Profiling Pioneers in Sexuality, Sexploitation

Germany’s pioneering gay filmmaker, Rosa von Praunheim, is primarily a documentarian, but his “The Einstein of Sex: The Life and Work of M. Hirschfeld” (tonight at 7 at the Goethe-Institut, 5750 Wilshire Blvd., Suite 101) is an engrossing biographical drama about the young turn-of-the century physician, a homosexual Jew who challenged the widespread belief that homosexuality is a mental illness and held that sexual orientation was an inborn trait and not a matter of choice.

Hirschfeld looked toward the 20th century with great hope and not without reason. Despite predictable negative responses, the indefatigable Hirschfeld was successful enough in his cause that by 1919, he was able to establish his world-renowned Institute for Sexuality in Berlin. There Hirschfeld, a specialist in nervous disorders, was, in addition to working with homosexuals, a marriage counselor who advocated condoms for both birth control and to combat venereal disease.

In the enlightened Weimar Republic, Hirschfeld was even able to win an official recommendation for the abolition of Paragraph 175, Germany’s anti-homosexual law. Hirschfeld was fortunately abroad when Hitler came to power, making the burning of his institute and its records inevitable.

Praunheim presents Hirschfeld as dedicated and brave but often naive and self-absorbed to the point of obtuseness. In his earlier years, he inspired the love and devotion of a young Austrian aristocrat, but he rejected the man because he reasonably felt that a sexual relationship, which invited trial and imprisonment, would jeopardize his work.

Later he either did not comprehend--or didn’t want to comprehend--that his devoted young lover and his selfless transvestite housekeeper were in increasing danger in Berlin while he toured the world with a new lover in the early ‘30s. In any event, both camp humor and camp pathos serve Praunheim well in telling Hirschfeld’s story. (323) 525-3388.

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The American Cinematheque presents “A Night at the Egyptian With Tsai Ming-Liang” Wednesday at 7 p.m. Composed of the major Taiwanese filmmaker’s “Vive l’Amour” (1994) and “The Hole” (2000), it will be followed by a discussion with Tsai, who has one of the most imaginative and uncompromising visions of life of any filmmaker today.

His principal theme is the isolation of the individual in impersonal, modern, urban society, which he began exploring in his 1992 debut feature, “Rebels of the Neon God.” Along with “Vive l’Amour” and his 1997 masterpiece “The River,” it forms a portrait of Taipei as a city that has lost its soul amid wrenching change. The two films screen in the Lloyd E. Rigler Theater.

The three people of “Vive l’Amour,” in which bleakness is spiked with occasional dark humor, are perhaps a little older and more financially secure than the youthful quartet of “Rebels,” in whom an overwhelming sense of futility gives way to increasing recklessness.

In “Vive l’Amour,” a spacious high-rise apartment, empty except for a bed, becomes at different times a refuge for a shy young gay man indulging in sexual fantasy and for the real estate broker trying to sell the unit, a place for sex she prides herself on keeping casual. One of her pickups is a confident, easygoing guy with an unsettling lack of the emotional needs that wrack the others.

In “The Hole,” the rain never seems to stop, a mysterious viral epidemic looms and, in a drab, huge housing project, a young woman battles a bad case of water seepage. A plumber leaves a hole in her ceiling, allowing the grocer who lives above her to peer down into her apartment. With dark absurdist humor, Tsai spins an increasingly erotic tale.

Beginning Friday, the Cinematheque will present in the Egyptian’s smaller Spielberg Theater a one-week run of Ted Bonnitt’s delightful documentary “Mau Mau Sex Sex” on sexploitation pioneers octogenarian Dan Sonney and septuagenarian David Friedman. For 28 years they had their own mini-studio on Cordova Street, off the old Film Row on Vermont Avenue near Washington Boulevard, once the home of film exchanges and theater equipment suppliers.

Sonney was the son of an Italian immigrant coal miner-turned-lawman-turned-showman who nabbed a famous criminal. Once the criminal served his time, he went on tour with the elder Sonney, who made a film in which the ex-con played himself.

Friedman, who worked in public relations and distribution at Paramount when he decided to team up with Sonney, credits his partner’s father with inventing the exploitation film, made on the cheap and dealing luridly with prostitution, venereal disease, drugs and child brides.

Sonney and Friedman became major producers of sexploitation fare in the ‘60s and ‘70s that was rendered obsolete by hard-core films and the video revolution (which has in turn resurrected the partners’ titles on cassettes). Sonney and Friedman are hearty, good-humored men without apologies. Bonnitt’s film, which takes its title from a serious documentary Sonney sexed up with crude additional footage, is affectionate and now boasts some titles for greater clarity.

Also screening at the Cinematheque this week: “Best of the Clermont-Ferrand Short Film Festival,” tonight and Friday at 7:30 p.m. 6712 Hollywood Blvd. (323) 466-FILM.

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The Nuart has followed its recent revival of “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” with Terry Gilliam’s “Jabberwocky” (1977), not a Monty Python film, though it reunites Gilliam and fellow Python Michael Palin.

Claiming that the Dark Ages were “darker than anyone expected,” Gilliam and his co-writer, Charles Alverson, thrust us back to those brutal, absurd times when life was primitive and crude.

When the monster Jabberwock is menacing the land, a dim but ambitious village cooper’s son named Dennis (Palin) decides to seek his fortune in the city, a walled fortress as hard to get into as Studio 54 in its heyday. Dennis manages to gain entry just as King Bruno the Questionable (Max Wall) announces a tournament in a quest for a knight strong enough to take on Jabberwock.

Gilliam offers a darkly funny take on human folly, lust and avarice as he evokes with a sense of melancholy the dawning of the modern age, in which the businessman begins supplanting the craftsman and “an appreciation of the world’s beauty,” to borrow a phrase from Dennis’ dying father, starts to fade. “Jabberwocky” opens a one-week run Friday. (310) 478-6379.

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Harold Lloyd’s “Grandma’s Boy” (1922) screens Friday, Saturday and Sunday at the Silent Movie. (323) 655-2520.