tlashop.com

Synopsis

Destricted is the first short film collection of its kind - bringing together sex and art in a series of films created by some of the world's most visual and provocative artists and directors. They reveal the diverse attitudes by which we represent ourselves sexually.

The Destricted brand is the first in a continuing series. The eight films presented explore the fine line where art and pornography intersect. The films highlight controversial issues about the representation of sexuality in art; opening up debate of the question whether art can be disguised as pornography or whether pornography can be represented as art or something else altogether. The result is a collection of explicit, stimulating, challenging, provocative, strange, and sometimes humorous scenarios that leave it up to the viewer to deliberate, discuss, and decide.

Impaled (38 mins)
Directed by Larry Clark
Everyone who was born after 1980 grew up with easy access to pornographic videos. Many children see explicit videos at a young age. Clark interviews people between the ages of 19 and 23 and asks how seeing pornography at such a young age shaped how they think about sex. What are their sex fantasies and how are they directly related to growing up with pornograhpy? This will be the background for acting out these fantasies.

We Fuck Alone (23 mins)
Directed by Gaspar Noé
An eloquent cinematic narrative about despair, loneliness and one man’s abandonment to pathologies of societal decay, We Fuck Alone is a dark odyssey into violent masturbatory fantasy. The film opens with the image of a beautiful young woman being rimmed on TV. As we pull back we encounter a young teenager being eaten by a large teddy bear before the narrative settles on a young man masturbating as he watches porn on the TV. The strobe lighting and deep pulsing soundtrack suggests a strange cinematic space in which desire to continue watching is tapped directly into the brain. As the man grasps for fulfillment, he reaches for a gun and begins to use it on his inflatable sex toy to fuck her in the mouth before both he and the film come to a brutal climax. Sex, beauty and violence combine to create a mesmeric and unforgettable landscape.

Four Letter Heaven (3 mins)
Directed by Cecily Brown
With Four Letter Heaven, acclaimed painter Cecily Brown extends the exploration of erotic impulse and the sexual power of paint that marked her early paintings into the realm of moving image. Composed of individually hand-painted frames, the stop motion film jerkily follows a close-up sexual encounter between a man and a woman. As we watch the moving parts - of cock, pussy, hand and mouth - the blurs and stains of paint appear to lubricate the action blending the thousands of images into a single thought.

Hoist (15 mins)
Directed by Matthew Barney
Hoist describes the encounter between the two central characters of the film; the so-called "Green Man" and a fifty-ton deforestation Caterpillar truck under which he is suspended. Following the three acts of traditional film narrative, it is structured according to the three phases of description, situation and condition. While the initial two phases relate to the definition of Hoist as an "an apparatus or method for lifting a load and shifting it laterally by an elevating means applied through a support from which a flexible member freely suspends a load engager," the third or final condition of the film suggests the imperfect consummation of the human and the mechanistic.

House Call (12 mins)
Directed by Richard Prince
House Call is a re-recording of a twelve minute mis-en-scene culled from the golden age of video porn. It harks back to an era before pornography had entered the mainstream, when pornographic pleasure was still encased in taboo. By recording and re-recording the clip, Prince adjusts the sensory bias, further disintegrating the video and its claim to sexual reality. The narrative shares an obsession that first appeared in the nurse paintings, describing as it does an illicit encounter between strangers whose professional intimacy is based on knowledge of bodily function and fluid.

Green Pink Caviar (8 mins)
Directed by Marilyn Minter
Filmed entirely in close-up Marilyn Minter's Green Pink Caviar is an action painting made with a girl's lips and tongue. At once seductive and repulsive we watch as her enlarged probosis appears to lick the camera lens turning the paint-like goo into a slowly moving lava flow of erotic possibility.

Scratch This (12 mins)
Directed by Sante D'Orazio
Scratch This is a playful riff on the codes and conventions of censorship. The film follows three lesbians as they configure their Sapphic passions in setting of a '60's-style ideal home. Like many of the 16mm films of that time, to protect the identity of the actors and producers, the original footage was presented without title or credits. By painstakingly scratching out the identity and genitals of each of the participants frame by frame D'Orazio turns the convention on its head. Slavishly devoting himself to obscuring the very thing that the film was about D'Orazio literally draws our attention to that which is hidden.

Cooking (15 mins)
Directed by Tunga
Cooking is a metabolic love story where successive transformations operate Eros' mineral power within matter. The films opening encounter takes place on a bed-like shrine surrounded by phials and containers of an unidentified liquid substance. As the woman fills one of the phials with her own urine the character of the encounter begins to crystalize and change. Fluids are exchanged in unconventional manners. The man's penis becomes mineral and the journey of fulfillment becomes one of penetrating destruction and excremental rebirth.