With much justification we complain that trans characters in the movies are usually played by cis actors. Two recent films that (fortunately) failed to be made, films about Lili Elba and James Barry were both intended to have a cis woman actor playing the trans characters even though Elbe was a woman, and Barry a man.
There are groups that have this worse than we do. Apart from Christopher Reeve after his accident, how many disabled characters are played by disabled actors?
This is a short list where trans actors of different types have played trans characters. I have not included professional gender impersonators here. A much longer list from Vesta Tilly to Julian Eltinge to RuPaul could be created, but that is not what this list is about. Nor, with one or two exceptions, does this list include documentaries, nor trans actors in cis roles.
It is no accident that is list is more World Cinema than Hollywood.
Kazuo Hasegaw in Yukinojo Henge (Actor’s Revenge), 1935
Ed Wood in Glen or Glenda, 1952.
Kazuo Hasegaw in Yukinojo Henge (Actor’s Revenge), 1963.
Rachel Harlow, Crystal LaBeija, Sabrina in The Queen, 1968.
Carlotta in The Naked Bunyip, 1970.
Bibiana Fernandez in Cambio de Sexo, 1977.
Jayne County in Jubilee, 1977.
Eva Robin’s in El Transexual, 1977
Angie Stardust in Die Alptraumfrau, 1981.
Angie Stardust, Jayne County, Tara O’Hara in Stadt der Verlorenen Seelen, 1983.
Georgina Beyer in Jewel’s Darl, 1985.
Shelley Mars in Die Jungfrauen-maschine, 1988
Eva Robin’s, Romy Haag in Mascara, 1989.
Alessandra di Sanzo in Mery per sempre, 1989.
Alexis Arquette in Last Exit to Brooklyn, 1989.
International Chrysis in Q & A, 1990.
Doris Fish in Vegas in Space, 1991.
Adele Anderson in Company Business, 1991.
Estelle Asmodelle in Secret Fantasies, 1992.
Ichgola Androgyn, Tima die Goettliche, Ovo Maltine in Ich Bin Meine Eigene Frau, 1992.
Eva Robin’s in Bella al Bar, 1995.
Lady Chablis in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, 1997.
Tima die Goettliche in Der Einstein des Sex, 1999
Antonia San Juan in Todo sobre mi madre, 1999.
Ingrid de Souza in Princesa, 2001.
Lauren Foster in Circuit, 2001.
Kokkorn Benjathikoon in Satree lek (Iron ladies), 2001.
Kokkorn Benjathikoon in Satree lek 2 (Iron ladies 2), 2001.
Florencia de la Vega in Los Roldan, 2004.
Stephanie Michelini in Wild Side, 2004
Alexis Arquette in Lords of Dogtown, 2005.
Bobby Darling in Navarasa, 2005
Raquela Rios in The Amazing Truth About Queen Raquela, 2008.
Lee Na-young in Lady Daddy, 2010.
Yasmin Lee in The Hangover II, 2011.
Harmony Santana in Gun Hill Road, 2011.
Showing posts with label movies. Show all posts
Showing posts with label movies. Show all posts
10 April 2012
02 December 2011
All Good Things
Directed by Andrew Jarecki
Script by Marcus Hinchey & Marc Smerling.
101 minutes 2010
Nationality of director: US
Location of story: New York, Galveston, Los Angeles, Bethlehem, Pa.
Filming location: Connecticut, New York City
Plot
See my Who’s Who entry for Robert Durst. The film adheres particularly closely to the facts, particularly by the standards of Hollywood. The major changes are the names of the characters, and a willingness to speculate just what happened to Kathie Durst and Susan Berman.
The film also adds a few lines of dialogue re why David Marks disguises as a woman. He tells the court that he wanted to get as far as possible away from being David Marks. Also Malvern Bump asks him if he actually likes girlie things, to which David says ‘no’.
Curiosities
All Good Things was the name of the health food store that Robert and Kathie ran in Vermont..
The names of all the characters were changed.
The film was made in 2008, but than sat on the shelf, and was quietly released to DVD early in 2011 after a minimal theatrical release.
Reaction of the Durst family and organization
Robert Durst visited the sets as the film was being made and watched from a distance. Apparently he likes the film, but doesn’t admit to any murders.
The Durst Organization considered suing, but “this movie will be seen by so few people that litigation would be superfluous”.
Script by Marcus Hinchey & Marc Smerling.
101 minutes 2010
Ryan Gosling plays David Marks (= Robert Durst)Country of finance: US
Kirsten Dunst plays Katie Marks (= Kathie Durst)
Frank Langella plays Sanford Marks (= Seymour Durst)
Philip Baker Hall plays Malvern Bump (= Morris Black)
Lily Rabe plays Deborah Lehrman (= Susan Berman)
Nationality of director: US
Location of story: New York, Galveston, Los Angeles, Bethlehem, Pa.
Filming location: Connecticut, New York City
Plot
See my Who’s Who entry for Robert Durst. The film adheres particularly closely to the facts, particularly by the standards of Hollywood. The major changes are the names of the characters, and a willingness to speculate just what happened to Kathie Durst and Susan Berman.
The film also adds a few lines of dialogue re why David Marks disguises as a woman. He tells the court that he wanted to get as far as possible away from being David Marks. Also Malvern Bump asks him if he actually likes girlie things, to which David says ‘no’.
Curiosities
All Good Things was the name of the health food store that Robert and Kathie ran in Vermont..
The names of all the characters were changed.
The film was made in 2008, but than sat on the shelf, and was quietly released to DVD early in 2011 after a minimal theatrical release.
Reaction of the Durst family and organization
Robert Durst visited the sets as the film was being made and watched from a distance. Apparently he likes the film, but doesn’t admit to any murders.
The Durst Organization considered suing, but “this movie will be seen by so few people that litigation would be superfluous”.
- Charles V. Bagli & Kevin. “That’s Me on Screen, but I Still Didn’t Do It”. The New York Times, Nov 24, 2010. www.nytimes.com/2010/11/28/movies/28durst.html.
- "All Good Things (film)". Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Good_Things_%28film%29.
22 May 2011
Eaux D’Artifice
Directed by Kenneth Anger
13 minutes 1953
Country of finance: Italy/US
Nationality of director: US
Filming location: Garden of Villa D’Este, Tivoli
Synopsis
A person in eighteenth-century clothing and sun glasses runs around the fountains of the Villa D’Este, to a soundtrack by Antonio Vivaldi.
Trivia
Kenneth Anger’s first film in 1947 was called Fireworks, which in French is Feux D’Artifice. This film is about water so: Eaux D’Artifice.
Anger in his early notes for the Cinema 16 catalogue described the film as “the evocation of a Firbank heroine” and her flight as “the pursuit of the night moth”. This refers to the end of Ronald Firbank’s Valmouth where the heroine goes into a garden in pursuit of a butterfly, dressed in her wedding gown and carrying her bouquet.
All we know about the actor, Carmilla Salvatorelli, is that s/he was a short person, a circus performer, introduced to Anger by Frederico Fellini. Anger wanted a short actor to make the fountains seem larger. The actor is otherwise unknown. When I first read about this film in the 1990s the general assumption was the actor was Carmillo Salvatorelli, that is that this is a cross-acting part. Now IMDB has changed the credit to say Carmilla Salvatorelli, and likewise the booklet that comes with the Magic Lantern Cycle DVD box. However in his revised notes for the Cinema 16 catalogue, Anger wrote Carmillo Salvatorelli.
The change of mind of over Carmillo/a Salvatorelli ‘s gender is no longer mentioned. However it is the fact that she has generally been considered to be male, that has resulted in this being considered a classic of queer cinema.
13 minutes 1953
Carmillo/a Salvatorelli as the Water Witch
Country of finance: Italy/US Nationality of director: US
Filming location: Garden of Villa D’Este, Tivoli
Synopsis
A person in eighteenth-century clothing and sun glasses runs around the fountains of the Villa D’Este, to a soundtrack by Antonio Vivaldi.
Trivia
Kenneth Anger’s first film in 1947 was called Fireworks, which in French is Feux D’Artifice. This film is about water so: Eaux D’Artifice.
Anger in his early notes for the Cinema 16 catalogue described the film as “the evocation of a Firbank heroine” and her flight as “the pursuit of the night moth”. This refers to the end of Ronald Firbank’s Valmouth where the heroine goes into a garden in pursuit of a butterfly, dressed in her wedding gown and carrying her bouquet.
The change of mind of over Carmillo/a Salvatorelli ‘s gender is no longer mentioned. However it is the fact that she has generally been considered to be male, that has resulted in this being considered a classic of queer cinema.
- P Adams Sitney. Visionary film: the American avant-garde, 1943-2000. Oxford University Press, 2002: 91-3.
- Deborah Allison. “Eaux D’Artifice: Wet Dreams and Water Sports in the Garden of Delights”. Senses of Cinema, 46, 2008. www.sensesofcinema.com/2008/cteq/eaux-artifice/
- “Eaux D’Artifice”. Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eaux_d%27Artifice
10 May 2011
Drag moments in Miller’s Crossing
Directed by Joel & Ethen Coen
Script by Joel & Ethen Coen.
115 minutes1990
Nationality of director: US
Location of story: an unnamed city
Filming location: New Orleans
The much acclaimed Coen Brothers gangster movie loosely based on Red Harvest and Glass Key by Dashiell Hammet and Jojimbo by Akira Kurosawa.
