Jean Genet – Page 4 – { feuilleton }

Flowers: A Pantomime for Jean Genet

Flowers (1986) by the Lindsay Kemp Company. Photos by Maya Cusell.

Weidmann appeared before you in a five o’clock edition, his head swathed in white bands, a nun and yet a wounded pilot fallen into the rye one September day like the day when the world came to know the name of Our Lady of the Flowers. His handsome face, multiplied by the presses, swept down upon Paris and all of France, to the depths of the most out-of-the-way villages, in castles and cabins, revealing to the mirthless bourgeois that their daily lives are grazed by enchanting murderers, cunningly elevated to their sleep, which they will cross by some back stairway that has abetted them by not creaking. Beneath his picture burst the dawn of his crimes: murder one, murder two, murder three, up to six, bespeaking his secret glory and preparing his future glory.

A little earlier, the Negro Angel Sun had killed his mistress.

A little later, the soldier Maurice Pilorge killed his lover, Escudero, to rob him of something under a thousand francs, then, for his twentieth birthday, they cut off his head while, you will recall, he thumbed his nose at the enraged executioner.

Finally, a young ensign, still a child, committed treason for treason’s sake: he was shot. And it is in honour of their crimes that I am writing my book.

(Our Lady of the Flowers by Jean Genet. Translation by Bernard Frechtman, 1963)

Lindsay Kemp’s all-male version of Oscar Wilde’s Salomé has been the subject of several earlier posts, a production staged in the mid-70s with Kemp himself playing the part of Wilde’s femme fatale. Kemp’s company produced a related work in 1974, Flowers: A Pantomime for Jean Genet, a stage adaptation of Genet’s first novel, Our Lady of the Flowers (1942), in which Kemp played the part of drag queen Divine. Wilde and Genet aren’t so far removed from each other artistically although I can’t imagine them getting on in person. Both men were prisoners, of course, and Our Lady of the Flowers was famously written in prison, the first copy being discovered by a warder and destroyed. There’s a more direct connection in Fassbinder’s Querelle during the scenes where Lysiane (Jeanne Moreau) sings “Each man kills the thing he loves”, the most famous line from Wilde’s The Ballad of Reading Gaol which refers to (among other things) one of Genet’s obsessions: the prisoner condemned to death. Wilde would no doubt appreciate Genet’s poetic reimagining of his fellow prisoners, and his use of flowers as symbols; what Genet would have made of Lindsay Kemp’s typically extravagant and rather camp stage creation is anyone’s guess. He did write several plays but in later years evaded questions about them or his novels by claiming to have forgotten all his works. By the 1970s Genet was much more interested in the political struggles of the Black Panthers and the Palestinians.

Much as I like Wilde’s play, given the choice I think I’d prefer to see the Genet staging. Salomé is familiar enough from various stage and film adaptations whereas Flowers was unique. There is a video record of the latter from 1982 but the copy uploaded by Lindsay Kemp has had its soundtrack removed following the usual annoying copyright complaints about the music. So there’s the frustrating choice of watching the whole thing with no sound or watching this 28-minute video compilation of still photos by Maya Cusell from a 1986 performance with music that may be the original live score. One thing the photos show is how close in appearance is Kemp’s Divine to his dancer at the beginning of Derek Jarman’s Sebastiane (1976). In 2012 Kemp talked to Paul Gallagher about his film and stage career, Flowers included.

Update: As noted by radioShirley below, there is a copy of the 1982 performance with full soundtrack!

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Querelle de Brest
• Jean Genet, 1981
• Un Chant d’Amour (nouveau)
• Jean Genet… ‘The Courtesy of Objects’
• Querelle again
• Saint Genet
• Emil Cadoo
• Exterface
• Penguin Labyrinths and the Thief’s Journal
• Un Chant D’Amour by Jean Genet

Querelle de Brest

Querelle de Brest (1947) by Jean Genet. Cover design by Jean Cocteau.

This weekend’s viewing was Fassbinder’s Querelle (1982) which is marvellous in its new Blu-ray transfer, and a great improvement on the muddy picture of the earlier DVD release. The film is still only the briefest sketch of Genet’s novel (although Genet biographer Edmund White enjoyed it) but I like the overheated atmosphere, the phallic set designs, Franco Nero (hey, it’s Django Gay!), and the film as a whole is a fitting memorial to Brad Davis, everyone’s favourite sweating matelot. So in honour of all that, here’s a small collection of Querellerie past and present.

Querelle de Brest was published in a limited edition of 525 copies illustrated throughout by Jean Cocteau who didn’t avoid the pornographic details. Even though copies were seized by the authorities, and the author fined, Cocteau’s involvement did little to harm his public reputation, something that’s impossible to imagine happening elsewhere. A few of the illustrations follow below, many more of the series can be found scattered across various websites.

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Tuxedomoon: some queer connections

UK poster insert by Patrick Roques for Desire (1981).

Yes, more Tuxedomoon: there’s a lot to explore. It’s always a pleasure when something that you enjoy one medium connects to things that interest you elsewhere. From the outset Tuxedomoon have had more than their share of connections to gay culture—to writers especially—but it’s more of an ongoing conversation than any kind of proselytising concern. This post teases out those connections some of which I hadn’t spotted myself until I started delving deeper.

