Description:

The Raspberry Reich

Friday, March 3, 2017 7:00 PM
(Bruce LaBruce, 2004, Germany, digital, 90 minutes)

The Raspberry Reich, directed by the bad boy of Canadian queer independent cinema, hearkens back to the radical politics and terrorist actions of the Red Army Faction, militant communists who turned theory into practice in West Berlin in the 1970s. The film follows a group of present-day militants who think of themselves as the “sixth generation” of the RAF. Their leader, Gudrun, makes her strand of feminism clear early on when she tosses Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway into the trash in favor of The Communist Manifesto and Wilhelm Reich’s The Sexual Revolution. She encourages her male comrades to liberate themselves from their heterosexuality and “join the homosexual intifada.” Shot in a deliberately propagandistic style, the film is satirical and sexy. The protagonists fellate shotguns, scandalize their bourgeois neighbors by screwing in the elevator, and eventually kidnap the son of a wealthy industrialist in order to turn him, Patty-Hearst-style, into one of their own.

---

About the film program:

“The Gay Left”: Homosexuality in the Era of Late Socialism

In an East Berlin gay bar in 1989, an old man explains his commitment to the communist party’s project of equality after World War II: “We stopped mankind’s exploitation by mankind. Now it does not matter if the person you work with is a Jew or whatever. Except gays. They were forgotten somehow.” The only official film from the German Democratic Republic dealing with homosexuality, "Coming Out", by Heiner Carow, ends with these lines. Similarly, this film series asks how the ideologies of communism, socialism, and capitalism address sexual minorities.

Including work from both sides of the Iron Curtain, “The Gay Left” brings multiple perspectives and historical moments into conversation in order to fight against forgetting.