This Night

While his penultimate work Deux (2002), an avant-garde autobiographical work utilizing female twin sisters to depict his life in a most allegorical way, was arguably his most personal effort, German New Cinema dandy Werner Schroter’s cinematic swansong, This Night (2008) aka Nuit de chien aka Diese Nacht based on the novel Para esta noche (1943) aka Tonight by Uruguayan novelist Juan Carlos Onetti, marked a final attempt at creating a highly personal celluloid mythology while on the brink of death. Beginning with the quote, “Of all the wonders that I yet have heard. It seems to me most strange that men should fear; Seeing that death, a necessary end, Will come when it will come,” from William Shakespeare’s play The Tragedy of Julius Caesar (1599), This Night follows a failed revolutionary hero named Ossorio (played by gay French actor Pascal Greggory) who returns to his home city of Santa María (a fictional city that was filmed on location in Lisbon and Porto, Portugal) one night in the hope of saving his lover Clara; a woman who the protagonist made the mistake of abandoning to fight for an abstract political cause that only sired failure and defeat. While in an apocalyptic city under the control of a terroristic militia led by a murderous mad man, Ossorio only has one night, “this night,” to save the woman he loves, but she seems to be nowhere to be found. Assembled by Schroeter when he was facing the deleterious and debilitating effects of malignant cancer, which the director would finally succumb to in 2008, This Night is as unrelentingly bleak and as decidedly dystopian as films come, so it is no surprise that Christiane Peitz would write in the director’s obituary that the film was, “a long journey into darkness, a hymn to life in the face of brutality and terror,” as death was at every corner for the determinedly damned dandy who created it. With a brief scene in the beginning of the fatalistic film of a pissing sailor that seems like it was taken straight out of the director's previous work Deux (2002) and his aborted dream film of adapting fag frog novelist Jean Genet’s novel Querelle de Brest (1953), This Night subsequently announces with its feverishly foreboding atmosphere that the viewer is about to witness a man’s dance with death in the name of love; a love that may be already lost. As Schroeter wrote in his posthumously released autobiography, “All my films, including Tonight, bear witness to my quest for a form that communicates vitality, the pleasure of creativity and beauty, which is a gift of our profession. In beauty, in recognition of beauty resides a hope—malgré tout, despite all. It expresses a hope even though the theme of the film deals with the darkest night aspects of existence …Without pain and a quest for truth there is no beauty,” and, indeed, This Night wallows in nocturnal pulchritude, albeit of the particularly perturbing and pessimistic sort, and a coming to terms with personal pain and those destructive forces that serve to only further that perpetual pang. A fiercely foreboding phantasmagorical neo-noir of the dauntingly dystopian, arthouse sort as only Werner Schroeter could have assembled, This Night reminds the viewer that only when a person can transcend a fear of death can they achieve greatness and create beauty, even in a despairing realm of imminent disintegration. 

A lot of things have changed in Santa María since 40-year-old doctor-turned-revolutionary Ossorio left his lover Clara behind to fight in a revolution against the system that ended in abject failure. Apparently, a ‘hero of the revolution’ among those who know of him, but an enemy of the current state, Ossorio is nothing more than a lone soldier in the city of Santa María; a fallen place where treacherous ‘friends’ will do anything to save their own hysterical hides, including selling out compatriots to a megalomaniacal dictator named Morasan (Bruno Todeschini), who does not think twice of slaughtering people left and right, as his militia has turned the city into a metropolitan graveyard that is about to be leveled to the ground by leaders on the mainland who want to do away with the renegade city.  With a cholera outbreak and a trigger-happy militia going around blowing away beauteous babes and hysterical homos on every corner, Santa María is no longer the majestic Mediterranean metropolis its name hints at.  887 boat tickets exist for those lucky individuals who will be able to leave the virtual necropolis before it is blasted into oblivion and Ossorio plans to make sure he and his sweet Clara leave safely via the boat, hence his sole objective when he made the quasi-suicidal decision to return to Santa María in the first place. Unfortunately, Clara made the mistake of writing and publishing articles in sympathy of a counter-revolutionary named Barcala (Sami Frey), who she temporarily had an affair with, in a newspaper that was described by her dictator detractors as, “an insidiously subversive rag,” thus being put on a master list of enemies of the militia, thus the possibility of finding her is dubious at best, or so Ossorio learns on his mission for love and redemption in a city where hatred, treachery, and fear reign supreme. On his rather unpredictable journey into the belly of the beast, Ossorio learns that Clara became the mistress of various other men, though she never found the love she lost when he went and fought in a failed revolution for a utopia that was not mean to be, thus also resulting in a love that was also not meant to be. Against his own will by unfortunate circumstances he cannot control, Ossorio’s mission takes a different course and he decides to save a little girl, and after receiving a "going away gift" in the form of two boat tickets from paranoid rebel leader Barcala, he is on the way to completing his mission, but in Santa María, men wear many masks and a former comrade can also be a corrupted enemy, or so the failed revolutionary learns. In This Night, the iconic Schroeter ‘diva’ is nowhere to be found, even if the film is ominously operatic, thus making the film a rare exception in the filmmaker's cinematic oeuvre. Featuring music by Liszt, Mozart, and Rossini, This Night is Werner Schroeter at his most ‘butch’ and stoic in a cinematic story where the protagonist has one last chance, during one last night, to sacrifice one's life for love while faced with total uncertainty, as well as accepting responsibility for actions of the past that led to one getting in that particular predicament in the first place.

Interestingly, while This Night both begins and ends with the character of Caesar’s dialogue from Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Julius Caesar, “Of all the wonders that I yet have heard. It seems to me most strange that men should fear; Seeing that death, a necessary end, Will come when it will come,” Schroeter neglected to add the first sentence of the quote, which is, “Cowards die many times before their deaths; The valiant never taste of death but once.” That being said, what Schroeter’s opted for leaving out of the quote in This Night is more revealing than what he decided to include, because in many of the director’s films, especially his earlier works like Argila (1969) and Eika Katappa (1969), characters perish, only to return in subsequent scenes totally unscathed. Whether these characters were “cowards” or not remains to be seen, but if anything is for sure, it was with his cinematic swansong This Night that Werner Schroeter finally accepted the inevitably of death and braved it stoically in the form of fierce filmic fatalism of the delectably dystopian sort that is effective both on a personal and political level. As someone who was born a month and a day before Germany’s unconditional surrender during the Second World War, Werner Schroeter virtually came-of-age in the sort of world he depicts in This Night, so it should be no surprise that a little girl, the director's virtual ‘inner-child’ as a gay man, is thrown into the madness of a metropolis on the verge of apocalypse. Although not his greatest film, This Night was the natural cinematic conclusion to a life of darkness that sought beauty amongst the chaos. 

