Tangiers 2002
Edmund Stoiber* prevented ARD TV to broadcast my film. (State Premier of Bavaria 1982-2007)
director Simom Bischoff on ER MORETTO
Looking back, it's a miracle that this film got made at all, and so fast.
The film had a ...
quite a sensational subject:
for the first time, you could see anything like it in a Swiss film on the screen:
more or less unconcealed homosexuality among the youth.
In the early 80s the subject was fashionable, it hit big.
Nobody talked of paedophilia in those days.
When the film sets in, the boy is 13.
And I met him when he was 13.
It wasn't illegal at the time, in Italy.
Today I wouldn't make such a film.
Today I make different things.
It's about a ...
pre-civilizatory culture,
pre-civilizatory erotics, pre-civilizatory sexuality.
And the relationship between a boy and a man had in that ancient culture a significant value.
And I'm saying that this has been lost in Italy.
I already knew about sex between men, but my affair with this boy, it was the first time.
I was fascinated how such an outsider could emanate so much charm and energy and life force.
That fascinated me, that contrast:
that's why you don't find this with domesticated youths,
that's why you find this life-force, or joy of life
or this ferocity, this originality, this charm.
Why do you find it in those rejects, in those marginal characters?
That has always preoccupied me.
Perhaps I wanted to get to the bottom of this somehow.
and ...
obviously I would re-process this in a film, and it worked instantly.
I don't want to be integrated, never wanted to be integrated.
The further away you travel, the stranger the surrounding culture becomes, the less you feel integrated.
I think this is what I found out, what pleases me.
To be a stranger.
When you're a stranger, you're alone, you're the opposite of gregarious animal.
You're just yourself, a singular apparition in the universe.
And the more you're a stranger, the more unique you feel yourself to be.
I think that's what I've been searching all the time.
They boys who sleep with men, in Napels, in Southern Italy, that's their tradition.
They learn about it, that it's being done.
It has ethnoligical or sociological roots I don't want to analyze further, because they don't know about it.
And it's the same thing in North Africa.
And if you lump this together with prostitution, as we have it in Berlin or Zurich or the bigger cities, then it's wrong.
Because money is a minor factor in those relationships.
First comes the tradition.
In order to become a man, a boy must sleep with a man.
Otherwise he won't obtain the masculine force.
That's the classic sexuality of initiation.
But in today's culture it's all corrupted, all those owerpowering influences, from anywhere.
Add to it the professional prostitution, some boys discover ...
how much money can be made, then it becomes genuine prostitution,
others develop in another direction and turn gay, what in the West is called gay.
and drop into the gay sub-culture, there are many ways.
But it all developed out of the original archaic tradtion.
And it's the same in North Africa.
... that point of attraction, it was the jet-set
famous people came here, in the 70s everybody went to New York
I don't know about today, in the 40s everybody went to Paris,
And Tangiers - Paris, that was ... many made the trip forth and back.
Today one's goes to Berlin, right?
Let me tell you, this country isn't policed at all.
or maybe it's a Police State, everything is totally abitrary, but there is nothing clearly defined.
Everything is illegal, all sex is illegal, but everyone is screwing all around.
It's all illegal, it's totally absurd.
You can only have legal sex inside marriage.
Because you have a document about it, all else is illegal.
But I think nowhere people screw more than in Morocco.
Even children. As soon as the boys start going out into the street, they're having sex.
Crazy!
It's different with women and girls.
They're protected.
A documentary is always fiction as well, there's no such thing as a pure documentary,
even though some peope believed or still believe that it's kind of pure and transports the truth 1:1.
And I wanted to reflect that and I tried
the threats of the city and the story I told,
the subject, I tried to break it,
within the tradition of Italian cinema, in general.
That boy whom I met when he was 13, 14, 15,
and about whom I made this film, he was, as I keep calling him, maybe I exaggerate a bit, the last of the raggazzi di vita.
Because with those boys, in the early 80s, all this culture of those marginal boys
who were open to this special kind of erotics, that got lost.
Pasolini has predicted all this.
The essence or principal aspect of his entire oeuvre is
the loss of this culture, this ...
this ancient culture, this original, authentic culture.
A boy can only learn about the Quran, that is, develop spiritually and intellectually,
if he has sex with his teacher.
Because the spiritual must have a physical counterpart.
If it's only spiritual, it won't work.
This is a classic materialist cultural attitude: there cannot be spirit without matter.
This homosexuality of initiation has been lost.
It disappeared with the process of civilization during the last 100 years.
But the urge which certain youths have, especially marginal ones,
the urge still remains, because they've still been educated or culturally formed in the ancient mode.
And then I'm fascinated by their anti-social, their outsider status, their non-civilized culture which I ought to hate.
But that boy had his first sexual experiences at 13 with men.
With men who were considerably older.
And later, when he grew older,
when he entered his adult bourgeois life, thanks his older lovers who had educated him, he simply couldn't fit this in.
And that's why he said, at the end of the film, that he'd made a mistake.
Because he believed that even without the sexual experiences of this youth he could have fitted in,
he could have found his way into the bourgeois world, whereas in fact it wouldn't have been ossible.
His sexual experiences helped him to find the way, he's mistaken about this.
Meaning, he believes without homosexual initiation he could have managed the same path,
and wouldn't have that flaw in his past.
That's the way it seemed to him at 17. Today he's over 30, what he thinks today ...
I only hear about him from others, I don't want to see him anymore, it makes me sad.
He drinks a lot and ... he's become really ugly.
realization: Michael Höfner, Jürgen Brüning