Week 47/2024

R.I.P. Paul Morrissey. The American avant-garde filmmaker passed away three weeks ago and so the screening of Flesh for Frankenstein at KASKcinema this week can serve as a commemoration. This same week, they’re also showing a 35mm print of Twilight, paired with a queer reading of the vampire saga. Having never seen Twilight, I imagine it as a kind of Morrissey-style schlock entertainment – but perhaps there’s more between these gothic tales about the horror of sexuality or sexuality of horror. Kristen Stewart herself called Twilight “such a gay movie,” though it’s generally seen as pro-abstinence propaganda. As argued in The New Statesman, “the act of heroism becomes the not having sex, even when it’s clearly desired by both parties.” In Robert Pattison’s own words: “Believe me, I want to. I just want to be married to you first!”

“Remember,” Paul Morrissey said about Flesh for Frankenstein, “to me, a conservative, sex is the stupid religion of the ‘liberal’. But the emotional urges towards family and to control life and, in doing so, frustrate death are far more complicated and interesting than the biological sex urge. Frankenstein wants control and possession, a much more powerful and confusing emotion. Sexuality is something to be against, something destructive.” In Morrissey’s version of the classic, Frankenstein is married to his sister, played by the Belgian actress Monique Van Vooren, and the experiments are about the unnatural urge to find an alternative to sex.

Shot back-to-back at Cinecittà with his own vampire myth Blood for Dracula, Flesh for Frankenstein ended Morrissey’s association with Andy Warhol’s Factory. He wanted to be independent beyond even the autonomy Warhol gave him. Jon Jost, another true American maverick, also began making films in the mid-sixties on shoestring budgets. CINEMATEK is screening his rare road movie, Frameup, about the beauty of the landscape and the shallowness of a zombie-like couple.