Nowhere Film Club #5 - Querelle

Each Man Kills The Thing He Loves: Querelle

Querelle (1982, West Germany/France, 108 mins)

Directed by: Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Written by: Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Burkhard Driest
Based on: Querelle of Brest (1947) by Jean Genet
Produced by: Michael McLernon, Dieter Schidor, Sam Waynberg
Cinematography: Xaver Schwarzenberger
Edited by: Juliane Lorenz
Cast: Brad Davis, Franco Nero, Jeanne Moreau, Laurent Malet, Hanno Pöschl

A bristling work of transgressive homoeroticism, Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s final film Querelle (1982) stands tall as one of his boldest, most formidable cinematic expressions. Taking cues from Douglas Sirk, Tom of Finland and Kenneth Anger, Fassbinder’s loose adaptation of Jean Genet’s 1947 novel Querelle of Brest creates a highly artificial filmic landscape where homoerotic desire is played out in intense, vivid fashion. Fassbinder’s film is about immense desire and repression, using Genet’s text as a springboard to advance his own cinematic project exploring the boundaries of erotic desire. 

Fassbinder’s position as a maverick arthouse filmmaker was staked on his ability to reappropriate Hollywood genres, twisting their conventions towards radical and queer ends. Armond White writes that “it was Fassbinder, of course, who set the standard for reinterpreting the tropes of Hollywood cinema for a modern, openly gay sensibility”^[1], paving the way for later queer filmmakers like Pedro Almodóvar and Todd Haynes. Fassbinder’s influence is difficult to overstate in this regard, he played an instrumental role in shifting art cinema perceptions of Sirkian Melodrama from pure disdain to reverent admiration through his desire to create “a hybridised ideological and artistic model of filmmaking that sampled the best of Eastern Europe and the West”^[2]. Thus blending of Hollywood influences with European Art cinema practices was thoroughly radical at the time, particularly among his peers in the New German Cinema who often sought to differentiate themselves from Hollywood filmmaking entirely. 

In 1971, Fassbinder wrote a treatise on Douglas Sirk in which he writes that “not one of us, Godard or Fuller or me or anybody else, can touch Douglas Sirk”^[3]. Sirk had not been seriously considered as an auteur up to this point; his films were considered too weepy or feminine to be given serious critical consideration. Fassbinder embraces Sirk with a combination of sincerity and irony, a double-vision which allows the audience to “be both in on the joke and moved by the plight of the characters”^[4]. Fassbinder’s genuine love for Sirk’s films – he describes them as among “the most beautiful in the world”^[5] – allowed him to mine them for inspiration while also playing with their generic conventions. Frank Episale argues that in Querelle, Fassbinder approaches Genet with a similar double vision where he “simultaneously embrac[es] the lush angst of the source material and recontextualiz[es] it within a post-Brechtian, post-modern sensibility”^[6]. The end result of this is a disorientation for the viewer as the film becomes “radically decontextualized in terms of time, geography, and genre itself”^[7].

Fassbinder’s treatment of Melodrama is heavily informed by his background in avant-garde theatre, returning the genre “to its theatrical origins based on the expressive possibilities of cinema and an open politicization of its usual narrative strategies and fictional materials”^[8]. The expressionistic, highly artificial aesthetic of Querelle is heavily informed by the dramatic lighting and set design of Hollywood Melodrama, as well as Fassbinder’s theatrical background. Through his dreamlike lighting and theatrical set design, Fassbinder creates an aesthetic environment which recalls the heightened emotional landscapes of films like All That Heaven Allows (1955) or Written on the Wind (1956), a dramatised world in which the emotional stakes are raised to their highest point. 

This artificial aesthetic extends to the bodies of the performers in the film, in particular Brad Davis as the titular Querelle. The highly eroticised depictions of male bodies are “strongly influenced by the conventions and dress codes established by gay subculture and pornography”^[9]. Fassbinder’s impossibly buff sailors were directly inspired by the work of gay erotic artist Tom of Finland, whose misproportioned drawings present a false, idealised version of the perfectly homoeroticised male body. Querelle renders Brad Davis as the idealised object of gay desire, the unreal, artificial figure of masculinity presented in gay pornography.

Patrick Shuckman argues that “Querelle can be read as a paradigm for the construction of masculinity and homoeroticism in a wider mainstream context”^[10], but it also functions as a meta-commentary on the relationships between spectator and image in film. Querelle reconfigures the assumed male gaze into a relation of homoerotic desire: “on the one hand, he [the male spectator] desires to possess the image (to objectify Querelle as a sexual object) and, on the other hand, he desires to be or to become the image (identification)”^[11]. 

Chia Soon Hann and Justin Ian put forward that “in Fassbinder’s films, the cinematic disembodiment of the body always occurs whenever subjects with fragmented selfhoods engage in sexual intercourse that is informed by underlying power relations”^[12]. Every homosexual act in Querelle is preceded by a disavowal of homosexuality; every character insists that they are not gay, regardless of how much they have sex with other men. Querelle’s fragmentation of self is evident in his disavowal of homosexuality despite expressing genuine desire for sex with other men and, particularly, receptive anal sex. His encounter with Nono is structured by an elaborate ritual which justifies the act of sodomy which follows, an act which sees Querelle visually disembodied by Fassbinder’s camera. Here “his body arouses desire by virtue of the absence of his own desire, which invests him with an intense erotic power”^[13]; he becomes the perfect, fragmented object of homoerotic desire. 

While Fassbinder could not have known Querelle would be his final film, it does serve as an unintentional coda to his career. It presents itself as a film object wherein the logic of desire, theatricality and eroticism which Fassbinder had been developing throughout his career is taken to its logical conclusion. Its influence on subsequent modes of queer filmmaking – particularly across New Queer Cinema – marks it as one of Fassbinder’s most enduring works. It is a film which has and will continue to reverberate throughout queer cinematic expression; whose power extends far beyond the confines of the film itself.