As HWMBO is away, I have time on my hands, so I went to Tate Modern to see the pre-premiere of Destricted. The blurb says “{Destricted} brings together sex and art in a series of films created by some of the world’s most acclaimed artists and directors, including Marina Abramovic, Marco Brambilla, Matthew Barney, Larry Clark, Gaspar Noe, Richard Prince and Sam Taylor-Wood.
The seven films are explicit in content, highlighting controversial issues about the representation of sexuality in art, opening up for debate the question of whether art can be disguised as pornography, or vice versa, and leaving the viewer free to choose his or her own line through these intersections of art and sexuality.”
The Starr Auditorium was mostly full, and we were treated to (among other things):
- A naked black uncut man under a large tractor rubbing his dick on the driveshaft (which was turning). This was quite scary but very erotic. It looked kind of like making pottery on a wheel, just with your dick rather than with your hands. You had to be there. It started with a very odd shot of something that looked like a slug, but turned out to be the man’s dick after watching it for a while.
- A mock-instructional film about the erotic lives of people in the Balkans. Sounds dull, but it was screamingly funny.
- Auditions for amateur young men to take part in a porn video. Their ideas about porn, when they first saw some, when their first sexual experience was, are quite funny. Then we get the ladies who are auditioning to be the partner in the film. The young man who was selected was rather softspoken and was a grower, not a shower. He is 21, and he chose a 40 year old woman because he’d never had anal sex and wanted to try it, and she was one of the few women who would do it. It was quite amusing and strangely, very hot too.
- A guy in Death Valley approaches the camera, takes off his shirt, kneels down on the ground, drops his trousers and jerks off. That’s basically it. At the end of this one someone in the audience said, “Oh no!” as if to say he wanted more. Got the biggest laugh of the night.
- An extremely bizarre one showing a punk man’s masturbatory fantasy with his blow-up doll, complete with strobe lights and a sound track that is maddening. I stuck it out to the end, but half the audience covered their eyes (to dampen the strobe effect) and then left the theatre. They missed the cum shot. Sad for them.
I enjoyed it, but YMMV, of course. A DVD is coming out of this, which presumably will be available through their website (see above). I don’t think that HWMBO would have liked this movie at all, but I enjoyed it.
Only thing was, it was all straight porno (except, maybe, Death Valley’s solo wanker and the driveshaft one at the beginning). This movie cries out for a gay and lesbian sequel!!! Who will make it for me?
Wow.. I didn’t think that it would all be so explicit when I heard that it was a sex film. It all sounds rather homo-erotic, but I’m sure there’s some feminist or even “post feminist” message in there somewhere.
If there was, I missed it. I think it was an exploration of sex on film made especially for the Tate. All new stuff.