Time travelling trans woman in 1928

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

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

The End of the World

Episode 1.2 of Doctor Who

Directed by Euros Lyn
Script by Russel T Davies
45 minutes 2005

Christopher Eccleston plays the Doctor
Billie Piper plays Rose
Zoë Wanamaker voices Cassandra

Country of finance: UK
Nationality of director: Welsh
Location of story: a spacestation
Filming location: Cardiff
Channel: BBC Wales


Synopsis

The Doctor takes Rose billions of years into the future to witness the end of the Earth as the Sun expands and destroys it.  Observation is from a space station, and the guests are the super-rich.  One of the guests is Cassandra, who has had 708 operations and is now just a stretched face.  She is described as the last Earthling (which of course ignores the two minions who move her frame and frequently moisturize her). 

Cassandra is also the bad guy.  She releases robot insects which destroy the station's protections so that all will die and she will make a killing having bet against the other guests on the stock exchange.  She teleports out at the last minute, but is brought back by the Doctor.

Incidentally, Casandra who uses makeup and mentions various ex-husbands is obviously to be taken as female, started out as  boy.  This makes her one of the more rococo specimens of the old film favourite, the transy killer.


Trivia

Zoë Wanamaker was unable to be in Cardiff when the episode was filmed.  Cassandra was originally voiced by Eve Myles, and Zo's voice added later. 

Of course referring to this series as number 1 is high revisionism.  The original season 1 of Dr Who was back in 1963.

Steppenwolf

Novel by Herman Hesse.  Berlin: G. Fisher Verlag 1927.  English translation 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 Haller
Dominique Sanda plays Hermine
Pierre Clémenti plays Pablo

Country of finance:  USA/Switzerland/UK/France/Italy
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

Bert Horgson (1911-2001) FBI agent.

The tale goes thus:

Bert was an FBI agent from Minnesota. He joined the FBI in 1935 to fight Nazi spies.

When FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover saw him he was re-assigned as a special agent en femme using the name Bettina.

Hoover kept him from quitting by a mixture of promises and intimidation. He even had Horgson’s legal identity changed to ‘female’, so that it would be illegal for him to wear men’s clothes. Hoover gave orders that after his own death, Horgson was to be confined to a high-security nursing home as a national security risk.

• Katrum Schultz. “J. Edgar Hoover Ordered Agents To Impersonate Women”. Weekly World News. 11/11/2002. Online at: http://bit.ly/cKKASn.

Cecil Beaton (1904 - 1980) photographer, set & costume designer.

Cecil Walter Hardy Beaton was the son of a prosperous timber merchant. He was educated at Harrow and Cambridge, where he read history, art and architecture but left without a degree.

The first photograph that he sold was of the Shakespearean scholar, George Rylands, in drag as the Duchess of Malfi. It was published in Vogue. Beaton worked regularly for Vogue from 1927 in addition to having his own studio. He became known for his fashion, society and royalty photographs.

In 1934 Gerald Berniers, under the name Adela Quebec, published his spoof novel, The Girls of Radcliff Hall, which featured himself, Beaton and others as lesbian schoolgirls at an institution named after the famous writer. Beaton attempted to have all the copies destroyed and it became a very rare book until reprinted in 2000.

Five years later Beaton published his own spoof of the memoirs by minor royals that were popular at the time. My Royal Past, By Baroness von Bulop as told to Cecil Beaton features photographs of Beaton and some of his friends crossdressed as the characters in the book.

During the war Beaton worked for the Ministry of Information. Later he photographed many Hollywood and Broadway stars. He expanded into set and costume design for both stage and film, and won Oscars for the costumes in Gigi, 1958 and My Fair Lady, 1964. He was an influence on photographers Angus McBean and David Bailey. He had affairs with Gary Cooper and Greta Garbo.

He was knighted in 1972, and two years later was paralysed on the right side of his body after a stroke. He died in his sleep at age 76.

• Adela Quebec. The Girls of Radcliff Hall. Privately published 1934. Reprinted as by Gerald Hugh Tyrwhitt Berners. London: Montcalm, 2000.
• Theodora Louise Alexina Ludmilla Sophie von Bülop, Baroness. My Royal Past, By Baroness von Bulop as told to Cecil Beaton. London: B.T Batsford. 1939. Reprint: London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson xiv, 105 pp1960.
• “Cecil Beaton”. Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cecil_Beaton.
• “The Girls of Radcliff Hall”. Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Girls_of_Radcliff_Hall.

