Q-Seattle Events: Tacky Tourist Clubs

Last week, we mentioned the new film, Wild Tigers I Have Known, that Three Dollar Bill Cinema will be presenting at Northwest Film Festival starting Friday, but the film group has even more in store this month. Starting Thursday night, they'll present a series called "Scandalous!" at the Film Forum movie house on 12th Ave [get directions].

The series includes several films and shorts that were shocking in their day. Each screening is on Thursday evening at 7 pm. Tickets are $10 (regular) or $9 (for Three Dollar Bill Cinema members). A series pass is available for $25. Tickets are available online through TicketWindow. Buy individual ticket(s) or buy a series pass.

These rarely-seen films, some on newly restored 35mm prints, tackled queer themes like none before as filmmakers began to challenge this enforced morality of the time by addressing off-limits subjects.

From polite lessons in socially acceptable behavior to vicious (and homoerotic) scenes of life behind bars, these taboo-breaking films demand your attention.

Tea & Sympathy

Cunningly, they start with the "polite lessons" tomorrow (Thursday, April 12 at 7pm) when they show director Vincente Minnelli's 1956 film Tea & Sympathy.

A sensitive outsider at an all-boys prep school struggles to fit in among his jock peers and prove his "manhood" with help from the headmaster's wife. Deborah Kerr and Leif Erickson reprised their roles from the hit Broadway play.

A Wikipedia analysis notes that the film's lessons were so polite that the cencors of the day and -- probably -- many in the audiences didn't even notice what they were watching.

The character of Tom can be interpreted to be either homosexual or maybe just a somewhat effeminate heterosexual. Since the Hays code was in effect when the film was produced, this possibility of a double reading was probably intentional. Of course the central message of the film, that it is OK to be different, remains fundamentally the same, no matter what one reads into the main character's sexual orientation.

In addition to Tom, the movie also features two other characters whose possible homosexual tendencies are delineated in such a subtle way that their portrayals may have been under the radar for 1950s audiences as well as censors: The first character is Tom's roommate, who, while a jock, does not have any experiences with girls nor apparently any eagerness to make them and who also defends Tom in a way that suggests sexual attraction. Being too simple-minded to enjoy Tom's pursuits like classical music or to consciously recognize his own hidden motivations, he is also somewhat protected from closer scrutiny by his surroundings as he seems to be like the other boys at the surface.

Caged

The 1950 film Caged, directed by John Cromwell, inspired several knockoffs and dozens of comedy routines since then.

An innocent young girl learns how to survive women's prison the hard way under the iron fist of a cruel matron. Agnes Moorehead (Bewitched), Eleanor Parker (The Sound of Music) and the ultra-imposing Hope Emerson star in this outrageous Oscar-nominated noir classic.

From a New York Times review: "Caged, considered the best woman's prison film ever made, represents a union between realistic socially conscious drama and the more stylized world of film noir."

With this uncompromisingly pessimistic statement on human nature, John Cromwell reaches his peak as a director. Under his expert direction, Eleanor Parker gives the best performance of her career and creates a convincing metamorphosis from a innocent young girl to a hardened criminal. Her performance is nuanced, low-keyed and emotionally charged.

Un Chant d'amour. Plus Kenneth Anger shorts

In a 2003 web article by Mark Adnum we get this analysis of the film and the filmmaker:

Jean Genet set an example for other self-performers like James Dean, Joe Orton and Andy Warhol to follow. His real life, like those of his successors, emerging as by far the most compelling work of art he produced. Like those other iconic artists, Jean Genet is Jean Genet's consummate creation, and finding the boundary between the day-to-day realities of life and his creative existence is a bit like exploring a Mobius Strip. ...

