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...

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.

Avant-guard film before the Avant-guard even existed, this film shows homosexual love and fantasm. Pretty mundane stuff in the cyberporn age, but scandalous at the time and the decades after. Had Jean Genet lived 20 more years, his vindication would have been complete.

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.

Anyone who has read any of the novels or plays of Jean Genet will pretty much know what to expect from 'Un Chant d'Amour'. Genet, in works like 'Miracle of the Rose', and 'The Thief's Journal' adhered admirably to the axiom to "write what you know" and drew upon his experiences of a lifetime in and out of French penitentiaries to initiate the reader into a seedy criminal underworld saturated with a poignant homo-erotic light, populated by characters who display vulnerability in their brutality and beauty in the tragic empty determinism of their lives. However, the predictability of the content of 'Un Chant d'Amour' does not detract from the film in the slightest but rather fleshes out (pun intended) Genet's poetic vision and suggests how he could have further elaborated this vision if he had made more than this single short film.

The film begins with inmates blindly attempting to pass a flower from cell to cell, and this poetic metaphor of communication serves as the conceptual heart of the film as we're introduced to a series of inmates, whose needs for expression and communication, whether it be linguistic or sexual, are routinely denied and whose unfulfilled desires becomes all encompassing and unbearable. This realm of repressed desire is overseen by the warden who peers into the cells and ogles the men, enjoying the incarceration he enacts moment-by-moment with sadistic glee, and yet whose own sexual desire is as unfulfilled as that of the prisoners and feels driven to seek consummation through abuse.

The inherent voyeuristic potential of cinema is something which would later be successfully explored by Hitchcock in films such as 'Rear Window' (1954) and 'Psycho' (1960) as well as Michael Powell in the controversial 'Peeping Tom' (1960); this movie predates the work of both and yet seems to be fully aware of its subversive positioning of the viewer as both voyeur and fetishist as the bodies of the inmates are coveted in a pornographic fashion. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that such an explicit depiction of homosexual desire has the potential to alienate some… indeed, curiously Genet himself later disowned the film on the grounds that it is too pornographic! However, begging to differ with Saint Genet, for my money the humane treatment of the characters, the carefully crafted atmosphere, and the cinematography courtesy of Jean Cocteau are easily enough to redeem 'Un Chant d'Amour' as a work of art (in a similar way to how Kenneth Anger's 1947 debut 'Fireworks' escaped a obscenity charge on the grounds of being Art).

However, this said, even at 26 minutes I still felt the film was a tad longer than it should have been and easily could have been trimmed down to be under 20 minutes. Still, what remains is both an important early cinematic exploration of male desire as well as a study of the double-edged sword of torture and solace human desire, independent of sexual orientation, can bestow.