François Reichenbach | Nus masculins (Male Nudes) / 1954

pretty boys

by Douglas Messerli

 

François Reichenbach (screenwriter and director) Nus masculins (Male Nudes) / 1954

 

      When I first watched Nous masculins—which features very few nudes and even when it does, primly places their bodies in fields, forests, and streams—I found the film almost to be effete, with its prettified pictures of good-looking boys wandering through gardens, posing with statues, or visiting piazzas, churches, and other tourist-like destinations throughout Europe. It reminded me of the numerous coffee-table books of photographs of males dressed, partially undressed, and nude by photographic artists such as, George Platt Lynes, Imogen Cunningham, Minor White, Larry Clark, Dave Martin, Brian Harris, and so many others. Even the numerous physique photographers of the 1950s and early 1960s appeared to be more interested in the only slightly hidden—and accordingly provocatively forbidden—sexuality of their subjects in comparison to the men filmed by Reichenbach in what is often described as his cinematic “travelogue.”

 

     Certainly, the young Taormina boys and adolescents who posed for turn-of-the-century photographer Baron Wilhelm von Gloeden were imbued with more sexual potential and, on the part of the photographer of more sexual interest than the French director allowed his handsome Italian men, like the one walking the stairs of Florio, Ischia’s famed Chiesa del Soccorso, to betray.

     Nonetheless, there was no question here that the director was focusing his gaze almost exclusively upon the dozens of handsome male individuals almost as if he couldn’t get enough of his seemingly voyeuristic pleasure. And when he finally reaches New York, the males he follows in tight denim jeans smoking alone or sharing a cigarette, and the men who inhabit Central Park, some seemingly romping rather campily in what appears to be a fashion shot, appear to elicit a subtle narrative that more fully involves the filmmaker.

 

Los Angeles, December 13, 2020

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog and World Cinema Review (December 2020).