A. Hans Sheirl - Dandy Dust (1998)

Cyber trash queer lo-fi body art nadrealizam. Vau! Izvrsnostično i megastralno.

 A cyborg with a split personality and fluid gender zooms through time to collect his/her ”selves” in a struggle against a family obsessed by lineage: This cartoon-like futuristic low-budget horror satire by the Austro-British filmmaker Hans Scheirl turns the real into the absurd, for the duration of a small cybernetic, chemo-sexual film adventure at least. Identity is just a matter of creativity, and far beyond cinema’s limitations. - Stefan Grissemann

"Produced, directed, written, edited by Hans Scheirl. Five and a half years in the making, Hans Scheirl’s “Dandy Dust” is an elaborate, gender-bending camp sci-fi epic with no aspirations toward narrative clarity. Redolent of everything from “Metropolis” to “Pink Narcissus,” with plenty of outre sex and violence, this objet d’art is often funny and always visually inventive. […] Dandy Dust is a “split-personality cyborg of fluid gender” living on artificially created sphere called 3075. His/her memory has been erased, so Dandy is alarmed by flashbacks to his early life on the Planet of Blood & Swelling. There, s/he was evidently sexually abused by an over-doting dad; that intimacy upset a harpy mom, who may have killed Dandy’s pa in retaliation. Or did Dandy do the deed himself? Did it even happen?" (Vanity review)

"One of the ways I like to gauge the success of a motion picture is by the level of comfort I feel when it comes time to unfurl my genitals. Normally covered with a thick, impenetrable layer of corduroy, the second the sturdy contents of my far-reaching crotch-o-sphere hit the warm musky air of my filthy shack, a surge of misguided trepidation washes over me. The fear that some unseen entity is going to all of a sudden leap out from the darkness and devour everything within spitting distance of my groin is always in the back of my mind. If that fear is nonexistent, that means the film wasn't very engaging. If, however, I appear to hesitate when the time comes to expose my fleshy apparatus for urinary, or, if I'm lucky, recreational purposes, it's safe to say that the film was a monumental success. Now, I know what you're thinking? How did my junk feel after viewing Dandy Dust? Well, let's just say I've been wearing a man-size diaper for the past three weeks. Of course, I haven't been wearing the same man-size diaper for that entire period of time–I mean, I do change it every five to six days. But that's not the point, the point is, uh–what the hell was I babbling about?–Oh, yeah, the amount of concern I felt for my venereal well-being was off the bleeding charts.

Having properly explained the status of my spiritual pudding after the movie, I'd like to move on and discuss the operational fortitude of the film itself. What is Dandy Dust? And what makes it such a large thorn in my blister-covered sausage? Rapidly spewing from the mind of Hans Schreil, an Austrian artist living in London, the highly experimental film is an uncompromising mishmash of diseased colour and vivid moistness. In other words, I had no idea what was going on.

Actually, that's not entirely true. I knew exactly what was going on. I'm just trying to buy some time in order that I may cobble together a semi-coherent collection of thoughts. Okay, put away your burning chainsaws and try not to bite your tongue off, because here I go. Bored with the quality of his existence on the planet of Blood & Swelling (day-glo decapitations and the mechanism of eternal destruction have become so passe), a gender ambiguous cyborg named Dandy Dust (Hans Schreil) flies through the galaxy and lands on a new planet called 3075. Hanging out with the cyberdykes in its bladderverse (a giant neon bladder at the centre of a parthenogenetic conception where everyone drinks vital fluids through translucent tubes connected to their fluorescent genitals), Dandy is puzzled, transfixed, and astounded by this newfound universe.

Unfortunately, or fortunately, Mao (Leonora Rogers-Wright) and Lisa (Carole Fuller), unamused by this vacationing ninny, remove the memory disc in Dandy's brain. Dressed like members of Altern-8, the twins are afraid that his memories of 3075 will taint the atmosphere and make the air unbreathable. In the meantime, Dandy goes about his day. Which includes getting covered with chromatic ooze, attending an art show, being harassed by coffin-shaped bats, and battling his dust-covered nemesis, who may or may not be a Dandy duplicate from another dimension.

