Some things never change... Not for those who were different in high school, not for star-crossed lovers, and especially not for Mykki Blanco in this epic tale of love/loss.
Matt Lambert, director: "To me the film is nothing more than a story of love and hate. It's a love story wrapped in the cyclical nature of conflict that humans seem to thrive on. It's a story of the moral relativity and polarizing forces of humanism and a simultaneous misanthropy that seems to live in all of us."
Taking perhaps the worst curse word out there and turning it into a symbol of power — that's the underlying theme behind this clip from Hercules and Love Affair and director Matt Lambert, who blur the lines between music video and documentary much like the way the NYC gay nightlife icons featured here blur the lines between taboo and acceptance. Paris, it seems, has never stopped burning.
Andy Butler, Hercules & Love Affair: "My initial idea was to conceptualise the song through a series of filmed interviews with performance artists who explore profanity and gender in their work but I was not aiming at the fusion of music, video and documentary. When I talked to Matt for the first time he mentioned the idea of combining the two formats - music video and documentary. Fast forward 6 months to when I previewed the early edits and it kind of blew my mind"
Matt Lambert, director: "I spoke to some of the people who appear in the video for over an hour. Each of them had a different answer and different relationship to the word 'cunt' as well as the appropriation and reclamation of profane language as a means of pushing culture forward. Language, especially when dealing with issues surrounding identity, defines people's realities whether they choose to embrace or ignore language.”
Desire comes from all shapes, sizes and ages. And despite what you probably learned from music videos, real sex isn't just for the young and lovely. And even the most nameless fuck might be rife with self-loathing, power and vulnerability.
This trilogy of films for German rock legend, Westernhagen, is an evolution of Lambert's past three years of making films surrounding the youth of Berlin. This Oedipal tale, set in West Berlin, follows 'Alphatier' (Alpha Dog) from his rise to power as he dethrones the father that created this beast.
Patrick Wolf is an underground Jesus who seems to be preaching a gospel of sexual freedom. But that reading gets a bit complicated when the darkly intriguing video reaches its bloody coda.
Where part one of this ongoing trilogy was all snowy coldness, part two burns with eroticism. (And if you're one to look out/for this kind of thing, there's also nudity. So, consider it NSFW). [SG]
