Live Score | Pisse
It’s about to get sleazy. In his classic all-male-adult film, Wakefield Poole recounts the experiences of a construction worker labelled as “straight” and his journey into unknown desires. We follow the nameless man with a moustache, flannel shirt and hard hat as he walks home from his shift through the streets of New York. On a street corner, a woman is hit by a car and her handbag flies at his feet. He grabs the bag, in which he later at home finds a lipstick – the first and by no means last phallus in the story – and an invitation to Club Bijou which he accepts without the slightest hesitation. During his visit, he wears no underwear under his denim. What follows is a dense sequence of flesh and colour: sex driven surrealism, in which our protagonist appears less as an active participant than as a reserved, possibly guilt-ridden, supporting character.
BIJOU
US 1972, D: Wakefield Poole, A: Bill Harrison, Robert Lewis, Peter Fisk, Cassandra Heart, 75’, no dialogue/projected silently, DCP
Despite the low production budget – the club scenes were shot within four days in the director’s flat – Poole, who worked as a cameraman and editor in addition to directing, pulls out all the stops on a visual level: split screens and multiple image overlays convey the protagonist’s world of thought to the viewer. There are also cabinets of mirrors and a highly expressive use of colour and light, while the spatial setting remains limited to the essentials. Despite all the concentrated “man on man action”, BIJOU is a highly avant-garde contribution to gay erotica – the perfect introduction to the genre for heteros.
Whether you are new to the genre or not, the post-punk band Pisse will sweeten the deal. In a work commissioned by GEGENkino, they are dedicating themselves to a new soundtrack for BIJOU. Like the construction worker in the film, Pisse have been surrounded by an aura of mystery and aloofness since their formation over ten years ago. The members of the band from Saxony, which has since become known throughout Germany and even the world, deliberately spread unreliable information about themselves. They consistently reject the commercial music business and, in addition to releasing their albums in vinyl editions, always make them available as downloads, where you can determine the price you pay for them yourself. The daily newspaper taz compares Pisse to the sarcastic punk of the early Goldenen Zitronen. Critics from other music magazines are also enthusiastic about their sound: Musikexpress voted the album “Mit Schinken durch die Menopause” one of the 50 best punk albums of all time in 2023.
It will be interesting to see how the band, whose instrumentation with a theremin is already rather unusual for a punk band, will deal with BIJOU’s series of images: whether they will orientate themselves on the structure of the original film score – evocative, atmospheric compositions and loops by Gustav Holst and Alan Hovhaness, interrupted by a pinch of Led Zeppelin. Whether they might incorporate text fragments or scraps of speech, as the Pisse lyrics are unrivalled and it is almost a shame without them. Whether they might put more emphasis on synthesiser and theremin. Or whether they work with samples and electronics. We don’t know. Ulrich Gutmair also writes about the band in the taz: “For all their filthiness, Pisse are washed in the waters of the avant-garde.” So much for Gutmair. The band’s official promo text, on the other hand, states: “Whipped by disgust, Pisse play low music for a dishonourable audience.” We look forward to aesthetic moments of friction between image and sound. It will be a celebration.
| Fri 13. Sept | UT Connewitz |
| 8 PM | With introduction by Marco Siedelmann € 15 |
Polyester US 1981, R./D.: John Waters, K: David Insley, M: Charles Roggero, D: Divine, Tab Hunter, Edith Massey, Mary Vivian Pearce, David Samson, Ken King, Mink Stole, 35mm, engl. OV
The “American Dream” in a dripping wet headlock of AA meetings and fetishes, depression and glue sniffing, religious double standards and a dysfunctional family. Mother and housewife Francine Fishpaw (Divine) is faced with the ruins of her middle-class idyll: husband Elmer (David Samson) turns out to be a wannabe playboy and secretly runs a porn movie theater. The children also indulge in their hedonism; son Dexter, for example, becomes a criminal because of his obsession with feet. Francine takes refuge in alcohol until the real savior, super-hunk Todd Tomorrow (Tab Hunter), appears on the horizon. “Polyester” is not only the “Filth Maestro’s” first studio production, it also marks Waters’ turn towards established forms of cinema. In terms of narrative and visuals, he seeks to engage with Hollywood melodramas in the style of Douglas Sirk. The humor remains tasteless as usual.
Hairspray US 1988, R./D.: John Waters, K: David Insley; M: Kenny Vance; D: Ricki Lake, Divine, Debbie Harry, Vitamin C, Sonny Bono, Leslie Ann Powers, Ruth Brown, Jerry Stiller, 35mm, OmdU
Waters and his muse Divine love the exalted colors, fashions, gags and characters of the classic Hollywood musical. The “camp” that this shrill world of lived dreams contains. They take it all up, but turn it into something different, something queer: their retro musical, which was to remain Divine’s last appearance, is eye-candy like the classics, but also a critique of puritanism, racism and the body standardization of the post-war decades in the USA. And it is the first film in which Waters enters the mainstream – despite the clear Baltimore underground spirit.
