Jean-Paul Dupuis | Dansité / 1978

two bodies in motion come to rest

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jean-Paul Dupuis (director), François Verret (choreography) Dansité / 1978

 

French experimental filmmaker and composer Jean-Paul Dupuis’ Dansité (the dance site also representing “density” or “specific gravity”) features two beautiful nude dancers, choreographer François Verret and Alain de Raucourt in a male-on-male pas de deux on a sandy beach among rocks. There, the two dancers play out soundlessly their relationship to each other as bodies, not unlike the sand grains beneath them, in terms of their magnetic valence and movement. These two men lay and stand immobile, fall, are pushed, pulled, intertwined, lifted, and crashed back to earth just as the winds play upon the sand.

    And there is both a kind seemingly ceremonial patterning, a complete randomness of the tumbles, and an interchange between the two as if they were magnetically pulled to or propelled from one another. If they often react in parallel conjunction, the two men at moments looking and behaving as similar and different as two grains of sand, they also are sent, in equal duration, scattering along the shore in momentarily opposite directions.

     As the 10-minute piece progresses, the continued rising of the two figures gradually seems to give way to gravity itself, as near the end one of the figures seems to be attempting to the pull the other up as surely the other is pulling him down. Eventually, his weight falls from its own gravitational pull onto the sandy floor, the two interlocked into one appears to be an intense permanence of non-motion, as what one commentary described—far more anthropomorphically than I have been characterizing these “bodies,”—a frieze, “staring at the eternity of the moment.”

     Interestingly, as they move towards stasis, the images also turn darker, with far less contrast as earlier images.

     But, of course, these are human bodies, and no matter that we might wish to describe them only as figures in motion, they are also two men physically intertwined in what can only be understood by the human mind as a sexual interchange. Their patterned behavior as opposed to their explosions of movement away and apart cannot help but be perceived by the human eye as the emotional reactions of two lovers, themselves attracted and repelled by each other. The détente which they finally reach, might be described as either the recognition of love or perhaps, in full romantic terms, the cessation of all search for another, death. It is fascinating that none of the short commentaries that I’ve read about this film bother to express anything about the gay sexuality at the heart of this work, as if in fact these beautiful male bodies were nothing but grains of sand or flotsam floating across the beach. Indeed, this might be one of the longest and most erotic homo-sexual encounters ever put to film up until the date of this work.

     Dupuis has made more than 50 films, short works and, most recently, longer documentaries, as well as composing music for theater and orchestra.

 

Los Angeles, May 8, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (May 2023).