Nude Indigo
by Ryan Akler-Bishop
from Issue 1
A Hollywood Bigwig on the casting couch remarks, “If you step into my frame and surrender to my lens, I will sculpt you into image immaculate.” Trusting or cynical, the offer of sparkly stardom is tempting. Yet to relinquish autonomy to another—particularly a gutless pervert who hides behind a camera—is no cakewalk. Narrative cinema is predicated on this puppeteer-marionette rapport between director and actor; the filmmaker becomes arbiter of your flesh, you become a glorified instrument in service of The Work.
This dynamic is magnified in the case of nudity. It’s such a petrifying thing to stand crotch-forward before the camera’s eye, to capitulate your naked aura to mechanical (or digital) reproduction, to publicly demystify yourself. To let every limb hang at the angle of another’s choosing, to have the rhythm of each breath curated, to see your intimacy coordinated. For some, there’s a thrill in this submission. But is our masochistic desire to be controlled just a proletarian acceptance of a towering puppeteer tugging our strings?
For the movie industry, nudity is a hyper-regulated commodity: objectification moderated through liberalism. In today’s cultural mores, to leak another’s nude is egregious, a trampling of trust. Yet to post one’s own nude is an exercise of corporeal sovereignty. The impropriety of disseminating nudity is not an indignity centered on the proliferation of a naked body but, rather, the distributor’s relationship to that commodified flesh. And so, what do we make of the nude filmmaker? The director who hangs their dong on-screen, who brandishes their breasts for the world to see? These architects of their own undraped presentation destabilize cinema’s puppeteer-marionette relation; the automata objectifies itself.
In this anarchic survey, I leave countless omissions: Bill Gunn, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Nick Zedd, Christopher St. John, Lena Dunham, Cheryl Dunye, Barbara Loden, Larry Fessenden, Marina de Van, Bruce LaBruce, Robert Beavers, etc. The lineage of the filmic self-nude is sprawling and international. There are so many modi operandi behind photographing your genitalia, infinite reasons to flash your meat to the infinite public…
The Nulla Poena Sine Culpa Penis: Gaspar Noé’s retroactive self-insert into The Rectum—the tenebrous S&M labyrinth from Irreversible—was a rebuttal to accusations of homophobia. Appearing as a frenzied masturbator amongst an underworld of gay, zombified hedonists, he claimed absolution by presentation of cock. A sacrificial penis to save face.
The Avenging Anus: Taxi to the Toilet is a spectacle of bodily revelation. Frank Ripploh (playing himself) sucks and fucks unsimulated across a myriad of bedrooms and bathrooms, unleashes his bladder into the mouth of a purring twunk, and spreads his cheeks for proctoscope probing. Story goes: two years prior to shooting, Ripploh was dismissed from his schoolteacher job after coming-out via the cover of Stern magazine. With Taxi, he enacts vengeance on the leagues of finger-wagging parasites who form the German establishment. Ripploh broadcasts every cavernous orifice for the world to see, every drop of fluid. His sex will not be subdued to placate the high-order of prudes!
The Externalized Nude: In her memoir, Mina Miller Edison, wife of moving-image pioneer Thomas Edison, recounts a peculiar project of her husband’s: once a month, he’d strip bare and record himself jumping up and down, stomach jiggling under gravity. An early, lost time-lapse film, Edison diarized his accumulation of bodily flab as he submitted to old-age. The camera lets us see ourselves anew, lets us record our transient body, lets us mourn its bygone iterations.
Can you fortify a failing marriage with film? In Love Stinks, German avant-gardists Birgit and Wilhem Hein carbonize their shared life on-screen. A divergence from their early structural works, it’s a movie split mostly between images of NYC (a temporary home for the couple) and the filmmakers performing sex acts, both together and solo. Whether it's a cunnilingus POV or an XCU of Birgit trimming her pubes, every nude tableau is a gesture of alienation. Even the startling intimacy of a domestic sex act reeks of isolation: hapless, drifting lovers in a city of solitude. To record your naked body (and its nude relations) means externalizing it. By making yourself an image, you can gaze at your life, your marriage, or your sex from outside-in. How do you reckon with yourself reflected as an image? Well, the Heins divorced a few years after Love Stinks.
The Vaginal Confessional: At a book-signing event, my friend Eddy once asked Anne Carson for a photo. “Should I pose naked?” she jested in reply, considered it for a moment, then added, “I suppose I’m already naked with my words.” In an uncharacteristic cliché from Carson, she submits to an age-old concept: nudity as the signifier par-excellence of vulnerability.
