Toronto-based filmmaker, photographer, writer and artist Bruce LaBruce presents 'The Visitor' – a British-set reimagining of Pier Paolo Pasolini's 1968 film, 'Teorema’.
Bruce has written and directed 14 feature films, since 1987. His first international box office success was 'Hustler White', which screened in Panorama in 1996. Plus, as a photographer, Bruce has presented several international exhibitions, one of them even causing a national scandal.
Pasolini's 'Teorema' sees an enigmatic protagonist, known as 'the visitor', arriving to the house of an upper-class family. Here, he seduces every family member, and suddenly departs. . . Leaving behind him an emptiness.
In LaBruce's 'The Visitor', 'the visitor' is a refugee who washes up in a small suitcase, on the banks of the River Thames in London. He's not alone – several identical-looking men begin to emerge from suitcases all around the city. 'The visitor' arrives at the house of an upper-class family, getting to know the maid who passes him off as her nephew.
The guest makes love with each of the house's residents. . . As they experience a radical, sexual and spiritual transformation.
'The Visitor' was recently shown as part of Sydney Underground Film Festival. Here, we speak to Bruce LaBruce about the project.
Firstly, tell us a little bit about you and your relationship to filmmaking.
I am a Toronto-based writer, filmmaker, photographer, and artist who has been making art for 35 odd years. I started out making short experimental queer films in the late '80s along with the queer punk fanzine J.D.s which begat the Queercore Movement. I simultaneously went to film school, getting a Masters degree in film and social and political thought, studying under the late, great film critic Robin Wood.
Why do you think the art of film is such an effective way to deliver a message?
Cinema is a spectacular event, in the Situationist sense, as Guy Debord described it, where everything directly lived recedes into a representation that is ideological and, in capitalist terms, marketable. It is therefore prone to exploitation and manipulation. The largely passive audience nonetheless projects its fantasies and desires onto the screen, which makes it a powerful tool for propaganda.
Bruce LaBruce
What approach did you have with ’The Visitor’ – what did you want to communicate on the whole?
With 'The Visitor' I wanted to make a pornographic spectacle with a relentless techno soundtrack that assaults the audience with sexually extreme imagery mixed with religious symbolism, hypnotic music, corrupted flashing political slogans, and extreme propaganda. It's a queer agit-prop art porn film which also contains elements of slapstick comedy and camp melodrama. It's designed to be immersive and provocative, challenging the conventions of mainstream cinema and queer representation.
’The Visitor’ is a new interpretation of a 1968 film. What can you tell us about this story?
'The Visitor' is a reimagining of Pasolini's masterpiece 'Teorema', which is part of his trilogy of films, along with 'Porcile' and 'Salo', about the psychosexual pathology of the bourgeoisie, the ruling class. 'Teorema' concerns an unknown young man, only ever identified as 'the visitor', who visits a bourgeois Milanese family and proceeds to seduce each member of the family: the mother, the father, the daughter, the son, and the maid. These seductions are mostly implied or represented symbolically, but in my version I wanted to not only make it clear that the characters are having actual sex with the visitor (and each other), but to make it sexually explicit (in this final trilogy, made before he was assassinated at the age of 53 in 1975, Pasolini seemed to be moving more toward pornographic expression, so I wanted to extend 'Teorema' to its logical conclusion). My idea was to re-interpret Pasolini's very political film in terms of contemporary queer politics and aesthetics.
Why was this particular story something you wanted to tackle?
The narrative of Pasolini's 'Teorema' – the members of a conventional family each seduced by a vaguely hustlerish visitor – has become a kind of meme, a narrative pattern almost as familiar as John Ford's 'The Searchers' narrative which has been reiterated again and again by the likes of Paul Schrader and Martin Scorsese. It's a very potent allegory for the revolutionary disruption of the nuclear family: after their seductions, the members of the family each undergo some sort of radical transformation, both sexual and spiritual, that allows them to recognise how repressed and deadened they had been in their previous conformity, and to express themselves fully as autonomous beings. The character of the son in particular questions the very notion of what it means to be an artist, and pushes the boundaries of artistic expression, a strategy with which I strongly identify.
There are themes of racism and celebrating queer identities in this film. Talk a bit about the themes throughout and how they’re effective in the context of the story.
In Pasolini's 'Teorema', the visitor is represented as white and roughly from the same class as the white family he invades. To update the project of the film in terms of a more contemporary queer political landscape, I conceived the visitor as a black refugee from a developing country – almost like an alien creature from another world – who emerges from a suitcase washed up on a raft on the Thames. He arrives as a multiple incarnation of the same character, blossoming from suitcases all over the city, a science fiction allegory for the notion that refugees are a kind of virus or invasive species, met with paranoia and xenophobia. The visitor is also sexually voracious and consuming, underlining how the black 'other' in a predominantly white society is perceived as a sexually potent and threatening avatar, a common trope that is pervasive in pornography. I represent him as a kind of sexual zombie who liberates the family from their social and sexual misery. The visitor in my version is sexually fluid – at one point he cross-dresses – and the daughter is played by a transmasculine performer whom the visitor impregnates, adding a contemporary queer twist to the proceedings.
This film played as part of Sydney Underground Film Festival! What most excited you about its inclusion in this event?
Sadly, I've only visited Australia once, and that was to Melbourne! I would love to return some day and show my work in Sydney, which in my imagination is one of the gay meccas of the world! I recently contributed an essay to an amazing monograph published about the work of Australian queer artist Paul Yore, and in my research of his work I realised how much Canada and Australia share in terms of colonial oppression and exploitation of Indigenous people, fractured identities, and false mythologies. So Australia for me is a kind of mirror image of the same set of political issues and problematics that Canada is heir to.
Why do you think it belongs in a festival like this one?
I'm still attached to the idea of 'the underground' in terms of artistic expression, the avant-garde, so I'm always excited to participate in film festivals that identify themselves as 'underground'. And since it's in Australia, from my perspective it's underground down under, which is about as under as you can get!
What’s next for you?
I've just published my fourth book of photography from the London-based publisher Baron Books, and I'm going to start working on another one. I also have three or four or more films 'in development', as they say, aka 'development hell', so I'm waiting to see which one will heat up first!
This story originally appeared on our queer sister site, FROOTY.
