Douglas Soares | Inocentes (Innocents) / 2017

beach boys

by Douglas Messerli       

 

Douglas Soares (screenwriter and director) Inocentes (Innocents) / 2017 [19 minutes]

 

Douglas Soares’ Innocents is less a cinematic narrative than it is a collation of homoerotic film clips of the young boys shot from the Ipanema apartment balcony of the noted photographer Alair Gomes.

      Born and raised in Rio de Janeiro, Gomes (1921-1992) was trained in engineering and physical sciences, but from youth on he developed an obsession with the male body, writing, often philosophically, about it in his diaries which eventually amounted to some 20,000 pages, and then, beginning in the 1960s through photography, his best known series, “A Window in Rio,” of 1977-80, consisting of images taken from his apartment window.

     Given that this was also the period of the Fifth Brazilian Republic, the military dictatorship of Brazil, it is all the more amazing that he captured so many thousands of images of beautiful young men on the beach, often in small groups or pairs in which they worked out together, talked, and displayed—as the narrator on the phone and in his own voice in Soares short tribute announces—obvious erections. 

     If there is any continuity in this work it is in the gradual shift the photographer makes from being only a voyeur, shooting from his window and balcony, to actually moving down to the beach itself, and finally to inviting in young men to more fully reveal their genitalia and erections.

   Each viewer will have to determine which images are more homoerotic and evaluate the psychological and social meaning of the invisible photographer’s relationship to his images.

     But there is one thing clear particularly in the earlier of the images, that Gomes’ subjects, despite their display of sexuality, are total innocents. They do nothing except attend to their friends at the beach and any sexual connotations we attribute to their actions is through the manipulation of the camera. Only in the final images where, presumably, they are willing unclothe themselves and reveal their erections do the figures actually participate in the artist’s voyeuristic approach to the world around him.

      Marcos Caruso provides the voice of Alair Gomes, who telephones friends and later speaks to his models. The models in this collation of images include Luciano Carneiro, Julio Fernandes, Felipe Herzog, Bruno Krause, William Manfroi, Matheus Martins, Iann Pastor, Tiago Correa Pereira, Allan Ribeiro, and Ed Saldanha.

      Alexandre Meto has written about this body of Gomes’ work, offering a slightly different perspective than my own comments above:

 

“Gomes focuses his camera on the men strolling on the seaside pedestrian walkway (calçadão) or engaging in acts of physical recreation on the beach. Strictly speaking, he is not engaging in voyeurism but rather in the simple observation of nearly nude bodies in a public setting. The most distinguishing characteristic of Gomes’s work is the intensity of his gaze, which plunges into the banal summertime activities of thousands of bodies that anyone might pass by even today on Rio’s beaches. Through framing and an almost musical sequencing of images, the artist reveals in these bodies the raw material for a form of representation that harkens back to classical notions of beauty and an idealistic aspiration to create eternal value. With Gomes, we can speak of a philosophical attitude and a practice of imagemaking founded in the belief that transcendent value, the truth of the body’s beauty, can be captured in the simple presence of a stranger on a beach.”

 

Los Angeles, December 8, 2023

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (December 2023).