own line, “I…I can be a bitch so you stay stoned all the time but were lovers and that is a fact” and concludes the song in German (Bowie also did a version of the song in German entitled “Helden”). The kind of gal that would have enjoyed being featured in Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon, Tally is quite candid about her life, but it still seems like a lot is left out of the doc, as one can only cram so much material in a 90 minute film. Growing up in a Jewish neighborhood of NYC populated by Teutonized Hebrews who escaped Uncle Adolf’s National Socialist Germany, Tally was born to a man in real estate but she seems somewhat evasive about her upbringing, stating to von Praunheim after he asks about her childhood, “How did I grow up? Like everyone else!,” as if it was an intrusive question. An innately cosmopolitan individual, Tally talks with great joy about how NYC is such a great and constantly changing place where immigrant communities come in, build up a neighborhood, and then another immigrant group comes in and continues the cycle of multicultural malignancy. Proudly proclaiming, “I sing city song,” Tally considers herself an “urban creature” who cannot survive outside of urban areas, confessing, “The country can kill me. I’m just a city child.” 

 Taking her first serious blues singing job at a black strip bar in Boston, Tally proudly states her favorite venues were the “most raunchiest ones.” Eventually, Tally made her way to Las Vegas where she did all-night shows from 7pm to 7am each day. In terms of what she liked most about Vegas, Tally describes how she was thrilled to see women selling their jewelry and men selling their wives for gambling money. Although she never made it big in Hollywood, Tally remarks regarding her love for Hollywoodland, “Well…I don’t want you to take this personally Rosa, but the thing I love best about Hollywood is that they give you little things that make life endurable.” While living in the courter of New Orlean, Tally believes she got a “European felling” without actually going to Europa. After discussing how she has been using drugs for two decades without getting addicted (though a couple of her ex-boyfriends apparently went insane due to their affinity for narcotics), gay and seemingly autistic actor Taylor Mead (The Flower Thief, Taylor Mead's Ass)—the ‘first underground film star’—rambles on about how he names all of his pet cats after Tally, absurdly proclaiming, “There’s probably no more beautiful woman in the world than Tally Brown.” As for her underground acting career, Tally describes how she was ‘tripping’ for four days on a Warhol production, not realizing she was being filmed, even describing herself as looking like a “petulant baby whale” in the finished film. The ultimate flagrant fag hag, Tally wastes no time proclaiming her undying love for lurking in gay bath houses. In one of the more unintentionally humorous scenes of the documentary, Tally’s East Asian painter ex-boyfriend states, “Well, I must confess, I never saw someone quite like Tally…and what startled me was, here was someone who was completely unconcerned with her weight…physical weight in the conversation sense…but was completely sensuous and beautiful.” With fellow Warhol superstars like Candy Darling, Ondine, and Mary Woronov, Tally also starred in the Lloyd Kaufman co-produced slasher flick Silent Night, Bloody Night (1974) where she took advantage of gorging on fake blood (aka chocolate syrup). Towards the end of the documentary, Divine does a drag show to a Kraftwerk song. In the end, Divine seems like the ‘greater’ of the two divas, though Tally could be her big sister. 

 Undoubtedly, Rosa von Praunheim has always been more proficient at making documentaries than narrative films and Tally Brown, New York is certainly one of his more serious docs, thus making it mandatory viewing for anyone with an interest in the homo-supremacist auteur. If nothing else, von Praunheim’s documentary is one of the greatest portraits of a real live fag hag ever made. While the overweight over-the-hill fag hag is probably the most odious breed of human creatures to ever populate the earth aside from big bloated bull dykes, Tally Brown, New York manages to portray the eponymous subject in a quasi-poetic way that even manages to do the unthinkable by even radiating an inkling of class. Indeed, Tally is certainly more tolerable than von Praunheim’s scatological Semitic superstar Lotti Huber, whose mere presence in films like Anita: Dances of Vice is probably enough to induce vomiting in more sensitive viewers. Tally Brown, New York is also notable in that Tally gives a strangely endearing tribute to her tranny friend Candy Darling—probably the only shemale that could pass for a female—who died of lymphoma on March 21, 1974, aged 29 and wrote in a letter to Andy Warhol right before she died, “Unfortunately before my death I had no desire left for life... I am just so bored by everything. You might say bored to death. Did you know I couldn't last. I always knew it. I wish I could meet you all again.” One of the last films Darling starred in before s/he died was a film directed by von Praunheim’s ex boy toy Werner Schroeter, Der Tod der Maria Malibran (1972) aka The Death of Maria Malibran. While Darling was deathly depressed with life, Tally Brown seemed to love to live, or at least that is certainly the impression one gets while watching Tally Brown, New York, a documentary that redefines the word 'diva' for a generation fed on negrophilia, fast food, and dope. 

