I caught up with this last night and thought it was, um, interesting, if mostly more disturbing than erotic! It is definitely a self conscious entry into the 'art or porn?' debate, mostly because the pieces attempt to be artworks
about porn and pornography's significance to modern culture, with varying degrees of success (and hilarity!)
Balkans Erotic Epic is both charmingly rustic and absurdist, in which some sexual urban legends are described and then illustrated either through rough animations or stylised live action sequences in which the various mud pools, rainy meadows, or green fields seem like outdoor stage sets than a real environment. Wondering whether this was a giant soundstage or a real location was the most interesting aspect of the piece, and this idea of a location used as a stage is returned to with lesser effect in Sam Taylor-Wood's piece. The rather po faced female narrator (a rather buttoned up lady wearing what I can only assume to be 'intellectual' glasses) who introduces and describes each of the sequences added a lot of (unintentional?) humour to the piece.
Overall this was probably the most fun of all the films, as lines of women rub their breasts to a song about loss or do extreme modern dance movements in a rainstorm, running towards the camera, throwing their skirts back and exposing themselves to the elements. Evetually we see a line of men trying to maintain a stoical posture, and their erections, during another patriotic song (the 'standing proud' impression is rather hilariously undermined however when in the final group of five men shown one gentleman has a rather confused expression and wandering eye, as if a little, um, intimidated by his companions). It perhaps could be seen as an ethnographic piece, trying to link sexual culture with the land, procreation and patriotism rather than to pornography, though I was always continually under the impression that it was all an elaborate joke!
Sync was by far the best of the series. Running about one minute and fifty seconds the film as a whole describes a coupling from first kiss to final separation underscored with a drum beat, but does this through moving the action forward using two or three frames from a film and then moving on to another that picks up the action and moves it forward again a further two or three frames, and so on. So for example the couple begin standing facing each other, move forward and kiss and then fall back onto a bed, but this is done using fifty or so differerent film clips to perform that action.
Perhaps it was also the best film of the series because it was so concise and did not outstay its welcome. It also had a lot of meaning that was fun to unpack and consider after the first viewing, unlike many of the other films where the first idea felt like the
only idea. For instance the density of the imagery, kind of like Brakhage, almost necessitates a frame by frame examination of the work for full appreciation - yet that frame-by-frame analysis is also a very funny comment on how the audience watches pornography, slow motioning their way through the 'good' bits to fully savour them!
Only by going through in this manner is it possible to try and identify films, but more importantly than that it was fascinating to see the way that all these disparate film sources fit together so well. The film is sort of an illustration of the theory that there are only so many ways to film a sex scene, and how the imagery is kind of codified for an audience, so you see the bodies in a similar position, and the size of shot corresponding but then have an eerie sense of everything else as changebale and malleable - only the action is a constant while the setting (the variously decorated bedrooms, the classic hayloft, even Showgirls provides an underwater setting!, and so on) and the bodies (ethnicity, facial features, body size, expression, etc) are in constant flux.
It is also interesting to see the way that both mainstream feature films are used, with a flurry of shots of porn films interspersed throughout, especially of course in the penetration scenes but also in the sections showing kisses or of moaning faces. This also has some relation I think to the disturbing way that scenes showing people in pain or frames of bloodied bodies, the violent assault from the Cape Fear remake or the rape scene from Irreversible are used as material during this constructed coupling. While this, as with the identification of film clips, flashes past almost subliminally quickly on a normal speed viewing it suggests a collapsing of context for sexual activity - mainstream film and porn, sexual violence as a form of sexual activity. (Also the various orgasm faces (male and female) seemed to move fluidly from ecstasy to horror and back) The separating line is blurred as the meaning behind the act is overwhelmed by simply witnessing the act, and in a way this illustrates the point of the entire film - that every sexual act builds up to provide a picture for a viewer of 'the' sexual act. I'm not sure I would really agree with this thesis as it seems more based on an assumed unthinking consumption of imagery, and I assume that consumers of pornographic imagery are much more active viewers persuing material more intently based on their specific interests, rather than simply getting off on just anything that involves sexual activity!
Some of the 'mainstream' films that I noted: Aria (the Vegas segment), Solaris (Clooney and McElhone), Cape Fear (the De Niro assault), Presumed Innocent (Ford and Scacchi), Irreversible (the tunnel), Last Tango In Paris (various scenes), In The Realm Of The Senses, Showgirls (various scenes), Emanuelle In America, Moulin Rouge! (McGregor and Kidman), Crash (various scenes), Sin City, Fight Club. Some films I thought I saw but was not certain about: I think I noted Alan Bates in Women In Love, Laura Dern and even maybe saw the face of a horrified James Stewart amongst the montage of male orgasm faces! Plus I think L'Ennui is in there too
Here's the film Is the film, wrongly credited to Noé. Of course be aware that despite being flash frames the film is still explicit and most definitely NSFW! I do like the way that the initial move in to the kiss at the beginning of the film is simply reversed for the separation of the couple at the end.
Matthew Barney's Hoist was a bit too self consciously wacky. The first sequence of a strange object becoming an obvious erection was quite striking, turning the human body into a strange alien object. The strange man with a bulbous root sticking out of his anus and flowers from his mouth (shades of The Fountain!) rubbing himself against the driveshaft of a truck was memorably bizarre, turning the human being into a kind of parasite clinging to the insides of the machinery. Though I was much more concerned about the possibility of this plant-person's genitalia getting torn (or at least worn!) off. It sort of takes a pornographic act into a whole different abstracted realm, yet at the same time it is utterly ridiculous! That's Matthew Barney for you I guess!