-Ty E

The Patriot

As one of 26 signatories to the Oberhausen Manifesto of 1962, which marked the 'official' launch of the New German Cinema aka Neuer Deutscher Film against "Papas Kino," auteur Alexander Kluge – a Frankfurt school lawyer turned filmmaker who traded trades at the recommendation of Theodor W. Adorno (who, in turn, introduced Kluge to Fritz Lang, thus enabling Kluge to work as an assistant on the 1959 The Tiger of Eschnapur and learn the tricks of the trade from one of the masters) – acted as a sort of ‘father figure’ filmmaker for the fellow filmmakers of his generation, including Rainer Werner Fassbinder, thus inevitably resulting in the omnibus film Germany in Autumn (1978) aka Deutschland im Herbst; a politically-charged work featuring film contributions from eight Teuton directors (including Kluge, Fassbinder, Edgar Reitz and Volker Schlöndorff) responding to the dubious deaths of far-left terrorists belonging to the RAF aka Baader-Meinhof gang, who had purportedly committed suicide in a heavily secure prison, as well as the future of Germany as a whole. With his segment for Germany in Autumn, Kluge would introduce the character of Gabi Teichert (Hannelore Hoger); a historian of Hessian history and proud Aryaness who attempts to dig deeper and deeper (both literally and figuratively as an amateur archeologist with a spade and as a studied scholar and history teacher) into Germany's past so as to discover 'positive' secrets from 2000 years of Teutonic history. Gabi Teichert would also be the lead protagonist in Kluge’s subsequent film The Patriotic Woman (1979) aka Die Patriotin aka The Patriot – an anti-climatic and anti-melodramatic drama-documentary hybrid utilizing a constructivist method of montage as a means to distance the viewer from tragedy, action, and, well, entertainment – which follows a proud German patriot and ‘dreamer of the day’ who slowly but surely falls into an abyss of bitter disappointment where she comes to learn through trial and error that, whether she wants to admit it to herself or not, there is no definitive German history, but an inherent antagonism between public and personal history. A special lady who takes an “interest in all the dead of the Reich,” including those who fought for the Third Reich, and who fanatically believes that, “the material for advanced history lessons isn’t positive enough because our German history isn’t positive enough either,” hence her personal crusade to change that, Teichert is ultimately upstaged by the historical lessons of a dead ‘talking knee’ (inspired by Bavarian author/poet Christian Morgenstern’s marvelously morbid poet “The Knee”) that used to belong to an unfortunate fellow named Corporal Wieland, who belonged to the ill-fated 6th Army (the first German field army to be totally destroyed in WWII) of the Wehrmacht and who fell at the battle of Stalingrad on Janauary 29, 1943, but as narrated in the film, all that was left of the fallen fellow was, “nothing more than a knee. It is not a tree, it is not a tent, nothing else.” A cinematic work directed by a German man who was born in 1932 and thus remembers the Third Reich, as well as his hometown and family home being blown to bits by British bombers during the Second World War, The Patriot is an ostensibly guilt-ridden celluloid work that, quite undoubtedly, shamelessly and aesthetically sterilely wallows in Kluge’s Jewish mentor's super absurd remark that, “Writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric,” but at least the director has the gall to admit that there is no such thing as a definitive account of history.

In a somewhat recent interview from 20 February 2012 entitled “I am a patriot of the 20s”: An Interview with Alexander Kluge" conducted by Candace Wirt, Kluge stated the following regarding his film The Patriot (1979) and being a ‘collector’ of history like Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm (who appear in the film): “A poet is always a collector. You have to find something. You do not have to invent reality, but to find reality. In the 30s and 40s, there was the Holocaust in our country. It is necessary to dig for the reasons and to dig deeper and deeper and deeper. You can’t carry on with the poetry of ancient times. You have to find these ancient times. Where are the roots of criminal behavior? And then there may also be roots for the remedy.” Indeed, while I am rather surprised that Kluge thinks of himself as a poet, I am not the least bit shocked that the Holocaust is his frame of reference and inspiration for analyzing history, as if all moments in German history were leading up to a genocidal racial holy war against foreign peoples whose influences on the Teutons has been mostly rather recent (basically, a couple centuries). An eternal ethno-masochist who was, quite involuntarily, one of ‘Hitler’s children,’ being from the generation that knew nothing but National Socialism, at least until 1945 when his nation was reduced to nothing more than a "Tot Reich" of rubble and regret, Kluge has assembled a work with The Patriot that, more than anything, basks in the personal misery of German history, albeit in an ironically intentionally mundane and monotone sort of way, as envisioned by a deleterious deconstructivist auteur of the anti-Occidental Frankfurt school persuasion who firmly associates films with a “magical” (i.e. being entertaining) quality as being of a manipulative National Socialist persuasion. A fiercely fragmented film directed by a man who is clearly more obsessed with the dead than the living, The Patriot intentionally establishes a deep divide between the spectator and the film’s protagonist by using abrupt voice-over narration (from Kluge himself), documentary and vintage footage, silent film style inter-titles, paintings by Caspar David Friedrich, a poster from the anti-Polish National Socialist propaganda film Heimkehr (1941) aka Homecoming directed by Gustav Ucicky (who is ironically believed to be the bastard son of Austrian symbolist painter Gustav Klimt), and even archetypical images from Hindu cosmology, as a means to illustrate the subjectivity and complexity of history, as well as to deter too much empathy for Gabi Teichert, but especially her cause for a patriotic pro-German history. Like Teichert, who wants to “change history” and attempts to do so by attending SPD (Social Democratic Party of Germany; a rather unlikely place to find individuals fond of German history) political conventions and doing illegal archeological digging to find positive raw ‘historical material,’ only to be disappointed in the end, the viewer must come to terms with the fact that the land of the romantics, thinkers, and philosophers is not so romantic, but barbaric and even philistinic, with its history of dehumanization and death of its populous at the hands of the state, but also, as narrated by Kluge, that, “At the time of this emperor [Napoleon I], the scholars Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm dug intensively into German history. They dug and dug and unearthed the fairy tales. Their content: how a people deals with its wishes over a period of 800 years,” thus resulting in some 'positive' aesthetic byproducts. Of course, in contemporary Germany, it seems that Auschwitz has replaced Grimm's fairy tales, just as defeat, guilt, and self-hatred has replaced a national conscious and kultur. In The Patriot, there is no ‘volkgeist,’ but instead, the expressions of an over-intellectualized dead soul whose fear of national identity is no less grand than his hostility toward celluloid beauty, because as a shabbos goy and Frankfurt school victim, Kluge is one of those individuals who personify Albert Camus’ words, “Those who lack the courage will always find a philosophy to justify it,” of which anti-Aryan academic, antagonistic ausländer, and all-around agitator Adorno happily provided to him.

