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.