Un chant d'amour is clearly influenced by Genet's North African military service, his homosexuality, and his 'shrugged-off' sense of separation from the 'group.' In the film, soldiers sweat their days away in the solitary cells of a military jail/oven in the desert, and dream of frolicking with each other in the grass and flowers of home. When desire and/or boredom overcome them, they rub themselves erotically against their concrete cell walls, blow cigarette smoke to each other through glory holes, or dance. A guard watches them through peepholes, simultaneously aroused and terrified by their bizarre and sometimes brazenly sexual behaviour. The film is a showcase for Genet's legendary sense of homosexual carnal glamour ? a sense or characteristic emphasised by Fassbinder in his film adaptation of Querelle de Brest (1982), and an area where Genet was way ahead of his time ? and his formidable knack for sound and image poetry. The fact that Un chant d'amour is Genet's only film is a big loss for film lovers. It is a remarkable and unique short film that has been regrettably uncelebrated.

It was more than just the outre subject that kept the film off of screens, according to Adnum.

Apparently made for the private porn collections of wealthy French gays, and later disowned by an embarrassed Genet ? á la George Michael ? on the grounds of his new found artistic maturity, Un chant d'amour (1950) was banned from public exhibition in France upon its initial release, and has won only sporadic screenings since, often in censored form. It is semi-pornographic, featuring full-frontal male nudes playing with their hard-ons, and fetishistic close-ups of sweaty feet, armpits and thighs. Watching the film is a confronting experience that can feel a bit like watching porn, so in a way it's no wonder that it has remained fairly obscure.

The evening is completed with three short films by Kenneth Anger. This page includes brief summaries of the films to be shown at the end of the month. (Unfortunately, the YouTube clips on the page have been removed in the GoogleTube copyright purge.)

Maximilian Le Cain, an Irish filmmaker, gives a detailed analysis of Anger's films and their significance.

Offering a description of himself for the program of a 1966 screening, Kenneth Anger stated his 'lifework' as being Magick and his 'magical weapon' the cinematograph. A follower of Aleister Crowley's teachings, Anger is a high level practitioner of occult magic who regards the projection of his films as ceremonies capable of invoking spiritual forces. Cinema, he claims, is an evil force. Its point is to exert control over people and events and his filmmaking is carried out with precisely that intention. ...

Anger's films are cinematic manifestations of his occult practices. As such, they are highly symbolical, either featuring characters directly portraying gods, forces and demons (Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome, Lucifer Rising) or else finding an appropriate embodiment for them in the iconography of contemporary pop culture (Puce Moment, Scorpio Rising, Kustom Kar Kommandos, also Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome). ...

Scorpio Rising represents the densest, most complex montage of Anger's career. [T]he hero's 'preparation' features images of Brando and comic books. This comparative editing is developed in the second part by the blasphemous, contrasting incorporation of images from the life of Jesus appropriated from a Z-grade Sunday school movie, a copy of which Anger is supposed to have discovered left on his doorstep by accident while editing Scorpio Rising. It is the perfect vehicle for conveying Anger's perception of an effete Christianity perishing in the face of the new phallic virility that the bikers embody.

But if all of that sounds too much like a film-school semester paper, they movies can be enjoyed as well for their transgressive eroticism.

We get this tidbit of biography from Wikipedia.

Anger was one of America's first openly gay filmmakers, and certainly the first whose work addressed homosexuality in an undisguised, self-implicating manner. He developed a close friendship with Dr. Alfred Kinsey of the Institute for Sex Research. Anger would later recall that Kinsey was his first customer after Kinsey purchased a copy of Fireworks when they first met in 1947. Anger eventually helped Kinsey build his film archive. The Anger Collection includes correspondence between the two men, as well as letters to and from former Institute director John Bancroft. Anger would later speak openly of his participation in Kinsey's research, including being filmed masturbating.

Anger talks about his carreer and current plans in this interview.

So, please don't be mistaken. This is not an assignment. There will be no quizes when the projector stops. But head to the Film Forum for a chance to see films that aren't often shown.

Labels: Gay events, gay organization, Gay Seattle, movie