Destricted (Various, 2006)

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Lino
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#1 Post by Lino » Thu Jan 26, 2006 4:52 am

This is one to look out for, guys and gals:

http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0492962/

http://www.destricted.com/

Already causing quite a stir over at Sundance. I wonder why...? :wink:

marty

#2 Post by marty » Thu Jan 26, 2006 4:58 am

DESTRICTED is a series arty short films directed by Matthew Barney, Gaspar Noe, Larry Clark and a few other visual artists. It is quite explicit. In one short directed by a woman a man masturbates in the middle of the desert and you see everything. In Matthew Barney's film a man has sex with some sort of bulldozer vehicle and in Larry Clark's short film, he interviews several young men asking them what their sexual fantasies are and then one lucky kid gets to fulfill it with a porn star....

Very curious to see this and I will definitely be checking it out at Berlin Film Festival in a couple of weeks.

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#3 Post by Grimfarrow » Thu Jan 26, 2006 1:42 pm

I only saw two of the shorts in it (Matthew Barney's and Sam Taylor Wood's). Wood's contribution is really dull - a man in a desert masturbates until he comes. So what?!

Barney's is much more, ugh, interesting. A guy with bulbs in his ass and mouth "greases" this machine with his own semen (yes, he ejaculates), then proceeds to "hump" the rolling machine. The credits for the film is really long - no idea why.

Haven't see Noe's or Clark's entries yet.

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jesus the mexican boi
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#4 Post by jesus the mexican boi » Thu Jan 26, 2006 2:18 pm

Grimfarrow wrote:Barney's is much more, ugh, interesting. A guy with bulbs in his ass and mouth "greases" this machine with his own semen (yes, he ejaculates), then proceeds to "hump" the rolling machine.
I smell Oscar!

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Lino
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#5 Post by Lino » Sat Jan 28, 2006 6:17 am

Whenever I think of this movie, I'm remembered of the words by the guy who did Deep Throat. On Inside Deep Throat, he prophetically said that he genuinely believed that his little film would be the first big step into marrying the sexually graphic with the artistic side of moviemaking. And that this would be the future of Hollywood. Well, it's taking us some odd 30 years but we're getting there, man!

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#6 Post by Lino » Thu Aug 24, 2006 10:14 am

Well, UK viewers rejoice! This film is getting a release next month in very selected places (note the need to remove this film as far away as they can to the notion that this is in any way pornographic... "It's not porn, hon -- it's ART!") and amazingly, it will have a DVD release shortly after:

http://www.destrictedfilms.com/

Oh, and any similarities between the packaging of that DVD and the one Taschen used for their Polaroid book is purely coincidental...

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#7 Post by indiannamednobody » Thu Aug 24, 2006 10:21 am

Thats pretty cool how they're packaging the dvd. I wonder how much it will be? Has anyone seen this and think it's good enough to justify a blind buy? Sounds hot.

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#8 Post by Lino » Thu Aug 24, 2006 10:26 am

I already pre-ordered it and no, I haven't seen the movie yet. But with a line-up of names like that, you can't go wrong, can you? Besides, I really want to see something new by Gaspar Noe -- Irreversible was ages ago! And I'm also a Larry Clark fan. BTW, Wassup Rockers is already available for pre-order on Amazon with a November date, for those of you who missed it at the theater like me.

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#9 Post by indiannamednobody » Thu Aug 24, 2006 10:30 am

Larry Clark is what sparked my interest initially. The more I read on all the short films, the more tempting it is.

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Antoine Doinel
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#10 Post by Antoine Doinel » Thu Aug 24, 2006 10:52 am

Here's an interview with Clark about his portion of Destricted:
Sex education

As the director of films like Kids and Bully, Larry Clark has often been accused of shocking exploitation. With his new documentary, Impaled, he's even managed to shock himself. Stephen Applebaum hears why

Monday August 21, 2006
Guardian Unlimited

Larry Clark is used to his work shocking other people. It happened back in 1971 with Tulsa, a candid photographic record of his friends' outlaw lifestyle, and then again in 1983 with Teenage Lust. In 1995, scenes of (simulated) underage sex in his debut feature, Kids, fuelled outrage on both sides of the Atlantic. His last movie, Ken Park, as yet unreleased in the UK, contained actual male masturbation.