Impaled is also quintessential Larry Clark, interviewing various inarticulate, sexually precocious twinks, choosing the most inarticulate and twinkish of them all and letting him interview various adult film actresses before choosing one to perform his first anal sex act with. There's little more to it than this, yet it perhaps does have merit as being perhaps Clark's 'purest' film - the one where the gazing at young men and watching them have promiscuous unprotected sex doesn't have to be couched in terms of a created narrative. Clark's films seem all about teens driven by urges that they understand the implications of, but consciously ignore for the short term goals of sex or murder (or both at the same time). Here the wish to star in a porn film but slight insecurities once that wish is about to be realised, yet the eventual putting of those doubts to one side seems less mannered than in the fictional works.
Yet despite feeling that this is of a piece with Clark's other works I still have issues with the film. I would have liked more probing questions from Clark of his potential porn actors, getting more into why they want to be in a porn film, or feel as if that is something worth aspiring to, as well as getting into the obsession with anal sex most of the chaps seem to have ingrained into them (from watching porn?) Clark does ask a few of these questions of the male candidates but the questions are very broad in nature and often the responses to them are not followed up on to any great extent.
The initial round of questioning seems particularly weak once the male participant is chosen and the adult film actresses have their interviews - their quite aggressive assertions that being in adult films are the best things that ever happened to them, and was a great career move leaving them with no regrets etc, are left unchallenged. Clark retires behind the camera at this point and lets the young guy he has chosen do a lot of the hesitant, mumbling interviewing himself, but I get the impresssion that even without this withdrawal by the director that there would be little interest in the female participant or the way that the various professional businesslike attitudes to the encounter (transaction) overpower the young man's initiation, despite this being where Clark's interests mainly lie. It prevents the film from reaching any particular insights or personal revelations about any of the participants, even into the director himself - or at least no more insights than would be revealed in any other 'casual' interview piece with a young man prior to a porn shoot.
In the end I'm left feeling that the film is just a kind of modern technology update to the old situation of an older man taking a younger apprentice to a brothel and buying the kid a prostitute for a night, with all the sublimated fantasies (of being a virile young man again) that such a situation implies. Only in this case the older man wants to be able to have the encounter he is paying for captured on film too.
Gaspar Noé's film, We Fuck Alone, has many of the strengths and weaknesses of his other works. I mentioned on the Enter The Void thread that I often found the initial ideas of his films fascinating but then found them over extended to the point of tedious redundancy. I found the same thing here, and perhaps this is a more pointed example given the use of epilepsy inducing flashes throughout the course of the piece (becoming something of a Noé trademark following the ending of Irreversible) that made the piece become that much more annoying faster than usual.
In a way however the strobing does feel motivated, since the film shows a sex scene occuring on a television set and then pulls back to roam (in a characteristically untethered floating camera fashion) around two different bedrooms of a young man and young woman as they, seemingly inspired by the images they are seeing on their respective televisions, masturbate alone. This film does have many of the reductive approaches to creating archetypal characters as in many of Noé's features: the girl is a fragile being and uses a stuffed toy to masturbate with in almost a parody of innocence wanting to be violated; the boy, to my mind at least, gets the far cruder and uncomfortable (and uglier) looking plastic sex doll to use. I did feel as if I 'got the point' of the film - that men are given less abstract things to take their sexual urges out on, but the crudity of these kinds of dolls, combined with the almost teasing sexual imagery of pornography showing the power of men over women builds up a kind of frustrated violence - long before the point became made far too literal as a gun hoves into view on the bed and the man uses it to perform fellatio on the doll before eventually ejaculating over it. Really the last five or ten minutes could have been removed completely and the film would have been better for it. I got the sense of threat through the constant strobing and the juxatposition of the girl’s ‘innocent’ play with her stuffed toy and the boy’s rough treatment of his doll, especially when the doll and camerawork combined to frame it in positions subliminally similar to the rape scene from Irreversible.
Sure, there would have been no literal cum shot had the film ended earlier but that would have perhaps worked to the film's benefit - though on the other hand the inevitability of such an ending with the long haul to get there, for such a paltry result, combined with a rather broad and reductive portrayal of male (and female) sexuality seems like a characteristic of Noé at this point. Complaining about the complete destruction of any subtlety of handling by over extending the message into the over explicitness of hammering the ‘message’ home that is shown in the last five minutes is perhaps pointless when it seems such an integral element (flaw?) to the filmmaker himself.
Richard Prince's House Call is quite weak - a 70s styled weakly premised porn film (of the ‘doctor screwing a patient’ ilk) with a strobing effect of a cathode ray tube television layered on top, likely in order to emphasise the way such material used to be viewed. Nothing particularly interesting here, though there is a neat Brian Eno-esque score on top of the action.
There was even less of interest in Sam Taylor-Wood’s Death Valley in which a chap undresses and masturbates in agonised fashion in the title location all in a single long shot. Basically it is Twentynine Palms with frustrated onanism instead of frustrated, semi-violent sex. Although it was amusing to think of it simply being a film about the lengths that one man will go to in order to find a quiet and isolated spot to masturbate, only to find that it has all been recorded by a distant camera crew using a zoom lens!
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