Sugar Daddies

With his film, Sugar Daddies, Scheugl leaves the cinema and projects the film in a place similar to the location of the filming: the film material consists of drawings on the bathroom walls at the University of Vienna. This film was shown in the bathroom at the Künstlerhaus during a meeting in Munich. (Birgit Hein, 1971)

Sugar Daddies (1968) can be seen as Scheugl’s transition from Expanded Cinema to his conceptual or structural film work. He filmed sexually explicit drawings, graffiti, and numerous (mainly gay) contact ads from a toilet at the University of Vienna, which he then projected in public toilet facilities on empty walls. He filmed this scenery again and subsequently integrated the new material into the initial version – simple, succinct, and yet spectacular. The film is dedicated to Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, a couple that had already celebrated burlesque and gender-specific role changes early on and whose films had always shown homoerotic components. There has definitely not been any other male couple in film history whom we meet so often in bed. Originally, the TV-cinema magazine “Apropos Film” program had scheduled to do a piece on the film, but the filming in the men’s toilet at Vienna’s Westbahnhof (train station) ended with a police citation, and thus in court. The covert treatment of the theme of homosexuality can be identified as paradigmatic in Austria. Even the material and body actions of Viennese Actionists, who transgressed social boundaries at the time with their depictions of sexuality, remained defined not only patriarchally, but also hetero-normatively. Scheugl thus presents one of the few filmmakers in Austria who dealt with queer forms of sexuality as a theme cinematically and also examined them historically. (Dietmar Schwärzler)