-Ty E

Nightmare in a Damaged Brain

While Guido filmmaker Romano Scavolini (Un bianco vestito per Marialé aka Spirits of Death, Savage Hunt) was once such an innovative and audacious filmmaker that the great Italian fascist poet Giuseppe Ungaretti described his first feature, A mosca cieca (1966) aka The Blind Fly aka Ricordati di Haron, as a masterpiece, for whatever inexplicable reason, he decided to irreparably taint his artistic reputation and became a genre hack of sorts who directed (sub)mainstream giallo, slasher, Poliziotteschi, action, and war flicks. Indeed, due to Scavolini’s artistic transgressions, he is best known nowadays as the man who directed the rather nasty and gratuitously violent and bloody slasher flick Nightmare in a Damaged Brain (1981) aka Blood Splash aka Nightmare aka Schizo aka Cauchemars à Daytona Beach, which was banned as a ‘Video Nasty’ in the UK due to its tasteless marketing gimmicks, which included a vomit bag and a competition to guess the weight of a fake brain in a jar. An Italian-American coproduction that actually does not suffer from poor dubbing and dirty dagos pretending to be American Anglos, Nightmare in a Damaged Brain is certainly a rare slasher flick with actual style and elegance that is unfortunately eclipsed by its silly slasher clichés, moronic moments of comic relief, and prominence of child actors. Advertised with the cheap tagline, “If You Were Terrified By "Dawn of the Dead" & "Friday the 13th" You Must See Nightmare!,” the film is also notable for irking American Guido special effects man Tom Savini, who threatened to sue over the fact that he was credited as the “Effects Director” on posters and old video prints of the film. While Savini denies he was the effects man (claiming to be a mere ‘consultant’ instead) and even went so far as describing the film as a “piece of shit” (even though the film is clearly better than at least half the stuff he has worked on during his rather uneven and uniquely artistically unmerited career), auteur Scavolini told one of the writers at retroslashers.net in 2007 that the From Dusk till Dawn (1996) star had ulterior motives and was indeed responsible for the effects, remarking, “He denied being involved in the making of Nightmare’s special effects for various reasons; mainly because he wanted more money if his name was used – as it was, at the beginning, in the poster of the film. But I know at least two other reasons, mainly psychological, but I will not release them to anyone.” Whatever the truth of the matter is regarding Savini and his questionable statements, it is indisputable that another special effects man on the film, Les Larrain (aka Lorrain aka Loraine), killed himself shortly after working on Nightmare in a Damaged Brain. Featuring Grand Guignol-esque violence and gore, a genetic (as well as Oedipal) explanation for homicide, and a cracked killer who is always suffering from unintentionally hilarious seizures where it seems as if his mouth is overflowing with cum, Nightmare in a Damaged Brain is a truly nasty video nasty that demonstrates that auteur Scavolini went from a sort of cultivated celluloid nihilism that quoted Rimbaud and Beckett as depicted in The Blind Fly to a savage philistine nihilism that wallows in blood, visceral hatred, and pointless heavy metal style misanthropy. 

