Bruce Labruce is the Migraine of the Masses!: An Interview With Bruce LaBruce (Hardcore Version) [2018]
Bruce LaBruce is the migraine of the masses. For more than thirty years the Canadian writer-director-artist-dramatist-pornographer has broken and blurred so many lines that to label his work “controversial”, “subversive” or even “shocking” at this point would be a gross oversimplification.
Better to take the first step and focus on LaBruce’s complex and intricate procedures for rendering the (often taboo) subjects that he wants you to deal/fuck with: within two minutes (or less) he will invade the most vulnerable corners of your subconscious, and then — when everything is imprinted on remote memories and the warnings turn off — he will offer himself as your trustworthy guide in exploring a carefully calculated universe. Or at least that’s what John Waters declared in a candid interview for the 2011 documentary Advocate for Fagdom, when asked about his perspective on the body of work created by the self-declared ‘Reluctant Pornographer’.
In effect, Labruce has been refining a provocative cinematic experience in which explicit sex-scenes (No Skin Off My Ass), male prostitution and hardcore sex practices (Hustler White, Skin Flick), live + experimental performance (Pierrot Lunaire; Offing Jack; Ulrike’s Brain), dystopian futures + demeaned nature/s (the shocking–but not so farfetched description of what 2022 will look like in Valentin, Pierre & Catalina; Otto; or, Up with Dead People), bold + intelligent humor (the defiant dialogue between Bruce and the annoying journalists in Super 8 ½; the final scene in Refugees Welcome; or, who could forget the S.C.U.M. Manifesto cameo in Gerontophilia !?), crude clashes and raw encounters (the desolating post break-up meeting between Rudolph and Otto in Otto; or, Up with Dead People), in-your-face xeroxed portraits + sex & politics + synchronized imagery juxtapositions (The Raspberry Reich , The Misandrists, Purple Army Faction), and self-reference (Flea Pit, Give Piece of Ass a Chance) collide as elements to envision exceptional cell/u~llages* that require scrupulous replays from the viewer (here’s a surprise, press the p⏸️use button at 00:26:05 and 00:28:06 in The Misandrists).
Bruce LaBruce is an effortless theory-mixtape-maker, a master of pornsonification, who reunites society’s rejected, melting together radical politics, queer underground culture, technocracy and street knowledge, un-life and immortality, only to secrete it within the cracks of a corpulent industry
I wanted to speak to LaBruce about the legacy of his 2004 film The Raspberry Reich, about the legal turmoil that resulted from the heirs of photographer Alberto Korda objecting to the use of his famous photo of Che Guevara, the ‘Guerrillero Heroico’, about the different versions of the film proliferating across porn and non-porn channels, its role as Trojan Horse amidst the explosion of the -tube world, recruiting members to a homosexual intifada, newly aware of the Red Army Faction. What resulted was an extended conversation on agitprop, insurrectionary porn, and the bedroom as a site of disruption.
Bruce LaBruce is the migraine of the masses. There’s no doubt about it.
I’m curious about the eclectic reactions people have had since you released ★The Raspberry Reich ★ in 2004, from the legal turmoil and copyright-conservatism madness of Alberto Korda’s heirs about the use of the already worn out Che Guevara’s portrait ‘Guerrillero Heroico’, to the broad availability and bootleg distribution of the movie in different versions in porn (and non porn) channels.
Heavily charged of Trojan-horse propaganda, TRR grew up slowly in the middle of the explosion of the -tube world to gain more and more homosexual intifada members aware of the existence of the legacy of the Red Army Faction.
What have you reflected about the influence that TRR had in your career fourteen years later?
★ The Raspberry Reich ★ experience was a wild ride for me. I was struggling to get films made in that era. At several points in my filmmaking “career” (I still hate the word), I tried and failed to get bigger- budgeted films off the ground. Although we regarded them as sexually explicit art films, my long- time producer, Juergen Bruning, and I gained reputations as pornographers for my first three films, No Skin Off My Ass (1991), Super 8½ (1994), and Hustler White (1996), which made it difficult for me to secure financing for bigger films. Juergen dealt with it in his inimitable fashion by starting the very first porn company in Berlin, Cazzo Film, and I began directing actual porn movies for him with the stipulation that I could release both hardcore and softcore versions, the latter more suitable for film festival play and theatrical release.
