- Project Proposal version 4

What do you want to make?



In the first year of Piet Zwart I have been looking at LGBTQI related topics. I mostly did so from a subjective perspective using photography, and by looking into queer cinema. In the presentation of the second term I made clear that I wanted to make a stronger statement with my work and be more political. 

I would like to continue with the three lines of thought that could be considered in my practice. Researching the photographic medium, but also the idea of 'seeing' in itself; developing a (gay) cinematic language of my own; and LGBTQI-related issues/identity. Ideally, as a graduation proposal, I would like to bring these entities together in several works that will be presented in an installation.

Video: The Love that Whirls

“That was my first film in color, in Kodachrome. I had met a remarkable-looking young man, named Ernest Lacy; he had an Irish mother and a Mexican father, so he was an interesting mixture. He had extraordinary eyes. I wanted to make a film with him. The idea for it came from Fraser’s The Golden Bough. The film was to present a ritual of sacrifice. Many different cultures have had ritual sacrifices, but I was thinking specifically of Aztec rituals. The film involved Lacy climbing to the top of a mountain and sacrificing himself to the sun. During the film he was nude. He had a beautiful body, and I was just using him as a nude figure, which has a long tradition in art, and has nothing to do with pornography.” 
“I filmed The Love that Whirls on Kodachrome, and at that time, to get 16mm Kodachrome developed, you had to send it to Rochester, New York. When I sent the film to Kodak, they confiscated it because of the nudity, and I never got it back. They had a flat rule about nudity; it didn’t matter whether it was a woman or a man or a child. No nudity. Parents couldn’t even make home movies of their children in the bathtub or playing in a sprinkler. Looking back, I probably could have gotten a lawyer and at least tried to convince them to send it back. But I didn’t do that. So I was shot down by Eastman Kodak. Their monopoly broke up in the sixties, and then there were independent labs that could develop Kodachrome and were willing to print nude imagery.“ (MacDonald, p. 33)

What:
During my research into gay cinema I came across the fact that in the 1950’s Eastman Kodak censored 16mm film stock which contained nudity or sexual content by destroying the film (or taking it home). Owing to this fact one of Kenneth Angers films, The Love That Whirls (1949) got lost. 

Through an interview I found out that The Love That Whirls was based on a passage found in the book The Golden Bough: A study in Magic and religion (1890), which is a comparative study of mythology and religion. Kenneth Anger mentions that it deals with Aztec ritual sacrifice and was filmed in Mexico. (MacDonald)

In the chapter Killing the God in Mexico Frazer describes the customs of sacrificing the human representative of a god in Aztec society. The rituals have all been well described by the Spaniards who conquered Mexico in the sixteenth century. Anger probably got inspired by the example given of a ritual sacrifice during the festival called Toxcatl, where a young man was annually sacrificed in the character of Tezcatlipoca. For a whole year he would be worshipped and treated as that great deity itself. After the year he would be taken to the temple of the sun, the priests would carve open his chest and then take out his heart to offer it to the sun. The person selected was carefully chosen on the ground of his personal beauty. "He had to be of unblemished body, slim as a reed and straight as a pillar, neither too tall nor too short. If through high living he grew too fat, he was obliged to reduce himself by drinking salt water."(Frazer, p. 517a)

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