Lionel Soukaz | Ixe / 1980

1001 reports of a planet preparing for extinction

By Douglas Messerli

 

Lionel Soukaz (screenwriter and director) Ixe / 1980

 

The press description usually accompanying the 1980 French experimental cinema piece, Ixe (in French sounding almost like a scream after being wounded, “Eeks”)—suggesting both the movie rating of X and, from the Latin, the vague indication of something unknown, “that”—describes director Lionel Soukaz’ work as being “the four points of the compass, the four ends of the cross: War, Sex, Religion, and Drugs.”

    Soukaz has generally acknowledged that he was determined to provoke the censors after their reaction to his and Guy Hocquenghem’s Race d’Ep (1971). In short, this work was out to shock, which it does to a certain degree even today with what the commentator on Letterboxd who identified himself as “Brian,” writes “is a dizzying aggressive montage of apocalyptic imagery, crescendoing in intensity from relatively banal juxtapositions of sucking-and-fucking with images of the Pope to gruesomely explicit scenes of heroin usage, bestiality, mass destruction, and war.”

     Yet the film is something far greater than that, representing as it does “Vivre,” life and existence itself, the cry of the French gay liberation movement.

      Throughout is a throbbing soundtrack which includes both serious rock, electronic sampling, and silly songs such as “I Feel Pretty,” the French singing nun’s hit ditty “Dominique,” and Iggy Pop’s “I’m an African Man,” accompanied often with the sound of mad laughter, as if Batman’s The Joker has gotten loose and is howling at the depravity of the world as the planet whirls into total extinction.

      In fact, the film ends in a full 5-minute roll of a flickering black screen as if after the image of the atomic bomb, our world went dead, and which many viewers argue anticipates the AIDS crisis as represented on film five years before the 1985-86 quartet of the first depictions of the epidemic in Nik Sheehan’s No Sad Songs, Arthur J. Bressan Jr.’s Buddies, John Erman’s An Early Frost, and Bill Sherwood’s Parting Glances.

      If nothing else, as our astute reviewer Brian argues, the work appears “to foretell, in a manner reminiscent of Pasolini’s late period, a disastrous collapse of gay sexuality’s utopian potential into the horrific, incoherent gibberish of a violent capitalist culture.” But even our critic recognizes that in that statement he has himself moved into an almost incoherent and inexpressible experience that can only be witnessed, not fully expressed.

      For in the end, Ixe does not permit narrative or, perhaps, even a coherent statement about its devastating impact. The seemingly endless barrage of comic, emotionally moving, violent, loving, and horrific images must be experienced through each viewer’s personal mind and heart. There is no one vision underlying Soukaz’s truly dangerous screed. This work gets under one’s skin through its flickering, vast edit of images that are simultaneously innocent, joyful, sexually explicit, drugged out, destructive, humorous, clichéd, and spiritually uplifting.

       The only way to fully express this film is to watch it. Below I have done my own mini-editing of some of the most memorable images flashed for 48 minutes before our eyes until we feel so exhausted and numbed that in its dark ending we perhaps feel that have witnessed far too much.

       Although there are no “actors” in this work, the visages of human beings include Jean-François B., François Dantchev, Farida, Karine, Hervé Leymarie, Lionel Soukaz, Verveine, Philippe Veschi, York, and Pope John Paul II.

Los Angeles, September 2, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (September 2025).