No Skin Off My Ass | |
---|---|
Directed by | Bruce LaBruce |
Written by | Bruce LaBruce |
Starring | Bruce LaBruce G. B. Jones Klaus von Brücker |
Distributed by | Strand Releasing |
Release date |
|
Running time | 73 minutes |
Country | Canada |
Language | English |
No Skin Off My Ass is a 1991 comedy-drama film by Bruce LaBruce.
LaBruce's debut feature film provides a template for many of the themes in LaBruce's later movies. Explicit sex scenes between LaBruce's character and von Brucker's are interwoven with a radical political message.
No Skin Off My Ass played at film festivals around the world and quickly became a cult film. Famously, Kurt Cobain declared it his favourite film. [1] [2] The film's soundtrack includes songs by several punk bands such as Frightwig and Beefeater. [2]
A punk hairdresser (Bruce LaBruce), known only as “The Hairdresser”, becomes obsessed with a mute neo-Nazi skinhead (Klaus von Brücker). Jonesy (G. B. Jones), a lesbian underground film director and the skinhead's sister, attempts to bring her brother and the hairdresser together. [3] Throughout the film, Jonesy is also working on a documentary around the Symbionese Liberation Army. [4] The cast also includes Fifth Column band members Caroline Azar and Beverly Breckenridge.
No Skin Off My Ass was filmed in Toronto on a budget of $14,000. Most of the cast were people LaBruce previously knew and worked with, helping to keep the cost down: the main cast was LaBruce himself and von Brücker, who were boyfriends at the time, and some of the film's runtime is pornographic footage of the two having sex. [5] G.B. Jones, who LaBruce worked frequently with on projects like the J.D.s zines, also acted in the film. [3]
LaBruce shot and edited No Skin Off My Ass on 8mm black and white film, blown up to 16mm in post-production. [6]
LaBruce's debut, according to him, "correspond[ed] with the burgeoning gay and lesbian film festival circuit and just sort of became a cult film." [5] Despite its enthusiastic reception, LaBruce "never expected it to go outside of underground bars in Toronto or alternative art spaces." [7] The movie has been shown at multiple film festivals and queer community events, including its debut at the 1991 Chicago Lesbian & Gay International Film Festival, [8] SPEW: The Homographic Convergence, [9] [10] the 1993 Baltimore Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, [11] and many others.
More recently, No Skin Off My Ass has been screened at the Museum of Modern Art twice, [4] at Outfest Los Angeles in 2016, [12] and at Visionär Film Fest in 2019. [13]
The film is discussed as "a queer retelling of Robert Altman's That Cold Day in the Park ," [5] a 1969 psychological thriller about obsession. Altman's film is based on a novel by the same name by Peter Miles. According to LaBruce, [14]
Altman de-queered it, so I decided to re-queer it... When I showed the film for the first time in Los Angeles in 1991, somebody brought Miles to my screening and he said my no-budget Super-8 movie was better than the Altman version! He gave me an autographed copy of his novel inscribed: "You got it right."
LaBruce's No Skin Off My Ass is, according to Alexander Cavaluzzo, "the voice of hardcore, tongue-in-cheek dissent with porn-packed political allegories." [3] The film is viewed today as "a homocore classic... a complex exploration of how subculture is articulated through style, and a poignant study in erotic fascination." [4]
Queercore is a cultural/social movement that began in the mid-1980s as an offshoot of the punk subculture and a music genre that comes from punk rock. It is distinguished by its discontent with society in general, and specifically society's disapproval of the LGBT community. Queercore expresses itself in a DIY style through magazines, music, writing and film.
Bruce LaBruce is a Canadian artist, writer, filmmaker, photographer, and underground director based in Toronto.
A gay skinhead, also known as a gayskin or queerskin, is a gay person who identifies with the skinhead subculture. Some gay skinheads have a sexual fetish for skinhead clothing styles.
J.D.s was a Canadian queer punk zine which started in 1985 and ran for eight issues until 1991. The zine was co-authored by G.B Jones and Bruce LaBruce and is credited as being one of the first and most influential queer zines. The zine's content was centred around anarchic queer-punk themes and heavily discussed queer-skewed punk music from the late 1980s.
Strand Releasing is an American film production company founded in 1989 and is based in Culver City, California. The company has distributed over 300 auteur-driven titles from acclaimed international and American directors such as Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Gregg Araki, François Ozon, Jean-Luc Godard, Catherine Breillat, Claire Denis, Fatih Akin, Aki Kaurismäki, Claude Miller, Manoel de Oliveira, Gaspar Noé, André Téchiné and Terence Davies.