When Tom Reagan bursts into the ladies’ room, notice, if you don’t blink, the large women in black and white: an obvious extra cameo by one of the other principles.
Then there is the woman who screams when Reagan falls upon her. She is played by Helen Jolly who is unknown except for this film. What do you think?
Script by Joel & Ethen Coen.
115 minutes1990
Gabriel Byrne plays Tom ReaganCountry of finance: US
Marcia Gay Harden plays Verna
John Turturro plays Bernie
Albert Finnie plays Leo
Nationality of director: US
Location of story: an unnamed city
Filming location: New Orleans
The much acclaimed Coen Brothers gangster movie loosely based on Red Harvest and Glass Key by Dashiell Hammet and Jojimbo by Akira Kurosawa.
When Tom Reagan bursts into the ladies’ room, notice, if you don’t blink, the large women in black and white: an obvious extra cameo by one of the other principles.
Then there is the woman who screams when Reagan falls upon her. She is played by Helen Jolly who is unknown except for this film. What do you think?
09 January 2011
Peacock
Directed by Michael Lander
Script by Michael Lander & Ryan O Roy.
Edited by Sally Menke.
90 minutes 2010 Lionsgate
Nationality of director: US
Location of story: Peacock, Nebraska
Filming location: Iowa
Synopsis
*** This review may contain spoilers ***
John has a low-level job in a bank in small-town Nebraska. Every morning Emma, whom no-one in town has met, makes his breakfast, does the washing and leaves him a note re shopping. John keeps a tin box under the outside stairs so that Emma will not know about his savings account and his sports cards. The room of the recently deceased Mrs Skillpa has been left untouched. Only a few minutes into the film we find out that John and Emma share the same body. One day a train caboose slips off the tracks and ends up in the Skillpa back yard as Emma is putting out the washing. This results in others meeting Emma. The local mayor wishes to use the derailment for political advantage. Emma is pleased to let him, John is antagonistic. Maggie comes by to ask why there have been no cheques since Mrs Skillpa, John’s mother, died. Emma drives her home and finds out that Maggie’s son was fathered by John – an attempt by Mrs Skillpa to make a man out of her son. Fanny Krill attempts to recruit Emma for her work at the women’s shelter, which results in John missing time at work. John attempts to run from Emma and the memory of his mother, and takes a room at the local motel. However when he opens the overnight bag that he has brought, he finds the dress and wig that define Emma. Emma decides to kill off John. She picks up a man, takes him the the motel room, kills him, dresses him in John’s suit and sets the room on fire.
Who are they?
This is the first and so far only film by Michael Lander.
This is the first and so far only film written by Ryan O Roy.
Editor Sally Menke died in September 2010 while hiking.
Cillian Murphy is an Irish actor of growing note who has played cis male parts in 28 Days Later, Girl with a Pearl Earring, Cold Mountain, The Wind that Shakes the Barley, Batman and Inception. He also played a trans woman, the lead character Kitten Braden, in Neil Jordan’s Breakfast on Pluto – in fact Cillian lobbied Neil for several years to make the film.
Susan Sarandon, of course, was Janet in the Rocky Horror Picture Show. She has been acting since 1969, has been in loads and loads of movies, and if she were British would probably be a Dame.
Ellen Page is an up and coming young actress.
Keith Carradine is part of the Carradine acting dynasty, has also been in loads of movies, is especially noted for his roles in Robert Altman and Alan Rudolph films.
Curiosities
In the same way that most films made in Toronto or Vancouver are claimed to be set south of the border, Peacock is filmed in Iowa, but claims to be set in Nebraska.
The when of the film is left vague, but as no-one has a television, it must be set in the early 1950s. Although the women’s shelter and the feminist orientation of Fanny Frill do seem to be a bit anachronistic re this assumption.
John has obvious beard stubble, while Emma does not. Emma is not shown dealing with this.
Nobody comments on how similar looking Emma is to John.
Whilst being a much better film than most of the rubbish that plays the multiplexes, Peacock was not released to either the festival or to the art-house circuit. The film was delayed for over a year after completion and then went straight to DVD.
Is John/Emma a transvestite?
A few minutes into the film we watch as Emma undresses to transform into John and we see that she wears male underwear. This is unusual for a transvestite.
John and Emma are both ignorant of what the other does. This is a symptom of multiple personality. The shrinks equivocate about whether one can be both trans and multiple. The DSM has said that to be transsexual, one must not have any (other) psychiatric condition. Other shrinks talk about co-morbidity. Both of these positions of course make the unreasonable assumption that being trans is in itself a psychiatric condition.
The ghost behind the screenplay is obviously Psycho’s Norman Bates. Both John and Norman are dominated by their dead mothers.
Another film that is echoed in Roman Polanski’s The Tenant, where the personality of the previous tenant of the room takes over Trelkovky’s body and life.
The film is not about choice, about deciding who you are and taking steps to be yourself. It is about an other that takes you over, and even kills the original.
There is another ghost behind the screenplay, one that Lander and Roy may not have heard of. The recurring voice of the dead mother constitutes an introjection. Remember how Sanda Davis explained how introjections can take you over, and that transsexuality can and should be treated and cured as an introjection. But apart from me and three other people, nobody has read Sanda Davis. I think that Davis owes much more to Psycho than Peacock owes to Sanda Davis.
As I said about Norman Bates, John/Emma is not like any other transvestite that you may have met.
Script by Michael Lander & Ryan O Roy.
Edited by Sally Menke.
90 minutes 2010 Lionsgate
Cillian Murphy plays John/Emma SkillpaCountry of finance: US
Susan Sarandon plays Fanny Crill
Ellen Page plays Maggie
Keith Carradine plays Mayor Ray Crill
Nationality of director: US
Location of story: Peacock, Nebraska
Filming location: Iowa
Synopsis
*** This review may contain spoilers ***
John has a low-level job in a bank in small-town Nebraska. Every morning Emma, whom no-one in town has met, makes his breakfast, does the washing and leaves him a note re shopping. John keeps a tin box under the outside stairs so that Emma will not know about his savings account and his sports cards. The room of the recently deceased Mrs Skillpa has been left untouched. Only a few minutes into the film we find out that John and Emma share the same body. One day a train caboose slips off the tracks and ends up in the Skillpa back yard as Emma is putting out the washing. This results in others meeting Emma. The local mayor wishes to use the derailment for political advantage. Emma is pleased to let him, John is antagonistic. Maggie comes by to ask why there have been no cheques since Mrs Skillpa, John’s mother, died. Emma drives her home and finds out that Maggie’s son was fathered by John – an attempt by Mrs Skillpa to make a man out of her son. Fanny Krill attempts to recruit Emma for her work at the women’s shelter, which results in John missing time at work. John attempts to run from Emma and the memory of his mother, and takes a room at the local motel. However when he opens the overnight bag that he has brought, he finds the dress and wig that define Emma. Emma decides to kill off John. She picks up a man, takes him the the motel room, kills him, dresses him in John’s suit and sets the room on fire.Who are they?
This is the first and so far only film by Michael Lander.
This is the first and so far only film written by Ryan O Roy.
Editor Sally Menke died in September 2010 while hiking.
Cillian Murphy is an Irish actor of growing note who has played cis male parts in 28 Days Later, Girl with a Pearl Earring, Cold Mountain, The Wind that Shakes the Barley, Batman and Inception. He also played a trans woman, the lead character Kitten Braden, in Neil Jordan’s Breakfast on Pluto – in fact Cillian lobbied Neil for several years to make the film.
Susan Sarandon, of course, was Janet in the Rocky Horror Picture Show. She has been acting since 1969, has been in loads and loads of movies, and if she were British would probably be a Dame.
Ellen Page is an up and coming young actress.
Keith Carradine is part of the Carradine acting dynasty, has also been in loads of movies, is especially noted for his roles in Robert Altman and Alan Rudolph films.
Curiosities
In the same way that most films made in Toronto or Vancouver are claimed to be set south of the border, Peacock is filmed in Iowa, but claims to be set in Nebraska.
The when of the film is left vague, but as no-one has a television, it must be set in the early 1950s. Although the women’s shelter and the feminist orientation of Fanny Frill do seem to be a bit anachronistic re this assumption.
John has obvious beard stubble, while Emma does not. Emma is not shown dealing with this.
Nobody comments on how similar looking Emma is to John.
Whilst being a much better film than most of the rubbish that plays the multiplexes, Peacock was not released to either the festival or to the art-house circuit. The film was delayed for over a year after completion and then went straight to DVD.
Is John/Emma a transvestite?
A few minutes into the film we watch as Emma undresses to transform into John and we see that she wears male underwear. This is unusual for a transvestite.
John and Emma are both ignorant of what the other does. This is a symptom of multiple personality. The shrinks equivocate about whether one can be both trans and multiple. The DSM has said that to be transsexual, one must not have any (other) psychiatric condition. Other shrinks talk about co-morbidity. Both of these positions of course make the unreasonable assumption that being trans is in itself a psychiatric condition.
Conclusion
It is difficult to watch this reacting as if John is a real-world transvestite. Some of the life options are real on this reading, but they do not stay so.The ghost behind the screenplay is obviously Psycho’s Norman Bates. Both John and Norman are dominated by their dead mothers.
