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).

Wallace Potts | Le beau mec / 1979

the sexual saturation of narcissus

by Douglas Messerli

 

Karl Forest and Wallace Potts (screenplay), Wallace Potts (director) Le beau mec / 1979

 

For those in the know, Wallace Potts, who directed this utterly fascinating documentary on one of the first of France’s gay porn superstars, is best known for his numerous films of Russian-born dancer Rudolf Nureyev’s performances. His ability to film all these important documentary movies came about because he was Rudy’s lover and close friend for 7 years. A soft-spoken, intensely handsome US Southern boy, Potts wowed not only Nureyev, whose immense ego he was able to balance with his gentle southern drawn and refusal to see himself at the center of events. After their breakup, he eventually attracted the great cinematographer Nestor Almendros into his bed while Almendros while he was shooting Truffaut’s The Last Metro  (previously having filmed Rohmer’s “Six Moral Tales” series, La Marquise d'O...,1976, Perceval le Gallois, 1978, and Pauline at the Beach, 1983, as well as Terence Mallick’s Days in Heaven, 1978 and François Truffaut’s The Wild Child  of 1970, and numerous Hollywood films.)

      The cinematographer Almendros also helped during the same period in filming Pott’s strange mix of a gay porn film and a truly revealing documentary into the make-up of his subject in Le beau mec, Karl Forest, with the additional help of François About who shot the great gay porn epic Equation to an Unknown, reviewed in these pages in the 1980 volume.

      Mixing recreated gay porn scenes with extant interviews this fascinating docufantasy, long available only on truncated VHS transfers (one of which I watched before I rented the new version), has now been reclaimed as a DVD restoration.

       Forest, serving as a co-writer, comes off sometimes as a brash, somewhat unthinking product of provincial France. He grew up in an area where the French underground had once inhabited, leaving their active rifles and ammunition in the caves. He and other boys behaved apparently somewhat like the boys in Italian director Matteo Garrone’s 2008 Italian crime film Gomorrah, where the young play with real rifles as if they were toys. Such behavior is seemingly always involved with sex, guns and sex being the standard associations in such sexually sublimated societies.

      Sex and guns become a major sub-theme of the film, as Forest joins the military, where as an officer, he refused, with some noted regret, to have sex with any of his military associates, terrified that he might be referred to in the strict system to which he was committed, as a faggot.

      The film early on asserts its significance through the deep sexual link between men and guns, with Forest, stark naked, sprawling on the nose of a large canon. Throughout this work Potts plays with the obvious sexual relationship between guns and cocks.

      Indeed, Forest willfully plays along moving on to other obvious sexual parallels as the self-willed porn star speaks often almost ironically of his life, keeping a slight distance between his role as a sex actor and an individual: “What I do at night I don’t do in the daytime. I see that film at night. I’m the actor.”

 

      Yet, increasingly Forest moves into a sexual world of fantasy with a bit a practical realism always embedded in the rifle of his constantly sperm-shooting life:

 

“I work out for myself, like preparing myself for other things. ….I use the mirror only to help me. When I see myself in the mirror I don’t fall in love with myself, shit no, if I fell in love with myself I wouldn’t be going to the gym.

    In ten years when the body’s gone I’ll have changed completely. But right now my life is dressing up and showing off and all that. …But right now, it’s the body, sex, and money.”

       Potts alternates these somewhat self-reflective comments with a large dose of open sex, something you can’t imagine even being possible today without it being described as pure porn. Yet we recognize this very sexy movie somehow as being also a kind of soft-porn eroticism. The director is able to manage this because of the sexual openness of the times, just before AIDS, and the irony in which Forest himself is able to capture his sexual allure.

        At one point, he states “What I really like is a well-developed boy.” And in the next moment he admits his sexual infatuation “Maybe it’s unfortunate, but I see people only for sex.” Moreover, unlike most later porn stars, hustlers, and sexual tricksters, Forest totally embraces his gay sexuality, admitting that “I’m a man for all seasons. I can do anything,” explaining that he likes to fuck, be fucked, to be sucked off, and move moreover into other sexual fetishes: “Yeah, I do fist fucking both ways, give and take.”

       Fantasy might be important--“Yeah, I have a ton of fantasies”--but he recognizes the dangers of where they might take him: “But fantasies are like playing with fire because sometimes when you let them out, they become disappointing.”

       It’s this honest sexual patter that keeps Potts’ film from taking all the lusting bodies of fucking and frotting too seriously. I truly don’t think you could make such an honest sexual film today, much like the next year’s Equation to an Unknown. It becomes so clear, in watching the entertainment that we have now grown so very conservative in the gay attempt to match heterosexual expectations that the raw difference this movie reveals is simply unacceptable.