 George Tatum (played by Baird Stafford, who starred in only one other film, Scavolini’s Vietnam War flick Dog Tags (1988)) is an Aryan American nutcase who spends his days and nights being strapped to a chair in a straitjacket and being force-fed anti-psychotics in a mental institution. Indeed, among other things, George has been diagnosed with the following afflictions (as featured on an archaic early-1980s computer monitor): schizophrenia, mild amnesia, homicidal, dream fixation, and seizures. As Nightmare in a Damaged Brain slowly but surely reveals as the film progresses in dream-sequences that the mental patient suffers from, George viciously slaughtered both of his parents with an axe while he was still just a wee lad after walking in on his parents engaging in BDSM. Thinking his mother was beating his father (who was bound to the bed while getting said beatings), little George decapitated his mommy with an axe, fetishistically butchered the rest of her headless body, and then proceeded to drive his rather brutal weapon of choice into his sexually debauched daddy’s astonished face. Now, George has a family of his own and after becoming the main human guinea pig in a dubious study involving a highly secretive experimental drug, he is magically declared sane and gets the opportunity to leave the nuthouse and reunite with his estranged family. While George is suppose to go to a halfway house, his damaged dome tells him to go elsewhere. Before heading to Daytona Beach, Florida where his family lives, George decides to stalk the slimy semen-and-scum-covered streets of 42nd Street in New York City where he checks out the peepshows, including one where a woman in a phone booth pleasures herself with a dildo for the viewer’s pleasure, but the unhinged family man suffers from a major seizure and fails to bust a load. After his peepshow mishap, George stalks a chick all the way back to her house, slits her throat while she is on the phone, drives his knife into her gut as if he is thrusting his cock in her cunt, and then whispers to his victim, “I’m sorry.” 

 Meanwhile, in Daytona Beach, George’s (ex)wife Susan Temper (Sharon Smith) is messing around with her Hebrew hippy boyfriend Bob Rosen (played by cinematographer/sound man Mik Cribben, who originally worked on dark porn chic flicks like Armand Weston’s The Defiance of Good (1975) and Cecil Howard’s The Final Sin (1977)) on his small yacht. Although a hysterical single mother who is quite incompetent when it comes to disciplining her three children and giving them affection, Susan is quite hysterical when it comes to her kids and interrupts coitus with Bob (who complains, “Oh, come on. Woman….You’re torturing me! I have needs…I’m a human being…I’ve got feelings”) to check up on her kids and learns that her son C.J. (C.J. Cooke) is ostensibly severely injured. Of course, C.J. is a scheming prankster who is quite desperate for his worthless mother’s attention and while claiming to have been stabbed, he merely covered his t-shirt with ketchup and made up an unbelievable story. As punishment for crying wolf, C.J.’s mother berates him and sends him to his room for the rest of the day. When C.J. scares his babysitter Kathy (Danny Ronan) by putting on a giant monster costume, the teenage girl threatens to quit and tells Susan that her son is “evil.” In what is probably the ‘classiest’ scene in slasher cinema history, boyfriend Bob makes a passing reference to Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966). Meanwhile, George makes various futile attempts to call his family to tell them to get out of their house, as he cannot stop himself from killing them if they are there when he arrives. George also calls his Doctor and complains, “I’m stronger than the pills,” but the Doc ultimately does not get there in time. First, George kills a neighbor girl named Candy (Candy Marchese) and ties her corpse to a chair in the attic of the Temper home, which C.J. and Kathy find. Eventually, Georges comes to the Temper home as if he is Michael Myers while sporting C.J.'s monster mask (thus Kathy assumes that it is merely C.J. playing another prank) and proceeds to kill everyone in sight. After strangling the babysitter’s boyfriend to death and then brutally killing Kathy with a hammer, George heads to C.J.’s room and begins breaking down the door with his hammer. Luckily, C.J. is just as homicidal as his father and blows daddy dearest away with a revolver. When Susan comes home and sees her estranged husband’s corpse on the ground, she screams, “That’s my husband…That’s my husband!,” as if it is a big surprise.  In the end, C.J. arrogantly sits in a police car and winks at the camera. Luckily, Scavolini opted for not making a worthless sequel. 

