Archive of films Pierrot Lunaire / Pierrot lunaire

Germany / Canada
2014, 51 min

Section: Imagina
Year: 2014

In his latest work, Canadian experimenter LaBruce updates the classic love story. A young woman dressed as a man seduces a girl whose feelings aren’t dispelled even after the cat’s out of the bag. In this black-and-white picture, timelessness merges with sexual provocation, theatricality with pure emotion.

Synopsis

Based on the poetry cycle by Albert Giraud and the Arnold Schoenberg music it inspired, Canadian experimenter Bruce LaBruce created an adaptation for Berlin’s Hebbel am Ufer theater and turned it into an unconventional film. A young woman dressed as a man seduces an attractive girl who has no idea that her seducer is actually a seductress. When the deception is revealed, however, the seduced girl’s feelings paradoxically do not change. And so the seductress decides to show the girl’s father her manhood.… This gutsy, intentionally affected, and eloquently acted movie may seem indebted to the work of foremost queer filmmaker Derek Jarman or to the visuality of creative duo Pierre et Gilles, but above all it relies on its own unique means of expression. By connecting elements of traditional melodrama and atonal music, it to some extent draws on the combination of the established and the novel typical for compositions by Schoenberg, who also placed his work in a cabaret environment.

About the director

Bruce LaBruce (b. 1964, Ontario) is a Canadian director, screenwriter, photographer, and artist who established himself in the mid-1980s with experimental movies on Super 8. He has made nine medium-length and feature films; his latest, Pierrot Lunaire, participated in the Berlinale’s Forum Expanded section last year, while his previous, Gerontophilia (2013), first screened at Venice. After premiering at Sundance, Otto, or, Up with Dead People (2008) went on to play dozens of festivals. Other films include No Skin Off My Ass (1991), Super 8½ (1994), and The Raspberry Reich (2004). In addition to shooting movies, he also creates music videos and directs for the theater. As a photographer he cooperates in a variety of media, and he has published a book on memory entitled The Reluctant Pornographer (1997). At present he is finishing up the film Ulrike’s Brain.

Contacts

m-appeal world sales UG
Prinzessinnenstr. 16, 10969, Berlin
Germany
Tel: +49 306 150 7505, +491 729 570 051
E-mail: [email protected]
www: www.m-appeal.com

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About the film

Color, DCP

Section:	Imagina

Director:	Bruce LaBruce
Screenplay:	Bruce LaBruce podle díla / based on the works by Arnold Schoenberg, Andre Giraud
Dir. of Photography:	Ismail Necmi
Music:	Arnold Schoenberg, Madlick
Editor:	Jörn Hartmann
Producer:	Jürgen Brüning
Production:	Jürgen Brüning Filmproduktion
Coproduction:	Bruce LaBruce
Cast:	Susanne Sachsse
Contact:	m-appeal world sales UG