Shota Kalandadze | ‘კინო სინჯები' ფილმის თრეილერი (Making of Movies, aka Movie Making Of) / 2014

gay eroticism

by Douglas Messerli

 

Shota Kalandadze (director) ‘კინო სინჯები' ფილმის თრეილერი (Making of Movies, aka Movie Making Of) / 2014 / [42 minutes]

 

Georgian director Shota Kalandadze describes his role as a erotic artist. Much of his filmmaking involves erotic heterosexual scenes, some of them exclusively. But a great many of his films, particularly Making of Movies, involves numerous homoerotic, lesbian, and homosexual erotic scenes, in this film perhaps outnumbering the heterosexual sequences.

      This film, which is more often short in short segments throughout the internet, is in its 42-minute entirety on Vimeo titled Movie Making Of, a title which it’s hard to determine if it is simply a bad translation which retained the original linguistic structure of the Georgian or was an intentional attempt to rethink the structural meaning of the movie-making activity. Yet at other Vimeo and YouTube locations with selections from the film it is often rendered as Making of Movies.

      In any event, this film consists of numerous short segments of women and men in various erotic movements. When women are featured, they are mostly dancing, sometimes fully dressed and at other moments nude or partially unclothed. Men are also shown dancing sexually with women, and some moments even engaged in the early stages of sexual intercourse and, at one point, during intercourse itself.

      The women are often quite beautiful, but clearly have been chosen, as Kalandadze reveals in one segment, for their interesting faces rather than standard notions of beauty.

       The boys, on the other hand, which he shows sometimes alone, almost as in the Warhol screentests, and with other boys, are almost all hirsute and beautiful specimens of, as one of his short films describes them, “Georgian boys.”

       In many of these scenes they are simply engaged in sports-like activities, boxing, weight-lifting, etc. But in others, there is clearly a homoerotic charge between the couples and threesomes, particularly when the boys themselves begin to dance with one another.

      The boys are presented half dressed, partially naked, and fully naked, in several scenes a point made of their bouncing cocks, particularly during exercises and dance.

      

     Although dance is the major motif of this film, since almost all the scenes are filmed in a small house with art of the walls, art itself becomes a major theme along, of course, with the music that we sometimes hear along with the dances.

     Most sequences are in black-and-white, but some suddenly appear in color.

     Seduction, of female and male and male on male is also an important theme of these unrelated sequences.

      If one truly sees these short and longer pieces as sequences from a would-be film in the process of being shot, one would have to suggest that there is no narrative spine to the work, the theme, if you can describe it as such, being Georgia culture and beauty, with a particular emphasis on dance, music, and the physical specimens that are represented, young and older (the latter particularly in some scenes with the women).

       The sequences, in their varied nature, nonetheless act almost as a lure as they move into more and more sexual content without ever veering from their voyeuristic nature into pure pornography. The subject—at least in this particular work—is eroticism, not sexuality as such.

       In other films, Kalandadze blurs those barriers by bringing in transgender figures and far more sexual scenarios.

 

Los Angeles, January 6, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (January 2024)