 Unquestionably, Nightmare in a Damaged Brain is a classless, tasteless, and conspicuously corrupt piece of cracked celluloid, yet due to its strangely soothing yet foreboding musical score, elegantly executed murder montages (sorry, Eisenstein!), and striking unhinged gore, it manages to standout amongst most slasher swill. The fact that Tom Savini hates the film somehow makes me appreciate it even more, as it is quite at odds with the political correct super negro gore of counter-culture auteur George A. Romero. Featuring the sort of Freudian pop psychology typical of similarly less appreciated slasher flicks like Richard Franklin’s Patrick (1978) and Ulli Lommel’s The Boogeyman (1980), Nightmare in a Damaged Brain is certainly better directed than any of the Friday the 13th films and makes most of the entries in the Halloween franchise seem like hokey hogwash. Indeed, for fans of Mediterranean slasher classics like Mario Bava’s A Bay of Blood aka Twitch of the Death Nerve and Juan Piquer Simón’s Pieces (1982), Nightmare in a Damaged Brain makes for mandatory viewing. A work that embraces ancestral heritage (the whole “the apple does not fall far from the tree” deal) and marvelously mocks the parenting skills of single mothers, Nightmare in a Damaged Brain thankfully does not fall in line with the contemporary pansy p.c. approach to horror filmmaking, even if it portrays blond beasts butchering babes and whatnot.  For those that question Romano Scavolini's talent as a filmmaker, just checkout his work The Blind Fly and wallow in the mind of an existentialist killer and forget you ever saw Nightmare in a Damaged Brain.

-Ty E

The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach

While determined avant-gardists during their entire filmmaking careers, French-born self-exiled husband-and-wife team Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet (Moses und Aron aka Moses and Aaron, Klassenverhältnisse aka Class Relations) did manage to direct at least one film, The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach (1968) aka Chronik der Anna Magdalena Bach, that was more or less made with a general audience in mind and, as far as I am concerned, it is their greatest film. A project that was apparently ten years in the making, The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach, which was Straub and Huillet’s first feature-length film, only started shooting in the second half of 1967 after the filmmakers managed to get the Committee on Young German Film and producer Joachim Wolf to produce it after various filmmakers and critics actively campaigned for the work. As a man whose first two films, Machorka-Muff (1963) and Not Reconciled (1965) aka Nicht versöhnt, did as much as they could to trash Teutonic history (while also portraying West Germany as a 'post-fascist' entity of sorts run by ex-Nazis), especially in relation to National Socialism, Straub seemed paranoid that the German government was trying to prevent him from creating his first feature, complaining, “It was of course idealist in the bad sense [to try and work within the subsidy system] because I didn’t know the power relations yet that operated in film production and distribution. [We thought], if they try so hard to stop us making this film, then we just have to make it. I realized exactly what the score was when the Ministry of Culture in Düsseldorf rejected my application for subsidy three times in five years. They were desperate to prevent The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach from coming out in the cinemas […] It is obvious, a film made outside the system will never get inside. The system takes revenge.” Of course, Straub also took his revenge because, as he bragged in the documentary The Making of Chronik der Anna Magdalena Bach (1967) while smirking in solidarity with his wife, he intentionally hired a non-German for the lead role of Johann Sebastian Bach, stating regarding the decision, “I wouldn’t want anyone to view this as a nationalist statement in any respect, that is…neither anti-, nor something else, but I do believe it is also…important that the person who, let’s say, impersonates Bach in this film—he impersonates Bach after all—is not German. Because of what happened in this country, mainly between ’33 and ’45, I am glad to have found a Dutchman.” Indeed, undoubtedly one of the film’s greatest qualities is its immaculate musical performances by Dutch harpsichordist, conductor, musicologist, Gustav Leonhardt, who specialized in the works of Johann Sebastian Bach, in what would ultimately be his first and last film role.  Ironically, I think Leonhardt's inclusion in the film only all the more Aryanized the work, as the Dutch people (the composer included!) tend to have more classically Nordic phenotypes that, according to most racial theorists (i.e. Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard), most Germans lack. While a majorly materialistic work (the film focuses on Bach’s struggles with money and patronage) that attempts to deconstruct and dismantle Bach’s ‘mythical’ legacy as a national hero and bearer of Teutonic high kultur, The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach, which is based on a fictional diary ostensibly written by the composer’s second wife, attempts to make its own myths, ultimately presenting the great German Baroque musician as a ‘proto-revolutionary’ who subverted the system, at least musically.  Rather ironically, with its utilization of authentic wardrobes/instruments, static direction, and obsession with monetary matters, The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach seems like a hopelessly bourgeois work that feels like it was directed by a book store owner suffering from Asperger syndrome with a pathologically pedantic understanding of music history.

