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Art Porn, or Porn Art 101
What this is, which I discovered due to it being listed as someone's entry on a 2012 Sight & Sound list (you know, for the 10 best films ever), is an experimental art film using as its primer a scene from a hardcore porno. It's basically just four people screwing on a bed - going full intercourse and fellatio, a mix of those - and this director has used a series of color treatments, blow-outs, over- exposures, who knows what else, taking from the playbook a little from Brakhage to give porn a different perspective. What that is exactly will differ from viewer to viewer, but I'm guessing in the back of this man's mind he wanted to subvert the old politician who once said about porn, "I know it when I see it." Oh, really?
This is creative in that respect, and of course being that it's people having sex in graphic detail there's (for lack of a way to describe it better) constant movement. But there is a process to it and a progression, and as the bodies move faster and with a greater urgency and as organs gain in their own intensity so do to the treatments on top of the image. This was done to a degree before by director Stan Brakhage (I think he may have even done something like this with the "nasty" genital body parts for a segment of Dog Star Man), but not to a degree like this where it's on the ground level all one shot of the people in the room, while all of the images and distortions make it look as though there's more cuts and splices and things that go 'pop' in front of you.
And because it's film, the abstractness gives it a rougher, rawer dimension. I'm sure some will still find titillation, but I don't think (or I'd hope, or maybe I don't care outside of the artistic intent) the director meant for it to be seen as it was before. Porn is always very basic: you might as well look at an oil derrick working in real time, except with flesh and hair. I think by latching on to the repetitive nature of it, not to mention the aspect that as bodies increase in heat and energy and reproductive purpose things move faster so the images get higher in light and intensity in the spots and specks and so on, this director finds something to say. Again, it may be more for students in a class to deconstruct it. But if you happen to find it (it's on YouTube under its Italian title, making it, technically, one of the only movies of this kind on the site), it's worth a look.
This is creative in that respect, and of course being that it's people having sex in graphic detail there's (for lack of a way to describe it better) constant movement. But there is a process to it and a progression, and as the bodies move faster and with a greater urgency and as organs gain in their own intensity so do to the treatments on top of the image. This was done to a degree before by director Stan Brakhage (I think he may have even done something like this with the "nasty" genital body parts for a segment of Dog Star Man), but not to a degree like this where it's on the ground level all one shot of the people in the room, while all of the images and distortions make it look as though there's more cuts and splices and things that go 'pop' in front of you.
And because it's film, the abstractness gives it a rougher, rawer dimension. I'm sure some will still find titillation, but I don't think (or I'd hope, or maybe I don't care outside of the artistic intent) the director meant for it to be seen as it was before. Porn is always very basic: you might as well look at an oil derrick working in real time, except with flesh and hair. I think by latching on to the repetitive nature of it, not to mention the aspect that as bodies increase in heat and energy and reproductive purpose things move faster so the images get higher in light and intensity in the spots and specks and so on, this director finds something to say. Again, it may be more for students in a class to deconstruct it. But if you happen to find it (it's on YouTube under its Italian title, making it, technically, one of the only movies of this kind on the site), it's worth a look.
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- Quinoa1984
- Oct 4, 2016
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- Also known as
- Trasferimento di Modulazione
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- See more company credits at IMDbPro
- Runtime8 minutes
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Top Gap
By what name was Transfer of Modulation (1969) officially released in Canada in English?
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