[DANDY DUST]
Interview with director HANS SHEIRL

|Dandy Dust premiered this year at the London Lesbian & Gay Film@Festival and is coming to Tokyo after playing at the Turin
Lesbian & Gay Film Festival. How have audience reactions been so far?


They were brilliant. Just what I hoped would happen. For the most part, people say they want to see it again. And the ones who *have* seen it again or a few times all say it changes every time. So it is a shape-shifter of a movie! I've already received many highly interesting comments, and that's even without the Dandy Dust web-site being up yet! Q. Are you expecting any particular kind of reactions from audiences in Tokyo? H: I hardly know any Japanese people. Takao [Kawaguchi, Festival director] is my first Japanese friend. It's true! What I know of the culture is some great movies, my inspiration coming from films by Shinya Tsukamoto & Suzuki Seijun. I would be intrigued to find out whether it's true that Japanese people read *a lot* more comix than here. And of course the tecno thing, and the childlike playfulness of TV adverts, and the bright coloured lights thing and the zen... I was very happy DANDY DUST got invited to be shown in Tokyo, even though it was rejected in Berlin. It proves to me that the movie can cross cultural bounderies and that it subverts, or shall we say 'inverts', not only 'traditional' narrative, but also the ossified western Art-house. I'm very interested to find out how the translation of the dialogues into Japanese comes across. There's so much dyke and transgender and drag-king campness in the rather poetic text that I could imagine the translation having moments of utter and hopefully funny surrealness.... Q. Have your films been screened before in Japan? If they have, where were they shown, and what kind of reactions did they get from audiences here? H. Unfortunately I wasn't here for it, but five of my earlier short films were shown at Image Forum last year as part of the program 'Austrian Avant-garde Cinema 1955-1997'. Q. You'll be visiting Tokyo for the Festival. Do you have any expectations for the city and the people? Is there anything in particular you want to see, anywhere you're hoping to go while you're here? H: I would love to walk through parts of the city where there are construction sites... Spaces of transformation. ..Club Marilyn in Shinjuku-ku. Or other drag-king and tranny places. But maybe I won't go out much. I'm a bit of a private person after this monster movie production.... maybe I will meet someone to hang out with in gardens. I want to draw. A friend said she would lend me her video-camera, but I decided to take a sketch-pad insread. Or better yet, I'll get one there!! Of course I will devour films at the Festival, the catalogue looks like a feast! I'll meet filmmakers, artists.... and a character who will hop into the frame and say: 'I'll produce your next movie, I know where to get the money' !!!!! Q. In your e-mail trailer, you refer to Dandy Dust as "fetish/tecno/punk/poly-media spurt-cinema!!" Could you talk about your style, its origins, and where you want to take it from here? I'm particularly curious about your take on "spurt-cinema." H: Mm, yes, spurt-cinema, that's one of my favorites too! Catherine Opie, my photographer friend from Los Angeles, coined that word. For me it makes a lot of sense to have a cinema that expresses the disintegration and corrosion of old, zombiefied values in a very material way, showing that the body IS the site of op- & re- & com-pression. My influences are splatter movies, Viennese aktionism, Jean Cocteau, dyke sex-culture, Hong Kong and Japanese live-action horror-comix, radical cyborg-body-art... What next? What about a multi-lingual drag/gangster/poly-gendered/sci-fi porno, playing in Tokyo, Vienna and Rio de Janeiro? But I will have a long and good break, travel with the movie and play with pen & paper & skin. Q. Another style question: in contrast to works by many filmmakers, who seem to see film as a predominantly visual medium and so concentrate on sightover sound, Dandy Dust uses sound as much as visuals to create its cinematic world. Is this attention to sound intentional? How do you understand (hear?) the role of sound in film? H: Yes, it is an integral part. One of the strengths of cinema is its synaesthetic (collaboration of the senses) character. When you go to the cinema you allow yourself to become vulnerable and highly perceptive. Sado-masochists call it 'Sensory Deprivation'. It also happens when you enter a temple or a garden that is sheltered from the street noise: suddenly you hear the noise of your feet on the gravel. All good cinema works with that. (And you don't get that with TV!) Usually the effect is unconscious. In DD everything is' hyper-text'. Image-wise it's a hyper-spectacle, sound-wise a special kind of multi-genre experimental noise-jazz. Q. You've mentioned in a previous interview that DANDY DUST is about "people... who won't ever take any traditional notions of sex and gender and family and genre for granted again," and it's clear from even a quick glance at the film that it insists on fluidity and refuses any preconceived notions of how gender and sexuality play into identity. Could you talk a bit more about how you see the future of gender, sexuality and identity? H: Well, everything *is* in flux for a tranny-boy!! My personal decision to transgender myself - I have been injecting testosterone for almost 2 years - had the effect that the movie, 5 1/2 years in the making, got transgendered as well. This was made possible through multi-layered production techniques. In these times of leaping transformation, language (word- based language) has become hopelessly limited. Fluidity in terms of gender or sexuality *or* identity (!) has only been described in pathological or derogatory terms: pervert, whore, schizophrenic. Queer culture in a broad sense (definitely beyond 'lesbian & gay'!!) has shaken all that up. And a lot of people within that wide and global community are living fulfilled (I'm not saying 'easy''!!) lives after re-appropriating and collaging old forms of behaviour to suit their specific contexts. Plus there are new technologies....I am very interested in the idea of the cyborg as a bio-tecno, self-re/producable happy pervert....Not the idea of one human being becoming a cyborg, but the cyborg as an entity that is alive in a context....human/machine/plant/stone/gas/animal complexities. I hate Hollywood's humanist indulgence. Q. As someone who is actively engaged in reducing these categories to rubble, do you have any personal anecdotes to share about the actual working-out of this process? . H: Phhh...It's a daily bombardement of new experiences! I can only say that I am going through a second puberty. I feel like I'm ten or fourteen or sixteen years old. I have lived forty years of my life as a 'woman' and almost two years as a 'man' now. This would not have been possible if it wasn't for my friends who are either trannies themselves or in any other way queer. There is amazing tolerance and readiness for change and play...and art!!! I don't know where I would be without art. Dead, at least mentally and/or psychologically! Q. Along with being a filmmaker, you're also known as a performance artist. Is film a separate medium for you, or do you see your films as part of a larger project in which you're involved? H: The latter. I like to express myself in different media. I also draw, paint and write, and I used to be part of an experimental music group in Vienna. Cinema involves all of these elements. My focus is always the body, or bodies. But I include the body of the movie; for example, the grain of the celluloid, the dancing light-rays travelling through the theatre, even the body of the projector. So technology and body are intwined just as are life and art!! Q. Where will DANDY DUST appear next? H: On June 13 at the New York Lesbian & Gay Filmfestival and later on that month at the San Francisco Gay & Lesbian Festival. It will be launched for a week-long cinema run at London's Lux Cinema on August 14 and most probably go on to other repertory cinemas in London and the U.K. It will be shown at the London Transgender Film Festival and MIX New York in the autumn. The next big event is 'Identities', Vienna's broadly conceptualized Queer Film Festival at the end of November. I very much hope to go to MIX Brazil next year!!!

Interview by Sarah Teasley (Festival staff)

Dandy Dust< - 94min, 16mm, U.K./Austria 1998

Fetish/tecno/punk/poly-media spurt-cinema!!

More articles on Dandy Dust in the online magazine 'Anon...'

http://www.phreak.co.uk/anon/eager/dandy.html

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