The Life of Sean DeLear, dir. Markus Zizenbacher, 2024 Austria, 82 min. π
Thursday, June 20, 2024, 3:30 PM, Roxie Theatre + streaming encore
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| The Life of Sean DeLear |
Visionary artist Sean DeLear (as in “chandelier”) was born Tony Robertson of Simi Valley, California. SeanDe was a creative powerhouse, the lead singer in the punk band Glue, drag queen, cabaret performer, pillar of the “Silver Lake scene,” and maker of many home videos, among other things. SeanDe passed away from cancer in 2017, leaving their collection of videos to their friend Markus Zizenbacher to make something. The result is this tribute film.
SeanDe came to terms with being queer in high school and never looked back. They disdained mundane work, feeling they had a higher calling, but managed to follow that vocation and make some remarkable art, crossing boundaries of genre, gender, race, and even hemispheres, spending much of their last years in Vienna with the art collective Gelitin. They were a phenomenal, larger-than-life personality, and were known in art and music circles far moreso than by the general public, counting people like Yoko Ono, the B-52s, Brontez Purnell, and Laurence Fishburne as friends. They had their teenage diaries published posthumously, talking about art and sex and family and life in general with no punches pulled and no expletives deleted. We can only imagine what wonders they would have created if they were still with us today.
The film is definitely worth seeing, but there are a few knocks against it. First, Sean DeLear’s mother and brother were and are homophobic fundamentalist Christians, the brother a pastor at a homophobic church. That, along with a bitter dispute about their father’s estate, led to SeanDe’s making a break from the family. I think the film would have been better without the extensive screen time given to those two in present day, including the brother preaching at his church. The other big distraction is just the fact that among SeanDe’s many prodigious talents apparently we cannot count “holding a video camera steady.” The footage jumps around with wild camera movements, but the compilation also jumps around a lot, with some interviews with surviving friends, bandmates, and family to splice the clips together, but without much of a narrative through line to pull it together into a cohesive story. For those reasons, I knocked it down to “highly recommended,” but it’s definitely a must-see for anyone active in any of the art scenes SeanDe moved in.
