The Beginning of Identification, and its End
by Philipp Gufler, 2024
19 min.
Music: Rory Pilgrim
Camera and color correction: Leo van Kann
Sound: Nathalie Bruys
Speaker: Susanne Sachsse
Contains adaptations of a performance by Ben d’Armagnac at Brooklyn Museum, New York, 1978 and text fragments from Karl Heinrich Ulrichs’s books Forschungen über das Räthsel der mannmännlichen Liebe, 1864–1880.
The short film by Philipp Gufler initially exhibits a binary situation: light blue and pink, flexibly assigned to two genders historically. This binarity liquefies in a lovely, obscuring initial development, androgynous bodies from various times appear with a text by Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, a pioneer of the ›third sex‹ theory. In the 19th century, he called for the public visibility of sexual diversity, as an imperative addressed to the »Uranians«: Expose yourselves, carry societal contempt onto the political stage, demonstrate solidarity with other oppressed people! An imperative of identification, a beginning of the history of queer emancipation. The circular form of the planet Uranus, for Ulrichs a utopian place of self-empowerment, is juxtaposed with the rectangular form of a tile trapezium. In it, the nude artist surrenders to a jet of water aimed at his heart. A ›naked body shot‹ that comments on the investigative, fixating gaze of society on the ›actual‹ gender of human beings. Here, Gufler cites a performance of Ben d’Armagnac from 1978, but is, in contrast with him, nude. The heart region symbolically hit by the jet of water becomes the erogenous zone of passivity. The second movement of the work leads to the end of the emancipation narrative. On the right side of the screen appear the right-wing positions of the ‘bad gays’ of our time (Pim Fortuyn, Alice Weidel, a neo-Nazi), in the historical footsteps of Ernst Röhm; self-confident gays and lesbians who have rejected solidarity, aim their toxic water at everything weak and at all sexual intermediaries and work to reconstruct binary conditions that allow for no third sex. The artist leaves the frame. (Jan Künemund for Videonale.20)
TRAILER
Filmfestivals
71. International Short Film Festival, Oberhausen (World Premiere)
German Competition
3. – 4.5.2025
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Divine Queer Film Festival
Turin, Italy
23. – 25.5.2025----
Queering the Belvedere
Blickle Kino im Belvedere 21, Vienna, Austria
12.6.2025, 18:30
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Contexts Festival of Ephemeral Art in Sokołowsko
Kino zdrowie, ul. Główna 36, Poland
17.7.2025, 22:00
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49. Open Air Filmfest Weiterstadt
Filmzelt, Weiterstadt
16.8.2025, 20:22
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15. Fringe! Queer Film & Arts Fest
13.-21.9.2025
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Nederlands Film Festival
20.9.2025, 8 pm
Louis Hartlooper Complex, Utrecht, NL
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