A Free Woman

In 1970, German auteur Volker Schlöndorff (Young Törless, The Tin Drum) directed would-be-actress Margarethe von Trotta in his masterful Baal adaptation starring Rainer Werner Fassbinder and a year later he would marry her, thus ultimately cuckolding himself as both a man and a filmmaker. Indeed, after the auteur directed his made-for-TV spaghetti western inspired anti-Heimat film The Sudden Wealth of the Poor People of Kombach (1970), virtually all of his films from then on until the mid-1970s revolved around his wife, with their last major work together being the pro-bolshevik period piece Coup de Grâce (1976). By giving von Trotta the opportunity to co-direct The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum (1975), which was the first big mainstream hit for both the directors and German New Cinema in general, Schlöndorff enabled his wife to establish herself as a filmmaker, thus she, as a proud feminist, no longer needed her hubby to further her career. Out of all the films the two collaborated on together, none better epitomizes Schlöndorff’s innate emasculation and artistic cuckoldry than A Free Woman (1972) aka Strohfeuer aka Summer Lightning, which is quite ironic considering it is one of the director’s most unconventional and least literary oriented works. Co-written by and starring von Trotta in a semi-autobiographical work loosely based on the ugly aftermath of her first failed marriage, A Free Woman is a hopelessly bourgeois feminist flick that might as well have been directed by the star herself as it resembles her early mundane melodramas. Luckily, due to her reasonably good looks and seemingly authentic portrayal of a disgruntled dame, A Free Woman does not reach the intolerable level of ‘broad power’ banality that plagues most of the actress-turned-director’s works. Of course, the film also seems less phony and ethno-masochistic because, unlike films like Rosa Luxemburg (1986), Rosenstrasse (2003), and Hannah Arendt (2012) where the director preposterously attempted to put herself in the Hebraic shoes of Jewesses, A Free Woman is a discernibly honest expression of von Trotta’s vulnerability and not a dubious piece of heavy-handed humanistic posturing. Undoubtedly, the film will seem rather ridiculous to many modern viewers, as the prospect of a woman ending up on the losing side of divorce nowadays seems about as likely as the Congo turning into a world power or Ireland colonizing Europe. Shot in a naturalistic and sometimes even documentary-like style typical of early works by kraut feminist filmmakers like Helma Sanders-Brahms and Helke Sander, albeit minus most of the agitprop elements, A Free Woman is undoubtedly one of the most softcore feminist films ever made, thus making it an all-around less repugnant work that seems like it was created by semi-reasonable people. Indeed, if one were to compare all the problems von Trotta’s character in the film faces to the reality of how the legal system favors women today; one would think the feminist dream has been fully realized. After all, how else could one explain how a director as consistently banal and vapid has gone on to become one of the most famous directors in Germany, as well as one of the most revered female auteur filmmakers in the entire world, yet one of the major themes of A Free Woman is how artistic institutions are purportedly male-dominated.

As demonstrated by the fact that she peddles to divorce court on a bicycle while wearing high heels and ultimately arrives late as a result, Elisabeth Junker (Margarethe von Trotta) does not exactly make the most sensible of decisions. As she admits herself, Elisabeth’s first mistake was marrying when she was far too young. While testifying in court, she confesses that her divorce from her husband Hans-Helmut (Friedhelm Ptok) was solely of her of own free will and has nothing to do with abuse or anything of that sort. In fact, while pregnant with her son Niki, Elisabeth temporarily left her husband and began sleeping and living with a swarthy hippie musician named Wolfgang, thus demonstrating Hans-Helmut's humiliating longstanding cuckoldry. Despite everything, Hans-Helmut is still in love with Elisabeth and even after they have officially divorced, he still tries in vain to get her back. Educated as a foreign language correspondence clerk, Elisabeth has not worked since she has been married and basically has to start from scratch in terms of a career. Immediately after her divorce trial, she buys a red wig as a sort of symbolic act of her ‘new life’ as an ostensibly free woman and begins dating a fairly nice, handsome, and charming red-haired chap named Oskar (Martin Lüttge) who looks like an Aryan lumberjack and makes a reasonably decent living as a civil engineer, yet she suffers from nausea and random barf attacks due to various anxieties, namely relating to the custody of her young son. Elisabeth also suffers the wraith of her mother, who is mad that her daughter made the decision to get a divorce for seemingly no reason. Not exactly the most puritanical of mothers, Elisabeth has no problem talking about sex arguing with her ex-husband, who blames her for ruining his writing career (indeed, before marrying her, he aspired to be a great novelist, but now he is a mere editor), in front of her preschooler son. Due to her lack of experience and dubious work history, Elisabeth first attempts to be a tourist guide for Japanese businessmen but she is not cutout for it and does not like taking photos with strange Jap dudes, so she is forced to take a lowly job as an entry level sales associate at a fancy fur shop run by an annoying queen of a fellow (played by gay Bavarian character actor Walter Sedlmayr, who was violently murdered by two half-brothers in 1990) where she befriends a young homo who writes pornographic stories (a sample of his writing reads as follows: “Now the vagina raped through the gates of hell and primly spread its handle-ends”) and has a nasty fur fetish, hence his choice of employment. Meanwhile, Elisabeth takes singing and dancing lessons, as she dreams of starring in a Hollywood musical. In a bizarre black-and-white dream-sequence that is quite unbecoming for a Schlöndorff film that resembles the Swinging Sixties aesthetic meets an Italian Giallo flick (minus the murder, of course), Elisabeth sings the following childish lyrics while a literally colorful troupe of multicultural female shoppers dances around her: “Man is man. But woman is not woman. Woman is vamp. Or she is a house wife. Woman is bed bunny. Or she is a rascal. If she’s elegant, then she’s called lady. […] A woman is never a woman. Only man is man. I don’t want to be a vamp. And certainly no Cinderella. Neither a bed bunny nor a rascal. And a lady I don’t want to be either. I just want to be a woman such as a man can be a man. I just want to be woman.”