Fr 05. Juli | John Waters double Feature LuRu Kino in der Spinnerei 14 Euro for combination ticket. |
| 7 pm | Polyester (US 1981 engl. OV, 35mm) € 8 (7 reduced) |
| 9 pm | Hairspray (US 1988 engl. Original with subs, 35mm) € 8 (7 reduced) |
Last year, our editorial ended with: saddle your bats! So we thought: more of it! That is why at GEGENkino #9, there will be talking goats (with subtitles). Theatrically dying budgies. Fishing boats as a swimming Gomorrah. Dogs. Dogs. Dogs. And the rabbit from NEKROMANTIK. The animal world in film is a world of fictions, humanization, often also of abuse. But also of speculative fiction, complicity, poetry, reflection, in short: humanly made through and through. Or maybe not? This year, we will be exploring the animal-human-relationships in a series of documentary and essayist forms: ANIMAL REALITIES. It has become quite a considerable section. Short, mid-length, feature length. Digital and analogue. Historic and contemporary. Experimental, immersive, contemplative, self-reflexive. We will carefully examine much discussed works as well as marginalised positions. Beyond this focus, we also encounter animals. During the opening night at UT Connewitz for instance, the previously mentioned goats of THE REAL LIFE AND STRANGE SURPRISING ADVENTURES OF ROBINSON refreshingly free ourselves from a anthroprocentric fixation without the film trying to genuinely empathize with an animal perception. Director Benjamin Deboosere will be our guest for a Q&A. In addition, the opening film will be the feature debut of the Belgian-Congolese rapper Baloji to marvel at: OMEN is a colourful, unpredictable, occult bomb of a film. Definitely a banger!
As an additional venue this year, we welcome the mobile Milieu-Cinema from Vienna. A converted moving picture-truck with a 35mm projector, which will stop at Rabet, next to Kino der Jugend and at Wagenplatz Karl Helga to fire forgotten findings, fun fair films and current creepy fun at you. We are especially looking forward to our visitors from Prishtina. On two evenings, Alush Gashi and Ilir Hasanaj will present works from the Kosovan film scene and the environment of Kino ARMATA, in which they are both active.
What else? Jörg Buttgereit has written a book about role models and his film works. Along with plenty of illustrative material and a high entertainment value, he will present Nicht Jugendfrei!: Tagebuch aus West-Berlin, and afterwards we will watch his necrophiliac cult film part one. A further book presentation riddled with entertaining examples of popular culture will be brought to us by journalist Jens Balzer. In Ethics Of Appropriation, he sounds out the complex aspects of cultural appropriation and argues the case for a prolific dealing with it.
Let us continue with an “Attention!” – this year, the live scoring will be an organ concert! Silent film pianist Richard Siedhoff will add a live score to the impressionist, black and white, underground splatter film BEGOTTEN on the venerable cinema organ of Grassi Museum. Additionally, he breathes a soundtrack into SCHENEC-TADY III by Heinz Emigholz, an abstract landscape film with mathematically arranged images. We dedicate a small homage to the almost forgotten filmmaker Martin Müller and his “aimless cinema” – wonderful that he will be coming to Leipzig and accompany the selection of his works.
More in staccato because all would go beyond scope otherwise: Selma Doborac will present her challenging DE FACTO and talk with us about it. A Mafia saga from Bollywood, Filipino seven-hour-slow-cinema, preposterous mask-horror from Austria, a stunning favela-Mad-Max-Mix as docufiction, indigenous memory as resistance, migrant sound systems meet Thatcher’s police state, the terror of a house without an exit, a punk film “like a Scorsese film that was beaten to junk in the Bowery for three days”, the fascist rabbit state of Efrafa and Virginia Woolf’s Orlando as trans-kaleidoscope.
Dinner is served. Feel cordially invited. It’s GEGENkino-time again at last.
FR 2023, D: Paul B. Preciado, A: Emma Avena, Arthur, Virginie Despentes, 98’, original with english subtitles, DCP
From a queer perspective, Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando – A Biography from 1928 is a decisive moment of literary modernity, because during its course, the young man Orlando awakens as a woman after a sleep lasting several days. For his experimental documentary film, Paul B. Preciado takes the figure of Orlando as a starting point for devoting himself with his own trans identity and as a playful proposal for about two dozen trans and non-binary people to recount their individual biographies. They slip into the role and comment on their respective transitions, their struggles with their own history and with state and medical-psychiatric regimes of control.
| Sun 17 Sept | UT Connewitz |
| 9 PM | € 6,5 (5,5 reduced) |
