Event

The Raspberry Reich

Red Renewal: Seattle's Socialist Spring

Apr 04 - Apr 05

(Bruce LaBruce, Germany/Canada, 2004, Digibeta, 90 min)

Late night!
21+ screening!

Friday, Apr 04 at 11:00PM
Saturday, Apr 05 at 11:00PM

Late night!

21+ screening!

Sexual revolution crass meets tongue-in-cheekery, as a terrorist group, led by the militantly sexually liberated Frau Gudrun, sets out to kidnap a bourgeois pig.

Bruce LaBruce, one of queer cinema's bawdiest bad boys, has created a film where plot is secondary to the stylistic critique of both terrorist chic and neoliberal identity politics. The Raspberry Reich was inspired by the work of Wilhelm Reich, an early 21st century Marxist psychoanalyst whose theories about cosmic sexual energy led to one of the most remarkable cases of American censorship ever (in which some six tons of his works were burned by order of the court).

Reich's cinematic legacy ranges from Woody Allen's Sleeper to the sci fi classic Barbarella, but few films have taken up his radical sexual politics so explicitly. Bad acting, elevator sex, handgun fellatio and a problematic trip to Burger King make for scintillatingly crude fun in this kinky counter-culture camp, that borrows as liberally from John Waters as it does Che Guevara.