Apprehension over the safety of my one-eyed goose named Lucy is merely one in a moronic armada of deciding factors when comes to judging cinema. As most people know, women who wield syringes full of iridescent sludge are just as important when it comes to wooing the lingerie-adorned cockles of my award-winning heart, and Dandy Dust has a doozy in the form of Suzie Krüger, the newly crowned queen of crazed female syringe wielders.

H.E. double upside down bendy straws, I think her left arm might have been a giant syringe. I know for a fact that it secreted slime. But then again, everything in this movie secreted something at one point or another.

Playing Supermother Cyniborg XVII ("the great Duchess of Loft and Spire"), Dandy's body part collecting mother figure, Suzie Krüger, wearing nineteen-inch heels, a purple bishop's mitre, and sounding like one of the female back up singers in the imaginary Skinny Puppy cover band, Life Born Addict Breathe Angel, is a frightening force of unwell nature. Similar in the way Gisele Lindley made us complacent by the sight of her tactile nipples in the Forbidden Zone, Suzie does the exact same thing with the coarsely sheared peeks and valleys of her boxed edifice. It got to the point where Cyniborg's microscopic clit and I were exchanging coquettish glances with one another.

A character with a flame for a head assists Dandy and shows him a gateway to his memories. Viewing them on a small television screen, we watch as Dandy is shown his troubled childhood. It is at this moment when we are introduced to my favourite character in the entire Dandy Dust macrocosm, and that is, Spidercuntboy (Svar Simpson), a hairy, parasitic demon with an exposed thoracic cavity who buzzes around inside Dandy's subconscious, and other places (they call Dandy's boycunt home sometimes, too). I liked Spidercuntboy because I understood what he or she was saying most of the time. In addition, their dialogue was mildly clever and I thought Svar delivered it in a manner that made the lover all things camp in me grin with reserved exhilaration.

Helping Dandy see into the future, Spidercuntboy shows him the sexually liberated version of himself in the cybernetic bladder of 3075. This effects the past when the usually reserved Dandy attends a "soiree" hosted by his nobleman father, Sir Sidore (Tres "Trash" Temperilli). Taking what he assimilated from 3075, Dandy stuffs his trousers with cold and hot food and starts to dry hump everything in sight.

This liberated streak in Dandy, however, does have its downside. After catching him having sex with his horses, Daddy rapes Dandy with his drill-penis.

Bloodied and battered, Dandy, after spending a fair bit of time with the twins on a giant screw that drips plasma, finds himself aboard his mother figure's crypt/mothership. A sort of cosmetic surgery ward in space, the film starts to get strange at around this point. The jarring physical appearance of Supermother Cyniborg XVII, and her flap deficient vagina, is still haunting as ever, yet it's the introduction of her repulsive staff (which includes the adorable Amanda J. Roberts) and their unorthodox dinning habits that made my external dangling a quivering mess.

Playing ping pong with eyeballs is one thing, smearing doll's blood over one's face to prevent aging, adult acne, and predawn diarrhea is, actually, just another in a long line of things. Listing lines, by the way, whether they be short lines or long lines, has never been my thing. Nevertheless, I was able to visually stab the doll's blood scene quite easily. I slid through it like I was violating a vat of melted imitation butter. It was everything else that was so hard to penetrate. I mean, the film doesn't exactly lay things out in an easy to digest manner. That being said, the spectrum placed in front of me was a rich tapestry of bright colours and splattering liquids.

Speaking of liquid, the film's overall temperament had a distinctly new wave vibe about it. The use of neon and the outlandish non-fashions seen throughout the film were very in tune with the style of that particular era. Also, the use of techno music, and not that lame happy hardcore crap, and operatic noise was very much akin to the outre spirit of Eraserhead, Klaus Nomi, Dr. Caligari (female foreheads are poked with needles) and Liquid Sky (I knew I said "speaking of liquid" for a reason).