While she does not seem to have that great of a relationship with her son, Elisabeth stresses a lot over the fact that Niki lives with her ex-husband. When she discovers a loophole in the law that prevents a man from taking custody of a child that is not biologically his, Elisabeth attempts to talk her ex-boyfriend into lying by making a declaration upon oath that Niki is his son, thus demonstrating her complete and utter lack of morality, as if she is a psychopathic child who will go to any unsavory extreme to get whatever she wants. Meanwhile, Elisabeth and her overweight friend begin frequenting Alte Pinakothek art museum in Munich where they receive free lessons from a rather rotund Leninist feminist art historian (played by real-life Marxist art historian Konrad Farner, who once defended kraut commie playwright Bertolt Brecht due to his support of Stalin) about the historically misogynistic character of western art. For example, Farner uses a late Gothic masterpiece by Masolini of baby Jesus and Mother Mary to prove that “woman is basically a nothing” and that “she has to always remain in the house,” as well as a work by Flemish master Rogier van der Weyden of a woman breastfeeding to prove the ‘passivity in extension’ that women have supposedly suffered under European Christendom. Additionally, Farner shows the women an eponymous 1752 painting by François Boucher of Louis XV of France’s young mistress/baby-momma Marie-Louise O'Murphy and when Elisabeth remarks the subject of the painting, who is totally unclad with her derriere being the most prominent aspect of the painting, has a “dull-witted face,” the art historian replies, “Yes, one could say her face doesn’t really look intelligent, but her bottom was famous. They envied Ludwig XV for this bottom. And all of Paris admired it in the parlor,” thus highlighting the singular semi-cryptic power that women, even of the proletarian pussy-peddling sort, have always wielded over men. Somewhat hilariously, Farner trashes a print created by degenerate French feminist modern artist Niki de Saint Phalle (who once co-directed the film Daddy (1973) with Peter Whitehead where she demonstrated her hateful, if not insanely incestuous, feelings for her father) by describing it as a parody of female emancipation. With the help of her ex-husband, Elisabeth manages to get a new job that she actually somewhat enjoys working as a translator at an art gallery. When she goes on a trip with an overweight art dealer named Schmollinger (Austrian-born actor/director Georg Marischka) who, being brainwashed by the whacked writings of Jewish psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, believes he has the god-given right screw any and every woman he wants to despite being married, Elisabeth faces unwanted sexual advances from the foul fat fellow. On top of her career looking brighter, Elisabeth is also treated to a romantic vacation to Italy from her boyfriend Oskar, whose undying love for her is unquestionable. Ultimately, Elisabeth’s ex-husband uses the fact that she is constantly away on trips for work (not to mention the fact she confessed to the law that she was living and sleeping with another man when she was pregnant) as a means to take custody of Niki. To further add salt to Elisabeth’s internal wounds, Hans-Helmut is also getting remarried to a kindergarten teacher who the social workers in charge of their case see as an ideal stepmother. In the end, Elisabeth gets married to Oskar, though whether or not the marriage is successful is dubious at best. After all, Schlöndorff and von Trotta's marriage did not last.

Ironically, while auteur Volker Schlöndorff was such an empathetic (aka cuckolded) husband that he directed an entire film dedicated to his wife’s pain and struggles during divorce, Margarethe von Trotta would also divorce him a little less than two decades after A Free Woman was released. Keeping that in mind, one can only assume that it is probably a film the filmmaker regrets directing, though, I for one, would not mind seeing a sequel, as it would give Schlöndorff the opportunity to direct an artistically authentic work that does not seem like another mere phony literary adaptation like most of his films, especially the more recent ones. The virtual kraut Brechtian feminist equivalent to Kramer vs. Kramer (1979), albeit vaguely more tolerable since von Trotta was more aesthetically pleasing than Meryl Streep was at the time, A Free Woman is also, quite strangely, Schlöndorff’s closest attempt at directing a Bergman-esque work, which largely has to do with the fact that the film was shot by Swedish master cinematographer Sven Nykvist. It should also be noted that not all the feminists were satisfied with the film, with Hebraic journalist/film critic Marjorie Rosen (author of Popcorn Venus: Women, Movies, & the American Dream) complaining regarding protagonist Elisabeth's decision to get married again at the end of the film: “by marrying again she makes a peculiar trade—surrendering her independence, her most precious freedom, out of disproportionate concern for friends’ momentary discomfort. This suggests that her passivity is simply due to ambivalence, or that at bottom she never wanted the burden of freedom in the first place,” as if marriage does not afford many women a rare form of freedom totally unknown to most men where they do not have to waste their greatest years slaving away at a soul-sucking job, among countless other benefits. As for von Trotta’s consistent failure with marriage, it probably has to do with the fact that her painter father Alfred Roloff never married her mother (whose aristocratic surname she adopted), thus giving her an ‘uncoventional’ perspective on male-female companionship and marriage. Indeed, as Hans Bernhard Moeller and George L. Lellis wrote in their book Volker Schlondorff's Cinema: Adaptation, Politics, and the "Movie-Appropriate" (2002) regarding the lessons commie feminist art historian Konrad Farner gives Elisabeth in A Free Woman: “The art historian suggests, perhaps, von Trotta’s own father, who was a painter. Indeed, at one point Elisabeth affectionately tells him that she would love to have had a father like him (a statement that takes on added resonance if one is aware that von Trotta’s father never married her mother).” In my mind, von Trotta’s adoption of feminism as a lifelong Weltanschauung and her propensity for getting involved with failed marriages with weak men seems to mostly have to do with the fact that she had a negligent father and not because of some sort of all-powerful institutional patriarchy.  In other words, it is not powerful men that made the filmmaker resent men, but feeble fellows who failed to live up to their responsibilities as both husbands and fathers. Indeed, aside from some lady lemmings who go to college and get brainwashed by some dyke professor with a bone to pick with men, how many women who are satisfied with their boyfriends/husbands actually end up becoming frigid feminists?! Indeed, as Otto Weininger theorized well over a century ago, feminism and so-called female emancipation has more to do with societal decadence, male emasculation, and the feminization of the workforce (i.e. office work) than any sort of phantom patriarchy.  After all, the naughty Nazi government, which put a premium on having a collective father figure known as the Führer rule over the Fatherland, did not prevent Leni Riefenstahl from becoming the greatest female filmmaker who has ever lived, as a woman whose literal artistic adventures make the von Trottas and Valie Exports of the world seem like bitter bourgeois housewives by comparison.

-Ty E

Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome

In many ways, Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954) is the most arcane, thematically and aesthetically intricate, and innately impenetrable work that American cine-magician Kenneth Anger (Scorpio Rising, Lucifer Rising) has ever directed. Not surprisingly, it also happens to be longest film Anger ever made (unless, of course, you count Don't Smoke That Cigarette! (2000), which would be a mistake since there was not much actual directing involved with that 'recycled' film). Loaded with Thelemite, Crowleyite, and kabalistic themes/symbols/iconography and starring real-life occultists and witches, Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome is also the pathologically private auteur filmmaker’s most spiritual cinematic experiment, yet it is also a piece of pure cinema that pays seamless tribute to everything from Italian silent epics to German expressionism to classic Hollywood musicals, with Anger’s biographer Bill Landis even describing the work as the director’s, “version of a glittering MGM musical.” A proto-psychedelic work (it has been described as a one of the first ‘head movies’ and reached the height of its popularity a decade later in the 1960s) that has been released in a number of different cuts (including a 1966 version entitled the ‘Sacred Mushroom Edition’ featuring a complete performance of Glagolitic Mass by Czech composer Leoš Janáček, as well as a third version made in the late-1970s featuring most of the 1974 Electric Light Orchestra album Eldorado), Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome is a keenly kaleidoscopic celluloid ritual of the decidedly decadent and fetishistically transcendental bacchanalian sort that reminds one why Anger once stated, “I've always considered movies evil; the day that cinema was invented was a black day for mankind.” Based on a masquerade party-like group ritual created by Anger’s unholy hero Aleister Crowley’s where members of a cult take on the identity of a god or goddess for All Sabbath’s Eve, Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome stars a number of real-life virtual artistic gods and icons, including Anger himself, erotic novelist Anaïs Nin, avant-garde/cult auteur Curtis Harrington (Night Tide, The Killing Kind), artist/occultist Marjorie Cameron (the crazed widow of the equally crazed rocket scientist/Thelemite Jack Parson, who blew himself up), and reclusive Hollywood actor Samson de Brier (real name Arthur Jasmine), who, among other things, starred in Alla Nazimova’s Beardsley-esque Wilde adapation Salomé (1923) and whose house the film is set in. Equipped with aesthetic nods to the Yellow Nineties and Hieronymus Bosch and featuring Nin wearing a birdcage over her little round head (apparently, it was not the first time, as the film was largely inspired by a "Come as your Madness" Halloween party that both she and Anger attended), a very young Harrington portraying somnambulist Cesare from Robert Wiene’s German expressionist masterpiece The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) with a certain foreboding Teutonic swag, and Scarlet Woman Cameron smoking ganja in tribute to The Great Beast 666, Anger’s phantasmagorical celluloid ritual is nothing short of an immaculate piece of exceedingly elegant high-camp evil of the cinematically aristocratic sort that proves the director was able to synthesize the best elements of European master cine-magicians like F.W. Murnau and Jean Cocteau. 

