Week 6

Fuses was pretty wacky. I liked the fact that the physical film stock was modified because it helped abstract the whole sexuality of the piece. It was a little bit reminiscent of scrambled porn, which I think doesn't help Carolee's intentions. I don't know if there is a way to escape perversity when depicting sex on film. Movement adds so much, and stimulates the mind however peoples' individual minds naturally get stimulated when seeing actual sex. The manipulated film stock is a nice try, though. Perhaps it would be more helpful if the images of her frolicking on the beach were completely removed, because that's kind of out of context and a little bit of a display, which should be avoided when trying to present the shared equal de-eroticized experience of sex. Also, that twitching penis close-up was a little too frequent for my liking, just had to throw that out there. Erect twitching penises are the worst.
On the other hand, Looking for Langston was all about objectifying the male body/sexuality. It was a pretty huge contrast to see the focused camera all over these sculptures and dudes' bodies, and because we were seeing objects (sculptures), the movie makes a pretty good reference to that objectifying sexuality point. It was similar to Fuses in that it represented sex through focusing the camera on the unexplicit parts of the sexual act, such as when you see the legs of the men who are assumingly making out or doing something weird up there. It reminds me of this scene in Wet Hot American Summer, actually, when Michael Ian black and Bradley Cooper, two straight actors, have a male lovemaking scene, and a lot of the humor is through keeping the camera only on their socks for the most part. For some reason seeing their socked feet moving around all hornily was a lot gayer feeling than if they had showed the performance explicitly. Maybe that has something to do with the power of the imagination and is why Fuses seems to fall a little short of its perceived goals. That and the scary twitching boner.