Stéphane Marti | Allegoria / 1979

the kindest use the knife

by Douglas Messerli

 

Stéphane Marti (screenwriter and director) Allegoria / 1979

 

Experimental filmmaker Stéphane Marti was born in Algiers in 1951, and became beginning in the mid-1970s a director who critics identified as one of the major protagonists of “body art,” who, having studied with Dominique Neguez, dealt with issues of gender identity disorder and various views of the concept of desire. He quickly became a central figure in what was dubbed “the School of the Body,” as his films focused on the bodies of his central figures as they both suffered and explored their sexualities.

     Allegoria is truly an allegory about many things: desire, gay sexuality, the satisfaction of homosexual infatuation—and as so very many films of the 1970s still revealed, the failure to satisfy those sexual inclinations—which ended generally in dissatisfaction and death, symbolic and sometimes real.

       The bathtub bound, fully clothed Aloual (the Madagascar born actor born in 1952 and who died in 2014, who appeared in several of Marti’s movies) is already bleeding, suffering from the breakup or actual murder by his lover, a white boy, who as either broken his heart symbolically or actually stabbed him in the heart physically. Does it matter?

       The black man is bleeding and dying, a victim of love and probably as well social injustice, who even when his lover seems to return, both of them made up with facial masks of intense make-up and glitter, have destroyed the other in their relationship.

        Time and again, we see the dying Aloual, half clothed, falling down a long flight of public stairs as if he were is some Eisenstein movie, with a broken or stabbed heart, unable to continue his voyage to wherever he might have been going.

        Their love is replayed for us but ends, over and over again, with his white lover stabbing him, followed by the twist and turns down the Odessa-like staircase.

         Despite our desires or even Marti’s attempts to re-reel the tape as if it might provide an alternative solution, sex has resulted in death, eros ends in thanatos. That this film was released just a few years prior to the AIDS crisis is highly significant and almost visionary. Marti survived, but most of his characters died for love.

 

Los Angeles, November 17, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema (November 2024).