#there’s something so sexy about themes that resonate with the trans experience

[longhandsart]

Big bold letters in my WIP that just says

MORE TRANS SUBTEXT

[bronanlynch]

hamlet, much ado, CORIOLANUS, henry the fifth (guess which one I had to c&p)

tbh I assumed u were just really really excited abt coriolanus which like. valid and mood

HAMLET: Do you have any specific/creative ideas on staging a production of Hamlet?

oh boy do I........ ok first of all I would def borrow some of the set/lighting stuff from the production that I saw a few months ago (the one with ruth negga as hamlet) bc there was a lot of really really cool stuff w doors and silhouettes that I thought was super effective. also extremely a fan of having hamlet played by a woman or a transmasc actor bc like. ok. I don’t think trans!hamlet was necessarily what that production was going for but that’s how it came across to me, a transmasc person like. I’ve seen hamlet played by women in a way that felt like hamlet’s a woman in that version, regardless of how much or little they change the script/pronouns. the ruth negga version was like. oh. hamlet is trans and also even if that wasn’t what they were going for it’s still the only portrayal of a transmasc character that’s ever resonated with me personally. not to get into gender stuff but I very rarely feel like I recognize myself in fictional depictions of trans people but something abt this specific hamlet just. really vibed w me y’know? something about the mannerisms and the costuming and the way his depression isn’t specifically abt his gender stuff but that sure doesn’t help (all the layers of being referred to/referring to himself as unmanly, talking abt hating femininity contrasted w how much this version of hamlet clearly cared abt ophelia+gertrude, another reason for everyone to disapprove of his relationship, etc)

anyway tl;dr my ideal production would make hamlet trans, also I’ve been kinda vaguely considering what the costuming might look like if u set it further back in history like. more like the time that the sources shakespeare was working on were from bc then I could use the stuff I learned for my dissertation abt early medieval clothing for something

also I hate how every single production I’ve ever seen has done ophelia’s ~madness so I wanna do a version where she’s playing the same game hamlet is of like. pretending to ~go mad~ so that ppl won’t see her as a threat except it doesn’t work bc there’s a moment when she’s like. giving out the flowers and too much of her anger comes through at claudius. when she leaves the stage for the last time claudius gestures for one of his guards to follow her out with the implication that he’s having her killed (later, when gertrude comes back to say that she’s dead, so does that guard and claudius nods like. yeah good job u did the thing). also laertes tries to follow ophelia when she leaves but claudius stops him, I don’t understand why you wouldn’t play it like that he can’t just let her go like that

also also if hamlet doesn’t die in horatio’s arms what’s even the point, from a narrative perspective as well as a homoeroticism perspective. also in general horatio needs to be present throughout and like. important? bc too many production neglect horatio but like. he’s the one who makes ppl care abt hamlet anyway I’m gonna stop now before I go into an entire essay

wait no that reminds me of the actual academic essay I did write abt generational conflict in hamlet and why u gotta cast the parent generation as like. obviously older than hamlet’s generation in order to get that across. also bc lots of productions cast hamlet & gertrude closer in age than hamlet & ophelia which. hmmmm. don’t love that

MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING: Go off about the best female character.

beatrice muchado is a strong contender but also everyone already loves her so I have less to say that hasn’t already been said, I would be tempted to say viola twelfthnight if I weren’t so firmly on team viola/cesario is trans, I love ophelia a lot but I hate the ~madness scenes, most of my favorite women in shakespeare productions I’ve seen have been women playing male roles like please I would love to talk abt the all-female julius caesar where brutus was a butch lesbian, or like. gwendoline christie as titania in midsummer except titania and oberon’s roles were swapped (which I have mixed feelings about bc the oberon/nick bottom stuff is played as a joke which like. to be fair that’s how titania/bottom is usually done and I know the joke isn’t actually just ‘haha they’re gay’ it’s abt the weird magic shit and the fact that puck and titania are messing with them but. y’know. the experience of being in an audience laughing at two dudes kissing did not make me personally feel great. however I fucking loved pretty much everything else about the production so it balances out to still being the best midsummer I’ve ever seen and also one of the best plays I’ve ever seen full stop)

