kultureflash

ARTWORKER OF THE WEEK #33

Bruce LaBruce @ Ritter/Zamet Gallery, London, UK

Bruce LaBruce is a Canadian writer, filmmaker and photographer based in Toronto. His films include the gay-porn classics Hustler White, Skin Flick and Super 8 1/2. His most recent project, The Raspberry Reich, a film about modern left-wing Germans adopting the culture of extreme left-wing movements in the 1970s -- particularly the Baader-Meinhof gang -- was screened last month at the NFT as part of the Lesbian and Gay Film Festival.

Bruce LaBruce is in the group show Sound of the Crowd at Ritter/Zamet until 22/05.

Rupert Goldsworthy: In 2002 I made a series of paintings on the Baader-Meinhofs and showed them in New York. Given the insularity of New York, I later wondered if it would have been comprehensible for a North American audience if I'd focused on American radicals rather than Germans. What led you to making this film specifically relating to German radicals as opposed to the Weathermen, Symbionese Liberation Army, Brigade Rosse or other radical left-wing '70s groups? Is it the tragic, iconic aspect of Ulrike and the core members part of the reason for your interest in them specifically?

Bruce LaBruce: Well, I think you hit the nail on the head there when you mentioned the insularity of New York. You might extend your thesis to include the insularity of America. As a Canadian I feel that I am, and certainly try to be, as connected to Europe as I am to the USA. I wasn't really concerned, frankly, whether Americans would get the Baader-Meinhof references, or even know who the hell they were. If they don't, it's a good opportunity for them to learn about it. I made the movie in Berlin and really had a German audience in mind when I wrote it. No one but a German would understand all the minutiae and particularities and conspiracy theories about the alleged suicides (or alleged murders) of the four main members of the RAF, and no one but a German would understand why the character Gudrun in my movie would get so over-wrought and melodramatic about it all. And because I was making a movie about these infamous and very influential German terrorists, I knew that I had to do my homework seriously and get everything right, because German audiences are obviously very astute about the whole history of the rise and fall of the RAF. But, you're right, it was the tragic, iconic aspects of the four main members of the RAF that attracted me to them specifically as subjects. The fascination with their carefully contrived, glamorous image -- the dark sunglasses and leather jackets, fast cars, and stylish iconography -- persisted in underground circles in the '80s and fascinated me and my friends in the punk scene. We all passed around a dog-eared copy of Jillian Becker's Hitler's Children (ignoring its conservative bias) and fantasized about our own glamorous coups d'etats.

There has also been a rich history of movies that have dealt with the RAF specifically or indirectly, such as Von Trotta's Marianne and Juliane and Von Trotta's and Schlondorff's The Lost Honour of Katarina Blum, Fassbinder's The Third Generation, and Richard Hauff's Stammheim, an interesting movie, based on the transcripts of the trials of the Baader-Meinhof gang, that no one seems to talk about anymore. So I wanted to continue that sort of tradition. I do kind of wish I'd made reference to the FLQ, our very own Canadian (Quebecois) '70s terrorists, but I couldn1t fit in everything.

RG: In his Gerhard Richter catalogue, Robert Storr neatly summarizes the Baader-Meinhofs' struggle as being "based on the Maoist notion that the triumph of the revolutionary Third World over the reactionary First World depended on bringing the battle from the margins to the center of the empire." In this film you focus on dead '70s left-wing European radicals right at a moment in history when the West is now the target of Muslim right-wing radicals. By making this film now are you intending on any level to draw a connection between the current terrorist attacks and the Baader-Meinhofs' involvement with the PLO in the '70s?

BLB: Well, yes, but somehow I didn't want to make the connection too obvious or blatant. Clearly it's extremely significant that the RAF were early sympathizers of the PLO (along with such other luminaries as Vanessa Redgrave and Jean Genet) and that they actually trained in PLO camps in the Middle East. I think this was an obvious acting out against the old guard German establishment, both left and right, who felt or were forced to feel a lot of guilt and shame about what the Third Reich did to the Jews during the Second World War. Support of Israel was therefore de rigueur in Germany, so the fact that the RAF and a lot of German youth started to support the PLO must have been a real slap in the face to the older generation. But I mean obviously the current state of terrorism, September 11th and all that that entails, is still directly or indirectly a result of the Israeli-Palestine conflict, no matter how hard US Republican try to deny it. The treatment of Palestinians by Israel and USA is the lynchpin of Arab resentment toward the West, followed closely by the American interference in Muslim holy lands in Saudi Arabia, and now Iraq (oil-rich holy lands, that is). I didn't want to get into this subject too deeply in The Raspberry Reich because ultimately it's more about broader concepts of sexual repression and the need for sexual revolution than it is about specific political and historical conflicts. (I don't care what's going on in Chechnya, Tibet, or Afghanistan. I care about my orgasm!) So as a kind of poetic gesture I began The Raspberry Reich with a (handsome) Muslim man reciting from the Koran mostly to invoke the Islamic angle as a kind of backdrop for the story I'm telling about the acolytes of the RAF. At the end of the film one of the would-be terrorists does end up training terrorists in a Middle East training camp, which makes the connection more concretely for those who may have missed it. Ultimately, though, it's always about, as one of the texts screams in the movie, the notion that "The Arrogance of the Strong Will Be Met by the Violence of the Weak". This goes for the Israeli-Palestine conflict, the Chechnyan conflict, and most any other conflict that breeds terrorism.

