Frameline 33: 'Anotherworld'

Anotherworld (Altromonde) is Fabiomassimo Lozzi's radiant visual interpretation of the interviews with gay men collected in the books Pornocuore and I Mignotti by Italian poets Antonio Veneziani and Riccardo Reim. The books enjoy an almost iconic status among Italy's gay population and, judging from Lozzi's film alone, it is not difficult to see why. The film should be mandatory viewing for all entry-level Cultural Studies and Social Sciences students, so profound is its exploration of psyche, sexuality, society, and the radical ways in which they intersect. And this does not even begin to assess the integrity of its formal achievement, which is considerable. Lozzi has tapped the creative talents of the famed Actor's Centre in Rome (Michael Margotta's extension of the NY based Actor's Studio) and he worked with the actors there for a period of six months in which they developed and shot the series of 43 linked monologues which comprise this 106-minute experimental production. Between monologues the camera is lyrical and expressionist, with segments like connective tissue drenched in cross-processed contrasts, exotic flares of yellows, greens, and reds, with fleeting images of bodies underwater (the swimmer comes up for air after the first positive monologue) or of dripping leaves, clustered candles, weeping stone angels, etc. Its short spoken vignettes have a pronounced theatrical aspect; they are soliloquies delivered by characters whose tongues have been freed by the privacy implied in the form. Scenes range from shower stalls,steam-rooms, bedrooms and other interiors to graveyards, railway stations, and churches; they are linked by subtle verbal and visual cues which together articulate some delicate high-notes above a more profound narrative trajectory.

This deeper story travels the distance from self-loathing and torment to liberation and love, and it traverses such psychosexual peaks and troughs as are seldom acknowledged in films anywhere. Some audience members objected to the relentless way in which the film explored aspects of internalized homophobia, but to my mind its fearlessness was exhilarating, not to mention essential to any understanding of the film's message and the power of the subject in general. By including scene after scene of lacerating self-hate and twisted sexual fantasy, Lozzi has methodically built his case, brick-by-brick and from the ground up, and it is consequently a case of such devastating exactitude it is breathtaking, heartbreaking, undeniable. It has to be said also that it's refreshing to be treated by the filmmaker as the adults that we are, equal to the material and ready to contemplate the full range of impact our societal norms inflict. When we hear men describe love as a black hole and themselves as degenerates with no souls, as people you can't love, we bear witness to the devastation of the human soul that can be wreaked by majority rule and official homophobia. It also provides the rich black ground against which we can contemplate with clarity the meaning of the monologues toward the end of the film, the high end of the spectrum, where men speak of being normal and wanting the ordinary things that everybody wants. Sandwiched between a Vatican document pronouncing upon homosexuality as intrinsically wicked, and the words recorded at a gay rights rally in Rome which speak of the renewed hope of living in a civilized country, this compassionate and remarkable film could not be more explicit in its depiction of the contorted lineaments of the human heart. Anotherworld is hands-down the best film of the festival.

Frameline 33: 'Lion's Den' and 'The Fish Child'

