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Silverfoxesclub-digest In this issue:
-Madame Guillotine
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Several popular methods of the time included hanging, often from street lampposts; burning at the stake, which was St Joan of Arc's untimely demise; quartering (also used in ancient Egypt as well as in Elizabethan England), which was execution by tying the condemned to four wild horses and sending them galloping off in opposite directions (ripping the condemned into quarters); death upon the rack, a slow and merciless death; death by drowning, where the condemned was held underwater for extended periods of time; as well as death by torture.
Dr. Guillotin decided that France should be consistent in its means of capital punishment, and that the accepted means should be by decapitation. He also hoped for a machine that could supply a more efficient and merciful death. He took his plans to several architects and engineers, but note that he himself did not buid a guillotine. Beheading machines had been used as early as 1350, but none were as sophisticated as the doctor's would turn out to be. However Guillotin's machine wasn't quite functional. It was originally planned to deliver death with a horizontal blade. But Guillotin, who knew of Louis XVI's great passion for riddles, took the plans to him for help! (How ironic?!) Louis suggested that the blade come down on an angle. Marie Antoinetted dismissed the machine as a 'cumbersome scrap of flotsam that will never catch.' Who would know that both would lose their lives on the cumbersome scrap of flotsam?
Until his natural death, Dr. Guillotin tried to
rid his name from the dreaded machine, quite
unsuccessfully. The Guillotine was used all
throughout history since then, up until the
1980's when the last public execution took
place. (It was also used by the Nazi Gestapo
to execute German student dissidents as
shown in an excellent German film called
"The White Rose.")
Now this guy still gets my mojo goin'. All!!! Aboard!!!
Headline: "The term gay cinema for me doesn't make sense, and I don't recognize it at all," Mr. Lifshitz said last month at the Cannes International Film Festival, where he presented "The Crossing," a documentary about a gay man searching for his father. "Come Undone" is one of three recent French films that depict gay life as if it were "almost nothing" . or "Presque Rien," the French title of "Come Undone." Being gay is portrayed as simply one facet of a character, not necessarily the defining one. In Olivier Ducastel and Jacques Martineau's second feature, "Adventures of Felix," which opened earlier this month, an HIV- positive gay Arab man from northern France hits the road also in search of his father, finding new meanings of family and acceptance at every stop on his journey. And in the comic veteran Francis Veber's latest farce, "The Closet" (also opening Friday), a heterosexual milquetoast, played by Daniel Auteuil, pretends to come out as a gay man in order to safeguard his job at a suburban condom factory. Suddenly he's a hit with his co-workers, not to mention his estranged teenage son, who sees Dad's coming out as cool. This new wave of gay-themed French cinema perhaps reflects how much more comfortable the French have become with the idea of gay life. France has traditionally held a live-and-let-live attitude toward sexuality: anything goes, so long as it's kept discreet. The French may have tittered at the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal . don't all politicians have mistresses? . but when Jean-Luc Romero, running for National Assembly on the ticket of the conservative R.P.R. (which alludes to Rally for the Republic), was outed last fall by a gay publication, his sexual orientation became a cause cilhbre, earning him front-page headlines and national hero status for his courage and convictions. This resulted in wider acceptance for openly gay politicians like the mayor of Paris, Bertrand Delanok, elected in March. "It's sort of in to be gay in France," said Mr. Veber, who makes his home in Los Angeles but returns frequently to his homeland to direct. "I can't say it's fashionable, but I can say that the younger generation has less prejudice against homosexuals than in the past." With the passage of civil marriage laws two years ago that recognized gay partnerships, and the ongoing establishment of Paris's Marais as a gay neighborhood to rival New York's Chelsea and Los Angeles's West Hollywood . not to mention the annual Gay Pride celebrations around the country this month (the Paris gathering is expected to attract 200,000) . French life has been noticeably transformed by "le coming out." But gay liberation arrived late in France because of a combination of factors, not the least of which was a lowering of the age