Date: Sun, 12 Oct 1997 20:21:52 -0700 From: gordon brent INGRAM environmental planning Subject: Queer-related films - 1997 Vancouver Intern'l Film Fest gordon brent INGRAM 1230 Hamilton Street #204 Vancouver Canada V6B 2S8 telephone: 1(604)669-0422 internet: gb_ingram@bc.sympatico.ca October 10, 1997 Notes from the queer-related films in Vancouver International Film Festival September and October 1997 Dear Colleagues, Due to the support of a number of Canadian cultural journals, I was able to review most of the queer-related films at the Vancouver International Film Festival. The following notes are for your use and for those of people to whom you would like to pass on the material. Distribution information on these films can be obtained by contacting the VIFF at Suite 410, 1008 Homer Street, Vancouver Canada V6B 2X1 tel. (604)685-0260 / fax. 688-8221 email: viff@viff.org I saw only a fraction of the films there but was able to take notes about the following Licensed to Kill USA 1996 Director: Arthur Dong 80 minutes This was one of the most disturbing documentaries in a long time and already has won the major prize in its documentary category at the 1997 Sundance Film Festival. The Director was bashed nearly twenty years before on the edge of the Castro District in San Francisco and suffers from linger anxiety around the episode. He sought out five men sentenced for homophobic hate crimes and both interviews them and reconstructs the events around the crimes. The police videos and photographs are grizzly. The result is a profound deepening of understanding of homophobic violence and the shifting motives at work. At one point, a closeted, highly religious, well-educated man who, when diagnosed HIV+ went on a killing spree in a Minneapolis park, says that he is not homophobic. He argues that homophobia is based on fear and his motivations were deeper than that -- a more profound loathing. Some of the other men were either closeted or had been raped as boys. All change their stories in the course of their interviews. With such a poor grip on reality, the one motivating force in each of their lives is hatred of gay men and lesbians. What is most chilling is the calm quality of "it was a bad day for me so I killed him." There is little remorse for the hatred just for the carnage and having gotten caught at it. The photographs of their dead victims will stay with you for a long time. Exile Shanghai Exil Shanghai Germany / Israel 1997 275 minutes This lyrical documentatary is a sort of Jewish diasphora version of Memories of Neocolonialism. Unfortunately, at over four and half hours in length, many of the poignant moments are lost in only vaguely relevant details. At times, the film examines the century from 1845 to 1949 when there was a large and lively Jewish community in Shanghai. But the real focus is on World War II when Shanghai was one of the few places where displaced Jews could get into without visas. The focus is on the 1943 - 1945 period when the occupying Japanese forced over 20,000 of the new Jewish refugees into into a squalid neighbourhood called Hongkew that they had only bombed a few years before in the Sino-Japanese War. This ghettoization was the result of Nazi pressure on the Japanese. Few people fully realized that this, the last "ghetto" constructed in the twentieth century, really functioned as a human sheald for a ammunitions dump -- though there was some bombing by the Americans. But it was in this period before the disintegration of Shanghai's Jewish community in the 1946 - 49 period, that both the differences and bonds of three jewish groups, the Sephardic merchants who came in after the opium wars and who became fabulously wealthy, the "White Russians" who came in the first three decades of the twentieth century, and the German and other western European refugees who arrived in the war, emerged. Organized around a series of poorly edited, rambling, but charming interviews with highly likable people nearly all of the older waves of Jews who did not have to live in the Hongkew ghetto, we learn of the opulance and magic of the International Sector in this last "wave" of imperialism and the horrible deprevations and health hazards that went on for many at the same time over the bridge in Hongkew. George Grant's recollections of gay Shanghai along the Bund, today China's major site of queer visibility, were poignant and worthy of another hour -- of another documentary. Sadly, the film's effort's to link images of contemporary Shanghai, a city in a building boom that is obliterating many of the locations mentioned, with the war years, fall painfully short. There were about three powerful documentaries here but they tended to cancel eachother out. The Last Bus Home Ireland 1997 Director: Johny Gogan 93 minutes For anyone who lived through the rise and fall of punk culture in a small city, this film is a pleasure. Set in Dublin in 1979, "The Last Bus Home" starts with the pope's visit and quickly