Impaled, Clark's 38-minute contribution to portmanteau art-porn project Destricted, now goes the whole way and shows a young man - selected from various lustful, or merely curious, hopefuls - fulfilling his dream of copulating with a porn actress. It is a disturbing work. Not because of the awkward, funny and downright messy sex between spacey porn star wannabe Daniel and a flirty fortysomething; but because of what Clark reveals about the pornification of the young men he auditions. Raised in a world where hardcore pornography is available, 24/7, at the click of a mouse button it is as if they are living in their personal adult movies. This time, even Clark was shocked.

"I was shocked and amazed," exclaims the lean and bearded 63-year-old, nursing a coffee. "This was an educational film for me, because I had no idea this was going on." When he asks the male applicants to disrobe for the camera, he discovers that most of them have removed all their pubic hair, just like porn stars. "It's so weird," he says bemused. "When you're a kid, pubic hair is the greatest thing in the world. Everybody loves pubic hair. You can't wait to get it. And these kids, very young kids, are shaving it off. It's like, what?"

The way they describe having sex is just as bizarre. "There's no mystery. You fuck, you pull out, and you come on the girl - that's the way to have sex. It's shocking to me. I had no idea, I swear to God. But it makes sense," he reflects. "If kids see that they think that's the way to do it." Consequently, anal intercourse is also high-up on their sexual desiderata, especially Daniel's. However, accidents will happen, and poor Daniel's fantasy turns into something resembling a porno blooper reel.

Impaled is quintessential Clark: a short-form expression of his artistic mission to show life in the raw. While his critics frequently accuse him of exploitation, he regards himself as a truth teller. Impaled is art, not pornography, he argues, "because I'm an artist and I made it and it works".

But is it really that simple? Even Clark asks himself whether he might actually be contributing to the phenomenon he is documenting. "I wonder if teenagers will see this and be influenced by the other kids," he muses at one stage.

The point is that since Tulsa, Clark's work, at least as he sees it, has been an assault on hypocrisy. When he was growing up in Oklahoma in the 50s, America was supposed to be a place of "Ozzie and Harriet, white picket fences, and mom and apple pie; there were no drugs in America, there was no alcoholism." Yet Clark remembers kids coming to school with black eyes from beatings by their drunken parents, and a girl in junior high school who was regularly sexually assaulted by her five brothers. Not even Life magazine talked about this side of American society, he claims. "So I always thought, 'Why can't you show everything? Why do all these things have to be kept secret?' So when I started working, my thing was, 'I'm going to show everything without the bullshit.' So I'm not afraid of what people think of what I do. Fuck 'em, I'm just going to try to keep it real."

Clark has led his life that way, too. He did not just observe the outlaw lifestyle of his friends in Tulsa, he was part of it. He took drugs, drove around the country with his girlfriend doing petty crime, and eventually wound up in prison for shooting a man while high. "I didn't kill him, but it was pretty crazy, man." Most of his friends from that time are now dead. "For some reason I just won't die," he says, laughing grimly. "I don't know why. It's like genetics or something. Luck."

I wonder how well Daniel will survive Impaled. He looks dazed at the end, perhaps even a little bit shattered. Certainly sex is not what he was expecting, poor dear. Clark rejects the idea that he was disturbed by the experience. However, "the realisation that Daniel has done this to Daniel, you can see that in his brain," he says, "going around, because it's not like he thought it would be. And he was really fantasising about it." So is Impaled exploitation or exploration? Personally speaking, the jury's still out.

· Destricted is released on September 8.

