The work of Jürgen Brüning has always been a lightning rod for controversy from the very beginning. In the early days, when he produced and curated films by transgressive cinema icons like Richard Kern and Lydia Lunch, mobs of leftist-feminist-anarchists ransacked his underground theater and spray painted, YOU ARE ALL PIGS on the walls. Later, as the producer of Canadian alt-queer-porn superstar director Bruce LaBruce’s films like No Skin Off My Ass and Hustler White, among others, he and Bruce were both praised and attacked for pushing boundaries, exploring taboo subject matter, and breaking down the walls that separated independent film and pornography. His least controversial period came when Jürgen and Jorg Andreas founded the first German gay porn company, Cazzo Films, and released a series of smoldering titles like Berlin Bonking Bastards, Thom Barron Calling, and Berlin Techno Dreams. Jürgen left Cazzo in 2001, and started his own company, Wurstfilm, which continues Cazzo’s focus on edgy, fetish-themed, rough and dirty sex. Today Jurgen’s winding down his work with Wurstfilm, focusing his attentions more on the popular Berlin Porn Film Festival, which he organizes, and continuing to produce the work of people like LaBruce and Dennis Cooper, whose first film he is hard at work on. I called Jürgen this weekend to talk about his career in film, what attracted him to the edgy and provocative, and what the future holds for artistic impulses in porn.
Adam: Jürgen, how did you first get involved in film?
Jürgen: Very easy. I went to the cinema. I loved Fassbinder and I was not really out gay, and Fassbinder never really said he was gay. He become my idol and I wanted to become a filmmaker. When I was 19, I moved to Berlin, to go to university, but I didn’t dare to apply at film school because I had a working class background and they only take like 20 students at the time, and also they said you should be older and have more experience in the world that you can tell stories about. It happened that I lived in a squat in Berlin, a warehouse space, and we started a cinema there. We started showing like super-8 films and I started making them. My first one I shot while visiting New York, and it was definitely not a masterpiece, then I was in an artist group, we did films and performances and installation. That’s where it started.
So you were mainly directing?
My role was really to organize all these events. In 1986 we wanted to do a feature length film and we decided that these two guys would do the script, and so we applied for money from German television and they accepted, they gave us a lot of money, which was great. And then everybody said to me, you have to produce the film. That was the first real film production in 1986, we had a budget of 200,000 dollars which was a lot of money then. But immediately with the first film we had problems with it. We sent them the script and they OK’d it — there was a department in TV that supported young emerging filmmakers which doesn’t really exist in the same way anymore. We changed the script a bit, we shot a four minute sequence that wasn’t in the script, and when the editor from TV saw the finished film she said we couldn’t have it in there. It was a scene where a woman was throwing a naked man through a roof and we played the German national anthem, and she said no that’s not possible we cannot show it on German television. I said “What are you talking about? There were so many people killed in the name of the German national anthem?” Finally it passed. But I always had problems with my films because of sexuality from the beginning.
You spent time in New York at some point, right?
In the late eighties I lived in Buffalo and was a guest curator at Hallwalls, this media arts center which was founded by Robert Longo and Cindy Sherman. They were looking for a film curator and I took the job. And I was always coming to New York and I met people like Richard Kern and Lydia Lunch, and in 1986 we did Richard’s film Fingered. Richard’s films were very straight, there were no interesting gay films like that in terms of sexuality in the 1980’s. There was a big scandal with Fingered because Lydia Lunch was raping a woman with a gun. All the women complained when I showed it at the Berlin Film Festival in 1987. It was very controversial at the time. I was still working in the cinema, the warehouse, and we showed films every night, and after the festival we showed the film in our cinema so people could see it — not to make money or anything like that — and ten masked men came into the cinema with baseball bats and took our money and destroyed our projection and wrote graffiti on the wall, YOU ARE ALL PIGS! I don’t know if you know Andrea Dworkin, but we had the same kind of woman in Germany — Alice Schwarzer, who was a big old feminist, and she started an anti-pornography campaign, and so this really left-wing German anarchist faction came to destroy our cinema. Like I said, I always had problems with cinema. Then I directed a film called What Is The Relationship Between Rosa Von Praunheim and Male Strippers in San Francisco? Rosa was the token gay filmmaker in German society. Fassbinder was not open, Werner Schroeter did artistic films. In America you had a commercial world — the Nob Hill Cinema and gay porn stuff in New York, and you had male strippers jerking off onstage in San Francisco. And we didn’t have this in Berlin. And I thought why is it that you can talk about sexuality, and not be open about it in cinema. In America you only had gay filmmakers in the underground, Gus Van Sant was not really out, John Waters was not really out, and so I met a young filmmaker Mark Goldstein and we directed the Rosa von Praunheim film.
