Peter de Rome | Encounter, or Paul & Richard & Michael, & David & Alan & Buddy & Hugo & Tom & Terry & Peter & Richard & Carlos / 1970

twelve gentle men

by Douglas Messerli

 

Peter de Rome (director) Encounter, or Paul & Richard & Michael, & David & Alan & Buddy & Hugo & Tom & Terry & Peter & Richard & Carlos / 1970

 

Born in Juan-les-Pins, Côte d'Azur, France, Peter de Rome grew up in England, where he worked as press agent for Arthur Rank and Alexander Korda. In 1956 he emigrated to the US, where he worked for a while at Tiffany’s, later as a civil rights campaigner, and eventually as publicist for David O. Selznick.

     In the 1960s, during which he spent a great deal of time on Fire Island, he began to make films, shot with an 8mm camera, of himself naked, having sex with someone he picked up on the streets, etc., intending the films only for the viewing of friends, but many of which were later collected in his 1973 anthology, The Erotic Films of Peter de Rome.

      Not part of that collection, Encounter was made in 1970, just a year after the earliest of his erotic film, Double Exposure (1969). The much larger cast of Encounter, including 12 men credited in the subtitle by only their first names, represents a move away from the “personal” work, paving the way for his only two feature films, Adam and Yves (1974) and The Destroying Angel (1976). Although he continued to make a few more shorts in the late 1970s, he stopped creating new works in the 1980s out of a kind of disgust for what film critic Alex Davidson describes as “the increasingly explicit but poorly filmed pornography” of that period. In an introduction to The Erotic Films, issued in 1984, de Rome wrote: “Until and unless I can make the sort of films I want to make, I am not interested in making any.”

      Although Encounter presents us with a gay sex orgy, it is less about the actual sex between the 12 men—some of whom were hired from a list of models and others of whom de Rome simply encountered upon the streets of New York—it is not really about sex but suggests rather a kind of ceremonial group activity. The original music was by composer Olivier Messiaen (much of whose work might be described as religious), but for the British Film Institute DVD he commissioned a new work by Stephen Thrower.

      One might even suggest there is something a bit comical in the film’s portrayal of what first seems to be a gathering or a secret society or cabal, as various men walking the Brooklyn Bridge and the lower Manhattan streets suddenly jut out their arms in a salute not that much different from the Nazis—except that a few of them, I observed, who were noticeably limp-wristed. Following the inexplicable salute, they begin moving, somewhat like the pod-people in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, all in the same direction, much to the perturbation of the “normal” passers-by.

      Obviously, what de Rome is satirizing here is the common heterosexual myth that gays recognize one another through a secret code, just as their late-night hangouts are secretive dens of disrepute where they meet to socialize in a private world outside of the sexual mores of the society at large.

       These twelve, representing almost every racial type, style of clothing and hair color, appear out of the blue, from traveling by bus, taxi, bicycle, and foot, to follow one another a bit like automatons, entering, one by one, a seemingly derelict loft space where they march up a long set of stairs, by the second-landing already tossing off their shirts to reveal their handsome lean chests.

     As they enter the loft space and their eyes adjust to the darkness they slowly reach out to one another, first caressing one another’s faces before slowly moving their hands down across pectorals, backs, and eventually buttocks. Soon, as if by magic, they are all nude (BFI writer Davidson notes that the one thing all these men have in common are “their luminous buttocks left free from tan lines).

      On cue, they begin bending, sitting, and rolling to simulate orgiastic sexual behavior, but except for the appearance of an occasion semi-erect penis, de Rome does not portray any of these sexual acolytes actually engaging in sex. Their actions represent more of a ritualistic dance instead of the pawing and groveling of sex-starved men.

      In the darkened room, the camera lovingly pans over their swaying and shifting bodies before presenting them in a perfect circular formation, their backs facing out, which suddenly opens up—almost as if they were dancers in a film choreographed by Busby Berkeley—to reveal floral-like petals of interlocked legs. Immediately the credits announce “The End” to what we might imagine is actually only the beginning.    

     De Rome, in this lovely work, has accordingly combined the ridiculous—the normative society’s absurd ideas about what it means to be gay—with the subline—the actual kinship and bodily fraternalization of men who sexually desire other men. Even the political implications of their early salute drop away as we now recognize that the outstretched hands represented a greeting and reaching out to one another instead of a coded statement of hidden bonds. These 12 men are the very opposite of angry men in judgment (as in the film Twelve Angry Men of 1957), but rather undertake a peaceful retreat to a place where they are no longer fearful of being judged.

 

Los Angeles, October 18, 2020

Reprinted from World Cinema Review and My Queer Cinema blog (October 2020).