Band of Thebes

Berinale Teddy Winner: Brazilian Film About a Gay, Blind 15 Year-Old

Writer-director Daniel Ribeiro's Hoje Eu Quero Voltar Sozinho/ The Way He Looks has won the Teddy Award for the best lgbt feature at the 64th Berlin Film Festival. "Giovana is Leo’s best friend. They spend their afternoons at the pool, awarding points for the level of their boredom and just hanging out. But there are limits to their intimacy. Leo is rather self-contained; even his schoolmates’ barbs can’t dent his sense of his own independence. Tired of his parents’ over-protective attitude, this blind fifteen-year-old wants to take control of his own life and apply for a school exchange. The arrival of a new pupil at school prompts Leo to reassess his daily routine. Having made friends with Gabriel he must now find a way to deal with Giovana’s jealousy. And yet, as naturally as Leo becomes aware of his feelings for Gabriel, the more he allows himself to feel unsettled by his friend’s tentative advances."  The jury called it, "A joyous debut feature from a director who combines great writing, characterization, performance, camera, and music to deliver a film that soars above the well-explored coming of age genre, giving new meaning to the old adage ‘love is blind.’"

After the jump, watch the Belle & Sebastian-infused trailer even if your Portuguese isn't grande.

Stefan Haupt won the Teddy's best queer documentary award -- and the Berlinale's audience award for best doc -- for his film Der Kreis/The Circle (below): "Founded in the early 1940s, the network around the magazine Der Kreis was the only gay organisation to survive the Nazi regime. Legendary masked balls in Zurich hosted 800 visitors from all over Europe. It is there that timid teacher Ernst Ostertag falls in love with drag star Röbi Rapp. Ernst searches for a way to fight for his gayness to be accepted as normal outside the boundaries of ‘The Circle’ network without losing his employment as a teacher. The film uncovers the fascinating universe of one of the first gay liberation communities. Enriched by impressive conversational records with Ernst Ostertag and Röbi Rapp, the film depicts a decades-long love story."

Roy Dib won best short for his 19-minute Mondial 2010: "A Lebanese gay couple decides to take a road trip to Ramallah. The film is recorded with their camera as they chronicle their journey. The protagonists and the viewers are invited through the couple’s conversations into the universe of a fading city."

Bruce LaBruce won a Special Jury Award for his 51-minute film Pierrot Lunaire, "A young woman that regularly dresses as a man falls in love and seduces a young girl that has no clue that her lover is of the same sex. When the girl introduces ‘her boyfriend’ to her father he becomes skeptical and unmasks the fraud."

The main Berlinale winners: Diao Yinan's Black Coal, Thin Ice took two big prizes, best film and best actor for Liao Fan; Richard Linklater won best director for Boyhood; Haru Kuroki won best actress for The Little House; and Dietrich & Anna Brüggemann won best screenplay for Stations of the Cross. Runner up for best film was Wes Anderson's The Grand Budapest Hotel.

Overlooked at the queer and general awards was Ira Sachs' Love Is Strange, coming later this year.

Mountains of Men, Men of Mountains

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Two of my favorite things, Men in the Alps, joined in this new photo book from Bruno Gmunder.

Born January 19: Patricia Highsmith, Matthew Stadler

European critics consider Patricia Highsmith's twenty-two novels and eight story collections literary descendants of Dostoevsky and Kafka, but American readers know her work mainly as fodder for films with gay undercurrents: Strangers on a Train, The Talented Mr. Ripley, and Ripley's Game. She was most at home in the darker corners of her characters' twisted psyches and as often as not her protagonists expressed themselves through murder. Even in her first full-time job she excelled at creating dual lives, scripting comic book heroes Captain Midnight, Spy Smasher, and the Golden Arrow. Her childhood was divided between Fort Worth and New York and her emotions were split between similar extremes: loving and loathing her stepfather and her mother who claimed to have tried to abort her by drinking turpentine. Highsmith said her unhappiest year was when her parents abandoned her with her grandmother at 12, yet throughout her life she seemed to seek the intensity of crisis and discord, pushing her friends to fight and her lovers to leave. One former girlfriend, the portraitist Allela Cornell, killed herself by swallowing nitric acid. Another girlfriend was Marijane Meaker, whose work you may know under her pen names Vin Packer, Ann Aldrich, or M. E. Kerr. A woman who didn't become a girlfriend was the frosty, smoldering blond young married mother in Bloomingdales who sent Highsmith into a fever of longing and productivity, resulting in her second novel, The Price of Salt [Kindle]. If you still think queer visibility began with Stonewall, this lesbian book sold nearly a million copies in 1952. And unlike Gore Vidal's 1948 gay novel The City and the Pillar, hers has a happy ending. (Though, unlike Gore, she used a pseudonym, Claire Morgan.) Sarah Waters thinks so highly of The Price of Salt she said it alone warranted Highsmith's inclusion in the National Gallery show Gay Icons. It will be Todd Haynes' next film, starring Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara.