My neo-Nazi porn film Skin Flick (1999) (hardcore title: Skin Gang) was the first movie I did following this model, and ★ The Raspberry Reich ★ (2004) (hardcore title: The Revolution Is My Boyfriend) was the second. Happily, these “side projects” ended up being just as interesting, if not more so, than the bigger films I didn’t manage to get made, largely because they were low-budget and pornographic so I was given complete creative freedom as long as I provided the requisite porn scenes. I call these two films my first “legitimate” works of porn because for the first time I was actually working with professional porn actors and working within the conventions of porn, although I challenged them as far as I could. It’s a long story, but nine months before 9/11 I fell in love with a closeted devout Shia Muslim who became my boyfriend, more or less, for three years. (He appears at the beginning ★The Raspberry Reich ★ in the midst of a religious ecstasy). It was strange because before that time I knew very little about Islam, but he certainly gave me a crash course! I was writing in defense of Islam both before and after 9/11 for a couple of columns I was writing at the time for Toronto publications.
So terrorism was the order of the day, so to speak, and that’s when a big shift to the right and neo-conservatism took hold with the rise of patriotism, jingoism, and war-mongering. I was alarmed by how a lot of leftist discourse was squelched in the public domain after 9/11, but I was equally alarmed by how ineffectual the left was (and still is) at combatting the shift to the right, neo-liberalism, xenophobia, austerity, and other conservative tendencies in the ascendant. The left was becoming increasingly entrenched in dogma and doctrinaire politics, relying on shibboleths and paying lip service to radicalism. Blair’s Labour Party in England, a formerly socialist entity, gutted unions and formed an alliance with the Bush Republicans advocating conquest and a return to colonialism.
Meanwhile, the far left was reduced to a kind of fashionable nostalgia, and “radical chic” became popular, witness the capitalist exploitation of Korda’s famous image of Che Guevera, emptied of all political significance and reduced to a kind of empty logo of vague radicalism. So this was the zeitgeist that inspired ★ The Raspberry Reich ★, which, incidentally, came out the same day as The Motorcycle Diaries, a radical chic movie about Che that finally presents him as a Hollywood matinee idol. Smart critics noted the irony of the two films coming out at the same time, and I actually did get a lot of good reviews for the film. It played at over a hundred film festivals and was on its way to becoming a cult hit when about six months into my tour with the film Jurgen and I got hit with a one million dollar (Canadian) lawsuit for copyright infringement by the Korda estate. The lawsuit was launched in France, which has some of the toughest copyright laws in the world, but the sixty-page court document was delivered to my door in Toronto by a local sheriff, so it was pretty heavy. We got a famous gay French lawyer, Emmanuel Pierrat, to defend us, but we technically lost. The damages were reduced to about 8k Euros, but we had to cover the court costs, so we ended up having to pay about 30k Euros (the budget of the film was about 60k!), effectively erasing all our profits from the film. The film is a critique of radical chic and both a critique and celebration of the radical left, but it is obviously anti-capitalist, so the irony of being scuttled by Che and Korda over copyright was bitter. They argued mostly that we “demeaned” and “defiled” the image of Che, although I didn’t really intend having a hot porn star jerk off on a blow-up of the Che image to be demeaning at all — more of an homage, really.
I just figured everyone else in the world was jerking off to the image, so I might as well show it literally.