Indeed, The Patriot is undoubtedly a film that must be seen multiples times to be digested properly, but that presupposes that it is a cinematic work that is worth seeing in the first place, which is dubious at best, unless you happen to be a ‘true believer’ whose doctrine is that somewhere in proximity with the ‘New Left,’ or someone who wants to understand how the contemporary, ethno-masochistic German artistic/academic thinks and feels.  At the conclusion of The Patriot, Kluge even went as far as pure obfuscation of meaning, stating in regarding to a scene of the ‘talking knee’ speaking in the dead language of Latin that, “When the knee speaks Latin, I do not at all assume that anyone understands that, at least not anyone who interests me as a viewer,” thus highlighting (if one does their homework), in a needlessly esoteric way, a time when knowledge of history was restricted to a small minority of individuals. Of course, today history has been ‘democratized,’ at least to some extent (but certainly not in Germany and many other European nations where it is a criminal offense to disagree with certain elements of 20th century history, especially the sort that Kluge has spent his life and career dwelling on), but as demonstrated by protagonist Gabi Teichert of The Patriot, who, “was sure the material for history lessons at the advanced level was deficient,” people tend to believe the version of history they want to believe, or at least the version of history that has been beat into their brain since birth because, after all, no one enjoys cognitive dissonance. Although, as narrated in The Patriot that, “It’s hard to present a patriotic version of German history,” things would be quite different if Germany had won the Second World War, as it is quite doubtful that the “The Holocaust” would still be described as the most horrible and tragic event in human history, as it is today as a result of the victor's version of history becoming the 'official' history of the Second World War. Probably not. If Germany had won the war, the Holocaust (which would undoubtedly not be called "The Holocaust"; with the phrase itself not being actively promoted until the mid-1970s by American/Israeli Zionist circles) would probably be portrayed as a noble and necessary campaign against a hostile enemy, if mentioned at all, but few are willing to question the subjectivity of history, not even Alexander Kluge. If The Patriot does anything of value, it is opening up the viewer’s mind to the complexity and indefiniteness of history in a variety of both personal and political ways. For example, early on in The Patriot, documentary footage of British bomber pilots who, “have not learned anything definite about Germany. They have just expertly shot up the country for eighteen hours. Now they are returning to their quarter to sleep,” but they are quite pride of the fact that “Total 950 Kaput Krauts” (i.e. they killed 950 Germans) despite their lack of understanding of German people, kultur, and history because their context for ‘understanding’ the country’s history is that of defeating an enemy nation and not understanding it on any personal or ‘objective’ academic level.  Of course, Kluge, who personally experienced the terror bombings of the British, sees that particular history from a totally different perspective.

In the end, the closest the viewer ever gets to personally ‘knowing’ Gabi Teichert is by seeing her naked body from the perverted perspective of a peeping Tom with insomnia, thereupon underscoring the voyeuristic and scopophiliac quality of cinema itself. Rather absurdly, Ms. Teichert, being a virtual victim of patriotic psychosis, sees the peeping Tom's actions as “contemporary research” and not all that different from her own as a historical researcher, thus baffling the viewer with her rather odd perspective on being the victim of a unsavory sexual degenerate who rapes women with his eyes via binoculars.  In short, at least as far as The Patriot is concerned, 'perspective is everything' when it comes to history. At the end of The Patriot, it is revealed that, “Every New Year’s Eve, Gabi Teichert reflects on the 365 days had. The hope remains for improving the material for advanced history in the coming year,” even if, “The Hessen Culture Ministry wants to abolish history altogether. And combine it with geography and government to make ‘social studies’.”

As Corporal Wieland states in The Patriot, “In the name of the dead of Germany and the 6th Army, I’d now like to express my principle views. If everyone can speak, so can I. A dead knee sees things a bit differently. For example, Bismarck, who is said to have made history…Often I’m asked where I learned so much. It’s a mistake to think that the printed matter in libraries is related to history. We, the dead and their parts, are history. Every cell that doesn’t want to die knows everything, from the beginning right to the very end. Only the quarrelsome brain doesn’t. We dead cells know everything and have reason to. The resurrection of the dead, and who really wants to die, presupposes a thorough knowledge of history. Basically I’m a historical expert. Other dead colleagues refer to me as the ‘Father of Accuracy’,” but he also later admits, “Note that a knee strides forward in principle. Over 2,000 km to Stalingrad, it bends and stretches every half metre, directed by an obstinate brain that’s still there and has no more to say. Some say I use the word ‘principle’ too much. Quite right. It’s a habit I picked up from Corporal Wieland’s brain. I always said ‘principle’ when it was under pressure. I myself have no principles, just a firm will to survive.” Holocaust survivor, novelist, and Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel certainly has principles, but one can only wonder what account of history his circumcised member has to tell or at least the members of his racial kinsmen, at least judging by the original Yiddish version of his novel Night (1955) where the writer reveals that certain concentration camp survivors ran off to "fargvaldikn daytshe shikses" ("rape German shiksas" aka "impure German women") so as to seek Jewish revenge for aggressive Nazi antisemitism. That being said, if one where to use Kluge’s The Patriot as a guide for interpreting history, one can only guess the historical value of films like Spielberg’s Schindler's List (1993) and Saving Private Ryan (1998), but something tells me that the director’s friend/mentor Theodor W. Adorno had already made up his mind on such historical matters and would give the films his full approval, at least judging by his rather subjective and exceedingly emotional quote, “Writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.” If Kluge considers himself a poet and his film The Patriot is, in turn, a work of celluloid poetry, I guess then, at least going by Adorno’s logic, the filmmaker is a kraut barbarian.

 Even in his self-loathing, Alexander Kluge was still able to reveal, if only to a minor extent, the taboo historical truth in terms of Germany's collective suffering during the Second World War, which Hollywood has never and will never acknowledge, and for that alone, he deserves some minor praise.  During a segment of The Patriot featuring documentary footage of bomber pilots dropping bombs on a German city and burning buildings during a literal "Holocaust" (burnt offering) scenario, the voice-over narrator states: "Let us not forget that sixty thousand people burned to death in Hamburg."  Although the historical record shows that more Germans than Jews died in the Second World War, not to mention the millions that died after the war during Stalin's expulsion of ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe and the starvation of German POWs by various allied nations, who is willing to acknowledge it?!  Until Germany and other European nations come to terms with less than comforting aspects of their own histories and rediscover their roots, Europa will continue to decay until all that is left is a 'multicultural,' alien-conquered corpse and one does not need to be a patriotic philistine to acknowledge this truth.

-Ty E

The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover

About a decade ago, I made the rather grave mistake of watching British auteur Peter Greenaway’s film Prospero's Books (1991) – an audaciously avant-garde, flesh-driven cinematic adaptation of William Shakespeare’s The Tempest borrowing aesthetic attributes from Manierist paintings and featuring armies of elderly naked folk and a little boy happily swinging back and forth on a swing and urinating into a pool – which proved to be a terribly trying and exceedingly excruciating cinematic experience, so, naturally I have been a bit apprehensive about watching any other films directed by the seemingly pretentious and unpleasantly perverted filmmaker ever since. After hearing nothing but praise about Greenaway’s previous cinematic effort The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (1989), including from braindead gorehounds and anti-arthouse advocates, I decided to give the auteur another chance, which I am most certainly happy I did, as the film proved to be one of the most suavely and sophisticatedly stylized and ideally idiosyncratic works of sordid scatological celluloid that I have ever seen, so much so that I am more than prepared to give Prospero's Books another chance. Probably Greenway’s most famous/infamous film, as well as his most accessible, The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover is a greatly gastronomic themed work of corrupting culinary cinema featuring a farcical approach to food, feces, sploshing, bathroom stall blowjobs, sadomasochism, and cannibalism, among various putrid and pleasing things. Oftentimes described as an allegorical work depicting tyranny and tragedy of Thatcherism in regard to Britannia, The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover is luckily a work where the viewer need not know, nor care about the sociopolitical subtext to appreciate it as it is a film that is big on aesthetics, character, comedy, and storyline that does not sacrifice cinematic quality for some ‘bigger’ and now-relatively anachronistic message. Featuring Helen Mirren giving bathroom blowjobs, a bookish Jew being forced to eat his own book, a bitchy woman taking a fork to the face, and the torture of a pure as snow and angelic albino boy, The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover is a rare cinematic work that reminds the viewer that black comedy has no bounds as an obsessively obscene yet aesthetically refined film that will make even the most cold and callous of viewers feel oddly overwrought. Doing the seemingly impossible by creating a seamless yet seemingly mismatched marriage between the aesthetic qualities of Baroque and Flemish paintings and thematic moral and sexual libertinism of lavishly lewd literary transgressors like the Marquis de Sade and especially Georges Bataille, Peter Greenaway has cooked a tasty, if not stomach-churning, celluloid meal with The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover; a film that reminds the viewer that sometimes there is a fine line between the physical appearance of chocolate mousse and feces, and high art and low art. 

