Although we regarded them as sexually explicit art films, my long-time producer, Juergen Bruning, and I gained reputations as pornographers for my first three films, No Skin Off My Ass (1991), Super 8 ½ (1994), and Hustler White (1996), which made it difficult for me to secure financing for bigger films. At several points in my filmmaking “career” (I still hate the word), I tried and failed to get bigger-budgeted films off the ground. I was struggling to get films made in that era. The Raspberry Reich experience was a wild ride for me. How do you feel today about the influence that film has had on your career, fourteen years later I'm curious about the eclectic reactions people have had since you released The Raspberry Reich in 2004. All other images courtesy Bruce LaBruceīruce LaBruce is the migraine of the masses. Portrait of Bruce LaBruce by Saad Al Hakkak. What resulted was an extended conversation on agitprop, insurrectionary porn, and the bedroom as a site of disruption. I wanted to speak to LaBruce about the legacy of his 2004 film The Raspberry Reich, about the legal turmoil that resulted from the heirs of photographer Alberto Korda objecting to the use of his famous photo of Che Guevara, the ‘Guerrillero Heroico’, about the different versions of the film proliferating across porn and non-porn channels, its role as Trojan Horse amidst the explosion of the -tube world, recruiting members to a homosexual intifada, newly aware of the Red Army Faction. This gamut of cinematic variations demonstrates that multiple arousing systems, successfully bended and corrupted, can be re-introduced to once-hidden filmic references, confronting audiences with polymorphous subjects covering gay orthodoxy, sexual diasporas and the voracious ratiocination of capitalism, without anyone even noticing it.īruce LaBruce is an effortless theory-mixtape-maker, a master of pornsonification, who reunites society’s rejected, melting together radical politics, queer underground culture, technocracy and street knowledge, un-life and immortality, only to secrete it within the cracks of a corpulent industry In effect, LaBruce has been refining a provocative cinematic experience in which explicit sex-scenes, male prostitution, hardcore sex practices, live performance, bold humour, crude encounters, in-your-face agitprop imagery, and pointed self reference collide. Or at least that’s what John Waters declared in a candid interview for the 2011 documentary Advocate for Fagdom, when asked about his perspective on the body of work created by the self-declared ‘Reluctant Pornographer’. For more than thirty years the Canadian writer-director-artist-dramatist-pornographer has broken and blurred so many lines that to label his work “controversial”, “subversive” or even “shocking” at this point would be a gross oversimplification.īetter to take the first step and focus on LaBruce’s complex and intricate procedures for rendering the (often taboo) subjects that he wants you to deal/fuck with: within two minutes (or less) he will invade the most vulnerable corners of your subconscious, and then – when everything is imprinted on remote memories and the warnings turn off – he will offer himself as your trustworthy guide in exploring a carefully calculated universe. Bruce LaBruce is the migraine of the masses.