How Much Does It Cost for Cinema to Tell the Truth of Sex? Cinéma Vérité and Sexography

Abstract

As Foucault has shown, the Christian pastoral and modern psychiatry share a concern for sex as the truth of the subject which must be passed through `the endless mill of speech'. But what happens when the Confessional and the Couch come into contact with the Cinema? How does realist, documentary and cinéma vérité film-making modify confessional discourse? In this article, I compare Pier Paolo Pasolini's Love Meetings (Comizi d'amore) (1964) with a pair of documentaries by Wiktor Grodecki on young male prostitutes in Prague (Body Without Soul (1996) and Not Angels But Angels (1994)), Larry Clark's KIDS (1995), Paul Morrissey's Flesh (1968) and Andy Warhol's Blow Job (1963). I also consider how Jennie Livingston's Paris Is Burning (1990), in its similarity to Grodecki's and Clark's works, also departs from their (implicit) homophobia towards a critique of its own shared cinéma vérité investment in truth-telling.

Keywords

documentary cinema homosexuality Michel Foucault queer theory sex work

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