While watching Dandy Dust I couldn't help but think of this one time I was playing the music of Test Dept. for a group of friends back when I was a wide-eyed teen. The shocked looks on their faces as they listened to the disjointed racket emanating from the low-cost sound system filled my adolescent soul with a rare form of underage smugness. Well, even though I watched this film in an isolation chamber, I have to admit, the sensation I felt was eerily similar to the day I introduced a bunch of T'Pau fans to the ear shredding beauty that is industrial music. Sure, it was quite some time before I could expel urine with the comfort that I am accustomed to, but that's the price you have to pay sometimes for the opportunity to be a self-satisfied prick in a man-size diaper." - House of self-indulgence


“Remember the extra selves: waste products of unification.” - Dandy Dust, 1998


A far as I know, this film has had no official release and only made limited rounds on the queer film fest circuit. There is a lot going on here. For one, the zombie cyborg mutant mother looks a lot like Kathy Acker (or at least they were getting the same fashion advice). The structural complexity of this film makes it difficult to follow the first time through, but this intricate narrative structuring is not executed in vain. The whole film revolves around the concepts of excess and multiplicity, which is mirrored in the splintering of subjectivities and realities. Dandy Dust is two characters living between multiple worlds and genders. But there are also other characters that emerge as literal embodiments/disembodiments of disparate parts of Dandy Dust. In one part, a mummy who represents the non-embodied part of Dandy Dust lusts after Dandy’s body, which is said to be perverse, vile, dirty (the things of the flesh) and serves as a potential metaphor for confrontations between the mind and body. (See the video uploaded by my partner at the bottom of this post.) The disembodied aspect of his character also manifests as another character—a bodiless figure that has a flame for a head.

In another scene, Dandy Dust pulls his pants down to find a pulsating fuzzy creature between his legs. It rips off his body, and fuzzy black ball unfurls. It appears to be a spider, but a spider whose body is a big vagina. Such is the beginning of the character Spidercuntboy. Dandy Dust cries, “you horrible, horrible little thing!” at the creature that was just attached to his body, and Spidercuntboy replies, “I can change into a long, big pleasant thing if you want.”

This trash, sci-fi art film is actually deeply rooted in “queer underground, feminist art, dyke culture and contemporary radical body art.” Lo-fi special effects, crude futuristic sets, and lowbrow animation created by an artist team of self-described “sex mutants” are laced throughout the film. And what’s interesting is—beneath all the cinematic experimentation—we get a perspective that falls more on the trans male side of the spectrum (transmen are often rendered invisible in the media). Hans Scheirl—a gender bending trans person—plays the film’s protagonist. Hans was the co-director of the lesbian sci-fi film Flaming Ears. The colorful, hyper-stimulating, high-speed feel of Dandy Dust is reminiscent of the videos of artist Ryan Trecartin, but with much more substance and a decidedly queer sensibility." - Ballerinas Dance with Machine Guns
    

   

cyberdykes in the bladder of 3075

Amanda J Roberts as Hiller

Hans Scheirl as Dust

Suzie Krueger, Tre Temperilli, Leonora Rogers-Wright

landscape on the planet of 3075

Svar Simpson as Spidercuntboy

   

cast:

Hans Scheirl, Suzie Krueger, Tre Temperilli

aka Trash, Leonora Rogers-Wright, Svar Simpson,

Angela de Castro, Del laGrace Volcano, Sarah Schulman,

Sue Golding aka Johnny de Philo, Tina Keane and many others

 

cinematography + digital animation: Jana Cipriani

production + costume design: Amory Peart

miniature + F/X cinematography: Nigel Reed

video camera + lighting: Stephen Smart

additional hi-8 camera: Tina Keane

1st assistent director: Amanda J. Roberts

production manager: Lulu Belliveau

sound design: Jewels/Jason Barker

music: Yossarian, Emma EJ Doubell, Bent

 

written, produced, edited + directed by Hans Scheirl

 

funded by the Federal Ministry of Art and Education of Austria, the Arts Council of England,

the Cultural Department of the Federal Government of Salzburg, the City of Vienna and Sigrun Scheirl.