Rose Troche is an American film and television director, television producer, and screenwriter.
Holger Bernhard Bruno Mischwitzky, known professionally as Rosa von Praunheim, is a German film director, author, producer, professor of directing and one of the most influential and famous queer activists in the German-speaking world. A pioneer of Queer Cinema and gay activist from the very beginning, von Praunheim was a key co-founder of the modern lesbian and gay movement in Germany and Switzerland. He was an early advocate of AIDS awareness and safer sex. His films center on queer-related themes and strong female characters, are characterized by excess and employ a campy style. They have featured such personalities as Keith Haring, Larry Kramer, Diamanda Galás, William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Judith Malina, Jeff Stryker, Jayne County, Divine, Charlotte von Mahlsdorf and a row of Warhol superstars. In over 50 years, von Praunheim has made more than 150 films. His works influenced the development of LGBTQ+ movements worldwide.
Super 81⁄2 is a 1994 satirical drama film written and directed by Bruce La Bruce. The film is about a failing pornographic film director who enters into a partnership with a lesbian filmmaker. It becomes clear that she has her own agenda and is exploiting him to help her succeed in her own project.
Triga Films is a UK film company specialising in gay porn. Early pioneers of chav, scally, "straight lad" and working class gay films, the company started in 1997 with the release of its first film entitled Skinhead, a mildly erotic documentary about the British skinhead phenomenon and its links to gay working class culture, or gay skinheads. The company also made a lesbian release entitled Dolly Birds in 1999, before specialising entirely in gay male products.
The Iris Prize, established in 2007 by Berwyn Rowlands of The Festivals Company, is an international LGBTQ film prize and festival which is open to any film which is by, for, about or of interest to gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender or intersex audiences and which must have been completed within two years of the prize deadline.
Richard Fung is a video artist, writer, public intellectual and theorist who currently lives and works in Toronto, Ontario. He was born in Port of Spain, Trinidad and is openly gay.
Cazzo Film is a German pornographic film studio based in Berlin. The company has been producing gay pornographic films since 1996.
The Queer Palm is an independently sponsored prize for selected LGBT-relevant films entered into the Cannes Film Festival. The award was founded in 2010 by journalist Franck Finance-Madureira. It is sponsored by Olivier Ducastel and Jacques Martineau, filmmakers of Jeanne and the Perfect Guy, The Adventures of Felix, Crustacés et Coquillages, and L'Arbre et la forêt.
Amber L. Hollibaugh was an American writer, filmmaker, activist and organizer concerned with working class, lesbian and feminist politics, especially around sexuality. She was a former Executive Director of Queers for Economic Justice and was Senior Activist Fellow Emerita at the Barnard Center for Research on Women. Hollibaugh proudly identified as a "lesbian sex radical, ex-hooker, incest survivor, gypsy child, poor-white-trash, high femme dyke."
The Melbourne Queer Film Festival (MQFF) is an annual LGBT film festival held in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia in November. Founded in 1991, it is the largest queer film event in the Southern Hemisphere, in 2015 attracting around 23,000 attendees at key locations around Melbourne.
It is Not the Pornographer That is Perverse... is a 2018 English and German language collection of four gay pornographic short films directed by Bruce LaBruce for CockyBoys studio. The title refers to Rosa von Praunheim's film It Is Not the Homosexual Who Is Perverse, But the Society in Which He Lives (1971).
Zombie pornography is a subgenre of pornography involving zombies, a type of undead being with uncontrollable appetites but no personal desire. Films in the subgenre emerged during a surge in the 1980s Italian sexploitation industry and saw minor release in the United States the next decade, but their use of zombie sex was primarily to shock the viewer. Film-maker Bruce LaBruce released Otto; or, Up with Dead People (2008) and L.A. Zombie (2010), two prominent gay zombie porn films seen by scholars as subverting homophobic tropes about gay life; in the films, zombification is physically similar to AIDS, a disease typically associated with gay men. While zombie porn may be appealing to some because it breaks taboos related to necrophilia, and plays with male viewers' fear of castration, zombies are also ferocious creatures that can destroy their sexual partners. As a result, the genre has remained largely unappealing.
Kamikaze Hearts is a 1986 American quasi-documentary film directed by Juliet Bashore and written by Bashore and Tigr Mennett. It stars Sharon Mitchell, Tigr Mennett, Jon Martin, Sparky Vasque, Jerry Abrahms, and Robert McKenna. The soundtrack was composed by Georges Bizet, Walt Fowler, and Paul M. Young.