Pierrot Lunaire (2014)

Invited by the conductor Premil Petrovic to stage Arnold Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, a musical theater work from 1912 based on the poems of Albert Giraud, LaBruce transposed a strange and tragic episode of true crime onto the composition. Complementing the original atonal score is a narrative about a trans man who is outed by his girlfriend’s father and forbidden from seeing the young woman again. Crestfallen, the protagonist decides to prove the fact of his manhood by castrating a taxi driver and then revealing his newly transplanted member to the two of them. This story, which for LaBruce “serves as a kind of allegory for all gender radicals and outcasts driven to extremes by the disapproval and hostility of the dominant order,” is rendered in a visual style that nods to the era of Schoenberg’s melodrama. LaBruce cheekily appropriates the formal vocabulary of silent cinema with black-and-white photography, irises, and intertitles like “A cock, a cock, my kingdom for a cock!”

Released Feb. 9, 2014 51 min None+

Genres: Drama, Music

Keywords: imdb.experimental-film, imdb.transgender-man, imdb.intertitle, imdb.go-go-boy, imdb.pole-dance, imdb.breasts, imdb.dildo + 21 more, imdb.strap-on-dildo, imdb.ejaculation, imdb.melodrama, imdb.theater-production, imdb.transgender, imdb.theater, imdb.gender, imdb.stripper, imdb.male-stripper, imdb.lesbian-interest, imdb.ftm, imdb.gay-interest, mdblist.ext.2k-blu-ray, imdb.melodrama-drama, mdblist.has-trailer, imdb.male-explicit-nudity, imdb.male-frontal-nudity, imdb.male-nudity, aspectratio.1-78-1, tmdb.transsexual, tmdb.lgbt