RG: I was recently talking to Edmund White about Genet's relationship to the PLO and we then got on to the topic of how currently a Muslim boyfriend is such a very hot catch for gays. I hear you recently published an article called "How to Shag a Muslim" which sounds really great. Can you explain this distinctly post 9/11 phenomenon? Is this the Stockholm Syndrome?

BLB: Well there's nothing sexier than the Stockholm Syndrome, and perhaps I am in the grip of it. I've been going out with a devout Shiite Muslim now for over three years, which has really influenced how I view the whole clash of civilizations between the west and the Arab world. My "huwi", as we sometimes call each other (his term -- a contraction of husband and wife; he also would never refer to himself as homosexual, but will allow that he is unheterosexual!), is of Indian descent, born and raised in East Africa, and speaks six languages, including Koranic Arabic, so obviously his perspective on America and the whole world order right now is fundamentally different from the average western viewpoint. I met him at a bathhouse in Toronto about seven or eight months before 9/11, so I can't really be accused of jumping on any sort of bandwagon. In fact, I see it as some strange sort of premonition. Before meeting him I had been vastly ignorant of Islam, so he really offered me a crash course that helped me digest the events of 9/11 and its aftermath. One thing I noticed immediately about him was these kinds of vague anti-Semitism (i.e., anti-Jewish sentiment) that he had about him, which I now gather is a kind of white noise that exists across the Arab World. As so many of my friends in Toronto are Jewish, I took him to a friend's for Passover and he quickly began to get over it, especially after realizing how closely related Jewish and Muslim customs really are. Anyway, I wrote "How to Shag a Muslim" for Vice magazine as a tribute to my friend. I didn't mean to encourage a movement, although I suppose why not? Although I do hate the way white homosexuals tend to have this kind of colonialist fetish for certain ethnic groups. Someone recently called me a "curry queen" and I almost puked on them.

RG: I'm always amused by the story that the Baader-Meinhofs were expelled from a PLO military training camp in Jordan because the German girls were sunbathing topless on the roof of their barracks. Would the intense homophobia and closettedness of much of Muslim culture be a hard topic to address directly in a film? Are you using the Baader-Meinhofs as a metaphor to talk about the erotics of specifically left-wing radicals and guns? It seems like bulldozing gays in Afghanistan wouldn't be much of a subject to be able to make such a playful film as The Raspberry Reich

BLB: The misguided notion that homosexuality is forbidden in Middle Eastern and Arab cultures is a really good example of how the west completely misinterprets Muslim attitudes and practices. Only when homosexuality becomes overt or organised is it severely punished. I mean, doesn't anybody remember Lawrence of Arabia? One of my favourite scenes in that extraordinary movie is when Lawrence walks into the officers' mess after making it across the desert with his Arab boy and insists that the boy get his own room and a clean bed. The scene is overtly about him insisting that an Arab be treated equally to a white man, but the subtext of course is that he's fucking the boy, an Arab custom, and that he has adopted this Arab custom and doesn't care who knows it. But you're right, it is a subject that would be difficult to address overtly in a movie. I would love to make a documentary about my friend, but he is discrete about his sexuality so it would be impossible. But just because the Muslim world is more discrete and secretive about its sexuality, it doesn't mean they are repressed, a common western misconception.

I did sort of transpose my ideas about sexual politics relating to the Muslim question onto The Raspberry Reich and the Baader-Meinhofs. The opening scene, for example, in which Che, a member of The Raspberry Reich, makes love to his gun, was actually inspired by a home-made video I saw on CNN of an Al Qaeda terrorist declaring jihad on the west, and in it he was literally kissing his rifle and cradling it in his arms like a lover. It was chilling. It's also easier to make a satirical, somewhat light-hearted movie about terrorism by making it about a group that is no longer active who have sort of already passed into the realm of mythos.

RG: I just read your new book ride, queer, ride, which I much enjoyed. I really related to your forward, which discussed on the tiresomeness of gay pc policing of images of gays in film. After the controversial response and walkouts at Sundance, how do you feel the London Gay Film Festival response has been to The Raspberry Reich? Has the film been attacked by the London gay p.c. militia? Are you interested in deliberately provoking controversy or couldn't you care either way?