 Opening with Aubrey Beardsley style inter-titles (painted by handsome blonde beast Paul Mathison, who also played Pan), Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome then cuts to exceedingly effete master magician/Master of Ceremonies (Samson De Brier)—a man who will take on the persona of Lord Shiva, Hindu deity and the Supreme God within the Hindu sect Shaivism, among countless other identities—playing with jewelry, putting on a series of fancy rings, swallowing some jewels, slowly arising from his bed, picking up a pair of scissors, and heading to a bright red room where he stares at a dual mirror (with one of the mirrors featuring the reflection of a pentacle) intently, and paints his face like a decadent dandy with a tinge of pancake makeup. Meanwhile, the redhaired Scarlet Woman (Marjorie Cameron), Whore of Heaven, offers a small figurine of a horned devil to a creepily colorful character named the Great Beast (also De Brier), who uses his tentacle-like fingernails to communicate, but the small statue instantly bursts into flame as soon as the ominous entity touches it. Immediately after, the Scarlet Woman lifts up a fat joint and the kaleidoscopic devil lights it, with a blue image of Aleister Crowley smoking a pipe in Arab garb being juxtaposed in the background. In the next scene, a rather beateous Lilith (played by Renate Druks, who would later direct the obscure short film Space Boy (1973) starring Florence Marly)—the kabalistic goddess of destruction—arrives from an endless void of nothingness and attempts to offer Emperor Nero (also De Brier) a golden apple, but he seems rather disinterested in the gift. From there, a fag hag-like Isis (Katy Kadell), who looks more like Cleopatra on crack, attempts to catch the interest of her corpse/reptile-like brother-husband Osiris (once again, De Brier), but he is disinterested, though he is flattered by the Great Beast’s attention. While Nero was less than intrigued by Lilith’s offering, Count Alessandro Cagliostro (De Brier again)—the great hypnotist and enemy of the Catholic Church who Crowley celebrated in a Gnostic Mass—gladly accepts and swallows the ruby jewel she has to offer him, which she takes out of a pretty pentagram-shaped box. Meanwhile, De Brier as Lord Shiva is offered grapes by an almost albino-like Pan (Paul Mathison). As Pan begins to walk slowly in a pair of blood red leather boots, Isis dances for the entertainment of Osiris, Lord Shiva and Lilith toast each other, and Cagliostro is presented with a large pendant, the ritual begins to get underway. 

 Undoubtedly, Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome begins to pick up speed when Astarte (Anaïs Nin)—the goddess of the moon—appears with a bluish moon-shaped object superimposed over her head (which is covered with a birdcage) like a halo and Pan seems to be becoming rather sexually aroused by her angelic pulchritude. After Astarte disrobes (Nin is virtually naked), she catches a silver sphere from the sky and hands it to all-powerful pothead god Shiva. In Shiva’s hands, the sphere shrinks and when it finally gets small enough, he eats it, thus causing him to grow fairy-like wings and become a very happy boy. After the Scarlet Woman gestures to the Great Beast for another light for her magic joint, Germanic somnambulist Cesare (Curtis Harrington) magically appears. The Somnambulist is under the sinister command of the Great Beast, who forces the sleepwalker to enter a labyrinth with a image of a witch with a pentagram on her forehead and a classic Baphomet pentagram. Ultimately, the Somnambulist enters a white room where he is handed an urn containing the hallucinogenic wormwood brew 'yage' by Hecate (Kenneth Anger), who looks like an Arab drag queen headed to a gothic funeral. A silent servant of the Great Beast, the Somnambulist serves the yage to all the gods and goddesses. The exotic elixir causes Shiva's s face to turn green and he begins to suffer paranoia, among other things. Everyone else seems more or less happy and ecstatic, with Pan even accidentally spilling the bittersweet brew on himself in a playful manner. While Pan is admiring Lilith’s stunning beauty, scheming trickster Lord Shiva drops a dubious substance in blond beast's drink, thus causing him to suffer a series of nightmarish hallucinations, including confusing visions of a number of the party members taking off various masks (i.e. Lilith takes off two identical masks before revealing a skull-like face with a huge mouth inspired by Crowley’s sketch “High Priestess of Voodoo”). Pan’s hellish hallucination is a triple-layered superimposition where Anger incorporated scenes from his 6-minute short Puce Moment (1949), which was shot by Curtis Harrington. From there, an all-out orgy ensues, with Pan—the only masculine man at the entire masquerade—acting as the ‘prize,’ especially for the lecherous goddesses, who claw him like rabid pussycats.  Indeed, the gals strip, scratch, and torment Pan while supreme queen Hecate gets off to the entire scenario by performing what seems like a spastic belly dance. Eventually, the Goddess Kali (Marjorie Cameron) appears as blood-red-tinted-scenes from Giuseppe de Liguoro silent masterpiece L'Inferno (1911) are superimposed in the background. Kali manages to strike fear into the Great Beast, but the pernicious party keeps going, with the Somnambulist even sneaking in a smile. As Anger stated at the end of an audio commentary for Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome, “So the ultimate feeling is one of spirituality.” 

