An almost legendary film, very often cited, which defied censorship and outraged critics, this short 1950 film made its clandestine journey, passed from hand to hand among initiates, across the world, until its release was finally authorized in 1975.
Jean Genet was 40 years old when he shot his only film, "A Song of Love," in secret with his circle of friends, as its subject was considered a serious "public indecency" by french law. Genet did not risk returning to prison, the painfully formative place of his erotic-poetic universe; he simply wanted to reclaim it. Born to an unknown father and abandoned by his mother, Jean Genet was placed in foster care, then in a reformatory juvenile center before joining the army to escape juve. And later a deserter and a not very skilled delinquent, he got caught and was sentenced to prison several times. French writer Jean Cocteau helped him obtain a presidential pardon and launched his career.
Prison was the framework of his thoughts and of his film.
For A song of love Jean Genet chose to set words aside The movie is silent, though you might find it with a music added later. The story starts with a prison guard who catches two inmates trying to pass flowers through the bars of their windows. He enters the cell corridor to spy on the prisoners one by one. Each inmate, alone in his cell, finds freedom only in captive onanism or a wall-passing fantasy. The guard takes us with him to spy, to peep, and fantasize, into Jean Genet’s mind.
The writer makes the prisoners beautiful, desirable, desired, and here is his lover Lucien Sénémaud playing one of them. It’s obviously no coincidence that the prison environment is so sexualized.
Prison is a micro-society of homo sapiens in which a hierarchical functioning is established, just like outside; it’s a common behavior among mammals. Incarceration dispossesses individuals of a large part of their personal and social identity. In the absence of females, the hierarchy that seeks to establish itself is based on expressions of virility and male stereotypes of masculinity. In this closed universe, virility becomes a means of survival and self-assertion in the hierarchy. It’s the virile competition that determines WHO rises in the hierarchy of men, to acquire power and security.
Consequently, homophobia acts as a way to reassure those who struggle for their domination, in an environment deprived of women, where one must not appear as such. Sexual assaults are used as a means of exercising power and proving one’s strength, one’s superior hierarchical legitimacy. Prison thus becomes a place of sexual tension and erotic charge, inducing behaviors of rivalry and violent confrontations. On top of this, a second layer of virile hierarchy, that of the prison administration, made of injunctions and prohibitions. It’s in these environments that Jean Genet’s libido developed.
The guard takes the spectators, through the peepholes, to see in each cell the living tableau that becomes eroticized. The prisoner, alone with his own body, has, as pleasure, only the contact of his body, to trigger fantasies that project him outside the walls.
These walls that prevent, that separate, and that also create fantasies. Walls with some flaws, for a phallic straw that spits its smoke, or bars for giving apple blossoms, fruit tree of sin. These walls that prevent men from loving each other, while locking them together, that separate them while creating promiscuity.
Genet made this film without restraint in the narration, because he already knew that censorship would prevent its distribution. He didn’t bother to use the attributes that built post-war manlyness : the tank top of the french market porters, the tattoo of criminals and bad boys, the uniforms, the sailor uniform because the boat is also a closed masculine place, and the muscle, hairiness, smell, domination, submission, erection, exhibition, dance, voyeurism. In 1950, Genet released a flood of desires like a gush.
"The camera can open a fly and search its secrets" (Le bagne).
Homosexuality, forbidden, a "social scourge" that "corrupts youth," according to the french law that condemned it during WWII, and even after the war a police ordinance prohibits men from cross-dressing or dancing together in public places in Paris. Genet was well aware that his film, produced by his friend Nico Papatakis, would be too subversive to be distributed.
The film had no legal existence until it obtained its censorship visa, in France in 1975, forbidden to those under sixteen. Jean Genet achieved a masterpiece. Probably with some advice from his friend Jean Cocteau, the writer knew exactly, and with great precision, how to bring his fantasies to life.
Jean Genet unknowingly created such powerful iconography that it has continued to nourish gay culture for decades. Some examples: faithfully adapted by Fassbinder for his novel Querelle de Brest, clips like Cargo by Jean-Baptiste Mondino, up to Jean-Paul Gautier’s marine universe. Far beyond, the fantasized imagery of prison has continued to renew itself through productions like Midnight Express, The Kiss of the Spider Woman, and tv series of course from OZ, up to more recently Monsters. And not to mention X-rated films that have made and remade it an art, over and over again.
And his work has also been a source of inspiration in literature and theater. The philosopher Michel Foucault, analyzed several important aspects of Jean Genet’s work, particularly around the prison universe, its social structures.
Genet managed to extract from prison, from misery, from filth, a poetry of resilience, a lyricism of hope born from desire. He wrote in his first book Our Lady of the Flowers : "To love each other as, before separating, two young boxers who fight (not combat), tear each other’s shirt, and, when they are naked, amazed to be so beautiful, believe they see themselves in a mirror, remain mouth agape for a second, shake the rage of being caught their tangled hair, smile at each other with a wet smile and embrace like two Greco-Roman wrestlers, fit their muscles into the exact connections offered by the other’s muscles, and collapse on the mat until their warm sperm, spurting high, traces a milky way across the sky (...)".
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