Argentine cinema has undergone a renaissance since the end of the dictatorship in 1983 and especially since the mid-late nineties, when economic collapse triggered a wave of social-realist films which are winning acclaim on the international scene. No director is more emblematic of this shift than Pablo Trapero, whose exploration of the Argentine prison system in Lion's Den ('Leonera') follows other well-received films about police corruption and the working class. Lion's Den stars his astonishingly beautiful wife Martina Gusman in her first leading role as the young, pregnant Julia, whose inability to remember what happened at the scene of her boyfriend's murder has led to her incarceration in a special ward for women with children in a vast and decaying prison complex somewhere in Argentina. The film is shot on location at an actual prison and utilizes real-life female prisoners in a brilliant supporting cast which supplies grit and pathos in measures it would be impossible to achieve by more conventional means. What we get is a movie about a community of poor, marginalized but undefeated women which avoids the cliches of the genre by virtue of its human authenticity and documentary ingenuity. Martina Gusman brings such maturity and fearlessness to the role it is difficult to believe this is her first lead. She's fascinating to watch - for her beauty, certainly, but also for the shifting register of vulnerability, ferocity and weariness she brings to the character of Julia, whose resilience makes her a heroine we can rejoice in. Her pregnancy and motherhood prove to be the redemptive factor in an otherwise bleak existence; her relationship with her son Tomas brings her into the fold of the community as much as it is fostered by it. What Julia learns in prison is what she was denied as a child and discovers within herself as a resource 'delivered' so to speak by female companionship. The many scenes of women with their children in cramped spaces made to function by dint of their fierce will to nurture is the ironic context in which we grasp the failure of Julia's own mother in this respect, and the implication extends to society, since Sofia is a shallow middle-class woman who has pursued her career in Paris at the expense of raising her own child. There is a strong political critique in this formula which is well-served by the location and cast. When Sofia takes Tomas away from the prison she triggers a revolution of sorts which precipitates in turn a surprising and intensely suspenseful conclusion. Frameline's decision to include the film is a bold and slightly curious one; it is more a feminist than a lesbian drama, despite the relationship that develops between Julia and her cellmate Marta, the sexuality of which feels more circumstantial than central, and there are liberal doses of the usual hate-filled epithets (faggot pansy bitch dyke) that made me wonder how the audience was taking it. But hopefully the genius of the film is apparent to any audience regardless of context. This is a rough-cut gem, worthy of the acclaim it received at Cannes and certain to bring more well-deserved attention to Trapero's films and to New Argentine Cinema generally.

Lucia Puenza's melodramatic Fish Child (El Nino Pez) is more conventional, though there are strong notes of class critique in the portrayal of the contemporary bourgeois family in Buenos Aires, and some lovely magical-realist touches with the evocation of the mythic child at the bottom of the lake for which the movie takes its name. The central conceit is a love-story between the adolescent Lala (played by XXY star Ines Effron) and her family's Paraguayan maid, Ailin (Mariele Vitale), a lush, romantic saga of boundary-defying logic which is hopefully meant to caricature the soap-operas it resembles. I found myself bored by a relationship that seemed contrived and idealized in the extreme, but it is possible that a greater familiarity with Argentinian culture might yield a more sophisticated reading of this material. What I did like was the frank depiction of Ailin's predicament and her (curiously, for this drama) natural adjustment to it; as a sexual object in both her life as a girl in Paraguay and as a servant in Buenos Aires she is exploited and manipulated, but her instinct is not to hate or incubate fantasies of revenge. The two girls do plot an elaborate escape strategy, but Ailin is not alienated by her sexual life; the scenes involving her employer, Lala's distracted father, and herself point to an acceptance of the situation and even an affection on her part, which is counter-intuitive and provocative in more ways than one. But when Lala discovers the pair in flagrante the melodrama is ramped up beyond recognition, with a possible suicide attempt gone wrong, an (accidental?) death, Lala's escape to Paraguay, Ailin's arrest and detention, Lala's return and dramatic rescue of Ailin, and the couple's subsequent liberation. Material like this requires more irony than the film delivers, at least for an international audience, but perhaps the irony is meant to reside in the fact that lesbian couples can occupy a melodrama as well as any? If so, it is somewhat lost on a San Francisco audience.

Frameline 33: 'Light Gradient' and "Give Me Your Hand'