moves on to suburban youth rebellion. The temporary club scenes in old bingo halls, the excruciating music, the "fucked up" sexual politics, and the attitude are beautifully recreated though this group was far more polite than what I knew on the North American west coast. There are countless vignettes of middle-class alienation and conflict in this film that says more about where people were at back then than "Sid and Nancy" could ever. The undercurrent of homoeroticism and homophobia came into the film as no surprise though its understated treatment is right on. How well all of the relationships are explored take this film where others have failed. There is a brilliant scene of picking mushrooms, furtive homoerotic contact, and a subsequent attempt at a rape of his girlfriend by the freaked out male protagonist. The last quarter of the film is closer to the present -- about fifteen years later. Puntuated with about half of Sinead O`Connor's celebrated 1990 song, "Troy," the new Dublin has trendy cafés and contemporary culture and has gone from being a backwater of London to a regional centre of the European Union -- just as homosexuality was finally decriminalized. "The Last Bus Home" gives us that resolution with long lost loves that most of us wont ever get - nor could stand. Veering towards Irish romanticism, the "fuck you" edge keeps "The Last Bus Home" a razor's edge away from sentamentality. Robinson in Space Britain 1997 Director: Patrick Keiller 83 minutes This film is a series of rambles across England that use the same film devices as in Keiller's celebrated 1994 "London." Loosely playing off of Daniel Defoe's 1727 "Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain." The "Robinson" in the film's title refers in part to Defoe's better known novel "Robinson Crusoe." The various walks are filled with charming historical and literary tangents linked by visions of the recent "New Europe" economic expansion: rusty industrial sites being replaced by shopping malls etc. ect. The underlying message is that Britain is more industrialized than ever and that all the Thatherite talk of the deindustrialization of the British economy, to the supposed shift to a service economy, was just a cover for more insidious hegemonies of globalized capital. While this may be true, the passages from over-quoted post modern luminaries like Henri Lefebvre and Doreen Massey fall flat and the repeated images of new factories and high technology industrial sites become more than a little repetitious. The fey aside's such as Britain being the only country that makes the high quality material needed for latex fetish-ware and the narrator's travelling companion's homoerotic proclivities come across as grasping at straws for something immediately entertaining; as only lightly titillating gossip with little substance. I found myself thinking that if I had a decent mountain bicycle and as much time as the filmmakers, I could have found more interesting visions in these landscapes. "Robinson in Space" might work as a film to show in an introductory course on English (as opposed to British) geography. The cinematography is a pleasure. But whatever art there was in this project has been suffocated by obscure references as statement. Franz Fanon: Black Skin, White Skin Britain 1996 Director: Isaac Julien 70 minutes The creative team of Isaac Julien and Mark Nash has produced the most lyrical discussion of the legacies of Martinique-born Franz Fanon. This status, alone, makes the film worthy of viewing. But this pastiche has far too much thrown in to make a coherent statement on any of the many theoretical impacts of the several books written by Fanon just before his untimely death (from leukemia at 36 in 1961). Most problematic is the application of the Julien / Nash trademark device of mixing actual photographs and interviews with dramatic re-enactments. While it might have worked for Julien's "Looking For Langston," which was made nearly a decade ago, the treatment falls short on Fanon whose legacy is unresolved and whose theoretical impacts on a range of fields have yet to be fully assessed. Julien does not establish his own relationship to Fanon's work, some of which was homophobic. For the producer to be discussing Fanon's contentious theories of race without positioning himself in relationship to it, especially as a self-descibed "snow queen," is highly problematic. This lack of confrontation with father figure Fanon makes the film "fluffy" stuff in deed. The operatic singing and piano clanging that comes and goes, as was used in Julien's "The Attendant," is pure distraction. There are brilliant moments followed by excruciating re-enactments -- notably the ones with Simone de Beauvoir. Thankfully Sartre did not show up. The eminent British theoretician Stuart Hall is the bright-eyed muse and his commentaries provide the only real structure for the film. The interviews with Fanon's family are poignant as are those with some of the