Ronald Chase | Cathedral / 1971

gay sex as a holy act

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ronald Chase (director) Cathedral / 1971

 

Today Ronald Chase is best known for his work with opera, employing techniques of film and photography to numerous operatic production designs, often working with director Frank Corsaro, beginning in the late 1960s and early 1970s—during the same period of his early short films—with his productions for the Washington Opera Society (three of which I saw as a young man living in that city), The Turn of the Screw, Koanga, Beatrix Cenci, and A Village Romeo and Juliet before branching out to the Houston Grand Opera, the New York City Opera, Opera Theater of St. Louis, Los Angeles Opera, the Chicago Lyric Opera, and elsewhere for productions of Die Tote Stadt, Docktor Faust, Anna Karenina, Die Frau ohne Schatten, and Lulu.

      Having studied as a dancer at Bard College, Chase also filmed dance works such as The Covenant (1966), directed two feature films, Bruges-la-Morte (1976) and  Lulu (1977), created many photographic exhibitions, and filmed several shorts, including Fragments (1964), Clown (1969), Chameleon (1969), Scene One: Take One (1971), Parade (1972), Sally Simpson (1972), Beatrice Cenci (1972), A Village Romeo and Juliet (1975), Fantasia on the Childhood of Busoni (1976), and Very Angry People (2000).  Only a couple of these short films are overtly gay; I discuss Parade and Chameleon elsewhere in these pages.

      Cathedral, on the other hand, is clearly an LGBTQ work, beginning with three men laying together on a bed. At first in the ten-minute work, the camera simply focuses on faces, moving briefly over sometimes unidentifiable body parts, examining them in such quick glimpses that we can hardly determine if they are even bodies, let alone what their relationship is to one another.

      But gradually hands reach out to touch, to stroke, show affection, and to simply explore the other. This process continues for some time, but gradually moves up from the chest onto the face, and, as it does so, effects the interactions between the bodies as, one by one, they come together time and again in a series of overlaying images and montage in gentle kisses.      

     In their engagement with one another, it is clearly deep love they are expressing to one another rather than an act of sexual foreplay. Again and again, hands reach out, stroke the curves of the shoulder, back, and hip as lips come in contact with the other’s lips.

    Slowly this moves into what one might even describe as a kind of dance, reflected patterns of a screen or a sheet interplaying upon their bodies just as their hands and lips continue to create new abstractly carved patterns out of their bodies themselves.

     Eventually, we see the white, green, and lightly colored shapes transform into bright colorful reflections that are clearly those of stained-glass cathedral  windows—in Chase’s case the windows of the St. Chapel in Paris—which after a period of intercutting with the bodily motions begin to shift more quickly, the dashes of colors almost creating a of kind of neon street-sign bedazzlement that twists and twirls around the slumbering bodies to finally embrace the trio,  pulling the three, a holy trinity of sorts, into  the vortex of the cathedral, making it clear that in their  employment of gentle  touching and kissing that the three have transformed  their very bodies into  something holy and worthy of being held in the cathedral along with its other relics.

      As the director states about it his own work, the film was thought to have lost of over 50 years, and was discovered in 2019 and restored in high-definition. “...One of the earliest of the gay films after Stonewall,” it “refused to see touch, affection, and sensuality only in pornographic terms.

 

Los Angeles, August 15, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (August 2021).