Ursula Puerrer, A. Hans Scheirl, and Dietmar Schipek’s Flaming Ears reflects its collective artistic input in a freeform, often jagged approach to both its narrative and visuals. Set in the year 2700 in the burned-out, fictional city of Asche—“ash” in German, the first of many signs that subtlety is far from a governing principle here—the 1992 film depicts a realm that might be likened to a kind of cyberpunk Weimar Germany. Unspecified calamity has left streets torn up and buildings rotting, and the collapse of the status quo has allowed a queer underground to emerge from the shadows and closets.
The story, such as can be easily followed, concerns comic book artist Spy (Susana Helmayr) having her apartment burned down by performance artist Volley (Puerrer) as both a manifestation of her pyromania and a perverse tribute to her partner, Nun (Scheirl), a bald-headed woman who roams the streets in a red plastic jumpsuit in search of carrion for her meals and who’s heavily intimated to be an alien. When Nun stumbles across Spy, beaten into unconsciousness by Volley in a subsequent confrontation, she hides her from Spy. From this point, the plot becomes practically nonexistent as the three characters constantly dip in and out of each other’s orbits, with the directors all the while indulging in tangentially connected visual gimmicks and depictions of alternative, anti-status-quo living.
Shot on Super 8 and blown up to 16mm, the film has a grimy look that further highlights the dilapidation of the surroundings. Interiors are no-wave hellholes fit only to grow mold, while miniatures of dilapidated city skylines project this rot over an entire urban sprawl. The filmmakers include moments of stop-motion animation of things like mutated vermin vomiting toxic bile on characters or die-cast cars zipping along tiny roads, and sometimes they alter the framerates of images so that the actors appear as if they’re thrashing around at inhuman speed.
The accumulated strangeness of Flaming Ears, as defiant as it is enervating, becomes the point as the relevance of the main characters to each other and the audience slips somehow further out of grasp, with each strange, disconnected scene of gutter-trash innovation its own reward. The film, then, is a bracing reminder of a time when queer artists weren’t necessarily interested in normalizing their marginalized community and instead reveled in transgression.
There are echoes of Derek Jarman and John Waters here, and the casual ways in which industrialism causes degradations of the flesh even recall Tsukamoto Shinya’s Tetsuo: The Iron Man. But the odd tenderness underneath the façade of brutal nihilism is the filmmakers’ own, a reminder of the real affection that struggles to express itself in repressed societies.
Image/Sound
Even sourced from a 4K master, Kino’s disc can only reflect the film’s lo-fi Super 8 image, retaining all of the source format’s limitations that the filmmakers incorporated into their aesthetic. Colors smear into each other save for the odd pop of red or the purple of a painted sky, and the many unlit, abandoned buildings used for backdrops disappear into grainy blotches of darkness. Only the occasional close-up offers anything approaching detail, with everything else rendered in all its accurate murk. The soundtrack is likewise captured faithfully, including ambient hiss from poor-quality microphones, but dialogue is always clear, as are the sound effects of explosions and the crunch of feet on streets covered in garbage and broken glass.
Extras
Kino’s disc comes with three short films by the directors, each showing off some of the no-budget visual ideas and sexual exhibitionism that can be found in Flaming Ears.
Overall
A cult object of underground queer cinema receives a welcome, if barebones, release.
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