It was a complicated lawsuit, which named such co-conspirators as Amazon.com and other distribution entities, and the film was technically banned for distribution only in certain regions. The film’s slogans, particularly “The Revolution is my Boyfriend”, started to be widely quoted online and on t-shirts and banners, neatly mirroring the radical chic critiqued in the movie. Meanwhile, after I got back from a tour with the movie in 2005, I met my future husband, a Cuban dancer at the famous Tropicana in Havana who defected to Canada during the Special Period in the nineties when he was in his early thirties. We would end up being together for 12 years. He used to tease me because I made this film about revolution and revolutionaries while he actually lived through a REAL revolution with all the complexities and paradoxes and hardships it entailed. He affectionately called me “Brucito Subversivo.” (We went to Havana together when my film Gerontophilia played at the Havana Film Festival in 2013, which was quite controversial.)
My fascination with the Red Army Faction, which started when I read Jillian Becker’s book “Hitler’s Children”, published in 1977, when I was a punk in the mid eighties, continued, and I’ve revisited the theme of terrorist chic, abduction, fuckwashing, and revolution, a number of times since. In Los Angeles at the gallery that represents me, Peres Projects, I mounted a show in 2007 called Heterosexuality Is the Opiate of the Masses at whose opening I performed a live porn-lite abduction scenario/Polaroid performance piece involving terrorists, guns, slogans, faux-violence, and a lot of fake blood. Over the next ten years I did variations of this performance at other galleries in Barcelona, Toronto, New York, London, and Pittsburgh, at the Warhol Museum. I directed a short in 2010 called Give Piece of Ass a Chance, which is a dyke homage to ★ The Raspberry Reich ★ written by a burlesque performer and sex trade worker activist, which features explicit lesbian sex.
And most recently, my films ★ The Misandrists ★ and Ulrike’s Brain explore the same territory in lesbian feminist terms. Oh, and I made a short porn film called ★ The Purple Army Faction ★ starring Francois Sagat which also involves terrorist abduction and fuckwashing in a gay context. So the legacy continues! ★ The Raspberry Reich ★ remains one of my strongest cult films, particularly in South America.
I’m also very interested in the process of designing agitprop/agitporn strategies in the film.
How did you decided to make the ready-witted conjunction of sex scenes, provocative dialogues and flashing capitalist repellent messages? (There’s an early trace of it in Skin Flick / Skin Gang)
Is truly a brilliant sneak attack to the viewer, like the unexpected presence of Genesis P- Orridge, the infamous (and appropriately enriched) Marx’s phrase Homosexuality is the Opiate of The Masses or the constant excerpts from The Revolution of Everyday Life.
If you follow the maxim “Talent borrows, genius steals,” then ★ The Raspberry Reich ★ is genius. I stole quite brazenly from a number of sources, including Raoul Vaneigem’s The Revolution of Everyday Life, Dusav Makaveyev’s WR: Mysteries of the Organism, Godard’s La Chinoise, Fassbinder’s The Third Generation, and other works that I’ve probably forgotten. But this is a style that I’d been developing since my involvement with the Queercore Movement, including my fanzines and early super 8 experimental films. It’s a kind of collage technique, or bricolage, or detournement, whatever you want to call it. In my early super 8 films I would combine material that I shot directly off the television, found footage, and scenes that I shot myself, and repurpose it or “queer” it for my own political purposes. It’s a synthesis of unlikely source material — found pornography, classic Hollywood film imagery and music, punk imagery and music, etc. — that creates unexpected and complex meaning and signification.
The point is to make this act of “stealing” into a work that expresses your own style and meaning. Godard always often used agit-prop text in his sixties movies, but I use the same technique in conjunction with gay pornography and queer activism, which gives it a whole new purpose and significance. I am also critiquing his critique of radical chic, so there are many layers. I subvert already “revolutionary” slogans like “Religion is the Opiate of the Masses”, for my own radical queer purposes, ending up with “Heterosexuality is the Opiate of the Masses”.
One of the recognizable traits of my work is that if the audience thinks I’m being sarcastic, I’m probably being sincere, and if they think I’m being sincere, I’m probably being sarcastic. Ambivalence and ambiguity are both strategies I picked up from the punk movement. It makes you more nimble, hard to pin down, difficult to co-opt.
