destructuring gay porn
by
Douglas Messerli
Francis
Savel (as Dietrich de Velsa) (writer and director) Équation à un inconnu (Equation to an
Unknown) / 1980
How
to you explain something that is completely unknown, unpredictable, and
impossible to define? In the science of physics an unknown value can be
determined if we know the value of all but one of the unknowns. But what if all
but one of signifiers are unable to be signified, are unable to be made real
except by the one known quantity, in this film’s case, sex.
Moreover, the title of this film does not
describe itself—at least in English—as an equation for the unknown, in short
something that works toward solving the riddle, but is linguistically represented
as of, almost suggesting a kind of tribute to it, as in the case of “The
Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.” And, in fact, that analogy is quite appropriate,
since all of the sexually consumed “soldiers” of this film, had, by the time of
the film’s 1980 release, died, most likely of AIDS.
But before we can even begin to explore
that issue, we need to determine just what kind of film this is. I truly
believe that if I were to show a DVD of this work to almost anyone of the general
public most anywhere on the planet they would, if they might allow themselves
to the pleasure of its full 99 minutes, immediately shout out “Oh, that’s a
porn movie!” or “that’s an adult gay film.” And, for the most part, they would
be right.
Cinema aficionados and critics might soon
after mention the innovative use of the camera, noting, for example, in one
instance how the camera, stationed below the elegantly-banistered elliptical staircase
follows the film’s “hero” (Gianfranco Longhi) as he climbs to the to top, time
and again temporarily moving out of the frame to reenter into view. Or they
might point out how the three motorcyclists and one tag-along riders move in
misty night through a small tunnel as they seek out a nearby shack in which to
perform their sexual acts, remarking how they look somewhat like the beautiful
vampires of Dracula. And they would certainly proclaim as filmmaker Yann
Gonzalez—whose restoration of this film has allowed me and others to see it—this
is “the most melancholic porn film I’ve ever
seen.”
These same cinematic observers might also
categorize the director, Francis Savel (as listed in the credits as Dietrich de
Velsa), as working in the tradition of, as Diego Semerebe actually has commented
in his essay in the on-line cinema journal Slant, that “The closest
example to this type of cinematic communion between pornography and poetry is
perhaps James Bidgood’s Pierre-et-Gilles-esque extravaganza Pink Narcissus
from 1971, or Fassbinder’s slightly less cartoonish Querelle from 1982.”
Owner of the early transvestite cabaret
in Paris, La Grande Eugène, and an artist (an Alain Delon-narrated short about
the creation of one of Savel’s paintings is included as an extra on the DVD of Equation),
historians would assuredly remind us that Savel collaborated with Joseph Losey
on Mr. Klein and Don Giovanni.
Despite the film’s severe melancholia, Gonzalez,
I remind, still describes it as a “porn film” and goes on in an interview with
Jordon Cronk in Film Comment, agreeing with Cronk’s statement that the
film was “an effort to lovingly represent what was the last gasp before the
AIDS crisis,” added
“There is an attitude in those protagonists of
the ‘70s—in the faces, in the bodies, you see in those porn films that they
enjoy giving mutual pleasure to one another. There’s an innocence, a naïveté,
in those films. They were the pioneers of the porno genre in a way because
those were the very first porno images and there was a joy in the fact of
pioneering a movement, of making joyful love, having sex in front of a camera.”
Similarly, Semerebe almost rhapsodizes:
“What’s
so unusual about Savel’s film isn’t only the way it rediscovers queer bliss in
the unvarnished aura of the everyday, but how devoid of anxiety its world is.
Gay sex is depicted as immune to guilt and fear. If strangers catch two lovers
having sex, it’s either to watch them as voyeurs or to join in. This isn’t the
same logic of cheap sexual voracity that tends to govern traditional porn, but
a logic of absolute openness. In the film, sex is a ceaseless flow comprised of
an always welcome amalgamation of visitors—that is, sex angels that promptly
turn up at door thresholds or just out of the blue to ensure pleasure lasts.
“Group sex in Equation to an Unknown
never amounts to a spectacle of pragmatic transactions. Pissing and rimming are
portrayed as inherently tender, even poetic, activities. Orgies aren’t staged
so much as they unfold spontaneously, bathed in delicate lighting and quixotic
piano notes, as if each body merged with other bodies magnetically so they
could form some sort of multi-tentacled organism. There’s no time for
characters to reason or filter their impulses. They simply act in what feels
like seamless reciprocity, or a kind of solidarity aimed at collective harmony
through boundless sexual satisfaction.”
