Canadian queer filmmaker Bruce LaBruce mixes porn, art-house cinema

“I’ve always been more into being an outsider than an insider,” said Bruce LaBruce, “and using being gay or queer as an opportunity to express difference, be more experimental and avant-garde, to even be a double agent — to live in the normal world and also live a more exciting underground life that is off-limits to other people. I guess you could say it’s a sort of gay exceptionalism.”

The Toronto filmmaker and self-described provocateur is the subject of a career retrospective, Bruce LaBruce: Tender and Transgressive, at the Cinémathèque québécoise, Sept. 27 to Oct. 26, in conjunction with Montreal’s Festival du nouveau cinéma. It’s a fitting title for a series looking at the oeuvre of an artist who has consistently blurred the lines between pornography and art house cinema.

LaBruce has had retrospectives at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the Cinémathèque de Toulouse and the TIFF Bell Lightbox, and his films have premièred at revered international festivals including Sundance, Berlin, Locarno and Venice.

“(My movies explore) sex and sexuality, and this idea that fetish is — I hate the word normal, but it’s not something to be ashamed of, nor is porn,” LaBruce told the Montreal Gazette recently. “I also explore the idea of taboos, why they exist, to challenge conventional ideas about sex.

“I think we’ve gone through a very regressive period over the past 10 to 15 years. Part of that has been gay assimilation, which I’m not very enthusiastic about. In order for gays to be accepted into mainstream culture and politics, the gay movement has rejected a lot of its more extreme elements. For me the whole engine of the gay liberation movement was sex, sometimes extreme sex or sexual expression and sexual experimentation. A lot of these things have been marginalized even further, so I’m interested in continuing that kind of queer practice.”

The retrospective includes films from throughout LaBruce’s repertoire, from early features No Skin Off My A– (1991), Super 8 ½ (1994), Hustler White (1996) and Skin Flick (1999) to mid-career gay zombie films Otto; or Up with Dead People (2008) and L.A. Zombie (2010) and his more recent, Quebec-shot films Gerontophilia (2013), Saint-Narcisse (2020), and his latest, the bisexual romp The Affairs of Lidia, a comedy shot in Montreal for Barcelona feminist porn director Erika Lust’s production company LustCinema.

LaBruce calls Saint-Narcisse “my homage to the Québécois cinema of the ‘70s,” and believes our province’s more European attitude to sex may explain why it has been easier for him to get films made here over the past 10 years.

“There’s an edginess (to Quebec films), and an adult perception of sexuality,” he said. “I also think cinema is more central to the culture. It’s a more developed cinema.”

Quebec’s precarious position as a francophone outpost in Canada and North America may also have something to do with it.

“I’m always with the underdog,” LaBruce said. “To me, it’s a punk thing.”

Cinémathèque artistic director Marco de Blois says LaBruce’s films are steeped in socio-political critiques and a reverence for the history of cinema. Skin Flick, he notes, has elements of Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange and the work of Italian great Pier Paolo Pasolini, while Hustler White can be seen as a tribute to Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard. Elsewhere his movies conjure famed directors Robert Altman, Federico Fellini and John Waters.

“LaBruce was born out of the queercore movement of the ‘80s, a queer movement within punk culture questioning capitalism and neo-conservatism,” de Blois said. “That defined his rebellious spirit and led him to put explicit representations of gay sexuality on screen. He can be placed in the post-porn wave of cinema, porn with social and political ethics and esthetics.

“Post-porn makes us consider sexual representation in new ways. Pornography was always on the margins and underground. LaBruce frees himself of those constraints to show sexuality in his films, bringing an energy and a sense of provocation that was absent from Canadian cinema. Except for maybe (David) Cronenberg, Canadian cinema is a bit tame. LaBruce brings a refreshing spirit of delinquency to the screen.”

AT A GLANCE: The retrospective Bruce LaBruce: Tender and Transgressive is at the Cinémathèque québécoise from Sept. 27 to Oct. 26. For tickets and information, visit cinematheque.qc.ca

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