Pierrot Lunaire

Pierrot Lunaire — Plot

Invited by the conductor Premil Petrovic to stage Arnold Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, a musical theater work from 1912 based on the poems of Albert Giraud, LaBruce transposed a strange and tragic episode of true crime onto the composition. Complementing the original atonal score is a narrative about a trans man who is outed by his girlfriend’s father and forbidden from seeing the young woman again. Crestfallen, the protagonist decides to prove the fact of his manhood by castrating a taxi driver and then revealing his newly transplanted member to the two of them. This story, which for LaBruce “serves as a kind of allegory for all gender radicals and outcasts driven to extremes by the disapproval and hostility of the dominant order,” is rendered in a visual style that nods to the era of Schoenberg’s melodrama. LaBruce cheekily appropriates the formal vocabulary of silent cinema with black-and-white photography, irises, and intertitles like “A cock, a cock, my kingdom for a cock!”

• Release date
• February 9, 2014
• Runtime
• 51 min
• Genres
• Music, Drama
• Director
• Bruce LaBruce

Pierrot Lunaire — Cast

Susanne Sachße Pierrot Lunaire

M

Maria Ivanenko Paulina Bachmann

L

Luizo Vega

M

Mehdi Berkouki

B

Boris Lisowski

K

Krishna Kumar Krishnan Bruce LaBruce