Monika Treut, independent filmmaker
Ghosted, a supernatural lesbian drama by Monika Treut
Monika Treut is a German movie director and writer whose films deal with sexual liberation and expression from a lesbian perspective. She is best known for Seduction: The Cruel Woman (1985), a daring film for its time.
Monika Treut was born in Mönchengladbach, Germany, on April 6, 1954. She studied literature and politics at Philipps-University in Marburg. In the mid-seventies she began working with video.
Her doctoral thesis The Cruel Woman: Female Images in the Writing of Marquis de Sade and Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
was published in Germany, Switzerland and Austria in 1984.
In the 1980s Treut started to write, direct and produce independent features and documentaries, which screened at film festivals all over the world.
Retrospectives of Treut's work have been held in Mexico City, Sao Paolo, Taipei, Toronto, Cambridge, Helsinki, Hamburg, Thessaloniki, Los Angeles and Lisbon.
Her first feature, co-directed with Elfi Mikesch, was the controversial Seduction: The Cruel Woman,1985, which since has become a cult classic.
The black and white coming-out tale Virgin Machine followed in 1988. My Father Is Coming, a comedy of manners set in New York, was released in 1991.
In 1992, Treut began directing documentaries including Female Misbehavior
, a portrait of Norwegian-born Eva Norvind, a B-movie star in Mexico and later a dominatrix in New York; and Gendernauts
(1999), about a group portrait of transgendered cyborgs in San Francisco.
In 2001 she completed Warrior of Light, about Yvonne Bezerra de Mello, an internationally renowned human rights activist who works with children in the slums of Rio de Janeiro.
In 2002 Treut fell in love with Taiwan. There she wrote, directed and co-produced two documentaries, Tigerwomen Grow Wings
and Made in Taiwan.
Her most recent feature film, Ghosted
(1994), is a lesbian love affair with supernatural undertones set in Taiwan and Germany.
The New York Times said the film containsthoughtful storytelling and a refreshingly matter-of-fact view of lesbian relationships.Since 1990, Treut has lectured at Vassar, Dartmouth, the San Francisco Art Institute, and the universities of Chicago, Chicago, San Diego and Cornell.
Treut runs the independent film production company, Hyena Films in Hamburg, Germany.
Armand Whyte's verdict: We can be grateful to Netflix, available online via Xbox 360, for making Treut's films available to an American audience. That was beyond Blockbuster.
But the question has to be asked whether it was worth the wait or the effort. On Netflix the production quality is so bad on
SeductionandVirgin Machinethe movies are unwatchable unless you are a paid viewer or a diehard fan.Treut was once daring for being a lesbian filmmaker. Now that gay and lesbian cinema is part of the mainstream, with better production values than an independent such as Treut can afford, we can have doubts about her relevance.
She is neither as daring or as creative as French director Catherine Breillat. In fact, Treut's movies are trite and artless in comparison. But she has thrown off some of her Germanic stiffness since becoming infatuated with Taiwan in the early 2000s.
By Armand Whyte
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