 In describing the ‘pleasure dome’ of Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome in an audio commentary for the film, Anger stated as follows, “The pleasure dome that is being inaugurated is actually a prison…it’s something you can’t escape from once you’re in it, and I wanted to create that feeling of claustrophobia, like you can’t escape these people or this place.” Indeed, Anger’s film is certainly one where the viewer is trapped in an almost demonic dance of metaphysical decadence, thus making it the next best thing to going to some sort of real-life Crowley Mass (which would probably make for a less pleasurable experience, not to mention the fact that it would probably be comprised of far less attractive people). I have to admit my interest in Crowley/Thelema is about next to nil, yet Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome makes such spiritual degeneracy seem nothing short of ethereal and delightfully divine. For Curtis Harrington, starring in the film was apparently nothing short of an (un)holy experience, or as he wrote in his autobiography Nice Guys Don't Work in Hollywood: The Adventures of an Aesthete in the Movie Business (2013): “For me, it was a dream come true to play Cesare the somnambulist from THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI. Cameron, a painter and occultist, played the sorceress and was extraordinary in a mantilla and Spanish shawl. Anaïs was her counterpoint in a blue cocoon and golden mesh. Samson, who played the host to these personages, appeared in many guises, all of them magical. It was a vibrant gallery of portraits, each transformed by the film itself.” America’s once-foremost cineaste Amos Vogel was so impressed with the “wicked film” that he paid a great compliment to Anger, describing the auteur as, “one of the true subversive iconoclasts of the cinema.” Indeed, while I hesitate to describe Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome as my favorite Anger film, it is most certainly the filmmaker’s most accomplished work as both a filmmaker and as an occultist, as an innately penetrating piece that celebrates the evil essence of cinema as an artistic medium of ritual and manipulation. With that being said, it almost seems unimaginable that Anger never really faced a strong backlash from religious types, especially when one considers when the film was made. A devout tribute to the so-called “wickedest man in the world,” Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome ultimately reminds undying agnostics like myself that magic takes its most potent and influential form in celluloid. 

-Ty E

Skoonheid

With my recent viewing and reviewing of Aryan Kaganof’s wonderfully wayward rape musical Nice to Meet You, Please Don't Rape Me! (1996), I felt it was about time that I checkout another, albeit somewhat less controversial, South African film about sexual pillaging, Beauty (2011) aka Skoonheid aka Purity directed by relatively young Capetonian auteur Oliver Hermanus (Shirley Adams). As I learned after talking to a white South African cinephile, apparently there is no way in hell that a film like Skoonheid would have been allowed to see the light of day during the apartheid.  Indeed, aside from featuring a brutally disgusting and stomach-churning scene towards the end of the film that puts the strangely iconic ‘squeal like a pig’ scene from John Boorman’s Appalachian classic Deliverance (1972) to shame in terms of its random rectum-reaming gruesomeness, the film also features a less than thinly disguised attack on the values of the white Afrikaner communist, especially the old school bourgeois that came of age during the apartheid era and now must face the natural repercussions of being white during a new era black rule. A somewhat nasty reworking of Thomas Mann’s novella Death in Venice (1912) set mostly in Cape Town that was directed in a glaringly Haneke-esque style (indeed, Hermanus has cited The Piano Teacher (2001) as being one of his favorite films), Skoonheid centers around a successful married Afrikaans businessman who leads a second secret life as an alpha-homo (he is a 'top') and becomes obsessed with (and ultimately begins stalking) his old best friend’s handsome collegiate son. In the film's depiction of an older and rather introverted sexually repressed man brought up under a strict authoritarian system that does not look too kindly on homos who develops a dangerously fanatical and ultimately violent infatuation with a young heterosexual man, Hermanus' film also owes a heavy thematic debt to John Huston's Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967) starring Marlon Brando and Elizabeth Taylor, as well as The Sergeant (1968) starring Rod Steiger. As director Hermanus—a man of mixed racial origin (aka ‘mystery meat’)—revealed in an interview with the major Marxist website World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) as to why he decided to set the film in Bloemfontein: “I chose it because I assumed it was the sort of South African city where I’d never want to spend my life. It’s a bastion of Afrikaanerdom and very segregated. It was the capital of the Orange Free State in the first republic of South Africa and was where the British first established concentration camps to lock up Afrikaners during the Boer War.” Indeed, it terms of its glaring ‘new left’/Reichian style critique of the white Afrikaner community, Skoonheid utilizes similar libelous clichés that one would expect from a heavy-handed filmmaker like Spielberg (i.e. the complete fabrication in Schindler's List that Yid-killer Amon Goeth was secretly in love with a Jewess). Still, Hermanus manages to bring a degree of nuance to the central character in that, although he is a conservative cracker who loathes coloreds and eventually rapes a young man as a result of being sexually repressed, he is still a sympathetic character to the audience, at least to some extent, yet Skoonheid ultimately blames white-ruled South Africa for the protagonist’s sexual savagery and it thus pathetically predictable in that regard, as if the director wanted to kiss the mainstream left's already bloated bunghole. Aesthetically, the film straddles a healthy median between arthouse and Hollywood and is thus a sort of South African equivalent to Tom Ford’s A Single Man (2009) as a dark and tragic fag flick that most people can relate to, yet due to its single scene of sadistic forced sodomy towards the end, Skoonheid also features a tiny tinge of exploitation that might appease the appetites of jade gorehound and ex-convicts. 

 Middle-aged business owner and family man Francois van Heerden (Deon Lotz) is at his eldest daughter’s wedding party, but he is not celebrating his little girl’s big day as his discernibly lonely eyes are magnetized to a young law student and advert actor named Christian Roodt (Charlie Keegan), who is the son of the protagonist’s old friend Willem (Albert Maritz). Francois has not seen Christian, who calls him ‘uncle Francois’ out of habit, in 7 years and he is determined not to wait another 7 years to seem again, yet he lives in a conservative suburban Bloemfontein and the young man lives in 'liberal' multicultural Cape Town. To make matters worse, Francois’ young statuesque blonde daughter Anika (Roeline Daneel) and Christian have just started a romance of sorts, thus evolving into a truly bizarre love triangle that only the protagonist is aware of. In fact, Francois resents his two daughters and bitchy wife Elena (Michelle Scott) because, as a closet homo, he hates women, especially the sort that incessantly nag at him. Indeed, Francois is part of a secret group of suburban Afrikaner sodomites that all randomly meet at one of the members’ house and engage in discrete micro-orgies of sorts. When one of the members of the sod collective attempts to bring an effeminate negro to the orgy, he is told “no crazies…no coloreds” and that he is “no longer welcomed” and thrown out of the house in a somewhat physically aggressive manner, thus demonstrating there is an unspoken apartheid of sorts among Afrikaner South African suburban sodomites. Naturally, Francois begins stalking Christian, who is always hanging out with Anika. Due to his undying infatuation with Christian’s charming twink beauty, Francois begins to suffer acute anxiety and irritably and even goes to a doctor to address what are ultimately psychosomatic symptoms.  Indeed, Francois is god's loneliness gay man, but he self-deludes himself into coming up with an absurd plan to make Christian his boi toy.

