Constantine Giannaris | Jean Genet Is Dead / 1987

autumn dirge

by Douglas Messerli

 

Constantine Giannaris (screenwriter and director) Jean Genet Is Dead / 1987

Shifting between Super 8 and video footage, mixing images of light and color, Greek-born director, working in England in 1987* attempts to counterpose images of landscape and prisons while his child actors, Steven McLean and Rafael Penal read from the works of Jean Genet’s The Miracle of the Rose and A Thief’s Journal, discussing the prisons the youthful Genet spent his early life in, particularly Mattray Penal Colony for the reformation of delinquents.

      Children often housed with adults, by 1926-1929, when Genet was imprisoned there, it had lost its reputation for being a liberal institution and was known for its harsh treatment of both boys and men.

 

      Interspersed with his descriptions of the prisons and the landscape are Genet’s early thoughts on sex and salvation and many other themes that were seen as highly controversial still in 1987. Genet had died the year previous, and it is clear that Giannaris felt in his film’s representation of deserted places which nonetheless appear to offer refuge, it would be a forceful tribute to the dead author, while also standing as emblems for both the isolation of suffering and death by AIDS in their sense of solace and community as described in Genet’s texts.

 

      If nothing else, these forsaken locations call up Genet’s life of homosexual argument and activity, and reiterate the fact that his life of living as a thief, vagabond, vagrant, and prostitute brought him closer to comprehending the dreams and sexual obsessions of the gay community, suffering not for their sins but simply for their natural desires, refused and punished by a society that cannot embrace anything outside of its limited normative perspectives.

      If at moments Giannaris’ 35-minute movie is repetitive and even boring, it is nonetheless nearly always mesmerizing as images of architecture and males face the endless rays of the sun, which both invigorate and ravage their bodies, at times creating a sense of something close to feverish delirium.

      And finally, just as Genet describes the constant sense of the light infused with the golden colors of autumn at the Mattray Penal Colony, so too is Giannaris’ movie a kind of autumn dirge for the end of something golden and beautiful, which now lays dying and empty.

 

*IMDb lists the film as 1989, but several other sources which I see as more reliable, including Mubi and British sites, describe it as Giannaris’ first film of 1987.

 

Los Angeles, April 3, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (April 2024).