When did you meet Bruce LaBruce and how did you start working together?
In 1989 I was in Toronto, and I met Bruce at a party. We didn’t talk much, and then he was in San Francisco when I was shooting the film about Rosa von Praunheim, and I invited him to come and we talked more. He wound up playing an extra in this film, and then he proposed that he had an idea for a film, and he sent me some pages of No Skin Off My Ass and I said, okay that sounds good, and he went off and took a long time and send me the film in super-8. But festivals couldn’t have shown a long super-8 film, so I paid for it to have it transferred to 16mm and it played festivals. The film critic Amy Taubin saw it and wrote that it was like “a new Warhol asthetic…” and the film took off.
The film was a success but it was also quite controversial and went against a lot of stuff that was around in gay culture at the time.
A little bit, but not really. That’s more of a legend. Presenting a gay skinhead as one of the main characters and having this feminine hairdresser obsessed with this skinhead was something new. I mean people weren’t versatile then. You were either top or bottom. But in Germany some magazines didn’t want to write about it because it was about skinheads. They thought everyone who looks like this is a Nazi, but it’s not true. Years later everyone was dressed like this. All the gay festivals showed the film, and it was my first production that was shown around the world.
Last week I was talking with Casey Scott, and we were talking about how there weren’t many countries around the world that had their own porn industries, and I’m curious if porn was being produced in Germany and what was your first encounter with it?
I think you have to see it a little more in the global capitalistic view, you know. American films were dominating the world and it was the same in porn. In America it was the same as in Europe, porn was illegal but there was still porn being done, like you had examples in the thirties and forties and fifties, and even earlier. But in Europe porn was first legalized in Denmark in 1967. We had this history of soft porn and stuff done in the sixties, and when it was legalized they immediately made soft and hardcore versions. There were people who made nude films that were educational in the late sixties and early seventies and they were million sellers. Five million people went to see the films. In Germany it was illegal to show porn in public, but what they did was they sold the ticket for 1 dollar, but you had to buy a drink for 5 dollars, so it was a kind of trick because it wasn’t a public screening because it cost more to buy a drink than a ticket. It was how they managed to do it Germany. In Germany it’s still a law that you can’t show pornography on the internet, to avoid people under 18 seeing it, so my company as a German company cannot put any porn on the internet, I have to go to another country to do it.
Is that why you partner with Dark Alley for Wurstfilm?
No, Dark Alley is putting our stuff also on the internet, but no, my porn company is very small and we didn’t want to become a big porn company like CockyBoys. Even when I did Cazzo we never wanted to. So we founded a company in the Netherlands and then we had to register in the Netherlands, and we gave exclusive rights to GunzBlazing which is actually owned by AEBN. All these big American internet companies are trying to buy content and so what they do is buy the company. But to go back to Europe, we started Cazzo the porn company in 1995, and in Germany there were two other companies doing porn, but they weren’t known. In Germany you could only buy porn in sex shops that you can only go into when you are 18 years old, or you can rent them there. 95% percent of the porn in the sex shops was from America. My porn idol was, what’s his name with the big dick?
Jeff Stryker?
Jeff Stryker! Yes. He was my idol, when I was 18-20. He was the porn guy for me. And there was only one guy in France named Jean-Daniel Cadinot, who started in the late 70s to do gay porn. He was the first guy who had any kind of vision in Europe. Cadinot was the other one I really liked. People like Wakefield Poole we didn’t have in Europe, the only one who compared was Cadinot. When we started doing porn, it was in the air. There was a new generation of gay people interested in porn and people were responding to the films I was doing with Bruce. I hated this discussion of “Is it art or is it porn?” So I asked a friend who studied at film school, should we do a gay porn together? And he said, Yeah. So he thought of the idea and I put the money together. The problem was when we wanted to find a cast, we wanted to find people and so we had to put an ad in a magazine, and they refused to publish sexual or commercial ads. I had to fight with them for three or four months to get them to put the ad in. When we did finally get the ad we got 150 people who wanted to do it. People really wanted to do it.