BLB: I frankly often feel more comfortable showing my movies at non-gay festivals, even though they involve explicit homosexual sex because the audiences at regular festivals come in with much less ideological baggage concerning gay issues, and seem to look at the work more strictly from a cinematic point of view. I think the walk-outs at Sundance, which can have some very mainstream audiences, were mostly by people who had probably never seen gay porn before, and it's hard to watch porn in a theatre sitting beside a stranger, particularly since as a culture we know longer watch porn in theatres like we used to. I don't think there's anything terribly un-pc about The Raspberry Reich, certainly not compared to my last movie, Skin Flick. The crime of The Raspberry Reich is that it is an intellectual (if you will allow me), or at least political, porn movie, which rankles some gays who don't like to have their porn interfered with by art or politics. There seems to be a strain of anti-intellectualism going around these days. It's all about style and aesthetics. People don't want to have to think too much.

RG: You recently mentioned to me that you'd come across the son of Gudrun Ensslin when the film was screened at the Berlin Film Festival. What was his response? Was it hard for you when you met him? I'm also curious how the Berliners' response varied as opposed to elsewhere? I always find your work hilarious, did they try to take it very seriously and try to take you to task for possibly appearing to play with the subject too lightly?

BLB: Actually, I met Felix Ensslin, the son of Gudrun Ensslin, during the editing of The Raspberry Reich. He is a friend of Klaus Biesenbach, the director of the Kunstwerke, the modern art museum in Berlin, so when he heard about my movie he invited us both to a dinner. I explained to him the whole thesis of my movie, the pornographic angle, etc., and he was very enthused by the idea. He told me that it was true that the core members of the RAF took very seriously the ideas of Reich and Marcuse, and believed that sexuality was political and that there had to be a sexual revolution before there could be a social and political revolution. He was an extremely intelligent and cultured man, so we got along very well. It was Gudrun Ensslin's brother, I was told, who attended a screening of The Raspberry Reich at the Berlinale, and he asked me a question about Jillian Becker's Hitler's Children during the Q&A session after the film, although I didn't know it was him at the time. We got a lot of mainstream press when The Raspberry Reich was released in Berlin, and most of it was quite positive. Some critics took it pretty seriously, while some complained that such serious and sensitive subject matter shouldn't be treated in a humorous and/or pornographic manner. In general I think it was appreciated for its seriousness of intent and the gentleness of its satire. One of the most respected intellectual film critics in Germany, Georg Seesslen, gave it a quite positive review in Film magazine. My producer told me that the Green Party Minister of the Environment and Alfred Biolek, Germany's most famous talk show host, both went to see it in the cinema, so I gather it reached a pretty interesting audience.

RG: When I met you in 1990 you were only known as a filmmaker, but in recent years you've been showing your photographs in galleries a lot. How do the two things vary for you? Has one medium fed the other? For you, how does it vary in showing these photographs in an art gallery as opposed to showing this film in a movie theater? It seems in the context of Terry Richardson or Wolfgang Tillmans your photographs are better understood in the art world, rather than the film world where your films can sometimes be marginalized by the press and the pc contingent as the work of the "gay punk shock-meister".

BLB: Hmm. Well it has been interesting. The art world is so completely different from the cinema world. Sometimes it seems like the cinema world has become so immersed in mainstream narrative products that when they see something anti-narrative or experimental they don't know what to do with it. I think that the whole experience of making Skin Flick/ Skin Gang almost forced me into the direction of the art world because a lot of film people just couldn't swallow it, it was so out there. It was only when I showed it, along with a bunch of my photographs, at MC Magma, a wonderful gallery in Milan, which also showed Skin Flick as part of the show, that the movie started to get some serious consideration. (A critic from Flash Art saw it there and wrote that as a porn it was "an epic of the form" and called me a "pornographic Brecht".) But I have met with resistance from the art world as well for showing pornographic work. I mean, post-9/11 the art world, like everything else, has become very conservative, and I was showing photographs of Muslims with titles like Dreamy Terrorist or of my friend the artist Kembra Pfahler in a black burqa lifting the fabric to show her vagina. So I guess it was tough work. But the problem I always have is that people in the art or film world think that I'm too pornographic, and people in the porn world think I'm too arty. I'm kind of in a purgatory between the two. Or a waiting room. What I have discovered is that I can take a photo of a naked guy with a hard-on and publish it in a gay jerk-off magazine and it is considered pure porn, then take the same photo and frame it and put it in an art gallery and it becomes art. It's all context. Or presentation. The last solo show of photographs I had, at John Connelly Presents in New York, had a huge crowd at the opening and great word of mouth, but the critics largely ignored it. I heard through the grapevine that some people in the art world didn't take it seriously because it was too purely pornographic. Who knows? I think we sold six or eight photos, which isn't bad. My main gallerist is still Javier Perez from peres-projects in LA. He gets me.

Rupert Goldsworthy is a British-born, New York-based painter/installation artist and curator.