Un chant d'amour

Genet's only film is a stunner. A short glimpse into the existence of a tortured soul.It must have elicited some gasps in 1950. If I was gay I would probably watch this film every week. I'm not, so let's just say that the images will haunt me for the rest of my days...

One of the most memorable of short films, UN CHANT D'AMOUR is also one of the most controversial. Made by the famed gay writer, Jean Genet, it is set in a prison and features uncensored homosexual scenes which may cut a little too close to the bone for some. If, on the other hand, you're not a homophobe, this is a beautiful and cinematically wonderful experience, with the same kind of magical attraction as Jean Cocteau's ORPHEE or LA BELLE ET LA BETE. Highly recommended for people with open minds, regardless of their own personal sexual orientation.

Setting something of a benchmark in eroticism, and, in particular, prison-based eroticism - something that would later carry through to everything from 70's exploitation cinema to the work of Todd Haynes - Un chant d'amour (1950) remains the sole cinematic work of poet and dramatist Jean Genet. As with his writing in works such as Our Lady of the Flowers and The Thief's Journal, Un chant d'amour basks in the romanticised fantasy of lurid, low-rent subject matter; taking themes and ideas that were (and probably still remain for some viewers) incredibly controversial and approaching them from an unexpected angle, to find poetry in even the most callous of violence, or beauty in the ugliness of human behaviour. As you would expect from Genet's writing, the film is essentially a poetic-abstraction, relinquishing ideas of narrative and character to create a tone that is stylised and somewhat subjective; with the use of close ups and slow motion in particular creating a world that is part evocative, homoerotic fantasia and part metaphor for human existence.

In the film, the hellish environment of the prison becomes a hotbed for repressed sexuality and complex emotions, as both inmates and guard submit to their feelings of lust (often attached to the ideas of power and domination) that finds an escape in a surreal, claustrophobic nightmare that is punctuated by a scene of pastoral reminisce. Beyond this bold, expressive presentation, the film is also notable for its striking black and white cinematography by artist and filmmaker Jean Cocteau; so as well as being fairly daring in terms of content, it is also something of an influential work in a purely visual sense. For one, you can see the influence on a filmmaker like David Lynch, whose films Eraserhead (1976) and The Elephant Man (1980) in particular draw heavily on the influence of Cocteau's own short films, The Blood of the Poet (193?) and The Testament of Orpheus (1950), both of which share a similar look and feeling to Genet's film in question. You can also see certain thematic influences on the work of R. W. Fassbinder, whose dream project, an adaptation of Genet's Querelle de Brest (1982), would be the acclaimed German filmmaker's final film prior to his death at the age of 37.

Above all, the film should be seen as a metaphor for the nature of unrequited love in general, and not simply as a work of homoerotic fantasy. The themes of the film are universal, dealing with confinement, longing, despair, desperation and eventually escape. Genet would return to a number of these same themes with his later work, Prisoner of Love, but the visual expression of these ideas as presented in Un chant d'amour is really quite special. Yes, the film is still somewhat sexually explicit, even after fifty 50+ years on release, with the depiction of homosexual sex, abuse and expression really pushing the boundaries in terms of male, physical presentation. Regardless, it remains a truly fascinating work, both poetic and disturbing in equal measures and certainly worth experiencing for fans of both Cocteau and Genet.

I can't believe that all four reviews here are preoccupied by the homosexual aspect of Genet's short film. I guess being familiar with his novels - Our Lady of Flowers, Funeral Rites, etc - I took it for granted that his film would necessarily be set in a prison and involve human longing manifest in homosexual contact between inmates. Don't be fooled, though. Movies like Brokeback Mountain harp on the homosexual factor, making it a political issue that hammers the viewer over the head. Midnight Express made prison sex a pop-culture joke. Genet seems naive by comparison. It's only a vehicle for his art, though certainly a favored one, owing to fact he spent most of his life in French prisons. Anyway, the setting could function just as well as a fictional netherworld dedicated to isolation. Its a brilliant and deliberately shocking movie and shouldn't be missed by anyone.

UN CHANT d'AMOUR is a remarkable short: sordid, brutal, provocative; yet as poetic and lyrical as its title suggests. Although not as rich and beguiling as Fassbinder's QUERELLE, and despite its claustrophobic lack of humour, the film lacks the prolixity that often mars Genet's most famous literary works.

Indeed, there are no words in this film at all, or music, or any kind of sound. Just complete silence. This is thematically vital: set in a prison, with inmates in solitary cells, the film explores the idea of the voice - who has the power to speak, and hence represent themselves, in our society. The film begins with the figure symbolic of this power in society - authority - in this case a police warden. Robbed of a voice, he is reduced to the role of a voyeur, becoming OUR representative. The complicity between authority and criminality is a favourite Genet theme. As the audience for this kind of film is predominantly middle-class, it is the warden who sees for us an underworld we would normally run a mile from.

We see frustrated prisoners, trying to communicate: by passing flowers through barred windows; knocking on walls; through special code; or, in the film's most exquisite and arousing sequence, through a shared smoking between a hole in the wall. The film is a melodrama, literalising what Nicholas Ray made figurative - imprisonment and repression. The film, inevitably, honestly, ends as it began, with one crucial, perhaps hopeful, difference. Some men get relief from this intolerable situation through masturbation, others by mad erotic breakdancing. There are scenes which escape this hell into a kind of pastoral arcadia, where two men find happiness amidst sunny verdure. It is difficult to tell whether this sequence is a flashback, flashforward, or merely a dream (the whole thing could be the warden's fantasy), but it too eventually ends in brutality and death.

All this is shown to us from the viewpoint of the warden. His gaze, though, is explicitly fetishised - he is made complicit in what he sees. This is literalised when his arousal becomes unbearable, and he begins whipping a prisoner. The phrase 'climax of the movie' begins to take on more than one meaning.

The inmates themselves are subject to explicit fetishism - being reduced to a series of torsos, limbs, hands, members. Normally in cinema, this kind of spectacle is visited on beautiful women for the delectation of the male viewer. Here the male prisoners are treated to huge close-ups and soft lighting, like the greatest Hollywood starlet, a profoundly subversive gesture. Years before cultural studies, masculinity is systematically shown to a performance, a process of becoming.

The film is bookended with childlike Cocteauesque credits on a blackboard, as if by laying squalor and sexuality so bare and unflinchingly, Genet hopes to return us to a kind of innocence, a new way of seeing.