former Algerian revolutionary fighters. The Hanging Garden Canada 1997 Director: Thom Fitzgerald 91 minutes The Hanging Garden has been the favourite of both the Toronto and the Vancouver film festivals. Set in Nova Scotia in the present, a gay man, who in his teens was grossly obese from an eating disorder, returns home after a ten year absence for his sister's wedding. His sister is marrying his teenaged boyfriend who rejected him after an aborted sexual interlude that was inadvertedly witnessed by a hysterically Catholic grandmother -- all ten years before. This dense but almost too symmetrical tragi-comedy is enriched by the setting: a hanging garden of colourful flowers set above a bleak shoreline. The garden becomes the "site" of flashbacks of family violence, an attempted teenaged suicide, sex between teens, attempted sex between a married "bisexual" male and a gay man, an overworked housewife, a dysfunctional marriage, and a lot of drinking. The gorgeous flower shots play off the starkness and lack of resolution of these family secrets -- and the limitations of pop psychology. Companions: Tales from the Closet Vaninnor -- Betrattelser fran Garderoben Sweden Director: Cecilia Neant-Falk & Nina Bergström 55 minutes This is a warm documentary of recollections of Swedish lesbians in their sixties and seventies. The footage is uneven but the contents are inspiring. The relative privilege of Swedish professional women and even housewives in descretely exploring their sexualities, well before Stonewall, is underscored. This is not a film about sexual radicalism but of slow, relatively comfortable, and highly personal processes of coming out -- over decades. This is a good documentary to illustrate partial, "blind eye" tolerance of lesbianism within the context of the homophobic welfare state. Queer shorts: Freaks, Queens, Skater Dudes & Closet Cases The short, such a staple of self-defined gay male film culture since its inception two decades, may be on the decline outside of the world of film schools. The problem is that the average ten minute film cannot help but be cute, superficial, and in desperate need of being funny. And whether or not to include sex remains a question. But there is some hope. Joel Moffett's 1997 "My Body" (USA, 30 minutes) works some depth and does not have to try very hard to be funny. He works off almost a mythic story. Eric Marciano's 1996 "Narrowcast" (USA, 18 minutes) goes back to John Water's poor taste camp, layers it with some more contemporary gestures, and it is a pleasure -- though it is mostly recycled. The most powerful piece in this series, that worked anything more than well-established forms of established gay humour, was Simone Horrocks' 1996 "Spindrift" (Britain, 10 minutes) on two hustler / "rent-boy", skate-boarders in London -- beautiful gestures. Stolen Moments Canada 1997 Director: Margaret Wescott 90 minutes This lush documentary funded by the National Film Board of Canada would comprise a good introduction to a course entitled Lesbian Essentialism 101. The interviews and historical footage are lovely but the film itself does not have a central argument other than there always have been lesbians. This is not exactly a new concept for most people. More problematic is the way that the film meanders, often superficially, through discussions of history, love and butch / femme, and politics. I don't think that I have heard the term "gay woman" used so many times for twenty years. "Lesbian" is used a few times as is "queer" and less frequently "dyke" but this is definitely a film about "gay women." There are lots of poignant fragments that make "Stolen Moments" worth a viewing even if the whole is less than the sum of its parts. In the question and answer period, Director Margaret Wescott noted that she began the film over ten years ago. It might have been better to have completed the film by the early nineteen nineties. The historical location of the film, for better or worse, is about the late nineteen eighties. Happy Together Chunguang Zhaxie Hong Kong 1997 92 minutes The queer film genre of the obsessive love-hate gay male relationship is alive and well in this sultry tale. Call me twisted but I loved this film. I was charmed, nearly even seduced. "Happy Together" starts out with sodomy, aka buttfucking, a la spit under the worst flourescent light and recorded on the grainest of film stock. Who cares that the ejaculation was over in twenty seconds? It was probably better that way. After the fucking was out of the way, the plot is simple: a handsome young gay male couple from Hong Kong has moved to Buenos Aires and there are countless scenes of kissing, tangoes - yes male-male dancing, arguing, working at bad jobs, breaking beer bottles, breaking up, and searching for eachother -- often in vain. Fortunately for both the protagonists and the audience, the only assaults on the body are symbolic in the form of one lover's purposely hiding of the other's Hong Kong