Another film that is echoed in Roman Polanski’s The Tenant, where the personality of the previous tenant of the room takes over Trelkovky’s body and life.
The film is not about choice, about deciding who you are and taking steps to be yourself. It is about an other that takes you over, and even kills the original.
There is another ghost behind the screenplay, one that Lander and Roy may not have heard of. The recurring voice of the dead mother constitutes an introjection. Remember how Sanda Davis explained how introjections can take you over, and that transsexuality can and should be treated and cured as an introjection. But apart from me and three other people, nobody has read Sanda Davis. I think that Davis owes much more to Psycho than Peacock owes to Sanda Davis.
As I said about Norman Bates, John/Emma is not like any other transvestite that you may have met.
16 August 2010
Serp i Molot
English title: Hammer and Sickle
Directed by Sergei Livnev
Script by Sergei Livnev & Vladimir Valutsky
93 minutes 1994
Aleksei Serebryakov as Evdokim Kuznetsov
Country of finance: Russia
Nationality of director: Russian
Location of story: USSR
They became the models for Vera Mukhina's famous sculpture that adorned the 1937 Paris World's Fair and became the emblem of Mosfilm. The athletic male representing the Hammer (Heavy Industry). After posing for the statue, the Kuznetsovs became celebrities, living in luxury, Kuznetsov a member of the Supreme Soviet.
However Kuznetsov became angry and attacked Stalin. He was shot in the scuffle. Paralysed and unable to speak, Evdokim was turned into a hero once more: he had supposedly saved Stalin's life and was exhibited as a museum piece. His wife commanded his thoughts, and even wrote his book "Hammer and Sickle."
Directed by Sergei Livnev
Script by Sergei Livnev & Vladimir Valutsky
93 minutes 1994
Aleksei Serebryakov as Evdokim Kuznetsov
Country of finance: Russia
Nationality of director: Russian
Location of story: USSR
Synopsis
As part of a experiment to meet the demand by Stalin that the Soviet Union have more soldiers, Evdokiia Kuznetsova is taken from the gulag and is transformed into a man, Evdokim. He then becomes a Stakhanovite building the Moscow underground in the 1930s, marries a female fellow worker, and adopts a child, Dolores, who had been orphaned in the Spanish Civil War.
They became the models for Vera Mukhina's famous sculpture that adorned the 1937 Paris World's Fair and became the emblem of Mosfilm. The athletic male representing the Hammer (Heavy Industry). After posing for the statue, the Kuznetsovs became celebrities, living in luxury, Kuznetsov a member of the Supreme Soviet.However Kuznetsov became angry and attacked Stalin. He was shot in the scuffle. Paralysed and unable to speak, Evdokim was turned into a hero once more: he had supposedly saved Stalin's life and was exhibited as a museum piece. His wife commanded his thoughts, and even wrote his book "Hammer and Sickle."
Interpretation
- Birgit Beumers. “Myth-making and myth-taking: Lost ideals and the war in contemporary Russian cinema”. Canadian Slavonic Papers. Mar-Jun 2000. Online at: http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3763/is_200003/ai_n8890675/
- Aleksandr Prokhorov. “ “I Need Some Life-Assertive Character’ or How to Die in the Most inspiring Pose: Bodied in the Stalinist Museum of Hammer and Sickle”. Studies in Slavonic Cultures. 1, Jan 2000. http://www.pitt.edu/~slavic/sisc/SISC1/prokhorov.pdf
06 June 2010
Steppenwolf
by Basil Creighton. London: Martin Secker. New York: Henry Hold & Co. 1929. Many other editions.Film
produced by Melvin Fisherman & Richard Herland.Directed by Fred Haines
Script by Fred Haines based on the novel by Herman Hesse
106 minutes 1974
Max von Sydow plays Harry HallerCountry of finance: USA/Switzerland/UK/France/Italy
Dominique Sanda plays Hermine
Pierre Clémenti plays Pablo
Nationality of director: US
Location of story: Germany
Filming location: Basel, Hamburg.
Synopsis.
Harry Haller, a man devoted to the high culture of Goethe and Mozart but alienated by the shallow bourgeois pretence of admiring that culture, sees himself as having a second animalistic nature, a wolf of the steppes. However he is in despair and on the verge of suicide when he encounters Hermine in a chance visit to a dance bar. She offers him friendship and teaches him to value the little things in life, to dance and to take drugs. From the start he notices that her features have a masculine aspect, and feels that she reminds him of his childhood friend Hermann. He eventually fully falls in love with her at the costume ball where she is dressed as a man. She and Pablo, a jazz saxophonist, take Harry to a magic theatre where he is able to encounter some other of his myriad personalities.Who are they?
Herman Hesse (1877 – 1962) was an influential German-Swiss novelist with interests in Buddhism and Jungianism.Melvin Fishman produced only this film. He was a student of Jung and Alchemy and wanted Steppenwolf to be the first Jungian Film. The film was in pre-production for seven years as Fishman built up a relationship with the Hesse family to obtain the film rights. He did lots of drugs and had a heart attack shortly after the film was finished. Two years later another heart attack killed him. He died with 20 Swiss Francs in his pocket, and no other money.
Richard Herland produced one television series and four films between 1964 and 1986. He raised the money for Steppenwolf.
Peter Sprague, the major financier, was a scion of US industrial wealth who thought of himself as radical.
Fred Haines (1936 – 2008), from Los Angeles, fluent in French and German, did a degree in literature. He met film director Joseph Strick and together they wrote the script of James Joyce’s Ulysses, 1967. It was nominated for an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay. He was a co-writer of Strick’s Tropic of Cancer, but took his name from the credits after a disagreement. Steppenwolf in the only film that he directed.
Max von Sydow has been in over 140 films. He is one of Sweden’s most distinguished actors. He has played both God and the Devil.
Dominique Sanda is a French actress who was especially known for her roles in Italian films. She has been in 54 films.
Pierre Clémenti, also French, had just completed a two-year sentence for drug charges.
Curiosities
The post-Zabriskie-Point Michelangelo Antonioni was approached to direct, but he thought that the book was unfilmable. John Frankenheimer and actor James Coburn were also approached to direct.Timothy Leary, on the run from prison, was considered for the part of Harry Haller, but he gave two acid tabs to Sprague who then had a bad trip.
Conrad Rooks, a heir to the Avon cosmetics fortune, who had made the druggie film Chappaqua, was also courting the Hesse family for Steppenwolf, but ended up with Siddhartha instead.
While the film was made in English, none of the actors are native English speakers.
Peter Sprague, the major financier ended up owning the rights. He put the film on a shelf for two years.
The colours were wrong when the prints were made.
The special effects were cutting edge for 1974.
Mati Klarwein (1932 – 2002), who did the album covers for Santana’s Abraxas and Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew, painted the images in the corridors of the Magic Theatre.
The Czech artist, Jaroslav Bradac , did the animated sequence.
Decades earlier than the Terminator films and The Matrix, Steppenwolf includes a sequence where humans are fighting a war against the machines.
The entire film is available on YouTube.
“…it seems to me that of all my books Steppenwolf is the one that was more often and more violently misunderstood than any other, and frequently it is actually the affirmative and enthusiastic readers, rather than those who rejected the book, who have reacted to it oddly…”–Hermann Hesse in the 1961 prologue to Steppenwolf.
I was one of very few people who saw the film on the big screen.
Interpretation
Do we have one personality? Or is it an illusion? Early in the book, Harry sees himself as having two personalities: the spiritual, high-culture snob; and the wolf from the steppes who loathes the bourgeoisie.When he enters the Magic Theatre the illusion, his fake personality are fractured and he finds that he has thousands of personalities. Significantly he does not have any female personalities, or perhaps he merely fails to acknowledge them.
There is a suggestion in the text that somehow Hermine is not real - as such she would be Harry's Anima (Hesse was influenced by Carl Jung at the time he wrote the book). This idea is supported by the fact that 'Hermine' is the feminine form of the Hesse’s first name. As Harry is not able to recognize his feminine selves, his anima is projected outwards. and takes the form of an independent person. The ‘fact’ that he maybe/maybe not kills Hermine at the end would constitute a further refusal to accept his inner woman.
- Janny Fabian. “Jung hearts run free”. The Guardian. 21 April 2000. http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2000/apr/21/4.
- “Steppenwolf (1974)”. 366 Weird Movies. Mar 24, 2009. http://366weirdmovies.com/15-steppenwolf-1974
- “Steppenwolf (novel)”. Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steppenwolf_%28novel%29
- “Steppenwolf (film)”. Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steppenwolf_%28film%29
07 February 2010
Fellini’s La dolce vita
Directed by Federico Fellini.
Script by Federico Fellini, Ennio Flaiano, Tullio Pinelli, Brunello Rondi & Pier Paolo Pasolini (uncredited)
174 minutes 1960
Nationality of director: Italy
Location of story: Rome
Filming location: Rome & Cinecittà
Nico (Christa Päffgen 1938 – 1988), related to the Päffgen brewery in Cologne, went on to appear in the Morrisey-Warhol film Chelsea Girls and to sing with The Velvet Underground. She died aged 40 after a minor heart attack while cycling.
Dominot continued as a female impersonator and performer and has his own club in Rome.
Carlo Musto is otherwise unknown.
