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piratecinema vs coronavirus
This year, we weren't planning to do a program each and every week - but other
than that, Pirate Cinema will remain open. In case you've never been at one of
our screenings: In its current form, Pirate Cinema is a rather private affair,
with an average attendance of 10 to 15 people - we used to advertise the space
as a 12-seater (even though sitting is not required) - and the likelihood that
you are going to run into the sort of people here with whom you are routinely
exchanging hugs or kisses anyway is sufficiently high to make a visit to Pirate
Cinema a relatively riskless adventure. At the same time, given the indefinite
absence of many major proprietary entertainment options in Berlin, to which we
never aspired to serve as an "alternative", but also considering the sudden
spike in desire for community in times of crisis, which we share, we may have
to rethink our own role, program, form and function in the coming weeks.
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sunday march 15
from 8:30 pm
pirate cinema s08e02
https://piratecinema.org/images/s08e02.jpg
the wild boys
bertrand mandico
2017 110 min 4.95 gb
french with english subs
before & after: pirate cinema
season eight sneak preview part 2
takeaway (6 gb)
boro in the box (2011)
living still life (2012)
prehistoric cabaret (2014)
salammbo (2014)
memories of a boobs flasher (2014)
our lady of hormones (2015)
any virgin left alive? (2015)
depressive cop (2017)
pirate cinema berlin
bar cinema discotheque
u kottbusser tor
e-mail for directions <x at rolux.org>
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Season Eight continues on Sunday with Bertrand Mandico's "The Wild Boys". It
would have been silly to try to come up with a better introduction to the film
than the one Jonathan Romney has written for Film Comment, and why plagiarize
when you can pirate, so we have included it below.
For those of you in exile, quarantine or hibernation, our screening from last
week is now online in its 10 gigabyte entirety. Please keep in mind, however,
that it was a rather site-specific program, and at least parts of it may look
and sound very different on small screens and speakers.
readme: https://piratecinema.org/videos/S08E01.txt
video: https://piratecinema.org/videos/S08E01.mp4
subs: https://piratecinema.org/videos/S08E01.srt
or alternatively, all of the above as a torrent:
https://piratecinema.org/torrents/S08E01.torrent
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Wild Boys
In Joris-Karl Huysmans's Decadent novel of 1884, Against Nature (À Rebours),
the aesthete hero des Esseintes cultivates a taste for all that is artificial.
One of his particular predilections is for plants that don't look remotely
natural, but appear to have been expressly crafted to look like imitations of
plants - with buds that look more like jewels, or leaves that resemble fabric,
or better still, rotten flesh pretending to be foliage.
This freakish botany comes to mind when watching the new French film Wild Boys
(Les Garçons Sauvages). It was partly shot on the island of Réunion, in the
Indian Ocean, and therefore in real tropical forest settings - and yet,
director Bertrand Mandico contrives to make you think that he's actually
created this environment on a studio set, and not the most realistic one
either. A film of pure artifice, Wild Boys puts you in mind of the work of Guy
Maddin (it could all be taking place on a neighboring island to the setting of
his notorious short Sissy Boy Slap Party), of Raul Ruiz, and of fellow French
directors F.J. Ossang and Yann Gonzalez, director of the torridly pan-erotic
You and the Night (he gets a thank-you credit from Mandico). Oh, and let's add
Fassbinder's Querelle and inevitably Jack Smith too, always an implied guest at
this kind of polymorphously perverse dressing-up party.
Like much of the work of these directors, Mandico's film proudly inhabits its
own hermetic world and follows its own irreducibly specific codes; we're
talking about the kind of cinema that, unless you take it entirely on its own
terms, leaves you thinking, "Yes - but what's it for?" Unless you're willing to
enter into its erotically facetious dream world, a film like Wild Boys doesn't
make much sense, can look like the work of a filmmaker entirely indulging his
own sexual and cinematic fetishes, with complete disdain for whether or not
viewers will connect with it. This film represents a particularly elaborate
form of snow-globe cinema, creating its own sealed world and inviting you to
enter it or just admire it from outside. In literary terms, it's close to the
self-enclosed verbal and imagistic universes of Raymond Roussel and Ronald
Firbank, and the end credits thank both William Burroughs and Jules Verne: if
those two writers had pitched camp together on some faraway shore, this might
be the kind of fantasy that might have jointly concocted.
The wild boys are a group of teenage lads, pupils at some sort of fancy
educational establishment. After an eerie nocturnal opening on a tropical
island - where one boy, Tanguy, meets a dog with a human face - we meet the
wild boys in a flashback: they're wearing scary papier-mâché rictus masks, and
entertaining their literature teacher (Nathalie Richard) by putting on a
performance of Macbeth for her. Over-excitable as they are, and in thrall to
some sort of demonic deity - which manifests as a jeweled skull and rejoices in
the name of Trevor - they rape their teacher and tie her to the back of a
horse. A trial follows, in which a long-haired judge rises up in back
projection like an avenging deity, and naked gilded men stand guard in the
courtroom.