 

   

Leonora Rogers-Wright and Carole Fuller as the twins Mao and Lisa

Hans Scheirl as X-Sir Sidore

 
 Još:

(Angela) Hans Sheirl  The Abbotess and the Flying Bone

 
 
 
 

 
 
 

         

 
   

 
When the fisherwoman wades through the river and briefly stops to lift up her apron to urinate, and then again, to lift onto her shoulders the body of someone who has drowned, caught between the stones, then everything becomes clear: this woman is capable to do anything... - Elke Schüttelkopf

 

(Angela) Hans Sheirl  Flaming Ears


This edgy, sci-fi lesbian fantasy follows the lives of three women: a comic book artist, a performance artist/pyromaniac and an amoral alien who likes lizards. In this cyberdyke movie, love and revenge vie for supremacy amidst violence and ennui in an anti-romantic plea for love of all kinds. German with English subtitles.

Shot in Super-8 and exploded to 16mm, "Flaming Ears" is a German "Blade Runner" - about a sexed-up pyromaniac, her red-plastic-clad mate, and a revengeful comix artist - characterized by a fierce, punky throb and gelatinous F/X. As sapphic thrillers go, it's twenty times more fun than "Basic Instinct".

“In 2700 – it was the year of the toads – the city of Asche was burnt-out, a wild beast, too vast for its citizens who were gathering in gloomy cellars. Just like the city, they were ready to pee into the face of Death at any time – chance was little for a pure heart to survive…”

“Flaming Ears” is a pop sci-fi lesbian, fantasy feature set in the year 2700 in the fictive, burnt-out city of Asche. It follows the tangled lives of three women: Spy, a comic book artist; Volly, a performance artist and sexed-up pyromaniac; and Nun, an amoral alien with a predilection for reptiles. It’s a story of love and revenge, and an anti-romantic plea for love in its many forms. It’s also a story laced with sex, violence and a pulsating soundtrack, a cyberdyke movie, stimulating both the body and the brain.

Rote Ohren fetzen durch Asche (Flaming Ears)

A. Hans Scheirl, Ursula Pûrrer & Dietmar Schipek

1991, Austria, 16mm, color, sound,
German w/English subtitles, 84 min.

TV Guide.com calls it a "dismal miasma of butch posturing," and "a festival of ugliness."
MIX NYC calls it "fabulous" and "a beloved classic!" Let's celebrate the 20th anniversary of this groundbreaking masterpiece of dyke filmmaking!
Collaborators shared acting, writing, filming and every other aspect of the production of this highly stylized, science fiction dystopian lesbian romance. Flaming Ears was shot in super-8 and blown up to 16mm. This process gives the film a grainy quality on top of its brightly colored costumes and sets, setting up the viewer to contemplate the landscape of a shabby but vivid low-budget future. The film is set in the year 2700, but we may learn more about the year 1991 by observing the contents of this time capsule of the queer imagination.
Keep an eye out for Spy drawing comics, Volley setting fires and Nun eating reptiles. Keep an eye out for stop-motion animation, clunky special effects and that infamous furniture sex scene. There is so much to look at, but don't get too caught up looking for the plot line! With minimal dialog, spoken sometimes in metaphors, the images create their own iconography of a sexy but bleak future bursting with fetish attire and violence. Relying on tactile images more than words, we see fire, water, smoking, tea drinking, roller-skating and dancing. The film requires our careful attention and yet is simultaneously forgiving of our wandering minds as it conveys more a sensibility than a narrative. In the abandoned and desolate city of Asche, the world is inhabited almost entirely by lesbians. Hands get blown off, bombs get blown up and guns get fired. Nearly every detail of this film is cryptic, with symbolism and stylization going so far in the end as to transform one of the characters into a cardboard cutout. Let's wear our dark cyberpunk best for this late night screening - And bring on the strange!
"I am a woman. I make films. I know how to work with a ridiculous budget: you can call me a master of improvisation. I'm lesbian and I have a preference for experiments, I am a strategist, a utopist. I am Volley. As simple as that. And Volley loves precision, ease, aggression, devotion and wit. I live in a special world, and I walk through the so-called world heavily armed." Ursula Pûrrer, director and actor
"They are female lone warriors, and they try to live their lives as intensely as possible and thus collide with each other somehow. lt's a matter of life and death. And love." A. Hans Scheirl, director and actor
 