       As I discussed with a friend of mine only yesterday, AIDS changed everything, politics behind it so that we can simply no longer totally enjoy our bodies, or the sexual differences between heterosexual caution and homosexual excess.

       Love clearly has nothing to do with it: “Yeah, once I was in love. As it turns out, he wasn’t in love with me. I was in love with a boy, but since he wasn’t in love with me, it didn’t work out. I don’t know why it didn’t, and didn’t try to understand why it didn’t.”

     Yet, even in this dreamscape of sexual abandonment there is a true comeuppance, a kind of inevitable sadness that we have come to expect in all gay films, alas.

     By the end of the film Forest is 27 years of age and wondering whether or not he is “sexually saturated.” And in the last scenes of the film, he makes love to himself in the mirror, becoming a true Narcissus.

      But then that myth was always been about the beauty of the body mirrored into a duo in which anyone might imagine himself (or herself) as the other. Nureyev, himself, was long rumored to have choreographed the striptease sequences.

    The great dancer died of complications of AIDS at age 54 in 1993. Potts himself died if complications of lymphoma in a Los Angeles hospital in 2006 at age 59.

       Vito Rosso was right, as usual. Beautiful gay boys are always destined to die. But in this movie we see the beauty of their sexual energy and the vitality of their lives.

       If you’re not squeamish about gay sex, Le beau mec is a film you have to see.

 

Los Angeles, November 17, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema (November 2024)

 

 

Bertrand Mandico | Ultra pulpe (Apocalypse After) / 2018

a lost planet

by Douglas Messerli

 

Bertrand Mandico (screenwriter and director) Ultra pulpe (Apocalypse After) / 2018 [37 minutes]

 

French director Bertrand Mandico has created in Apocalypse After a hot-sex art house film that is beautiful to look at but is frankly rather empty in its narrative about a film shoot in which the actress and director, Apocalypse and Joy D’Amato (Pauline Jacquard and Elina Löwensohn) end both their lesbian affair and their cinematic relationship in a series of surreal-like images.

    Pushing both the bond between the two and the actor to give her more of the “subliminal perversions” of film she is seeking, Joy makes films that are essentially filled with allusions from everyone to artist Henry Darger to filmmakers such as Jean Cocteau and Walerian Borowczyk. The images she captures—through Mandico’s camera—are, in fact, quite stunning, but the pop science fiction tale behind it is pure hokum and distracting.

      Critic Brandon Ledet nicely summarizes it: “The Apocalypse After short is a thematically cohesive but logically incoherent collection of all the stylistic flourishes & quirks sketched out in Mandico’s first two features: the plant life molestations of The Wild Boys, the hollow geode-face zombies of After Blue, and the practically achieved glamour that merges their aesthetics—gel lights, rear projections, body glitter, smoke, prosthetic nipples, etc.”

    He continues  “… In a way, the film shoot setting positions “Apocalypse After” as Mandico’s Knife+Heart (a movie he acted in as a porno cinematographer), but it’s even less of a coherent, linear story and even more of an expression of its director’s fascinations & frustrations with his artform.  Dialogue that declares details of the film shoot “magnificently hideous” or complain, “It’s beautiful, but at the same time I don’t know what he means,” function as meta commentary on the achievements & shortcomings of Mandico’s art.  No dialogue feels more essential to the piece than an actor’s monologue recalling watching forbidden, adult films as a child – compelled & mesmerized by the images on the screen but too young to fully comprehend them. Mandico has a way of turning pornographic indulgence into transcendent visual art, and even then he directs his avatar in Löwensohn to shout that the images are still not erotic enough.  Nothing ever could be.”

 

     Although Mandico’s film also calls up elements of Guy Maddin, Kenneth Anger, and James Bidgood, I’ll take their films any day over the layers of imitation that constitute Mandico’s cinematic world. Perhaps the true missing element here is his utter lack of humor. It’s one thing to imitate those figures I’ve mentioned along with Yann Gonzalez and even Peter Strickland, but it’s quite another to carry the viewer into the work’s narrative. Camp, which at times this film veers towards, is more about the audience than the auteur’s vision.

      I feel chocked, put off, restricted in watching Apocalypse After as if it were an LGBTQ science-fantasy that never once attempted to reach out to me. If Mandico has only paid a little less attention to his own cinematic self-satisfied images and just focused a little more on the viewer, I might have been able to share in his mad fantasies.

 

Los Angeles, November 17, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (November 2024).