Four years after the release of MeTube 2, the bondage opera performers from outer space are back again.
Tag Archives: Austrian
APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: HAGAZUSSA (2017)
DIRECTED BY: Lukas Feigelfeld
FEATURING: Aleksandra Cwen, Claudia Martini, Tanja Petrovsky, Celina Peter, Haymon Maria Buttinger
PLOT: An orphaned goatherd exacts revenge on her village before succumbing to her own dark fate.
WHY IT SHOULD MAKE THE LIST: The sensation left by this brooding contemplation on mystic solitude and the effects of cruelty renders it a far cry from typical supernatural horror. It is a stunning example of the genre of Eldritch Dread. For the briefest of moments I was on the fence about this movie’s viability as an Apocrypha candidate, but after some thought I can attest it is well within the scope of such an honor—though I’m relieved this came to our attention after the Canon had closed and the possibility of hundreds more films opened up.
COMMENTS: If the prospect of watching long, meditative shots and hearing only some few dozen lines of dialogue over the course of one-hundred minutes discourages you, perhaps you should stop reading right now. Lukas Feigelfeld’s debut Hagazussa begins on a lonely alp, runs its course on a lonely alp, and finishes abruptly on a lonely alp. Like the slow muffling of snowfall, the patient viewer will find the film’s subtle accumulations result in something profoundly rewarding.
From our opening glimpse, we can imagine the entire childhood of young Albrun (Celina Peter), living alone with her mother in a high-mountain cabin tending to a herd of goats. The few locals all fear Albrun’s mother (Claudia Martini), a fear that even Albrun develops when her mother is stricken physically, then mentally, by a grotesque disease. Grown up and now completely alone, the adult Albrun (Aleksandra Cwen) keeps no company other than her own infant daughter, acquired by means unknown. She is surprised when a local peasant defends her against the taunts of some idle lads, and seems on the cusp of reaching out to the rest of humanity, when her naivety is betrayed.
Very rarely do I approve of films relying on “atmosphere” to carry them, but Hagazussa has the advantage of drawing its quiet intensity from a handful of sources. The unearthly quavering drone of MMMD (a cryptic duet whose music has been described as “Chamber Doom”) grabs your ear right from the start. The score is appropriately minimalistic, limited in tone as well as deployment, which heightens the effect of its eerie nature wonderfully. The harsh beauty of the mountain setting complements its sparseness. Scenes are typically covered in snow, or rain, or lake water, with long shots cutting between the extreme closeups of the characters.
Which brings me to Aleksandra Cwen. With such little dialogue and exposition, we rely on her to convey the sense, if not the exact nature, of what is going on, and her face and eyes do a marvelous job. This triangle of haunting sound, haunting backdrop, and such a haunting face carries the viewer through a fragile, minimalist narrative amazingly well.
Be advised, anyone who plans on streaming this through Amazon: there is no subtitle option, only closed captioning. In other words, you can either have no subtitles, or all the subtitles, with every musical, sound, and even non-sound[efn_note]Never before have I seen a notice spring up (and spring up so often) in closed captioning stating, “No Audio”; but then, Hagazussa has a lot more silence in it than most movies.[/efn_note] cue brought to your attention alongside the dialogue. Despite having watched it with continual captions, Hagazussa still managed to enchant me with its measured disquietude.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
CAPSULE: VAMPIROS SEXOS (1988) & MONDO WEIRDO (1990)
Vampiros Sexos AKA I Was a Teenage Zabbadoing
Mondo Weirdo AKA Jungfrau am Abgrund (Virgin on the Edge)
DIRECTED BY: Carl Andersen
FEATURING: Feli Schachinger, Carl Andersen (as “Zaphod Beeblebrox”) (Vampiros Sexos); Jessica Franco Manera (Mondo Weirdo)
PLOT: Vampiros Sexos has something to do with a space vampire trying to recover poisoned olive oil which turns teenagers into “zabbadoings”; in Mondo Weirdo, a sexually repressed young woman enters a world of nightmarish eroticism.