Things are getting ugly and rather unsanitary at the positively posh and upscale Le Hollandais Restaurant when the owner and head chef Richard Borst aka "The Cook" (Richard Bohringer) isn't able to pay psychotic sadist gangster Alfred Spica aka “The Thief” (Michael Gambon) money he owes. On top of stripping Borst’s clothes off and rubbing dogs turds all over his disrobed body, super sicko Spica – a low-class yet curiously charismatic barbarian who loves gorging his mouth with food just as much he basks in humiliating and torturing people – also takes over his rather refined place of fine dining, thus setting the tone for a film about bad table manners that makes Paul Bartel’s Eating Raoul (1982) seem like culinary child’s play by comparison. Naturally, Spica makes a habit of attending Le Hollandais every night with his eccentric and erratic entourage, including his gorgeous and cultivated wife Georgina Spica aka "The Wife" (Helen Mirren) and criminal underlings Mitchel (Tom Roth), Cory (Ciarán Hinds), and Turpin (Roger Ashton-Griffiths), among various other ill-mannered low-lifes and dedicated degenerates of the organized crime kind. A boorish, belligerent, and physically bloated megalomaniac who generally does and says whatever he wants whenever he wants, Alfred is not someone who is used to hearing "no" for an answer, let alone encountering people that have the gall and balls to contradict him, so the last thing he would suspect is that his well bred and seemingly uptight, bookish wife is having an affair with another man right under his nose. Unbeknownst to Alfred – a man who beats and rapes his wife from time to time – his wife Georgina is secretly having a heated love affair with an intelligent and seemingly introverted bookshop owner Michael (Alan Howard) that involves the collaboration of the Cook and his many employees in providing these lovers with sexual sanctuary at the restaurant. While Alfred goes on ridiculous rants about everything, including how close in proximity the vaginal hole and anus is on his wife and how about 60% of the patrons at the restaurant are Jewish, Georgina is getting her ‘groove on’ with Michael in toilet stalls, dirty dish rooms, walk-in refrigerators, and other sanitary and not so sanitary places. Of course, when Alfred finds out about Georgina’s matrimonial indiscretions, he vows to kill and eat Michael, but he only fulfills half his promise, thus his wife makes sure that he keeps his word in what he describes as, “a revenge killing, an affair of the heart,” but what turns into a sick sideshow of the stomach starring a devilishly charismatic gangster turned psychologically-castrated cannibal cuckold.  Indeed, while it is Alfred that has Micheal literally stuffed like a Thanksgiving turkey using pages from the bookshop owner's favorite tome, a book on the French Revolution, it is Georgina that makes sure her dead flame is properly dressed and fully cooked, so that her husband can also experience what it is like to have the penetrating bibliophile 'inside' his body.

 As oftentimes described by reviewers of the film, The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover utilizes eccentric characters, which are essentially walking and talking caricatures of the reasonably complex and calculating sort, as allegorical representations of the following: The Cook = Civil servants, The Thief = Thatcher and her insatiable need for greed and unwavering arrogance, The Wife = Britannia, The Lover = leftist/intellectuals who have the power to seduce, but are too impotent and ill-equipped to put up a worthy fight. Luckily, the film is too steeped in succulently stylized tableaux, character pathology and aesthetic scatology for one to feel like they have been penetrated with a putrid and pretentious political parable of the preposterous pomo sort. While Marco Ferreri’s filmic food farce La Grande Bouffe (1973) aka The Grande Bouffe may make for a bodacious brunch with barrels of boobs, buffets, and belches, The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover is a meticulously prepared three course celluloid meal that totally fulfills without the unwanted side-effects of sentimentalist flatulence and preachy political puffery that is known to result in deleterious diarrhea of the mind and soul. Admittedly, The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover was specially prepared for those with refined taste for tableaux and iron stomachs for aberrant aestheticism and subversive themes, so if you’re looking for some filmic fast food, stay clear of Greenaway’s celluloid cuisine and head to the dead-end drive thru of Stevie Spielberg or Mickey Bay’s mass-produced fodder. 

-Ty E

Santa Sangre

 

Admittedly, I have become quite disillusioned with the films and character of “acid-garde” auteur turned comic writer/would-be-guru Alejandro Jodorowsky (El Topo, The Holy Mountain) over the past couple years or so, but strangely, at the same time, I have found a new affinity for his Mexican-Italian surrealist thriller-horror film Santa Sangre (1989) aka Holy Blood; a work I was so annoyed with upon my initially viewing of it some 8 or 9 years ago that I did not even make it to the midpoint before turning it off. The first film he directed in almost a decade after his failed children’s filmic fable Tusk (1980) and his aborted attempt at cinematically adapting Frank Herbert’s epic 1965 science fiction novel Dune, Santa Sangre – a work co-written and produced by Claudio Argento (the younger brother of Italian giallo maestro Dario Argento, who produced many of his big bro’s films, including Suspiria and Mother of Tears) – was a sort of “comeback” effort for Jodorowsky, but it was, unfortunately, a short-lived one as his subsequent attempt at creating a cinematic blockbuster, The Rainbow Thief (1990), was an abject failure of the first order, both artistically and especially financially speaking. Featuring the sort of sordid sideshow surrealism and gross and gory yet gorgeous grotesquery fans have come to love and expect from Jodorowsky yet with a much more coherent narrative than El Topo (1970) and The Holy Mountain (1973), Santa Sangre arguably makes for the seemingly megalomaniacal avant-garde auteur’s most accessible and, dare I say, eclectically and endlessly entertaining work, thus making it the perfect introduction to his odd and oftentimes oneiric yet ominously obscene cinematic oeuvre. Although often described as a Chilean, Latino, and/or French filmmaker, Jodorowsky is undoubtedly the virtual archetypical “wandering Jew,” as someone who was born to Ukrainian Jewish immigrants that learned to dislike the natives of Chile due to their mistrust of his 'foreign' character, as well as the American mining industrialists that mistreated the natives, thus developing a dual hatred for American imperialism and its victims, which bleeds deeply through his celluloid works, including Santa Sangre; a film that portrays the majority of Mexicans as savage scavengers, filthy freaks, and, at best, suave criminals and charismatic psychopaths. A man that was apparently, according to himself, the product of rape after his father sexually ravaged his mother, Jodorowsky (who once claimed to have literally raped the heroine for a scene in El Topo, thus following in the foul footsteps of his fiendish father) was naturally resented by the woman that rather reluctantly gave birth to him, which most certainly seems to shine through in Santa Sangre; a film about a child magician turned bestial adult mental patient and malicious murderer who thinks he is a phoenix and is horribly haunted by his armless and merciless mother. Featuring a visual feast of human freaks of the genetically dubious sort, hungry mobs of mud-covered Mexicans who are hellbent for the foul flesh of dead elephants, voluptuous zombie babes, kooky coke-snorting beaners with Down syndrome, a super slavish religious cult that worships a girl that who was raped and had both her arms cut off by two bodacious buggering brothers, and meta-Fellini-esque carnival and murder scenarios probably inspired by psychedelic drugs and even more mind-penetrating personal memories, Santa Sangre is a surrealistically sound film that convinced me that Jodorowsky is more than just a pretentious psychopath who is addicted to his own deluded, drug-addled pseudo-spirituality of "psychoshamanism."