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#11 Post by colinr0380 » Thu Aug 24, 2006 3:52 pm

Well the BBFC website suggests it hasn't been edited at all.

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#12 Post by Lino » Sat Aug 26, 2006 5:09 pm

"Tate Modern said the film was art not pornography." There you go. Now we can all watch it and not feel dirty.

marty

#13 Post by marty » Sat Aug 26, 2006 8:59 pm

I have seen Destricted at Berlin Film Festival and it leaves little to the imagination as its very explicit - blowjobs, vaginal sex, anal sex, ejaculation, erections, cunnilingus, masturbation etc. The films are of varying quality. The one where a man is masturbating in the middle of the desert looks great but after five minutes, you wish he would cum already. It dragged too long for my liking. The best short, by far, is Larry Clark's film where he interviews teenage boys to talk about sex and then selects one to have sex with a female porn star on camera. This was the most enjoyable short. I definitely think adults should be allowed to see it and people will see it mostly out of curiosity but I don't think anyone who sees it will claim it as a masterpiece. Its an intriguing concept and I look forward to further Destricted films as initially planned.

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#14 Post by Lino » Fri Sep 29, 2006 4:16 pm

I got my UK DVD yesterday and immediately proceeded to watch it as my anticipation for this one-of-a-kind project was big. Well, what can I say - it certainly was what I was expecting it to be! In other words, it delivered the goods, literally.

I don't want to go into spoiler territory too much but let's just say that the results are pretty in your face to put it bluntly. Like marty said above, everything is shown but you can sense a director's eye behind all of them so this is definitely not porn. At times it feels strangely liberating (the Martina Abramovic segment, for instance), in others downright suffocating (the Gaspar Noe one) and in another ones, mind-blowing (there is one segment that lasts barely two minutes long but if it did last longer, you would end up an epileptic!).

The biggest surprise to me was to realize that the last barrier in mainstream cinema (if you could call this mainstream) had finally been broken: erect penii are shown and in great quantity and variety. And lots of men masturbating and ejaculating. Now, I know that Clark's Ken Park had already shown that as well as various other films (even as far back as Oshima's Empire of the Senses) but nowhere in the history of the medium (porn excluded) does this become more significant than in this particular visual experiment. And I personally aplaud that.

I'm sure that Destricted will attract very disparate opinions from subsequent viewers (even heated ones, I bet) but I like this new direction. Breaking barriers is one of my personal ambitions and main concern in art in general because we live in a time where pretty much everything has been conquered and broken down and when I see that it hasn't, I get all excited (with this movie, it isn't hard not to be if you know what I mean...).

Highly recommended, of course. One last thought - sometimes I felt like I was walking into a Museum of modern art and they were showing these segments in video installations that were distributed all over the building. Yes, it's that arty in parts but very daring most of the time. See it.

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#15 Post by Antoine Doinel » Fri Nov 17, 2006 11:29 pm

From ScreenGrab:

[quote]In honor of the fact that the omnibus art porn film Destricted recently became “the most sexually explicit film to not be classified as pornography by the British film rating board,â€

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#16 Post by Lino » Sat Nov 18, 2006 10:46 am

Fantastic news, Antoine! And thank you for digging that up. The Destricted project is really off to a great start and I personally cannot wait to see its immediate results.

Now, what would be really, really cool is if this gets enough word of mouth, then they would be able to invite truly great directors to contribute a segment. Can you imagine someone like Scorsese or or even maybe Todd Haynes doing a porn short? Now we're talking business!

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#17 Post by colinr0380 » Thu Nov 30, 2006 2:15 pm

I hadn't realised this before but the director of one of the segments, Marco Brambilla was the guy who made Demolition Man and Excess Baggage! This seems like a bizarre swerve into art/porn territory for him.

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#18 Post by justeleblanc » Thu Nov 30, 2006 2:54 pm

I LOVE Demolition Man!