Writer-director Jan Kruger's third feature Light Gradient (Ruckenwind) begins as a simple tale of two young lovers taking a trip by bicycle through the countryside in Germany, though the parable of the fox and the hare which accompanies the opening credits introduces a hint of Middle-European fairy story and foreshadows the power dynamics in the relationship we are about to witness. When Johann and Robin reach the Brandenburg Forest before nightfall, they struggle with their tent in the rain for a few minutes, and then the movie swerves into decidedly less innocent territory, as they play a game of hide-and-seek in the dark which ends in one of them being tackled to the ground, hogtied, smeared with mud and stripped by the other. These feral undertones are amplified by the narrative development, as the couple lose their bikes and wander further into the forest and away from civilization, encountering finally a house and its two enigmatic occupants, an adolescent boy and his mother. The curious relationships that develop between the four are subtle, understated, and unstraightforward; sexual tension flickers from one character to the next in a delicate flutter of signals that never abates, and it is in the context of these developments that the men undergo a redefinition, or perhaps simply a clarification, of their private power dynamic. The telling of the second fable, about a wild man who lives in the forest and leaves a skinned swan in a bed of its own feathers as a calling card underscores the wilderness theme, and wilderness dominates the visual field by virtue of some stunning cinematography, which lavishes attention on leaves, trunks, water, and other aspects of the natural environment as it frames the men's gorgeously lit bodies. One shot of trellised and silhouetted leaves against a rich amber glow of skin (echoing an earlier shot of Robin against the gold of passing fields) was almost supernaturally beautiful, but the film continually hints at a sort of minutely configured exchange between natural and supernatural elements, as if reality and fantasy, or fable, are subtly related in every dimension of our lives, especially the sexual. When Johann eats some hallucinogenic berries and suffers a two-day fever, the fable seems to enter his mind in a way that invites its own realization, triggering a sexual denouement which references every level of this intriguing story. The film has a light touch, and a dark center; it blends clarity with mystification, innocence with violence, and its final resolution is more of a question than a statement. This is a true work of the imagination, a beautiful, lingering, sophisticated film.


The same cannot be said for Pascal-Alex Vincent's one-dimensional 'Give Me Your Hand', inexplicably showcased by Frameline as a main attraction. The film explores the bond between the handsome but sullen-faced twins Quentin and Antoine as they hitchhike through the French countryside on their way to their mother's funeral in Spain. The camerawork is assured, the scenery is lovely, but the boys in this film are dull; it is clearly their beauty alone which is the focus, because there is precious little in the way of script; of their interior lives we see precisely nothing, and their relationship consists mainly in pushing, shoving, and slapping one another. There is a reversal of sorts in their relationship in the course of the film, as the dominant Antoine is confused by Quentin's sexual experience with a man and the brothers separate on bad terms. When they reunite in Spain the action is meant to suggest a greater capability on the part of the previously more submissive Quentin, who has arrived unscathed in Spain despite his brother's trick of 'selling' him to a stranger in a reststop cafe. The brothers fight once more, which is to say, they tumble recklessly in the waves before a blissfully swooping camera, after which Quentin gains the upper hand, revives his brother on the sand, and walks away. It is to be hoped that this signals an advance in maturity for one or both of the brothers, but it would have been a more interesting film if some maturity had featured earlier on or anywhere in this fluffy, trivial, good-looking feature.

Frameline 33: 'Maggots and Men'

Local director Cary Cronenwett's stunning debut feature Maggots and Men, which premiered Sunday at the Castro Theatre, is the most successfully realized and brilliant experimental film project I have ever seen. It is a collaborative visual and performance montage which brings together the talents of an eclectic - to say the least - group of independent artists, trans/queer activists, film students and performers of every stripe. Set in revolutionary Russia in 1921, the film recounts events leading up to the battle at Kotlin Island between the anarchist sailor collective at Kronstadt naval base and the Red Army under orders from Trotsky. It has the flavor of a 1920's Soviet propaganda film with notes of classic Russian avant-garde cinema: its primary visual reference is Eisenstein's 1925 masterpiece 'Battleship Potemkin', which it conjures directly, but this 58-minute black-and-white silent film incorporates several further layers of reference in a complex and elegant blend of performance art, agit-prop, propaganda, poster art, chamber music, political activism, anarchist literature, historical recreation, and cabaret.

In a gender-activist twist, the cast of sailors are made up of as many as 100 female-to-male transsexuals, as well as bio-male actors; their radical community of brothers is frankly homoerotic, wistfully imagined and beautiful to watch, captured on 8 and 16mm film through a vaseline-streaked lens; cabaret scenes include male-to-female actors and other gender variations; the central character (played by Stormy Knight) appears briefly at one point in drag. In this way, the filmmaker, who is himself a FTM, positions issues of gender politics squarely in the middle of the anarchist/socialist struggle and the dream of radical liberation for all people, as envisioned by the sailors at Kronstadt, but also by activists such as Emma Goldman and queer artists and filmmakers like Genet and Fassbinder (it is clearly reminiscent of Fassbinder's Querelle). The story is chronicled in the form of letters (beautifully crafted by writer Alec Icky Dunn) from one of the sailor-comrades to his sister, narrated in Russian with English subtitles, and these letters are influenced in turn by the letters and speeches of Emma Goldman, who was among other things a tireless advocate for gays and lesbians before anybody else had thought to champion their cause.