Another trait of my work is that I often critique a film or a movement or a tendency at the same time that I celebrate it or appreciate it. I acknowledge my own ambivalence toward my subjects. As for the agit-prop technique of ★ The Raspberry Reich ★, I have always maintained that pornography is the perfect vehicle for propaganda. The audience is put into a receptive, sexually aroused state, so it’s like a spoonful of sugar that helps the political message go down! I also argue that porn is like a collective sexual subconscious, so the political message or “propaganda” enters the subconscious realm. Another characteristic of my work, which has developed from years of making no-budget film with limited access to proper equipment or crew, is turning the mistakes (or disasters) in my filmmaking into its greatest strengths.
So for ★ The Raspberry Reich ★, I had a sound recordist who was completely inexperienced, so the recorded sound was unusable, and I had very limited resources to make the film, so the footage didn’t look very good. So, out of necessity, I went into a studio and post-dubbed the entire movie, which gives it the kind of feeling of a propaganda film, or a B-movie, or a foreign film you would see on television, and I invented the whole over-determined agit-prop style with so many slogans and so much text crossing the screen most of the time. Actually, in one sense, it was a way to disguise how lackluster the footage looked! I hated the footage during editing, but when we spruced it up with all the colours and text and overlays, it became quite stylish! And by the way, I didn’t really know if the post- dubbing would work, so the editing process was a bit torturous, not know if the film could be, in a way, salvaged.
But this is how I often work, making your limitations work for you.
It would be fascinating to go further in the way in which you use bedrooms in your filmography as unusual spaces for intimate, sexual and political disruption, in many of the sets the bed is explicitly a place where (usually queer bodies) are used as thresholds or insights to particular mindsets, fluids, and ideological postures; there’s impressive moments I’m remembering right now from Otto or Up with Dead People, Hustler White, Gerontophilia or Skin Flick, every scene has moments embedded in which sex goes beyond than a simple physical performance.
What are your thoughts on this?
Well, in ★ The Raspberry Reich ★ Gudrun says “sexuality is a force of nature that cannot be contained by a mattress or a sheet,” and she chants, “Out of the Bedrooms, Onto the Streets!” as she and Holger fuck their way out of the bedroom and into the living room and then out of their apartment and into a public elevator. But yes, beds are often a nexus of sexual provocation and disruption in my movies. Starting with my first feature, No Skin Off My Ass, the hairdresser and his love object, the neo-Nazi skinhead, end up in bed together, a scene that is both romantic and pornographic, both ironically and unironically.
In mainstream cinema the bed is often the site of heterosexual monogamy and normalcy, with countless Hollywood movies showing the husband and wife in bed talking or having mostly boring sex, and the sex scene is often elided. But I try to subvert this reactionary tendency by making it a site of fetish and perversion. In Hustler White an amputee hustler fucks a john up the ass with his leg stump on a dirty mattress on the floor; in Skin Flick, a neo-Nazi masturbates onto a copy of Mein Kampf on his bed, and two others have an explicit, somewhat brutal sex scene one another bed; in Otto; or, Up with Dead People, the queer zombie boy eviscerates the boy he has picked up in his bed, splattering the walls with blood; in LA Zombie, the alien zombie fucks a man back to life on a dirty mattress in his homeless lair. In Gerontophilia, the 18-year-old gerontophile and his 81-year-old love object have sex in a king size motel bed, and then the old man dies while they are sleeping. In ★ The Misandrists ★, the girls in the home for wayward girls all sleep in one giant bed consisting of eight beds pushed together, where the eventually make a porn movie of their lesbian orgy for revolutionary purposes.
So once again, a site of sexual conformity and monogamy becomes, in my movies, a space of sexual revolution and acting out against the customs and conventions of the dominant order.
In an interview made in the premiere of ★ The Misandrists ★ /Ulrike’s Brain at Berlinale you declared that cinema/porn should be insurrectionary; as an attempt to incite the writing of material for a new manifesto, (although, who could possibly get tired of The Purple Resistance Manifesto!?)
