Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, March 30, 1995 TAG: 9503310003
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MARK MORRISON STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Keep in mind that Sprinkle is a porn star-turned performance artist who, in one of Treut's films, uses a gynecological tool to give the camera a close-up view of her anatomy.
Kroger, meanwhile, is where Treut goes to buy groceries.
Is something wrong with this picture?
Treut explained during an interview last week at Hollins College, where she is a visiting professor this semester. As she talked, the German-born filmmaker smoked a near-constant succession of Natural American Spirit cigarettes.
She said she could spend hours at the grocery store just watching the people. Regular people. To her, they are more exotic in their ordinariness than Annie Sprinkle or Max the transsexual or Carol Macho.
Those Kroger shoppers are the ones to keep an eye on. Annie, Max and Carol - they are the normal ones.
"That's how I see them," Treut said.
But back to Annie, Max and Carol. They are subjects in "Female Misbehavior," which is a compilation of four short films that Treut made between 1983 and 1992. That film, along with two others by Treut, will be shown as part of the German film festival this weekend at Hollins.
In "Female Misbehavior," what's so odd and effective about the segments on Annie, Max and Carol is the way they discuss themselves.
"When I put someone in bondage it's sort of an art form for me," Carol tells the camera so casually that she could be talking about picking out melons at the supermarket. Of course, Carol is dressed in leather, with breasts and gut uncovered.
"What I do is titillate ...," she continues into the camera.
Carol is a member of a group called the Lesbian Sex Mafia.
Then there is Max, who used to be Anita and who was a lesbian until she became Max.
"It was like the impossible dream," Max says in a deep, manly voice about his transsexual journey. Like Carol, he talked in a casual manner about male hormone injections and the details of his sex-change operation.
"You sort of become your own twin brother," he said.
To most film audiences, such subjects are at least bizarre, possibly even perverse or offensive, maybe shocking. Treut is unfazed.
"Maybe, in a way, I don't find anything exotic," she said.
Maybe, in a way, that has something to do with the unconventional upbringing she had in Germany, although it probably doesn't explain everything. Treut contends that she doesn't know why she is compelled to make the films she makes. Nor does she give it much thought.
She was born in 1954 in an industrial town near the German border with Holland. Her father was a dentist. Her mother, she called a ``tragedy.''
Her parents married, she said, so that her father could avoid getting drafted into the Nazi army. They never loved each other and lived essentially separate lives; he as a philanderer and she as a once-talented woman who "more or less wilted away in depression."
Her mother's experience, Treut conceded, may partly explain why she is attracted in her film work to subjects like Annie and Carol, women who clearly are not wilted. "My interest is in how radical women can be," she said.
Her background offers few other revelations. She was an only child, unusual for the times, and she practically raised herself.
In one sense, that was good, she said. It gave her the freedom to roam the streets, stay out late and explore life at a young age.
In another sense, however, she said her friends' families often were more of a family to her than her own. And she was a tomboy. "People on the streets would think I was a boy," she said.
It all seems sort of sad, but Treut dismisses that notion.
"I was strange, but I was not unhappy,'' she said.
She was a good student, eventually earning a Ph.D. for her thesis exploring what she calls ``cruel women'' in the writings of the Marquis de Sade and Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, the founding fathers of sado-masochism.
This led to her career in film when she was asked by German filmmaker Elfi Mikesch to co-write and co-direct a screen adaptation of Sacher-Masoch's book, ``Venus in Furs.''
The result was "Seduction: The Cruel Woman." The film is about a dominatrix who runs a Hamburg gallery. "Seduction" was a hit at the Berlin Film Festival, which ensured foreign distribution and reviews in The New York Times, Film Comment and The Village Voice.
Treut followed with "Virgin Machine," in which a German woman writing an article about romantic love travels to San Francisco and embarks on a tour of the city's lesbian scene.
There she encounters Susie Sexpert, who, in the film's funniest moment, shows the woman her collection of unconventional toys.
She also experiences her first lesbian affair.
Treut's most recent full-length film is "My Father is Coming," about a struggling German actress in New York who is visited by her father. While there, he meets the porn star Annie Sprinkle and is introduced to her subculture.
Though a lesbian, Treut couldn't point to any one character or any one of her films as a reflection of herself. She said only that she identifies with all of them.
Treut said she is not trying to make any grand statement or push any particular agenda in her films. If anything, she hopes her message is one of tolerance and open-mindedness.
"It sounds pretty simple really," she said.
At Hollins, Treut is teaching two screenwriting classes and developing two projects. One is a documentary about a dominatrix who speaks eight languages, has worked with Mother Teresa and is pursuing her own Ph.D. at New York University. The other is a film titled "The Virility Factor,'' which she described as a science fiction satire on the women's movement.
Treut said both films will no doubt include her trademark cast of lesbians, transsexuals and other colorful characters.
You know, just regular folks.
by CNB