Stéphane Marti | Oratorio / 2008

leap into love

by Douglas Messerli

 

Stéphane Marti (director) Oratorio / 2008 [10 minutes]

 

To those viewers with untrained eyes and hardened hearts, Marti’s short experimental film might seem to be about three young men who descend upon public monuments and the Père Lachaise cemetery with the intention of desecration.

  

    To others, such as this commentator, this short cinema, performed to the accompaniment of music of Johann Sebastien Bach's Christmas Oratorio, and filmed in black-and-white instead of his usual multi-color studies of the male body and queer sex, allows Marti’s 2008 10-minute tour de force, Oratorio to breathe in the same air of Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless (1960) as its handsome young men literally dance their way through public spaces, filming their own “elfic” actions as they duck in an out of mausoleums to the dead and skip across sacred graves.

     In fact, almost with the energy of pop and rock singers of the 1960s (The Beatles included), this trio turns everything upside down, bringing an unexpected profane energy into the world of monuments to the sacred dead.

    This is truly a gay trio, one joyfully snapping the camera of the other happy couple who pose and play among the ruins and public spaces. Moreover, we can perceive that these three handsome young Pucks are homosexual, in love with life and one another, at one point kissing, and at other moments just hugging one another close.

     The camera catching queer poses is common to Marti’s filmmaking, but seldom has he work been so very rambunctious. And perhaps it helps to know that Père Lachaise was in my day, and perhaps still is one of gay men’s favorite cruising spots.

     Late in the film, the three almost mock the Romantic poets in reading aloud from Dominique Noguez’s Dictionary of Love while sitting atop a grave monument, almost as if their energy might bring all these dead men and women back to life.

     I can think of no other film quite like this except for, on a much larger scale, Claire Denis’s film Beau Travail of 1999, released about a decade earlier and even earlier, perhaps Leonard Bernstein’s and Jerome Robbin’s dance of 1944, Fancy Free, which later was transformed into the musical On the Town.

     If these three young men seem to stand in utter opposition to the spaces they inhabit in this short film, we need only think back to the fact that the foremost of these public spaces, Père Lachaise, is the resting space of so very many artists and thinkers, whose ideas, art, and writings still vitalize our lives.

     I feel sorry for those who cannot see just how Christian in spirit this rendition of Bach’s Oratorio is in its demonstration of Christ’s teachings about love.

 

Los Angeles, July 3, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (July 2025).