Yet in Je Tu Il Elle, nudity is instrumental in Chantal Akerman’s invitation into her subject’s world. Akerman plays a lovelorn lesbian, sprawled nude in ennui, performing quotidian tasks in her domicile. In the end, she encounters her ex-lover, and they make love across three static shots, each a few minutes in duration. Akerman’s cinema interprets visibility as the cornerstone of honesty, treating the uninhibited image (unfettered by puritanical, clothed modesty or continuity editing patterns) as a route towards representing interiority.
Years later, this ideal of naked truth is remapped as a punchline in the prolonged nude self-portraits of Joanna Arnow’s The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed. Cinema, with its seaways of international distribution, is ideal passage for a humiliation fetishist. Arnow’s film is a self-evisceration: a transformation of the interiority of the naked self into a deadpan gag. The film’s humiliation kink’d protagonist drifts through a series of sexual exploits, dressed-up as a “fuck pig” and used by callous older lovers. Arnow makes us spectators to her nude embarrassments, incorporating us into her cycle of sexual humiliation.
The Cocky Penis: I was only four when Vincent Gallo’s hulking member (prosthetic or real, debate amongst yourselves) catalyzed the downfall of his directorial career. The Brown Bunny’s climactic, unsimulated blowjob, performed by co-star and ex-girlfriend Chloë Sevigny, was received as a gaudy gesture of showman’s hubris. The Brown Bunny is one of the most self-flagellating movies I’ve seen, yet it’s made by one of the most vain men in existence. A motorcycle-racer floats through an anemic ghostland. He’s a deflated flesh-sack in a world of departures, where every encounter is a souvenir of the grief he’s self-inflicted. Is Gallo’s dick a gesture of pompous virility or an Akerman-esque vulnerability? Anyone familiar with Gallo or his website is entitled to unforgiving interpretations, yet the film’s overwhelming melancholy suggests more than boastful cocksmanship. Who’s to say? For Kanye West, this scene induced enough erotic trance for him to, years later, rap, “I need at least seven days with Chloë Sevigny/Since I saw Brown Bunny, it ain’t never been the same.”
The Disidentifiying Dong: Is R. Bruce Elder the quintessential masturbatory filmmaker? The man loves to shoot his dick: flaccid, stroking, cumming, everything. I can picture his urethra faster than some faces of my loved ones. Equipped with Canada Council $$$, Elder’s A Man Whose Life Was Full of Woe Has Been Surprised by Joy splices autopornography into eclectic collages. In garish close-ups, he morphs his junk into abstraction, an alienation from the human form, anatomy reborn. Respect your Elder!
Pussy Non Grata: Leatherbound and supine, Throbbing Gristle’s Cosey Fanni Tutti lays ogled by her own lens in Pussy Got the Cream. To become-image grants full terrain to self-mutate into a fantasized self-projection. Tutti becomes Bondage Queen, spandex encasing a flesh-labyrinth.
The Evil Dick: Richard Kern unzips a behemoth in The Evil Cameraman and wields it with malintent. A metafictional confessional, he stars as a woman-torturing cameraman. Across his early career of ultraviolent, hypersexual shorts, Kern was often condemned with accusations of sadism, misogyny, degeneracy. In Cameraman, his cock sniggers back, “Yes, I am the snake you say I am.” A self-desecration, a portrait of an artist possessed by the Ugly Spirit, an ironic admission to the basest accusations of vice.
Nietzschean sadist supreme Fred Halstead also brandishes his own wicked member in his porno-opus LA Plays Itself. Halstead embodies the antithesis of his 70s queer pornographer counterpart Wakefield Poole: the maestro of wholesome, homosexual utopias. No, no, no! Halstead is evil! He films himself violently fisting an abducted twink to industrial-drone noise. LA’s sex is abrasive, perhaps even predatory. Queerness cannot be defanged in Halstead’s films, it cannot be assimilated into a politics of respectability. Halstead’s member is a vehicle for brutal, inelegant desire. His cock trumpets the pleasures of unsanitized queer wickedness.
The Scientific Self-Nude: Tomorrow night, my friend Milk will shoot a movie where he walks from bedroom to kitchen, strips ass-naked, numbs his dick with ice, sews up his foreskin, and chugs several litres of gatorade. Where will the pee go if his foreskin’s threaded-shut? Back into the bladder? He asked me to operate the camera. I’m so scared I’ll forget to hit record.
