J'm'installe sur le rivage pour te voir mon gros gars t'éloigner vers le large
Rabbit, rabbit! I had to go for my annual physical this afternoon, but I stopped by Porter Square Books afterward to collect a book for my mother and look what was part of their summer sea-display:
I had wanted to write about so many queer films for June, but the month disappeared. Fortunately before we ran out of the formal observance of Pride,![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
rushthatspeaks and I made it to Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Querelle (1982) at the Coolidge. It was adapted from the 1947 novel by Jean Genet, but I have never seen anything onscreen that more resembled the novels of Chip Delany. Meant in sincere compliment, it is one of the sweatiest films I have ever seen. It looks like it smells like a porno theater. Its antihero is straight out of Tom of Finland with his sailor's tight, tight white trousers and muscular cleavage revealed by the barest excuse for an A-shirt, his boyish, chiseled, louche face under his insolently cocked bachi in the sullen, enticing haze that never varies from the sodium-smoke of just after sunset or just before dawn, a perpetual cruising hour. The sea-wall of its fantasized Brest is studded with stone phalli, anatomically complete with slit and balls. All graffiti in town is dicks. The chanteuse of the dive bar sings Wilde like Dietrich, but some of the construction workers with their buff hard hats are playing video games while the naval lieutenant who pines for Querelle records his poetically criminal obsessions into a portable tape recorder. The bare-chested, leather-vested cop at the bar actually is a cop outside of it, where he looks just as fetishistic in his fedora and black leather trenchcoat. Every interaction between men looks like a negotiation or a seduction whether it is one or not, although on some level it always is, regardless of the no-homo excuses manufactured to allow their bodies to meet. Constantly, metaphysically, literally, this movie fucks. Its hothouse, bathhouse sexuality must have come in just under the cutting wire of AIDS. I have no idea what it would offer a viewer with no sexual or aesthetic interest in men except its philosophy, although as my husband notes the philosophy is actually quite good, deconstructing its hard masc signifiers as much as it gets off on them, dissolving in and out of the words and ultimately the life of Genet; the theatricality of its interlocked sets and swelteringly flamboyant lighting would look entirely natural on the stage. It quotes Plutarch and stages a hand job that without a glimpse of cock would have caused mass apoplexies in the Breen office. (Send it back in time, please.) It was my introduction to Fassbinder and if I had seen it as an adolescent, I imagine it would have had much the same effect as Tanith Lee. It was introduced by the series programmer wearing leather in its honor and a T-shirt for Kenneth Anger's Scorpio Rising (1963). It made a superb date movie.
I had wanted to write about so many queer films for June, but the month disappeared. Fortunately before we ran out of the formal observance of Pride,
rushthatspeaks and I made it to Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Querelle (1982) at the Coolidge. It was adapted from the 1947 novel by Jean Genet, but I have never seen anything onscreen that more resembled the novels of Chip Delany. Meant in sincere compliment, it is one of the sweatiest films I have ever seen. It looks like it smells like a porno theater. Its antihero is straight out of Tom of Finland with his sailor's tight, tight white trousers and muscular cleavage revealed by the barest excuse for an A-shirt, his boyish, chiseled, louche face under his insolently cocked bachi in the sullen, enticing haze that never varies from the sodium-smoke of just after sunset or just before dawn, a perpetual cruising hour. The sea-wall of its fantasized Brest is studded with stone phalli, anatomically complete with slit and balls. All graffiti in town is dicks. The chanteuse of the dive bar sings Wilde like Dietrich, but some of the construction workers with their buff hard hats are playing video games while the naval lieutenant who pines for Querelle records his poetically criminal obsessions into a portable tape recorder. The bare-chested, leather-vested cop at the bar actually is a cop outside of it, where he looks just as fetishistic in his fedora and black leather trenchcoat. Every interaction between men looks like a negotiation or a seduction whether it is one or not, although on some level it always is, regardless of the no-homo excuses manufactured to allow their bodies to meet. Constantly, metaphysically, literally, this movie fucks. Its hothouse, bathhouse sexuality must have come in just under the cutting wire of AIDS. I have no idea what it would offer a viewer with no sexual or aesthetic interest in men except its philosophy, although as my husband notes the philosophy is actually quite good, deconstructing its hard masc signifiers as much as it gets off on them, dissolving in and out of the words and ultimately the life of Genet; the theatricality of its interlocked sets and swelteringly flamboyant lighting would look entirely natural on the stage. It quotes Plutarch and stages a hand job that without a glimpse of cock would have caused mass apoplexies in the Breen office. (Send it back in time, please.) It was my introduction to Fassbinder and if I had seen it as an adolescent, I imagine it would have had much the same effect as Tanith Lee. It was introduced by the series programmer wearing leather in its honor and a T-shirt for Kenneth Anger's Scorpio Rising (1963). It made a superb date movie.
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What a delightful discovery! Congrats!
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Thank you! It actually did make me feel good! There was a book of sea-folklore in the same display, just out of shot.
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Also I knew Fassbinder though a really, really weird lesbian-obsession/Evil Bad Mad Lesbian German film and had no idea he was so prolific!
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It worked great!
Also I knew Fassbinder though a really, really weird lesbian-obsession/Evil Bad Mad Lesbian German film and had no idea he was so prolific!
And when he was our age, he'd been dead for six years!
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(The thing that made me reconsider Fassbinder was being a last-minute dresser on a student production of Bremen Freedom which turned out to be a darkly hilarious comedy about a 19th-century female serial killer— I guess she was an evil bad mad more-or-less straight iirc German)
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Your Tumblr is a gift to the internet, by the way. I always forget to say so.
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That is so cool!
Now I want a story about various movies being sent back in time to freak out the Breen office.
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It made me happy! I hope someone buys it!
Now I want a story about various movies being sent back in time to freak out the Breen office.
If we're lucky, Paris Is Burning (1990) will cause spontaneous combustion.
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I would love to hear what you think!
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Full disclosure that I have not read the original novel for comparison—the film seems to depart creatively at points and quote outright at others—but the results are amazing.
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Thank you!
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Whichever one looks like it most appeals! He seems to have a substantial palette to choose from. Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974) and World on a Wire (1973) always looked interesting to me and Fox and His Friends (1975) has been on my radar for Karlheinz Böhm. Querelle was obscure to me and personally a great place to start.
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Nine
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I aspire to be Paul Nash.
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That's great! <3
I'm sorry you didn't get to do all the write ups you wanted, though. Well done on getting this one in under the line, anyway - despite *windmills* all the everything.
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*hugs*
It was unexpected and made me happy! I immodestedly recommended they could order and include one of my other collections, thematically.
I'm sorry you didn't get to do all the write ups you wanted, though. Well done on getting this one in under the line, anyway - despite *windmills* all the everything.
Thank you!
There is so much everything.