 



Having spent much of the eighties making provocative and wonderfully titled Super-8 shorts, Ursula Pürrer and Angela Hans Schierl turned their attentions at the end of the decade to producing a feature. Finally completed in 1991, Flaming Ears is in many ways an extension of these earlier works. The home-made pop (video) aesthetic, the playfulness, the transgressive nature, the punk-lesbian-transgender elements are all in place. Indeed, anyone who delighted to Index’s previous Pürrer and Schierl release, a compilation of their shorts entitled Super-8 Girl Games will know exactly what to expect. And yet: how do you transpose the witty, distinctive likes of Zigzagging Rivulet Sneaks Up On Shamelessly Wetting Thighs - near-perfect at only four minutes in length – to an hour-plus duration? What becomes of concept, content and plot?
Despite enlisting another co-director in Dietmar Schipek, a move which may suggest a concerted effort in offering some expansion to their previous efforts, Pürrer and Schierl make surprisingly few concessions to narrative cinema. Flaming Ears can be classed as science fiction – set in 2700 and demonstrating certain post-apocalyptic tropes of the genre – yet it’s still very close to the earlier “home movies”. The fact that these pieces were so distinctive and singular no doubt helps the creation of the own world, as it were. But it also prompts certain problems. As with the works of another distinctive filmmaker seemingly living in a world of his own creation – Andy Warhol – the home movie feel can’t help but incorporate a little boredom. Yet this boredom, in Warhol’s case, was intrinsic to the end results; his films didn’t deal in genre, they were closer to documentary and occasionally melodrama, however stunted. When combined with science fiction, however, there’s an almost self-destructive clash as a result, the two perilously close to cancelling each other out.
This isn’t to say that Flaming Ears is a failure, merely that it doesn’t work as a piece of storytelling. There’s no thrust to keep us intrigued at this level, and the characters are similarly flimsy, with Pürrer, Schierl, et al essentially playing themselves if their other works and indeed interviews are anything to go by. It’s in its strange vision where Flaming Ears comes to life. The blown-up Super-8 stock creates some wonderful textures, making the colours pop and lending the mostly night-shot scenes a fiendish ambience. (One that’s further enhanced by occasional glimpses of “real life”: the headlights of cars driving past in the distance and the like.) Moreover, the intentionally and unavoidably cheap SFX – model work, cardboard cut-outs, pixilation, even a quilt thrown over a car as a futuristic short-hand – have a kitsch charm, both quaint and lovely. Comparisons to the likes of Café Flesh, Forbidden World and Liquid Sky are fitting, even if the end results are all very different (Liquid Sky coming closest). And, of course, this explains how Flaming Ears found its niche at midnight screenings following the initial premiere at New York’s Gay and Lesbian Film Festival. It has cult written all over it, a near-definitive case of ‘love-it-or-loathe-it’ cinema, though as with so many such films I find myself falling between the two stools. As an introduction to Pürrer and Schierl, Super-8 Girl Games is undoubtedly the place to start, but Flaming Ears will certainly have an audience someplace, however selective.- The Digital Fix

There are many remarkable filmmakers in the history of avant-garde cinema. But few are those who have completely changed our perception about the cinema material and its aesthetic and political potential as a means of fighting the clarity and purity of the production, reproduction and circulation of images with unconventional passion. Among them Jack Smith, who during the 1960s introduced a new language transgressing the lenses of the ideological machine and its signified reality using self-exoticizing, orientalizing and other camp devices; and Hans Scheirl who since the 1980s went even further in destabilizing and distorting the economy of image construction to trash the coding and ordering apparatus of what is termed normal behavior, the oppressive norms and control of a schizophrenic consumerist capitalism, and gives the images a new material mode of existence. His cyborg protagonists go beyond good and evil with their polymorphly perverse appropriation of the technologies of image production, cutting up the totality of hegemonic representation and bending the polarized world system, normative patterns of behavior and the representative theater of oedipal power. They ruin the image of accepted subjective formations in order to open up a utopian horizon to a possible existence in relentless invention, driven by boundless flaming desiring machines beyond the confining formulas framing and producing our reality. (ds)

