JEAN GENET

Un Chant d'Amour- 1950


JEAN GENET
(December 19, 1910 – April 15, 1986) was a prominent and controversial French novelist, playwright, poet, essayist, and political activist. Early in his life he was a vagabond and petty criminal, but later took to writing.
His major works include the novels Querelle of Brest, The Thief's Journal, and Our Lady of the Flowers, and the plays The Balcony, The Blacks, The Maids and The Screens.

Genet directed Un Chant d'Amour, (A Song of Love) his only film, which he directed in 1950. Because of its explicit (though artistically presented) homosexual content, the 26-minute movie was long banned and even disowned by Genet later in his life.
The plot is set in a French prison, where a prison guard takes voyeuristic pleasure in observing the prisoners perform masturbatory sexual acts. In two adjacent cells, there is an older Algerian-looking man and a handsome convict in his twenties. The older man is in love with the younger one, rubbing himself against the wall and sharing his cigarette smoke with his beloved through a straw.


The prison guard, apparently jealous of the prisoner's relationship, enters the older convict's cell, beats him, and makes him suck on his gun in an unmistakably sexual fashion. However, the inmate drifts off into a fantasy where he and his object of desire roam the countryside. In the final scene, it becomes clear that the guard's power is no match for the intensity of attraction between the prisoners, even though their relationship is not consummated.


Genet does not use dialogue in his film, but focuses instead on close-ups of bodies, on faces, armpits, and penises. The film's highly sexualized atmosphere has been recognized as a formative factor for works such as the films of Andy Warhol.


Cast

Java
André Reybaz
Coco Le Martiniquais ... Second dancing prisoner (uncredited)
Lucien Sénémaud ... (uncredited)

jean genet- circa- 1947