Jean Genet

  • Jean Genet – Jean Genet [Interview with Bertrand Poirot-Delpech] (1982)

    1981-1990DocumentaryFranceJean GenetShort Film

    An interview with Genet.Read More »

  • Jean Genet – Un chant d’amour (1950)

    1941-1950EroticaExperimentalFranceJean GenetQueer Cinema(s)

    From Amos Vogel’s Film as a Subversive Art:
    Genet’s only film — hounded by the censors, unavailable, secret — is an early and remarkably moving attempt to portray homosexual passions. Already a classic, it succeeds as perhaps no other film to intimate the explosive power of frustrated sex; male prisoners in solitary confinement “embracing” walls, ramming them in erotic despair with erect penis, swaying convulsively to auto-erotic lust, kissing their own bodies and tattoos in sexual frenzy. In a supremely poetic (and visual) metaphor of sexual deprivation, two prisoners in adjoining cells symbolically perform fellatio by alternately blowing or inhaling each other’s cigarette smoke through a straw inserted in a wall opening, while masturbating. Like all of Genet’s early work, the entire film is, in effect, a single onanistic fantasy, filled with desperate frustration and sensuous nostalgia. In the end, and after many failures, some flowers — painfully passed from one barred window to the next — are finally caught by the prisoner in the adjoining cell in a poetic affirmation of love in infinite imprisonment.Read More »

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