Fenix (Axel Jodorowsky; the director’s son, who bares a striking resemblance to his father thus making for the perfect alter-ego for the auteur) is all fucked up and like many deranged people, his mental affliction started after a rather tragic series of events he experienced during his completely corrupting childhood during those especially critical coming-of-age years. Rather prestigious and wise for a child carny, young Fenix (Adan Jodorowsky; another one of the director’s sons) works as a “child magician” at a Gringo-owned (as advertised) Mexican carnival run by his semi-nefarious knife-throwing father Orgo (Guy Stockwell) and whose best friend is a middle-aged Mexi-midget named Aladin. Fenix’s mother Concha (Blanca Guerra) also works at the carnival as a trapeze artist and aerialist, but her real passion is being the leader of a renegade religious cult that has a raped and dismembered girl (who has no arms) as its patently perverse and preposterous patron saint. On top of suffering from spiritual insanity, Concha suffers from self-imposed sexual repression and totally hates a tattooed woman (Thelma Tixou) that also works at the carnival because her husband Orgo has a rather dubious and risque relationship with her that includes throwing knives only a couple inches away from her illustrated meat-curtain. The tattooed woman also has an adopted daughter named Alma (Faviola Elenka Tapia); a blonde-haired, deaf mute tightrope walker that Fenix is feverishly fond of.  Naturally, little Fenix's life begins to take a dramatic turn for the worst when one of his friends, a small elephant, dies and is given a public funeral where it is paraded through the city streets in its campy coffin like all great Mexican folk heroes and is subsequently dumped in a trash pit, where a virtual army of dirty mestizo savages (played by real poor people whose sole costume for the film was mud splattered across their clothes and for whom the director apparently gave real beef to quench their hunger) rip the deceased beast to shreds so they can eat its rancid meat, thereupon traumatizing the little magician, yet the downward spiral that is his late childhood has only begun to turn into a very real nightmare. To simultaneously console and make a man out of his son, ogre-like blond beast Orgo tattoos a large spread-eagled phoenix (a symbol typically used as a sign of “resurrection” or an “exceptional man”) onto the boy's chest that is identical to his own chest tat via his favorite knife and some bloody red ink in what is a symbolic mark that will perpetuate a family curse. In retaliation for seeing Ogor fondling and fornicating with the tattooed woman, Concha pours sulphuric acid onto her husband’s Orgo's disloyal dick and balls and he retaliates by cutting her arms off, thereupon turning her into a mommy martyr in the form of her favorite limbless rape victim saint. With his manhood mangled and ruined, Ogor – who is no Adonis as a large and in charge fellow with an exceptionally unflattering and badly bulging beer gut – walks naked into the street while grasping his disfigured genitals and slits his own throat with his favorite phallic throwing knife, all while Fenix watches to horror while helplessly locked in a trailer.

Flash forward a decade or so into the present, Fenix is now a funny feral-like fellow who thinks he is a phoenix as an emotionally monotone maniac who stands crouched down and perched on a tree and eats raw fish in a mental institution where he seems to be the only patient who does not suffer from Down syndrome. One night, when he and the merry mongoloids are taken on a night field trip to a local movie theater, he and his crazy comrades are given cocaine by a suave pimp (Teo Jodorowsky; undoubtedly the director’s least ugly son) with his hair slicked back like a greaser who has an obese prostitute as a girlfriend. The pimp takes them to the more sleazy side of the superlatively shitty city, where Fenix sees the tattooed woman, who now works as a fleshpeddler, trying to sell cheap tricks on the seedy sunset strip, which throws him into a fit of rage. His encounter with the tattooed whore must have awoken something deep inside of his subconscious because he regains the strength and will to live, but also sees the ghost of his dead mother, who calls out to him, so naturally he escapes from the less than secure mental hospital and rejoins his mommy to begin his new life of murder and mayhem.  To his decided dismay, Fenix witnesses the tattooed women trying to teach now-grownup Alma the trick of the trade of a hooker, but before long, the ex-carny covered in salacious tats is brutally mutilated by an unseen woman’s hands with red finger nails. Together mother and son go on vengeful seek-and-destroy missions, but is the armless Madonna just really a figment of the marvelously mad man’s macabre and murderous imagination?!  Can lifelong love interest Alma prove that 'love conquers all,' by getting Fenix to stop fetishizing his freaky mom?!  Through a series of trials and errors, including attempting to take on the identity of the 'Invisible Man' and giving way to his bi-curious side by dating and courting a massive and muscular cross-dressing wrestler, Fenix comes to realize that his mother is not of the nice, nurturing sort and that he needs to finally come to terms with his unpleasant past, even if it means eradicating his phantasmagorical procreator for a woman of the more physical and less homicidal and incestuous sort.