The Angels of Light: Not the Michael Gira group but an earlier band of musicians and performers in San Francisco in the early 1970s. The Angels of Light formed out of performance troupe The Cockettes following a split between those who wanted to charge admission for their shows, and those who wanted to keep things free to all. Among the troupe there was Steven Brown, soon to be a founding member of Tuxedomoon:

The group began as an offshoot of The Angels of Light, ‘a “family” of dedicated artists who sang, danced, painted and sewed for the Free Theater’, says Steve Brown. ‘I was lucky to be part of the Angels—I fell for a bearded transvestite in the show and moved in with him at the Angels’ commune. Gay or bi men and women who were themselves works of art, extravagant in dress and behaviour, disciples of Artaud and Wilde and Julian Beck [of the Living Theater] … we lived together in a big Victorian house … pooled all our disability cheques each month, ate communally … and used the rest of the funds to produce lavish theatrical productions—never charging a dime to the public. This is what theatre was meant to be: a Dionysian rite of lights and music and chaos and Eros.’

Rip it Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984 by Simon Reynolds

(Special Treatment For The) Family Man (1979): A sombre commentary from the Scream With A View EP on the trial of Dan White, the assassin of Harvey Milk and George Moscone. White’s “special treatment” in court led to a conviction for manslaughter which in turn resulted in San Francisco’s White Night riots in May, 1979.

James Whale (1980): An instrumental on the first Tuxedomoon album, Half-Mute, all sinister electronics and tolling bells as befits a piece named after a director of horror films. Whale’s Bride of Frankenstein (1935) is not only the best of the Universal horror series, it’s also commonly regarded as a subversive examination of marriage and the creation of life from a gay perspective. (Whale’s friends and partner disagreed, however.)

Cover art by Winston Tong.

Joeboy San Francisco (1981): The Joeboy name was lifted from a piece of San Francisco graffiti to become a name for Tuxedomoon’s DIY philosophy. It’s also a record label name, the name of an early single, and a side project of the group which in 1981 produced Joeboy In Rotterdam / Joeboy San Francisco. The SF side features a collage piece by Winston Tong based on The Wild Boys by William Burroughs, a key inspiration for the band which first surfaces here.

In one piece, the band cites its influences as: “burroughs, bowie, camus, cage, eno, moroder”. Can you say what you admired or drew on vis-à-vis these artists?

William S. Burroughs — ideas concerning use of media — tapes, projections, his radical anti-control politic in general as well as his outspoken gayness. Early on we duplicated on stage one of his early experiments projecting films of faces onto faces.

Simon Reynolds interview with Steven Brown

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Skivvies

Not had anything for a while deserving of the eye candy tag so here’s some gratuitous shots from a short promo video for some underwear company or other (he said disingenuously). The ad is directed by Steven Klein, and the piece as a whole doesn’t appear to have had a straight viewer in mind given the amount of shots that look like AMG beefcake or extra auditions for Fassbinder’s Querelle. And speaking of Rainer’s matelots, they’ve been in mind recently following news that the director’s Genet fantasia will be making a welcome appearance on Blu-ray later this month. The DVD format didn’t do much for those saturated colours so this is good to hear. (Underwear tip via Homotography.)

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Hello, sailor
• Querelle again
• Sailors
• Mikel Marton
• Exterface

William E. Jones on Fred Halsted

Presenting an interview by John Wisniewski with William E. Jones, author of Halsted Plays Himself (2011). The subject is gay filmmaker and performer Fred Halsted (1941–1989) whose 1972 film LA Plays Itself was a pioneering piece of low-budget cinema which combined a fragmented view of Los Angeles with explicit liaisons between several men, one of them portrayed by Halsted himself. Halsted took advantage of the period between 1970 and 1975 when porn in the US was no longer illegal but hadn’t yet been industrialised. As with Genet’s Un Chant d’Amour, what you get on the screen isn’t a product, it’s the representation of an obsession. It’s this that makes LA Plays Itself a still surprising and provocative piece of work.

I arrived at this film and Halsted somewhat belatedly, in fact I don’t think I’d read anything about him at all until William E. Jones was interviewed when his book was published. (Matters haven’t been helped in this country by the way hardcore porn of any kind was still illegal into the 1990s.) LA Plays Itself fascinates for the view it gives of the LA cruising scene which John Rechy described in considerable detail in The Sexual Outlaw. It’s a curiously hybrid film, neither straightforward porn—many of the sex scenes are fragmented—nor is it narrative fiction or outright documentary. Together with the recently reissued films of Peter de Rome, it’s the kind of thing that few people would be likely to make today, despite the easier access to film technology and the relaxing of censorship. And like all porn films of this era, it now has a unique look simply because it’s been shot on film.

None of Halsted’s films appear to be on DVD at the moment, and as William Jones notes below, Sextool (1975), the film Halsted regarded as his major work, may only exist as a single fading print.

Here’s John and William.

* * *

John Wisniewski: Why did you choose to write your book on filmmaker Fred Halsted?

William E. Jones: For several years I made money in the adult video industry, producing budget DVD compilations (4 hours for $10) sold in adult video stores. Before technological innovation rendered my job redundant, I watched over 700 hours of gay adult film and video produced between 1969 and 1999. In such vast quantities, the material, especially from the second half of the period, began to seem nightmarish in its ugliness. I would relish the opportunity to see any earlier title, produced before 1985, directed more or less like a movie, shot on location, and sometimes even acted fairly well. I can say without hesitation that Fred Halsted’s films were my favorites of all the videos I saw during those years in the porn industry.

Fred Halsted’s films have many fans but few advocates, and I thought my book could intervene in a decisive way before his legacy – the films and the memories of those who knew him personally – disappears completely. I also chose him as my subject because of his connection to Los Angeles. He lived and worked in neighborhoods I pass through nearly every day. But there was something else that drew me to his films, the uncanny power of work by a novice, and a self-taught one at that. His films are crude, idiosyncratic, and at their best have the force of a revelation.

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