And it wasn’t about getting paid.
No, it was about presenting sexuality in front of a camera. People were really hungry to do it. Guys really wanted to expose themselves. We decided at that point to do our first porn, I asked friends, camera people and lighting people if they would work for free, because we didn’t have much money for doing the film. But of course we paid the performers who were in front of the camera. We cast ten guys, and we learned by doing. Nobody knew how to do a porn film. What do you do when there are no hard-ons? There was no Viagra then. Everybody was shy. You could hear a needle fall when a sex scene was shot and the guy couldn’t get a hard-on. Nobody dared say anything. It was so funny.
Was making porn a fun experience for you in general?
Between 1995 and 2000 was really the best time making porn with Cazzo. It was so much fun. And you could make money at that time in Germany. We were the first company who would push porn into other media than sex magazines. Everybody wrote about the first one, and then people said we should do another one. And then we learned about how to market them. We realized we could market it as “Cazzo, the first German gay porn company.” And then we realized we could pay with the money we made in porn for our other film projects. But we always decided to do not so many films a year. The first year we did two, the second year we did three or four films. In our highest time we were shooting not more than five or six a year.
One I really love is the adaptation of Run Lola Run, Thom Barron Calling.
For me what I liked was that there was a straight scene in a gay porn. Because my film Bonking Berlin Bastards had a scene where drag queens put a mobile phone into the ass of this guy and people were like, “What are you doing putting drag queens in a gay porn film, you cannot do this!” And I really liked that we put a straight scene in the gay porn film. But it wasn’t easy to find a woman willing to do that.
In films in the seventies and early eighties, you still saw things like drag queens and got glimpses of real life. Peter Berlin has a drag queen scene in That Boy, and Joe Gage has a straight scene in Heatstroke. Porn wasn’t always pushing towards the ultimate masculine fantasy. Things still looked a little like reality.
I think you have to see it in this context. Gay pornography was the only material where gay people could see their own lifestyle, because it was not addressed in any other mainstream gay film. It was the only place you could see real gay people. And when I see gay porn from America from that era, I see how much they cost and were shot in 16mm, and they portrayed much more of a narrative. I found out when we started Cazzo that there was already a formula. We were in the time when we were making video, which was much quicker than shooting film. And they said you need five scenes in your film. And in our first film Berlin Techno Dreams, we said we wanted to do the first gay porn film ever made in the world. We wanted first of all better music because most porn music was horrible. So techno music was trendy and so we found musicians to do music especially for us. And we went to an underground techno club and asked them to shoot a porn film, and they were shocked, and only gave permission because it was a gay porn film and not a straight porn film, because that would not have been politically correct. What we said was, people who are in front of the camera in porn, they are not actors. So we couldn’t really tell a story because these guys couldn’t act, it was stupid. So we said, lets present this feeling of what’s happening in Berlin with the music and clubs, and I think it worked. What happened was when it came out, the younger guys said it was great, but when it finally came to the sex shops, then we got information from the distributor that people complained the film was too dark, edited too fast, all these complaints. I always said it’s really difficult to do a porn film where you have a narrative story, because I don’t want to make fun of the people in front of the camera who can’t act. That’s why I did other films with people like Bruce. But Bruce’s films are always getting the same reaction, “Oh these people cannot act!” and we just had to say, “That is on purpose because that is the style we want to use.” But with porn it was really hard. We did casting in Paris for the Dennis Cooper film I’m doing, and it was really hard because we’d cast guys and then in the end they go, “Oh but I can’t do penetration.”
My favorite of Bruce’s films is Skin Flick and the hardcore version Skin Gang. When did you start the strategy of saying we’re going to do softcore versions that can play gay festivals, and hardcore versions that go to porn venues?
