DESTRICTED is the kind of film that makes you proud to be British. But it's not the kind of film that I want to watch again.
The basic idea is that since the invention of the VCR and latterly the internet, porn has been taken out of public spaces and into the home. Kids grow up watching porn and to a large extent their expectations of sex are based on porn rather than garnering real life experience. The VCR and internet also made porn big business - sitting alongside mainstream Hollywood in So-Cal. The weird part is that while lots of us have sex and use porn and feel happy in our liberal environment, it is still bizarrely difficult to have an adult discussion about the relationship between sexuality and porn. The classic example is when a publicly funded museum in the US put on a Robert Mapplethorpe retrospective in the late '80s. Senator Jesse Helms hounded out the curator, called off the exhibition and essentially shut down the National Endowment of the Arts. All because he couldn't tell the difference between art and smut. So, you could say that we are long over-due an unfettered intelligent discourse about the All Porn All the Time culture that we live in and the impact that has on how we understand our own sexuality.
To that end, three English movie producers got together and said, let's ask seven modern artists to submit short films about this subject, and we'll stitch them together and make a film and call it DESTRICTED coz that's a witty title. It will be shown in museums but also reclaim public spaces. We will provoke a much needed discourse! Bravo!
Sadly, the results don't live up to the neat idea or the grand good intentions. The first movie is a bizarre short called HOIST by Matthew Barney. It graphically depicts a guy covered in mud and moss with a beet stuck into his arse getting himself off by rubbing against the moving parts of an agricultural machine. Presumably this has an Important Meaning. It was just odd. Not sexy. Not uncomfortable. Just a bit naff and boring. Then we get a very funny film from Marina Abramovic called BALKAN EROTIC EPIC that sends up Balkan sexual myths with live action footage and explicit cartoons. There are lots of unattractive old Balkan women and men running around exposing themselves or masturbating into the ground. As an added bonus, Marina's dead-pan narration does sound very Borat.
After all this pointless exposure it is rather a relief (ha ha!) to get to Richard Prince's short. Prince specialises in plagiarising other people's work. This is NOT Ripping People Off. It is Questioning Authorship apparently. So, in HOUSE CALL, Prince just takes a camera and photographs a TV screen showing a 1970s soft-core porn flick. Horny naked blonde chick calls in the doctor, nudge nudge. Like I said, it was finally rather nice to see reasonably straight-forward porn. And for this segment, I rather question the BBFC granting this movie an 18 certificate. Anyways, on to by the far the most witty and short segment called SYNC. Here Marco Brambilla basically rapidly cuts together scenes from a lot of different porn films from meeting to various positions to money shots. It's quick, funny and does more than any of these films to highlight the automation and alienation of modern sex.
Next up is IMPALED. This is the longest segment and is the funniest and most interesting on an intellectual level. The infamous Larry Clark interviews a bunch of hapless teens for a job in a porn film. He selects one, the guy then interviews a bunch of actresses and then he gets to it with the Lucky Gal. The interviews are fascinating. A lot of the guys feel inadequate both in terms of size and experience because their only benchmark is porn. Moreover, when they say they like certain things, it is not clear whether that is a genuine or "manufactured" desire. Great stuff.
The penultimate film is literally a pile of pretentious wank called DEATH VALLEY by Sam Taylor-Wood. Man goes into empty scrub land. Man wanks. End. Once again it's all about MEANING, but to me it just seemed rather dull and obvious.
And finally, we have French provocateur, Gaspar Noe, with his rather obvious movie called WE FUCK ALONE. Here, he shows us the alienation of modern sex by having various people masturbate with various sexual aids in separate rooms while nursery music and a baby crying fill the sound-track. It reminded me of that art-school movie that Daniel Clowes satirises in GHOST WORLD. I expected better from Noe.
So there we have it. A film with a noble aim, and I am very happy that it can be shown in the UK without death threats being sent through the mail or the TATE having its funding removed. But, as laudable as the project is, with the exception of the Larry Clark segment, there is nothing new or revelatory here.
DESTRICTED showed at Sundance and Cannes 2006. It is currently on apparently sporadic and super-limited release in the UK but appears on DVD in a couple of weeks. You'll be able to buy it in the Tate Modern gift-shop apparently.
