From: Patrick Friel (email suppressed)
Date: Mon Oct 18 2010 - 22:18:29 PDT
White Light Cinema and The Music Box Theatre Present
The U.S. Premiere of Bruce LaBrucešs Controversial Film
L.A. ZOMBIE
Tuesday, October 26, 2010 10:00pm
At the Music Box Theatre (3737 N. Southport Ave.)
Queer film auteur Bruce LaBruce (No Skin Off My Ass, Super 8 12, Hustler
White, Otto; Or, Up with Dead People) raises the stakes for art porn with
his controversial new film L.A. ZOMBIE. It has enthralled and disgusted
audiences in equal measure at the Locarno Film Festival and the Toronto
International Film Festival and was officially banned (refused governmental
classification), but still secretly screened, in Australia.
LaBrucešs gay zombie horror porn is all of those things, but it is also
experimental in form, often lyrical in tone, and has an underlying social
message for those who want to find it.
ŗLetšs get a few things out of the way. L.A. Zombie is a hardcore gay porn
film. There are numerous scenes of men having graphic sex shot in the manner
of pornography, not art film erotica. The film also continues Bruce
LaBrucešs longstanding love affair with genre, with plenty of low-tech,
half-eaten corpses, lots of spurting blood and a most unusually-shaped
zombie penis that dominates the filmšs psycho-sexual world. Fair warning?
But L.A. Zombie is very much an art film, too. In fact, it is one of the
most poignant films about dashed expectations and the ennui of poverty I can
recall by a Canadian filmmaker. Its tone in some ways recalls LaBrucešs
revelatory first film, No Skin Off My Ass, but trades in LaBrucešs
hairdresser persona for a more fractured narrative gaze, a perspective borne
from the city itself and reminiscent of Jacques Rivettešs Paris nous
appartient. This sets L.A. Zombie far apart from LaBrucešs last ten years of
hardcore work, which has tended to strike a satirical, confrontational tone,
perhaps most notably in his agitprop phenomenon The Raspberry Reich.
Aesthetically, L.A. Zombie is a most unusual hybrid. Although LaBruce has
been working in digital video since starting to make more sexually explicit
work, he had yet to achieve the same cinematographic impact of the stunning
black-and-white photography of Super 8 1/2 or the seventies underground
aesthetic of Hustler White. L.A. Zombie changes that. LaBruce uses the
digital medium to stretch the Los Angeles landscape, using its endless
sunsets and radioactive, yellow glow to create an uneasy tone of penniless
decadence. Long shots are held for maximum imaginative power and the film
plays out in near silence. In many respects, L.A. Zombie feels like an
update of and tribute to Joe Gagešs revolutionary late-seventies gay porn
trilogy, which, in my mind, is among the finest set of films made in any
genre.˛ (Noah Cowan, Toronto International Film Festival)
L.A. ZOMBIE
(2010, 63 minutes festival version, Video)
Directed by Bruce LaBruce
Official website:
http://www.lazombie.com/
This screening is co-presented by White Light Cinema and the Music Box
Theatre
The screening takes place Tuesday, October 26 at 10:00pm at the Music Box,
3737 N. Southport Ave.
Admission: $9.25
www.whitelightcinema.com <http://www.whitelightcinema.com>
www.musicboxtheatre.com <http://www.musicboxtheatre.com>
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