Taxi Zum Klo
This week we are showing Frank Ripploh’s Taxi Zum Klo* (1980)* on Thursday, January 15th, at 7 PM.
Here is the link to RSVP. Doors will be at 6:50 and we’ll start the show at 7:10!
*Taxi Zum Klo *is the semi-autobiographical work of Frank Ripploh, who writes, directs, and stars in the film. A tender and funny meditation on freedom, it tells the story of a promiscuous elementary school teacher who struggles to split his time grading spelling tests, making a life with his homebody boyfriend Berndt, attending his socialist organization’s Chilean solidarity meetings, and cruising for anonymous sex around Berlin. Ripploh explores the painful existential fact that one has but a sliver of time in the day–in a life–by waltzing his audience through gay landscapes to display the pleasures and anguishes that come with incompatible longings. *Taxi Zum Klo’s *array of unsimulated sex scenes led it to be heavily censored for decades, surviving in its unedited form on the underground film networks. We’re excited to show the just recently released new restoration.
Ripploh, a prominent performer in the queer underground as Peggy von Schottgenberg, was fired from his position as a school teacher in 1978 after he came out publicly, posing on the cover of a gay magazine. Central to the film is an examination of the social anxiety over the perceived unique threat of the “gay teacher” spreading homosexuality, a trope still trotted out widely by in conservative terror over queer contagion and liberal disavowal of the threat by locating sexuality as merely biologically determined. Ripploh pivoted into his new career in the German New Wave film movement, becoming a frequent collaborator with Fassbinder and Ulrike Ottinger until his death from cancer in 2002
Nonverbally, Stefan, Charlie, Stark
Other excellent upcoming film events to keep an eye out for: 1/14, 7 PM: Tom’s Movie Night presents Robinson’s Garden (dir. Masashi Yamamoto, 1987) at Performance Works Northwest
1/18, 7 PM: Spectrum Between presents Frederick Wiseman’s Aspen on 16mm at 5th Avenue Cinema