Peter de Rome | Moulage / 1971

recreating queer bodies

by Douglas Messerli

 

Peter de Rome (director) Moulage / 1971

 

Except for his narrative wit and the cinematic complexity of his works, several of Peter de Rome’s films might truly be described as coming down firmly on the side of the “cock and ass,” pornography rather than representing “the school of the body.” One need only think of the almost hypnotic lure of the sex act performed in a subway in his Underground (1972), the fantasy sex scenes of Daydreams from a Crosstown Bus (1972), or the highly graphic S&M images of repeated bondage and rape in his Prometheus (1972) to recall that several of de Rome’s earliest works depicted images of erection and ejaculation some years before it had yet become commonplace on the screen. Indeed, he is often described as the father of gay sex cinema.

      But, as I have also argued for his The Second Coming (1972) the director simultaneously attached a great deal of sacredness to the male body and is interested, particularly in a work such as Encounter, or Paul & Richard & Michael, & David & Alan & Buddy & Hugo & Tom & Terry & Peter & Richard & Carlos (1970) in the abstract beauty of the male nude even engaged in what is basically a group orgy. In both works, the sex is less perceived as a primitive urge than as a kind of abstract dance, with which the body is always inextricably connected.

     In his 1971 work Moulage, in fact, the body is not only observed and admired but totally embraced and fondled entirely without sex taking place—except for a few sucks of the model’s penis to  bring him to semi-erection. To the music of Christoph Willibald Glūck sculptor Richard  Etts transforms his model Aren Rikas—sans nipple and cock rings—into a ghostly image of himself by applying the handsome boy’s mid-riff and penis up to his neck with oil, moulage, layers of cheese cloth, and further layers of moulage time and again while repeatedly hand-drying  before peeling the hardened plaster away from his body.

      While Rikas picks the final bits of plaster from his skin, Etts carefully wets down the inner shell of the cast and, turning it over, peels off the layers of cheesecloth leaving the plaster shell intact.

      Gradually we see the lean chest of the model, nipples erect; and slowly, after the artist pulls away more layers of cloth, we see the image of Rika’s semi-erect penis. Together Etts assesses the beauty of his “creation,” a ghostly portrait of the body of the now fully dressed young man at his side.

    We have long been schooled through countless reproductions of stone and marble images to recognize the tattooed, cig-smoking somewhat attractive punk now as a kind of Greek or Roman god. If nothing else Rikas has become a low-grade artwork, a sort of down-home Dorian Gray, whose plaster image is forever frozen in youth while we recognize the boy’s mid-riff may very soon develop into a beer belly, his penis eventually remain limp for long periods at a time, his lovely muscles gradually disappearing along with his lean chest. If he was, for example, 20 at the time of the film, he would not 70 years of age.

      Within a span of about 14 minutes, we have discovered the model now has a terrifying double in the world, an image of the man he already no longer is. Yet the sacred body will remain, like the oddly shaped plaster woman he have observed sitting on the shelf, as a tribute to Ett’s art on his studio wall, a body to be worshipped again and again.

 

Los Angeles, August 15, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (August 2021).