Noël Coward (1899 – 1973) and Gerald du Maurier (1873 - 1934) …

at a theatrical garden party in the late 1920s.

This photograph is found on page 40 of Terry Castle.  Noël Coward & Radclyffe Hall: Kindred Spirits.  New York: Columbia University Press 1996.

Earthlings Welcome Here

Episode 2.13 of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles (SCC)

Directed by Félix Enríquez Alcalá.
Script by Natalie Chaidez
60 minutes 2008

Lena Headey plays Sarah Connor
Dinah Lenney plays Eileen/Alan Park

Country of finance: USA
Nationality of director: USA
Location of story: USA
Filming location: USA

Synopsis

Sarah, chasing the image of three dots, goes to a UFO convention where she hears about a blogger, Abraham, who has written of the three dots.  She is approached by Eileen who says that she knows about Abraham.  Her trailer contains maps of sighting of Abraham and of UFOs.   At a restaurant, Sarah follows Eileen into the ladies room and demands that she must meet Abraham.  Eileen takes off her wig and confesses that she is Abraham.  Her real name is Alan Park, and as an MIT graduate was employed on a secret project with an unknown metal.  Park fearing for his life went into hiding and disguised as a woman so as not to be recognized.  Park never knew where he worked for he taken there each day in a closed van.  Sarah takes Park to a regression therapist to go over memories of noises etc.  She records the session, and although an assassin kills both Park and the therapist, Sarah is able to deduce the location of the plant.

Who are they?

This is the only episode of SCC directed by Félix Enríquez Alcalá.  He has directed episodes for a lot of television serials.

Natalie Chaidez wrote 30 SCC episodes.

Dinah Lenney is in only this episode of SCC but is a regular as Nurse Shirley in ER, and has played small parts in many television series, almost all female parts.

Conclusion

A cross-dressing drama for the cis-gendered.   Passing in gender role creates problems of its own, extra problems that a person hiding from bad guys does not need.  How did Eileen rent a car without a drivers license in her female name?  The script avoids these problems.

• Antonio Cuomo.  “The Sarah Connor Chronicles - St. 2, ep. 13: Earthlings Welcome Here: Recensione dell'episodio Abraham”.  Movieplayer.it. www.movieplayer.it/articoli/05229/the-sarah-connor-chronicles-st-2-ep-13-earthlings-welcome-here/

Shakespeare’s Sonnet 20

This, probably the best known of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, is central to discussions of homosexuality in Shakespeare.  It is possibly addressed to a cross-dressed young man, or at least a young man with androgynous beauty.

'A woman's face, with Nature's own hand painted,
Hast thou, the master-mistress of my passion;
A woman's gentle heart, but not acquainted
With shifting change, as is false woman's fashion;
An eye more bright than theirs, less false in rolling,
Gilding the object whereupon it gazeth;
A man in hew all Hews in his controlling,
Which steals men's eyes, and women's souls amazeth.
And for a woman wert thou first created;
Till Nature, as she wrought thee, fell a-doting,
And by addition me of thee defeated,
By adding one thing to my purpose nothing.
But since she prickt thee out for women's pleasure,
Mine be thy love, and thy love's use their treasure.'   

Proposed identifications of the young ‘master-mistress’ include Willie Hughes and Henry Wriothesley, to both of whom we will return.

• “Sonnet 20”.  Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonnet_20

Wanda Koolmatrie (1949 - ) writer.

Koolmatrie, an aboriginal Australian, was born to the Pitjantjatjara people but taken from her mother in 1950 and raised by white foster parents. She finally expressed herself in an aboriginal acting troop. Her 1994 autobiography, My Own Sweet Time, won the $5,000 Dobbie award for women’s life writing.

When she proposed a sequel to the book in 1997, the publisher insisted on meeting her, and it came out that she is the female persona of Leon Carmen (1950 - ) and John Bayley, two white men with a grudge that white men cannot get published. Carmen admitted that he had not ever met an aboriginal woman.

• Wanda Koolmatrie. My Own Sweet Time. Broome WA: Magabala Books 1994.
• John Bayley. Daylight Corroboree: a first-hand account of the Wanda Koolmatrie hoax. Eidolon Press 2004.
• “Wanda Koolmatrie”. Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wanda_Koolmatrie.