Final Flesh: Porn goes apocalyptic avant-garde

Dir. Vernon Chatman

[Drag City; 2009]

After a prologue explains that the atom bomb is about to drop, we’re shown a family of three (mother, father and adult daughter) sitting around a kitchen table, deciding that they will stay and “die with dignity.”  The mother and daughter give birth to various food items and the father tires to climb back into the womb, and then daughter relates a dream.  We see a mushroom cloud, then another trio of actors in a different apartment who believe they are in the afterlife: they recite more humorous nonsense about God, death and the apocalypse and enact more bizarre skits before the action shifts to another trio in a different room, then another…

 For Final Flesh, we’re going to break with tradition and provide four different “indelible images,” one from each segment of the film.  A girl breastfeeds a porterhouse steak; a woman in a jeans, a tank-top and a skull mask threatens a man on his deathbed; a couple make out by mashing the skulls drawn on their backs together; a young lady in black lingerie performs a wedding ceremony on two corpses lying side by side.

 The conceptual art premise of sending a non-erotic script to beacted out by pornstars-for-hire might be weird enough, but when that apocalyptic screenplay requires the bemused amateur actors to bathe in the tears of neglected children and recite lines like “I just creamed my demon” after being slapped, we’ve traveled beyond the snarkily experimental into the realm of the existentially deranged.  All the world’s a stage and these men and women play many parts; if some of those roles require them to pour ketchup in a conch shell and poke at it with a turkey baster while moaning orgasmically, then maybe that’s just how this universe rolls.

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Tearoom: Vintage glory holes

For two weeks in the summer of 1962, using a two-way mirror, police in the central Ohio town of Mansfield secretly filmed the activity in a public men's room in the town square. The surveillance recorded dozens of men having sex, resulting in more than 30 prosecutions for sodomy, with at least a year in prison time for each.

Decades later, acclaimed filmmaker William E. Jones  acquired the Mansfield footage while working on another project. The images so fascinated him that he's been screening it, unaltered by further editing, as the 56-minute Tearoom.

Shot without sound, in grainy color 16 mm, it's a stunning document. The men range in age from their 20s to their 60s. They are white and black, fat and thin, in a banker's suit or name-patched mechanic's uniform. Faces humorless, eyes on the door, they masturbate, give handjobs and blowjobs, and perform anal sex; a few exchange money. 

The Andy Warhol Museum screens the film. 

(16mm film transferred to video, color, silent, 56 minutes, 1962/2007) 

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Tarnation: The life of a queer boy and his schizophrenic mom

Your greatest creation is the life you lead

Tarnation is an autobiographical documentary film about the very personal experience of growing up with a mother who was suffering from a schizoaffective disorder, an episodic illness in which both affective and schizophrenic symptoms are prominent within the same episode . It tells the story of three generations of a Texas family. The film was made in 2003 by Jonathan Caouette. He created a collage of still photos, Super-8 video tape, answering machine messages, video diaries and early short films, from the previous nineteen years of his life . It cost just over $200 to make the initial film. Some well-known producers, including Gus Van Sant, spent more money enhancing its technical qualities to bring it to a wider audience.

Tarnation is essentially a film of two parts. The first recounts the author's childhood and teenage years as affected not only by his mother's psychosis but also by her lengthy absences from his life when she was sometimes hospitalised for several years at a time. It tells of his first teenage experience with marijuana, obtained from a drug dealing friend of his mother, which was actually spiked with PCP, resulting in his first admission to hospital and the diagnosis of depersonalization disorder . A core symptom of this syndrome is a subjective experience of unreality, as if dreaming, in which the individual feels that his own feelings and/or experiences are detached, distant and not his own, a quality that the film definitely manages to convey at times. This part of the film also tells the story of his mother Renee's life from her early days as a beautiful child model to a teenager who embarks on a lengthy course of twice weekly Electroconvulsive therapy (ECT).

The second part of the film deals with the period after Jonathan has left the family home in Texas and moved to New York, where he meets his partner David and begins to work as an actor. His mother comes to visit him there a few years later and he begins to build an adult relationship with her more closely than ever before

The film uses intertitles to tell the facts of the story, speeded up sequences, slow motion frames, multiple images and other special effects to express his inner turmoil.As well as giving us an experience of Renee's mental illness, Tarnation also vividly depicts Caouette's own mental health struggles from drug induced hallucinatory experiences, depersonalization disorder and deliberate self-harm to anxiety and panic. Tarnation is a documentary film about the whole experience of mental illness from a very personal point of view that gives the viewer a real sense, affectively, of being in close proximity to significant mental disturbance. Tarnation doesn't hold back on portraying the pain and chaos that can be part of life where psychosis is present.

The act of making Tarnation could be described as 'creative play' involving the imaginative creation of the film as a transitional phenomenon that helps him to process the highly charged, difficult emotions that exist between him and his mother

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