Which would be the golden rules from Labruce to make fearless insurrectionary cinema?
1) Question authority.
2) Support your local pornographer; all porn is art.
3) Don’t be ashamed to use shock value and sheer provocation as ends in themselves.
4) Challenge conventions, both formal, cinematic ones and cultural, heteronormative ones.
5) Support your local prostitute, because you are probably one too.
6) Kill your cinematic idols.
7) Make porn, not war.
8) Challenge the gay orthodoxy.
9) Shock yourself. If you think you’ve gone too far, it’s probably a good sign artistically speaking.
10) Never succumb to political correctness or conventional wisdom!
I consider that Refugee’s Welcome has one of the most exciting genesis and development to date, the short film was submitted and (in)famously rejected from Berlinale, is starred by Pig Boy + Jesse Charif and it has the treatment of previous works like Gerontophilia (the soundtrack is remarkable), is full of warm humor, explicit gay sex and present-day subjects like the growth and exacerbation of the refugee crisis and social/sexual integration. Although you mentioned that you envisaged Refugee’s Welcome as liberal sexual fantasy, is also a brave attempt to portray refugees as 360º human beings. But above all is a provocative porn-sonification that arises fresh and open perspectives on a multilayered issue.
Can you share the experiences you had while filming Refugee’s Welcome in the streets of Berlin?
I’m particularly interested in the sex scene towards the end of the film, with the highway in the background.
The idea for Refugee’s Welcome actually came from meeting Pig Boy, the Czech porn star, online. When we chatted I discovered that he is also a published poet and quite a smart man, definitely debunking the stereotypical porn star image (which porn stars I meet and work with often do). At the time I was looking for a project to do with Erika Lust’s porn company, so I came up with the refugee concept, having become aware of the situation in Berlin and seeing the “Refugees Welcome” signs in the windows of certain cafes and bars.
So I cast Pig Boy as the poet who saves the refugee from the racist neo-Nazi skinheads, but then I had to cast the refugee. I put a casting notice on social media, looking for a Syrian, but this proved to be impossible, so I ended up casting Jesse Charif, who is Lebanese. He had never done a porno before, so it was a bit of a risk. But he and Pig Boy ended up having great sexual chemistry, and they were both very sweet to work with. We shot the opening scene of Jesse at the exterior of an actual Refugee Center in Berlin.
We shot the scene where they meet, while Pig Boy is giving a poetry reading, at an actual anarchist café that already had a Refugees Welcome sign in the window! (I heard later that the producers arranged a screening of the film at the same café, and they didn’t like the movie at all! They complained about the “white savior” angle and didn’t like that the white character topped the refugee! The latter is ridiculous, since a) I don’t consider bottoming any sort of humiliation or degradation — unless you want it to be! — and b) I asked Jesse to also fuck Pig Boy up the ass, but he wasn’t comfortable with it so we didn’t do it.)
The final scene by the highway was improvised. I was across the busy street at the exit to the freeway yelling, “fuck him, fuck him,” so Pig Boy pulled down Jesse’s pants and started fucking him. I was too far away to tell if they were actually doing it at that point. The Erika Lust people were amazing because not only was it the first totally gay film they produced, but also they gave me a total free hand, allowing me to include political and religious content, which they generally steer away from. The film also references a number of my other films about skinheads, especially Skin Flick.
Maybe the next comparison is remote and at times forced, but I find some similarities in the feedback/reception that The ★ Misandrists ★ got from festivals like the Frameline Festival, rejecting the film because “it’s a film of lesbians directed by a gay man” and John Waters’ Desperate Living (1977), when lesbian groups stopped the film from being shown in Boston at the Orson Welles Cinema by saying “how dare a man make a comedy about lesbians!”, years later John declared in This Filthy World about the incident that “is odd how even minorities sense of humor can change in 20 years”.
As someone who is aware of cultural diagnosis around the evolution and growth of sexual identity(ies), do you agree that we are witnessing a new wave of gay conservatism?
