Chuck Vincent holds a central position in porn history, even though his major achievements have either been forgotten or downgraded (due to changing tastes and revisionism) since his death. As someone who knew him and reviewed his non-X films throughout the '80s I am submitting the first review of VISIONS, hopefully to inspire further reactions.
In its mainly abstract format -largely an hour-long dream sequence with ballet and sex acts scored to classical music, it presages the so-called "art porn" of recent decades - think Andrew Blake and Michael Ninn as the most popular. A forerunner would be the Amero Bros.' BACCHANALE, which is far better known.
With Roberta Findlay handling the camera, the film immediately reminded me of the fuzzy line between independent underground cinema in the '60s and the soft porn that morphed into XXX, for which Findlay and her late husband Michael are central figures. Their underrated MNASADIKA is a key example.
Here Vincent cast Wade Nichols as the symbol of the creative spirit. He's a composer seemingly blocked. The key character of the janitor lectures him after hours on the need to "be a do-er", having regularly witnessed Nichols as a sort of slacker, not getting his mojo going when it comes to creative music.
Their conclave is interrupted by the appearance of two burglars, one of whom (David Christopher, familiar if enigmatic figure on the NYC Adult scene) bludgeons Wade into unconsciousness, cuing the endless dream sequence.
This fantasy is staged on the cheap but is still fitfully effective. It consists of Nichols wandering in a smoky, under-lit set amidst hanging plastic curtains, where he witnesses or participates in various tableaux of writhing bodies or disembodied hands (in the manner popularized by Jean Cocteau in his influential fantasy films). Best sequence is a white-on- white reverse gang-bang where several women literally smother Wade with affection and Findlay has shot everything in sharp detail.
Elsewhere the murkiness of the presentation is a major drawback, making many of Vincent's stagings seem merely pretentious, especially with the cast in white-face that suggests that dreaded cinema device/cliché -mimes. Antonioni got away with it (though still suffering some ridicule) in the famous scenes in BLOW-UP, but it doesn't work well here.
I had great sympathy for Wade's character and found the film overall to be quite moving. As an experiment (both Vincent and Findlay use pseudonyms probably to differentiate it from their day jobs as straight-ahead commercial pornographers) it may have failed, but I respect their trying to achieve something serious and lasting.
Vincent was very, very serious about breaking some barriers in society regarding sex cinema, as he emphasized in several interviews I did around the time of his would-be breakthrough ROOMMATES, and VISIONS also gives evidence of his artistic struggle to break free from toiling in the confines of a black sheep cousin to the mainstream entertainment industry. He didn't live to see porn (analgous to current stats about video games) end up becoming a larger industry than the regular movie business.
