BRUCE LABRUCE

A filmmaker, photographer, writer, and artist based in Toronto but working internationally. Along with a number of short films, he has written and directed thirteen feature films. As a photographer he’s exhibited at numerous galleries around the world, including a photo exhibit called “Obscenity” at La Fresh Gallery in Madrid which caused a national ruckus in Spain.

LaBruce has contributed to a variety of international magazines, newspapers and websites as both a writer and photographer, including index magazine, for which he also acted as a contributing editor, Vice, The National Post, The Guardian UK, Honcho, Purple Fashion, Numero, Dazed and Confused, Tank, BlackBook, Bon, Fantastic Man, Man About Town, and many others. He’s had a number of notable film retrospectives, including one at the TIFF/Bell Lighthouse under the auspices of the Toronto International Film Festival in 2014, and one at MoMA in New York in 2015. His latest feature, “Saint-Narcisse,” is currently on the festival circuit after premiering at the Venice Film Festival. A new art book of his photography called “Fixations” will be out early next year from Milos Mestas Editions and an exciting merchandise collection with Threadless.

Your greatest inspirations or influences?

My greatest inspirations are coffee and anal sex. I am influenced by the great gay avant-garde filmmakers of the past such as Jean Genet, Kenneth Anger, Jack Smith, Peter de Rome, Wakefield Poole, Peter Berlin, John Waters.

I am also influenced by classic Hollywood directors of the sixties like Richard Brooks, John Frankenheimer, Robert Aldrich, and Richard Fleischer, and classic European auteur filmmakers such as Godard, Fassbinder, Antonioni, Varda, Chabrol, Liliana Cavani, Pasolini, Von Trier, and Heneke. I am also influenced by maverick USA filmmakers of the late sixties and seventies such as Frank Perry, John Cassavetes, Robert Altman, Jerry Schatzberg, William Friedkin, John Schlesinger, Tony Richardson, and Barbara Loden.

Tell us a bit about your creative process? things you are looking forward to this year..

My creative process is very erratic, somewhat mysterious, and more than a little fragile.

I often have a political motivation of sorts, but it has to be glamorous and revolutionary. (My definitions of "glamorous" and "political" and "revolutionary" are a bit obscure and differ from the conventional definitions.) Sometimes i have to wait for my muse for a long time. Inspiration can come slowly. Endless edging, endless foreplay. But then it can come like a lightning bolt, a big orgasm. I am often inspired by a particular person I meet who captivates me with their beauty and/or intelligence. Sometimes I lose motivation and I don't care about much of anything except movies, which I always watch come what may. Cinema makes more sense to me than life. This year I am looking forward to travelling again. I get a lot of inspiration from travelling internationally. In the past four years I was invited to queer film festivals in places as far flung as Colombia, Chile, Peru and Serbia. The emerging queer political movements in such countries behind these types of small film festivals and the energy behind them also energizes me and stimulates me and inspires me to create. It also affords me the luxury of seeing the world from the perspective of less privileged cultures.

How has this year changed your creativity or how you see the world changing moving forward?

I was in post-production with "Saint-Narcisse" when the pandemic hit, so we were interrupted for a couple of months and then we were able to finish it and we even travelled with it to Venice when there was a lull in Covid infections last September. But I haven't travelled since so it is a bit daunting to get back in the saddle. I think the world is going to be going through great upheaval and strife in the coming years - more pandemics, more fascism, more extreme weather due to climate change, etc. - so it's best to buckle down, strap in, and learn how to survive both creatively and existentially. Typhoon, typhoon!!

Who do you consider to be an icon of our time?

Kill your idols.

Although right now I'm pretty smitten with Lil Nas X, like everyone else.

Do you think the art world needs to change, and if so how can it be improved.

Yes, I think the art world needs to be torn down.

It's corrupt beyond repair. It's pure commodity now, an overdetermined field of meaningless signifiers, and there is way too much of everything: too many artists, too many photographers, too many filmmakers, too many graphic designers, too many fashionistas. There are more artists now than people.

It's a vast wasteland of decorative, throwaway nonsense. With some obvious major exceptions, there is very little significant political art anymore that questions the art system, art hierarchies, institutional art hegemony, late capitalist and materialist overdrive, corporate art in the service of an Uberclass. Race- and gender-bias analysis is on the upswing, which is great, but class analysis is lagging far behind. Hollywood has become particularly elitist and out of touch. Too much real estate porn, not enough real porn! Cable television is the new narcotic, keeping everyone docile and homebound in a perpetual state of blissed-out blankness. The new veal. Fundamentalist, unregulated capitalism has made some artists and filmmakers far too wealthy and removed from everyday reality, a super-elite that fancies itself leftist and progressive but that actually serves corporate interests that allow a corrupt system of privilege and an imbalance of wealth and power to perpetuate itself indefinitely in the service of promoting the status quo and the conventions of the dominant ideology.

Maybe everyone should just press pause for a while, get off social media, stop playing so hard into materialism and celebrity, and just live again for a change. Modestly and without guile. Solipsism and narcissism are also dangerous pandemics. People are way, way too far up their own asses. Of course I am not immune to this behaviour at all and I don't always manage to practice what I preach, which is one of the things I hate most about myself, but at least I’m aware of it!

What does wellbeing mean to you.

Anal liberation, a pure, joyful orgasm, a nice glass of wine, hardcore drugs, pornography, both making and watching, good friends, love in your heart, yoga, rampant promiscuity, meditation, political agitation, revolutionary spirit, laughter. I don't laugh as long and hard as I used to, which is sad. At different points in my life i used to literally bend over double laughing, or roll on the ground, or stop breathing. I would shake and convulse with laughter. It's pretty rare now. Maybe I was mad. But the thought police have taken away the laughter. The Fascist right is grotesque, but the Stalinist left has taken the fun out of everything. 

Thank you so very much for this interview, Bruce.

Cover photo by Saad Al Hakkak