of consent to 18 when President Frangois Mitterrand took office in 1981, which has been widely blamed as contributing to France's significant AIDS casualties during the 80's. Activism did not bloom until mid-decade and, lacking a visible gay community until recently, France has only "come out" in spirit in the last five years. Its gay- themed films are beginning to reflect this change in atitude. "In France, nobody understands the idea of community," said Mr. Martineau, the screenwriter and co- director of "The Adventures of Felix" and an Act-Up veteran who teaches in the French university system. "It's a universal country; everybody's been taught to act the same. A lot of gay people don't understand the idea of community, even the idea of gay movies. They always say it's a movie but not a gay movie." This might explain Mr. Lifshitz's aversion to the gay director sobriquet. But in France's newfound acceptance of gay life lies an important paradox: gay films, while celebrated, aren't distinguished or singled out for their gay themes like they are in America. "When we went to the Berlin Film Festival earlier this year, `Felix' won two prizes, and Frangois Ozon's film" . "Under the Sand" . "won another," said Mr. Martineau's partner, Mr. Ducastel (the couple's first feature was "Jeanne and the Perfect Guy," a critically acclaimed 1999 musical about the AIDS crisis). "It was the first time that French films earned so many awards at one festival. But not even in gay magazines did you read about this. We were so proud, we thought we'd read everywhere that French cinema won three awards in Berlin. But there was nothing. People don't care about gay films in France." In "The Adventures of Felix," gay life seems almost an afterthought as its young, happy-go-lucky protagonist (played by Sami Bouajila) heads for Marseille in search of a father he's never known. Few people he encounters along the way seem to care that Felix is an Arab and HIV-positive, least of all Felix. He wanders through a French countryside that's as colorblind as it is flat-out welcoming. Although it is never directly revealed that he is carrying the AIDS virus, we see him popping a daily regimen of pills, an occurrence as commonplace to him as tuning into his favorite soap opera every morning. In one early scene, Felix purchases a rainbow-colored kite to bring along on his journey. "We wanted him to travel through France with the rainbow flag, but with no consciousness of it," said the openly gay Mr. Ducastel, in New York recently to present the film at the New Festival, a gay and lesbian film festival. "In France there are still people who have no idea what the rainbow flag symbolizes." What Felix discovers is that it symbolizes everything and nothing . or "almost nothing." "Homosexuality in France today has totally changed its face," said Mr. Lifshitz. "It's now a multiplicity of faces, which combine to reduce the old archetypes we've seen hundreds of times at the movies. Our movies are often very clean and antiseptic; there are very few blacks, Arabs, homosexuals. A number of new French directors on the scene have tried to move beyond these archetypes, to try and do other things." Like Frangois Ozon, whose films exude a gay sensibility without directly announcing themselves as gay films, France's new-wave gaydirectors prefer to be seen as filmmakers who happen to be gay. Or, in the case of Mr. Veber, a heterosexual whose work often incorporates an us-versus-them mentality as its central theme . a straight man on the outside looking in on gay life in France. "The Closet" has sold more than five million tickets since its release in February, making it the third- most-popular French film of the year so far. THIS well-intentioned mass- market comedy aroused its share of controversy in France with its stereotypical depictions of homophobic characters, including a macho brute played by Girard Depardieu. But the farcical shenanigans cloak the message that it's not only O.K. to come out in today's France, it might even be to your benefit to do so even if you aren't gay.
"I chose a setting, a condom factory, where
the c.e.o. might be scared of the gay and
lesbian lobby if he fired a gay employee,"
Mr. Veber said. "I was most interested in
focusing on the reactions of all the people
around this guy who pretends he's gay. It's a
film about the perceptions of others, in that
sense."
Whether or not Sibastien Lifshitz becomes
the next Rohmer, Frangois Ozon the next
Truffaut and Mr. Ducastel and Mr.
Martineau the next Jacques Demy, an
activist streak has returned to French
cinema, even if it's a reluctant one.
Gay-themed French films are being made in
increasing numbers. Just don't look for the
rainbow flag to herald their arrival. End of silverfoxesclub-digest V1 #282
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