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#19 Post by Commander Shears » Thu Nov 30, 2006 3:23 pm

Larry Clark might be the one director that I cannot view cinematically, but only socially / politically. While I find most sexual content in recent years to be transparent and desperate grabs at publicity, I find it disappointing more than offensive. Admitted pornogrpahy doesn't bother me in the slightest. However, if I had a child that was contacted by Larry Clark for a film or photoshoot, I would hunt him down and pull a Sonny Corleone on him right there. Other than that, I have no problem with him.

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#20 Post by colinr0380 » Thu Nov 30, 2006 5:24 pm

justeleblanc wrote:I LOVE Demolition Man!
It is one of my guilty pleasures too! :-$

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#21 Post by Jay » Sun Jan 14, 2007 4:48 pm

I found the teddy bears in that Noe segment to be perhaps the most politically and erotically (and, perhaps, politically because erotically) charged stuffed animals since the bedframe adornments of _Rules of Attraction_ or maybe the "closeted" dolls in _ET_. Kidding of course; but also kind of not... :shock: "Holy..."

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Re: Destricted (Various, 2006)

#22 Post by colinr0380 » Wed Feb 17, 2010 8:43 am

I caught up with this last night and thought it was, um, interesting, if mostly more disturbing than erotic! It is definitely a self conscious entry into the 'art or porn?' debate, mostly because the pieces attempt to be artworks about porn and pornography's significance to modern culture, with varying degrees of success (and hilarity!)

Balkans Erotic Epic is both charmingly rustic and absurdist, in which some sexual urban legends are described and then illustrated either through rough animations or stylised live action sequences in which the various mud pools, rainy meadows, or green fields seem like outdoor stage sets than a real environment. Wondering whether this was a giant soundstage or a real location was the most interesting aspect of the piece, and this idea of a location used as a stage is returned to with lesser effect in Sam Taylor-Wood's piece. The rather po faced female narrator (a rather buttoned up lady wearing what I can only assume to be 'intellectual' glasses) who introduces and describes each of the sequences added a lot of (unintentional?) humour to the piece.

Overall this was probably the most fun of all the films, as lines of women rub their breasts to a song about loss or do extreme modern dance movements in a rainstorm, running towards the camera, throwing their skirts back and exposing themselves to the elements. Evetually we see a line of men trying to maintain a stoical posture, and their erections, during another patriotic song (the 'standing proud' impression is rather hilariously undermined however when in the final group of five men shown one gentleman has a rather confused expression and wandering eye, as if a little, um, intimidated by his companions). It perhaps could be seen as an ethnographic piece, trying to link sexual culture with the land, procreation and patriotism rather than to pornography, though I was always continually under the impression that it was all an elaborate joke!

Sync was by far the best of the series. Running about one minute and fifty seconds the film as a whole describes a coupling from first kiss to final separation underscored with a drum beat, but does this through moving the action forward using two or three frames from a film and then moving on to another that picks up the action and moves it forward again a further two or three frames, and so on. So for example the couple begin standing facing each other, move forward and kiss and then fall back onto a bed, but this is done using fifty or so differerent film clips to perform that action.

Perhaps it was also the best film of the series because it was so concise and did not outstay its welcome. It also had a lot of meaning that was fun to unpack and consider after the first viewing, unlike many of the other films where the first idea felt like the only idea. For instance the density of the imagery, kind of like Brakhage, almost necessitates a frame by frame examination of the work for full appreciation - yet that frame-by-frame analysis is also a very funny comment on how the audience watches pornography, slow motioning their way through the 'good' bits to fully savour them!

Only by going through in this manner is it possible to try and identify films, but more importantly than that it was fascinating to see the way that all these disparate film sources fit together so well. The film is sort of an illustration of the theory that there are only so many ways to film a sex scene, and how the imagery is kind of codified for an audience, so you see the bodies in a similar position, and the size of shot corresponding but then have an eerie sense of everything else as changebale and malleable - only the action is a constant while the setting (the variously decorated bedrooms, the classic hayloft, even Showgirls provides an underwater setting!, and so on) and the bodies (ethnicity, facial features, body size, expression, etc) are in constant flux.