Hans Scheirl

Born "Angela Scheirl" 1956 in Salzburg, Austria. While studying at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna (1975-80) Scheirl began to make super-8 films. 1981-82 s/he worked for Arleen Schloss' regular performance event "Wednesdays at A's" in N.Y.C. and started to do performances. Until 1998 Scheirl made more than 50 films in different formats, all of which challenge norms of sexuality and gender identity in a performative way. Best known are the two feature-films "Rote Ohren fetzen durch Asche" ("Flaming Ears") (1991) (co-directors: U. Pürrer + D. Schipek) and "Dandy Dust" (1998). 1996 Scheirl took on a transgender identity. He lived in London for 16 years where he completed an M.A. course in Fine Arts at Saint Martins College of Art + Design in 2003. Since 2006 he is professor for "Contextual Painting" at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna.

Black Heart Leaking – Instruction for Amateur Constructor Female

Das Schwarze Herz Tropft – Bastelanleitung zu Rinnen
AT / 1985
11 min.

Objects fill the lead roles: swaying plants with succulent leaves; and vases, tall and lean like the torsos of young women. Metal and plastic foil, leather straps and piles of flour, enigmatic symbols and garishimages, all accompanied by shrill music and a tumult of voices, mechanical clattering, angry snorting and the cracking of a whip. (Elke Schüttelkopf)

1/2 Frogs Fuck Fast

1/2 Frösche Ficken Flink
AT / UK / 1992 - 1996
18 min.

Summer 1992, NYC: First feature-film Flaming Earsis opening the 'New Festival' at the 8th Street Playhouse. Dietmar and Hans are staying with 'Shi-zu' in the Lower East Side. Elke comes to visit. Hans and Elke fuck on the roof, 'Shi-zu' examines holes, Dietmar jumps in the wig, Zande is boxing in a gym in Brooklyn: 'Shi-zu' watches, Hans is filming.
Winter 1993, London. Si.Si. visits Hans. Si.Si., Suzie and Hans are filming obscene games (handstand, frankfurter, uniform). Sadly, the filmed footage is lost. (H.S.) 

Summer of 95

Summer of 95
AT / UK / 1995
10 min.

An eventful summer: London in dragking fever! The "dustydaddy dandydyke d@d@s" are meeting at the Dandy Dust Factory. Hans and Svar are driving to Scotland. Then Hans travels to California and is fotographed by Cathy. They create a new persona: "the dirty old man" with a new grey moustache from the movie shop. On his return Hans finds Jason with chickenpox. This doen't stop Jason and Svar from performing the "T"-ceremonies.
The second part (Nirvana) shows the events from Jason's point-of-view. (H.S.)

Zig-Zag Streamlet Sneaking in Shamelessly Twighwetting

Gezacktes Rinnsal schleicht sich schamlos schenkelnässend an
AT / 1985
4 min.

Zigzag streamlet sneaking in shame-
lessly twighwetting. Three Faries in
green light are moving towards – the
steam in the night – coal and pissing
knees are glowing – icy fingers
are melting now – though that
everywhere in big puddles – mirror-
pictures are trembling – mirror-
pictures are trembling. (Pürrer/Scheirl)

Super-8 Girl Games

Super-8 Girl Games
AT / 1985
2 min.

1. the arrow
2. the gloriole
3. the armpitchfountain
4. the glance
5. the medium wave
6. the present
A scratch-film. (Pürrer/Scheirl)

A Rubber Dinghy and Oysters

Ein Schlauchboot und Austern
AT / 1985
3 min.

Lunatics in the subway – Take a
break at the diner – Goggles seen
from near – Astrid is very seductive
and reprimands the child – Favorite
family-shots sneaking in – Make
a move upside down – Toilette and
confusion in orange light – Marching
on the meadow and – the simultaneous
fall in the counter-post –
Astrid cannot hold back the laughter –
Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah (Scheirl)