45 Years After Its Original Release, ‘Taxi zum Klo’ Returns to U.S. Theaters in a New 4K Restoration
Altered Innocence
In celebration of the 45th anniversary of its original release, Taxi zum Klo (Taxi to the Toilets), written and directed by Frank Ripploh, returns to movie theaters in a new 4K restoration, courtesy of distributor Altered Innocence, on Friday, August 1.
Equally celebrated and excoriated upon its original 1980 release in West Germany, Taxi zum Klo works as a pioneering work of queer cinema and Ripploh’s most celebrated filmmaking effort. Made on a micro budget with a narrative close to Ripploh’s own experiences, Taxi zum Klo is a sexy, ruminative, and hilarious dive into the life of a gay Berliner caught between the mundanities of convention and the sexual desires he craves to explore.
The film follows Frank (Ripploh in the role), a thirty-year-old primary school teacher living in Berlin. By day, Frank is a devoted educator, but after hours, he makes the most of West Berlin’s decadent underground queer scene: cruising the city’s public restrooms, saunas, and parks in search of sexy hookups with men of all types. One cold winter evening, Frank meets the handsome and sweet Bernd (Bernd Broaderup) at a movie theater, and the two launch an intimate romance, a change of pace from Frank’s usual practices, which typically skew much more casually. The seasons pass, and Bernd moves in with Frank; however, Frank eventually grows bored by his new partner’s aspirations for a quiet, conventional life in the country. Much to Bernd’s dismay, Frank reverts to the sexual freedoms he once enjoyed, struggling to choose between settling into a monogamous lifestyle or the titillation of unadulterated liberation.
Altered Innocence
Blurring the lines between confessional documentary, comedy, and pornography, Taxi zum Klo reflects Ripploh’s real-life experiences living in West Berlin during the 1970s and early 1980s, a culturally significant era for the city’s queer community. Released between West Germany’s easing of Paragraph 175’s legal limitations on the activities of gay men and the widespread outbreak of the AIDs epidemic that would ravage the globe, Taxi zum Klo unabashedly captures a distinctively unrestrained era of queer history.
Intended to be shown only in clubs and small arthouse theaters, Taxi zum Klo received much more commercial attention than Ripploh ever expected upon its release. Due to its unsimulated sex scenes (including on-screen ejaculation and urolagnia) that worked to contest taboos built around depictions of queer desire on screen, the movie caused much controversy as it travelled around the world from Germany, even leading to the arrest of two theater owners who screened Taxi zum Klo in Norfolk, Virginia, in 1983.
While Ripploh experienced an unlikely triumph with Taxi zum Klo, the movie’s 1987 sequel Taxi nach Kairo was not as esteemed, and he never directed another film again. However, he notably appeared as an actor in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s queer classic, Querelle, and was a familiar face among the highest echelons of the New German Cinema movement. Just ahead of his 2002 death from cancer, Ripploh released a director’s cut of Taxi zum Klo that was released on DVD the same year.
For the first time in 4K, Taxi zum Klo will be re-released in theaters across the United States, beginning on August 1. On the first leg of its journey, Taxi zum Klo will be screened at New York City’s Metrograph as part of its series, “The Many Faces of Frank Ripploh,” from August 1-7.