It is also interesting to see the way that both mainstream feature films are used, with a flurry of shots of porn films interspersed throughout, especially of course in the penetration scenes but also in the sections showing kisses or of moaning faces. This also has some relation I think to the disturbing way that scenes showing people in pain or frames of bloodied bodies, the violent assault from the Cape Fear remake or the rape scene from Irreversible are used as material during this constructed coupling. While this, as with the identification of film clips, flashes past almost subliminally quickly on a normal speed viewing it suggests a collapsing of context for sexual activity - mainstream film and porn, sexual violence as a form of sexual activity. (Also the various orgasm faces (male and female) seemed to move fluidly from ecstasy to horror and back) The separating line is blurred as the meaning behind the act is overwhelmed by simply witnessing the act, and in a way this illustrates the point of the entire film - that every sexual act builds up to provide a picture for a viewer of 'the' sexual act. I'm not sure I would really agree with this thesis as it seems more based on an assumed unthinking consumption of imagery, and I assume that consumers of pornographic imagery are much more active viewers persuing material more intently based on their specific interests, rather than simply getting off on just anything that involves sexual activity!

Some of the 'mainstream' films that I noted: Aria (the Vegas segment), Solaris (Clooney and McElhone), Cape Fear (the De Niro assault), Presumed Innocent (Ford and Scacchi), Irreversible (the tunnel), Last Tango In Paris (various scenes), In The Realm Of The Senses, Showgirls (various scenes), Emanuelle In America, Moulin Rouge! (McGregor and Kidman), Crash (various scenes), Sin City, Fight Club. Some films I thought I saw but was not certain about: I think I noted Alan Bates in Women In Love, Laura Dern and even maybe saw the face of a horrified James Stewart amongst the montage of male orgasm faces! Plus I think L'Ennui is in there too

Here's the film Is the film, wrongly credited to Noé. Of course be aware that despite being flash frames the film is still explicit and most definitely NSFW! I do like the way that the initial move in to the kiss at the beginning of the film is simply reversed for the separation of the couple at the end.

Matthew Barney's Hoist was a bit too self consciously wacky. The first sequence of a strange object becoming an obvious erection was quite striking, turning the human body into a strange alien object. The strange man with a bulbous root sticking out of his anus and flowers from his mouth (shades of The Fountain!) rubbing himself against the driveshaft of a truck was memorably bizarre, turning the human being into a kind of parasite clinging to the insides of the machinery. Though I was much more concerned about the possibility of this plant-person's genitalia getting torn (or at least worn!) off. It sort of takes a pornographic act into a whole different abstracted realm, yet at the same time it is utterly ridiculous! That's Matthew Barney for you I guess!

Impaled is also quintessential Larry Clark, interviewing various inarticulate, sexually precocious twinks, choosing the most inarticulate and twinkish of them all and letting him interview various adult film actresses before choosing one to perform his first anal sex act with. There's little more to it than this, yet it perhaps does have merit as being perhaps Clark's 'purest' film - the one where the gazing at young men and watching them have promiscuous unprotected sex doesn't have to be couched in terms of a created narrative. Clark's films seem all about teens driven by urges that they understand the implications of, but consciously ignore for the short term goals of sex or murder (or both at the same time). Here the wish to star in a porn film but slight insecurities once that wish is about to be realised, yet the eventual putting of those doubts to one side seems less mannered than in the fictional works.

Yet despite feeling that this is of a piece with Clark's other works I still have issues with the film. I would have liked more probing questions from Clark of his potential porn actors, getting more into why they want to be in a porn film, or feel as if that is something worth aspiring to, as well as getting into the obsession with anal sex most of the chaps seem to have ingrained into them (from watching porn?) Clark does ask a few of these questions of the male candidates but the questions are very broad in nature and often the responses to them are not followed up on to any great extent.