also best is such a vague and subjective thing like. Idk I love a lot of them for different reasons, y’know? I do think beatrice and maybe juliet are the ones I would say are the best written, gertrude is a close third bc it really depends on how she’s played in any given production but one of my favorite parts of hamlet is in the last scene when she drinks the poison if it’s framed as her knowing exactly what’s going on and daring claudius to stop her and admit his own guilt

CORIOLANUS: Which gay pairing has the most evidence? (Conversely, which pairing do you wish had evidence?)

cesario/viola+orsino is canon send tweet. but really like. usually the cross-dressing heroine changes back into women’s clothing at the end to restore heteronormativity or whatever and I know that viola does say “hey I’m gonna go change” but never actually does and orsino still calls them cesario after that in one of his very last lines so like. I’m just sayin

 brutus and cassius’s deaths are basically the same as romeo and juliet’s, and are therefore also a pyramus and thisbe retelling, in this essay I will

HENRY V: What is the best monologue/soliloquy? in general I’m not that into king lear but edmund’s “now gods, stand up for bastards” monologue is extremely good and sexy, somewhere there’s a recording of riz ahmed doing it that’s just. chef’s kiss

as a hamlet stan my favorite hamlet soliloquy is his first one, the one that starts with “oh that this too too sullied flesh would melt,” and ends with “but break my heart for I must hold my tongue” which not to be a basic bitch but that’s one of my favorite lines in anything ever

also antony’s funeral speech for caesar gets me (almost) every goddamn time. the one singular exception to this was the shakespeare in the park production a few years ago where they were trying to do shallow modern political commentary that really didn’t work and actively undermined the themes of the play

[nofomoartworld]

Hyperallergic: A Polish Filmmaker Explores Trans Identity Through Abstraction

Still from Endless by Wojciech Puś (all images courtesy of the artist)

Per the gracious invitation of artist Wojciech Puś, I had the opportunity to be on location in various parts of Poland during the summer of 2016 with the close-knit cast and crew of the experimental feature film Endless, which he wrote and directed. A work in progress, the film can be described as non-narrative, exploring trans themes with hints of the psychological thriller genre. Puś’s eclectic points of reference include the 1962 film Last Year at Marienbad (directed by Alain Resnais), Lana Del Rey’s music, and Beatriz Preciado’s 2013 book Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era.

To provide some brief context, I was in Poland in fall 2015 and summer 2016 on a Fulbright grant to explore artworks examining LGBTQ subject matter. In 2014, having visited several cities in Poland as part of a study-abroad trip I had organized for my MFA and BFA art students at Florida International University in Miami, I believed that Poland was on the verge of becoming a hotbed of creativity for artists working on LGBTQ themes. In hindsight, I jumped the gun. LGBTQ subject matter has long been taboo to discuss, even within the progressive art scene. I do not mean to imply the Polish art world is homophobic, but certainly there was caution (understandably so, in some cases) on the part of some people I met about divulging information about artists in connection to this sensitive issue in a country where more than 90% of the population is Catholic.

Still from Endless by Wojciech Puś

Still from Endless by Wojciech Puś

That Puś’s film is being produced at all is surprising, given that the official funding bodies of Poland have not embraced it. According to the artist, the lack of interest in LGBTQ subject matter is a longstanding issue, not something that can be solely traced to the new nationalistic anti-refugee government, which is opposed to LGBTQ rights, too. Indeed, the country’s Minister of Justice, in his comments regarding the plethora of rainbow flags visible in the streets during the recent protests of the Polish government’s restructuring of the courts, equated homosexuality with anti-patriotism.

