Michael Brynntrup | All You Can Eat / 1993, USA 1995

a special and limited audience namely adults

by Douglas Messerli

 

Michael Brynntrup (director) All You Can Eat / 1993, USA 1995

 

In five minutes, counted down several times throughout the short film, German director Michael Brynntrup rhythmically takes us through dozens of male orgasms clipped from 1970s gay porn films.

      With a great sense of humor Brynntrup’s hovers over the standard X-film notice, insistently warning us of our viewing responsibilities—we, being presumably part of a “special and limited audience, namely adults who request and desire sexually explicit materials” told that we cannot sell the film “to any persons except consenting adults who agree to view the film in private and further agree not to transfer the film to minors or to any person who does not wish to view the material”— before diving into the actual sex acts which include both masturbation and anal sex.

      The humor lies in the fact that all we see of these graphically sexual acts is the young men’s faces and shifting expressions as they enjoy sex or come to a climax.

      The first series of faces are simple expressions of pleasure as these teenage boys and slightly older men—not all of them very attractive—rather straight forwardly cum.

   But after a number of these ejaculations, Brynntrup shifts the rhythm of 1-2-3-4 to something more complex, the images suggesting not just the sexual act but anticipation (a licking of the lips), voyeurism (the eyes focused on another), mutual or group orgasm, and pain.

     In the last section, the music slowly winds down, suggesting the last minutes of spent sexual release, amplified by repeating it with several different figures before the short work announces:    

“The End.”

      The obvious question, of course, is whether or not observing sex without seeing any sexual organs is pornographic or not. Might these faces, without the context of the porno film, be seen simply as a group of young men enjoying life, simply taking it the pleasure of an April morning or the appearance of a dear friend. Or does pornography even define joy itself when it matches our notions of how sexual release is expressed. Are the sexual actors who are performing these scenes expressing precisely what everyone else does in ejaculating or experiencing a good fuck, or are they “acting,” giving us something that we have to expect as emblems of sexual gratification?

      There are certainly no answers, but the questions about what pornography consists of spiral endlessly out of this small work. Is something pornographic only because it represents the body parts of ass and penis (those parts of the human anatomy which we are not allowed to reveal in public or even on Facebook and other such internet services) or does the “pornographic danger” exist in the expression of how those particular body parts make us feel with entered, pulled, jabbed, or rubbed?

     Does pornography perhaps even define the joy we take from participating in such natural and normal acts? Throughout these clips we see only one person at a time, never two men or more. Accordingly, can this work even be describes as representing homosexual sex?

      By the time we reach the climax of this film, we are certainly more confused about sex than any of the young men we are watching. Does the pornography perhaps lie in our eyes and not at all in the acts we are witnessing?

      Is the director’s humorous title itself pornographic. What if he explained that all these boys have just had bitten into something delicious, like a chocolate eclair or a handmade tamale?  How do we identify active sex?

 

Los Angeles, February 12, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (February 2022).