Un chant d'amour (1950)
Directed by Jean Genet

Film Review

Jean Genet's inspired and totally unique visual poem evoking homosexual desire and existentialist suffering has achieved the status of an icon of gay cinema, although it is only quite recently that the film has succeeded in reaching a wide audience.  After its initial screening in 1950, the film was immediately banned in France and the only copies remained in the hands of wealthy gay intellectuals for well over a decade.  Attempts to screen the film in America in the 1960s resulted in arrests, near-prosecutions and finally an outright ban.  Fifty years after its near still-birth, the film was finally judged to be acceptable for public screenings, although in many cases some of the film's more controversial scenes were cut.  Genet himself disliked the film (a loose adaptation of his existential novel The Miracle of the Rose) and, in later life, disowned it.

Despite its chequered history and reputation as pornography for the gay intelligentsia, Un chant d'amour is arguably Genet's most evocative and haunting work.  His only film, it is easily on a par with his celebrated literary works, such as Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs and Querelle de Brest.   With the mocking surrealism of Luis Buñuel and dark poetry of Jean Cocteau, it is as much a condemnation of middle class values (particularly contemporary society's harsh attitudes towards homosexuality) as it is a celebration of sexual desire and a reflection of Genet's grim existentialist outlook.  Few, if any, subsequent films with a gay theme have been anywhere near as successful at conveying the essence of same-sex attraction and the brutality of a world that regards such a thing as unnatural and immoral.  The film depicts homophobia with uncompromising brutality, through the sadistic prison warder, an obvious metaphor for a society that is both titilated and repulsed by the idea of homosexual acts.

This is a short film (the total runtime is just 26 minutes), made in black and white, with no soundtrack.  Stylistically, the film is nearer to the experimental films of the 1930s - such as Cocteau's  Le Sang d'un poète or Man Ray's  surrealist shorts - than anything else produced in 1950.   The cinematography is crude, some might say primitive, but it could hardly be more effective.  Genet is clearly able to draw on his own experiences in prison to bring a sense of raw authenticity to what we see.   Small wonder that Genet was a hero of the existentialists - his film conveys the bleakness of a existence in a godless universe with painful believability.  As the prisoners languish in their solitary cells, yearning for the merest form of human contact to reaffirm their existence, we cannot help but share a fragment of the existentialist nightmare that was Genet's own troubled life, a life marred by rejection, depression and self-doubt.

Anyone with a wider appreciation of Genet's work will see that Un chant d'amour is less a film about homosexuality or voyeurism, but much more one about the torment of living in an empty loveless universe, a bleak kind of humanism that makes it surprisingly relevant to a 21st century audience.  Whilst it may have a reputation for being one of the most notorious pieces of gay erotica, it is also probably the most effective fusion of existentialist philosophy and cinema.

Film Synopsis

In a French prison, two inmates in solitary cells try to communicate with one another.  One is young, clean and handsome; the other somewhat older, unshaved and unkempt.  Both are in dire need of human attention to break their eternal solitude.  The closest they come to physical contact is sharing the smoke from a cigarette through a small hole in the wall that separates them.  Neither realises that their bizarre ritual is being watched by another man - the prison warder.  This seemingly incorruptible figure of authority is drawn to spy on his prisoners.  He is disgusted by what he sees through the spy hole in each door - men arousing themselves sexually - yet he is unable to avert his gaze...