The film is a homegrown miracle of modern art, absolutely original, completely self-assured, unpretentious, playful, and transgressive. Scenes of educational acrobatics are supplied by Bay Area agit-prop theatre group Blue Blouse; music throughout is an original composition for piano, harp, oboe, bass and percussion by local artist Jascha Ephraim; art direction, a study in perfection, by Flo McGarrell. It took 5 years to complete, with technical support from the City College film department and funding from Intersection for the Arts. Check out the film's fascinating in-production website, complete with visual research, bios, script info, etc, and Jascha Ephraim's account, which includes a 2-minute trailer. Also, the interesting interview with Cary Cronenwett by sf360's Michael Fox, for information about the director's influences, motivations, and process.

Point Reyes

Seamus Heaney 'The Redress of Poetry"

Poetry gains much from its great advocates, and there is no better advocate for poetry in the English language than Seamus Heaney. 'The Redress of Poetry' is a collection of lectures delivered at Oxford between 1989 and 1993 which explore the ways in which poetry can be said to 'redress' what is out of balance in the human experience and in society at large. His sections proceed more or less chronologically, beginning with an analysis of the 17th-century metaphysical poet-priest George Herbert and continuing through chapters on Christopher Marlowe, Brian Merriman, John Clare, Oscar Wilde, Hugh MacDiarmid, Yeats and Larkin, Dylan Thomas, and Elizabeth Bishop. For his understanding of redress he invokes Simone Weil's If we know in what way society is unbalanced, we must do what we can to add weight to the lighter scale ... we must have formed a conception of equilibrium and be ever ready to change sides like justice, 'that fugitive from the camp of conquerors'; he expands the definition to include George Seferis's comment that poetry should be strong enough to help, and refers as well to Czeslaw Milosz, Osip Mandelstam, and Vaclav Havel who, without any guarantee of success, were drawn by the logic of their work to disobey the force of gravity, to exercise in their work a far-reaching moral imperative to hope. If he does not elaborate on these exemplary agents of redress it is because the English language is Heaney's specific focus, including the way in which English as an extension of imperial power has upset the scale and been challenged by Irish and Scottish poets, a political theme he explores especially well in the chapter on Hugh MacDiarmid and in the closing essay on the crisis in Northern Ireland in 1981.

The theme of hope is most clearly worked out in the chapter on Yeats and Larkin, where Yeats is seen to succeed and Larkin to fail in the business of what can only be called spiritual affirmation. Larkin is famously immune to the romantic consolations of visionary art. In classic English fashion he repudiates the very idea of the transcendent, choosing instead to focus his energies on what Heaney calls the inexorability of his own physical extinction in poems like the one here selected, 'Aubade'. For all its technical perfection, 'Aubade' is decried as an example of its creator's having betrayed the essence of poetry, which is, according to Milosz, a faith in life everlasting, however that may be understood. Perhaps we forget too easily, Milosz continues, the centuries-old mutual hostility between reason, science, and science-inspired philosophy on the one hand and poetry on the other? Statements about poetry don't get much more fearless than this, but Milosz's 'indignant' rejection of Larkin's poem is, I think, misplaced. To my mind, 'Aubade' is for all its negativity a paradoxically life-affirming poem, taking a mood of black despair and rendering it, through precise transcription, absolutely luminous, which is a sort of miracle and definitely not an example of going over to the side of the adversary. It is always a matter of the 'right words in the right order', and not so much of intention or belief, when a poem succeeds. If the words are allowed to dictate the meaning, they will subvert reason, science, and science-inspired philosophy whatever creed they might espouse in a denotative sense. The poem is too long to quote in full, but here is the last verse, the summation of Larkin's night of contemplating the inevitability of death;

Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.

It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,

Have always known, know that we can't escape,

Yet can't accept. One side will have to go.

Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring

In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring

Intricate rented world begins to rouse.

The sky is white as clay, with no sun.

Work has to be done.

Postmen like doctors go from house to house.