Steiner was based on the novelist Cesare Pavese(1908 – 1950) an anti-fascist and award-winning novelist who committed suicide. Co-screenwriter Tullio Pinelli had gone to school with Pavese and felt that he had become burnt out.
The film opens with a parousia, an arrival of Jesus as a statue carried by a helicopter. It ends with a parousia of the sea monster that can still look at you after being dead for three days (the fish symbolism of Jesus is hinted at here). Both the opening and the ending have a non-communication because of distance or of noise. Thus like Mark’s gospel the end reflects the beginning. Click here for an essay by David Ulansey comparing the beginning and end of Mark’s gospel.
The centre of Mark’s gospel is the transfiguration where Jesus goes up a mountain to gain an epiphany. At the centre of La Dolce Vita Marcello goes up to Steiner’s apartment and finds that what he believed in does not exist. Steiner says: "Sometimes at night the darkness and silence frightens me. Peace frightens me. I feel it's only a facade, hiding the face of hell".
The Vatican newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano condemned the film as a parody of Jesus’ second coming. The film was banned in Catholic Spain until 1981 after the death of Franco. The Vatican also disliked the film for its portrayal of Rome’s aristocracy which of course is very dynastically intertwined with the Church hierarchy.
The famous sequence of bathing in the fountain was suggested by Giò Stajano (who became Maria in 1983) who had himself done the fountain thing, and had written novels about the café society scene in Rome, of which La Dolce Vita can be seen as a sequel. His novels, of course, have a lot more gay characters.
When Marcello’s father visits and they go to a nightclub, he tells of his visit to Paris where he saw a stripper who revealed herself to be a man. Probably he had been to Le Carousel, but it is not named.
In the last party scene, optimistically called an ‘orgy’ in some accounts, there are suddenly two young men who change upstairs, come down in drag and do a dance routine. The others refer to them with male pronouns. IMDB lists three transvestites: Domino, Carlo Musto and Antonio Jacono (uncredited). Close watching of the film fails to reveal a third transvestic character, but the mystery is resolved when one discovers that Domino’s birth name was Antonio Iacono.
Script by Federico Fellini, Ennio Flaiano, Tullio Pinelli, Brunello Rondi & Pier Paolo Pasolini (uncredited)
174 minutes 1960
Marcello Mastroianni plays Marcello RubiniCountry of finance: Italy/France
Anita Ekberg plays Sylvia
Anouk Aimee plays Maddalena
Alain Cuny plays Steiner
Annibale Nichi plays Marcello’s father
Walter Santesso plays Paparazzo
Nico plays herself
Dominot and Carlo Musto play transvestites
Nationality of director: Italy
Location of story: Rome
Filming location: Rome & Cinecittà
Synopsis
Marcello is a hack journalist chasing celebrities, religious stories and the local aristocracy. He encounters Steiner, an established writer with a loving wife and children, and an attractive apartment, all that Marcello aspires to. Later Steiner kills his children and commits suicide.Who are they?
Marcello Mastroianni (1924 – 1996) acted in 143 films. La Dolce Vita made him famous. He was married to Flora Carabella from 1948 until his death. He famously had an affair and a daughter with Catherine Deneuve. He died of pancreatic cancer. It is also rumoured that he was the young boyfriend of Giovanni Montini (1867 – 1978) whose stage name was Pope Paul VI.Nico (Christa Päffgen 1938 – 1988), related to the Päffgen brewery in Cologne, went on to appear in the Morrisey-Warhol film Chelsea Girls and to sing with The Velvet Underground. She died aged 40 after a minor heart attack while cycling.
Dominot continued as a female impersonator and performer and has his own club in Rome.
Carlo Musto is otherwise unknown.
Steiner was based on the novelist Cesare Pavese(1908 – 1950) an anti-fascist and award-winning novelist who committed suicide. Co-screenwriter Tullio Pinelli had gone to school with Pavese and felt that he had become burnt out.
Religious aspects
The film divides into seven episodes, which reflects the seven hills of Rome, the seven sins, seven sacraments, seven days of creation etc. See the Wikipedia article for details.The film opens with a parousia, an arrival of Jesus as a statue carried by a helicopter. It ends with a parousia of the sea monster that can still look at you after being dead for three days (the fish symbolism of Jesus is hinted at here). Both the opening and the ending have a non-communication because of distance or of noise. Thus like Mark’s gospel the end reflects the beginning. Click here for an essay by David Ulansey comparing the beginning and end of Mark’s gospel.
The centre of Mark’s gospel is the transfiguration where Jesus goes up a mountain to gain an epiphany. At the centre of La Dolce Vita Marcello goes up to Steiner’s apartment and finds that what he believed in does not exist. Steiner says: "Sometimes at night the darkness and silence frightens me. Peace frightens me. I feel it's only a facade, hiding the face of hell".
The Vatican newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano condemned the film as a parody of Jesus’ second coming. The film was banned in Catholic Spain until 1981 after the death of Franco. The Vatican also disliked the film for its portrayal of Rome’s aristocracy which of course is very dynastically intertwined with the Church hierarchy.
The trans bits
When Marcello’s father visits and they go to a nightclub, he tells of his visit to Paris where he saw a stripper who revealed herself to be a man. Probably he had been to Le Carousel, but it is not named.
In the last party scene, optimistically called an ‘orgy’ in some accounts, there are suddenly two young men who change upstairs, come down in drag and do a dance routine. The others refer to them with male pronouns. IMDB lists three transvestites: Domino, Carlo Musto and Antonio Jacono (uncredited). Close watching of the film fails to reveal a third transvestic character, but the mystery is resolved when one discovers that Domino’s birth name was Antonio Iacono.
Sexual politics
La Dolce Vita was made between two great scandals. The heterosexual Montesi Affair of 1953 began with a dead young woman washed up on a beach near Ostia (a second hint from the sea monster at the end of the film) and expanded into police and political cover-ups and tales of drugs and orgies. The gay Ballete Verdi scandal, 1960 came right after La Dolce Vita opened, and unlike the Montesi Affair included no murder, but like it expanded to include celebrities.- “La Dolce Vita”. Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Dolce_Vita
- Philip French. “Italian cinema’s sweet success”. The Observer. 17 Feb 2008. http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2008/feb/17/features.worldcinema.
- Darwin porter & Danforth Prince. Hollywood Babylon: It’s Back!.
Blood Moon Productions, Ltd. 2008: 161.
04 January 2010
The films of Candy Darling
See the biographical entry on Candy.
Flesh 1968
Women in Revolt 1972
There are no clips online from Women in Revolt.
04 October 2009
Weapons of Mass Distraction
Script by Larry Gelbart
100minutes 1997 HBO
Gabriel Bryne plays Lionel PowersCountry of finance: US
Ben Kingsley plays Julian Messenger
Mimi Rogers plays Ariel Powers
Jordan Ladd plays Letitia
Nationality of director: US
Location of story: Los Angeles
Filming location: Los Angeles
Synopsis
Powers and Messenger, both unscrupulous entrepreneurs, use blackmail, bribery and other crimes to get their way. Finally both dig up enough dirt on the other that they have to become partners. Except that the ‘dirt’ on Powers, which refers to his wife and their threesome with a younger woman, Letitia, is in fact nothing at all to be ashamed of.Who are they?
Larry Gelbart was one of the writers on Tootsie
, 1982.Jordan Ladd is part of the Ladd acting dynasty.
Mimi Rogers was Agent Dana Fowley in the X-Files, and the mother in The Rapture
, 1991.Gabriel Bryne and Ben Kingsley are well known lead actors.
Conclusion
Any husband should be proud to have a wife who has overcome such obstacles. Even if, in modesty, she had never actually mentioned them.
Of course the cliché that trans women were sexually abused as children is done far too much in movies. It is true in only a few cases.
I suppose that a cis actress had to be cast in this film, otherwise the 'surprise' would be anticipated.
29 September 2009
Surrogates
Directed by Jonathan Mostow
Script by Michael Ferris & John Brancato based on a graphic novel by Robert Venditti & Brett Weldele
88 minutes 2009
Nationality of director: US
Location of story: Boston
Filming location: Boston and other towns in Massachusetts.
Did you watch the Matrix films and wonder why no-one had an other-gender body inside the Matrix? This film does not leave that aspect unexplored.
Instead of a virtual reality Matrix, most people in this film have a surrogate that is a younger, better looking version of themselves. They send the surrogate out to work and play, and they themselves stay at home in a high-tech chair that allows them to see, hear and feel whatever happened to the surrogate.
A young woman in a skimpy dress is murdered at the beginning of the film. The surrogate cops, Greer and Peters chase up her operator, and find an overweight middle-aged man. An attractive young black man is shown by his ID card to be really a middle-aged white man.
Peters’ surrogate is at first operated by the real Jennifer Peters. Later the real one is killed, and the Peters surrogate is being operated by the bad guy. Greer has to get himself inside the Peters surrogate so that he can save the world.
To put it simply: The Bruce Willis character save the world while in this body.
In conclusion: a middlebrow sex-transfer fantasy for those who do fantasize other-gender bodies, but never actually do it in reality. This aspect is generally not being mentioned in the reviews.
Script by Michael Ferris & John Brancato based on a graphic novel by Robert Venditti & Brett Weldele
88 minutes 2009
Bruce Willis plays Tom GreerCountry of finance: US
Radha Mitchell plays Jennifer Peters
James Cromwell plays Cantor
Ving Rhames plays the Prophet
Nationality of director: US
Location of story: Boston
Filming location: Boston and other towns in Massachusetts.