Alcoholic, anti-American, anti-Semitic, stingy, and racist, Highsmith lived in Switzerland for more than thirty years and died, intentionally alone, at 74. She left her estate of several million dollars to Yaddo, where she had rewritten her first novel, Strangers on a Train, at Truman Capote's urging. Joan Schenkar's illuminating and entertaining biography, The Talented Miss Highsmith: The Secret Life and Serious Art of Patricia Highsmith [Kindle] again proves difficult characters often make the most riveting reading. Schenkar also edited Patricia Highsmith: Selected Novels and Short Stories. Reader Lori Hahn recommends M.E. Kerr/Marijane Meaker's Highsmith: A Romance of the 1950's [Kindle].

 

The first book editor for Seattle's The Stranger, the first literary editor for nest, Matthew Stadler wrote four gay novels in the 90s. After Landscape: Memory (a high school student's jottings from WWI era San Francisco), The Dissolution of Nicholas Dee (an art historian's surreal jaunt through the Netherlands, with dwarfs and orphans), and The Sex Offender (the Orwellian, unsuccessful "rehabilitation of a male teacher who had an affair with a 12 year-old boy), his fiction culminated with Allan Stein, a funny, beautiful, and disturbing novel again mixing art criticism, historical settings, foreign travel, and sex with students in this tale about a tutor hired to teach Gertrude Stein's 15 year-old nephew in Paris in the early 1900s. Despite his transgressive preoccupations, Stadler's work was embraced by the mainstream enough to win him a Guggenheim, a Merrill, and a Whiting, but no sales, and at 40 in 1999 he turned away from fiction to focus on urban planning, the positive aspects of sprawl, and publishing. He's edited four anthologies including the urban theory reader Where We Live Now and has a book about two projects in the Dutch city Deventer. He founded Clear Cut Press in Portland in 2001, and in 2009 he cofounded Publication Studio, a successful print on demand model for books that has spread to seven other cities. Even his ardent fans may be unaware that after a dozen-year break, Stadler self-published his fifth novel in 2011. He compares Chloe Jarren’s La Cucaracha set in Guanajuato, Mexico to an international mystery a la John Le Carré that explores "the mongrel dynamism, the deluded optimism of 21st century neo-liberal politics."

Born December 13: Lionel Baier

Swiss gay filmmaker Lionel Baier began his career with a short called "Good Enough To Eat" and two docs: one for Swiss television called The Pastor, the other about gay pride in the Valais. At 28 he released his first feature, a breakout festival hit despite some annoying camerawork, Garcon Stupide, about a confused, uneducated, perpetually frisky 20 year-old named Loic who wants more than the quick tricks he turns with older men on the streets of Lausanne. The marketing department tried to sell Baier's follow-up, Stealth, as another gay romp but the character's main preoccupation is coping with the discovery that his family's background is Polish, which leads to a road trip, which leads to a providential hookup. In 2009, Baier made Another Man about a straight writer who stumbles into a job as a small-town newspaper movie reviewer, plagiarizes one vicious, high-flown film criticism, and must pretend to be a leading intellectual among his city peers, with humiliating yet romantic results. For something different, the next year Baier shot a 60-minute drama about a 34 year-old who knows when he's going to die, Low Cost, in a month on his cell phone. This year he released Great Waves, his first period drama, set in April 1974 during Portugal's Carnation Revolution. Today he's 38.

Born October 14: Katherine Mansfield

Cousin to Australian author Elizabeth von Arnim (The Enchanted April), friend of D.H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf, spiritual heir to Chekhov's humanism, New Zealander Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp became a peerless master of the short story and died at thirty-two. She burned through sexual passion with women and men but not really with either of her husbands. Blatantly exploiting the affection of a singing teacher eleven years her senior, she agreed to marry George Bowden only because she was already pregnant by another man, refused to sleep with him on their wedding night and left him for good within hours. Her starchy mother arrived in England from New Zealand, blamed the breakup on her longtime lesbian lover Ida Baker, dispatched her daughter to a spa in Bavaria, and cut her out of her will. Mansfield miscarried. But it was there she discovered Chekhov. Upon her return to London in 1910 she started writing more seriously. In 1911 she began a relationship with editor John Murry, left him, got back together, left him again in 1913, got back together again, left him again in 1917, and in 1918 married him. Within two weeks she departed to travel for her health. First Paris, then she and Ida Baker lived in San Remo, Italy. As her tuberculosis worsened, she weakened, and yet this final period gave rise to her greatest works. Thirty-five of her best, including "The Garden-Party," "The Doll's House," and "At the Bay," are found in her Selected Stories from Norton. To understand her life, get her notebooks or brilliant biographer Claire Tomalin's Katherine Mansfield: A Secret Life or Jeffrey Meyers' Katherine Mansfield: A Darker View. In a wise appreciation for the Telegraph, lesbian author Ali Smith mentions Mansfield's immediate impact on her contemporaries thus:

