Cary Cronenwett's 'Maggots and Men' (2009)

An island of anarchist sailors, shadowboxing, executions, gymnastics, aggressive close-ups of fly larvae, and a predominantly transgender (F to M) cast: Cary Cronenwett's experimental film Maggots and Men uses curious images of decomposing organic matter to deconstruct an obscure historical narrative. Shot in grainy black-and-white, the film opens with a Russian voice-over. What evolves is a largely an epistolary tale, told by Stepan Petrichenko--the leader of the Kronstadt Uprising of 1921--to his sister Anya, who goes unseen. This invisibility of the letters themselves (their successful delivery to Anya can be known only through the audience's faith) makes a statement about the unreliability of text. Indeed, much of what had been printed about the Kronstadt uprising--one of several anti-Bolshevik revolts of the Third Russian Revolution, in which civilians clashed with the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic--has since been refuted by scholars of anarchism, such as Paul Avrich.

The film's unconventional format (a combination of stills and montage, an homage to 19th-century Russian avant garde cinema) mirrors this ideology. A troupe of actors, performing on a stage in an ambiguous time and place, recant the events of the uprising using handcrafted sets from what could be found materials. Stepan's narratorial voice becomes to the soundtrack to their contortions--the human drama of war is given life through the silent abstractions of controlled physical movements.

The kinetic, humanistic nature of these scenes highlights the inadequacy of language at communicating the battle between Russia's Bolshevik Army with the country's better-equipped naval fleets. Nor are linear narratives able to convey the chaos and unpredictability of war--instead, several scenes depicting expansive snow, a surrealistic execution, and a soldier flanking a slab of suspended raw meat (hence the "maggots," a gruesome symbol of death) are transposed in a single shot. The result is a violent pastiche, yet it retains a sense of playfulness: the film's historical accuracy is not so much jeopardized as the very idea of "historical accuracy" itself.

Cronenwett maintains this sense of play when he questions traditional methods of "knowing": the deceit of Lenin and the deceptiveness of heteronormative history is made real by actors whose appearances are also intended to deceive. The film was “cast with actors from a range of masculine gender expressions”; this retroactive "queering" relieves much historical pressure from one male-dominated, heterosexual, militaristic perspectives, and allows the feverish anarchism of those revolutionary years to eclipse constructs such as gender and orientation. Somewhat ironically for a film made by and for transgendered people, much of the sexual interaction between two "male" actors could be interpreted as the overt homoeroticism of many original Soviet-era films (Cronenwett cites The Battleship Potemkin as one important cinematic influence, though one can easily see shades of Fassbinder's 1982 film Querelle.)

Only one scene depicts actual sex--set in a back-room of a cabaret, presumably within the naval fortress of Kronstadt, against a frenetic backdrop of rhythmic Balalaika and dancing couples. The scene is not anticipated, or even climactic; rather its significance lies in one director's ability to confront the retroactive heteronormalization of a subculture (in this case, anarchists) who arguably have been otherwise expunged from mainstream historical frames. Why, then, are their sexual predilections assumed to be "mainstream"? The viewer might feel slightly ironical or trite pondering such theoretical issues when thousands were killed in a battle for laborers' rights and unrestricted food access. Yet it is a greater disrespect--a different kind of political killing--to not recognize historical actors in their totality.

Maggots and Men appeared in the Frameline 33 LGBTQ film festival on Sunday, June 21, 2009, at San Francisco's Castro Theater.