It was not really planned. It was problematic to get money to do the films. Hustler White was really difficult to get the money together for. We shot it on 16mm and it cost $50,000 which is not really very much money but it was still very hard to get together. I had to go to German companies to get an advance, but it couldn’t be too explicit because they couldn’t distribute it. So with Skin Flick we did in 1997 or 1998, and we had done Cazzo already and made some money with Cazzo, and Bruce proposed the idea of the film, and I said maybe Cazzo can put the money in but we have to do two versions, one like how you want to do it, and another with the sex. Like in Hustler White there is a little bit of sex they aren’t shot like real porn sex scenes. I had to persuade my partner Jorg who was really opposed to it. During the shooting there was a lot of fighting between Bruce and Jorg, because Bruce was not interested in shooting sex, and so there was fighting. That happened also with The Raspberry Reich. With Hustler White, different countries wanted to cut certain things to make it past the censors, and of course Bruce and me said we’re not cutting anything, and then we said okay, we’ll make a really artistic version how Bruce and I want it. And then when it goes commercial the companies can do whatever they want. Skin Flick was the first where we did an artistic and a porn version. But we decided that they had to be two different titles, so people didn’t mix it up. So we had Skin Flick shown in festivals, but festivals could never show the hardcore version. Of course when people get to know that there were two versions, now Bruce is having more retrospectives because he is getting more and more famous, and I tell them they can’t show the hardcore versions. That’s our thing. The porn version of Raspberry Reich is called The Revolution is My Boyfriend, and then one for L.A. Zombie, but the hardcore never gets shown in festivals.
Do you think, as the head of the Berlin Porn Film Festival, that there is really a place for artistic impulses in hardcore porn?
Of course there is but it’s very difficult to achieve. I’m trying with some films. I’m very curious how it will work with the Dennis Cooper film, because, and this is the same thing with Bruce, Dennis can write really well, but to combine sexual images with the narration is really difficult, because the sex interrupts the narration. I would say for me, in a narrative film you cannot have a fifteen-minute sex scene. Like with Bruce for the artistic version, we show as much explicit stuff as is necessary for the story of the film, you show two minutes or so to show people what is really going on. The porn version is for guys who just want to get aroused and jerk off. The porn people are trying to change a little bit, and the independent side people are trying to change more too. There’s a young person Antonio Da Silva who’s very great. He would be a good person to do a film for CockyBoys. Jorg is totally out of porn now. After I left Cazzo I started the company Wurstfilm, which was another way to make money so we could do other stuff. Now Wurstfilm is winding down too. We are not shooting very much anymore. I’m doing all these other films like the Dennis Cooper film, and others. I produced Bruce’s most recent short film Pierrot Lunaire.
Do you enjoy the power of porn to shock?
That’s one of the smartest questions I’ve ever been asked. I would say it’s tricky. Does porn shock? I don’t know. When I really became a public porn person, I really enjoyed that you could shock straight men by showing two men fucking. Of course I don’t enjoy that homosexuals and other minorities get beat up over it. I guess I would enjoy it more if I could make a better living out of it. I don’t want to become rich. I never got rich with Cazzo. When I left Cazzo they ended up making more money. I enjoy what I’m doing but enjoyment means other people recognize what I’m doing and there are not so many people who recognize and enjoy what I’m doing. Bruce is getting really, really famous, and he’s the head of the Queer Palm jury at Cannes. He enjoys it a lot, but he had to make big compromises with his most recent film Gerontophilia, and because it’s not explicit it gets sold all over the world and recognized. I really liked when we did Otto or Up With Dead People, and I got a letter from Mexico, from a young guy who said, “I really identify with Otto and how he feels, it’s so great.” That I enjoy. I enjoy when it’s one person.
Adam Baran is a filmmaker, blogger, former online editor of Butt Magazine and co-curator of Queer/Art/Film. His short film JACKPOT, about a porn-hunting gay teen, won Best Short Film at the Miami Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, and was recently featured on The Huffington Post, Queerty, and Towleroad, among others. He is a features programmer at Outfest Los Angeles LGBT Film Festival and NewFest in New York. In his spare time, he complains about things to his friends. “Fisting for Compliments”, his weekly musings about the intersection of sex, art, porn, and history, will appear every Monday on TheSword. You can contact him at Adam@TheSword.com and follow him on Twitter at @ABaran999. Check out his previous columns in the Fisting For Compliments Archive.