"She dunted Virginia Woolf, with a good sharp elbow, into the kind of experimental writing for which Woolf is revered. She unknowingly presented her friend DH Lawrence with one of the more sapphic narrative episodes of The Rainbow by telling him stories of her youth, and was later, again inadvertently, his model for the character of Gudrun in Women in Love."

Smith also cites Mansfield's influence on T.S. Eliot, Simone de Beauvoir, Scott Fitzgerland, Willa Cather, Eudora Welty, Katherine Anne Porter, Elizabeth Bowen, Brigid Brophy, Christopher Isherwood, Carson McCullers, Philip Larkin, and Angela Carter.

Frank O'Connor Short Story Award Finalists

    

Two Brits, two Americans, a Canadian, and a Swiss writer comprise this year's finalists for the world's richest prize for a story collection, the Frank O'Connor Short Story Award. Previous winners include Yiyun Li for her remarkable, gay-inclusive Gold Boy, Emerald Girl, Edna O'Brien, Haruki Murakami, Nathan Englander, and Jhumpa Lahiri. The shortlist:

David Constantine, Tea at the Midland

Tamas Dobozy, Siege 13

Deborah Levy, Black Vodka

Joyce Carol Oates, Black Dahlia & White Rose

Peter Stamm, We're Flying

Claire Vaye Watkins, Battleborn

Cut from the longlist of 78: Emma Donoghue's queer-filled Astray, Junot Diaz, Jennifer Haigh, Ron Rash, George Saunders, Joan Silber, and Jess Walter, among others. The winner will be announced in early July at the Cork short story festival.

Born May 15: Barbara Hammer

Just since 2009 when she turned 70, pioneering queer filmmaker Barbara Hammer has had a retrospective of her work at MoMA in New York, the Tate in London, and the Jeu de Paume in Paris; her short called "A Horse Is Not a Metaphor" won a Teddy at the Berlinale; her brilliant and inspiring book Hammer!: Making Movies Out of Sex and Life [Kindle] won a Publishing Triangle Award, won a Lammy, and was a favorite on Thebes' queer lit poll; and this year she won a Guggenheim. All deserved, and all infinitely more gratifying when you remember she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer in 2006. Her decades of creating dozens of experimental work to record queer lives (Dyketactics, A Gay Day, Superdyke Meets Madam X, etc.) reached a new high in 1992 with her first feature documentary Nitrate Kisses, acclaimed at Sundance, festivals worldwide, and at the Whitney Biennial. She says, “I choose film and video to make the invisible visible. I am compelled to reveal and celebrate queer and other people whose stories have not been told. I make a multi-level cinema that engages audiences viscerally and emboldens them intellectually. My current work has turned towards recovering missing histories of lesbian artists and is inspired by the words of Gayatri Spivak who cautions against an uncritical archivism leading to nostalgia.” The MoMA curator wrote:

... she came out as a lesbian, an act that helped radicalize her approach to directing. Galvanized by the second wave of feminism in the 1970s, she soon became a pioneer of queer cinema. Hammer has since directed more than eighty films, using avant-garde strategies to explore lesbian and gay sexuality, identity, and history, along with other heretofore unrepresented voices. In the 1970s her films dealt with the representation of taboo subjects through performance, and in the 1980s she began using an optical printer to make films that explore perception. In the 1990s she began making documentaries about hidden aspects of queer history.

Barbara was born in Hollywood, graduated from UCLA, and earned two masters degrees at SFSU. She has lived in New York City for many years and still teaches each summer at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland.

