Douglas Messerli | The Body's Dance of the Other / 2021

the body’s dance of the other

by Douglas Messerli

 

It is surely not accidental that about the very same time that gay movie-makers began to create films featuring male nudity and sexuality, several other cinematic artists shaped experimental non-narrative works that critics over the next few years would describe as “the school of the body.” Taking their cues perhaps from Willard Maas’s 1943 short in which male and female bodies were explored so close-up that they appeared at moments to be newly discovered continents, directors such as the San Francisco-based filmmaker/dancer/opera designer Ronald Chase, the London / USA auteur Peter de Rome, and the French theoretical cineaste Stéphane Marti all focused on the portraying the male body as a kind of sacred being apart from the source of its fleshy sexual delights.

      In a some respects one might almost argue that the differences between these film directors and the wave of future porn artists such as Wakefield Poole, Fred Halsted, Peter Berlin and over the next decade Jerry Tartaglia and Jean-Daniel Cadinot were something akin to the pitch battle played out through French LGBTQ cinema in a far more symbolic manner in the early 1950s between Jean Genet and François Reichenbach that continued to send waves over the next decade into US and British filmmaking. One might almost jokingly describe it as a struggle between a focus on the male cock and ass over the representation of the male pectorals and face—not that either of these two schools wished to demean the other body parts. There were obviously plenty of beautiful abs and faces in Poole, Berlin, and Cadinot’s films, and a great many lovely asses and cocks in Chase’s, de Rome’s, and Marti’s works. But what the camera did to them, how it embedded them (literally) in terms of setting, and what those bodies did or didn’t wear meant nearly everything. In short, it was a struggle that continues still today between so-called “dirty” and sacramental gay cinematic art, between a literalization of the body or a far more abstract representation of it.

     In each of these films, it appears, the other can be adored, touched, kissed, and even recreated as an artifact, but once it is truly sexually embraced or “mounted” it has lost the wonder of its “otherness.”

     The body is a thing to be worshiped, idolized, or even simply watched in motion, but the minute it is controlled it loses its exceptionalness, it becomes too much like the other which it excites, entices, and allures. In a strange way it becomes like Bob Mizer’s “Indian” I previously described, a dead wooden thing that only stands for the beauty it once possessed.

 

Los Angeles, August 15, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (August 2021).