Touring with the film has revealed which would be the reasons for such attitudes of segregation?
I have always questioned identity politics with my work. I often have characters that engage in homosexual sex but do not identify as gay (hustlers, neo-Nazi skinheads, extreme left wing revolutionaries, gerontophiles, etc.) But my films have also always been inclusive in terms of race, class, and gender.
I find the new emphasis on identity politics has really narrowed creative expression and it demonstrates a profound ignorance about sexuality, history, and human experience. My sexual identity is pretty much fixed — I’m a Kinsey 6, if not a 7 — but I acknowledge that this means I’m sexually repressed. I believe, after Freud, that everyone has some bisexual potential, and the tendency to increasingly entrench gender identity as innate and immutable is really preposterous. It also leads to strict rules about sexual representation — how gays, lesbians and transgender people “must” be portrayed, the policing of representation, a kind of proprietary stance about who is allowed to portray these characters. It really boils down to a naivety about sexuality, and a complete failure of the imagination. It discourages people who may have the potential for some kind of sexual fluidity to express themselves. I’ve always been a “bad gay,” but now this political correctness has made me feel even more alienated from the notion of “gay identity,” particularly since the new assimilationist model is so conservative and dull (However, I can still do “Old School” with the best of them!).
Having ★ The Misandrists ★ rejected by a number of major LGBTQ festivals actually was the best thing that could have happened to the film. In the USA, for example, the film ended up being released in 30 cities in theatres and venues that encouraged a broader audience to view it. I found it encouraging that a film that takes on issues of gender, feminism and identity politics in a challenging way found its audience in the current climate, and the discussions around the film, whether negative or positive, were refreshing.
Not every representation of an LGBTQ character should be expected to adhere to “positive reinforcement.” Some of my favourite gay characters in cinema have been evil or criminal or camp or tragic, and those that aren’t at least have depth and ambivalence. Having said that, I still support the idea of LGBTQ characters being represented as militant and extreme, even separatist. I try to contradict myself at least once a day. And clichés can sometimes be liberating.
★ Purple Army Faction ★ is a return to ★ The Raspberry Reich ★ as an in-reverse conversion faction that has the main purpose of smashing heteronormativity.
The humor and the embedding of propaganda are astonishing! (Fight overpopulation, convert a breeder. / Save the planet. Go gay. / Down with procreation. / Smash the straight state. / Think globally. Fuck locally.)
Rather than just revisiting previous works for this project, what drove you to build this scenario as a weapon to depict a new world and think about heteronormativity as the clear minority?
★ Purple Army Faction ★ is made in a similar style to my films ★ The Raspberry Reich ★ and Give Piece of Ass a Chance. It’s agit-prop, satire, pastiche, and porn all in one. This is what I mean by embracing gay extremist scenarios and characters and not being afraid to depict clichés, which are often based in a certain amount of truth.
When I was in University, there was an anti-gay group called the “League Against Homosexuals” who would have meetings and post fliers on campus, and their motto was, “Queers Don’t Produce, They Seduce.” So this was the starting point for ★ The Purple Army Faction ★, basically embracing this slogan and extrapolating its sentiment into a speculative future where, because of over-population, it might be necessary to discourage breeding by converting mass numbers of straight men to homosexuality! (That is, converting them to the model of the “old school” gay, for whom having children wasn’t particularly desirable.)
It’s a neat corrective to the idea of trying to convert gays to heterosexuality, in this case justifying the reversal of that repulsive activity through a moral and biological imperative. In this case, as in ★ The Misandrists ★ in lesbian terms, I am absolutely supporting the idea of a fixed sexual identity, but only when it is in the service of militancy, political radicalism, and glamour!
The gay guys that convert the straight character in ★ The Purple Army Faction ★ are so sexy and stylish that anyone would want to be converted to gayness by them, especially through fuckwashing! The film is also obviously a reaction against gay conservatism and assimilation, which essentially expects gays to become homonormative similacrums of heteronormativity. And of course, along with the other two similar films of mine I mentioned, it was important that the film be strongly pornographic in order to convey convincingly and authentically the concept of sexual revolution and gay radicalism.