While I would hardly describe the activities this film portrays as
representing the gay world of all of the 1970s (by mid-decade AIDS cases had
begun to show up in almost all metropolitan areas), the beautiful, muscular and
slim white young boys draped in denim, most of whom had little desire to hide
their bodies in leather gear or other such “costumes”—in this film’s throwback
to the racial restrictions of the time there is only one Arab boy, no blacks,
Hispanics, or other ethnicities, who along with older men, hovering close by,
are not permitted entry into the sexual participants’ look-alike league—is the
world of the late 1960s and early 1970s I experienced in New York City and
elsewhere. Except for an occasional police raid, in the bars and their
backrooms I visited (Stonewall, with its mix of gays, lesbians, and
transsexuals was more regularly invaded) as well as in parks, alleys, cars, and
even at times on isolated side-streets, sex was open, fun, predictable, and, if
one so desired, nearly endless, just as Savel’s film depicts it. As Gonzalez
almost declares it to be, it was a kind of homosexual paradise in which youth was
deified.
Reviewer Jason Arment gives us a slightly
different bent bemoaning that when he sat down to the double feature of
Gonzalez’ Knife+Heart and Equation at Denver’s Sie Film Center, “we
found out minutes before the show started that it [the latter] was pornography,”
and going on to quite dismiss the work:
“The
problems with Equation to an Unknown isn’t the acting, which is adequate
considering, nor the production value, which is on point, instead it’s the lack
of sex and musical score which debilitate the film. Sure, there are
ultra-explicit sex scenes, but nothing special. The lack of music was
especially problematic as my friend snored through stretches of boredom.”
So unhappy was this viewer and his friend
that one has to wonder if they were possibly heterosexual or perhaps had just
seen to many gay porno films in the past.
Yet, as we shall see, he has a point. If
this is simple, if beautifully filmed, pornography it does indeed represent all
of the standard tropes of gay porn movies.
It is now time to apologize to any
delicate readers for my use below of some rather crude gay sexual terminology,
but that is the only way I can present the facts of Savel’s representation of
gay sexual practices in their order of bodily involvement. Please absolve me
with the possibility that you may simply allow my words as representing a kind
of urban dictionary of gay slang.
Let me add that along the way the director
also catalogs these so-called deviant sexual practices within the context of various
activities and avocations that were widely featured in gay flicks of this time.
The central character, La figure principale (Longhi) is a well-dressed
motorcyclist, whose major attire, other than his short shirt and faded denims, consists
of gloves, yellow goggles, a white cotton scarf and a white cycle-helmet framed
by in red.
For readers who have not seen a gay film
or only a couple, I can assure you that there are hundreds pornos that play out
something like this scene. Soccerboys are important in gay filmmaking.
The
next scene is another gay porn standard: several boys are standing around a
pinball machine watching Le joueur de flipper (Dominique Delattre), who
apparently has not yet mastered the game and, accordingly is joined—with penis
rubbing against the ass and hands embracing the young pinball player’s hands—by
Le jeune Arabe presumably to teach him how to better master the game.
Meanwhile, our principale has chosen this little hot spot to have a drink at the bar with a snack. An
older patron sits a table nearby busy drinking harder liquor since we will
surely not be included in any of these boy’s games. When the young Arab decides
to go to the loo, the pinball player soon joins him to be sucked off before the
flipper proceeds to fuck him.
Soon after the pinball player returns to
the bar the principale determines to
join the fun, but just as he is beginning to enjoy himself, the probably pissed-off
Le patron de bistrot (Jean-Claude Patrick) enters, pushing our “hero”
out of the way before taking out his cock and releasing his urine all over the
willing-to-do-anything Arab boy.
That’s lunch. Now our hero boy takes
again to the streets via the motorbike for a late night snack, first with a worker
holding on tight to the principale’s pants before he picks up a half un-zipped
uniformed Le pompiste(Tony Weber), who, conveniently
finished for day with pumping gas, goes for a ride of the central figure’s
bike, his cold hands stuffed into the driver’s pants pockets.
They stop for a moment on a narrow side
path to have sex on the seat of the bike, the gas-station attendant sucking off
the driver before snowballing the cum he has just acquired into the principale's mouth with a kiss, the excess semen
running down our hero’s chin.
