Formally superior to the True/False Venus movie we half-watched, it’s a casting call of men (all men) reading aloud from the eponymous book, a girl’s early-1900’s sexy diary, assumed to have actually been written by a creepy old man. This opens certain conversations – one guy wants to know why we speak of toxic masculinity but not toxic femininity, another won’t read the page he’s assigned because it’s too vulgar (then the off-camera director, the only female voice among a hundred men, reads it to him). But mostly it’s not interrogating or contextualizing the text. And it’s not an audiobook movie – the film somehow remains focused on the delivery of the words, more than the words themselves. Neither is it scolding the men (always in pairs) or the viewer for participating, but rather it becomes celebratory in scenes where all the readers gather and chant passages from the text in unison. A strange and wonderful movie.

real film heads would know you don’t hire a boom operator for a casting call:

Beckermann’s career sounds worth exploring, as laid out by Darren Hughes in Cinema Scope (there’s also a book on her out there by the Austrian Film Museum). Beckermann:

I like to be surprised. I didn’t know these men before. There was a waiting area with a buffet, and then I just asked my assistant to bring two or three in. So I didn’t even know who would be with whom … Today there are many taboos. At the time when Mutzenbacher was written you had Sigmund Freud, and people talked about sexuality probably more than today.

if a guy with an ear-horn comes along, you absolutely put him front and center: