Destricted

Destricted is a collection of short films linked by a common theme of sex. Like Shortbus, Lie With Me and 9 Songs, the film has achieved notoriety for its inclusion of unsimulated, graphic sexual activity. Ostensibly investigating the realms of art and pornography, the film has been exhibited at the Tate Modern in London, followed by a number of other events, and is now on UK DVD release with an 18 certificate. The DVD was released in a limited edition silver vacuum-pack on September the 25th, 2006.

The classification of the film as an 18 in the UK is itself an indication of the content of the film, a reflection of its intent to present itself as art rather than pornography, for which a Restricted 18 classification would be more suitable. A US release is, of course, unlikely.

The films:

Balkan Erotic Epic / Marina Abramović

Almost educational, this film features old rituals from the Balkans. Each ritual is introduced and followed by a short film section or animation showing the mechanics of the ritual. We see a variety of women leaping about in the rain, trying to get the raindrops to fall on their labia. A field of men, viewed from above, fuck the ground to ensure its fertility for the coming year; a rather bizarre sight if truth be told. Three sets of men in traditional Balkan dress stand proudly before us as a Balkan folk song is played over the top, the subtitles looking strangely incongrous beneath their erect penises which protrude from their flies. The animation of a Balkan housewife removing a dead fish from her vagina is surreal, particularly when she grinds it up to brew a love-potion-esque mug of tea, but not as alarming as the one where she wipes her vaginal secretions on her son's face to bless him for a journey.

Hoist / Matthew Barney

Made up in greens and browns, with shredded leaves and moss surrounding it, a penis slowly becomes erect over a period of minutes. For the first few minutes it is unclear what is happening; it seems as though some strange, slug-like creature is writhing slowly over a forest floor. A large machine is then introduced to us, and workmen attach it to a crane so that its wheels might be hoisted from the ground. Rumbling into action, the camera slowly zooms beneath to the drive shaft of this massive vehicle. There, initially stroking it before raising himself to rub his erect penis against the wax-coated, spinning shaft, is a man. Presumably the owner of the penis at the beginning of the film, he is covered in leaves, dirt and other plant matter. A large gourd hangs from his anus and there is a similar protrusion from his mouth. He continues to rub his penis against the drive shaft as the camera zooms and pans, slowly, occasionally showing the edges of the massive, lazily spinning wheels of the machine. Eventually, after drawing back his foreskin, the man achieves orgasm and ejaculates. We zoom back out from the belly of the machine, past the spinning wheels, and the film ends.

Sync / Marco Brambila

Short, but clever. Taking hundreds of scenes from different pornographic films, the director cuts it all together with a frantic drum track to make a new film. The scenes are chosen and cut together so that it looks like one shot, but with the actors' faces, legs, buttocks and genitals changing in a constant blur. It produces a kind of generic porn film and serves to show that there truly is only so many ways you can fit people together.

Impaled / Larry Clark

One of the more intellectually fascinating pieces. A series of young men appear and are asked a variety of questions about their attitude to sex. It becomes apparent that they are auditioning to take part in a porn film, although the interview also reveals their own attitude to sex as a generation that has grown up with readily available porn. It's fascinating, for example, to find out that each of the men believes it is important to ejaculate outside the vagina, or to note the utterly naive expectations of various aspects of sex. One young man is chosen, and at this point he is asked to interview and choose from a range of female porn stars. He chooses an older woman who is willing to have anal sex with him. She performs fellatio on him, and they have vaginal and anal sex. He eventually ejaculates, following a slight accident during the anal portion of the activity. Most people realise that if you're going to try that you're inevitably going to notice something brown one day. Of course, in the glorious world of pornography such things never happen, and the revulsion on the young man's face is wickedly joyful to behold. A sad film, actually, and probably the best of the bunch.

We Fuck Alone / Gaspar Noé

Strobe lit for about twenty minutes, I'm afraid. Two people in separate rooms masturbate while watching the same piece of pornography. A young man with a bizarrely Hitler-esque haircut masturbates and fucks a sex doll before fucking its mouth with a handgun of some kind whilst ejaculating into its vagina. The woman uses soft toys to stimulate herself. Every now and then we zoom into the television, through the pornography which forms a reflection of the solo sex act, and back out into the other room. The message, one presumes, is that sex without love is merely masturbation using another human. Either that or Gaspar Noé is actually mad. (See Irreversible for further evidence of this, but take care to check for some further details before committing yourself; it's violent.)

House Call / Richard Prince

An old porn film with the soundtrack replaced with strange, industrial-tinged electronica. The film has been produced by recording a television showing the porn video. You can't see the edges of the screen, but the pattern of phosphor dots is clearly visible, making a grainy, washed-out image. It's strangely clinical to watch, and not even slightly erotic. Although, come to think of it, not one of the videos has been remotely erotic so far. Plenty of genitalia and nudity, but not a lot of eroticism. Perhaps that's the point.

Death Valley / Sam Taylor-Wood

We pan slowly across a desert scene. A man appears, walks nearer to the camera and removes his shirt. He opens his jeans, pulls them down to his thighs, kneels and masturbates. A few minutes later he uses his t-shirt to lean his elbow on and continues to masturbate, keeping his body off the ground by supporting it on his knees and elbow. He kneels up, wanks some more, props himself up again and eventually ejaculates onto the desert floor. And then it ends. If you like men then I suspect this is the nearest you'll get to erotic, and I'm not sure why this isn't just pornography - it's a man wanking in front of a camera. Still, there you go. Art needs no explanation...

Sources: Do visit the imdb for more information. Someone there has also gone through the films one by one for you. There's not a lot of information on Wikipedia, but you can always pop over to the Destricted website for more info.

Nightbreed

To begin with there was The Hellbound Heart and Cabal, both short but intense novellas by author Clive Barker. Scarcely a year later he created Hellraiser, a film version of The Hellbound Heart, producing an intelligent but gory horror. Following the success of Hellraiser - and it was a success, introducing some of the most enduring and grotesque images of horror ever seen - Clive and a Hellraiser-impressed Fox were keen to follow up with something better. That's where Cabal came in.

Naming the project after Cabal's main protagonists, the Nightbreed, Barker adapted and shaped the novella to produce a complex script involving a shadowy underworld of exiled horrors. The Nightbreed are not accepted by society; each one has killed and is, through the power of their brokendeity Baphomet, provided with some sort of power, or at least something that makes them different; the changes in question are not always beneficial. Young Aaron Boone (Craig Sheffer), carefully framed for multiple, bloody murders by his psychiatrist, Decker (reassuringly played by David Cronenberg), makes his way to Midian, 'where the monsters live'. He's followed, of course, and pretty soon Decker turns out not only to be homicidal, but genocidal, too. The monsters must die, particularly as Boone is one of them and knows Decker's secret, and thus Nightbreed becomes more than simply a horror film, taking on the role of an allegory about intolerance. Primarily, of course, it's a horror film, as shown by the make-up effects, the ambitious sets, and copious quantities of blood. It's subtle horror, too - the scene in which a family is deliberately and matter-of-factly slaughtered by Decker is chillingly plausible.

Sadly, though moderately popular on release, Nightbreed has not stood the test of time. Like Hellraiser, upon its release Nightbreed was accompanied by a range of tie-in books, computer games and comics. Unlike Hellraiser, however, it failed to spawn a sequel (although this is not necessarily a bad thing), and (more importantly) failed to produce an enduring image: Hellraiser had Pinhead, the chief Cenobite, whose pin-studded visage has since become a universal symbol of the horrific. Nightbreed has no such icon - despite its lavish sets, equally grotesque make-up effects and intelligent script, it has simply faded. A recent DVD release may go some way toward reviving it, but ultimately Nightbreed has had its chance and missed it, for whatever reason. It's a shame; maybe Nightbreed wasn't the perfect horror film, but it was by no means a bad film.

Don't forget the Danny Elfman soundtrack, either. Nightbreed was supposed to be a success - the next big Barker movie. So what went wrong? Nightbreed was dogged by unforeseen complexities. Marc Almond, given a part by Clive as a friendly gesture, was later forced to pull out, leaving the film with one Almond-sized full body prosthetic and no-one to fill it. The complex underworld of Midian was expensive to produce - all rope bridges and suspended walkways; corners had to be cut. Add to this, too, the twenty-five minutes of material Barker was forced to remove. Fox were unhappy with the explicit horror and unpleasant sexual imagery - in the original cut the Berserkers, described by other Nightbreed as 'mad bastards', were equipped with savage, penis-like heads, not dissimilar to that of Rawhead Rex in an earlier Barker film. Add to this mix, also, more than a little overacting on the part of Hugh Ross, and some dreadful eighties hair on the part of Anne Bobby.

The end of Nightbreed clearly leaves the way open for a sequel. It is unlikely to ever appear, of course, but just in case, the DVD edition is readily available. Now may very well be the time to acquaint yourself with the novella Cabal, closely followed by the film...

Nightbreed was directed by Clive Barker and produced by Gabriella Martinelli and Joe Roth. It was released in 1990 featuring the acting talents of Craig Sheffer as Aaron Boone, Anne Bobby as Lori Desinger and David Cronenberg as Dr. Philip Decker. The music, released on CD but difficult to obtain, was composed by Danny Elfman.

Penis Landscape

Penis Landscape is the affectionate name for work 219: Landscape XX, by the Swiss artist H.R. Giger. Created in 1973 from airbrushed acrylic on paper covered wood, the original piece measures 70 x 100 centimetres. To those who have seen Giger's work before, it comes as no surprise that of the two names, Penis Landscape is the more appropriate.

You are familiar with Giger's work, by the way. It's almost impossible not to have heard of Alien, lovingly designed by Giger with an appropriately phallic head. Species, too, provided an opportunity for grotesque sexual imagery, and the idea of loving Giger's work has become something like a mark of the elite. William Gibson mentions Giger's paintings of New York in Idoru, and the underworld of the internet is almost smothered in Giger-esque imagery. Failing that, album covers by Emerson, Lake And Palmer, as well as artwork involving Debbie Harry may well have come to your attention.

Landscape XX, however, remained entirely unremarkable for a decade until the Dead Kennedys chose to feature it on the sleeve of their 1985 album Frankenchrist. At this point, work 219 became of the utmost importance to a San Francisco court. In 1986, the painting, and various newspaper clippings associated with it were scrutinized fiercely. Eventually, the image was declared to be art, and therefore not pornography, after a period in which the album remained unavailable.

The image itself is as visually stunning as all Giger's work. It features six whole penises and three half-penises, their base and scrotum cruelly snipped off by the image's edge. The head of each penis is inserted into a vagina, though at least one appears to be on the verge of slipping out, and only one has been prudent enough to use protection. All but the buttocks and genitalia of each individual are hidden by that peculiar, scummy surface Giger seems to love painting, leaving a repeating pattern of penis, vagina, penis, vagina, which you realise could easily continue on to infinity. The style fits with Giger's obsession at the time, vast repeating landscapes of tiled images, always with a grotesque or shocking theme: the heads of diseased infants wail at us from the image, or a cracked metal skull, held secure with wires, is drilled from above by a sinister and filthy mechanism.

We may be led to ask why. Aside from the standard answer, confirmed by court ruling (It's art!), this painting is merely part of Giger's usual theme-based work. From the earliest moments in his career Giger has focused on specific themes, whether it is the Passagen series - stark images of dimly-lit passageways, many blocked in some way by curious yet simple metal devices - or the Erotomechanics portfolio: images of sex between things which are part metal, part flesh, sometimes part of the landscape, all seen from strange viewpoints - either unbearably close up or so distant that the act itself becomes simply a part of the surroundings. This is what the landscape series achieve: these infinite planes of image simply serve to reduce their contents to near-meaninglessness. Their purpose, save for existing in their own right as 'art', seems merely to entertain or, if we read Giger's accompanying words in his book ARh+, to horrify.