Rote Ohren fetzen durch Asche

“In the year 2700, the year of the toads, ‘Asche’ was a burnt-out city.
Too big for its souls who banded together in dark basements.
It was an unrestrained wild animal,
ready to pee in Death’s face at any time.
And its residents were equal to it in every way.
Highly unlikely for a pure heart to survive.”–Flaming Ears introductory narration

DIRECTED BY: Ursula Pürrer, A. Hans Scheirl, Dietmar Schipek

FEATURING: Susanna Heilmayr, Ursula Pürrer, A. Hans Scheirl

PLOT: The lives of a comic book artist, a serial arsonist, and an extraterrestrial converge when Volley burns down the comix press. The artist, Spy, goes in search of vengeance, only to be beaten up by the bouncers at the club where Volley performs; Nun, Volley’s alien girlfriend, then finds Spy lying unconscious in the gutter and falls in love with her. Meanwhile, Volley develops the hots for her chauffeur, and a young girl graffitis the city with the image of a flower vase.

BACKGROUND:

• Scheirl and Pürrer became lovers in the 1980s and started making “lesbian punk home movies” in Pürrer’s Vienna apartment with a Super 8 camera and homemade props. They would later form the band Sta-Prestto make their own film soundtracks.
• The Catholic symbolism in the film reflects the predominant conservatism of Viennese society at the time, in contrast to its very small punk scene of musicians and artists.
• The soundtrack features the music of local punk bands, sometimes even capturing live performances. None of the music was formally licensed.
• When Scheirl and Pürrer’s films toured women’s and feminist film festivals in the 1990s, the S&M content often proved controversial and sometimes led to walkouts.
• The then-contemporary popularity of Fluxus theater led some viewers to assume Flaming Ears‘ outrageous style was a deliberate mockery of their performance art. This was not the intention of the filmmakers, who were simply expressing their punk aesthetic.
• A. Hans Shceirl (Nun), also credited as Angela Hans Scheirl, is a transgender man who transitioned with testosterone in 1996. He later directed the infamous Dandy Dust (1998) and became a painter and professor at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: There’s a lot of eye-catching and provocative imagery throughout Flaming Ears, with a plethora of unusual proclivities on display. But one of its most mysterious moments occurs when the otherwise unknown Blood suddenly shows up out of the blue to grant Spy’s rotting corpse the kiss of life. It’s confusing, oddly touching yet revolting, and emblematic of Flaming Ears‘ fairy tale combination of enchantment and grotesquerie. It’s also a major pivot point in the splintered narrative.

TWO WEIRD THINGS: Erotic arson; the healing power of alien saliva

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: What isn’t weird about this movie? The two items listed above are only the very weirdest elements. There’s also furniture humping (with lighter fluid used as lube), an immortal alien whose severed limbs come back to life, and an oddly suggestive conversation about gardening cacti. With a rough and ready DIY aesthetic, Flaming Ears is art-house done No Wave-style. At any moment the live action can be interrupted by a stop-motion animated sequence, a prop, or a painting. In one memorable scene a cardboard cutout, with a cartoonish line-drawn face, replaces one of the actors. The dialogue is obscurely poetic and the futuristic setting thinly sketched, leaving the viewer on their own to figure out what exactly is going on, like an alien crash-landed on an unknown planet.

Flaming Ears re-release trailer

COMMENTS: Usually, films that take place in a future dystopia explain the reasons behind societal collapse, but Flaming Ears ignores all backstory and explication, plunging the viewer into an enigmatic underworld rife with danger and desire. The introductory narration sets a darkly humorous and mysterious tone that persists throughout the film. The opening scene plays out like the intro to a classic horror movie, but what follows couldn’t be less formulaic.

On a dark and stormy night a horny pyromaniac burns down the den of printing press Black-Hearted Pirates . Simultaneously, a comic book artist goes to her window as lightning strikes and sees two haloed figures urinating on the ground. An extraterrestrial clothed entirely in red leather roams the rainy streets, eating whatever nonvenomous animals she finds. When a random passerby tosses her a dead rat, it explodes in her hand. Another woman then suddenly bursts into the artist’s study. “The revolution of love is bloody,” she announces, “A melancholy bird glides over the sea of cruelty.”

Rain falls perpetually in the city of Asche, and yet everything is always on fire. Buildings burn to the ground, children gleefully play with candles, dead rats conceal hand grenades, and reptiles are casually roasted for dinner with acetylene torches. The main characters are also wet and burning with desperate passions—for each other, fire, corpses, and revenge—and these desires drive the narrative deeper into the abyss before it all explodes out of the basements and into the sunlight.