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Even for a website that specializes in weird movies, Carl Andersen’s two ultra low-budget punk sex films are an acquired taste for specialized audiences. Most will want to stay far away, but others will eat it up… you know who you are.
COMMENTS: I’m sure Carl Andersen put a lot of work into Vampiros Sexos, but it plays like something slapped together over a drunken weekend (which is probably the exact aesthetic he was going for). The “plot” is a loose assembly of vampire tropes and silly jokes interrupted by long, explicit, polyamrous orgies. It’s presented in grimy black and white and often uses odd angles and shaky cameras, with scenes (deliberately) overlit or underlit so you can barely make out what’s going on. Sonically, it sometimes plays like a silent film (complete with intertitles that switch between English and German), and at other times like a Doris Wishman roughie with unsynced sound. Mostly, it plays like a long, explicit DIY music video, with the band Model D’oo supplying songs like “I Was a Teenage Zabbadoing” in a lo-fi, synth-and-drum heavy style trapped halfway between early 80s New Wave and industrial music. Sexos contains attempted slapstick, full-frontal zombies, stripping during the credits sequence, “The Three Psychedelic Stooges” (I never figured out what this referred to), vomiting, goofy gore, lots of scenes shot inside what looks like a cellar punk club, and a sexy lady with a shaved head. The sparse but occasionally amusing B-parody dialogue includes lines like “inside this vat is an undiscovered olive oil. I will now take it onto me to cook up some pretty lunch” and “I will show you my zombie bootie.” Anderson is fond of referencing his influences (or, more accurately, stuff he thinks is cool): “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” Night of the Hunter, and Andrei Tarkovsky. His actual stylistic influences are more like a combination of Jonas Mekas, Nick Zedd, and Gerald Damiano. It’s not as much fun as it sounds.
Mondo Weirdo shows improvement, though if you caught it sans-Sexos you might think you were looking a first attempt at a student film (again, I suspect that’s exactly the aesthetic Andersen is going for). This time around the lighting is uniform, the camera is fluid rather than jerky, and there are more ambitious effects, like a triangularly split screen for a lesbian sex scene. Even Model Doo’s music has improved, becoming more ambient and soundtrack-like at times. The film begins with a vintage exploitation disclaimer, though one delivered in broken English, describing the upcoming attraction as “one of the most bizarre cases in history of distorted sexuality” and warning “should you seem to have problems to share this world of nightmare and bloodily cruel events, please leave the auditory [sic] now.” The opening finds attractive, waifish Odile menstruating (presumably for the first time) in the shower, then walking into a punk club where two girls are going at it hot and heavy around a stripper pole. She’s so scarred by the confluence of these two events that she spends the rest of the film walking around in a daze, giving blow jobs, slitting throats, mystically traveling through the bell of a saxophone, vomiting, licking blood, and engaging in split-screen lesbian sex. At one point a Guy Maddin-style intertitle explains “elisabeth bathory invites odile to a strange dinner with strange people and very strange things are going on!” A doubling of characters puts me in mind of Meshes of the Afternoon, while the theme of a doomed, rebellious girl silently wandering through a haunted landscape makes Odile into a teen pornstar version of the Gamin from Dementia (1955). The graphic sex is still distracting and the desire to shock immature, however, and the overall product, while better than Sexos, is a bit boring, in the film school dropout way that the Cinema of Transgression can make sex and violence boring.
Cult Epics label founder Nico B. named these movies to his top 10 weird movies list in 2015, calling Vampiros Sexos “a European punk rock hardcore sex vampire film, stylistic and trashy at the same time” and noting that Weirdo “surpasses the first one in obscenity.” He was so impressed he acquired the rights and released this three-disc set: a DVD of Sexos (transferred from VHS and presented with the short “What’s So Dirty About It?,” an experiment using the hardcore scenes from the feature edited into a strobing pattern), Mondo Weirdo on Blu-ray (with Andersen interviews as a bonus feature), and a CD of Model D’oo’s songs from both films.