 Ultimately, Francois plans a fake business trip to Cape Town so he has an excuse to spend time with Christian. When Francois arrives at the Roodt home, he cannot keep his eyes off Christian and when the young man complains he wants an iPod, the business man goes out and buys one for him as a present. Upon hearing that Christian has headed to a place called Clifton Beach, Francois lies to his friend Willem so he can get the young man’s phone number, but when he arrives at the beach to surprise his crush with the iPod, he sees that the boy is with his daughter Anika. Enraged his much resented daughter is with the mensch he loves, Francois calls the cops on his progeny for ostensibly stealing his car (she drove his BMW to get to Cape Town), thus ruining her date at the beach just as she had unwittingly ruined his. After his failed attempt to surprise Christian at the beach, Francois goes to a gay bar, tells an effeminate negro to “buzz off” when he attempts to hit on him, and barfs after drinking to many beers and getting turned on by a young Adonis-like fag. That same night, Francois manages to meet up with Christian and confesses to him, “Sometimes I still feel like becoming a pilot and flying way and leaving everything...everyone,” thus demonstrating his disillusionment with life. Christian is well aware of his charm as a handsome and likeable young man and clearly realizes Francois ‘likes’ him, so he offers his 'uncle' a ride because he wants to ask him to fund a business he hopes to start. When Francois and Christian go to the former’s hotel room, the latter asks his secret admirer for money for his potential business prospect. Francois attempts to kiss Christian, but the young man suavely rebuffs his advances and continues to talk about the money he would like to borrow. When Francois finally comes to the realization that Christian only wants to use him for his money, his loses his cool, goes completely beserk, and begins to beat and bugger the young man in a fierce fit of rage that leaves the law student completely emotionally and anally ravaged. A number of times during savagely sodomizing Christian, who cries like a little girl and does very little to fight back, Francois loses his erection. When everything is said and done, Francois’ sadistic sexual conquest seems like somewhat of a disappointment. As for Christian, one never knows what becomes of him, but he certainly never calls the cops on Francois and stops seeing his rapist’s daughter Anika. In the end, Francois goes back to business as usual, though he continues to admire young handsome homos from afar at restaurants and whatnot. 

 Ultimately, Skoonheid is a film about the inability of people to change once they have been brought up a certain way. In that regard, it seems director Oliver Hermanus thinks there is little hope from white Afrikaans who grew up in apartheid era South African. Indeed, all the white suburbanites of the film agree that “The country is going to hell” and that, in regard to the actions of the black-run ANC government, “They are forcing us to be racist.” As auteur Hermanus revealed in an interview with WSWS regarding why he had the white characters make these remarks: “These are very common sentiments amongst conservative white South Africans. In their private lives Francois and the milieu he’s from often discuss amongst themselves whether or not the apartheid system was better, safer for them. They may appreciate some of the new political changes, but at the end of the day they would choose the old system because it guaranteed them economic strength and security.” As Hermanus would also reveal in an interview with the UK website Idol Magazine regarding how the Afrikaner community has responded to the film: “The very conservative community was definitely scared, outraged, shocked. The younger community was very excited, but the general consensus was that the story wasn’t far-fetched, everyone felt they had an uncle or a brother who behaves in a similar way – emotionally distant, and you can sense that there is an underlying feeling of repression.” Indeed, more than its odd pro-gay liberationist message (to Hermanus’ credit, he did not want people to view his film as a ‘queer’ work, though it would ultimately win the coveted ‘Queer Palm’ at the Cannes Film Festival), Skoonheid is a film about the bitter end of white South Africa and the traditional white bourgeois Afrikaans community in general. Indeed, with the death of Francois’ generation while come a culture ‘gone with the wind,’ so to speak, and black South Africa will certainly express a sigh of relief when that day comes. Of course, when the day comes when whitey is gone, it is quite dubious whether or not films like Skoonheid will still be allowed to be made, especially in a backward nation where ‘corrective rape’ (aka raping lesbos in an ostensible attempt to convert them to heterosexuality) is quite vogue.  Out all the potential rape scenarios that happen in real-life South Africa on a daily basis, Skoonheid manages to depict the most unlikely, thus more than clearly indicating where the brown filmmaker's sympathies lie.  Indeed, while Skoonheid seems subversive on the surface, its message is undoubtedly as mainstream as they come, thereupon making it a work that is as equally disappointing as it is engaging.  On the other hand, the film has incited some irrational hatred in LGBT-lobotomized homos comparable to William Friedkin's Cruising (1980) due to its less than flattering depiction of a crypto-cocksucker so, in that regard, Skoonheid certainly rises above the majority of sod celluloid swill of Hollywood and ultimately makes a great counterpoint to the shamelessly superficial sentimentality of Brokeback Mountain (2006).

-Ty E

I, a Man

In compensation for the fact that he had lost a screenplay that had been lent to him with the rather tasteful Warhol-esque title Up Your Ass, pansy pop-artist Andy Warhol cast the would-be-screenwriter in his latest film I, a Man (1967). The writer of the screenplay was a deranged bull-dyke named Valerie Solanas—a diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic and all-around feminist whack-job who urged women to overthrow the government and exterminate all men in her hyper hysterical self-published polemic, the SCUM Manifesto (the acronym meaning “Society For Cutting Up Men”)—and by early 1968 she would try but ultimately fail to assassinate the man who gave her only two acting roles (Solanas would also have a very small cameo in the Warhol production Bike Boy the same year). As for her excuse for wanting to kill the alpha-con-artist, Solanas made two seemingly contradictory statements on two different ocassions: “I just wanted him to pay attention to me. Talking to him was like talking to a chair” and “He had too much control of my life,” probably not realizing that, as Paul Morrissey has mentioned in various interviews, that Warhol was socially retarded, if not downright autistic. Ironically, Solanas botched assassination attempt would contribute to the end of Warhol’s directing career because, aside from the fact that Paul Morrissey was already ghost-directing most of his films by that time, the beloved soup can fetishist would be too afraid to get involved with active art and working hands-on with superstars after his near-death experience, so he focused on more entrepreneurial matters. Indeed, Morrissey began collaborating with Warhol on films in 1965 at the youthful age of 27 by taking creative control over My Hustler (1965) and would secure his place in cinema history a year later by (co)directing the cult classic Chelsea Girls (1966) where he introduced a psychedelic split-screen technique, even though his real directing career had yet to begin. Of course, as a work that, according to Morrissey himself, was apparently shot in one day (mainly at night), I, a Man is not exactly one of Morrissey’s most innovative and remarkable works, but it would act as a prototype of sorts for his iconic anti-counter-culture trilogy (Flesh, Trash, Heat) starring Joe Dallesandro and is thus mandatory viewing for fan’s of the vehemently rightwing auteur’s subversive oeuvre. Apparently, the film was originally supposed to star Jim ‘The Lizard King’ Morrison in the lead role but The Doors singer’s manager was against the idea, so his friend, Hollywood actor Tom Baker (who would later appear in the Italian-French film anthology Love and Anger (1969) aka Amore e rabbia and Dennis Hopper's The Last Movie (1971), among various other obscure art films) took over the job as the leading man and would ultimately have the honor of being verbally berated by meat-beating Sapphic psycho Solanas in a dark stairwell. Like Bike Boy, I, a Man, which is a parody of the prosaic piece of now-forgotten Danish-Swedish erotica I, a Woman (1965) starring Essy Persson, is a work of quasi-anti-sexploitation that follows a handsome but hopelessly dumb and superficial stud as he gets with a bunch of equally vapid chicks and they spend more time insulting one another than doing anything even remotely sexually appealing. An early cockeyed vision of Morrissey’s mockery of ‘toilet culture’, the film features, among other things, lesbo lunatics talking about beating their meat, burnout bohemian babes call their breasts fried eggs, young impotent men proudly proclaiming their love of TV and hatred of literature, and a spontaneous séance given in honor of the late great John Wilkes Booth. Indeed, I, a Man features a cast of pretty vacant characters who talk, talk, talk, yet have nothing to say, thus acting as a sort of movie microcosm for what the whole Warhol Factory was about. 

