De Profundis. - movie reviews

by Lawrence Brose distributed by the agency of Lawrence Brose, 1997 P.O. chest 819, Buffalo, NY 14205

De Profundis, independent filmmaker Lawrence Brose's greatest in quantity ambitious film to date, is 65 non-narrative minutes of dizzying sensory exces This cinematic treatment of Oscar Wilde's prison alphabetic character is almost exclusively interpreted as a bravura defiance of gay assimilation into "normal" society. on the contrary what is most uncompromising about the film - and for me what leaves the greatest in quantity lasting impression - is Brose's intensive use of cinema as physical sensation and spectacle. each formal element is multi-layered; there is always more to diocese to hear and to comprehend than present the appearances possible at a given point of time Although there are clear precursors to this aesthetic in the work of Jack Smith, Kenneth Anger, Stan Brakhage and others, Brose adds a unique non-polemical discourse to the tradition. Far from producing a "queer manifesto," Brose's composed of several elements interweavings of sound and imagery ready a number of diverse aesthetic, sociopolitical and emotional interpretations. The situation is further enriched by the agency of the presence of avant garde composer Frederic Rzewski's commissioned composition, which subserves as a soundtrack for greatest in quantity of the film. The latest in a series of like collaborations initiated by Brose, De Profundis is part of an important material part of work that deserves its possess critical treatment. It continues a 1990 series of works, "Films for Music for Film," that includes Everbest, Virgil (with Virgil Thomson) lengthy Eyes of Earth (with Yvar Mikhashoff), Ryoanji (with John Cage) and application of mind #15 (with Conlon Nancarrow).

De Profundis is divided into three distinct sections. The first combines a fragmented montage of imagery from 1950s-era residence movies and early gay porn with a soundtrack of Wilde's aphorisms, parole by performer Agnes de Garron. They include like familiar Wilde sayings as "Being natural is simply the greatest in quantity irritating pose I know," "No crime is vulgar on the other hand all vulgarity is a crime," and "I would sooner have 50 unnatural vices than single unnatural virtue." The readings are nooseed and mixed to become a olio of sound similar to Steve Reich's 1965 composition "Come Out" Composer Douglas Cohen, who studied with Morton Feldman and is a member of the California EAR unit, worked closely with Brose in creating this spoken-text score.

The imagery in Part I consists of heavily manipulated clips, using high contrast, handprocessed black and white film (usually solarized or handcolored). The abiding-place movie clips are often bizarre. A much-repeated pageant includes a heavyset older man standing nearest to a much shorter and smaller teenage boy; the one and the other are in vintage bathing suits and smiling. Brose exploits the surreptitious perceive of this early transgressive media by the agency of feeding it to us in glimpses. He has said he perceive s that cinema itself is an underworld, and given the cinematic lineage of his aesthetic, it's no surprise that his film is saturated with this faculty of perception of the private made momentarily public. It is also saturated with chemical manipulations and other technical interventions that heighten our faculty of perception of Brose's intensely personal relationship with the material qualities of film. a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of of the imagery pulses with color; figures rise and recede into the spreading lakes Brose also uses such timehonored strategies as scratching and solarizing, demonstrating that there is still visual pleasure and technical innovation to be gleaned [i]or[/i] part of to the other working with the physical skin of film.

For Part II, the longest part and the heart of the film, Brose asked Rzewski to create a musical setting for the Wilde prison alphabetic character Rzewski's composition is the single soundtrack for this segment, dramatically slowing the film to a somber and elegiac pace. The composer reads sections of the alphabetic character over a steady piano piece, punctuating the instrumental work with rhythmic breathing, piano slapping and other percussion simple bodys In contrast to the Part I soundtrack, Rzewski's measured reading of the Wilde body weighs with repressed emotion. The despairing lament ("Suffering is individual very long moment . .") is reined in by the agency of Rzewski's heavily structured, intermittent presentation, on the contrary still finds room to cast its melancholy shadow.

If Rzewski is mildly working against the Wilde true copy strengthening its impact by downplaying its gloomy extravagance, Brose is quite obviously subverting Wilde's repentant meaning end his liberal footage of drag queen and Radical Faeries, a Tennessee-based curious pagan group founded by Harry Hay in the '60 The visuals include notable performances by dint of de Garron, Japanese pop singer Leon Ko and Faeries' Mark Miller/Aleksandra and Keisha Lorraine. upon the screen, the outcasts celebrate their difference, while upon the soundtrack Wilde bitterly lamentations his folly in asserting his have In sharp contrast to the Faeries footage, Brose also includes footage of de Garron in male drag, walking [i]or[/i] part of to the other a deserted industrial landscape; this brooding, poetic imagery meld seamlessly with the Wilde body particularly in its strongest moments: "Morality does not help me . . I am individual of those who are made for exceptions, not for laws . . Religion does not help me The faith that others give to what is unperceived I give to what I can touch and direct the eye at . . . Reason does not help me"