Yet Puś’ film is not about LGBTQ visibility or rights. It’s closer in spirit to how performance studies scholar José Esteban Munõz describes queerness as distinct from the pursuit of rights in his seminal book Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (2009). He writes, “Queerness is not yet here. Queerness is an ideality. Put another way, we are not yet queer. We may never touch queerness, but we can feel it as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality.” The stills of a surreal scene filmed at a colonnaded space in Warsaw’s Palace of Culture resonate with Munõz’s statement. Puś mobilizes cool blue lighting: it is icy and melancholic, yet it suffuses the entire space, enveloping the subjects. In this way, they begin to blur with their surroundings, and the possibility emerges of moving away from the now and here toward the then and there (invoked in the title of Munõz’s book). Indeed, the hottest part of a flame is blue. In its queerness, Puś’s visual style is generous and porous.

Endless is loosely based on the life of a trans woman who grew up in Łódź. Puś, though, is not interested in showing the subject’s journey from a man to a woman, or from point A to point B. To do so would be to traffic in the fiction of the stability of identity — neither A nor B is fixed, after all. Instead, he approaches trans identity through the aesthetic mode of queer abstraction, a term borrowed from art historian David Getsy’s writings that means, on the most basic level, using abstraction rather than figuration to explore LGBTQ experiences.

Still from Endless by Wojciech Puś

Still from Endless by Wojciech Puś

Still from Endless by Wojciech Puś

Not that figuration is eschewed altogether. For instance, in one scene a character looks into a mirror, which begins to vibrate in synch with the bass of the haunting music of Lana Del Rey. In the background, another figure appears, wearing a strapless emerald green dress. The former closes their eyes and begins to sway to the music; soon, the latter walks behind them and begins to mimic their movements. (I am using the pronoun “they” because in this film the characters are not easily coded as male or female.) As the mirror vibrates, the commingling bodies appear to blur into one. Now and again the mirror is still, and this effectively snaps the figures back into distinct bodies. What the viewer witnesses is not straightforward (pun intended), and it is this productive ambiguity in which Puś revels.

There is a blurring not only of subject and subject, but subject and object, too. Figure and landscape often metaphorically merge into a seamless whole. In one scene, the scantily clad characters described above use selfie sticks to take photos of themselves near a natural pool nestled in the mountains. The hypersexuality and mysteriousness of both characters is echoed by the wild, lush flora and the overall surreal quality of the setting. In this way, the characters become entangled with the landscape.

Still from Endless by Wojciech Puś

Still from Endless by Wojciech Puś

Given that Puś’s project exceeds the fixed category “gay,” I would not contextualize it within the history of art by primarily gay men in Poland that is beginning to be unearthed by scholars like art historian Paweł Leszkowicz. Puś’s work is also different than that of his Warsaw-based contemporary peer Karol Radziszewski, an artist who often deals more explicitly with gay male lives. It makes more sense to consider Puś’s work in a broader international context, outside of the art world. There are certainly connections with David Lynch, as art critic Cathy Drake points out in reference to Puś performance in Warsaw. Puś himself intimated as much when he described aspects of his film to me via text: “Even if you try to hold on to one character it dissolves into something you can follow only with your intellect or intuition.”

I would also position his work within the genealogy of “new queer cinema.” There are certainly affinities between Puś’s work and that of Derek Jarman, in particular, his gender-bending Caravaggio (1986) and his abstract Blue (1993). Puś’s presentation of a fraught or false utopia coupled with a strong use of color is reminiscent of Todd Haynes’s Safe (1995). Finally, the sexy and violent world of Gregg Araki’s The Living End (1992) comes to mind, as well. These are all provisional connections, of course, given the movie is still in production. It is slated to be finished by the end of 2018.

Still from Endless by Wojciech Puś; photo by Kuba Ceran

Still from Endless by Wojciech Puś

Still from Endless by Wojciech Puś

More work by Puś can be viewed at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw.

The post A Polish Filmmaker Explores Trans Identity Through Abstraction appeared first on Hyperallergic.

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