2007
Pat Tremblay, Micki Pelerano et Nate Archer, Usama Alshaibi, Karl Lemieux, Héléne Cattet and Bruno Forzani, Pierre-Luc Vaillancourt and Frédérick Maheux, Serge de cotret, Mike Dereniewski, Anne Hanavan - Cinéma Abattoir
L’erotisme is a collection of short films many which feature erotica while most of them just push the boundaries of conventional filmmaking with their bizarre, grotesque and surreal imagery. While watching these short films you will see needles sowing orifices shut (Ritualis), a man who falls in love with a prostitute (Maldoror), a woman who plays with her ass for nine minutes (Ass), an overexposed blowjob scene (KI), razors, sadism and heightened colors schemes (La Fin de Notre Amour), a tale about rape and revenge (Extase de chair brisée), a toy baby doll is beaten and fondled (Baby Doll), a naked woman poses with a pig head (The Loneliest Little Boy in the World) and a woman who plays with herself with Black Sabbaths “Paranoid” as the soundtrack (Paranoid).
Ritualis, dir. Pat Tremblay. Ironically, the disc starts out somewhat sedately … with a Satanic ritual. The film may be filled with demented images of a Black Mass, ritual piercings — including that of a labia — and murder, but at least Tremblay cuts in some sedate winter forest scenery to give you a respite from the terror. Plus, with a fun death metal soundtrack and slick image and audio manipulation, Tremblay’s film is more fun than disturbing. It’s a very lively, catchy little short.
Maldoror: A Pact With Prostitution, dirs. Micki Pellerano and Nate Archer. Visually, Pellerano and Archer have done an excellent job mimicking B&W films from the silent era. The story is simple: Boy falls in love with Prostitution while a disgusting Glow Worm Head orders Boy to kill her. By the way, Prostitution is portrayed by a single topless refugee from a Kenneth Anger film (Lucifer Rising). Again, this is somewhat of a low-key film like Ritualis and provides a great contrast. Although both films feature heavy image and sound manipulation, Ritualis looks new and modern, while Maldoror successfully imitates the past. These two films certainly set up the tone for the rest of the disc, which alternates between these two styles.
Ass, dir. Usama Alshaibi. Now we’re getting into troublesome material. Alshaibi has been active in the underground scene in Chicago for years, but the first film I saw by him was the music video for “Hold My Scissors” on Other Cinema‘s Experiments in Terror 2 compilation DVD. “Scissors” I really loved. As for Ass, I really liked the concept. It’s a film that rapidly alternates between two shots documenting the same action. That action though is of Alshaibi’s wife Kristie, who goes by the name Echo Transgression, as she masturbates while crouching on her knees. The film alternates between a few frames of Echo’s face to a close-up of the masturbation and back and forth like that for several minutes, i.e. until Echo climaxes. The intense imagery and quick cutting are extremely powerful, almost too much so. As you start to invest yourself in one shot, you’re thrown into the other and I couldn’t really get a grip on either of the angles. For a few minutes, I was really into it, but after 10 I got kind of lost.
KI, dir Karl Lemieux. While pornography is generally about stark realism. You have to actually see the sex in order to get turned on, right? Not in Lemieux’s film. Amorphous B&W blobs eventually dissolve into two naked bodies getting it on. It’s like shooting a porno on ancient, deteriorated film stock. And yet, although Lemieux only teases the sex hidden behind totally washed out and cruddy cinematography, he still ends up making a somewhat titillating short.
La Fin de Notre Amour, dir. Helene Cattet and Bruno Forzani. Presented as a series of still images and highly stylized ones with stark, vibrant primary colors of blue and red, a naked artist guy is interrupted from his anatomy studies by a faceless female visitor. The guy is highly disturbed by his guest and takes to slashing himself and toying with her with a knife. My interpretation of the events unfolding is of an artist having a love-hate relationship with his artistic soul, which he pays for with his body and his brain. The violence here is both very abstract and very concrete at the same time and the use of still images is extremely jarring. So, in that, it’s kind of like Alshaibi’s Ass, but I found myself more emotionally invested in Amour due to the more complex action.
Extase de chair brisee, dir. Pierre-Luc Vaillancourt and Frederick Maheux. This one was by far my favorite film of the collection. It’s kind of like a cross between The Road Warrior with Flaming Creatures with I Spit on Your Grave. In it, a pretty young woman minding her own business is grabbed and raped by two dudes wearing metal masks alongside the train tracks. They’re eventually interrupted by a woman wrapped up like a mummy who’s out walking her Gimp on a leash. The mummy woman then tortures the victim with a blowtorch. Left for dead, the victim returns wearing a gas mask and enacts a bloody, violent revenge against all of her attackers. This is also another silent B&W film with a whispery industrial noise soundtrack. Vaillancourt and Maheux capture the action in an extreme handheld close-up action. As grotesque as the plot is, for the most part the actual violence is either blurred out with lens and/or film distortion or takes place off screen. But what makes the film so unsettling is the whip-fast camerawork that gives the action a brutally intense ferocity. Plus that with the excellent costume design and eerie, disquieting soundtrack, this is one vicious, nasty piece of work. It’s great.
Baby Doll, dir. Serge de Cotret. The title says it. The “star” here is a toy tied up S&M style and “tortured” by an unseen assailant, mostly by spanking. This is kind of a snippet of a film and it’s interesting because in my review of the documentary Susan For Now, I pondered whether there was any sexual fulfillment in S&M style play, which from what I understand there isn’t. As brief as it is, Baby Doll plays with that notion by having a silent, unblinkingly cheerful recipient and a sadist whom we never see and don’t know what pleasure he/she/it is deriving from it.
The Loneliest Little Boy in the World, dir. Mike Dereniewski. This is another brief little film, this time a woman — a priestess, perhaps? — worships a giant pig’s head stuck on a post. She derives ecstasy during her ritual and her intense passion causes the pig’s head to burst into flames. Like Extase de chair brisee, there’s an unsettling abstract soundtrack made up of Satanic backwards chanting and various distorted grunts and yells. The message: Those that worship you the most will eventually just burn you out.
Paranoid, dir. Anne Hanavan. And speaking of worshipping, the main disc concludes with a naked platinum blond Hanavan wielding a camcorder — well, she’s wearing stockings and a crucifix — “worships” her own body on a bed in front of a wall-length mirror. And that’s all to the tune of Black Sabbath’s “Paranoid.” It’s a very rock ‘n’ roll film.
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