The basic idea is that since the invention of the VCR and latterly the internet, porn has been taken out of public spaces and into the home. Kids grow up watching porn and to a large extent their expectations of sex are based on porn rather than garnering real life experience. The VCR and internet also made porn big business - sitting alongside mainstream Hollywood in So-Cal. The weird part is that while lots of us have sex and use porn and feel happy in our liberal environment, it is still bizarrely difficult to have an adult discussion about the relationship between sexuality and porn. The classic example is when a publicly funded museum in the US put on a Robert Mapplethorpe retrospective in the late '80s. Senator Jesse Helms hounded out the curator, called off the exhibition and essentially shut down the National Endowment of the Arts. All because he couldn't tell the difference between art and smut. So, you could say that we are long over-due an unfettered intelligent discourse about the All Porn All the Time culture that we live in and the impact that has on how we understand our own sexuality.
To that end, three English movie producers got together and said, let's ask seven modern artists to submit short films about this subject, and we'll stitch them together and make a film and call it DESTRICTED coz that's a witty title. It will be shown in museums but also reclaim public spaces. We will provoke a much needed discourse! Bravo!
Sadly, the results don't live up to the neat idea or the grand good intentions. The first movie is a bizarre short called HOIST by Matthew Barney. It graphically depicts a guy covered in mud and moss with a beet stuck into his arse getting himself off by rubbing against the moving parts of an agricultural machine. Presumably this has an Important Meaning. It was just odd. Not sexy. Not uncomfortable. Just a bit naff and boring. Then we get a very funny film from Marina Abramovic called BALKAN EROTIC EPIC that sends up Balkan sexual myths with live action footage and explicit cartoons. There are lots of unattractive old Balkan women and men running around exposing themselves or masturbating into the ground. As an added bonus, Marina's dead-pan narration does sound very Borat.
After all this pointless exposure it is rather a relief (ha ha!) to get to Richard Prince's short. Prince specialises in plagiarising other people's work. This is NOT Ripping People Off. It is Questioning Authorship apparently. So, in HOUSE CALL, Prince just takes a camera and photographs a TV screen showing a 1970s soft-core porn flick. Horny naked blonde chick calls in the doctor, nudge nudge. Like I said, it was finally rather nice to see reasonably straight-forward porn. And for this segment, I rather question the BBFC granting this movie an 18 certificate. Anyways, on to by the far the most witty and short segment called SYNC. Here Marco Brambilla basically rapidly cuts together scenes from a lot of different porn films from meeting to various positions to money shots. It's quick, funny and does more than any of these films to highlight the automation and alienation of modern sex.
Next up is IMPALED. This is the longest segment and is the funniest and most interesting on an intellectual level. The infamous Larry Clark interviews a bunch of hapless teens for a job in a porn film. He selects one, the guy then interviews a bunch of actresses and then he gets to it with the Lucky Gal. The interviews are fascinating. A lot of the guys feel inadequate both in terms of size and experience because their only benchmark is porn. Moreover, when they say they like certain things, it is not clear whether that is a genuine or "manufactured" desire. Great stuff.
The penultimate film is literally a pile of pretentious wank called DEATH VALLEY by Sam Taylor-Wood. Man goes into empty scrub land. Man wanks. End. Once again it's all about MEANING, but to me it just seemed rather dull and obvious.
And finally, we have French provocateur, Gaspar Noe, with his rather obvious movie called WE FUCK ALONE. Here, he shows us the alienation of modern sex by having various people masturbate with various sexual aids in separate rooms while nursery music and a baby crying fill the sound-track. It reminded me of that art-school movie that Daniel Clowes satirises in GHOST WORLD. I expected better from Noe.
So there we have it. A film with a noble aim, and I am very happy that it can be shown in the UK without death threats being sent through the mail or the TATE having its funding removed. But, as laudable as the project is, with the exception of the Larry Clark segment, there is nothing new or revelatory here.
DESTRICTED showed at Sundance and Cannes 2006. It is currently on apparently sporadic and super-limited release in the UK but appears on DVD in a couple of weeks. You'll be able to buy it in the Tate Modern gift-shop apparently.