 Beginning with no less than 4 minutes of Johann Sebastian Bach (Gustav Leonhardt) playing on his harpsichord, The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach then proceeds with the incessant off-screen narration of Anna Magdalena Bach (Christiane Lang), which is accompanied by historical documents, vintage sheet music, old drawings, etc. While an ostensibly aesthetically subversive avant-garde work, The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach essentially has the same structure as Hollywood musicals (and, in turn, pornography), albeit minus the flamboyant pageantry. Indeed, the structure of the film is more or less like this: narration from Anna Bach, Bach playing, narration from Anna Bach, Bach playing, etc. While watching the film, one learns that Anna’s father was a trumpeter at the court of the Weissenfels and her brother did the same thing for the court of Anhalt-Zerbst. Chapel Master Sebastian (Anna calls her hubby by his middle name) was previously married to another woman in a marriage that sired three sons and a daughter, so 17 months after his first wife died, he married Anna and created a clavier book for her and his children. Sebastian originally received patronage from a music-loving Prince, but after his ‘serene Highness’ married a princess from Bernburg, things sort of fell apart. From there, Sebastian headed to Leipzig and became a Music Director and Cantor at the St. Thomas church but it was not an ideal situation for the composer to go from being a Chapel Master to a mere cantor. Apparently, Sebastian, who was born into a great musical family, always had an obsession with great organists and would travel to Hamburg and Lübeck on foot to hear such musicians play. Like many people of his time, Sebastian was not immune to tragedy, as his firstborn child, Christiana Sophia Henrietta, and second son Christian Gottlieb, died while still young children (although not mentioned in the film, between 1723 and 1742, Anna and Sebastian had 13 children together, though seven died in early childhood). Of course, during his career, Sebastian faced “vexation, envy, and persecution” from rivals, namely from a guy named Krause (Walter Peters) at the University of Leipzig. When Sebastian composed funereal music for a dead queen, the director of the ‘New Divine Service’ of the university protested, and thus he was only able to perform his music “purely as a favor” for a period of time. As Sebastian writes in an appeal for patronage regarding the imperative nature of financial assistance in enabling a composer to dedicate their time to composing new and original music: “It is in any case wonderful that one should expect German musicians to be capable of performing all kinds of music, from Italy or France, England or Poland, just as the virtuosi for whom it is written, who have studied it so that they almost know it from memory, and receive heavy salaries besides, as a reward for their care. This is not taken into consideration, but they are left to their own anxieties, so that many, worried over their bread, cannot think of perfecting, even less of distinguishing themselves. For example, one only has to go to Dresden and see how the musicians there are salaried by His Royal Majesty. All concern for their livelihood is removed. Chagrin is left behind. Each person has only one instrument to cultivate. It must be excellent to hear.” 

 As The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach progresses, Sebastian’s unwavering assertiveness as a composer who is more interested in creating revolutionary works than merely following an outmoded game plan only increases all the more. As a means to appeal to a Prince, Sebastian gave a number of cantatas in honor of the princely household. When Sebastian is told by his superiors that he is a cantor and should yield to Herr Principal and the Rector of the university, he replies to the threat with, “I really don’t care; cost what it may.” Indeed, Sebastian superiors make the following complaints regarding his character: “Not only does this cantor not do anything, but he doesn’t want to explain himself. He doesn’t give the singing lessons, and there are other complaints. A change will be necessary. It must break one day.” When students at the university refuse to play after Herr Krause gets his way, Sebastian is eventually given the title of ‘Court Composer.’ Upon composing works for a certain Count Keyserlingk, Ambassador to His imperial Russian Majesty at the court of Dresden, so that the royal could have solacing music to listen to during sleepless nights, Sebastian was handsomely rewarded with a golden goblet filled with 1000 gold Louis. While Sebastian’s eldest son Gottfried Heinrich’s genius never developed, his 18-year-old son Johann Christoph Friedrich’s genius did, as he entered a fellow named Count Schaumburg-Lippe’s chapel a few weeks before his father's death and created a grand credo. While working on the beginning stages of a piece entitled Art of the Fugue (which was never completed), Sebastian lost his eyesight, yet he managed to create an organ chorale on the melody “When we are in greatest need” while blind. While he eventually gained back his vision, a couple hours later he was overcome with apoplexy, followed by a high fever and expired “mildly and blessedly” on 28 July 1750 (modern historians believe he died from a combination of stroke and pneumonia). 

