Baron Bonds with Bruce La Bruce
Bruce LaBruce is a true zeitgeist of our generation.
As a moviemaker Bruce LaBruce is unchallenged in the way
he makes movies, he operates without a care for who will watch
them, an avant-garde artist in every sense. He doesn’t set out to
deliberately offend like a fledgling artist might, but offend he can.
He makes what he wants, about what he wants, with micro budgets.
Confronted with money he doesn’t bow to the masses; he uses it
to make something true to himself and his vision. This piece is not
intended as an homage to Bruce LaBruce, he like everyone else has
flaws, but it is the honesty in his work that overrides and forcefully
volleys back any criticism sent his way.
LA Zombie was the movie that brought Bruce into the
consciousness of most of today’s young film enthusiasts and
budding auteurs. But on the back of this controversial masterpiece,
the artistic importance of his oeuvre is bound to be rolled out,
and consumed once more. Banned at the Melbourne Film Festival,
it wasn’t so much the shock of sexual orifice intrusion (already
witnessed in Otto: or, Up with Dead People) that shocked those
who did get to see the movie, but its portrayal of the LA homeless
situation and its explicitly original handling of horror and porn.
“I made LA Zombie more as a visual idea, I only had a three
page outline when I went to LA to shoot it, and when I went for
pre-production and scouting locations we really noticed the severe
homeless situation so we included as much as we could when we
were shooting. It’s obviously systematic of something much wider
that is happening, that America is turning into a banana republic.”
Throughout history horror writing has manifested society’s
fears, but recently the genre has lost its way, regurgitating
old themes, films and stories. Stoker’s Dracula and its numerous
adaptations highlighted the fear of the immigrant and the
foreigner, and Shelley’s Frankenstein set its sights on science
and the enlightenment. Bruce LaBruce doesn’t see that
correlation in horror today.
“I think that the whole new wave of horror movies,
are almost like an anti-intellectualism where certain people,
and certainly horror geeks, almost resent when you try to use
the genre for nefarious purposes, like metaphor or allegory, it’s
almost supposed to be unconscious or something, so they feel
very territorial about the genre. There’s a kind of tendency
to reject any kind of analysis of horror.”
Romero re-introduced the zombie onto our screens as
a political monster and now Bruce has re-worked Romero’s idea
of the ‘Political Zombie Film’ by introducing the homosexual
man as the zombie in Otto; or, Up with Dead People for one of
the worlds first brushes with the ‘Gay Zombie Porno’. With LA
Zombie, Bruce took that theme one step further, introducing not
just alienation as a theme but poverty as well. So what we’re left
with, as Bruce alluded to, is LA Zombie the first ‘Gay Zombie
Poverty Porno’ ever made.
“Both Otto” and LA Zombie featured marginalised, schizo
gay people and a friend of mine who saw LA Zombie said ‘wow,
that really is poverty porn’ because it’s combining elements of porn
with cinéma vérité style footage of the homeless, whilst looking at
street life in LA. I tried to put two seemingly impossible elements
together so I mixed porn with this documentary realism; some
people get it and found it interesting and some people just can’t
get past the porn.”
Bruce LaBruce was greatly influenced by his mentor in film
college, the respected film critic Robin Wood who edited a seminal
book on 70’s horror, ‘The American Nightmare: Essays on the
Horror Film’.
“His main theory was that a lot of these films signified the
return of the repressed. There was a lot of repression in American
society post Vietnam, there was political upheaval, there was a
return to a certain social conservatism and a lot of the analysis was
about sexual oppression and how any kind of repression returns as
some kind of monstrous form; it has to manifest itself someway!”
Bruce claims that it’s this idea that he was referencing
somewhat in Otto; or, Up with Dead People, his first foray into the
horror genre. Last year LaBruce wrote a tongue-in-cheek article for
his column ‘Wondering’ in Vice Magazine, criticising Canada and
some of its foreign policies.
“I was partly forced out of the country in a way because
my early films were that sexually explicit I was accused of being
a pornographer. I had film labs call the cops on me, I would have
them try and confiscate my work, so it was hard to get funding
from anyone in Canada so I was forced to move away to make the
films, that’s when I moved to LA for a year”
Whether or not Bruce is consciously referring to his
feelings toward the extreme conservatism that runs rife through
Canadian society in his films, he definitely still finds it a difficult
place to go back to in terms of work.
“I get next to no distribution in Canada, there is a
weird phenomenon here, you are forced to leave for your work,
because there isn’t an interest or a market here for avant-garde,
underground or pornographic film so you have to go somewhere
else to make it. Then when you come back they kind of resent
you for having gone away in the first place. There’s also a sort of
preventionism in Canada.”
From early in his career Bruce found minds akin to his own
in Berlin. His long time producer Jurgen Bruning found funding
and open arms for Bruce in the German capital. The city’s influence
on Bruce LaBruce is evident in No skin off my Ass and Skin
Flick in their association with the gay skinhead, a culture he first
witnessed in Berlin. However it’s in The Raspberry Reich that the
love affair really blossoms. The Raspberry Reich is a pastiche of
revolutionary fashion and fads and an ode to the Red Army Faction,
the famous Baader Meinhoff group who ran amuck during the
70s. Upon release, Bruce was introduced to Felix Ensslin who was
Gudrun Ensslin’s son, one of the four main members of the RAF.
Through him Bruce met Gottfried Ensslin, Gudrun’s brother who,
whilst she was in jail exchanged letters with his sister in which she
encouraged his homosexual activism. Gottfried loved the film for
embracing these ideals, and it is these links that encourage
Bruce to push on in his use of pornography as political activism.
“I like to think we did something unique that was about
sexual revolution but also a porn movie which I think was
important, as it was like ‘put your Marxism where your mouth
is’. It was also not only an investigation into their belief system
but also a critique into how revolutionary movements are coopted
or how they become incorporated into fashion, and their
political significance becomes irrelevant, dissipating, leaving empty
signifiers that are exploited by capitalism.”
Bruce again referenced porn’s importance as a weapon
in a recent column, saying, “Today, with the emergence of the
gay conservatism, pornography appears to be the last bastion
of sexual radicalism. That’s why I always express solidarity with
gay pornographers. They’re the last glimmer of glamour in
the gay movement.”
As we chatted with Bruce about last year’s gay marriage
law passing in New York he said,
“There is no movement anymore, there is no solidarity,
there’s no progressive or subversive agenda anymore, so what
unified people disappears, in a way I think the gay movement
is dead anyway. I think it’s a shame that so much money has been
poured into marriage as opposed to AIDs, the AIDs crisis has
kind of been put on the back burner to fund the marriage agenda.”
It was back in Canada where Bruce found his first real
avant-garde inspiration in AA Bronson and his partners
‘General Idea’, enthusing,
“3 gay men in an art collective who made work that was
ahead of its time, and specifically homosexual and influenced by
the sitiuationalists, they put a political and aesthetic dimension
to the work that was quite avant-garde way back in the 70s.”
This is where Bruce wants to be. He cites himself as
a purveyor of The Gay Avant-Garde and he is an inspiration
to others because of it. But what’s most inspiring is that Bruce
LaBruce isn’t nearly done, he has only just begun and with porn
as his weapon, he won’t stop until the machine has been bombed
into submission.
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