Sent home, the boys are pressed into the care of a Dutch sea captain (Sam
Louwyck), who prides himself as a specialist in disciplining unruly youth, and
pressgangs them into a sea voyage that's a sort of nautical boot camp. Before
they leave, he makes them eat a strange hairy fruit - something between a
lychee and a sea urchin, but more ripely laden with sexual overtones than
either. On the journey, he uses a bizarre system of ropes and pulleys to keep
the boys tied up, making them essentially part of the ship's mechanism. He also
likes to flash his heavily tattooed penis: "If you want something to read, come
and see me." Once at sea, this accursed crew hoist a hairy sail. No, that's not
a euphemism, although in this setting, you'd expect it to be; no, they
literally hoist a hairy sail, which is weird enough. Things will get weirder
still, me hearties.
What I haven't mentioned yet is the casting of the boys. The Captain taunts one
of them by calling him "Fillette" ("Girly" in the subtitles), but the boys are
actually all played by women, including the Swinton-esque, severe Anaël Snoek
as Tanguy. The best known among the actresses is Vimala Pons as piratical alpha
male Jean-Louis, said in the opening voiceover to be "a strange mix of acid and
milk." Pons, one of the most playful and altogether game presences in current
French cinema - her credits include Christophe Honoré's Métamorphoses,
Verhoeven's Elle, and Antonin Peretjatko's larky The Rendez-Vous of Déja-Vu -
looks perfectly boyish here, with a mean scowl, a tough jaw, and the general
look of a wolfish teenage Kyle McLachlan (if you want to be really perverse
about it, she has the strangest touch of Harry Styles). All the actresses, in
fact, look perfectly like boys and for the most part, we forget - if we were
ever aware of it - that we're watching women. This conceptual trick drives the
film, and consistently tricks our perceptions, all the more so because these
actresses don't sound remotely female at any point (I couldn't see any sign in
the credits that they were dubbed by males).
Wild Boys isn't the first film to pull this particular cross-dressing
routine - Mandico may well have taken his cue from the 1988 Japanese cult
movie, Shusuke Kaneko's Summer Vacation 1999, about homoerotic relationships
between schoolboys, who are all played by teenage girls. But the trans casting
is just the beginning of a riotous exchange of gender identities: the Captain,
it turns out, already has one female breast, Amazon-like, and when the crew
dock on a distant island, they meet its reigning savant, one Dr. Séverin, or
Séverine (Elina Löwensohn), who has crossed gender barriers thanks to that
furry fruit that the crew have all been gobbling.
The island itself - and heaven knows what the Réunion tourist board will think
of this - is a lush erotic paradise. Nutrition is provided by liquid gushing
from cactus-like appendages - cue a cascade of blow-job sight gags - while the
boys are invited to relax between the foliage-covered legs that writhe in the
undergrowth. Designed by Astrid Tonnellier and shot by Pascale Granel - largely
in black and white but occasionally slipping into rich, jewel-toned color - the
world of Wild Boys is lusciously unreal, its artifice reminiscent of those
Maddin films that most resemble fantasy tableaux in department store windows at
Christmas. Unlike Maddin, though, Mandico doesn't revel in the joys of
cheapness: Wild Boys looks impossibly expensive at times, sea storm sequences
and all, its Sternbergian opulence the polar opposite of the scratchy punk
illusionism you might expect from this kind of utterly marginal cinema.
Mandico is a new name on me. This is his debut feature, although he has made
numerous shorts since 1999, including Boro in the Box, in which Löwensohn -
apparently his long-term muse - plays, among other roles, the voice of Walerian
Borowczyk. One of his films seems to be an Icelandic tribute to outsider artist
Henry Darger, while another is Salammbô, after the febrile Flaubert novel of
exotic, erotic antiquity. What can one say about such homages except: it all
figures. By the end of Wild Boys, the furry fruits have taken full effect:
after an orgiastic scene in which the boys start fighting and kissing in a
tempest of white feathers, the actresses finally reveal themselves as women, as
breasts fill the screen and prosthetic penises start dropping into the sand
left, right and center.
If you can manage not to object that we've seen it all before - this is not
a film that stands on ceremony about originality - Wild Boys is highly
pleasurable both as an hyper-crafted aesthetic object and as a sweetly
dirty-minded erotic fantasia, polyvalent enough to please all comers
(including, presumably, the contingent identified by Blur, "Girls who are boys
who like boys to be girls who do boys like they're girls..."). Wild Boys could
almost be a too try-hard entry in a contest to produce the Queerest Film Ever,
but it's engaging and distinctive, although it may fade from your mind like a
lurid dream the moment it's over. The best joke, however, comes at the end,
with Dr. Séverin(e)'s last words, "Never be vulgar." Mandico's film exists at
that delicate nexus that defines a certain school of camp, where outrageous
vulgarity shades into the utmost, most exquisite refinement. The makers of
Pirates of the Caribbean might want to learn a few tricks to liven up their
next installment.
https://www.filmcomment.com/blog/film-week-wild-boys/
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Pirate Cinema recommends
Mother Truth and her Unruly, Loving Children
CAMP Rooftop (f.k.a. Pirate Cinema Bombay)
February 29 - March 28, 2020
https://studio.camp/events/MotherTruth
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