Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM.

This week I’m looking at avant-garde, sexual films. There are lesbian terrorists in Germany disrupting the patriarchy, and a filmmaker in Wisconsin disrupting the traditional documentary.

The Misandrists

Wri/Dir: Bruce LaBruce

It’s 1999 in a forest near Berlin.

In a stately manor, uniformed schoolgirls study biology, philosophy, and politics, taught by stern nuns with severe habits. The school’s symbol? A cross on an orb. The girls share their meals with the nuns at a candle-lit table. But this is no ordinary girls’ school. The students are all adults, former petty thieves, runaways and sex workers. Their teachers are radical feminist separatists. The habits they wear are just costumes they put on to fool outsiders. Their prayers celebrate the fact they were born as women not men, and they worship the vagina, ova, reproduction, and lesbian sex. (And the cross and the orb is actually an inverted women’s symbol!)

Big Mother (Susanne Sachsse) sleeps beneath giant mugshots of Emma Goldman. She tells the students to practice sex with each other – but avoid monogamy. Some of them watch explicit gay porn for helpful tips. Their ultimate goal is to destroy the patriarchy and create a world without men… by any means necessary. Their first terrorist action as the FLA (The Female Liberation Army) will be to force Berliners to watch the all-women porn film they plan to create. All the students are happily engaged in sex, except one: Isolde (Kita Updike). For some reason she feels excluded. But this isolated world is disrupted by an unexpected arrival: a wounded revolutionary named Volker (Til Schindler) fleeing the police. Isolde hides him in the basement. What will happen if the man is discovered? Will the FLA’s action be a success? And is there a traitor in their midsts?

The Misandrists is Toronto’s homocore punk pioneer Bruce LaBruce’s latest film And his first with a nearly all-female cast. (It’s a follow up to The Raspberry Reich, also about German radical activists, and is strongly influenced by The Beguiling.) It stays true to Blab’s earliest super8 films, combining satire, humour, queer topics with explicit sex, radical politics, and a distinctly non-Hollywood feel. The cinematography (James Carman), costumes and makeup go way beyond his early films, but the intentionally shocking and disruptive style is true to form.

Does it all make sense? Kind of. Does a slow-motion pillow fight with scantily-clad young women make fun of 1970s softcore porn… or is it just gratuitous titillation? I’m not sure why there are extended scenes of women necking with a hard boiled egg, and some of the extended political screeds recited in flat monotones test any viewer’s patience… but again deliberately, revisiting German expressionism.

Agitprop as lesbian porn.

But it really hits home with its sex-positive attitude combined with clever challenges to preconceptions about gender, sex and genitalia (ie “what makes a woman a woman?”).

It’s funny, surprising and ultimately satisfying. Just don’t expect a traditional, mainstream movie.

The Feelings are Facts: the Films of Nazlı Dinçel

Nazlı Dinçel is an American filmmaker in Wisconsin, who immigrated from Ankara, Turkey as a teenager. Her work documents her sex life on 16 mm film, in an often abstract and disjointed manner. Her embrace of the tactile nature of her topics translates into a handmade, hands-on style of filmmaking. A typical short film will alternate between over-exposed film stock or a black screen and explicit footage. A large part of her films is the text, recited dispasionately by the narrator and accompanied by the same words scratched or burned into the film stock itself… often one word (or part of a word) at a time.

Her images vary from disjointed body parts – vaginas, penises, buttocks, mouths – and the omnipresent hands and feet, painted with glittery nailpolish. Her forms include shots of nature and ancient ruins, as well as more intimate bedroom shots. Images are framed by lens irises, reflected in mirrors, bookended between black, silent screens. Sound consists of voices, pop music, and a constant ticking and scratching sound (is that the sound of the 16mm camera itself?)

Her stories come from her own sexual experiences, retold. Her early days of solitary experimentation as a teenager hidden in a washroom where she lost her virginity, she tells us, to a carrot. And her later relationships and sexual encounters. It also deals with her own cross-cultural alienation, with Turkish folklore and Islamic prayer clashing and combining with her changes in adolescence and as a woman.

In Her Silent Seaming (2014), she shares the bedside murmurs of some of the men she has slept with. As the narration progresses it gets more and more repetitious with the words scratched into film eventually reaching a disturbingly frantic peak. Images vary from blurred footage of sex organs to the artist herself in a Marilyn Monroe wig kissing a mirror with her lipsticked mouth.

Solitary Acts (4,5,6) (2015) consists of three films of thoughts and memories of sexual experimentation, culminiatng in explicit, extreme close up footage of a woman, presumably the filmmaker, pleasuring herself, andlater doing the same to an unidentified man.

Shape of a Surface (2017)

…takes us to ancient Roman ruins in Turkey, with a call to prayer in the background as she observes headless Roman statues, and later orally worships a living man.

Between Relating and Use (2018)

…is the most cerebral of all the films, a semiotic examination of fetishes, in both the anthropolical and sexual sense of the word. But of course it also includes her trademark sparkle-nailed foot paired with a man’s genitals.

Instructions on How to Make a Film (2018) introduces beginner filmmakers to the joys of film, a medium she admits is nearly obsolete.

These are beautiful, thoughtful, deliberately disjointed, and highly personal films. As they progress so do the images, with written words becoming less and less reliable, until in some of her later films they cease to match their meaning.

I have only seen a digital version of these films on my computer, but you can see the original short films in all their 16mm glory at the AGO Jackman Hall on February 12 as part of the monthly Vertical Documentary series.

Nazlı Dinçel will be present at the screening. And you can see The Misandrists at the TIFF Bell Lightbox tonight with Bruce LaBruce in person for the Q&A.

This is Daniel Garber at the Movies, each Friday morning, on CIUT 89.5 FM and on my website, culturalmining.com.