Like Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) meets Steve Balderson’s Firecracker (2005) as directed by a younger, more vivacious Luis Buñuel on LSD attempting to direct a film in the spirit of Dario Argento, Santa Sangre is a psychedelic psychosexual cinematic tale about the irrevocable consequences of one man’s stunted and terribly tragicomedic coming-of-age that ultimately had murderous consequences of the ominous oedipal sort, which also seemed to have plagued director Alejandro Jodorowsky; a man whose mommy resented him since birth since he was the rather unwanted product of rape, even once telling him, “I cannot love you.” Of course, while Fenix dealt with his demons by killing people, Jodorowsky creatively and cleverly concocted some of the most gnarled and grotesque yet strangely gorgeous scenarios ever captured on celluloid with those featured in Santa Sangre being some of his most seemingly personal. Whereas someone like Steven Spielberg makes mundane and absurdly artificial coming-of-age movies that portray childhood as a positively pleasant period of majestic perfection of the literally supernatural and non-allegorical sort where everything works out immaculately in the end and is saturated with severely soulless and superficial sentimentalism, Jodorowsky bares his determinedly damaged inner-child with Santa Sangre; a film with the message that, to quote Morrissey, “Barbarism Begins at Home,” and that one must get over these childhood ills if they ever hope to move on with their lives. In a 2008 interview with Bright Lights Film Journal, Jodorowsky admitted regarding his film and the difference between he and the Hollywood Shoah-man of Show biz, “In Santa Sangre, I shot in the streets where all the thieves and the criminals and the drunks are, I went there to shoot. It's a very . . . you know, you are not you when you are shooting. The person who made those pictures is not me. I was a completely different person when I made these pictures: I would see no one, I would sleep only four hours a day, I didn't drink, I didn't take drugs, I didn't have a woman — nothing. I ate very little. The only thing I did was make the pictures. They are honest pictures. They are good, they are bad — they are something which happened there, which is honest… But, say, Spielberg is not honest. I hate Spielberg, because none of his movies are honest. His violence is ill, it's not honest. He shows an ill violence, as though he was the father of history. He hates Jews, because he is Jewish. He is making business with that, with Europe. He is fascist, because America is the centre of his world. If I can kill Spielberg, I will kill Spielberg.”  Indeed, any film that led Jodorowsky to lay off the psychedelic drugs for an extended period of time must have been an important and even spiritual work as a sort of personal cinematic 'exorcising' ritual and quite possibly the most honest and strangely hopeful work the seemingly damned director has ever created.  That being said, until the day comes when S. Spielberg directs an extra-erotic big-budget 'kids-ploitation' film celebrating the triumph of Judea and the destruction of Europa and Occidental civilization, as well as the spiritual and financial enslavement of the Goyim, will he have reached a degree of personal and artistic integrity that is anywhere near as great as his renegade messianic kinsman Alejandro Jodorowsky.

-Ty E

The Island of the Bloody Plantation

While many fans of German New Cinema master auteur Rainer Werner Fassbinder's cinematic oeuvre find it quite baffling that Ulli Lommel – the star of the filmmaker’s first film Love is Colder than Death (1969) aka Liebe ist kälter als der Tod and director of the Fassbinder-produced homo-cidal serial killer flick The Tenderness of the Wolves (1973) aka Die Zärtlichkeit der Wölfe – would go on to haphazardly and half-assedly direct some of the worst digital diarrhea works, including Daniel - Der Zauberer (2004), which was once voted the worst film ever made on imdb.com, as well as countless sub-schlock and similarly titled direct-to-dvd serial killers flicks like Zodiac Killer (2005), B.T.K. Killer (2005), and Green River Killer (2005), the most embarrassing Fass-bande-related work is indubitably The Island of the Bloody Plantation (1983) aka Die Insel der blutigen Plantage aka Escape from Blood Plantation aka Prison Camp Girls, Jailed for Love directed by Kurt Raab (although it is often contended that Peter Kern was either the director or co-directed) and produced by Peter Kern. Although the star of such Fassbinder classics as Why Does Herr R. Run Amok? (1971) aka Warum läuft Herr R. Amok?, Satan's Brew (1976) aka Satansbraten, and The Stationmaster's Wife (1977) aka Bolwieser, as well as the star/writer of The Tenderness of the Wolves and production designer for virtually every single Fassbinder film leading up to 1977, Kurt Raab, for whatever reason (but most likely a tasteless attempt at hoping to earn a relatively hefty monetary return on a shallowly contrived cinematic work that relies on its exotic location and people as its sole appeal), decided to direct a Women in Prison (or WiP) film; a totally trashy and thoroughly tacky subgenre of exploitation cinema oftentimes containing lurid and crudely contrived lesbian action between braindead scream queens and scenes of softcore quasi-pornography and intrinsically idiotic gore scenes. Not unsurprisingly, Kurt Raab – a flamboyant homosexual who inevitably died of AIDS and whose death was chronicled in the documentary Yearning for Sodom (TV 1989) aka Sehnsucht nach Sodom, which he also co-directed – did not feel the need to include too many bare-skinned buxom blonde and brown beauties in his WiP flick The Island of the Bloody Plantation, but instead, countless scenes of homo-hustler-turned-actor Udo Kier in compromised, unclad and oftentimes shirtless situations and a couple shots of small yet perky Filipino tits. An absurdly asinine celluloid abortion from whatever angle you look at it, even as a work from the innately idiotic and aesthetically competent subgenre of WiP, The Island of the Bloody Plantation – a would-be-wild-and-wanton work that also features Fass Superstar and blonde beastess Barbara Valentin in a radically ridiculous role as a comrade-raping neo-nazi she-bitch who has packed on a couple pounds since her days as an astute attendant at Auschwitz; a place with a great starvation diet – is not only fuming filmic feces on Fassbinder’s grave, but also further proof that without the fallen filmmaker as their all-powerful Führer and father-figure, his incestuous film family, aside from a couple exceptions, was nothing more than a group of misguided moneymakers. 

 Like Island of Lost Souls (1932) meets Apocalypse Now (1979) meets Iron Sky (2012) as if directed by Jess Franco’s half-retarded, gay kraut bastard brother, The Island of the Bloody Plantation is set on a secluded yet heavily guarded tropical island (like many cheap exploitation films of its time, it was shot in the Philippines) ruled by a terribly debauched nazi doctor named Otto Globocnik (played by boxer-turned-actor Karl-Otto Alberty and clearly named after Slovenian-Austrian SS leader Odilo Globocnik) in what is a maniac neo-nazi microcosm that includes countless Filipino islander slaves, especially of the female persuasion but also some mutant man-loving 'house Fligga' midgets, and a handful of traitorous Flip men, including Hartman (Udio Kier); a race traitor who has fallen with a wilily eye half-caste native named Cora (Karen Lopez). On top of committing the unholy sin of racial treason, Hartman – a heartfelt hero with a bleeding heart for exotic primitives – is loved by the queen nazi bitch of the island, Olga (Barbara Valentin) aka “Bloody Olga” (her nickname during his early days as a concentration camp guard). Naturally things are not as glorious as during the golden age of the Third Reich, as the fallen Führer, who used to be called “white stallion” during his illustrious and murderous years as a super suave SS officer, likes to have sex with his brown slaves, which enrages Olga as demonstrated by her rather brazen rhetorical question to him, “What kind of example are you setting for your men…messing around with subhumans?”  Of course, good ol’ Globocnik is not the only one with a feverish fetish as Olga is in love with handsome Hartman, so much so that she rapes him at gunpoint and makes his naked native girlfriend Cora watch. A bodacious butch yet clearly once-beauteous blonde and salacious sadomasochist who is quite proud of her old moniker “Bloody Olga” from her old Jew-gassing days, Olga states to Hartman, “I love it when you hate me...it puts fire in me,” while he reluctantly ravages her puss. Needless to say, the unhinged and fetishistic fascists of The Island of the Bloody Plantation are so extreme that they are a virtual parody of the "Authoritarian Personality" as described by Jewish Marxists of the Frankfurt school like Erich Fromm and Theodor W. Adorno.  Some of the Nazi guards, including Bevney (director Kurt Raab somewhat playing himself as a perverted pederast who loves quoting bible verses) and some fat kraut, force some of the natives to fornicate in front of them so as to obtain optimum scopiphiliac pleasure. Naturally, things go awry for the island of aberrant authoritarian Aryans when Hartman helps the islanders to run an untermensch revolt in the spirit of the Haitian Revolution where the Asiatic islanders exterminate the white leaders (minus Hartman and Olga's 'secret' and innocent daughter). With a little help from primitive magic from one of the flip girls and a poisonous spider, the Filipinos prove that the Germans are not the only masters of genocide, but, of course, they need race traitor Hartman to help them pull it off. 

