DIRECTORS IN FOCUS

William E. Jones, Los Angeles

25.10., 20:15, Eiszeit 1

The Fall Of Communism As Seen In Gay Pornography
USA, 1998, 19 minutes, William E. Jones, English original version
Every image in "The Fall Of Communism As Seen In Gay Pornography" comes from gay erotic videos produced in Eastern Europe since the introduction of capitalism. The video provides a glimpse of young men responding to the pressures of an unfamiliar world, one in which money, power and sex are now connected. Handsome, hungry and defiant, these youths are caught up in a brutal system that sees them as nothing more than cheap labour. This video is not about "naughty" transgression or titillation, but about the real pornography of human exploitation.

Director's Statement: Around the time my first two films were released on video, I noticed the tape "Men Of The Balkans" in my neighbourhood video store. It made the intriguing claim of being the first gay porno shot in Bulgaria. The work of Jean-Noël René Clair, a major auteur of contemporary gay porn, "Men Of The Balkans" was part of a flood of porno from former socialist countries that began appearing in U. S. video stores in the early 1990s. I wanted to make a work about this phenomenon, but I could not travel to Eastern Europe. Fortunately the material came to me; there was plenty of it to be found on the shelves of American video stores. I decided to make an "armchair" documentary, a compilation piece composed entirely of scenes from porno tapes, by reediting the material and adding only my commentary.

The company that handled my films at that time also distributed gay porno. Their main titles were produced in the former Soviet Union by a Swedish man with a limited budget and a taste for young ruffians. He sought out a certain kind of guy - poor, masculine, and above all, a bit desperate - that reminded him of the kind of boy who tormented him during his upbringing in rural Sweden. In his correspondence with the distributor, he mentioned wanting to consume these young men and to be consumed by them, enacting some sort of symbolic revenge while taking his pleasure. The videos that came from the Swede's erotic quests, called "Young Russian Innocents", had a devoted following.

As I watched "Young Russian Innocents", as well as dozens of other post-communist pornos, I realized that the atmosphere of coercion in these videos accounted for much of their erotic appeal. The fantasy of making another person do whatever one wishes is fairly common, and many get to realize such fantasies, if only in a limited way, in the sex tourism of the third world. With the collapse of socialism in Eastern Europe, it became possible to enact these fantasies on a whole new group of people: young men who were white, educated, relatively well fed, and suddenly with no prospects whatsoever.

The scenes of "Young Russian Innocents" were "auditions" for subsequent productions, very few of which were actually shot. The young men were given the impression that they could become stars if they performed well. The $50 that the director offered as payment for an audition gave him license to ask the boys all about their personal lives (not so unreasonable, since he had to determine how willing they were to perform certain acts) and to poke and prod them in various ways. The director himself never undressed or engaged in straightforward sex acts with the boys, as this would have involved showing his body and perhaps revealing his identity. During all the action, he wore a long sleeve dress shirt and wristwatch, and this gave the scenes the aspect of a medical examination. Many of the young men seemed frightened, albeit relieved that they were the playthings of a middle aged amateur pornographer and not the victims of kidnapping. The subjects often looked at the camera, but it was not at all clear what their gazes meant. Some may have needed direction or reassurance. Others were resisting the situation, spoiling the shot by looking into the camera, implicating the spectator who would eventually see them, and thereby calling the whole process into question. What these young men were hoping to gain by appearing in these videos is unclear. Money is the most obvious motive, and the only one mentioned explicitly in the videos, but some of the subjects must have had other things in mind. Unfortunately, their thoughts and opinions will most likely remain unknown.

"The Fall Of Communism As Seen In Gay Pornography" has reached a limited audience and has received some attention, not all of it positive. A film festival in Australia programmed the video in 1999, but the screening had to be cancelled. The Commonwealth Censor withheld an official exhibition certificate after looking not at the video itself, but at the synopsis, which contained the full title of the piece. Apparently, any work with the word "pornography" in the title was sufficiently suspect to be censored. The publicity around the case brought the video to the attention of the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, which eventually acquired my work for its permanent collection. Around the same time, I was contacted by a British organization that nominated the video for an Erotic Oscar. I was a bit surprised by the nomination, though not by the fact that another video won the award, since eroticism was not my main goal in making the work.


Tearoom
USA, 1962/2007, 56 minutes, William E. Jones, silent
"Tearoom" consists of footage shot by the police in the course of a crackdown on public sex in the American Midwest. In the summer of 1962, the Mansfield, Ohio Police Department photographed men in a restroom under the main square of the city. The cameramen hid in a closet and watched the clandestine activities through a two-way mirror. The film they shot was used in court as evidence against the defendants, all of whom were found guilty of sodomy, which at that time carried a mandatory minimum sentence of one year in the state penitentiary. The original surveillance footage shot by the police came into the possession of director William E. Jones while he was researching this case for a documentary project. The unedited scenes of ordinary men of various races and classes meeting to have sex were so powerful that the director decided to present the footage with a minimum of intervention. "Tearoom" is a radical example of film presented "as found" for the purpose of circulating historical images that have otherwise been suppressed.


William E. Jones is an artist and filmmaker who grew up in Ohio and now lives and works in Los Angeles. He has made two feature length experimental films, "Massillon" (1991) and "Finished" (1997), several short videos, and the feature length documentary "Is It Really So Strange?" (2004). His work has been shown at the Cinémathèque Française and Musée du Louvre, Paris; International Film Festival Rotterdam; Oberhausen Short Film Festival; Sundance Film Festival; and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. His films and videos were the subject of a retrospective at Tate Modern, London, in 2005. He was included in the 1993 and 2008 Biennial Exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art. He has published two books: "Is It Really So Strange?" (2006) and "Tearoom" (2008). His work is represented by David Kordansky Gallery in Los Angeles. He works in the adult video industry under the name Hudson Wilcox and teaches film history at Art Center College of Design under his own name.


Ole Ege, Copenhagen
24.10., 22:00, Moviemento 1

Petra Joy, Brighton
26.10., 22:15, Moviemento 1

Charles Lum, New York
24.10., 22:30, Moviemento 3

Abbreviations:
H = Heterosexual, S = Gay, L = Lesbian, T = Transgender, NX = does not contain explicit sex scenes, X = contains explicit sex scenes, D = documentary film, FT = Fetish, SW = Sexwork (films on sex work and prostitution), F = films made by female directors, A = animation