Posts tagged jaap kooijman
Put your Marxism where your mouth is
THE RASPBERRY REICH
Canada, 2004
Director: Bruce LaBruce
Stars: Susanne Sachsse, Daniel Batscher, Andreas Rupprecht, Anton Z. Risan, Daniel Fettig
Available on DVD - order here
Review by Jaap Kooijman
“Put your Marxism where your mouth is” is one of the slogans that repeatedly run across the screen of Bruce LaBruce’s The Raspberry Reich. Also, on LaBruce’s own website, black and red T-shirts are sold with the slogan printed on the back. Like the film’s other statements such as “Madonna is counter-revolutionary,” “heterosexuality is the opiate of the masses,” and “join the homosexual intifada,” the slogan reveals how political criticism in capitalist society (think Naomi Klein’s “No Logo”) can easily be reduced to sound bite products of the same corporate culture it criticizes. In this way, LaBruce exposes the possible hypocrisy of radical political activism, yet at the same time – by doing so – performs a self-conscious radical political act himself by revealing the ability of corporate capitalism to appropriate even the most radical criticism, which subsequently can be bought on DVD.
With all his films, the Canadian gay independent director keeps viewers guessing what they are actually watching. Are his films meant as a joke – just amateurish camp – or are they political pamphlets in disguise, criticizing the prudish bourgeois moral of capitalist society? LaBruce never fails to point out in his films, either implicitly or explicitly, that he realizes how ambiguous his films are, often making fun of the possible intellectual and farfetched academic interpretations of his work. The Raspberry Reich is no exception. Both a pornographic film to shock and titillate its audience and an over-the-top hilarious portrayal of a group of German radical political activists (or terrorists, as Bush would say), clearly modelled after the Rote Army Faction (RAF), The Raspberry Reich makes fun of intellectual Marxism without denouncing its political potential.
The Raspberry Reich tells the story of a contemporary German group of radical political activists, led by Frau Gudrun (Susanne Sachsse), who literally has copied the identity of the real-life Gudrun Ensslin, an original member of the RAF Baader-Meinhof Gang active in the 1970s. Gudrun believes that non-conformist sexuality is a political act to bring capitalist society down, and thus she fucks her boyfriend Holger (Daniel Batscher) in the elevator of their apartment building, while a German elderly couple looks on, both shocked and aroused. But as Gudrun believes that monogamous heterosexuality is a construct to maintain bourgeois capitalist society, the act of non-conformist heterosexuality is not revolutionary enough for her. Therefore she perceives homosexuality (sex, not homosexual love) as the most powerful revolutionary act. She encourages Che (Daniel Fettig) to masturbate while caressing phallic guns in front of huge posters of the Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara, here reduced to an iconic commercial image. She also forces her straight male followers to have sex with each other, though much to her dismay, the initially reluctant men enjoy gay sex so much that it no longer remains just a revolutionary act, but soon turns into homosexual love.
Blue movie
Canada, 1996
Director: Bruce LaBruce
Stars: Tony Ward, Bruce LaBruce, Ron Athey
Review by Jaap Kooijman
Canadian filmmaker Bruce LaBruce has described himself as the reluctant pornographer. It’s a fitting title, as most of his films, including No Skin Off My Ass, Skin Flick, and Hustler White, mimic the look and feel of gay porn films, but always stop short of becoming hardcore. With the exception of Skin Gang(the hardcore porn edition of Skin Flick), all LaBruce’s films suggest more sexually explicitness than they actually show, and as a result, rather than merely providing images for masturbatory pleasure, Bruce LaBruce’s films urge us to rethink our distinctions between pornography and erotic romance.
Soapy heaven
LATIN BOYS GO TO HELL
USA, 1997
Director: Ela Troyano
Stars: Irwin Ossa, Alexis Artiles, John Bryant Davila, Mike Ruiz
Available on DVD - order here
Review by Jaap Kooijman
Watching Latin Boys Go To Hell is just like watching soap. It is difficult to decide whether the actors are very bad, or instead very skilled ones who succeed in imitating the amateurish acting style of the average soap. Moreover, the film is inspired by the Spanish-language telenovela format, which, with all its melodrama and hysteria, is surely the soapiest soap genre of them all. Latin Boys Go To Hell revels in soap’s guilty pleasures and celebrates soap’s artificiality by suggesting that the overly exaggerated reenactment of love and revenge, so typical of soap, actually comes closer to a real experience of life than other forms of art.
