From the editor and writers of Bright Lights Film Journal
Action! Interviews with Directors from Classical Hollywood to Contemporary Iran
(Anthem Art and Culture), by Gary Morris (Editor), Bert Cardullo (Introduction), Jonathan Rosenbaum (Foreword). London and New York: Anthem Press, 2009.
(Anthem Art and Culture), by Gary Morris (Editor), Bert Cardullo (Introduction), Jonathan Rosenbaum (Foreword). London and New York: Anthem Press, 2009.
"I dare anyone to squeeze between
two covers a more varied, useful and
flat out entertaining sampling of
the personalities that make the
seventh art the liveliest."
— David Hudson, IFC.com
— David Hudson, IFC.com
Where Kink Is King
The 2004 CineKink Festival
Won't you be my pony boy?
Film festivals serve different purposes for different audiences. For distributors, they're a chance to trawl for marketable product. Filmmakers and actors get a chance to hobnob with their peers, observe audiences observing their work, and with luck get it into wider release. Cinephiles go to discover new genres or directors or to test opinions about familiar ones. For marginalized communities, whether queer, ethnic, or kink, film festivals have a different appeal as a kind of communitarian "home movie." They're an important record, a reinforcement of value, a snapshot of where they are at that moment in history. Aesthetic achievement, "quality" so-called, though always welcome, is necessarily less important than celebration, exploration, and sheer visibility.
An event like New York's CineKink Festival (October 21-24, 2004) is best viewed in these terms. This is not about brilliant cinema, or even marketable product. The shorts, features, and docs on view offer, with varying degrees of artistry, a window into the BDSM and associated communities. Despite this apparent insularity, fests like this are worthy of notice by anyone interested in alternative byways of culture and sexual expression. The fest, curated by Lisa Vandever, in fact bills itself as "the really alternative film festival," an accurate moniker. This article looks at some of the low- and highlights this year.
More ambitious is Edith Edit's witty Dominatrix Waitrix, a techno sex fantasy in which a dom helps abused restaurant servers by replacing them for a day with what she calls "a machine vixen to guide them through their drudgery." However, this "vixen" spends most of her time in sex play with the people she's replacing, though she does scream "Now give me my fuckin' tip!" a few times to startled diners. Dominatrix Waitrix has the look and feel of an elaborate performance piece, and in fact its stars — particularly lead Sache, a self-described "technoshaman psychonaut" — are known for their performances around Chicago. Unlike Alice in Footland, though, this one features convincing polymorphic perversity; it ends in a charming clusterfuck that includes all manner of erotic fun.
Another disappointment is the feature Mango Kiss. Sassafras (!) and Lou are two dykes who make the trek to San
Francisco to become performance artists and engage in some creative nonmonogamy in the robust dyke leather scene. Complications ensue when Sass becomes a reluctant dominatrix and Lou gets the hots for their neighbor Leslie. An early voiceover informs us, "This is a cautionary tale," and the caution appears to be pretty conventional — monogamy is best, no matter how cute the neighbor girl is. There's lots of SM play, but it's mostly farcial and hard to believe despite all the chrome and leather accoutrements. Location shooting and a vivid color palette capture the visual charms of San Francisco, and the actors have their moments, but ultimately this film is too theatrical for its own good. In an epilogue, Lou tells us that "Sass and I went on to make a wonderfully self-indulgent performance piece," — an unfortunately accurate description of Mango Kiss.
If the Web is any indicator — and it's surely as good as any other — ponyplay is becoming ever more popular, though it still appears to be unknown, or at least unacknowledged, by the mainstream. Elizabeth Elson's Born in a Barn is a model documentary on the subject, a respectful study that pays homage to the subculture without sugarcoating or sensationalizing it. The film works as both a primer for the uninitiated and a celebration for the participants. It looks at several couples and individuals at rest and play, perhaps most notably "Trigger," a 40-something real estate agent who holds outdoor seminars for enthusiasts, in which he explains that "ponyplay can be foreplay but most do it for power exchange." Scenes of Trigger, who's robust but no Atlas, trotting around with women on his shoulders have a quirky sweetness. The varieties of roles, from handler to various "breeds" of ponies and horses, are discussed, as are the kinds of activities that occur in this world, which may or may not include sex. And the roles seem surprisingly fluid, with power exchanges often working both ways without the hard top/bottom dichotomy idealized in SM fantasy. Some players dream of living full-time in "ponyspace" — the film shows "human horse stalls" being built for this purpose — while others treat the whole thing as sexual theater, to be experienced episodically before returning to "real life." The overriding feeling seems to be the urgent desire to be released from the complexities and disappointments of being human — "The needs of a horse are simple and basic," says Trigger. The world could do worse than operate on this esoteric group's "animal principles" of "honesty, loyalty, and trust," as the dire events that followed this festival on November 2 show.