As can be expected from virtually all of the Morrissey/Warhol collaborations of the mid-to-late-1960s, I, a Man begins just abruptly as it concludes with male bimbo bro Tom Baker sleeping in bed with an annoying chick (Cynthia May) who tells him that he has to leave ASAP as her old fashioned parents are arriving soon, but before he actually leaves, the two mentally/erotically challenged love birds decide to play footsies under the bed. A mundane male whore, Tom begs for everything that he can get for free from the hysterical young lady, including cigarettes, coffee, and a shower. By the end of their little love fest, the girl tells Tom that he should, “Jump out of the window before my parents come.” When Tom, who is now naked and standing in the chick’s kitchen, asks her for some sugar for his coffee, she says “you don’t deserve it” in a rather nasty fashion and throws a cup of java in his face.  Needless to say, Tom leaves after that and goes looking for another dumb dame to exploit with his imaginary charms. On top of the roof a penthouse, Tom proves to the next girl (Stephanie Graves) that he tries in vain to swoon that he cannot even remember the most rudimentary characteristics of her appearance, stating when she puts him on the spot by remaking that he does not even know the color of her eyes, “Yes I do, they're…the same color they were when I met you.” When Tom asks the girl, who lives off the generosity of an older man, if she is a hooker, she simply states, “Well, not really […] I don’t go around and walk the streets,” thus revealing that she realizes that she is a whore of sorts, if not a rather successful one with a loyal sugar-daddy. On his next dull date, Tom hooks up with a feisty fire-crotch (Ingrid Superstar aka Ingrid von Schoffen), who shows him her fairly decent tits (which she calls “fried eggs”), to which he responds, “You should take better care of yourself,” as if he is the living embodiment of god's gift to women. After grabbing one of Ingrid’s breasts and further insulting her appearance, the two attempt to conjure up the spirit of John Wilkes Booth (of course, an infamous real-life assassin will appear later in the film, but no one knew that at the time it was made) during a séance to ask him why he killed Lincoln while the little lady lies on a table with a candle sitting between her legs, but naturally no apparition appears as they clearly have no clue what they are doing. 

The next chick Tom hooks up with is tragic German diva Nico (who only originally agreed to be in the film because she thought her then-crush Jim Morrison would star in it, so she demanded Tom Baker star in the film when the Lizard King opted out), who is undoubtedly the most mild mannered and elegant chick in the entire film (though, it should be noted that, unlike all the chicks who used speed, heroin was Nico’s drug of choice, hence her calm presence). Despite his innate superficiality and unwarranted arrogance, Tom seems to make a true romantic connection with Nico, who treats him with unwarranted warmth and affection, as if she is desperate for true love yet a bit shy at the same time. The next chick Tom visits is a sweet French babe (played by Ultra Violet aka Isabelle Collin Dufresne, who was Salvador Dalí's muse during the mid-1950s until the surrealist introduced her to Warhol in 1963 and she decided to move into the Factory not long after) who tells him to, “blow hot air on my feet.” Tom and Ultra Violet have a short but sweet sensual time that mostly involves them messing around like little children on the latter’s apartment floor. Unfortunately for him, the next young lecherous lady Tom hooks up with, Ivy Nicholson aka ‘Ms. Tigress’ (as she calls herself during the scene), is a bit crazed and proclaims to be strong because she has “Mongol blood” and then proceeds to babble about how Alice in Wonderland is a “funny” and “romantic” novel. Of course, Tom seems no more intelligent, confessing, “I don’t like to read much…I watch a lot of television…which is more exciting.” It should be noted that Ivy was apparently no less emotionally troubled in real-life because, as Tom would later reveal in an interview regarding working with her, “The first time I sensed impending danger was during a scene with Ivy Nicholson. She had stipulated that she would not appear on camera with me in the nude. Shortly after the scene began I walked out of the frame and removed the towel I was wearing in order to put on my pants. Clad only in unlaundered bikini underwear, Ivy exploded in an emotional fury and stormed out of the room in tears, claiming she had been betrayed. I was talking with Warhol, who was very much perplexed by Ivy's behaviour since, as he casually pointed out, 'Ivy'll cut her wrists for me…’.” 

 In the next and arguably most important scene of I, a Man, Tom briefly hooks up with demented dyke Valerie Solanas, yet rather ironically, the actor admitted he had a somewhat nice experience working with the fiercely frigid feminist on the film, stating in an interview, “My third scene was with Valerie Solanas. I felt no personal threat from Valerie. Just the opposite. I found her intelligent, funny, almost charming, and very, very frightened.” Of course, anyone who has actually seen the scene will notice that Solanas seems like anything but frightened as she tries with all her man-woman might to emasculate poor Tom boy. Tom and Solanas have their fleeting encounter in a shadowy stairway (which was apparently shot at the Warhol Factory) and the lethal lesbo proceeds to call the man-whore a “fink” and adds, “You know, you’ve got the most squishiest male ass I’ve ever seen.” Indeed, with her vulgar objectifying remarks and aggressive behavior, Solanas seems like a living parody of the sort of misogynist men she proclaimed to want to exterminate in her manifesto. After Solanas reveals, “It all started in the elevator when I grabbed your [Tom’s] ass,” she confesses “You got me at a weak moment…I’m a pushover for a squishy ass,” but she ultimately proves to be all talk as she abandons Tom because, as she states herself, “I gotta go beat my meat.” While Warhol/Morrissey should have probably ended I, a Man with the Solanas scene, Tom goes to see one more chick, Bettina Coffin, in a brazenly banal scenario that unfortunately takes up the entire final 1/3 of the film. For those viewers looking for fag porn, Tom’s uneventful erotic encounter with Bettina is the only scene where he exposes his cock and balls. Of course, instead of getting an erection and boning babe Bettina, he bitches at the chick for killing cockroaches and her unborn baby (she says she had an abortion because she did not want to marry the father of the child). Shockingly, Tom’s seemingly unending dialogue with Bettina is the only point in the entire film where he makes any sense and gives evidence that his moral compass is not as busted as one initially suspected. In the end, Bettina attempts to call her brother, who she was supposed to meet for dinner but Tom screwed that up, and the film cuts off abruptly. 