As if to immediately disprove that, the
busy hero, now floating upon what appears to be a waterbed, popular in all sex
flicks, is gradually joined by six or seven of the boys, now lined up against a
wall in the next room, with whom he has previously had sex, for the necessary
orgy, each of them joining him one by one for whatever kind of sex one might
imagine.
I don’t think I’ve ever described in
such detail a gay porn film, but if nothing else, this should establish that
Savel’s work, at least superficially, represents adult gay entertainment. But,
as Peggy Lee has many a time asked, “Is that all there is?” My answer is most
definitely “no.”
First of all, not only is the central
figure a complete blur, without a name, a job, any family members or friends
other than the nebulous if constant interloper François (who, incidentally, is employed), but he has utterly no interests in life other
than sex. Throughout, he barely eats and never seems to sleep. This may
certainly help to explain why he is a bit morose.
But, more importantly, it is nearly
impossible to make sense of his sexual excursions. Savel interrupts his first
sexual encounter with the soccerboys, continuing it grand finale only after Le principale motors home and falls into bed,
soon after, to be jacked-off by François. Not only
is the hiatus confusing, but it suggests that what we see as the actual sexual
culmination as simply being a fantasy.
This certainly helps to explain how our
hero can ejaculate throughout the film almost non-stop, sometimes minutes apart
from his last sexual interlude.
In the incident at the bar with the
pinball players, moreover, his sexual diversion is interrupted by the
patron/barman. And his first encounter with the gas-station attendant on the
motorcycle seat might similarly be seen as interrupted by the arrival of the other
two cyclistes.
Even their shacking up for sex seems
fantastical when the director immediately after plants the hero upon his bed
having sex, yet again, with François, followed, more strangely still, by him
suddenly being rolled out on a huge waterbed that could not possibly have fit
into the small room in which he have just seen him.
The men from his past sexual encounters
seem not all to be there “spontaneously” as Semerebe describes it, but as part
of a seemingly planned event wherein each of them has been invited to what
might be described as a kind of theatrical event. And one by one they come
forward, as the “hero” motions to them, with almost balletic-like movements, as
if they were performing at a version of a theater try-out. In fact, the entire
orgy is accompanied by off-screen laughter of a man and a woman (the only
heterosexual voices that this film presents, certainly the only female voice).
Throughout this work, windows appear
where we previously saw none, spaces suddenly enlarge and contract. People with
whom Le principale is consorting suddenly disappear into thin air.
Except for the sex he (the first time
somewhat reluctantly) has with François, it appears
that our sexual non-entity is living in a rather predictable gay porno-film of
his own making, all the pretty boys, their large penises and tight asses, being
a product of his own imagination. It is, in some senses, like a nightmare world
in which the central, unnamed figure” “can’t get no satisfaction.” Certainly,
that terrible lust for totally predictable illusion of endless pleasure might
explain his and all the others’ melancholia.
Without being able to ever touch the
fantasies you’ve conjured up for yourself—or worse yet, what others have
conjured up for you—joy is impossibly out of reach. The only joy we
recognize in this film derives not from his present escapades but from the hero’s
past on that bicycle with François. In this film we
have to wonder if even François, who makes his first appearance from a window
not shown in the previous scene, truly exists except as a loving memory.
Living only in future fantasies, with a past
that cannot again enter the present, our unknown figure is himself already
dead, a nonentity. I don’t know precisely when Savel filmed this movie, but by
the date of its release, AIDS had already killed thousands. Accordingly, even
what Gonzalez imagines is a beautifully hedonistic portrayal of sex in the
past, is not real, but another fantasy itself, with the author showing the
viewer just how fantasies are brought into being—and most importantly, how the
dreamer himself is destroyed by them. The pattern is clear: take two people,
four, numerous of them, put them in a room and rub their bodies together. The
juices that run from orifices is called pleasure. But whether or not they can
create a fire, something to sustain them throughout life is dubious.
Let us restate the “equation,” E
(the imaginative energy of the dreamer) equals m (the mass or time put
into the effort) both unknown, but add + c to the second power (the
speed of light, the source of any film put upon screen, results when multiplied
in this scientific formula is an atomic reaction) where all is totally
destroyed. The soldier is now thrown back into his unknown grave.
Los
Angeles, September 13, 2020
Reprinted
from World Cinema Review (September 2020).
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