 As typical far-left feminist academic Caryl Flinn wrote in her stereotypically holocaust-worshipping philo-Semitic work The New German Cinema: Music, History, and the Matter of Style (2004) regarding the Frankfurt School influenced essence of The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach: “In the film, Bach’s music is performed on period Baroque instruments, not a common practice in the mid-1960s. That choice insisted on a concrete historical context for a figure whom, as Theodor Adorno argued at the time, Germans had transformed into an ahistorical myth of German nationality. Bach had become museumized, his music confined to the rarefied realm of concert halls. Certainly film theatres were not the place to hear him, as Straub and Huillet learned while trying to get CHRONICLE produced and distributed. Their use of Bach, then, was not just historically appropriate to the film, but helped criticize the contemporary deification that Adorno observed.” Indeed, the greatest aesthetic asset of The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach is undoubtedly its authentic instruments and wardrobes, with Gustav Leonhardt’s harpsichord-playing being easily the most emotionally potent aspect of the film (in fact, without his score, the film would be an exceedingly empty celluloid communist manifesto), yet that does not save Straub and Huillet’s work from being an innately static piece of historical revisionism and mythmaking twaddle disguised as state-of-the-art historical authenticity. Like with Straub’s next film Der Bräutigam, die Komödiantin und der Zuhälter (1968) aka The Bridegroom, the Actress and the Pimp, The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach concludes in a pseudo-spiritual manner with the lead character gazing out of a window as if staring into eternity. In that regard, as much as the film opts for taking a typically materialistic Marxist approach to history, it still ends up wallowing in the mystical world, if only for a moment (but at quite arguably the most important moment), as if Straub saw the act of creation as the greatest spiritual act and the only true form of transcendence. Ultimately, The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach is most interesting as a historical footnote of German New Cinema, and German film historian Thomas Elsaesser probably best summed up the importance of the film in his book New German Cinema: A History (1989) when he wrote: “’Bach’ is heard (rather than seen) struggling equally hard with poverty, child mortality, musical form, court intrigues, dull insensitivity, the blows of fate and bad medicine. He is seen with the only weapon at his disposal, which is his music. Deceptively coded as piety, J.S. Bach’s response to adversity is one of the clearest articulations of the possible freedom that the artist can have in relation to social demands: the freedom to resist through the discipline imposed by form. […] Precisely because it is not an allegory of the subsidy system, but an act of resistance to it, THE CHRONICLE OF ANNA MAGDALENA BACH, even before it encountered its difficulties with the public and the press, was already a formulation and a critique of the Autorenfilm and its concept of the artist.” Indeed, the influence of the film on German New Cinema is incontestable as Fassbinder would make the aesthetic style of Straub and Huillet’s work more palatable with his period piece Effi Briest (1974). Wim Wenders would also pay tribute to The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach with his work Falsche Bewegung (1975) aka The Wrong Move, which includes an excerpt from Straub and Huillet’s film where the suicide of a vice-rector is mentioned. An anti-melodramatic arthouse musical that wallows in antagonizing the audience in its aesthetic sterility and static camera work, The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach is ultimately a great argument as to why ‘French’ filmmakers should not touch Teutonic historical figures.  Indeed, Fassbinder, Helma Sanders-Brahms, Hans-Jürgen Syberberg, and Alexander Kluge would only become great filmmakers after they discarded their French influences. As for Straub and Huillet, they would never make a greater film than their first feature The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach.

-Ty E