Oh and I also used a lot of conservative and even Trumpist slogans and repurposed them in support of an extremist gay agenda!
You worked with François Sagat before (in L.A. Zombie) in similar urban locations, but this time you also directed new co-porn actors who perform the members of the PAF.
How did they receive the idea of belonging to the PAF?
How did they reacted and incorporated the script into the performance?
I had already tortured Francois Sagat by making him play an alien zombie who fucks dead people back to life in my gorn film L.A. Zombie, so he already knew pretty much what to expect from ★ The Purple Army Faction ★. The other three boys, Arad Winwin, Dato Foland, and Levi Karter were porn stars that I chose from the Cockyboys roster, and they were all totally receptive to the idea of the film and fully engaged in both the narrative and porn aspects of it.
But as I often do in my films, I expected porn actors without experience in narrative film to execute ridiculously complicated dialogue in English, so it was particularly challenging for Dato, whose first language is Russian, and Arad, who is Persian. Even though the intention of their performances is great and convincing, the dialogue wasn’t perfect, so I decided to post-dub the entire film with other voices. This ended up making the film even better, because it reinforced the late-show, B-movie, Exploitation, Action Film type of a vibe that I was going for.
I love working with porn stars who are “non-professional” actors (they’re actually both professionals and actors) because they are usually hungry to do work that is different or more challenging, and of course they are also used to being in front of the camera and they know their angles and how to look great and sexy!
The Purple Resistance Army Manifesto is a sharp text that was designed to tackle, or at least resist to the ever-changing face(less) of advanced capitalism, the manifesto includes sharp points that are still growing up against mainstream culture like the development of counterintuitive individuals, the rejection revolutionary reactionaries and the embrace of the anal liberation.
What would you add or change to update this manifesto?
Well first of all, I would call it a (wo)manifesto, not a manifesto. I stand by most of The Purple Resistance Army (Wo)manifesto. When I updated it to be included in a book on Pussy Riot, I took out the anti-Pamela Anderson section. She’s actually no better or worse than most celebrities. She must have just done something at the time that annoyed me. I would now also amend the section The Tyranny of Stylists/The Aesthetic Dementia.
I think style and styling has in some ways improved since I wrote the (wo)manifesto, and in some ways it has gotten worse. There’s a lot of great styling and stylists emerging from social media sites like Instagram that are more imaginative, less heteronormative, more intersectional, etc. I was irritated at the time by the co-option by middle class white gay stylists of the street style of transsexual street prostitutes and strippers of colour, but now that really has become the default style for all celebrities and many civilians, so there’s no real point to complaining about it. I do think it’s getting tired now, though. If I see one more sheer dress I think I will poke my eyeballs out with toothpicks and use them as martini olives. It’s become really square. They’re trying way to hard. We really need a new Mr. Blackwell — of any gender — who calls out all the fashion no-nos going on today.
The attempt to appear as naked as possible while still being dressed on the red carpets seems really square now. There’s a lot of bad style and styling out there, but there’s just so much of everything now that it’s impossible to call it all out. It’s a free-for-all, a messy hodge-podge of questionable tastes and choices. (I address this issue in my follow-up (wo)manifesto, “Notes on Camp/Anti-Camp”) The last Met Ball, for example, based on Catholic themes, was grotesque and unforgivably apolitical. These days, everyone is just into excess and materialism and the flaunting of wealth in a really gaudy and meretricious way. It’s the same with mainstream film. It’s just about how many celebrities you can stuff into one movie, exhausted superhero tropes that are reactionary and predictable, and real estate porn.
Ulrike’s Brain is your first project conceived as a B-movie from ★ The Misandrists ★.
How did this RAF’s brain transplantation idea started to become a full B-movie?
Can we expect more B-movies of your films in the future?