Born January 19: Patricia Highsmith, Matthew Stadler

European critics consider Patricia Highsmith's twenty-two novels and eight story collections literary descendants of Dostoevsky and Kafka, but American readers know her work mainly as fodder for films: Strangers on a Train, The Talented Mr. Ripley, and Ripley's Game. She was most at home in the darker corners of her characters' twisted psyches and as often as not her protagonists expressed themselves through murder. Even in her first full-time job she excelled at creating dual lives, scripting comic book heroes Captain Midnight, Spy Smasher, and the Golden Arrow. Her childhood was divided between Fort Worth and New York and her emotions were split between similar extremes: loving and loathing her stepfather and her mother who claimed to have tried to abort her by drinking turpentine. Highsmith said her unhappiest year was when her parents abandoned her with her grandmother at 12, yet throughout her life she seemed to seek the intensity of crisis and discord, pushing her friends to fight and her lovers to leave. One former girlfriend, the portraitist Allela Cornell, killed herself by swallowing nitric acid. Another girlfriend was Marijane Meaker, whose work you may know under her pen names Vin Packer, Ann Aldrich, or M. E. Kerr. A woman who didn't become a girlfriend was the frosty, smoldering blond young married mother in Bloomingdales who sent Highsmith into a fever of longing and productivity, resulting in her second novel, The Price of Salt [Kindle]. If you still think queer visibility began with Stonewall, this lesbian book sold nearly a million copies in 1952. And unlike Gore Vidal's 1948 gay novel The City and the Pillar, hers has a happy ending. (Though, unlike Gore, she used a pseudonym, Claire Morgan.) Sarah Waters thinks so highly of The Price of Salt she said it alone warranted Highsmith's inclusion in the National Gallery show Gay Icons. Alcoholic, anti-American, anti-Semitic, stingy, and racist, Highsmith lived in Switzerland for more than thirty years and died, intentionally alone, at 74. She left her estate of several million dollars to Yaddo, where she had rewritten her first novel, Strangers on a Train, at Truman Capote's urging.

Joan Schenkar's illuminating and entertaining biography, The Talented Miss Highsmith: The Secret Life and Serious Art of Patricia Highsmith [Kindle] again proves difficult characters often make the most riveting reading. Schenkar also edited Patricia Highsmith: Selected Novels and Short Stories. Reader Lori Hahn recommends M.E. Kerr/Marijane Meaker's Highsmith: A Romance of the 1950's [Kindle].

 

The first book editor for Seattle's The Stranger, the first literary editor for nest, Matthew Stadler wrote four gay novels in the 90s. After Landscape: Memory (a high school student's jottings from WWI era San Francisco), The Dissolution of Nicholas Dee (an art historian's surreal jaunt through the Netherlands, with dwarfs and orphans), and The Sex Offender (the Orwellian, unsuccessful "rehabilitation of a male teacher who had an affair with a 12 year-old boy), his fiction culminated with Allan Stein, a funny, beautiful, and disturbing novel again mixing art criticism, historical settings, foreign travel, and sex with students in this tale about a tutor hired to teach Gertrude Stein's 15 year-old nephew in Paris in the early 1900s. Despite his transgressive preoccupations, Stadler's work was embraced by the mainstream enough to win him a Guggenheim, a Merrill, and a Whiting, but no sales, and at 40 in 1999 he turned away from fiction to focus on urban planning, the positive aspects of sprawl, and publishing. He's edited four anthologies including the urban theory reader Where We Live Now and has a forthcoming book next month about two projects in the Dutch city Deventer. He founded Clear Cut Press in Portland in 2001, and in 2009 he cofounded Publication Studio, a successful print on demand model for books that has spread to seven other cities and earlier this week brought out Stephen Boyer's novel Parasite. Even his ardent fans may be unaware that after a dozen-year break, Stadler self-published his fifth novel in 2011. He compares Chloe Jarren’s La Cucaracha set in Guanajuato, Mexico to an international mystery a la John Le Carré that explores "the mongrel dynamism, the deluded optimism of 21st century neo-liberal politics."

Third Man on the Mountain

What did you do in Mission: Impossible--Ghost Protocol, when hot, butch Jeremy Renner demanded, "Next time, I get to seduce the rich guy." After spending a quality moment imagining that scene, you no doubt flashed back to a wonderful old Disney movie called Third Man on the Mountain, in which a thirtyish hiking guide complained to his friend, "Why was there never a rich Englishman waiting for me in a crevasse?" Based on the novel Banner in the Sky, the movie tells the story of a restless Swiss teen dishwasher Rudi who one fateful afternoon rescues a famous climber, John Winter [played by 6'4" Michael Rennie], and, perfectly naturally, the fatherless teen develops a major mancrush on the handsome captain. The wealthy alpinist buys the boy the best boots, ropes, and harness and takes him higher than ever before; Rudi forgets all about his tomboy girlfriend. The movie is the perfect valentine for gearheads turned on by pitons and crampons, or for anyone who wants to spend 100 minutes with a not very veiled romance in the shadow of the Matterhorn. Filmed on location in Zermatt in 1959.

UPDATE: Jeff Kurtti sends two new links from the Walt Disney Family Museum about the making of the movie and its young star (who also appeared in Kidnapped, Swiss Family Robinson, and 11 years on Hawaii Five-0). Third Man on the Mountain was the museum's January film.