Overseas British passport. If you believe that there is never any resolution around a few of those more intense relationships, this film is a meditation on bitter sweet loss and misery as the purest form of love and eroticism. Southern Chinese gay male stud culture busts out in the land of the tango but mind the glass. A Queer Story Jilao Sishi Hong Kong 1996 Director: Shu Kei This portrayal of gay male and lesbian middle class life in Hong Kong feels like it was made for television. Fortunately, the introduction veers from the sanitized, consumer culture and rages against south Chinese homophobia, both overt and the more liberal and hypocritical. A relationship of eight years, between a younger, "out" hairdresser and his older, closeted counsellor lover is on the rocks. The counsellor's lesbian aunt is beginning to confront the hostility that kept her estranged from her son after she went to live with her girlfriend. The son is, you guessed it, now a raging homophobe graduating from college. The older gay man's high school girlfriend is putting pressure on him to finally marry her -- even though she suspects that he is gay. The most hysterical scene is when the closeted counsellor accompanies a homophobic client into the Shanzhen district ust outside of Hong Kong, in mainland China, to confront her husband's gay male "concubine." The script is well-crafted and the acting compelling with numerous understated but poignant moments. Regeneration Britain / Canada 1996 Director: Gillies MacKinnon 110 minutes This film is as beautifully crafted as the Pat Barker historical novel on which it was based. "Regeneration" is the story of the partial convalescence from World War I of the real-life poets Sigfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen in Craiglockart Military Hospital in Edinburgh. But Sassoon is not really "ill" except in the sense of being sick of war. His denunciation of the British government and its complicity in prolonging the carnage landed him in what amounts to the country club military hospital for "public school fools." Sassoon bonds with Owen -- played by the stunningly handsome Stuart Bunce, who is much more damaged by the war, and develops a strained friendship with military doctor William Rivers. The pro-war doctor's relatively humanist therapies are at odds with the prevailing trends such as of those for the new electro-therapy. Sometimes coming off as too rich a period piece, the superb cinematography of architecture, landscape, and, not mention, handsome men's faces -- these talking heads will turn heads, is, fortunately, equal to the acting. The fragments of morbid poetry are beautiful, in part due to their understatement, though the soundtrack is a bit heavy. Sadly, the undoubted homoeroticism is nearly completely removed from the narrative except for some unbearably steamy movements. This historical censure of homoeroticism is embarrassing in the nineteen nineties especially given Sassoon's well-celebrated bisexuality. For there not to have even been a serious hug or a kiss between those men, rescuing eachother from their post-war deleria in the privacy of the hospital grounds, was a painful and inaccurate ommission. The highly realistic trench warfare will cause nightmares. Baby, It's You USA 1997 Director: Anne Makepeace 59 minutes This is a bit too much of a PBS-type documentary of baby boom angst for my tastes. The Director now in her late forties wants to conceive with her husband only to find that an abortion from when she was eighteen had scarred her tubes. This tour of family and reproductive technologies grapples with some of the angst of being close to conception but not close enough. Shinjuku Black Society Shinjuku Kuro Shakai Japan 1996 Director: Miike Takashi 102 minutes Shinjuku Black Society aka Shinjuku Chinese Gang War is one up on Reservoir Dogs. The violence and depravity is on a par with Pasolini's gruesome "100 Days of Salo." Tokyo's gay neighbourhood, Shinjuku, is the queer location for this exceptionally reactionary comment on cultural hybridity and contemporary sexual politics. The story line is of two brothers of a Japanese father and a Chinese mother. At one point, the family had been persecuted in China. The older brother is a "top," nominally heterosexual, police detective and the younger man is a gay "bottom" lawyer running drugs and body parts in a Chinese gang. Along the way, are numerous Chinese-Japanese gang executions and a foray into that land of mediation of Japanese and Chinese culture, Taiwan. But geography, in Shinjuku Black Society, is subordinate to mutilation which in turn is almost an anthemn for social conflict. Complicating this tale of two brothers are such angelic figures as a gang mistress who is anally raped by the police officer and who later rescues him from being quartered alive as organ traffic because of the memorable organism that he gave her. And there is a slashing hustler who specializes in giving fellatio while crunching