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Movie Stocking Stuffers
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By John Demetry
'Tis the season for celebrating, and many Queers may feel left out. They need not. In the holiday shopping spree, DVD and videotape offer the opportunity for a celebration--and sharing--of our culture, an antidote to the consumer malaise that erases the feeling of Christmas morning when you're a kid. The challenge of the Pet Shop Boys' song is to make your own Red Letter Day. So, sing a different tune this season. Here's some suggestions to the tune of the The Twelve Days of Christmas. It's a list of films from twelve Queer filmmakers, foreign, independent, classic, or Hollywood, spiritual stocking stuffers whether you've been naughty or nice. Enjoy "The 12 Gays of X-Mas." On the first day of X-Mas, my true love gave to me: A movie by John Schlesinger (Sunday Bloody Sunday).
On the second day of X-Mas, my true love gave to me: Two movies by Francois Ozon (See the Sea, Sitcom). Of the two Ozon videos available, the one I most recommend is See the Sea, a combination of the same-titled short film and another called A Summer Dress. The impossibly-talented young filmmaker's trailblazing See the Sea opens up new corridors of horror in its story of a mother who lets a stranger into her house. Ozon lets a sexual-dread tension build to an unexpected climax-and it features the most original gay cruising scene in cinema history! The preceding tale of sexual awakening, "A Summer Dress", is as playful and sexy as anything ever committed to celluloid. On the third day of X-Mas, my true love gave to me: Three movies by Patrice Chereau (L'Homme Blesse, Queen Margot, and Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train). Chereau's Those Who Love Me is my favorite film, as I've noted in the past. His 1984 L'Homme Blesse, translated as The Wounded Man, however, was one of my first encounters with queer cinema. (How did it end up on the shelves of my local Blockbuster?). Its train-station cruising milieu sets the stage for a cruel, operatic duet between sexual desire and inevitable death. Chereau displays a wounding insight into social interactions, beginning with scenes of family tension. Cold colors, especially the chrome-chill of the blues, suffuse the film's environment with a longing and loss that climaxes in murder as consummation. On the fourth day of X-Mas, my true love gave to me: Four movies by F.W. Murnau (Nosferatu, Faust, Sunrise, and Tabu).
On the fifth day of X-Mas, my true love gave to me: Five movies by Gregg Araki (The Living End, Totally F***ed Up, The Doom Generation, Nowhere, and Splendor).
Concluding the brilliant Teen Apocalypse Trilogy, this 1997 work, the formal rigor may suggest inspiration from later Godard, but the style, the sense of humor and of existential despair are unmistakably Araki. Goofing on the simplistic cross-cutting narrative of 90210 clones, Araki delivers a multi-culti, pan-sexual vision of youth culture on the edge. On the sixth day of Christmas, my true love gave to me: Six movies by Andre Techine (Barraco, Rendez-Vous, Scene of the Crime, Wild Reeds, Thieves, and My Favorite Season). I think I first realized that I was queer when, in high school, I read Armond White's essay on Wild Reeds in a 1995 issue of Film Comment. I wasn't able to actually see it until I was in college and it was on video, and my queerness was established. Then, later at school, I had the momentous opportunity to see it projected-talk about a Red Letter Day! This coming-of-age story poignantly intersected with my own sexual, political, and aesthetic awakenings-and that precisely describes the theme of the film. Its nostalgic setting and stunning set of four characters (a straight boy, a gay boy, a straight girl, and a straight-but-horny boy) all in love with the wrong person makes it an almost unbearably moving affirmation of life's struggles. All sentiment aside, I'm not ashamed to admit that its one of my ten favorite movies of all time. On the seventh day of X-Mas, my true love gave to me: Seven movies by Terence Davies (Terence Davies Trilogy, Distant Voices Still Lives, The Long Day Closes, The Neon Bible, and The House of Mirth).