The story shifts among the three leads. Confusingly, they are never referred to by name in the English subtitles, but all are thankfully distinct enough in their looks and personalities to be easily distinguishable: Spy (Heilmayr), the comic book creator; Volley (Pürrer), the nightclub performer with a fetish for lit fuses; and Nun (Scheirl), Volley’s alien girlfriend, who survives being blown up but loses a hand and spends the rest of the film with her bloody stump bandaged in a filthy rag (while her severed hand takes on a life of its own). In a noirish set-up, Magdalena, Volley’s chauffeur, reveals to Spy Volley’s responsibility for the explosion at the printing press and Spy decides to wreak her revenge.

Flaming Ears is an artifact of a specific time and place (the punk scene of late ’80s-early ’90s Vienna), yet it lives on in a cinematic world so divorced from reality as to feel completely timeless. The gritty dystopian city, represented by a detailed model complete with toy tanks and trucks, contains recognizable tropes, but the chaotic visual style prevents Flaming Ears from ever falling into any one cliché. The predominantly female cast, in punk-drag costuming, provides a distinctly queer edge. The contrived dialogue, like Byronic poetry or lines from Max Ernst‘s surrealist collage novels, adds an unlikely layer of art-house pretension, while the sound design emphasizes the kinky creak of leather and the squish of bodily fluids, heightening the raw sexuality on display.

Instead of a three-part narrative structure, the main plotline repeats three times, like a musical refrain with variations on a theme. Characters kill each other then the dead come back to life, still intent upon their murderous goals.

Seemingly drawing upon such weird movie touchstones as  Tetsuo: The Iron Man , to the playful game-like nonlinearity of Eden and After, and the noir surreality of “Twin Peaks,” Flaming Ears concludes with an epic showdown among Volley, Spy, and Nun, in “[a] place. . . where you can lay down your gigantic body,” a garden with a straight white path flanked by triangular topiaries (a quotation to the suspended limbo of Last Year at Marienbad), where a truck-driving priest just happens to be taking a stroll. Volley transforms Nun into cardboard, which Magdalena comes along to neatly fold up and carry away.

Flaming Ears rewards repeat viewing, especially for non-German speakers relying on subtitles. Amid the visual richness and oblique dialogue, certain themes gradually emerge (of self-sacrifice, self-determination, and freedom of expression). The opening scene shows Spy drawing a red-suited figure, suggesting Nun is one of her characters, along with Blood, the title character of her comic. However, Magdalena, while praising Spy’s “abundant fantasies,” also accuses her of writing “stolen stories.” So, does art imitate life, or does life imitate art? Try to make sense of it and Flaming Ears will slip out of your grasp, like a rubber glove slick with vaginal fluid.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“A strange, surreal film that may as well have ‘destined for cult status’ emblazoned across every frame… guaranteed to be unlike anything you’ve seen before.”–Lee Jutton, Film Inquiry (revival screening)

“…if you’re fond of such 1980s cult objets d’art as Liquid Sky, Born in Flames, Population: 1, Forbidden Zone, and such, you may well find Flaming Ears is exactly the movie you had no idea you’ve been waiting for.”–Dennis Harvey, 48 Hills

IMBD LINK: Rote Ohren Fetzen Durch Asche (1992)

OFFICIAL SITE:

Flaming Ears (Blu-ray) Kino Lorber Home Video – Kino Lorber’s site for the restored film offers basic information, the trailer, stills, and of course a link to purchase

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

Ursula Pürrer at the Queer Cinema Film Festival in Stockholm, 2022 – Interview with the director/actor about Flaming Ears (in English)

Flaming Ears | Remake Festival – Detailed information about the restoration and digitization of the film and an excerpt from the essay “The Inorganic in Flaming Ears” by Andrea B. Braidt

LIST CANDIDATE: FLAMING EARS (1992) – This site’s original Apocrypha Candidate review

HOME VIDEO INFORMATION:

Kino Lorber released the 4K restoration (!) of Flaming Ears on Region A Blu-ray with English subtitles (buy). Special features are unfortunately sparse, but include three earlier short films by Shierl and Pürrer: Super-8-Girl Games (1985, 3 Min.); Gezacktes Rinnsal schleicht sich schamlos schenkelnässend an (Jagged trickle sneaks shamelessly thigh-wetting, 1985, 4 Min.); Das schwarze Herz tropft (Bastelanleitung zu R-innen) (The Black Heart Drips, 1985, 13 Min.) The film is also available for purchase or rental on-demand.

Flaming Ears [Blu-ray]

• A truly fearless underground film newly restored in 4K, Flaming Ears playfully disrupts narrative conventions with its witty approach to film genre, and its punk visual splendor

New starting from: 14.99 $

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Where to watch Flaming Ears