CITY OF LOST SOULS
1983. 94 min. Directed by Rosa von Praunheim.
Tickets here: https://www.ifccenter.com/films/city-of-lost-souls/
T Fleischmann, author of the book length essay Time is the Thing the Body Moves Through, presents the film CITY OF LOST SOULS (1983) starring Angie Stardust of the famous New York Club 82 who plays house mom to a group of raunchy and wildly eccentric outsiders living in Berlin. Amongst the cast is Glam Rock punk singer Jayne County (of Derek Jarman’s JUBILEE and the Warhol Factory films), and the late Tara O’Hara. The film funnels through a vortex of sets saturated with americana, devilish hellscapes, underground nightclubs, and a diner that serves up flesh of all varieties. We join the characters in a feverish state as they fuck, wax poetic about racism, transphobia, queerness, and political commentary on the east versus west. For these lurid exhibitionists, even the act of eating becomes a type of orgy, as the characters don’t just bite and chew as much as they devour disproportionately large servings of food in erotic, messy sploshing scenes. The film is unabashedly risqué, camp, and queer in a way much like american transplant and trapeze artist Tron summarizes it to the audience, “I am not gay, straight, bi nor trisexual; I’m simply sexual!”
T Fleischmann is the author of the book-length essays Time Is the Thing a Body Moves Through and Syzygy, Beauty and the pamphlet Gonorrhea, SESTA, Institutions. Among other places, their shorter writing can be found in The Paris Review, Guernica Magazine, Music and Literature, Los Angeles Review of Books, and a number of anthologies, most recently We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics. Fleischmann also collaborates on an ongoing body of visual work with the artist Benjy Russell and, when not writing, organizes for trans liberation and prison abolition from their home in rural Pennsylvania.
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