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About Just out. (Portland, OR) 1983-2013 | View Entire Issue (March 16, 2007)
TWO film DISC LIMITED EDITION •<r The Jean Genie d (2/ wutl (S ong oi tow) Early erotic masterpiece finally sees the light on DVD by Christopher McQuain n a recent discussion about the general lack of subversion associated with mainstream gay culture now that such a thing is (thankfully) possible, 1 found myself saying, by way of ■ illustration, “Jean Genet would never have shopped at Abercrombie & Fitch.” This French novelist, playwright and filmmaker—who became famous in the 1950s and 1960s with provocative, homoerotic novels and plays like Our Lady of the Flowers and The Maids— is a fig ure whose homosexuality can be said to have been the most “normal” (i.e., socially acceptable) thing about him. A chronically recidivist prisoner since his troubled childhood, Genet was turned on by the criminals he found himself surrounded by, and was able to parlay his feverish erotic obsessions and misanthropy into some of the most beautiful prose ever written. He rejected “straight” society in all senses of the term, and he saw himself as an eternal and irredeemable champion of whomever he consid ered to be oppressed, whether that meant gays (when we were considered “perverts”), thieves, jailbirds, Black Panthers, immigrants, Palestinians, etc. But there was always a deep, tense core of tenderness to Genet’s work. He evidently took Oscar Wilde’s famous line, “All of us are lying in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars," to mean that the deeper in the gutter one lies, the better view of the stars one is afforded. This paradoxical, quixotic—some might say perverse—worldview is on full display in Genet’s 1950 film Un Chant d’ Amour (A Songof Love), which has just been released to DVD for the first time in the United States. The film, a 25-minute silent short, can be likened to those of Jean Cocteau, Genet’s fellow aesthetictan of excessive feeling and eroticizer of male flesh (especially the former’s 1930 film Blood of a Poet). There is a sort of narrative to Un Chant d’Amour, but much of the imagery, gorgeously com posed and shot, is purely poetic. Like any erotic dream, which is what the film unequivocally resem bles, “reality” is a mere jumping-off point, a source of raw material to be transformed and lent profounder meaning by the imagination. The film takes places in a prison, where the inmates are separated from one another in solitary cells. A prison guard watches through peepholes as they masturbate in various stages of undress, which arouses the voyeur. Two prisoners in particular draw his attention'The first, darkly handsome, is attempt ing to communicate with an object of affection, a cherubic and narcissistic young man in the adjacent cell. The first man pounds on the wall that separates them; one masculine arm swings a flaccid bunch of flowers back and forth from a barred cell window, teasing the extended arm in the next window as it attempts to grasp what must be a rare (if not unique) cinematic instance of a phallic bouquet. a F ilm by J ean A C m > E ki tnuM G enet LtYV In what might be the film’s most beautiful and memorable image, the first prisoner passes a thin straw through a tiny hole in the wall sepa rating them, via which the smoke Jean Genet parlayed his feverish erotic obsessions into from his cigarette can be generously some of the most beautiful prose ever written. transferred through his lips and into the waiting mouth of his object of desire. The American queer filmmaker Kenneth Anger, and an guard, evidently jealous of this interplay, enters the additional disc containing two documentaries from cell of the first man and physically assaults him, the early 1980s featuring interviews with Genet as sending him into a reverie in which he and his a wizened, chain-smoking curmudgeon, charming paramour are a free couple frolicking and exploring for retaining his irascibility well into old age. (He one another in the woods. The vivid fantasy, died at age 75 in 1986.) This release is a treasure romantically and sexually powerful, is consolation trove of background and insight for Genet aficiona enough for the imprisoned protagonist, who is both dos, neophytes and cinema buffs alike, but the real defeated and satisfied. In the last shot, the reaching prize is the film itself. “Pornography” and “art" are arm in the cell window finally catches hold of the highly subjective terms, but for those swept up in swinging bouquet. its overpowering erotic and aesthetic currents, Un The film is supplemented with an enlightening Chant d'Amour will easily qualify as a masterpiece in either category. • introduction by Jonas Mekas, a legendary curator and exhibitor of underground film; a surprisingly tentative, dispensable commentary by acclaimed C hristopher M c Q uain is a Seattle freelance writer. Rock World Beat MUSIC MILLENNIUM Soul ii.iinitiiiiiiiiiiiihiintuii r~? ■ >iflimtnr-WSSS Okies wr - ' Women's 1111111111U11111111 Folk jazz Gospel Country New Age Bluegrass Soundtracks Musicals Lounge Big Band Comedy Reggae Spoken Word and more... 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