“Some set-ups and movements of Passeio com Johnny Guitar are built as the reversed mirror reflection of those envisaged by Ray. The more one watches Monteiro’s short, the more one appreciates its evocation of Ray’s mise en scène. But this evocation is not a copy, an imitation, or a reproduction. He follows the pulsations of the scene and, caught in its wavelength, expands its resonances. He responds to those memories triggered by the soundtrack as if executing the steps of a lover’s dance.” The latest short film explored in Cristina Álvarez López’s series is new to me, but not only is Joa?o César Monteiro’s Passeio com Johnny Guitar a welcome discovery, Álvarez López’s elucidation of the film’s three and a half minutes as the quintessence of cinephilia is a stirring read.
“The climactic vanquishing of these grotesque aberrations allows life to proceed (we are freed, the straights can breed). Yet wasn’t it a little more fun with them around? Hence the central paradox of movie monsters: the horror genre implicitly asks us to identify with them, to see the world a tad askew and to want to cause mayhem and destruction to the more financially, physically, or socially privileged among us. This productively discomfiting form of identification is perhaps more acute for the queer viewer. For gays, relegated to the dustbins for most of cinema’s existence, insidious monsters can be figures of empowerment; they are often more decadent (Phantom of the Opera), worldly (Hannibal Lecter), romantic (Dracula), amusingly catty (Freddy), or bullshit-free (Michael Myers) than the supremely dull protagonists struggling to survive.” Michael Koresky’s survey of queerness in cinema hits 1932 and the topic’s most congenial genre, horror, as the unquestionable abhorrent racism of The Mask of Fu Manchu contrasts with the less cut-and-dried homoeroticism of the tortures greeted upon lead hunk Charles Starrett.
Read More “The View Beyond Parallax… more reads for the week of March 16”