Through the Haze of Love: Querelle, from Film to Book

Author(s): Marvin Heiferman

Source: Aperture, No. 103, FICTION AND METAPHOR (SUMMER 1986), pp. 54-59
Published by: Aperture Foundation, Inc.
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/24471936
Accessed: 20-12-2018 21:47 UTC

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 Throughthe
Through theHaze
Haze
of of Love:
Love: Querelle,
Querelle, Querelle: The Film Book (photographs by Roger Fritz) is the
£ CI D 1 bizarre and beautifully produced photo-novella of Querelle
from
trOm Film Plllll
to Book tO 1500K (Rainer Werner Fassbinder's claustrophobic
by
by Marvin
Marvin Heiferman
Heiferman Querelle (Jean Genet's pot-boiler homosexual novel). The book
contains a shooting script, the film's spoken dialogue, 120 garish
photographs, and an appreciation of Fassbinder by film director
Douglas Sirk. It's a triumph of excess, a catalog of self-absorbed
sexual posturing, a hand-book for hand-jobs.
The authorship of both the film and these photographs right
fully belongs to Rolf Zeherbauer, the film's art director and set
decorator. There is something terribly unwholesome about the
look of this project, a nasty elegance, as if David Salle decorated
a summer-stock version of Oklahoma. Artificiality, here, is es
calated to a high operatic pitch—the sets look like an abandoned
World's Fair site, seen through hallucinogenic mist. This is

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photographic turf shared by Richard Prince's disturbing "Sun- film is fetishized. There is orange light and blue light. There is
set" pictures, composite photographs of couples and families foreground, midground, and background. Everything looks just
cavorting in the surf and on the beach just as the apocalyptic so, lousy and glamorous. Still photography on this, or any,
sun goes down. They might as well have been made just beyond movie set is like the art of taxidermy: dead specimen removed
the sea walls enclosing the Querelle set. from a living environment for future analysis and display.
In this romantic construct, a cartoon of sexuality comes to Whether Roger Fritz did a good job is impossible to tell and
life: a community of sailors, stuffed into tight uniforms and on hardly the point. The photographs are as gorgeous, arch, and
the town, lives incestuously among pimps, soldiers, cops, and tedious as the film.
whores. Purposefully colorful characters strut and slink through Nothing is quite as compelling as sexual longing; still, it's
an MGM musical version of the sexual underground. It's as if hard to talk about and harder to photograph. Uncontrollable
Tom of Finland (the gay world's Hogarth, justly famed for his thoughts orbit a state of desire. Dizzying bursts of obsession
outrageous he-man/fairy illustrations) married Gigi. Metal studs and aching sensuality are not what camera manufacturers gen
glisten, every dangled cigarette gleams . . . adventure awaits. erally invite us to capture. But, because photographs stimulate
This is ritualistic description, as well rehearsed as the re-en- desire and simulate it, pictures such as these do interest us,
actment of a scripted, limited sexual behavior. The look of the whether or not the sexuality depicted does. What's at issue here

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is the schizoid quality of photography that allows one to si- drag. If Querelle seems enervated, if the panting and grabbing
multaneously possess and disdain an image, to be enthralled seem an admission of loss, then perhaps that was what Genet
and be horrified by the subject matter or our reactions to it. A was after, what Fassbinder animated, and what Fritz meant to
sexual image ready for use in the night-table drawer is as much record. These pictures are not the representation and celebration
a description of the reality escaped from as it is the entry point of fantasy; at best, they are erotic flashcards.
to a new consciousness. Photography, like sex, allows for a The arrogance and innocence of beauty and the isolation of
willful loss of reality in the service of a heightened truth. Pho- repression and of age are paraded before the lens. By soldering
tography, like sex, allows for manipulation and for abuse. these moments to film, fictions are cast and reality, in a funny
The images in Querelle are too color-soaked and world-weary way, gets tidied up. The phonier the image, the more real the
to be shocking, too flaccid to be pornographic. These pictures, viewer can feel. By ensuring the present a past, photography
at first glance so artful, hot, and glamorous, become overformal grants the future and the viewer an unearned, satisfying order,
and powerless. There is no air, no energy. A world of bogus To look at a photograph suggests an intimacy that, in fact, is
masculinity is presented as if underwater, slurred. Alienation, only manufactured. No wonder propagandists and artists make
loneliness, and repression hardly seem to matter. Fraternalism, such good use of photography, creating fictions for those who
camaraderie, and worldliness seem excuses to dress up in brutish agree to be fooled.

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What is worthwhile is to confront Jean Genet's narrative
method, his extraordinary imagination which fantasizes a world
that seems alien at first, a world in which singular laws seem
to be in force in the service of some astonishing mythology.
It is tremendously exciting to discover, at first slowly and
then more and more forcefully, how this strange world with
its own peculiar laws relates to our own subjective sense of
reality, how it brings surprising truths to the surface of this
subjective reality of ours by forcing us (and I am fully aware
of the possible bathos in this) toward certain recognitions and
decisions which, no matter how painful they may seem to be,
bring us closer to our own lives.
RAINER WERNER FASSBINDER

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