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Pierrot Lunaire (2014)
Directed by Bruce LaBruce
Music, Drama · 51m
Invited by the conductor Premil Petrovic to stage Arnold Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, a musical theater work from 1912 based on the poems of Albert Giraud, LaBruce transposed a strange and tragic episode of true crime onto the composition. Complementing the original atonal score is a narrative about a trans man who is outed by his girlfriend’s father and forbidden from seeing the young woman again. Crestfallen, the protagonist decides to prove the fact of his manhood by castrating a taxi driver and then revealing his newly transplanted member to the two of them. This story, which for LaBruce “serves as a kind of allegory for all gender radicals and outcasts driven to extremes by the disapproval and hostility of the dominant order,” is rendered in a visual style that nods to the era of Schoenberg’s melodrama. LaBruce cheekily appropriates the formal vocabulary of silent cinema with black-and-white photography, irises, and intertitles like “A cock, a cock, my kingdom for a cock!”
Cast
Susanne Sachße
Paulina Bachmann
Bruce LaBruce
Crew
- Director
- Bruce LaBruce
- Writer
- Bruce LaBruce
- Director of Photography
- Tomas Liska, Ismail Necmi
- Original Music Composer
- Arnold Schönberg
- Producer
- Tomas Liska, Anna Mülter, Claus Matthes, Jürgen Brüning, Bruce LaBruce
Details
- Release date
- 2014-02-09
- Runtime
- 51m
- Genres
- Music, Drama
- Original language
- EN
- Spoken languages
- English, German
- Countries
- Canada, Germany
- Production
- Jürgen Brüning Filmproduktion