Jean Genet‘s only film, which he directed in 1950. Because of its explicit (though artistically presented) homosexual content, the 26-minute movie was long banned and even disowned by Genet later in his life. The plot is set in a French prison, where a prison guard takes voyeuristic pleasure in observing the prisoners perform masturbatory sexual acts. In two adjacent cells, there is an older Algerian-looking man and a handsome convict in his twenties. The older man is in love with the younger one, rubbing himself against the wall and sharing his cigarette smoke with his beloved through a straw. The prison guard, apparently jealous of the prisoner’s relationship, enters the older convict’s cell, beats him, and makes him suck on his gun in an unmistakably sexual fashion. However, the inmate drifts off into a fantasy where he and his object of desire roam the countryside. In the final scene, it becomes clear that the guard’s power is no match for the intensity of attraction between the prisoners, even though their relationship is not consummated. Genet does not use dialogue in his film, but focuses instead on close-ups of bodies, on faces, armpits, and penises. The film’s highly sexualized atmosphere has been recognized as a formative factor for works such as the films of Andy Warhol. if you like the film, please leave a comment below. Jean Genet
From an excellent analysis and history of “Un Chant d’Amour” in Artforum.com, on Genet’s eventual repudiation of the film:
“In time, Genet became dissatisfied with his film, disowning it as ‘a sketch of a sketch.’ Sartre has pointed out that Genet is the writer and not the reader of his work––that his excitement was in creating, not in consuming. Perhaps it’s also reasonable to assume that neither was Genet the spectator of Un Chant d’amour, and underestimated its merits. [Owner of the Parisian nightclub where ‘Un Chant d’Amour’ was shot and the film’s funder Nick] Papatakis recently suggested that it was Genet’s political development that eventually precluded his pleasure in the film. The explicit homoeroticism of Un Chant d’amour was daring in 1950, but censorship has gradually relaxed since then; if, at least in its creators’ eyes, the film is deprived of its ability to shock, it becomes, as Papatakis observes, a fleur bleue, a little love story.”
I love this , I have the dvd.
This was amazing where did you get the dvd?
Hello Bill, You can buy it on amazon
This short film needed no dialogue.. it speaks to the soul of the need for the human touch, a voice , and intimacy. Haunting. Excellent actors.
Genet was well before his time in making that film. I thought it beautiful, sad and totally erotic.
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This post is a reminder of when I discovered the GENET’S in a bookstore when I was in high school. It taught me so much about loving of dick, let me know but it was all right. To want a good black hard dick. Amen.
When in 1966 distributor Sol Landau attempted to exhibit the film in Berkeley, California, he was informed by a member of the local police special investigations department that were he to continue screening it the film “would be confiscated and the person responsible arrested.” Landau responded by instituting the case of Landau v. Fording (1966) in which he sought to show Genet’s work without police harassment. The Alameda County Superior Court watched the film twice and declared that it “explicitly and vividly revealed acts of masturbation, oral copulation, the infamous crime against nature [a euphemism for sodomy], voyeurism, nudity, sadism, masochism and sex…” The court rejected Landau’s suit, further condemning the film as “cheap pornography calculated to promote homosexuality, perversion and morbid sex practices.” He was similarly rebuffed in the District Court of Appeal of California, which accepted that Genet was a major writer but cited this as a lesser work of an early period and declared that in the end it was “nothing more than hard-core pornography and should be banned.” When the case reached the U.S. Supreme Court, the decision was confirmed once more, in a 5-4 per curiam decision in which the justices simply stated that Un Chant d’amour was obscene and offered no further explanation. —Jonathon Green and Nicholas J Karolides, The Encyclopedia of Censorship.
Love this….find it incredibly erotic and emotionally and sexually charged …..sometimes i think the gay world has actually gone backwards not forwards….this movie is 71 years old yet it has all the elements of why men with men is so right and so primal and horny….the more mature prisoner is completely masculine and absolutely stunning …the suggestive way that their lust and love is portrayed is more powerful because it taps into our own imagination…..incredibly horny art !!
Probably the best and most beautiful gay film I’ve ever seen! So much more sensual than porn films. This burns deeper into the heart, and a man’s need and burning desire to be intimate with another man! It truly was a beautiful and erotic work of art! Thank you for sharing!
It was interesting that all the elements and erotic fantasies that we today associate with the androsexual world were there already 71 years ago. The prison setting, the closeted, oppressive man in a uniform, the pretty boy, the rugged hairy man, the glory hole, the scent of a man’s crotch (represented by flowers), snowballing (here with smoke instead of cum) and of course the primal need to suck cock.
It’s an amazing part of history, buried beneath about a mile of Hollywood cheese.