 With its particularly poorly dubbed English dialogue, curiously corny and poorly aged theme song, mindless worship of the nubile “noble savage,” lackluster direction and use of generic genre conventions, farcical treatment of Fassbinder Superstars, lunatic left-wing social message, crude low-camp comedy, and cheap softcore sensuality, The Island of the Bloody Plantation is, at best, a dedicatedly disgraceful but surely symbolic celluloid artifact for the forsaken future of German cinema after Fassbinder’s death (it should be noted that the film was released only a year after R.W. overdosed on cocaine) that features a handful of entrancing scenic beach shots and, at worst, something that borders on the equivalent of a celluloid lobotomy. Featuring a boorish brigade of blond and debauched nazi nihilists who seem to openly welcome their own demise, especially Olga (who inexplicably allows the natives to run their revolution due to her hard-on for Hartman), The Island of the Bloody Plantation also makes for a vaguely eccentric yet rarely entertaining work of erratic ethno-masochistic exploitation cinema.  On a personal level, I did enjoy Barbara Valentin's particularly peculiar and rather against-type performance as Olga to some degree because instead of playing her typical role as a blonde bimbo, she plays a passionate psychopath who will do anything for her man and daughter, even if it results in her inevitable self-destruction, despite being a genocidal cunt and whatnot. Of course, unlike The Tenderness of the Wolves, The Island of the Bloody Plantation offers no psychological insight for the self-loathing of its oftentimes vainglorious villains aside from their nostalgia for Nazism under Hitler, thus backing Wagnerian-Brechtian auteur Hans-Jürgen Syberberg’s argument that modern German art is, "filthy and sick... in praise of cowardice and treason, of criminals, whores, of hate, ugliness, of lies and crimes and all that is unnatural." Indeed, while The Island of the Bloody Plantation tries to play off its overwhelming hatefulness and degeneracy as merely sardonic like the typical Hollywood quasi-commie comedy, it is quite obvious that the film wallows in wantonness and was made to make a quick buck under Fassbinder’s legacy and as a way for the ex-Fass-bande actors to spend a nice tropical vacation. If Kurt Raab is in hell, which some more superstitious individuals might believe since he was denied Christian burial at the Catholic cemetery near where he grew up in Bavaria due to prejudices against his perverse passing via gay cancer, I am sure Fassbinder has penetrated his poofer poop-chute with a pitchfork for directing The Island of the Bloody Plantation, but, for some reason, I am sure he likes it hot in his marvelously mangled man-hole. 

-Ty E

Race d'Ep

If Franco Prosperi and Gualtiero Jacopetti of Mondo Cane (1962) fame directed a documentary about male homosexuality on a much smaller budget than they used while working on their epically exploitative cinematic vacations, it would have probably resembled Race d'Ep: un siècle d'images de l'homosexualité (1979) aka The Homosexual Century; a militant celluloid salute to subversive sodomy and a semi-educational tribute to one century of homo history (spanning from the 1880s to 1980s) directed and co-written by Lionel Soukaz (Ixe, Maman que man)  and co-penned (and, in part, co-directed) by French commie queer theorist Guy Hocquenghem. With the second word of the original Frog title being a play on the word for "pédé," a French slur for gay men, Race d'Ep reveals on merely a superficial level that it is a renegade agitprop work on the so-called ‘fag race’ and indeed it is. A man who believed ‘white supremacy’ and ‘racism’ could be annihilated via fanatical fudge-packing, Hocquenghem, who is clearly behind the majority of ideas featured in the aesthetically and thematically hostile work The Homosexual Century, would, like his homophile hero Michel Foucault, die prematurely via AIDS at the age of 42, yet would earn the title,”the father of queer theory” among his faggy fanboys. Still, Hocquenghem, like director Lionel Soukaz and their cinematic collaboration The Homosexual Century, would fail to earn an international reputation of any notably degree, thus the documentary makes for a rather distinct depiction of what the “gay agenda” was like before it was neutered by mainstreamer fag fascists who sought to homogenize their fellow homos and demand that heteros acknowledge the supposed normality of spitting semen into another man’s brown-eye or face the bitter wrath of hysterical homosexualist ad hominem attacks that ruin careers and give petty power to self-glorifying queers. Indeed, during The Homosexual Century, there is no talk of gays wanting to adopt children or joining the military (in fact, anti-fagdom and militarism are treated as one in the same as deplorable traits of hostile "heteronormative" folks), but pro-pederasty is most certainly one of the major themes, as is mass male orgies and the belief that gayness is the result of being biologically different and not just another form of normality. As devilishly expressed in the narrated message towards the third part of the documentary that the, “best thing for an Occidental democracy was a blond and white, liberated, young” aka a sexually aberrant Aryan Marxist who wears women’s clothing and sucks men's cocks, The Homosexual Century makes for a decidedly degenerate documentary that argues that the last century – the one that saw Europe lose all of its empires, colonies and status in the world, as well as seeing the dissolution of art and kultur and the rise of feminism, communism, globalism, multiculturalism and other collectivist cancers that appeal to mundane majorities – was a fairly great one for guys who like guys.

Essentially four different short films (or at least the version I watched was) that span from the 1880s to the 1980s that make up a feature-length documentary that starts with a curiously campy and queerly carnal pornographic docudrama about German pederast/photographer Baron Wilhelm von Gloeden and concludes with a pseudo-cinéma vérité 'arthouse' melodrama about a closet-case family man and his sleazy encounter with a dirty Frenchman whilst cruising Paris, The Homosexual Century is a relatively eclectic (as far as filmmaking techniques are concerned), if not thematically erratic, work that cannot decide whether it wants to be a piece of poofer erotica or a serious work of pole-smoking propaganda. Unsurprisingly, shot in gay guerilla-style during the height of mass demonstrations for “homo liberation” in fall of 1979 in France and elsewhere in the Occident, part one of The Homosexual Century, "Le temps de la pose" (23 mins), depicts late 19th-century cock-sucking kraut photographer Wilhelm von Gloeden as a princely pervert who started a virtual one-man-revolution with his proto-pornographic photographs of underage boys who he took a special liking due to their perceived exotic and ‘Arab’ appearances. In between goofy footage of von Gloeden getting his groove on as the master of getting disrobed Guido twinks to strike gay Greek poses, the segment also features sordid and salacious scenic sodomy from consenting young men that ultimately seems more silly than "sexy" as one can only assumed the director intended it to be. According to one of the boys, the Baron, “made us princes of art,” which must undoubtedly be true as high-profile pederast Oscar Wilde was a fan of von Gloeden’s Uranian photos. Naturally, von Gloeden and his cousin Guglielmo Plüschow are important in gay history because they made it somewhat acceptable to erotocize young men, but it seems quite ridiculous that this story would take up about a quarter of The Homosexual Century.  It would probably have been better spent discussing Uranian poets like Lord Alfred Douglas (Wilde's treacherous butt boy), John Addington Symonds, John Moray Stuart-Young, Montague Summers, and the eccentric Frederick Rolfe aka "Baron Corvo," but I guess images have always been more popular than actual literature, even among the cultivated cock-sucking sort.

