Un Chant D'Amour (1950) +

A truly startling bit of erotic filmmaking -- a legendary film by a legendary figure which, for me, truly lived up to the legend, on both counts. The film bears all the hallmarks of Genet (especially as mediated by such interpreters as Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Todd Haynes): an appreciation of the beauty of palpably masculine men; vivid strictures of social hierarchy and control; uniforms; criminality; fetishistic eroticization of the masculine mundanities (here cigarette smoke), all leavened with an instinct toward sublime beauty and a longing for romantic love. The scenario of this film is simple: two men share adjacent cells, a narcissistic young man and a virile older man. Both are supervised by a primly authoritative guard. The film begins with the guard observing the two inmates as they attempt to pass flowers from hand to hand, by swinging them back and forth outside the windows of their cells. The guard then passes through the cell block, surreptitiously viewing each of the half dozen prisoners in their respective units. Most are either whacking off or dancing naked or peeing. Only the narcissist and the elder prisoner are doing something not overtly lewd or base, and its to the two of them that the guard is drawn. He watches, rapt, as the narcissist dances with himself, occasionally pausing to receive cigarette blown through a straw, carefully inserted through a tiny hole in the wall separating the two men. The passing of smoke, from mouth to mouth, through this tiny straw amplifies an incredible longing for intimacy in both the guard and the elder prisoner, even as the narcissist appears to accept (or reject) the gift of the exhaled smoke as his due. As the charge of the exchange between the two men amplifies, we begin to see the fantasies of the elder prisoner and the prison guard interspersed into the scene. The elder prisoner imagines himself and the narcissist running free in a field, playing tag and collapsing into restful repose, taking comfort from an easy closeness together. The guard imagines a more abstracted, dancelike configuration of nude male bodies, his and the narcissists, configured in a thrilling chiaroscuro not unlike George Platt Lynes or Mapplethorpe's male nudes. At a certain point, as each fantasy begins to escalate in intensity, the guard interrupts the elder prisoner as he begins to masturbate. As the guard begins to beat the elder prisoner, their respective fantasies accelerate -- quick flashes of eroticized imagery of the beloved boy -- until the beating climaxes and the guard retreats from the prisoner's cell. The film concludes as the guard again observes the attempt to pass the flowers between the windows of the cell. As the pass is finally successful, the film ends. The short, intense film is thrillingly erotic -- a lush black and white photography, scored by the crackling silence of the 35mm projector, amplifying the quietude and intensity of the carceral isolation. The film also presents a vivid distillation of the erotics of Genet: authoritarian power, masculine romantic longing, the violent erotics of sexual transference/displacement. The men are beautiful. The images even more so. And the pornographic flashes -- the panoptical sequence of erotic surveillance is utterly strange but completely titillating -- are astonishing to witness, even without attention to the fact that this film was made in 1950. My heart was in my throat the whole time. The film's reverie in erotic suspense and longing was, for me, completely vivid. Of course, MrStinky was nonplussed and the man behind me fell asleep. So, it may just be a matter of my own curious conditioning via Jean Genet, but I found this to be among the most thrilling pieces of erotic art I have yet encountered. Simple, shocking, palpable, poetic, romantic -- with startlingly gorgeous men and captivatingly idiosyncratic sexual scenarios -- a deliciously ripe bit of cinema. Yum yum yum.