 A mind-numbingly mundane window into counter-culture-victimized human crud who unwaveringly support ‘free love’ yet cannot even consummate coitus in a work starring a future rock 'n' roll casualty who would drop dead just like his good bud Jim Morrison via a heroin overdose 15 years after proudly revealing to the entire world that he was an arrogant moron by becoming a one-time Warhol superstar, I, a Man is nothing short of static semi-eccentric celluloid excrement that demonstrates why Paul Morrissey would become one of the most important American cultural critics of his generation. As for murderously gynocentric ‘lone wolf lesbo’ Valerie Solanas, she was apparently embarrassed by her role in the film and would send Warhol a postcard dated August 25, 1967 making the following complaint: “Dear Andy, I’ve been noticing gross misspellings of my name in articles & reviews connected with ‘I, A Man.’ Please note correct spelling.” Of course, after she cowardly shot Warhol (as well as art critic Mario Amaya) on June 3, 1968 in a stereotypically passive-aggressive female manner while the pop-artist was turned around and talking on the phone, Solanas would not have to worry about people misspelling her name, as she was inevitably immortalized with the sympathetic biopic I Shot Andy Warhol (1996) directed by Canadian feminist Mary Harron (who later demonstrated her hatred of white Nordic men with American Psycho (2000)) and starring the equally sub-homely Lili Taylor in the lead role. In fact, Solanas’ performance in I, a Man was reenacted in Harron's horrendous film, with Bill Sage portraying Tom Baker. After serving a mere three-year prison sentence (had she been a man, she would have most certainly had a longer and more agonizing prison stay), Solanas was released in 1971 and would continue to stalk Warhol via telephone, thus she was arrested again in November 1971 and spent the rest of her pathetic life drifting between mental institutions and homelessness. In a classicallly female fashion, Solanas would later express no remorse for her crimes, stating regarding her botched assassination attempt against Warhol, “I consider that a moral act. And I consider it immoral that I missed. I should have done target practice.” As for Warhol, he would fittingly relate the attempt against his life to cinema, stating, “Before I was shot, I always thought that I was more half-there than all-there—I always suspected that I was watching TV instead of living life. People sometimes say that the way things happen in movies is unreal, but actually it's the way things happen in life that's unreal. The movies make emotions look so strong and real, whereas when things really do happen to you, it's like watching television—you don't feel anything. Right when I was being shot and ever since, I knew that I was watching television. The channels switch, but it's all television.”  Of course, I, a Man, as well as most of the pre-Flesh (1968) films, make real genuine emotions seem like a thing of the past, with the actors being strung-out on speed and always sedentary, and the direction being so innately inept, that the viewer almost suspects they're trapped in some sort of bohemian purgatory of perennial banality. Indeed, if Warhol and Solanas are now in hell together as some might conclude, I would not be surprised if their punishment was to watch unending screenings of I, a Man while listening to the pansy pontificating of poof poet/woman-beater/sod superstar Ondine.

-Ty E

The Harder They Come

I have never been a big fan of the Blaxploitation films and I can honestly say that the only film from the played-out subgenre that I appreciate in any way is Melvin Van Peebles’ Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song (1971), which ultimately unwittingly gave birth to a neo-minstrel movie trend that has provided cultural cuckold Quentin Tarantino with a pseudo-religion of sorts. Of course, what makes Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song different from the rest of these films, aside from the fact that it was actually directed by a black man, is that it is a serious film made for serious reasons and was not meant as mere monetary-motivated exploitation of proletarian negro kultur, but as an action-packed agitprop work with a blatant black power message, hence why the film was promoted by the Black Panther Party, who made it mandatory viewing among its members. Like Van Peebles’ film, The Harder They Come (1972), which was the very first feature film produced in Jamaica, also takes a no bullshit approach in depicting a rebellious black antihero who is determined to rise above his sub-meager circumstances, even if it kills him. Directed by a white Jamaican of French Huguenot and English descent named Perry Henzell who attended boarding school in the United Kingdom during his teens and later attended McGill University in Montreal in 1953 and 1954 before dropping out and wandering around Europa, The Harder They Come is a rare piece of Europid-directed black cinema that is neither patronizing nor phony in its essence, but instead gives an authentic voice to the voiceless with a vengeance that is hard to ignore. Indeed, the film was such a groundbreaking moment in Jamaican cultural history that apparently when the film first premiered in Jamaica, some 40,000 people showed up at the theater, which only had a capacity for 1,500 audience members. Described by some as the ‘the first English language movie in history to require subtitles in the United States’ due to the fact that the actors speak a sub-literate form of Creole dialect, The Harder They Come was barely noticed when it was released in February 1973 in New York City by Roger Corman's New World Pictures, but instantly developed a cult following when it was screened as a midnight movie a couple months later, ultimately playing for 6 years straight. Arguably most notable due to its soundtrack by the film’s star Jimmy Cliff, the film also brought reggae out of the third world and introduced it to Americans. Shot in a somewhat cinéma vérité-like style with oftentimes shaky handheld camera shots on 16mm film stock and loosely based on the life of real-life Jamaican negro outlaw/folk hero/”original rude boy” Vincent "Ivanhoe" Martin aka ‘Rhyging’—a figure who gained fame in 1948 after escaping from prison, committing a series of robberies, and killing a couple of crackers before being gunned down by the cops—The Harder They Come is like the Bonnie and Clyde of the Caribbean, albeit much more gritty and organic in persuasion, as if the viewer becomes a passive accessory to the crimes. Indeed, The Harder They Come is, if nothing else, an action-packed celluloid salute to the politically and socially impotent, perennially poor and disenfranchised, and hopelessly and stupidly romantic. A film that more or less features virtually every single negative stereotype associated with the black community, including unrealistic get-rich-quick schemes, charlatan preachers who wield power over the masses of the ignorant and poor for their own economic gain, young men who'd rather deal dope than do an honest day’s work, and backstabbing women that cannot help but put their men in deadly situations, The Harder They Come is true social realism and not the phony plastic sort that bolshevik filmmakers tried in vain to peddle. 

 After his miserly grandmother dies and leaves him nothing aside from a couple of bucks (she sold her house before her death and wasted virtually all of the money on a big funeral), young soul brother Ivanhoe "Ivan" Martin (Jimmy Cliff) moves from an isolated rural area of Jamaica to urban Kingston in the hope that he will fulfill his dream of making a hit reggae album and becoming rich and famous overnight. Luckily for him, Ivan is far too ignorant to realize how little of a chance he has of actually making it big, thus he does not hesitate in trying everything to become a big star. When Ivan arrives in the superlatively shitty city, he discovers a plague of poverty, unemployment, crime, and political corruption. Although Ivan’s mother (Lucia White) denies him a place to stay and takes the last bit of money he has, she gives him the name of a person that will ostensibly “try to help him”; a powerful charlatan known as the ‘Preacher’ (played by professional dentist Basil Keane, who was apparently the first black man that was an officer in the U.S. Navy, as well as a good friend of Martin Luther King, Jr.). That same night, Ivan meets a dubious dude named Jose (played by Carl Bradshaw, who has been described as, “Jamaica's most renowned actor”) and the two go to a Rialto theater to watch the classic Spaghetti Western (according to director Henzell, wop westerns were the “staple of slum cinema” in Jamaica at the time) flick Django (1966) starring Franco Nero. In an important foreshadowing scene, an audience member in the theater remarks, “The hero can’t die until the last reel.” Indeed, The Harder They Come is certainly the closest thing to a black Jamaican western, with Cliff acting as Nero's character in Django. The next day, Ivan hears about a music producer on the radio named Hilton (played by Bob Charlton who, according to Henzell, is “one of the greatest insurance salesmen in the world”) and becomes determined to chase him down to promote his music. Ultimately, Ivan takes residence in a broken down car on the Preacher’s property and fixes up an old bike owned by the religious leader. Meanwhile, Ivan attempts to find work but fails everywhere he goes, which ultimately forces him to resort to begging. When Ivan asks a rich black bourgeois housewife (played by Beverly Anderson, who would later become the first lady of Jamaica as the wife of Prime Minister Michael Manley) for money, he is met with the nasty response, “What’s the matter with you young, healthy boys? All you know to do is beg, beg, beg. That’s all you can do, just beg?,” thus demonstrating the class division in a nation with the rather ironic motto: “Out of Many, One People.” Ultimately, Ivan starts a rather tame romance with a chick named Elsa (Janet Bartley), who is unfortunately one of the Preacher’s many slavish young concubines. Naturally, the Preacher is repulsed by Ivan’s love of pornography and reggae, so when he discovers that the young heretic is messing around with Elsa, he becomes enraged and kicks him out. When one of the Preacher’s goons, Longa (played by real-life convicted rapist Elijah Chambers), attempts to takeaway Ivan’s bike, the two get in a bloody knife fight and the struggling reggae artist is ultimately punished with “eight strokes of the tamarind switch” for his act of attempted murder in what is a rather homoerotic scene. Indeed, Ivan is bent over, has his pants pulled, and is whipped on the ass, which literally causes the antihero to piss himself.  Although totally dehumanized by the experience of being bent over in public, Ivan luckily does not have to serve any jail time.

