No Skin Off My Ass

LaBruce’s seminal first feature is a low-rent semi-remake of Robert Altman’s That Cold Day in the Park, with LaBruce himself taking the Sandy Dennis role (you can make the comparison yourself when we screen the original this season as part of our Altman retrospective). A punk hairdresser with a skinhead fetish (LaBruce) encounters a handsome, troubled young skinhead sitting on a park bench and manages to lure him back to his apartment, strip him naked and draw him a bath filled with Mr. Bubble. In what would become the basic LaBrucian template, explicit sex and offbeat comedy intertwine with radical politics, here espoused by the skinhead’s sister — played by G.B. Jones, co-founder of LaBruce’s fanzine J.D.s and an original member of punk legends Fifth Column — who is shooting a movie within the movie titled Girls in the SLA (a reference to the notorious 1970s left-wing terrorist group the Symbionese Liberation Army). Shot on grainy Super 8 blown up to 16mm, with LaBruce’s exaggeratedly emotive voiceover scoring the action, No Skin Off My Ass is “sweeter than Warhol, subtler than Kuchar, sexually more explicit than Van Sant” (Amy Taubin, The Village Voice).

About the Director

Bruce LaBruce is an internationally acclaimed filmmaker, photographer, writer, and artist based in Toronto. Along with a number of short films, he has written and directed nine feature films, including his most recent, Gerontophilia, which won the Grand Prix at the Festival du Nouveau Cinema in Montreal in 2013, and Pierrot Lunaire, which won the Teddy Award Special Jury Prize at the Berlinale in 2014. As a visual artist he is represented by Peres Projects in Berlin, and has had numerous gallery shows around the world, the latest of which, called Obscenity, a photography exhibit, caused a national ruckus in Spain in 2011.His feature film L.A. Zombie was notably banned in Australia in 2010 after having been programmed at the Melbourne International Film Festival. It later premiered in competition at the Locarno Film Festival, Switzerland that same year. LaBruce has written and directed three theatrical works at the Hau Theater in Berlin, including a production of Arnold Schoenberg’s avant-garde piece Pierrot Lunaire at the legendary Hebbel am Ufer Theater. He adapted the latter project into an experimental film, incorporating footage from the stage production combined with additional material shot on location in Berlin. He has also directed theatrical works at the Theater Neumarkt in Zurich, Switzerland, and he participated as a director in the Hau Theater’s ambitious X-Homes project in Johannesburg, South Africa. LaBruce has written a premature memoir called The Reluctant Pornographer, and has had two books published about his work: Ride, Queer, Ride, from Plug-In Gallery in Winnipeg, and Bruce(x)ploitation, a monograph from his Italian distributor, Atlantide Entertainment. 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, Purple Fashion, The Guardian UK, and many others. He has also been a regular columnist over the years for Eye, Exclaim! and Vice magazines. Additionally, LaBruce has directed a number of music videos, two of which won him MuchMusic Video Awards in Canada. Most recently, LaBruce has been honoured with film retrospectives at both TIFF/Bell Lightbox 2014, and at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, 2015. The MoMA retrospective featured all nine of LaBruce’s features as well as a program of short films. All of the films have now become part of MoMA’s permanent film collection.

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