The initial round of questioning seems particularly weak once the male participant is chosen and the adult film actresses have their interviews - their quite aggressive assertions that being in adult films are the best things that ever happened to them, and was a great career move leaving them with no regrets etc, are left unchallenged. Clark retires behind the camera at this point and lets the young guy he has chosen do a lot of the hesitant, mumbling interviewing himself, but I get the impresssion that even without this withdrawal by the director that there would be little interest in the female participant or the way that the various professional businesslike attitudes to the encounter (transaction) overpower the young man's initiation, despite this being where Clark's interests mainly lie. It prevents the film from reaching any particular insights or personal revelations about any of the participants, even into the director himself - or at least no more insights than would be revealed in any other 'casual' interview piece with a young man prior to a porn shoot.

In the end I'm left feeling that the film is just a kind of modern technology update to the old situation of an older man taking a younger apprentice to a brothel and buying the kid a prostitute for a night, with all the sublimated fantasies (of being a virile young man again) that such a situation implies. Only in this case the older man wants to be able to have the encounter he is paying for captured on film too.

Gaspar Noé's film, We Fuck Alone, has many of the strengths and weaknesses of his other works. I mentioned on the Enter The Void thread that I often found the initial ideas of his films fascinating but then found them over extended to the point of tedious redundancy. I found the same thing here, and perhaps this is a more pointed example given the use of epilepsy inducing flashes throughout the course of the piece (becoming something of a Noé trademark following the ending of Irreversible) that made the piece become that much more annoying faster than usual.

In a way however the strobing does feel motivated, since the film shows a sex scene occuring on a television set and then pulls back to roam (in a characteristically untethered floating camera fashion) around two different bedrooms of a young man and young woman as they, seemingly inspired by the images they are seeing on their respective televisions, masturbate alone. This film does have many of the reductive approaches to creating archetypal characters as in many of Noé's features: the girl is a fragile being and uses a stuffed toy to masturbate with in almost a parody of innocence wanting to be violated; the boy, to my mind at least, gets the far cruder and uncomfortable (and uglier) looking plastic sex doll to use. I did feel as if I 'got the point' of the film - that men are given less abstract things to take their sexual urges out on, but the crudity of these kinds of dolls, combined with the almost teasing sexual imagery of pornography showing the power of men over women builds up a kind of frustrated violence - long before the point became made far too literal as a gun hoves into view on the bed and the man uses it to perform fellatio on the doll before eventually ejaculating over it. Really the last five or ten minutes could have been removed completely and the film would have been better for it. I got the sense of threat through the constant strobing and the juxatposition of the girl’s ‘innocent’ play with her stuffed toy and the boy’s rough treatment of his doll, especially when the doll and camerawork combined to frame it in positions subliminally similar to the rape scene from Irreversible.

Sure, there would have been no literal cum shot had the film ended earlier but that would have perhaps worked to the film's benefit - though on the other hand the inevitability of such an ending with the long haul to get there, for such a paltry result, combined with a rather broad and reductive portrayal of male (and female) sexuality seems like a characteristic of Noé at this point. Complaining about the complete destruction of any subtlety of handling by over extending the message into the over explicitness of hammering the ‘message’ home that is shown in the last five minutes is perhaps pointless when it seems such an integral element (flaw?) to the filmmaker himself.

Richard Prince's House Call is quite weak - a 70s styled weakly premised porn film (of the ‘doctor screwing a patient’ ilk) with a strobing effect of a cathode ray tube television layered on top, likely in order to emphasise the way such material used to be viewed. Nothing particularly interesting here, though there is a neat Brian Eno-esque score on top of the action.