Jessica Franco Manera is reportedly the daughter of prolific Eurosleaze director Jess Franco, to whom the film is dedicated (alongside Jean-Luc Godard). It takes a special kind of man to dedicate a film to the father of the actress you’ve cast in a role requiring her to perform hardcore sex.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
SATURDAY SHORT: METUBE 2: AUGUST SINGS CARMINA BURANA (2016)
Street performers put on an otherworldly act when a generous boy and father donate a few coins to their tip jar.
CAPSULE: IN THE BASEMENT (2014)
Im Keller
DIRECTED BY: Ulrich Seidl
FEATURING: A cast of “ordinary” Austrians
PLOT: A documentary about secret hobbies in which Austrians indulge their basements, including a man with a shrine to the Nazis, a woman who cradles creepy lifelike newborn dolls, and multiple S&M devotees.
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: As we have often pointed out, due to their very nature—which requires them to be rooted in reality—documentaries have a much harder row to hoe if they aspire to weirdness. In the Basement tries to strangen things up, formally speaking, with cut-and-paste editing and awkward minimalist tableaux; it still doesn’t make it all the way to “weird,” though.
COMMENTS: In one of the opening scenes of In the Basement, a man (whom we never see again) silently watches as his pet python stalks a helpless bunny rabbit crowded into the corner of a plexiglass cage. My immediate thought was, there’s no healthy reason for him to be watching this. In the Basement is built around the idea of watching what you shouldn’t. It takes us into the private demesnes of a tuba-playing Nazi sympathizer, a woman obsessed with creepily realistic baby dolls, and a hairy man who cleans his mistress’ toilet with his tongue, among others. To add to the alienating feel, the editing seems purposeless, bouncing back and forth between the film’s subjects at random. To generate further discomfort, establishing shots are held for much longer than is necessary. The director scatters snapshot moments where the subjects stand posed stock-still and stare at the camera without expression at several points throughout the film. Sometimes these are the main characters, and other times they are people who did not make it into the film proper, like the middle aged women who stand arranged around a washing machine as it runs through a noisy rinse cycle. The carefully posed amateurs staring affectlessly at the camera from gray rooms invoke the absurdist spirit of Roy Andersson.
Rarely are the subjects asked to speak about themselves or their hobbies, with the noteworthy exception of a masochistic woman who, standing nude except for the thick ropes ritually wrapped around her, confesses the personal history that brought her into the subculture. It’s In the Basement‘s lone moment of obvious insight and humanity.
While it engenders a morbid fascination, there are some serious downsides to Basement. For a while, the documentary earns extra thrills just from the fact that you don’t know what new kink is going to be introduced next. But eventually it runs out of surprises. There aren’t enough weirdos willing to go onscreen, so director Seidl ends up filling up space with redundant S&M devotees (who probably get an extra kick of humiliation from being exposed to the public). The amount of time devoted to these six, plus the wince-inducing detail involved in their explicitly detailed torture sessions, makes you wonder if maybe Seidl should have abandoned Basement‘s ostensible thesis and just made a movie about the S&M lifestyle instead. More upsetting, however, is the revelation that some of the scenes were, basically, faked. Although Seidl’s M.O. lately has been blurring the line between fact and fiction, narrative and documentary, that technique doesn’t seem fruitful in this context. Does Basement say something about the contemporary Austrian soul, or is it just a carefully curated compendium of grotesques? Although I believe Seidl intended to make an artistic statement about social and psychological repression, in practice the movie plays more to the latter interpretation. When Jacopetti and Prosperi did this kind of thing, they did not drape it in obscuring Art.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
“It’s in more conventional observation and confessions to camera that the film really delivers its strange, melancholic universe.”–Lee Marshall, Screen International (contemporaneous)