on ice crubes. This is a brilliant but truly disgusting film. If you were wondering whether the cultural engines of homophobia were still alive -- the ones that collapse homosexuality in with criminality, sexual abuse, and racial hybridity, this film confirms the worst. Even the Japanese distributor was hesitant to let it out of the country for fear of liability. Twilight of the Ice Nymphs Canada 1997 Director: Guy Director: Guy Maddin 100 minutes Gay camp may be on the declline but heterosexual kitsch is back in full form with this queer tale set in a world of eternal twilight, enchanted forests, and ostrich farms. The sets are fantastic. The sex and affected "romance" is outlandish. The dubbed dialogue is so thoroughly sarcastic and the mythic quality is so enchanting that "Twilight of the Ice Nymphs" in deed works. Straying into commentaries on contemporary sexual politics, this film spoofs those allegories as well. It is all thoroughly enjoyable. David Searching USA 1996 Director: Leslie L. Smith 101 minutes David Searching is another sweet American film about the youthful search for gay / lesbian love a la "Go Fish." There is nothing gritty about this film and the charming male protagonist's angst is all too cute and skin deep. In times of stress, he retreats to his poorly decorated bedroom. This is a Manhattan without homophobia where the garbage and homelessness are too trivial to include in the story. Success is just around the corner. Even the sex club scenes were far too sanitary to be credible. The main discomfort that many will experience is in seeing the young man masturbating awkwardly in his white jockeys. He could have taken them off. Hayseed Canada 1997 Directors: Andrew Hayes & Joshua Levy 90 minutes This is doggie love and spoofing central Canadian cultural icons at its finest. Well-crafted and wholey sarcastic, we see a "boy" playing off of a hustler version of Marilyn Monroe naivity while in search of his lost dog. He goes to Toronto and gets sold at a slave auction for charity. Luckily, he is abducted by aliens and returned to "pure" rural Ontario life. A Cha-Cha for the Fugitive Gei Taowangzhe de Qia-qia Taiwan 1997 Director: Wang Tsai-Sheng (Wang Caixiang) 85 minutes The must be the year of angst from the ambisexual Chinese artiste. This time, a bisexual artist is waiting to move to New York City to be with his male lover while living with his girlfriend in a sumptuous loft in Taipei. Do I sound bored? I was as much as the protagonist in this visually sumptuous but hollow betrayal of privilege artists in this wayward province of China. This film is about our protagonist's boredom the experience clouds the entire statement. The landscapes and locations are intriguing, particularly the rave where performance artists are hauled away by government agents for sarcastically asking for socialism to come to Taiwan. The bright lights and monitors on the floor of the rave space are pretty but the film does not hold together. East Palace, West Palace Dong Gong, Xi Gong China / France 1996 Director: Zhang Yuan 94 minutes This variation on the hunter being captured by the prey may well be one of the more influential films of this decade on homosexuality, sadomasochism and drag. "East Palace, West Palace" is an awesome breakthrough for Chinese cinema. Set in a series of imperial parks in central Beijing -- that see a lot of gay male cruising at night, a young writer is singled out by a guard. After a few run-ins with this one officer, the young man sets himself up to be detained, those handcuffs please!, where he taunts the increasingly interested guard through divulging his personal history and sex life. This film explores the links between state power and sadomasochism in a way that few would ever dare -- especially in, of all countries, China!!! With lean dialogue, steamy scenes galore though no sex, the cinematography is powerful in juxtaposing the architectural spaces of the Manchu, nationalist, revolutionary, and current state capitalist periods. In the eighteenth and nineteenth century, Beijing was the most erotically tolerant cities and had some of the densest enclaves of homosexuality in the world. Today, while homosexuality is not illegal, per se, many gay men and lesbians are repeatedly arrested for hooliganism, especially around public sex, and some repeat offenders in some areas receieve long prison and even death sentences. There are some subtle statements at work about the resonance of the former tolerance of homosexuality invoked through the traditional palace architecture. This awesome film will change the face of both Chinese and gay film. **************************************************************************** gordon brent INGRAM Ph.D. environmental planning 1230 Hamilton Street #204 Vancouver V6B 2S8 CANADA voice mail: 1(604)669-0422 fax: call ahead to confirm location email: gb_ingram@bc.sympatico.ca ***************************************************************************