Monday, November 24, 2014

A Rainer Runs Through It

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This week marks the final week of The Film Society of Lincoln Center's second half of their Rainer Werner Fassbinder retrospective here in New York, which has been, you know, an absolutely glorious experience. Yesterday I saw Querelle on a big screen for the first time and I have to say, it opened up the movie for me in a way that watching it on a small screen's lacked. Watching it at home it's easy to get distracted not just by its glacial pace but by the fact that your focus on a small screen tends to zoom in on the actors - here, with Querelle, that means your eyes end up wedged tight in on Brad Davis' cleavage, basically.

Which is a fine place to be wedged! Don't get me wrong! But being enveloped by the film as a whole, with it being projected up there larger than life, it does this film great favors. I felt it - the stink and poetry of it - in a way I never quite had before. I'm sure everyone's got their own pick based on their own experiences but I consider this The Gayest Movie Ever Made - Querelle captures, for me, something quintessential about homosexuality, about masculinity obsessed with itself, its expression externally, internally... top to bottom, the whole versatile experience, as it were. I know Fassbinder himself didn't like boxing it in like that but I'm not convinced it does hold the universal perspective he'd like it to... and that's great! That's a badge of honor pinned in there amongst all the chest hair and sweat.

Anyway I also managed to see the free screening of Last Works, Wolf Gremm's hour-long 1982 documentary that aired on TV after Fassbinder died; it mainly consists of behind-the-scenes footage of Rainer acting in Gremm's feature-film Kamikaze 89 and of Rainer directing Querelle, all of which was happening in the months leading up to his death in June of '82.

Man oh man do I wish Last Works was available online (it doesn't seem to be on the Querelle blu-ray either) so I could make gif upon gif of the scenes of Querelle's Brad Davis and Franco Nero practicing the scene where they almost kiss - it's really, you, know, something special. Davis' well-documented drug-use is pretty clear in the footage, though - one second he's down, the next he's literally bouncing off the walls, sniffing and doing push-ups and scream across set. My favorite bit has to do with Rainer though - on the Querelle set he's almost never seen behind the camera without a giant glass of beer in his hand... until we're told towards the end that it's not beer, it's actually whiskey and soda he's chugging as he works. I honestly don't know how he even made it to 37, but thank goodness we had him.
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1 comment:

sissyinhwd said...

Saw QUERELLE when it first opened in NYC at that art house across from Lincoln Center. I remember hearing a story around that time hew was in town for the NY Film Fest and he went to the Anvil and didn't come out to daylight. He supposedly was wearing white jeans and they were black when he left in the morning. It was fun back then...so glad I'm alive and healthy. HA