Did you watch the Matrix films and wonder why no-one had an other-gender body inside the Matrix? This film does not leave that aspect unexplored.
Instead of a virtual reality Matrix, most people in this film have a surrogate that is a younger, better looking version of themselves. They send the surrogate out to work and play, and they themselves stay at home in a high-tech chair that allows them to see, hear and feel whatever happened to the surrogate.
A young woman in a skimpy dress is murdered at the beginning of the film. The surrogate cops, Greer and Peters chase up her operator, and find an overweight middle-aged man. An attractive young black man is shown by his ID card to be really a middle-aged white man.
Peters’ surrogate is at first operated by the real Jennifer Peters. Later the real one is killed, and the Peters surrogate is being operated by the bad guy. Greer has to get himself inside the Peters surrogate so that he can save the world.To put it simply: The Bruce Willis character save the world while in this body.
In conclusion: a middlebrow sex-transfer fantasy for those who do fantasize other-gender bodies, but never actually do it in reality. This aspect is generally not being mentioned in the reviews.
19 September 2009
In Einem Jahr mit 13 Monden
Directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Script by Rainer Werner Fassbinder
129 minutes 1978
English title: In a Year with 13 Moons
Nationality of director: West German
Location of story: Frankfurt
Filming location: Frankfurt
In In a Year with 13 Moons, Erwin Weisshaupt thinks that he is in love with Anton Saitz, not exactly a prince, but as a businessman close enough for Erwin, the butcher’s assistant. An off-hand comment by Anton: ‘Too bad you’re not a girl', was taken too literally. Erwin goes to Casablanca, and comes back as Elvira. However, Anton is still not interested.
In this way, In a Year with 13 Moons is more faithful to Andersen’s story than is the Disney
animation that took its name, but altered the ending.
Elvira, in male clothing, tries to buy sex from rent-boys who beat her up when they discover that she is not a man. At home, Elvira’s lover Christophe, has returned after a long absence. They argue and he leaves for good. Elvira chases after his car and is knocked down. Elvira’s hooker friend Zora sees this and cleans Elvira up. Elvira takes Zora to the abattoir where Elvira worked when she was a man. Elvira goes home, attempts to asphyxiate herself but is saved when her ex-wife Irene arrives. Irene is concerned that a newspaper article about Elvira which mentioned the businessman Anton Saitz might cause trouble. Elvira promises to go to Saitz and ask for forgiveness. Zora finds Elvira crying in a video arcade and takes her to see a gay friend who has been eight years in a mental hospital, and has not been outside for months. Zora then takes Elvira to see Sister Gudrun at the orphanage where Elvira was raised. Elvira goes to visit Saitz, meeting an ex-accountant who was fired for being ill, and a suicide with an amazingly positive attitude about things. Saitz at first fails to recognize Elvira, but goes home with her for a chat. Zora is still in Elvira’s flat, and while Elvira is making coffee, Saitz and Zora start to make out. Depressed by this, Elvira cuts her hair and dresses in male clothing, and goes to see Irene and their daughter Marie-Ann to ask if she can return to being Erwin. It is too late. Elvira goes to see the journalist who had taken the interview, but it is after 11pm. Elvira goes home and kills herself. Zora and Anton, still making out, do not notice.
Armin Meier (1943-1978), a former butcher, was Fassbinder’s lover 1974-8. After a break-up he committed suicide on Fassbinder’s birthday. He was in 7 of Fassbinder’s films.
Ingrid Caven (1938 – ) actress and singer. She was married to Fassbinder 1970-2. She has been in over 50 films. Her current lover French writer Jean-Jacques Schuhl has written a book entitled Ingrid Caven which won the "Prix Goncourt" 2000.
Lilo Pempeit (1922 –1993) is Fassbinder’s mother. She acted in 23 films, mostly directed by her son.
Volker Spengler (1939 – ) actor. He was the adulterer Ardalion in Fassbinder’s Despair, 1978, and Hermann Goering in The Ogre
, 1996.
Eva Mattes (1954 – ) actress. Jury’s Special Grand Prix at Cannes 1979. Best Actress at Bavarian Film Awards 1981. She acted in three of Fassbinder’s films, and then played Rainer Fassbinder in A Man Called Eva, 1984. She has a daughter with director Werner Herzog.
In addition to script and direction, Fassbinder designed the sets, edited and did the camera work. He did this in no other. He also expanded Erwin/Elvira’s biography as a short story.
The speech at the end of the slaughterhouse sequence is the closing monologue from Goethe’s Torquato Tasso, 1790, where the poet in painful awareness of the arbitrariness of his existence switches between self-torture and self-confidence.
Two quotations from Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation
on suicide as an affirmation of the will.
A clip from Claude Chabrol’s Le Boucher
, 1970 (about a butcher who is sex-murderer). Armin Meier had been a butcher.
The ‘I Like to Hike’ scene from Jerry Lewis’ You’re Never Too Young, 1955, a gender switch version of The Major and the Minor, 1942 (both films are about passing as children).
The opening scene, along the bank of the Main River at dawn is accompanied by Mahler’s adagio movement from his Fifth symphony which is also used in the opening, also dawn, sequence of Luchino Visconti’s Death in Venice
, 1971.
While Elvira is asleep, Zora watches on television a news program about Pinochet’s Chile, and then there is a cameo by Fassbinder in the program.
The anecdote is told by the friend released from the mental hospital about a cemetery apparently of young children until it is explained that the dates are not of the person’s lifespan, but of the time during his life when he had a friend. This anecdote is of course also told in Orson Well’s Mr Arkadin
, 1955.
. It follows the last two days of Elvira’s life. She meets or visits most of the significant persons in her life, and from the dialogue we find out her biography. That Erwin was born illegitimately during to war, and given up to an orphanage. He was almost adopted, until the birth mother would not sign the papers because she was not able to admit the existence of the child to her husband. Erwin worked in an abattoir and married Irene, the manager’s daughter. He developed a crush on Anton, with whom he was involved in a shady deal with meat. Anton said: “Too bad you’re not a girl”. Erwin went to Casablanca and returned as a woman, Elvira, but was still rejected by Anton. Part of the irony is, as Saitz’s bodyguard says, “nobody loves Anton Saitz”. He has no wife or girlfriend. He appears to be the type of man who takes a woman, and then tires of her and moves on. Had Elvira been a female from birth, she still could not have made Anton love her. It is part of Elvira’s naivety that she does not understand this.
The genre of male-to-female transsexual narratives is small. However In a Year with 13 Moons does not seem to be of the type. These films deal with the difficulties of changing gender, of operations and hormones, of building a new life and seeking acceptance. In A Year with 13 Moons this is suggested rather than detailed - indeed of hormones there is no mention at all. The film is about a person, the gender hardly matters, who is failed by all those who know him, and who gives up. In this it is like other Fassbinder films, especially Fox and his Friends
, 1974.
Most of the books on Fassbinder describe this film as his most personal. In addition to directing and writing the script, he expanded Erwin/Elvira’s biography as a short story, he designed the sets, edited and did the camera work. He did this in no other. He also cast his mother as Sister Gudrun. This of course does not mean that it is autobiographical - at least not in a straightforward way. Fassbinder was not transgendered. He was more of what the modern gay scene would call a bear, and he usually had a beard. Unlike some other German directors, Lothar Lambert and Rosa von Praunheim, he never put on a frock to appear in front of the camera, and very few of his films contain transgendered characters (although it is said that there are undeclared drag cameos in several of them). However Laurens Straub has argued that the film is indeed autobiographical: “He could feel like a woman more than a man .... his quickness, his sense for intrigue ... and maybe he was longing to be a woman”. Straub is the writer of A Man Like Eva made five years later, when Fassbinder was also dead, in which Eva Mattes (who plays Elvira’s daughter, Marie-Ann, in In a Year with 13 Moons) played Fassbinder himself, a rather unattractive portrait.
Fassbinder made this film immediately after his lover Armin Meier committed suicide after one of their frequent rows over Fassbinder’s affairs with others or drugs or politics, a normal part of their dramatic relationship. The immediate cause was that Fassbinder was taking a different lover to the Cannes film festival. Meier took an overdose of pills on Fassbinder’s birthday. His body was not discovered until five days later when Lilo Pempeit, Fassbinder’s mother, who had a key, came to investigate because the neighbours were complaining of a bad smell. Fassbinder did not attend the funeral. Meier, like Erwin had been a butcher. Erwin’s sex-change is an attempt to buy love, a cry of loneliness, which Fassbinder identified with Meier. At the same time there is much of Fassbinder himself in Elvira, especially the anomic experience of urban life, which is not the way that Meier experienced it. However, the extreme passiveness of Elvira, and the simple-mindedness is such that one is doubtful that this is a portrait of Meier - surely Fassbinder is either insulting his dead lover, or is playing intellectual games. And while Fassbinder is part of Elvira, surely Fassbinder is part of Saitz also, in particular the manager of people who takes multiple lovers and then casts them aside.
Fassbinder had dedicated his 1974 film Fox and His Friends, which is about a working-class gay man exploited by his middle-class lover, to Meier and played the title-role himself. In 1977 he contributed a segment to Germany in Autumn which mainly consists of Fassbinder losing his temper as Meier voices working-class reactionary clichés about terrorism and authority. While Fassbinder grieved in his own way at Meier’s death, when he locked himself in Volker Spengler’s flat in Frankfurt for several days, the cynics who knew him were predicting that he was turning his lover’s death into a new film.