The second segment of The Homosexual Century, "Le troisième sexe ou Des années folles à l'extermination" (25 mins), is indubitably the most interesting and insightful part of the documentary as it depicts the various opposing and philosophically rivaling homosexual groups in Weimar Republic, Germany during the the 1920s and 1930s, which queer British novelist Christopher Isherwood apparently called the “Golden Age of Homosexuality.” Essentially divided into three rival yet somewhat overlapping groups – effete supporters of gay German-Jewish sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld; a man who believed homosexuals were a third sex (gay men being biological men with “female” souls), Adolf Brand; an anarchistic völkisch writer influenced by kraut egotist/atheistic anarchist philosopher Max Stirner who published the gay journal Der Eigene (aka The Own) that promoted neo-paganism and promoted the belief that homosexuals were more masculine than heterosexual men, and the “Confederation of Specials” (which is probably a bad translation of the real name); a group that promoted cultured cocktail aestheticism and anarchism – The Homosexual Century makes it quite clear there was actually a time when queers did not have a superficial pseudo-culture like they do today in the U.S. Like Adolf Brand, Hans Blüher (who later became a National Socialist for a time) supported the Wandervogel and German Youth Movement; proto-hippie back-to-nature groups that promoted neo-paganism, nudism, organic foods, eugenics, etc. that were partly inspired by the völkisch symbolist art of Fidus (Hugo Reinhold Karl Johann Höppener) – whose artistic works are featured in The Homosexual Century – and would later inspire the Hitler Youth. Ironically, Magnus Hirschfeld, who was called the “Einstein of Sex” by the New York Times (and later by Rosa von Praunheim), would develop a large body of research that was later used by the Nazis as scientific evidence of homosexual genetic degeneracy as depicted in The Homosexual Century in a most unflattering and quasi-pornographic manner in a debauched docudrama sequence featuring nude twinks and muscle fags dressed in black trench-coats with Nazi armbands. The documentary also goes on to describe how the Nazis trashed Hirshfeld’s research center, but made the mistake of featuring a picture of gay SA brownshirt Edmund Heines, who had his own mini-concentration camp where he tortured enemies as depicted in Rosa von Praunheim's documentary Men Heroes and Gay Nazis (2005) and was the deputy of Sturmabteilung leader Ernst Röhm (who introduced his boyish compatriot to sodomy, among other things); both of whom would be sacrificed in Hitler’s fratricidal purge, the Night of the Long Knives, under the dubious pretense (Hitler, who was one of Röhm's best friends, long knew about his loyal cock-sucking commando's 'vice') of their poofer perversity. To the credit of the makers of The Homosexual Century, while it is mentioned that the Nazis had a popular quote, “suppress the Jews, for Marxism to disappear,” it is also mentioned that Soviet writer Maxim Gorky once wrote, “suppress the homosexuals, for fascists to disappear,” thus revealing homosexuality was not uncommon among early leaders of the National Socialist Party. Judging by the political climate today in the Occident in regard to gay special interest groups, Gorky may have been on to something. Somewhat surprisingly, ‘conservative revolutionary’ poet Stefan George (who most modern academics write-off as a proto-Nazi poet of sorts) and his obsessions with getting his members of his literary circle to dress in ancient, homoerotic style Greek clothing is mentioned in a relatively positive light.

Undoubtedly, the final two parts of The Homosexual Century are most certainly the weakest despite the fact that they depict relatively 'homosexually liberated' periods in history. While the third part, "Sweet Sixteen in the Sixties" (10 mins), is nothing more than a Soviet montage-inspired agitprop piece of perverse poo-packing pornography filled with erect members, flower power fags frolicking around rather gayly, pretty boy orgies featuring buff bods and blowjobs, redundant rock ‘n’ roll/psychedelic music and aesthetics, and a celebration of how sodomy finally became sanctified in the Occident due to the emergence of counter-culture groups, Cultural Marxism/Frankfurt school ideas, and popular unisex clothing (which is described as a being more revolutionary and important than any other from of group protest), the final segment of the documentary, "Royal Opéra" (co-directed with Guy Hocquenghem, 25 mins), which was also released separately as an individual short film the same year (1979), is a minimalistic, melodramatic and would-be-erotic condemnation of homos in the closet as well as a demystification of public pissoir in the golden age of cruising that shares a striking resemblance to the French film Johan – Mon été 75 (1976) directed by the openly gay filmmaker Philippe Vallois (who also directed We Were One Man (1979) aka Nous étions un seul homme starring Piotr Stanislas, who plays one of the leads in Royal Opéra). About as interesting as Royal Opéra gets is when the characters decide to urinate in unison on a city sidewalk in broad daylight, as well as a scene where a racially insensitive remark is made by the dirty Frenchman regarding an urban abyss of sorts, where he states quite sardonically, "Moreover, this tunnel was as dark as a Negro's asshole in the depth of a mine."  Needless to say, not a single segment of The Homosexual Century is LGBT-sensitive enough to make the curious contemporary plea for gay marriage to seem even remotely reasonable as most of the proto-twinks, queens, and leather-fags featured in this radically pro-decadence documentary are 'bad to the boner' and love living the wayward way.

 Ultimately, The Homosexual Century is an uneven yet unintentionally eventful work of fierce fag agitprop from a bygone era when boy-on-boy buggery was still somewhat of a taboo in the Occidental world and that to some extent acts as counter-propaganda to the poofer political correctness that has infectiously engulfed Western European and Northern American society today. As with many works of its kind (and queer cinema in general), the documentary is also an incriminating and wildly wanton work that makes dudes that likes dudes seem like the most depraved and debauched deviants in the world, which is not helped by the the fact that co-writer/co-director Guy Hocquenghem was a vehement victim of his own political puffery, dying of “gay cancer,” which was probably caused by one too many anonymous trips to the tearoom. In terms of educational merit, The Homosexual Century, especially the second segment, is proof gay kultur was not always about retarded haircuts and a radically repugnant fashion sense, talking with a contrived lisp, glorifying dastardly drag queens and bitchy old hags and feminist fag hags, so-called LGBT’s collective war against heterosexuality (there was actually a time when fags hated dykes and vice versa), pill popping, and promoting a slave-morality-driven victim-based mentality.  It might be a stretch, but I would not be surprised if the contemporary cock-sucker cry for "gay marriage" is a result of a lack of persecution among gays in the Western world because, after all, masochism and man-on-man love go hand-in-hand.  In the past gays could proudly say they had Stefan George, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Jean Cocteau, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, etc., – individuals who actually suffered to some extent during their time – but who do they have now; Ellen Degenerate, Ogre O'Donnell, and pedomorphic pansy Neil Patrick Harris!? If the last century was the “Homosexual Century,” then this zeitgeist should certainly be concluded with an abberosexual apocalypse of sorts. After all, while the paintings of Caravaggio and the cinematic works of F.W. Murnau will always be treasured, no one is going to miss hearing about the much publicized tearoom exploits of drug-addled fag singers like George Michael and his less masculine compatriot, fairy fag Boy George.

-Ty E