The Life of Sean Delear

Markus Zizenbacher – Director’s Note

This is a very personal state funded film about the American musician, performer and underground drag icon Sean Delear who died in Vienna 2017 of cancer, age 52, where I , as his friend for ten years, took care of him during the period of his sickness. Sean Delear went back and forth from LA to Vienna since 2008 where he settled in 2015. Shortly before he passed, he shipped all of his belongings, videos, fotos, books and records to Vienna. In fact they arrived a month after his death and ended up in my flat. Soon it was clear to me that all the fragments Sean Delear left have to be put together in some sort of film.

I frankly wasn’t really aware of where this trip would lead me at that point. Sean was a kind of mystery to me, like he was even to many of his lifelong friends.

But I knew he wanted to put his archive together to a film and write a book on his life. And since we were engaged to make a permanent residency in Austria possible to him (an aspect my girlfriend wasn’t quite fond of), I justified the decision to finish what he started. So I talked to as many people from his orbit as possible to be able to make this movie. Seven years later the film is completed and has the form hopefully according to Seans imagination.

SEAN DELEAR was an all-round artist who inspired everyone who got involved with him. Singer BECK, the band REDD KROSS, the artist group GELITIN, to name just a few, but also to everyday people he met. You couldn’t pass by him without a reaction. His circles are spread across the western hemisphere where he absorbed, produced and influenced culture in all its facets. As an African-American, open homosexual, coming from a conservative middle class background, his life always combined a variety of extremes that fiction could never invent in a credible way.

SEAN DELEAR WAS LIVING ART, one of the last Warhol personas that circle around on this globe. An idiosyncratic representative of an anarchic mindset that is fairly typical for the now widely underrepresented generation X. Sean Delear was a fascinating visionary much ahead of his time, somewhere between DIVINE, DIANA ROSS and BRUCE LA BRUCE. No critic, not even his closest friends were able to put him into any defining box. Was he a drag queen, a singer, a model, a performer, an activist, a giggling creature of the night, a Hunter S. Thompson type of intellectual or just the stoner dude from next door? Any of these descriptions fits but do not capture the entire person.

Sean documented his whole life from 8mm to Hi8 to digital, in fotos and writing since the late 70s. It is an inspiring collection of flashlights through the last decades that show a vivid testimonial of the music and art scene, the changing of media included.

The film THE LIFE OF SEAN DELAER is hopefully bringing all these powerful and inspiring aspects ofSean DeLear´s life to an accessible piece of art.

Notes on THE LIFE OF SEAN DELEAR by Neil Young

A blazingly colourful and exuberantly transgressive personality who dazzled Los Angeles’ underground musical and artistic scenes in the late-1990s and 2000s, Sean DeLear (1964-2017) suddenly emerged as a genuinely seminal cultural figure via the posthumous 2022 publication of their intimate and explicit teenage diaries from 1979. I Could Not Believe It joyously chronicles the experiences of a young Black, queer creative finding their identity, voice and style decades before Barry Jenkins’ (rather more downbeat) Moonlight.

The Life of Sean DeLear is a vibrantly multi-faceted, buoyantly propulsive documentary portrait of this irresistibly charismatic one-off — sketched in celebratory but commendably clear-eyed style by writer- director Markus Zizenbacher. There can be very few people better qualified to do justice to this particular tale. Zizenbacher befriended DeLear — born Anthony Robinson in Simi Valley, an obscure California backwater — after the latter relocated to Vienna in the early 2010s.

There the former frontperson of Silver Lake postpunk-combo Glue reinvented themselves as a cabaret performer and collaborated with famed art-collective gelitin before passing away aged just 52. “SeanDe” entrusted their treasure-trove audiovisual archive to Zizenbacher, who with co-editor Sebastian Schreiner has crafted an eclectic collage generously spiced with effervescent extracts from DeLear’s own extensive video-diaries.

These jagged hand-held snapshots bring back to often-hilarious life the electric days (and especially nights) from a quarter of a century ago, placed in retrospective context by present-day testimony from the survivors who knew SeanDe best and loved them the most. Sean DeLear — as in “chandelier” — lit up their world. Markus Zizenbacher now illuminates Sean DeLear for ours.