Fassbinder is not the first filmmaker to dramatize his dead lover with a gender switch. The playwright and screenplay writer Terence Rattigan had an affair with Kenneth Morgan which ended with Kenneth’s suicide. In the play, later film, The Deep Blue Sea, 1952 and 1955, Kenneth has become Hester who twice attempts suicide as details of her affair with an ex-RAF pilot become known. Her husband William is based on Rattigan himself.
Let us return to Hans Andersen. Andersen, a closeted gay man who never married, had a lifelong friendship with Edvard Collin, of whom he wrote “he was the antagonist to my almost girlish nature”. When Collin announced that he would marry, Andersen wrote The Little Mermaid. He later confessed that nothing in his writing had ever moved him more. Even his first biographer, who is otherwise coy, wrote: “the little mermaid was himself ... She lost the prince, saw him wed another”.
The film contains several past-tense narratives: Elvira’s story of her life with Christoph told to Zora at the slaughterhouse; Sister Gudrun’s story of Erwin’s childhood; the cancer victim’s story of Saitz. This is a technique from pre-cinematic drama when flashbacks could not be done. Gudrun’s tale of how Erwin was born illegitimately to Anna Weisshaupt while her husband was a prisoner of war, and how her inability to admit this prevented Erwin from being properly adopted was written by Fassbinder as a short story - only parts of it are narrated in the film.
Volker Spengler, the actor who plays Elvira, does not specialize in feminine roles. He plays Elvira more with bravery than conviction. And when he switches to male clothing at the end, he looks natural as a man - very unlike Dil in The Crying Game , 1992, who looks like a woman in men’s clothing.
Zora, Erwin's friend says: ‘She just did it. And she didn't have a good reason, like, because of her soul, or something. I don't think she was even gay. Isn't that right, baby? You weren't even gay when you went to Casablanca.' This set Elvira apart from almost all transsexuals, most of whom have felt since childhood that they should really be the other gender. This is a dismissal of the opinions re the transgendered experience. It is not social constructionist, nor is it essentialist; it is neither nature nor nurture which lead Erwin to become Elvira. It is rather an existentialism of terrifying arbitrariness - a decision based on happenstance rather than pattern. There is one other film that features a transsexual - much better adjusted than Elvira - whose change was based equally on a whim, and whose story is also told in a past-tense narrative. This other is Tina in Pedro Almodovar's Law of Desire
, 1987, who had had the change as a teenager as part of an affair with her father. Like Elvira, Tina became a woman because she conformed to the whims of others.
Script by Rainer Werner Fassbinder
129 minutes 1978
English title: In a Year with 13 Moons
Volker Spengler plays Erwin/Elvira WeisshauptCountry of finance: West Germany
Gottfried John plays Anton Saitz
Ingrid Caven plays Die rote Zora
Elisabeth Trissenaar plays Irene Weisshaupt
Eva Mattes plays Marie-Ann Weisshaupt
Lilo Pempeit plays Schwester Gudrun
Nationality of director: West German
Location of story: Frankfurt
Filming location: Frankfurt
Allegory
The Little Mermaid, in Hans Andersen’s 1836 short story of the same name, falls in love with a prince of the land. Knowing that being a mermaid, with a tail instead of legs, she cannot win his love, she changes her tail for human legs. However, she is still a foundling, an outsider and a servant. He still does not love her.In In a Year with 13 Moons, Erwin Weisshaupt thinks that he is in love with Anton Saitz, not exactly a prince, but as a businessman close enough for Erwin, the butcher’s assistant. An off-hand comment by Anton: ‘Too bad you’re not a girl', was taken too literally. Erwin goes to Casablanca, and comes back as Elvira. However, Anton is still not interested.
In this way, In a Year with 13 Moons is more faithful to Andersen’s story than is the Disney
animation that took its name, but altered the ending. Synopsis
Elvira, in male clothing, tries to buy sex from rent-boys who beat her up when they discover that she is not a man. At home, Elvira’s lover Christophe, has returned after a long absence. They argue and he leaves for good. Elvira chases after his car and is knocked down. Elvira’s hooker friend Zora sees this and cleans Elvira up. Elvira takes Zora to the abattoir where Elvira worked when she was a man. Elvira goes home, attempts to asphyxiate herself but is saved when her ex-wife Irene arrives. Irene is concerned that a newspaper article about Elvira which mentioned the businessman Anton Saitz might cause trouble. Elvira promises to go to Saitz and ask for forgiveness. Zora finds Elvira crying in a video arcade and takes her to see a gay friend who has been eight years in a mental hospital, and has not been outside for months. Zora then takes Elvira to see Sister Gudrun at the orphanage where Elvira was raised. Elvira goes to visit Saitz, meeting an ex-accountant who was fired for being ill, and a suicide with an amazingly positive attitude about things. Saitz at first fails to recognize Elvira, but goes home with her for a chat. Zora is still in Elvira’s flat, and while Elvira is making coffee, Saitz and Zora start to make out. Depressed by this, Elvira cuts her hair and dresses in male clothing, and goes to see Irene and their daughter Marie-Ann to ask if she can return to being Erwin. It is too late. Elvira goes to see the journalist who had taken the interview, but it is after 11pm. Elvira goes home and kills herself. Zora and Anton, still making out, do not notice. Who is who
Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1954 – 1982) was a prodigy of West German cinema, completing 40 films, 2 television series, 24 stage plays, 36 acting roles and more in 15 years before dying of a drug overdose.Armin Meier (1943-1978), a former butcher, was Fassbinder’s lover 1974-8. After a break-up he committed suicide on Fassbinder’s birthday. He was in 7 of Fassbinder’s films.
Ingrid Caven (1938 – ) actress and singer. She was married to Fassbinder 1970-2. She has been in over 50 films. Her current lover French writer Jean-Jacques Schuhl has written a book entitled Ingrid Caven which won the "Prix Goncourt" 2000.
Lilo Pempeit (1922 –1993) is Fassbinder’s mother. She acted in 23 films, mostly directed by her son.
Volker Spengler (1939 – ) actor. He was the adulterer Ardalion in Fassbinder’s Despair, 1978, and Hermann Goering in The Ogre
, 1996.Eva Mattes (1954 – ) actress. Jury’s Special Grand Prix at Cannes 1979. Best Actress at Bavarian Film Awards 1981. She acted in three of Fassbinder’s films, and then played Rainer Fassbinder in A Man Called Eva, 1984. She has a daughter with director Werner Herzog.
Curiosities
1978 had 13 new moons.In addition to script and direction, Fassbinder designed the sets, edited and did the camera work. He did this in no other. He also expanded Erwin/Elvira’s biography as a short story.
The speech at the end of the slaughterhouse sequence is the closing monologue from Goethe’s Torquato Tasso, 1790, where the poet in painful awareness of the arbitrariness of his existence switches between self-torture and self-confidence.
Two quotations from Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation
on suicide as an affirmation of the will.A clip from Claude Chabrol’s Le Boucher
, 1970 (about a butcher who is sex-murderer). Armin Meier had been a butcher.The ‘I Like to Hike’ scene from Jerry Lewis’ You’re Never Too Young, 1955, a gender switch version of The Major and the Minor, 1942 (both films are about passing as children).
The opening scene, along the bank of the Main River at dawn is accompanied by Mahler’s adagio movement from his Fifth symphony which is also used in the opening, also dawn, sequence of Luchino Visconti’s Death in Venice
, 1971.While Elvira is asleep, Zora watches on television a news program about Pinochet’s Chile, and then there is a cameo by Fassbinder in the program.
The anecdote is told by the friend released from the mental hospital about a cemetery apparently of young children until it is explained that the dates are not of the person’s lifespan, but of the time during his life when he had a friend. This anecdote is of course also told in Orson Well’s Mr Arkadin
, 1955.Discussion
The film is very bleak, and all the more so as it was Fassbinder’s follow-up to the commercially successful The Marriage of Maria Braun. It follows the last two days of Elvira’s life. She meets or visits most of the significant persons in her life, and from the dialogue we find out her biography. That Erwin was born illegitimately during to war, and given up to an orphanage. He was almost adopted, until the birth mother would not sign the papers because she was not able to admit the existence of the child to her husband. Erwin worked in an abattoir and married Irene, the manager’s daughter. He developed a crush on Anton, with whom he was involved in a shady deal with meat. Anton said: “Too bad you’re not a girl”. Erwin went to Casablanca and returned as a woman, Elvira, but was still rejected by Anton. Part of the irony is, as Saitz’s bodyguard says, “nobody loves Anton Saitz”. He has no wife or girlfriend. He appears to be the type of man who takes a woman, and then tires of her and moves on. Had Elvira been a female from birth, she still could not have made Anton love her. It is part of Elvira’s naivety that she does not understand this.
