There can’t be many movies, pornographic, avant-garde, or both, in which one gets to see the writer-director-star getting fucked in explicit close-up. Yet that’s the case with Bruce LaBruce’s brilliant and hilarious 1994 feature, Super 8 1/2.
That low-budget, mostly black-and-white movie marked a significant development from his dreamily obsessive first feature, No Skin off My Ass (1991), about a hairdresser in love with a skinhead, making for a film quite unlike any other you’re likely to see any time soon, at a festival or otherwise.
LaBruce’s new feature, Skin Flick, takes even further the complex of ideas in his earlier films. Working with the conventions of gay male pornography while simultaneously sending them up and using them to ask salient questions about the politics of sexual identity, it is a film that will shock, titillate and entertain anyone open to its unique charms.
It is showing at this year’s J&B South African Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, along with the two movies mentioned above. LaBruce is also a guest of the festival, here to introduce his films and to participate in a panel discussion on pornography, violence and racism.
Accusations of racism were thrown at the 35-year-old Canadian auteur when Skin Flick showed in London. One newspaper dismissed it as “contemptible”, entirely missing the layers of irony in its portrayal of a neo-Nazi skinhead gang (one of them played by a Jewish actor) that invades the tasteful bourgeois home of a mixed-race couple and rapes the black partner while chanting racist slogans.
And that’s just one unsettling element in a gloriously iconoclastic film, one which takes care to offend in as many areas as possible. Even neo-Nazi skinheads should be somewhat taken aback by the scene in which a young gang-member masturbates over a copy of Mein Kampf.
Unlike your earlier films, Skin Flick was commissioned by a real porn producer, wasn’t it?
It’s a little more complicated than that, because Jürgen Brüning, who has co-produced all my features, probably partly got into porn production because of his association with my films.
But Skin Flick was commissioned as an actual hardcore porn movie.
Yes it was. Some people criticise my films for going too far, but then others would say, “Well, it’s really not that extreme – it’s not even as extreme as your average porn movie,” so I was sort of goaded into making a real porn movie.
The great thing about a movie like Super 8 1/2 is that you have all these things in the same movie, the explicit sex, as well as a real narrative, plus the humour …
Yeah, I was making a point. Super 8 1/2 in particular is about porno, especially about Seventies porno, and how great Seventies porno used to be. My character in that movie [a washed-up former porn star] explicitly says, “In my day they appreciated an unusual face, a distinctive body, not all these interchangeable cocks and pectorals.”
They all look like robots.
It’s body fascism. I’ve been saying that all gay porn today is implicitly fascist. It’s so monolithic, and the meaning has been flattened out. For me, it was a real experiment to make a real porn movie, but I discovered it’s a really conventional medium, much more so than you might think.
You know, there’s a formula, even for these European companies that are making slightly more unusual products. There’s a style that I had to conform to. There had to be x number of sex scenes, Character A has to fuck Character B x number of times, it has to last x number of minutes, different positions have to be covered, which is sort of a bitch to shoot. I was shooting it [Skin Flick] with my usual cinematographer, who’s straight, and his camera assistant is straight, and the sound guy is straight, so they didn’t have that much interest in shooting the porn scenes anyway. After you shoot one, you’ve seen it all, so we were trying to get into the interesting narrative stuff, the characters and so on, but the producers were always on our backs.
Now there’s a hardcore version and a softcore version of Skin Flick [we are seeing the softcore version – LaBruce says it’s the better movie – at the festival].
The softcore version I suppose inevitably brings the characters and the narrative into the foreground, and the contrast of the black-and-white and the colour sections makes the porn scenes more ironic.
It does. It was a condition in the first place that I could make a softcore version, which is more consistent with my other films.
In the hardcore version, the scene where the Russian guy [poet/ activist/actor Yaroslav Mogutin] reads the long poem is gone, and his text over the sex scene later is also gone. For me that text is really important to put in context some of the extremes the film includes, because it makes it so ironic that you have an actor playing a skinhead reading a text about him being a sex slave, which I really miss in the hardcore version. That’s his own text, which wasn’t designed for the film, but when I read it it was just exactly what I was talking about. His whole thing about being in the army and being the victim of a gang rape, except he likes it – it puts the rape in the film in a whole different context.
Having read some of the British press on the rape scene in the movie, I was surprised to find the scene wasn’t more extreme. I mean, you’re obviously satirising the rape fantasy scenarios that are already a formulaic part of pornography.
You know, I think some black people take offence because you’re not meant to represent black characters that way. He’s a black gay man who likes white men exclusively, and he’s basically a bottom [that is, sexually “passive”]. Blacks in porno are traditionally represented as these sexual potentates, virile, aggressive people, which in a way is racist too. So I decided to make a character you’re not supposed to represent – a black guy who’s into [dominant] white men, getting raped by a gang of skinheads. Is this his ultimate nightmare or his ultimate fantasy?
And you’re also sending up this chic, bourgeois interracial gay couple, sitting in their immaculate home eating sushi, with African art on their walls.
Yeah – I’m parodying myself a little bit, too!
Full festival programme available from Cinema Nouveau and on the official Gay and Lesbian Film Festival website