Cardboard Communism: Bruce La Bruce's Raspberry Reich

The thing about Bruce LaBruce's Raspberry Reich is that I really like it's melding of gay pornography and late-60s Godard-like communist commentary(La Chinoise, Made in USA), except for the fact that the image, the acting and the sound makes it sometimes seem like a highschool video project.
Provocative as it is (or seems to be), it doesn't really get as daring as early John Waters, or as edgy and imaginative as some of the pieces considered as the Cinema of Transgression ( Nick Zedd, Jon Moritsugu), or care about any of it's characters (or even the glossy performances), like you might see in the aforementioned or in a Paul Morissey film. Though it tells a story that you'd find in any of these cult-camp classics--a rich industrialist's son is kidnapped by a communist terrorist group that believes the only route to the revolution is via a homosexual infitada, a sexual revolution, and the son is going to be "tortured" sexually until the rich industrials gives into their demands (for publicity)--it's difficult to get beyond the blah production values. But then again, maybe that's the point. It's supposed to simulate the overlit, poorly acted aesthetics of gay porn.
Bruce LaBruce, a former porn star and now celebrated provocateur, shoots everything in video, sloppily shot and edited in Final Cut (I recognize the effects). While it is heartening to see a feature-length film shot and edited on affordable equipment, the results are less than cinematic. I was wondering then, afterwards, why I kind of liked the movie?
Everyone is enjoying themseleves, in the way that you and your high school friends might enjoy yourselves if you were trying to have fun, be silly, and make a movie about sex and radical politics (really not much more than a lot of sloganeering). It sort of has a fragment of the spirit of John Water's earlier films--but it's missing some of the panache, the absurdity, and of course a true performer like Divine. Still, I admire the film's commitment to staying inside a cheap, mass-production porno aesthetic, while having a content about a prospective sexual revolution. It's sort of like Fassbinder's Der Dritte Generation mixed in with the flat cardboard-ness of a porn.

Silence in Bresson’s Un Condemné à mort s'est échapé

Bresson’s A Man Escaped (Un Condemné à mort s'est échapé) seems, on my first viewing over a month ago at NYC’s Film Forum, to be one of those quiet films whose magnitude builds so slowly that you’re hardly aware until you bear the weight of the escape at the end. I’m drawn to the minimalism of this film—visually, performatively, sonically, textually. Without trying to stretch the drama of his main character’s escape, Bresson instead creates a story out of the many obstacles to be steadily and quietly surpassed. I would like to focus on the sound.

One intriguing aspect of Bresson’s film is the role of silence. Bresson was a minimalist. He wanted each sonic aspect of this film to be the absolute minimum necessary, which apparently meant only sounds that would help move the narrative core of the film along. There is one point in the film when the two prisoners (Fontaine and François, played by François Letterier and Charles La Clainche) are escaping and they are on the roof of the inner cell wall—they hear a squeaky sound. Fontaine says that it’s the only sound whose source he can’t figure out. Later, when they reach the roof of the outer cell wall, Fontaine and François encounter the source of the sound: a Nazi on a bike with ungreased chains circling the perimeter.


Sound in A Man Escaped is invasive: it’s a clue to the danger ahead, it threatens to give one away, it misleads, it informs. Sound plays a crucial role in every frame of the film. Consider, for example, the relationships between prison cells. In order for Fontaine to communicate to other cells, he relies on a distinct patterned sequence of knocks. Though he can’t see the expressions of his prison mates, he has to trust them. And in order to trust them, he must trust that they’ll remain silent—that they won’t give him away to prison authorities. Silence is a form of faith—in someone’s concealment of a secret.

A minimalist style might also contain a secret. Why does Bresson pare things down so much? Why are his “model” actors trained to merely say their lines (minimizing inflection or expressive emotional interpretation)? What we get is something like two serene lakes of sound and image. The scenes between Fontaine and François, at the end of the film, when François moves into the cell, seem to portray many interpretive possibilites. There is only the image and what is heard and said. François’ face and the soundtrack conceal full trust. We’re not entirely sure that François won’t rat on Fontaine, even after he’s joined him in his pact.

Not a word of affection is really uttered between the two characters, but the film’s gravity is held—in the end—by their attraction. It is unusual for a character who enters in the last third of a film to have so much weight. François can only be the silent thing that goes wrong or the key.

The voiceover throughout is of Fontaine plotting his escape, at any cost, even killing François. It is remorseless, quiet—you could even say almost “godlike”. But the voiceover (unlike most movies) isn’t just a simple narrational tool—it’s function is to allow us to follow Fontaine’s meticulous thought process. Subdued, logical strategies from the “inside” contend with the problems presented on the “outside”.

Interstingly, When asked about the film's sense of mysticism, Bresson has elaborated: "I do not believe that everything in a film is put there. You include some things without including them. What you call my 'mysticism' must derive from this. In Un Condamné I tried to make the audience feel these extraordinary currents which existed in the German prisons during the Resistance, the presence of something or someone unseen; a hand that directs all."