 After his small brush with the law, Ivan finally gets the opportunity to record his song “The Harder They Come,” but producer Hilton—an arrogant mulatto who has a complete monopoly over the entire Jamaican music industry—only offers him an insulting $20 for the song, so he decides to take his business elsewhere. While Ivan attempts to sell his song to other music producers, no one will buy it as they all take orders from Hilton. Of course, Ivan eventually gives in and sells the record to Hilton for $20, but the music producer tells an East Asian DJ to not play the song too much because, although he thinks that it is a great piece of music, he remarks regarding its composer, “he’s a troublemaker. I don’t want anything to do with him. I don’t want to build him up.” Still determined to make it big, Ivan tells his girlfriend Elsa that he refuses to live a straight life as a virtual slave, complaining to her, “You want me to go and beg for work for $10 a week for the rest of my life? I tried that. I’d rather die. And I don’t have to because I’m gonna make it,” so he begins dealing dope after his friend Jose offers him a position trafficking ganja from the country to the city on a motorbike. When Ivan gets in an argument with Jose over the meager pay, the dealer conspires to get his underling busted and locked up so as to ‘teach him a lesson’ by informing on the reggae artist to the cops. When a white motorcycle cop goes to bust Ivan, he freaks out and kills the cop. Later that night, Ivan is setup by a random whore he is sleeping with and finds himself surrounded by a brigade of cops, but he manages to get away after wasting three black pigs. Naturally, Ivan decides to get his revenge against his treacherous friends, so he kills the whore and subsequently tries to kill Jose, but he gets away. Now the #1 fugitive in Jamaica, Ivan finds that he is wanted by both the cops and the ganja dealers, with a high yellow detective named Ray Jones (Winston Stona) more or less controlling both sides. Meanwhile, Hilton decides to re-release the song “The Harder They Come” due to Ivan’s growing fame as a folk hero among Jamaicans and the song naturally becomes a big hit, though the cops soon have it banned. With his newfound star fugitive status, Ivan becomes rather arrogant and shamelessly narcissistic, even forcing his fat friend Fitz (Bobby Loban) to take special photographs of himself posing with guns which he has sent to various media sources. Ivan also takes advantage of his fugitive status by stealing a convertible and driving around aimlessly in a field, as if he has finally achieved the ‘Jamaican dream.’ Of course, Ivan knows his days are numbered and wants to have his fun before getting gunned down like an animal.  On the advice of a drug dealer friend named Pedro (Ras Daniel Hartman)—a Rastafarian who is the only person that does not betray his friend in the end—Ivan decides to flee to Cuba, but he ultimately finds himself cornered on a beach by a bunch of cops when he attempts to escape. Imagining himself to be Franco Nero in Django, Ivan decides to confront the cops even though he is out of bullets and is shot down, ultimately dying in a literal blaze of glory. 

 In the documentary Midnight Movies: From the Margin to the Mainstream (2005), director Perry Henzell states regarding his first feature: “The whole theme of THE HARDER THEY COME is: ‘can the little man get through?’ The promise of a city for somebody like that is an illusion…and their illusion is so strong that they'd rather die than give up the dream.” Indeed, talk to any American black male teenager and over 99 out of 100 of them will probably tell you that they are going to be either a professional football player, basketball player, famous rapper, and/or pimp/gangster when they grow up, with the majority of which opting for the latter dream as it is the most practical. Hell, even millionaire football players in the NFL cannot help but assault cops, rape women, carry illegal weapons in public, and murder and/or put hits on people as demonstrated by the fact that various NFL players have been arrested/cited on 685 different occasions since 2000 (of course, the real figures are probably much higher, as the NFL has probably done their best to hide arrests, not to mention all the undetected crimes these guys have undoubtedly gotten away with). Despite being a revolutionary work with agitprop elements, auteur Henzell, who is a Nordic blond that grew up on a 22,000-acre plantation, is apparently no leftist, as J. Hoberman and Jonathan Rosenbaum revealed in their authoritative work Midnight Movies (1983), “…Henzell denies any Marxist intentions and, according to journalist Claudia Dreifus, has views on economics that are only ‘slightly to the left of Ayn Rand’.” Furthermore, in the audio commentary Henzell gave for the Criterion Collection dvd release of The Harder They Come, the director mocks wealthy Americans for their stupid rules of conduct and dress, proclaiming that his family used their wealth as a root to freedom and not as a source of social imprisonment. That being said, I think that Henzell was able to relate to the poor blacks of Jamaica due to their uncompromising thirst for freedom as men that rather die young as ganja-peddling outlaws than die old as neo-slaves who work at dead-end jobs their entire lives and have nothing to show for it in the end. Indeed, as far as I can think of, The Harder They Come is the only film I have ever seen directed by a white man about a black subculture that does not seem like an impotent piece of P.C. propaganda, cultural cuckoldry, ball-less bleeding heart swill, and/or a total mockery of true negro kultur. Although Henzell started working on a second film, No Place Like Home, after the success he received from The Harder They Come, some movers lost the footage he shot and he scrapped the project for a couple decades, though he would eventually find the missing footage and finish the film in 2006 to some critical acclaim. Apparently, Henzell’s daughter Justine, screenwriter Chris Salewicz, Xingu Films and Conquering Lion Pictures were set to start shooting a remake of The Harder They Come in 2013, though it is dubious at best whether or not such a work could capture the gritty essence of the original film, which is a work that puts most of the oeuvre of Senegalese auteur Ousmane Sembène—the ‘father of African film’—to shame. 

-Ty E