God Wears My Underwear

I saw this film at a preview screening in Toronto and it hit a chord with me. The story is about a woman with gender identification dysphoria who believes she is reincarnated from a Buddhist monk who witnessed the rise of the Nazi's in the 1930's.

The storyline is presented in a style best described as stream of consciousness. A little hard to follow at first, but once I was into the film, I saw how all the parts fit together. In some ways this is more a work of electronic art than a film, but it definitely evoked an emotional response.

I think there are other ways the filmmaker could have handled the ending which is a bit of a downer. Indeed, I would like to have seen a longer film with more explanation and I'm wondering what changes the director made in subsequent cuts.

Of particular note is the music which is a kind of Middle Eastern, jazz fusion. I think the images and the music worked well together.

As one of the last unexplored frontiers and home to a rich supernatural tradition, Tibet has inspired much in modern literature and the popular imagination. As a child of the mid 20th century, I was raised on the stories of Sax Rohmer (Fu Manchu), Talbot Mundy (Jim Grim), and the quasi-realistic T. Lobsang Rampa. Newer fiction by Katherine Kurtz and others keeps the escapist flames alive.

While looking for material to use in school reports in 1960, my mother and I chanced upon issues of National Geographic from the 1920's that gave reality to these works of imagination.

The Western world stamped "unknown" on the map of Tibet. To Heinrich Himmler, Tibet was seen as the possible birthplace of the Aryan race. The Chinese looked at Tibet as one of "their nations" and the Tibetans rightfully feared a Chinese invasion. The British were careful to isolate Tibet from the outside world as much as possible to force Tibet to function as a barrier between India and the other powers in Asia. The Tibetan government (in the person of the 13th Dalai Lama, sent emissaries to Russia in an attempt to secure other allies. The German Expedition of 1939 was welcomed in Lhasa as a political option.

The Tibetan Buddhist traditions mix much of the old magical native religion with Buddhism. Magic, transcendence and the supernatural are key elements. The tradition of transference of power by the use of recognized incarnations captivates the imagination (never mind that it insures that those behind the scenes stay in power - the murder of the 13th Dalai Lama was an attempt to resist change).

Though the 13th Dalai Lama did not actually send someone to Germany in the 1930's, he might have - had he not been poisoned. Many Germans were fascinated by Tibet and it was even rumored that a group of Tibetan Lamas were found in the Fuhrer-bunker after Hitler's suicide.

As Tibetans have moved out into the world, the 14th Dalai Lama tells us that the time for recognized incarnations is largely past. In terms of the somewhat confused Theosophical body of literature that would translate to this being a time of great change, as it most certainly is.

Reincarnation memories are treacherous at best. Is there a past reality that confirms my feelings of deja-vu while running through the Tiergarten in Berlin at 5am? Is it possible to really know any specific past life connection, or is it more like visualizing a highway filled with souls progressing towards some unknowable future? (The Alice Bailey perspective).

How then can we find a more fertile ground for the creation of modern myth? Not all myths turn out well - many are precautionary tales. Karmic laws don't always create happy endings.

Like the tale of Camelot, the story of Eo/Lavinia (as witnessed by Otto) is one of the old order giving way to the new. As we are still in the midst of creating this legend, it is as yet unknown who the eventual hero will be.

The first 15 minutes are arguably the best part of the film -- the overhead shots of the choo-choo train coming from Tibet -- the title indicating that Himmler was the son of a chicken farmer -- the outrageously funny scene with the gravelly Jewish mother and the shrink taking funny notes on her ravings -- is a comic gem of a short-short film in its own right.

The main thrust of this extremely complex piece of work is an attempt to correlate the German Genocide of the Jews in the first part of the century with the Communist Chinese invasion, takeover, and ethnic cleansing policies, in Tibet in the second half of the century.

A difficult juxtaposition, to say the least, not worked out as fully as it might be in a longer exposition -- but what counts in this film more than the narrative line, is the dreamlike visual presentation and the unusual use of archival footage from the days of the rise of Naziism.

I saw this film in Manhattan as part of a film and video festival. It was the longest feature of the evening, and by far the most polished and engaging. The recurrent "trains" metaphor was haunting and stayed with me long after the evening was over. To me, the central purpose of the film was to explore the complacency of people as events unfolded around them which, in hindsight, clearly indicated a rush towards disaster. I think this is an important lesson for us to bear in mind in America today.

Complaints? Maybe just this, perhaps rather odd, one: The depiction of life in Berlin in the 30's is accomplished by interweaving vintage photos and shots featuring the film's actors. This visual matching is very skillfully done, giving the film a "documentary" look in the Berlin sections that can lull the non-alert viewer into thinking that they've seen it all before. For my personal taste, the strongest and most entertaining sections of the film were the imaginative and sometimes hilarious surreal scenarios.

I saw this at the Minneapolis-St. Paul Film Festival today, and while I have pretty tolerant tastes, this was HORRID. I couldn't even appreciate it from a camp/ironic viewpoint.

It's supposed to be about a Bay Area woman named Lavinia Hamilton who finds she's the reincarnation of Eo, a Tibetan monk sent to Berlin in 1933, just as Hitler takes power. I didn't get through the whole thing, since 15 minutes of this was more than enough.

Ms. Streit, the filmmaker, said beforehand that it was "non-linear," but there's a difference between non-linear and utterly stupid. The computer animation was pointless and absurd, the acting wretched, and the story nonsensical -- but not in an inspired way. It was bad in the Ed Wood sense -- where the filmmaker doesn't get how bad it is. (Actually, I've seen PLAN NINE FROM OUTER SPACE, and it was FAR better than this.) Bad can be good at times, but this is NOT one of those times. Ouch.