There was even less of interest in Sam Taylor-Wood’s Death Valley in which a chap undresses and masturbates in agonised fashion in the title location all in a single long shot. Basically it is Twentynine Palms with frustrated onanism instead of frustrated, semi-violent sex. Although it was amusing to think of it simply being a film about the lengths that one man will go to in order to find a quiet and isolated spot to masturbate, only to find that it has all been recorded by a distant camera crew using a zoom lens!
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Re: Destricted (Various, 2006)

#23 Post by Numero Trois » Tue Mar 09, 2010 5:47 am

colinr0380 wrote: The rather po faced female narrator (a rather buttoned up lady wearing what I can only assume to be 'intellectual' glasses) who introduces and describes each of the sequences added a lot of (unintentional?) humour to the piece.
That would be Marina Abramovic. Her piece has a certain charm to it, but it's about as inconsequential as most of the rest of the film.

The Matthew Barney, Gaspar Noé and Larry Clark films are exactly what you'd expect from each. Nothing more. With the Larry Clark film the only news to report is that at the very least there's one over-forty year old costarring. Which in Larry Clark's world probably counts as progress. As far as the Gaspar Noe film goes- the twenty minutes of nonstop strobe lighting is kind of funny, now that I think of it. But maybe only if used as the ultimate "rickroll."

Actually, I thought Richard Prince's film was the best of the bunch. It's just a snippet from a 70s porno film(filmed through a video screen) of a doctor doing a "house call." What makes it stand out is the fine score that Prince created for it.

Maybe the real story of this compilation is that decades after the lifting of censorship no one has yet figured out how to make a great pornographic movie. Maybe it's impossible. But then again, it's not like this group of shorts can be considered a serious stab at the matter.

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Re: Destricted (Various, 2006)

#24 Post by MichaelB » Tue Mar 09, 2010 8:08 am

Numero Trois wrote:Maybe the real story of this compilation is that decades after the lifting of censorship no one has yet figured out how to make a great pornographic movie.
Jan Svankmajer arguably managed it with Conspirators of Pleasure - but it's unlikely anyone would use it as masturbation material. Which is ironic, given that that's the central theme of the film.

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Re: Destricted (Various, 2006)

#25 Post by vogler » Tue Mar 09, 2010 1:20 pm

Numero Trois wrote:Her piece has a certain charm to it, but it's about as inconsequential as most of the rest of the film.
My opinion of Destricted is not all that far from yours, except for me the majority of it seemed utterly worthless. It's a shame because I find the idea of it very exciting - an artists take on pornography. The result makes me feel even more depressed about the dire state of contemporary art and the severe lack of creativity that often dominates. Having said that, I did rather like Marco Brambilla's film, and Marina Abramovic's contribution did at least put a smile on my face (It actually reminded me of some of the strange sketches that would appear on the Antoine de Caunes TV show Eurotrash).
Numero Trois wrote:Maybe the real story of this compilation is that decades after the lifting of censorship no one has yet figured out how to make a great pornographic movie. Maybe it's impossible. But then again, it's not like this group of shorts can be considered a serious stab at the matter.
I think it's more the case that decades after the lifting of censorship practically everyone has forgotten how to make a great pornographic movie. There have been many great pornographic movies but one has to look away from tripe like Destricted towards the real auteurs of adult cinema from the pre-video-era Golden age. Many of these people were far greater artists than any of those involved with Destricted could ever hope to be. Gerard Damiano, Radley Metzger, Gary Graver, Lasse Braun, Jonas Middleton, Armand Weston, Anthony Spinelli, Cecil Howard, the Mitchell Brothers, Shaun Costello, Stephen Sayadian, Zebedy Colt and many others produced films that were very genuine, and often quite successful, attempts at creating erotic/pornographic art.

What often shows in 1970s and early 80s adult cinema is the artistic freedom that these film-makers had. As long as the films fulfilled their purpose - to show explicit sex - they seemed to be able to get away with producing whatever kinds of films they liked. This led to all kinds of strange amalgams of pornography and bizarre surrealist inspired imagery. At their very best classic porn films most closely resemble some kind of experimental underground cinema. For me it is a very important area of creative independent film-making. Destricted on the other hand...

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