The idea behind Ulrike’s Brain is not so far from science fiction. After Ulrike Meinhof, Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin and Jean-Carl Raspe, the four main members of the RAF, were suspiciously found dead in Stammheim prison (Meinhof first, by strangulation; the others over a year and a half later, the men by gunshot, Ensslin also by strangulation), their brains were removed by the authorities to be examined by neuropathologist Dr. Jurgen Peiffer of Tubinger University. Peiffer’s examination of Ulrike Meinhof’s brain led him to the dubious conclusion that an operation to remove a benign tumour in 1962 caused damage significant enough to have contributed directly to her subsequent terrorist behaviour. Supporters of the RAF, who refused to believe that the actions of the left wing revolutionary were the result of a sick mind, vigorously opposed this theory. The examinations of the brains of the dead revolutionaries, who some believed were murdered by the state, also conjured visions of the grotesque medical experiments conducted during the Third Reich.
The subsequent revelation that the four terrorist brains had mysteriously disappeared and were unaccounted for added a further level of science fiction to the entire spectacle. Only Ulrike’s Brain was finally located and returned to her daughters to be interred with her body in 2002. In an even more bizarre twist, the brains of the remaining three RAF members have mysteriously disappeared, their whereabouts unknown to this day. Referencing sixties B-movies like They Saved Hitler’s Brain and The Brain That Would Not Die, Ulrike’s Brain finds Doctor Julia Pfeifer (Susanne Sachsse) arriving at an academic/scientific conference with an organ box containing the brain of the real Ulrike Meinhof, which was saved by the authorities along with the other three brains of the leaders of the RAF after they all died in Stammheim prison. It soon becomes apparent that Doctor Pfeifer can communicate telepathically with Ulrike’s brain, which is directing her to lead a new feminist revolution. To that end, Doctor Feifer is searching for the ideal female body to transplant Ulrike’s Brain into.
At the same time, her arch-rival, Detlev Schlesinger, an extreme right wing ideologue, arrives at the conference with the ashes of Michael Kühnen, the former German neo- Nazi leader and infamous homosexual who died of AIDS in 1989. Through mystical practice and occult ritual, Schlesinger intends to raise the spirit of Kuhnen from the dead, reincarnating him in a body he has robbed from a grave as a kind of zombie, to challenge Pfeifer’s left wing insurgency. When the two Frankenstein’s monsters of the extreme left and the extreme right meet, chaos ensues.
Ulrike’s Brain, the movie, all began as a performance/installation at the conference Die Untoten: Life Sciences and Pulp Fiction, an event curated in 2011 by Hannah Hurtzig at Kampnagel in Hamburg, the largest independent production venue for the performing arts in Germany. Hurtzig commissioned me to create a performance event to run parallel to the conference, which concerned researches and speculations about the zones of indeterminacy: the intersection of life and death. I decided to make a film for the event referencing pulp science fiction movies of the sixties, foregrounding the making of the film, which was performed in front of live audiences during the conference.
Susanne Sachsse, who plays Dr. Pfeifer, gave an actual lecture at the conference, posing as a “real” academic, adding an extra layer of obfuscation to the proceedings. Shooting extra material on location in Hamburg, I turned the performance/installation into an experimental film. I don’t really have any immediate plans to make another B-movie per se, although I have a few script ideas that contain B-movie elements.
Finally, in the last 5 years (especially at the time of your MOMA retrospective) I’ve noticed that many profiles depicted your status as an established outsider, I’m against this affirmation.
How would someone who has a desire to become established could make the films you’ve made, say the things you’ve said, take the pictures you’ve taken and write the screenplays you’ve wrote (let’s remember the line “The family model is a pre-revolutionary structure of oppression” from Ulrike’s Brain) through the years?
“Resistance is when I put an end to what that I don’t like.”
Actually I stole those lines from Ulrike Meinhof! But it’s all about how I re-contextualize them. I don’t really care what they call me anymore. I just keep making the movies I want to make. I have a voice and an aesthetic and I like to cause trouble. What else is there?
Bruce, you are the migraine of the masses.
