In 2019, JC Adams of XBiz.com conducted a Q&A with Carnal Media CEO and performer Legrand Wolf. In this interview, Wolf described the company’s work as “smut”.
“We call it ‘smut.’ You can call it ‘art,’ you can call it ‘movies,’ you can call it whatever you want. We like the subversion of calling it ‘smut.'”
Smut is a rite of passage for many same-sex attracted people. As a teen, smut was the only place I could see another queer person—a queer person who had the same desires as me, who didn’t make me feel alone. Smut was my salve during my self-inflicted solitude due to fear of the world, and my own self-criticism.
Jean Genet: Poetic Porn Pioneer
For imprisoned man Jean Genet, he soothed himself with his own smut: his first novel Notre-Dame des Fleurs (Our Lady of the Flowers.) Confined to his cell, Genet wrote the masturbatory epistles twice, after having his first copy found and burnt by a prison guard. It’s free-flowing, poetic and unreservedly: smut.
French novelist, playwright, poet and filmmaker Jean Genet (Literary Hub)
Jean Genet (1910-1986) is best known as a novelist, poet, activist and playwright; his most well-known piece being Les Bonnes (The Maids) a play about the sadomasochist game a pair of housemaids play as they act out the murder of their mistress. But he additionally made one foray into film: the proto-gay porn film Un Chant d’amour (A Song of Love).
The Filming of Un Chant d’amour
Un Chant d’amour was produced in 1950, shot at the nightclub La Rose Rouge in Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Financed by the club’s owner Nico Papatakis, Genet made a film of startling sensuality and bold homosexual passion which had been rarely seen up to that point. Although Genet had watched Kenneth Anger’s Fireworks, a symbolist homoerotic work produced three years previously, Genet’s film did not shy away from displaying overwhelming and direct desire.
Closer in style to the contemporary melodrama, Un Chant d’amour details the desire between two prisoners in neighboring cells and the voyeuristic pleasure that the warden takes from their tension. A bouquet of blossoms is fruitlessly swung between neighboring cell bars. Two lovers: a narcissistic murderer (Lucien Sénémaud), and an older lovesick North African man (unidentified Tunisian actor), share cigarette smoke through a straw that fits through their wall. The older prisoner lovingly caresses and kisses the wall, both completely isolated but united with his love on the other side. His lover touches himself and caresses his tattooed arms and rough feet.
Sharing the cigarette smoke through the straw (Argos Films)
Authority as The Enemy of Romance
The prison warden (André Reybaz), after witnessing his other prisoners openly masturbating (some defiantly), eventually reaches the cells of the lovers. Caught admiring the young murderer, he then goes into the cell of the older prisoner and begins to whip him with his belt. Intercut with his beating, the older prisoner imagines his life outside in the free and open woodlands with his younger lover. The dynamic makes the older man seem to be the more submissive partner. The warden additionally has his own dreams cut between: himself and another man nude in a series of sexual tableaux that ends with penetration. It’s more brutal and less romantic than that of his prisoner’s fantasies. The warden concludes by forcing his gun into the older prisoner’s mouth and makes him suck it.
The rough dreams of the warden in Un Chant d’amour (Argos Films)
As the warden walks away we see the continued attempts of swinging the bouquet of flowers between the cells. As his back is turned, the murderer’s hand finally catches the gift and draws it into his cell.
How Distribution of Un Chant d’amour Impacted the Future of Porn
Genet and Papatakis recognized there was no point in applying for a censor’s rating and so before 1971, all copies were privately released to recoup the costs. The subversive distribution and content are echoes of the pornography made today, distributed discretely to the consumer and enjoyed in the privacy of their own home. Even if by today’s standards Un Chant d’amour is not taboo-breaking, it was miles ahead of mainstream cinema for its depiction of male on male passion and defiant sexuality.
“Everything is eroticized,” said Slant‘s Fernando F. Croce, “from flaring nostrils to the clipping of a toenail…every image is charged by the need to break free and the thrill of defying society’s constraints from within.”
“[These are] two equally powerful and, in Genet’s view, far from contradictory pulls.”
The swinging of the bouquet of flowers bookends Un Chant d’amour (Argos Films)
Smut can help people see their desires externally
For people watching in the privacy of their homes, Un Chant d’amour was likely one of the few times people could relish in the soothing power of smut. The safety of knowing you weren’t the only one. I have some reverence for these twentieth century producers and consumers of gay erotic material, it would be terrifying but also liberating. As Legrand stated in the same interview with XBiz.com:
“[The porn industry] is something that erodes the traditional, patriarchal notions of what you should do with your body, sexually, and that’s fantastic. We should be more sexually liberated; at least, that’s our thinking.”
Smut can help people see themselves and their desires externally for the first time. And we have a multitude of artists, performers and filmmakers (such as Jean Genet) to thank for how far we have come in visually representing those desires.
For Genet, the homosexual is both imprisoned and liberated. Unified in our desire for connection, isolated from the sacraments of heterosexual partnership and its privileges.Â
You can call it smut, you can call it art. I think Genet would have preferred the more subversive term.
Un Chant d’amour is available on MUBI.
Sources: ArtForum, Literary Hub, MUBI, Slant, XBiz.com
1 comment
Excellent article by John Stevens, with a link to another excellent essay by Michael Koresky from 2019. I have no quarrel with any of the analysis and appreciation of this amazing work by Genet. However, I believe I detect in all I have read about Un Chant d’Amour that a crucial dimension to the work is missed. Occasionally this results in incorrect statements about the work though usually the comments tantalizingly just miss the point while coming so close. I have given a talk on Genet and included my own ideas regarding misconceptions and failed perceptions about Un Chant d’Amour. I am quite happy to share the section of my talk about the film. Very briefly, it has to do with accurately identifying which sequences in the film are reality and which are fantasy, and then identifying who is having the fantasies. This is where all the comment falls down. Crucially, comment also fails to acknowledge Genet’s deliberately employed technique of misdirection (a core component of much of his work), which starts in the film’s first moments. Assessing the confusion of fantasy/reality designed by Genet results in shifting the focus of the film to the prison guard. This shift in no way detracts from the film’s intentions as regards the powerful depiction of wider homoeroticism, though it does lend it a perhaps an unexpectedly conventional morality. Try viewing the film again but at each moment, at each cut, ask yourself: What am I actually seeing?