The genre of male-to-female transsexual narratives is small. However In a Year with 13 Moons does not seem to be of the type. These films deal with the difficulties of changing gender, of operations and hormones, of building a new life and seeking acceptance. In A Year with 13 Moons this is suggested rather than detailed - indeed of hormones there is no mention at all. The film is about a person, the gender hardly matters, who is failed by all those who know him, and who gives up. In this it is like other Fassbinder films, especially Fox and his Friends
, 1974.Most of the books on Fassbinder describe this film as his most personal. In addition to directing and writing the script, he expanded Erwin/Elvira’s biography as a short story, he designed the sets, edited and did the camera work. He did this in no other. He also cast his mother as Sister Gudrun. This of course does not mean that it is autobiographical - at least not in a straightforward way. Fassbinder was not transgendered. He was more of what the modern gay scene would call a bear, and he usually had a beard. Unlike some other German directors, Lothar Lambert and Rosa von Praunheim, he never put on a frock to appear in front of the camera, and very few of his films contain transgendered characters (although it is said that there are undeclared drag cameos in several of them). However Laurens Straub has argued that the film is indeed autobiographical: “He could feel like a woman more than a man .... his quickness, his sense for intrigue ... and maybe he was longing to be a woman”. Straub is the writer of A Man Like Eva made five years later, when Fassbinder was also dead, in which Eva Mattes (who plays Elvira’s daughter, Marie-Ann, in In a Year with 13 Moons) played Fassbinder himself, a rather unattractive portrait.
Fassbinder made this film immediately after his lover Armin Meier committed suicide after one of their frequent rows over Fassbinder’s affairs with others or drugs or politics, a normal part of their dramatic relationship. The immediate cause was that Fassbinder was taking a different lover to the Cannes film festival. Meier took an overdose of pills on Fassbinder’s birthday. His body was not discovered until five days later when Lilo Pempeit, Fassbinder’s mother, who had a key, came to investigate because the neighbours were complaining of a bad smell. Fassbinder did not attend the funeral. Meier, like Erwin had been a butcher. Erwin’s sex-change is an attempt to buy love, a cry of loneliness, which Fassbinder identified with Meier. At the same time there is much of Fassbinder himself in Elvira, especially the anomic experience of urban life, which is not the way that Meier experienced it. However, the extreme passiveness of Elvira, and the simple-mindedness is such that one is doubtful that this is a portrait of Meier - surely Fassbinder is either insulting his dead lover, or is playing intellectual games. And while Fassbinder is part of Elvira, surely Fassbinder is part of Saitz also, in particular the manager of people who takes multiple lovers and then casts them aside.
Fassbinder had dedicated his 1974 film Fox and His Friends, which is about a working-class gay man exploited by his middle-class lover, to Meier and played the title-role himself. In 1977 he contributed a segment to Germany in Autumn which mainly consists of Fassbinder losing his temper as Meier voices working-class reactionary clichés about terrorism and authority. While Fassbinder grieved in his own way at Meier’s death, when he locked himself in Volker Spengler’s flat in Frankfurt for several days, the cynics who knew him were predicting that he was turning his lover’s death into a new film.
Fassbinder is not the first filmmaker to dramatize his dead lover with a gender switch. The playwright and screenplay writer Terence Rattigan had an affair with Kenneth Morgan which ended with Kenneth’s suicide. In the play, later film, The Deep Blue Sea, 1952 and 1955, Kenneth has become Hester who twice attempts suicide as details of her affair with an ex-RAF pilot become known. Her husband William is based on Rattigan himself.
Let us return to Hans Andersen. Andersen, a closeted gay man who never married, had a lifelong friendship with Edvard Collin, of whom he wrote “he was the antagonist to my almost girlish nature”. When Collin announced that he would marry, Andersen wrote The Little Mermaid. He later confessed that nothing in his writing had ever moved him more. Even his first biographer, who is otherwise coy, wrote: “the little mermaid was himself ... She lost the prince, saw him wed another”.
The film contains several past-tense narratives: Elvira’s story of her life with Christoph told to Zora at the slaughterhouse; Sister Gudrun’s story of Erwin’s childhood; the cancer victim’s story of Saitz. This is a technique from pre-cinematic drama when flashbacks could not be done. Gudrun’s tale of how Erwin was born illegitimately to Anna Weisshaupt while her husband was a prisoner of war, and how her inability to admit this prevented Erwin from being properly adopted was written by Fassbinder as a short story - only parts of it are narrated in the film.
Volker Spengler, the actor who plays Elvira, does not specialize in feminine roles. He plays Elvira more with bravery than conviction. And when he switches to male clothing at the end, he looks natural as a man - very unlike Dil in The Crying Game , 1992, who looks like a woman in men’s clothing.Zora, Erwin's friend says: ‘She just did it. And she didn't have a good reason, like, because of her soul, or something. I don't think she was even gay. Isn't that right, baby? You weren't even gay when you went to Casablanca.' This set Elvira apart from almost all transsexuals, most of whom have felt since childhood that they should really be the other gender. This is a dismissal of the opinions re the transgendered experience. It is not social constructionist, nor is it essentialist; it is neither nature nor nurture which lead Erwin to become Elvira. It is rather an existentialism of terrifying arbitrariness - a decision based on happenstance rather than pattern. There is one other film that features a transsexual - much better adjusted than Elvira - whose change was based equally on a whim, and whose story is also told in a past-tense narrative. This other is Tina in Pedro Almodovar's Law of Desire
, 1987, who had had the change as a teenager as part of an affair with her father. Like Elvira, Tina became a woman because she conformed to the whims of others. - Hans Christian Andersen. “Den lille havfrue”. Eventyr, fortalte for Børn. Første Samling. Tredie Hefte. 1837.
- Marjorie Baumgarten - www.auschron.com/issues/vol14/issue42/arts.scanlines.html
- Ed Gonzalez. “in a Year of 13 Moons”. Slant Magazine. Aug 23, 2003. www.slantmagazine.com/Film/film_review.asp?ID=776
- Ronald Hayman. Fassbinder: Film Maker
. New York: Simon and Shuster. 1984: 76-83.
- Joseph Jacobs. “Fassbinder, Franz, Fox, Elvira, Armin, and all the Others”. October 21, 1982.
- Robert Katz & Peter Berling. Love Is Colder Than Death: The Life and Times of Rainer Werner Fassbinder
. London:Paladin. 1989: 139-143.
- Alice Liddell. “Brilliant, naturally, but very difficult to watch”. IMDB www.us.imdb.com/CommentsShow?0077729
- Hans Mayer. “Alternatives in the Nineteenth Century” 1975. Reprinted in Outsiders: A Study in Life and Letters.
The MIT Press 1984.
- Kaja Silverman. “Masochistic Ecstacy and the Ruination of Masculinity in Fassbinder’s Cinema”. in Male Subjectivity at the Margins. New York: Routledge 1992.
07 September 2009
Cold Souls
Directed and written by Sophie Barthes
101 mins 2009
Paul Giamatti plays Paul Giamatti
Dina Korzun plays Nina
Emily Watson plays Claire Giamatti
Katherine Winnick plays Sveta
Anna Dukova plays Olga
Country of finance: USA/France
Nationality of director: French
Location of story: New York, St Petersburg
Filming location: New York, St Petersburg.
SYNOPSIS
Paul, paralyzed by anxiety about playing the lead in Uncle Vanya on Broadway, reads in the New Yorker about a new service Soul Storage which removes your soul and preserves it until you want it back. He does this and becomes too light-hearted. So he rents the soul of a Russian poet, which enables him to get the performance just right. In St Petersburg, where souls are bought and sold rather than stored for a fee, the boss’s wife, Sveta, a soap-opera actress, wants the soul of an American actor. She gives a list of 12 names of famous actors. Her husband asks why no actresses on the list? Nina, the mule who transports souls between St Petersburg and New York inside her body, steals the only actor soul that the New York Office has. She tells Sveta that it is Al Pacino’s soul. Paul wants his soul back but is not to be found. He tracks down Nina, and then goes with her to St Petersburg. He finds out that his rented soul is that of Olga, a factory worker, and that unable to get her soul back, she has committed suicide. Nina and Paul drug Sveta so that they can extract Paul’s soul from her. They do so. It has become dried up from her soap-opera performances. They both return to New York where the Soul Storage company has been taken over by a hedge fund.
CURIOSITIES
Both Sveta and Paul acquire opposite-gender souls. In neither case does this affect their self-identity, their mannerisms or their attitude.
Olga dies without her soul. This is opposite to the legends in The Golden Bough where external soul storage is used to avoid death.
Why is it, in western movies, that it is always winter in Russia?
30 August 2009
Psycho
Novel by Robert Bloch, New York: Simon & Shuster. 1959.
Film directed by Alfred Hitchcock.
Script by Joseph Stefano.
109 mins, 1960.
Nationality of director: UK
Location of story: Arizona
Filming location: California, Arizona.
Norman Bates poisoned his widowed mother when she was forty, when she took a lover, had her embalmed and buried, and then two months later dug her up and kept her around the house. This left her a little bit immobile, and so he had to move for her. So he dressed as her, and as such carried out her will. Especially her will to protect her son from strange women, and to that end it was sometimes required that she must kill them.
Marion Crane stole $40,000 from her employer, and ran away. She stayed in the Bates Motel. Norman spied on her as she undressed. ‘Mother’ then killed her. Norman then sank her and her car in a nearby swamp without finding the money.
The detective who comes after her is killed by ‘Mother’ when he enters the house. Eventually Norman is arrested and the police psychologist declares that he is a transvestite.
