“We come to life, we die… It's a perpetual renewal. How boring.”

– Mibu

Nanon Zanzi (Joan Crawford) is mortally afraid of men. Of their grabbing, grasping, groping hands. This is why she only trusts her knife throwing partner Alonzo the Armless (Lon Chaney). What she doesn't know is that Alonzo and his 4'10”/1,47 m accomplice Cojo (that great staple of precode horror Tufei Filhela aka John George), use the #circus to hide from the long arm of the law, who is looking for a murderer with a deformed thumb. Who would suspect an armless man?

“Men! The beasts! God would show wisdom if he took the hands from all of them!”

– Nanon Zanzi

As mighty as Alonzo may be, the incomparable Lon Chaney owes much to armless violinist and knife thrower “Judge” Paul Desmuke. Story goes that Desmuke taught Chaney his knife act in two months. More probable is that some of the more impressive close-up scenes show the Judge's, not Chaney's, feet.

 

Like Alonzo, The Unknown has lost some flesh. Until 1968, only mangled bootlegs were available; a complete print was considered non-existent. Five years later, news broke about film reels of unknown origin labelled inconnu – [the] unknown, somewhere in the bowels of the Cinémathèque Française.

 

Some 14 minutes, outlining the Armless' background, are still missing. Do check your attic.

Cabaretera, a sub-genre from the Epoca de Oro (the golden epoch of Mexican filmmaking, 1930s—1950s), combines film noir with melodrama and musical numbers. Often set in cabarets (brothels), these films talk about the plight of the prostitute who – not without their pride and dignity – are forced to being the breadwinner in a poverty-stricken community.

 

El lugar sin límites harks back to those days. We follow the plight of La Manuela, a transvestite* who together with daughter La Japonesita works as a fichera (a dancehall performer) in the brothel run by Madame La Japonesa, La Japonesita's mother.

 

The return of Pancho, a hyper-macho trucker, disrupts the family regime. The trucker's attraction to the #flamenco dancing fichera is at odds with his machismo. Him being outed as a maricón (a Mexican slur for homosexual) would be the end of his world.

 

El lugar remains a groundbreaking film, not only in how it handles taboos like #gender roles and trans- and homosexuality, but also because it highlights how (self) destructive #machismo is in Mexican society.

 

Sergio de la Mora's excellently researched EL LUGAR SIN LÍMITES: Ripstein in Review delves much deeper than this little writeup here. Do read it (spoilers ahead).

 

*Roberto Cobo's La Manuela is transsexual. The term “transvestite” is what's used in the film and typical for its time.

Considered one of the earliest positive cinematic depictions of (male) homosexuality, Carl Theodor Dreyer's Michael tells the story of lonely artist Zoret (director Benjamin Christensen), his bright young muse and model Michael (Walter Slezak), and the more mature art critic Switt (Robert Garrison). Though it's mostly suggested – there's a female temptress (Nora Gregor) assuming a heterosexual perspective – its motif of the spoken and unspoken relationship between the men is definitely one of love, much in the same way Charles Vidor's Gilda (1946) is.

“Now I may die content, for I have seen great love.”

– opening title card

Michael is the second book adaption of Herman Bang's Mikaël (1902) after Vingarne [The Wings] (Mauritz Stiller, 1916).

Synchronous to the screening of a film that wasn't, Derek Jarman's Blue was broadcast on radio and television. Those who tuned into the radio could request a special card printed in that most spectral of colours, International Klein Blue, a blue that according to its creator Yves Klein, has “a quality close to pure space” and “immaterial values beyond what can be seen or touched”.

“You say to the boy 'Open your eyes'. When he opens his eyes and sees the light, you make him cry out, saying 'Oh, Blue, come forth! Oh, Blue, arise! Oh, Blue, ascend! Oh, Blue, come in!'.”

– Nigel Terry

Submerged in #blue, seeing through what was left of Jarman's eyes, we live through the artist's life, and love, and loss. When you leave the theatre, put down that card, you're temporarily blinded by the physiological afterimage of a devastating disease. What remains is the voice of a filmmaker who lost his sight.

Daniel (Bernd Feuerhelm) is a young man in #WestBerlin exploring his homosexuality. Initially he opts for a spießbürgerlich, petit-bourgeois, almost heterosexual affair. He then probes further, swings by Berlin's public toilets and pools. Only when he encounters a leftwing gay commune he finds that pride, not conformity, is his way of living his life.

“Werdet stolz auf eure Homosexualität! Raus aus den Toiletten, rein in die Strassen! Freiheit für die Schwulen!”

Von Praunheim's Nicht der Homosexuelle ist pervers is a plea for rebellion and visibility. For revolt and love. A wakeup call for gays and straights alike. Such a stir this film pamphlet made it became the blueprint for West-Germany's gay liberation movement.

“Europe, a Stutz Bearcat, the best restaurants. You fellas really have a hard life, don't you?”

– Harold Horn, DA

A Bigger Splash is the name of one of painter David Hockney's best known works and part of a series of pool portraits of the artist's close friends, one of them his lover Peter Schlesinger, an artist in his own right. When in the early 1970s the relationship between the two men started to unravel it affected #Hockney so much it almost rendered him incapable of working.

“I paint what I like when I like, and where I like.”

– David Hockney

While going through Polaroids he found that two of the shots, one of a man #swimming underwater, the other of a man standing on a poolside, fell into the composition he was looking for. The resulting Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) – where an unknown man can be seen swimming towards Hockney's fully-dressed former lover – bears similarities to Renaissance paintings where the composition of human figures, landscape, and perspective culminate in proto-cinematic storytelling.

 

Cinematographer and filmmaker Jack Hazan juxtaposes David Hockney working on Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) with speculative scenes about the creation of the work and the disintegration of Hockney's and Schlesinger's relationship. It did create a splash, in particular in its ordinary depiction of a homosexual relationship.

 

A Bigger Splash is of course not the only (pseudo) documentary about an artist and his or her life, but one of the very few honest ones. The struggle to create is not romanticised, nor is the intimate relationship between artist and muse a playground of lazy, perverse speculation. As Hockney creates, destroys, and recreates his Pool, so we all destroy our lovers to bloom again.