On the eighth day of X-Mas, my true love gave to me: Eight movies by Vincente Minnelli (Cabin In the Sky, Meet Me In St. Louis, The Clock, The Pirate, The Band Wagon, Lust for Life, Gigi, and Some Came Running). Uncovering gay codes in classic Hollywood films directed by queer filmmakers is a popular game, probably started by Vito Russo's overrated, but comprehensive, The Celluloid Closet. Minnelli's best musical, The Pirate, complicates the game. A disguised portrait of his marriage to Judy Garland, Minnelli here transforms camp fantasy of gender difference to find a love that transcends gender. Garland's greatest screen moment: hypnotized, she does an ecstatic, almost frightening in its sexual force, rendition of Mack the Black. Oh, and there's Gene Kelly in tights, too! On the ninth day of X-Mas, my true love gave to me: Nine movies by Sergei Eisenstein The Beachcomber, Strike, Battleship Potemkin, October, Ivan the Terrible - Parts 1 & 2, Alexander Nevsky, Que Viva Mexico, and Bezhin Meadow). There's a school of thought about film that looks at film history in terms of montage, expressionism, and realism. Usually, Eisenstein is crammed into the montage category-locating his genius in his radical method of editing films. I take a different perspective on Eisenstein, and submit the reconstruction of his lost film, Bezhin Meadow as Evidence A. Made up of still frames Eisenstein saved from each shot of the destroyed film, the propagandistic excitement of his editing gets eclipsed by a richer dialectic between photographic recorder and subject in which the bisexuality of Eisenstein plays an unmistakable role. I'd probably most highly recommend this for cineastes, if I hadn't seen the power of its images work so profoundly on the uninitiated. On the tenth day of X-Mas, my true love gave to me: Ten movies by Pedro Almadovar (Labyrinth of Passion, Dark Habits, What Have I Done to Deserve This?, Matador, Law of Desire, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!, The Flower of My Secret, Live Flesh, and All About My Mother). Until "All About My Mother", Almadovar's most popular film was Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown--and it's probably still his best. However, since most are aware of it, I want to spotlight two of his earlier, most stylistically exciting and luxuriant, films: Matador and Law of Desire. These are hilariously audacious melodramas that simmer and burn with sexual heat. On the eleventh day of X-Mas, my true love gave to me: Eleven movies by George Cukor (Little Women, Dinner at Eight, Camille, Holiday, The Women, Gone with the Wind, The Philadelphia Story, Gaslight, Adam's Rib, Pat and Mike, A Star Is Born, and Lies Girls).
His1957 Lies Girls is a splashy musical Rashomon. Posing the question, "What is truth?" it runs three conflicting stories, exploding concepts of identity-most entertainingly in a musical number with Gene Kelly that is based on the Marlon Brando biker flick The Wild Ones. On the twelfth day of X-Mas, my true love gave to me: Twelve movies by Rainer Wernver Fassbinder (The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant, Tenderness of the Wolves, Effi Briest, Fox and His Friends, Satan's Brew, I Only Want You to Love Me, Shadow of Angels, Germany in Autumn, Ali- Fear Eats The Soul, Querelle). These twelve titles are the tip of the iceberg of this intensely prolific filmmaker's oeuvre, a supernova explosion-quick as a flash yet enduringly influential. Working in melodramatic and/or satiric forms, Fassbinder dug deeply into Germany's history as well as intimate personal relationships. He tied the two by portraying micro- and macro-political power struggles through formally complex and artifice-busting techniques. Probably the two best to start with are Fox and His Friends, which has Fassbinder as Fox caught in the snare of eltist gay treachery, and The Marriage of Maria Braun, which plays modern German history through the greed of one woman. These two suggest the eclectic output of one of cinema's great artists-queer or otherwise. |
Gregg Araki's Splendor makes the X-Mas cut 
Tabu
Nowhere 
The House of Mirth 
A Star is Born 
© 1997-2000 BEI