standing,
sitting, laying down, and just playing around
by Douglas Messerli
James Broughton and Kermit Sheets
(directors) The Golden Positions / 1970
I know many people swear by the
great impact James Broughton (born 1913) made in presenting the nude human body
on film, but personally I have always found Broughton’s films, with a few
exceptions, as slightly embarrassing—not because of the nudity, but because
through the years of hippie gay life, his relationship with Pauline Kael, his
later marriage to Suzanna Hart (Stan Brakhage and his Jungian therapists with
the villains in suggesting that if he married he might get straight), and his
later gay relationship with his student Joel Singer, Broughton became almost an
antiquarian priest fighting for the love of the pansexual at a time when gay
liberation had gone far beyond his almost turn-of-the-century celebrations.
Broughton was not a very great poet, and while some of his films of the 1950
and 1960s were quite charming, despite his friendships with noted figures such
as Alan Watts, Michael McClure, Anna Halprin (who appears in this short film),
Robert Duncan, and many others, he was not a particularly profound thinker.
The Golden Positions, filmed the year Howard and I became companions,
seemed like a hippie throwback even that year when gay liberation was changing
the landscape.
Even Broughton makes reference, often somewhat comically to give him
credit, to a gay world almost forgotten, Edward Muybridge, doctored up with a
kind of Alan Watts nod to the three “golden positions” of the body as define by
Confucianism—standing, sitting, and laying down—while even winking at the
tradition of Victorian pornographic postcards while the music of Robert Hughes
sung by The Berkely Chamber Singers blithely play along at his only slightly
satiric Kyrie Eleison to nudity.
But despite his pansexuality, Broughton is still cautious in presenting
to male nudes together. Most of these images are heterosexual pairings,
although female couples do get some attention. But he keeps the male-male
pairings at a minimum, and often places them discretely with a female partner
in-between.
Yes, he glorifies the human body, but so did the equally arthritic
creator Willard Maas, who with his wife Marie Mencken, ran his camera over a
female nude in Geography of the Body, and later, in 1952 released a kind
of early (Version A) coming out film in the manner of Curtis Harrington,
Kenneth Anger, and Gregory J. Markopoulos, proving in the enterprise that he
was also a rather mediocre poet. Broughton had done the same thing in 1950 in
his totally engaging comic work, Adventures of Jimmy.
But by 1970 Broughton’s work, to me at least, looks just silly, like an
older man attempting to join in the San Francisco collective culture. No harm
there, but just a bit out of touch and embarrassingly dated. Using his own
voice as narrator, he further embraces the film with the sound of an elder
statesman, whose pitch and intonations are uncomfortably close to those of
Truman Capote.
Finally, it might be useful to remember that the same year this movie
was released international film and even Hollywood had gone much, much further
with Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist, John Waters’ satire The
Diane Linkletter Story, William Friedkin’s The Boys in the Band,
Douglas Hickox’s Entertaining Mr. Sloane, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s
The American Soldier, along with so many others with a far more advanced
vision of the LGBTQ+ world.
Broughton’s work brought high praise, but I think the Letterboxd
commentator using the moniker of Nick R, got it almost right:
“Batshit and lovely, if a little
overlong. Come for the dangly dicks and West Coast 70s vibes; stay for the
jokey classical vocal pieces, tableaux, and sensitive portraiture. Broughton
brings us back to the Muybridge zone to limber up our ideas of what it means to
be human and have a body.”
If I blush a little for Broughton’s clumsiness and dated visions, you
can’t blame him for trying to convert a heathen country that still today has
difficulty seeing naked bodies. I cannot post this work on Facebook, at least
with pictures, without knowing that I would be banned for several weeks. And if
I were to attempt to publish this piece in an Amazon printed book, they assure
me it would meet with the lowest priority and perhaps even be delayed or
refused publication. That’s why I have included so many images that are not at
all particularly shocking given the route LGBTQ+ films have since taken (even
in the 1970s). Yet the nudity is still verboten in the greatly confused
USA.
Los Angeles, May 10, 2026
Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog
(May 2026).