The voice overs by “mother’ are even more rococo. First hired was Paul Jasmin, an aspirant actor who had developed, as a joke, a practice of phoning well-known actors as 'Eunice Ayers'. Hitchcock also hired actresses Jeanette Nolan and Virginia Gregg to record the same lines. The version on the sound track is a splicing together of the three voices. From word to word it jumps from one to the other.
Like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, 1974, and Silence of the Lambs, 1991, Psycho is sort of, loosely, based on rumours of Ed Gein.
In Robert Bloch's novel Norman is in his forties, short and fat. However in the film, Anthony Perkins is still in his twenties, which changed the nature of Norman.
The first US film ever to show a toilet being flushed.
The film is in black & white because a) Hitchcock thought that it would be too gory in colour, b) he wanted to make it for under $1m c) he was making a superior version of the cheap b/w B-movies that did so well in the 1950s.
Some people have speculated about the licence plate on Marion’s second car: NFB-418. NFB =National Film Board of Canada, and 418 is the area code of Quebec City where Hitchcock had made I Confess, 1953. However there is no Canadian money or content in the film.
In the opening scene, Marion wears a white bra. After she steals the money, she wears a black bra.
The white Ford sedan is the same car used in Leave It to Beaver, 1957.
The house was built by cannibalizing several stock unit sections. The tower is from the house in Harvey, 1950.
It is Vera Miles, not Janet Leigh, in the shower scene in the trailer.
Parallels with Orson Well’s Touch of Evil, 1958.
he was trying to get one over on them and place a vulgarity in the picture.
The psychiatrist at the end claims that Norman was a transvestite. Purely technically, as he sometimes dressed as his mother, then he must have been. But he wore her dress over his male clothes, and has no existential need to crossdress as an end in itself. In previous decades the term ‘pseudo transvestite’ was used for persons who cross dress e.g. to commit a crime, to appear on stage etc. Norman is more of a pseudo transvestite than an existential transvestite.
He is not like any other transvestite that you may have met.
Other transvestites in Hitchcock’s films.
Psycho was effectively the first slasher film, a genre that generally retained gender ambiguity (see Clover’s book).
Bell-Metereau sees Psycho as the start of a new era, particularly in contrast to Some Like It Hot of the previous year. The Dame role, dressing as an older woman, Charleys’ Aunt and Old Mother Riley, a tradition that goes back to medieval morality plays and is found in Shakespeare, Music Hall and Pantomime, is usually taken to be good-natured (if you ignore the misogyny) but has had a dark side all along (think of Lon Chaney in The Unholy Three ,1925 and 1930, Lionel Barrymore in The Devil Doll 1936). Psycho is the iconic Dame and murder film, and much better made than most of the other films that came in its wake.
We can admire Psycho as a film, but the gates that it opened, not just the murderous Dame characters, but also the psychotic transy killers who came afterwards, added an undesirable colour to the public perception of trans persons.
There are transgendered killers. I have featured some of them on my other blog. But there are far too many in movies compared to a) the number of trans characters in movies b) the numbers of real killers who are transgendered.
Psycho was remade shot-by-shot from Joseph Stephano’s script, copying the camera angles of the originals, with the same errors, and in colour, by Gus Van Sant in 1998.
Film directed by Alfred Hitchcock.
Script by Joseph Stefano.
109 mins, 1960.
Anthony Perkins plays Norman BatesCountry of finance: USA
Janet Leigh plays Marion Crane
Vera Miles plays Lila Crane
Martin Balsam plays Milton Arbogast
Nationality of director: UK
Location of story: Arizona
Filming location: California, Arizona.
Synopsis
Norman Bates poisoned his widowed mother when she was forty, when she took a lover, had her embalmed and buried, and then two months later dug her up and kept her around the house. This left her a little bit immobile, and so he had to move for her. So he dressed as her, and as such carried out her will. Especially her will to protect her son from strange women, and to that end it was sometimes required that she must kill them.Marion Crane stole $40,000 from her employer, and ran away. She stayed in the Bates Motel. Norman spied on her as she undressed. ‘Mother’ then killed her. Norman then sank her and her car in a nearby swamp without finding the money.
The detective who comes after her is killed by ‘Mother’ when he enters the house. Eventually Norman is arrested and the police psychologist declares that he is a transvestite.
Curiosities
Hitchcock in his determination that audiences would not anticipate the climax cheated from the point of view of gender impersonation. Anthony Perkins does not play ‘Mother’ for the first two killings. In the famous shower killing scene, 'mother' is played by Margo Epper, a stuntwoman; and in the knifing at the top of the stairs scene she is played by another stuntwoman who goes by the name of Mitzi. Mitzi is petite and completely unlike Anthony.The voice overs by “mother’ are even more rococo. First hired was Paul Jasmin, an aspirant actor who had developed, as a joke, a practice of phoning well-known actors as 'Eunice Ayers'. Hitchcock also hired actresses Jeanette Nolan and Virginia Gregg to record the same lines. The version on the sound track is a splicing together of the three voices. From word to word it jumps from one to the other.
Like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, 1974, and Silence of the Lambs, 1991, Psycho is sort of, loosely, based on rumours of Ed Gein.
In Robert Bloch's novel Norman is in his forties, short and fat. However in the film, Anthony Perkins is still in his twenties, which changed the nature of Norman.
The first US film ever to show a toilet being flushed.
The film is in black & white because a) Hitchcock thought that it would be too gory in colour, b) he wanted to make it for under $1m c) he was making a superior version of the cheap b/w B-movies that did so well in the 1950s.
Some people have speculated about the licence plate on Marion’s second car: NFB-418. NFB =National Film Board of Canada, and 418 is the area code of Quebec City where Hitchcock had made I Confess, 1953. However there is no Canadian money or content in the film.
In the opening scene, Marion wears a white bra. After she steals the money, she wears a black bra.
The white Ford sedan is the same car used in Leave It to Beaver, 1957.
The house was built by cannibalizing several stock unit sections. The tower is from the house in Harvey, 1950.
It is Vera Miles, not Janet Leigh, in the shower scene in the trailer.
Parallels with Orson Well’s Touch of Evil, 1958.
An extended show-off dolly shot as a opening.
Janet Leigh is harrassed by a transvestite (an uncredited Mercedes McCambridge as a man) in a cheap motel in the US South West.
Both hotel managers are badly dressed, nervous, stammers, uncomfortable with women.
For more see the article by John Hall.
Is Norman a transvestite?
The MPAA censors objected to the use of the term "transvestite" to describe Norman Bates in the final wrap-up. They insisted it be removed, until writer Joseph Stefano used a dictionary to prove to them it was a clinical psychology term with no sexual connotation. They thought
he was trying to get one over on them and place a vulgarity in the picture.The psychiatrist at the end claims that Norman was a transvestite. Purely technically, as he sometimes dressed as his mother, then he must have been. But he wore her dress over his male clothes, and has no existential need to crossdress as an end in itself. In previous decades the term ‘pseudo transvestite’ was used for persons who cross dress e.g. to commit a crime, to appear on stage etc. Norman is more of a pseudo transvestite than an existential transvestite.
He is not like any other transvestite that you may have met.
Other transvestites in Hitchcock’s films.
Murder, 1930. Handel Fane, a trapeze artist who also does female roles on stage, is the killer.
To Catch a Thief, 1954. Danielle Foucard imitates a retired jewel thief so that he will be blamed.
Conclusion
Psycho joins a puritanical view of sex with psychopathology. This illiberal view was continued in giallo and slasher films in great number.Psycho was effectively the first slasher film, a genre that generally retained gender ambiguity (see Clover’s book).
Bell-Metereau sees Psycho as the start of a new era, particularly in contrast to Some Like It Hot of the previous year. The Dame role, dressing as an older woman, Charleys’ Aunt and Old Mother Riley, a tradition that goes back to medieval morality plays and is found in Shakespeare, Music Hall and Pantomime, is usually taken to be good-natured (if you ignore the misogyny) but has had a dark side all along (think of Lon Chaney in The Unholy Three ,1925 and 1930, Lionel Barrymore in The Devil Doll 1936). Psycho is the iconic Dame and murder film, and much better made than most of the other films that came in its wake.
We can admire Psycho as a film, but the gates that it opened, not just the murderous Dame characters, but also the psychotic transy killers who came afterwards, added an undesirable colour to the public perception of trans persons.
There are transgendered killers. I have featured some of them on my other blog. But there are far too many in movies compared to a) the number of trans characters in movies b) the numbers of real killers who are transgendered.
Sequels and Remakes
There are three sequels: Psycho II, Psycho III, Psycho IV: The Beginning. In these Anthony Perkins does get to play ‘mother’ as well as Norman.Psycho was remade shot-by-shot from Joseph Stephano’s script, copying the camera angles of the originals, with the same errors, and in colour, by Gus Van Sant in 1998.
- Rebecca Louise Bell-Metereau. Hollywood Androgyny. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985. Second Edition 1993: 129-132.
- Stephen Rebello. Alfred Hitchcock and the making of Psycho. New York: Dembner Books. 1990.
- Carol J.Clover. Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992.
- John W. Hall. “Touch of Psycho”. Bright Lights Film Journal. September 1995. www.brightlightsfilm.com/14/psycho.html.
- Richard Scheib. “Psycho”. The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review. 1998. www.moria.co.nz/horror/psycho.htm.
- “Psycho (1960 film)”. Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psycho_%281960_film%29
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