Heaney might not agree that this is transcendent writing, but the chapter in which 'Aubade' is discussed is occasion for some of the most lucid and challenging concepts of his own regarding poetry's transcendent potential. It is for statements like this that I read Heaney's essays: When language does more than enough, as it does in all achieved poetry, it opts for the condition of overlife, and rebels at limit. In sentences like these, he is bold, precise, and at the same time ecstatic, Nietzschean, persuasive in a way only a master of language can be. His chapters on Dylan Thomas and Elizabeth Bishop are even better. We hear of Thomas' melodramatic apprehension of language as a physical sensation, as a receiving station for creaturely intimations; of his great first gift, which enabled him to work instinctively at the deep sound-face and produce a poetry where the back of the throat and the back of the mind answered and supported each other. These are esoteric realms for literary criticism, but natural territory for Heaney, who has probed the matter of sounding-words and their resonance in the body more thoroughly in an earlier collection of essays entitled 'Preoccupations', and whose own poetry, of course, speaks volumes. Thomas' poetry is criticized, ultimately, for its lack of maturity, its rigid adherence to the physical as opposed to the spiritual properties of language and therefore its failure to answer, in the mode of a possible redress, the needs, the sensibilities, the breadth and scope of a developed enquiry: the poems of his twenties and thirties pursued a rhetorical magnificence that was in excess of and posthumous to its original, vindicating impulse. They mostly stand like elaborately crenellated fabrications, great gazebos built to the extravagant but finally exhibitionist specifications of their inventor ...

Elizabeth Bishop fares better - her work achieves in Heaney's opinion a perfect equilibrium between sadness and delight, detachment and concern; the poems are both preternaturally immediate and remotely familiar. His selection of her work is sensitive to what is most delicate in it. The heartbreaking 'Sestina', my favorite, is quoted in full. All of Heaney's many selections in this volume reveal his exquisite understanding of their merits. A poet such as Hugh MacDiarmid, whose elaborate and highly experimental reclamatory Scottish language/dialect poems might easily put off an ordinary reader, is rendered accessible by Heaney's sensitive reading, and we are afforded the delight of his 'Nothing has stirred ...', quoted below, which is a revelation, one among many. The book teems with allusions to jewels of which I would otherwise be ignorant - from Eileen O'Connell's lament for her husband Art O'Leary to Terry Eagleton's play 'Saint Oscar' to Czech poet Miroslav Holub's wonderful poem 'The Dead'. We might not be able to go to Oxford or Harvard, but Seamus Heaney, in his generosity, brings Oxford and Harvard to us; his four books of lectures and assorted prose pieces are the best education in poetry I have ever had.

Excerpt from a poem by Hugh MacDiarmid

"...Nothing has stirred
Since I lay down this morning an eternity ago
But one bird. The widest door is the least liable to
intrusion,
Ubiquitous as the sunlight, unfrequented as the sun.
The inward gates of a bird are always open.
It does not know how to shut them.
That is the secret of its song,
But whether any man's are ajar is doubtful.
I look at these stones and I know little about them,
But I know their gates are open too,
Always open, far longer open, than any bird's can be,
That every one of them has had its gates wide open far
longer
Than all birds put together, let alone humanity,
Though through them no man can see,
No man nor anything more recently born than themselves
And that is everything else on the Earth.
I too lying here have dismissed all else.
Bread from stones is my sole and desperate dearth,
From stones, which are to the Earth as to the sunlight
Is the naked sun which is for no man's sight.
I would scorn to cry to any easier audience
Or, having cried, lack patience to await the response.

from Collected Poems, Vol. 1, pp. 423-4
and quoted in the chapter on MacDiarmid in Seamus Heaney's 'The Redress of Poetry'

Quote: Wallace Stevens

"a poet's words are of things that do not exist without the words"
from 'The Necessary Angel' 1984

E. L. Doctorow 'The Book of Daniel'

The biblical Daniel not only interpreted the dreams of the monarch Nebuchadnezzar, but reimagined and reconstituted those dreams Nebuchadnezzar had forgotten, so that no detail of the enigmatic story they comprised would escape analysis. It is the task of E. L. Doctorow's Daniel, as a son of the executed Isaacsons (freely interpreted versions of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg) to piece together the story of his parents' trial and appeals process and the various political and cultural myths which surrounded it, together with his memories of life with them in the Bronx in the forties, memories of their friends, political actions, marital and family life, in an effort to discover the truth about their guilt or innocence and so lay a foundation for what continues to elude him: a sense of his own identity. 'The Book of Daniel' is a complex and layered work which pursues its quarry through aspects of fact and fiction, through public and private domains, until it comes to reference the act of writing itself, that is, the writing of 'Daniel's Book', as perhaps the only knowable phenomenon in what is revealed to be an enormously unstable, always elusive, and thoroughly relative truth. Daniel is unable to assemble a unified picture, but he does in a post-modern sort of way come to reject the idea that a unified picture is anything other than an illusion, possibly a dangerous one, since his parents and his sister perish as a result of their cleaving too tightly to their certainties. When his sister Susan says to him They're still fucking us. Good-bye, Daniel. You get the picture, she is already in a mental home after trying to commit suicide; her illusions have cycled her through stages of hysterical affiliation, starting with a belief in God when she was small, through experiments with sex and drugs to, finally (and fatally), the radical politics (sixties-style) she believes will help her rehabilitate her parents, her world, and herself. Daniel, on the other hand, cannot decide whether she has said "good-bye" or "good boy". There are several places in the book where Daniel's decision to write his story this way or that way are considered. We are party to his fragmented thought processes, his to-do lists, his doubts and questions, his wondering how to spell the word 'commit'. Paragraphs are broken, abandoned, picked up mid-sentence. In one intriguing moment, the words "violin spiders" appear suddenly at the top of the page, for no apparent reason. I'm still wondering about that. The story switches backwards and forwards in time, there are sudden shifts in perspective from first to third-person, and long, developed narrative segments reminiscent of Philip Roth or Saul Bellow interspersed with political and historical exposition ranging from descriptions of Tsarist Russia to Bikini Atoll to Anaheim. What makes the book a great one (it was hailed as "a masterpiece" by the Guardian when it came out in 1971) is Doctorow's ability to keep this number of balls in the air without stumbling. The sightlines of his fragmented story arcs dip and feint and weave through one another in such a way that a coherent picture emerges - not the picture Daniel was looking for, not 'the answer' a desperate mind craves - but a fantastically complex and mobile collage in which it is possible to recognize the pattern of lives lived in time and in society.

Doctorow takes a not-altogether dim view of the radical left, despite his relativist proclivities. His portraits of Paul and Rochelle Isaacson are subtle in details, nuanced, real - not exactly warm, though Rochelle emerges as a hero of sorts, but deeply human. Their struggle is contextualized, made comprehensible, and where their rigid beliefs betray them, we feel more sympathy than contempt. Which is to say, Doctorow handles the subject with enough sensitivity to accomodate a readerly bias toward the left, despite his rejection of radical absolutism. It is similar in this way to Hari Kunzru's 2007 novel 'My Revolutions': the characters are seen to be misguided, but their humanity is never abandoned, and so it is possible to approach them from different perspectives. Doctorow's Daniel is, if anything, more likely to alienate the reader's sympathies than his dyed-in-the-wool communist relatives, because he is cruel, disconnected, and frankly misogynistic. I am still undecided as to where to pin the blame for phrases such as "shoving large cocks into everyone's mother", "she obviously had a pair", and "I remember the hair around her slit", not to mention the cigarette-lighter-in-the-anus scene; some of these ugly phrases seem dangerously close to authorial, though I believe the intention generally is to attribute their spirit to Daniel's moral disturbance, which is ultimately contained (just) within his narrative. But do we really need to know about the "sour smell of excrement" which rises from Daniel's wife's spread buttocks? Doctorow walks a pretty fine line in this department. Fortunately he proves himself fairly adept at walking fine lines through other sorts of murky human territory as well, through the morally questionable aspects of the lecherous traitor Mindish and his controlling, middle-class daughter Linda, for example. His characters aren't idealized, to say the least. But they are recognizable, if we are honest. Doctorow is a cool-eyed sort of observer, who aims for the unclassifiable in us, no matter who we are or what we may or may not have done, and his refusal to deliver the answers we crave despite ourselves is curiously satisfying.