Regular readers have probably noticed that of late posting has been a little spotty.

Partly it’s because it’s August and there’s nothing I enjoy more than being on the water with my kids. A few more weeks and it’s back to school time, so I’m trying to get in as many beach hours with them as possible.

It’s also because MATT AND KHYM is taking up a lot of my creative energy. The problem (if one can even call it that) is that they’re too good. Their interview runs well over an hour, and it’s all good. Charming, sexy, sweet, humorous; it’s been really hard to figure how to cut in down to a managable length.

Lastly, I haven’t been writing in the blog much because I’ve been having to do A LOT of correspondence in support of DAMON AND HUNTER. It is abolutely our most successful release so far, both in terms of recognition and units shipped, and it turns out that trying to take advantage of that success take a lot of time.

We’ve been especially please with the reception DAMON AND HUNTER has received in Australia. It’s been covered in a number of magazines and newspapers, including DNA, The Melbourne Star, B-News, MCV, and QMagazine.

In July it played to an overflow audience at the Melbourne Underground Film Festival, and went on to be named Best Documentary at the fest. From there we were invited to show the film at QueerDOC, the world’s premiere gay and lesbian documentary film festival, in Sydney this September. All great news, with lots of thank you notes to write, journalist to talk to, and of course, boxes of DVDs to send to Australia.

Then late last week, the Australian Office of Film and Literature Classification dropped the hammer on DAMON AND HUNTER.

On the 15th, QueerDOC received notification from the OFLC that screening D&H would be a violation of Section 8 of the 2004 Film Festival Guidelines. That’s right, in Australia the government can tell you what you can and can’t show at a film festival.

What will happen now, I don’t know. The festival has already distributed nearly 50,000 copies of the program, including two screenings of DAMON AND HUNTER (which the festival expected would sell out). We’ve already printed up hundreds of posters and flyers and made arrangements to have them distributed throughout Sydney. The festival is currently in negotiations with the OFLC to see if they can show DAMON AND HUNTER in some sort of edited form, and we’re trying to make an appeal of the ratings. (Winterbottom’s 9 SONGS, a film that featured explicit footage of straight sex received a reduced rating from the OFLC. But without the major distributor backing of a film like 9 SONGS, and the very short notice, I’m doubtful our appeal will be successful.) If I were a betting man, I’d bet that Sydney is not going to get the chance to see the film that Melbourne enjoyed so very much.

And then there is still the question of what might happen to the organizers of the Melbourne Underground Film Festival and the owners of the venue that had the audacity to show DAMON AND HUNTER on not one, but two screens. Each violation of Section 8 is punishable by a year in jail and a $20,000 fine. Perhaps I felt a bit histrionic when I said that MUFF and Glitch were doing something courageous by showing DAMON AND HUNTER, but I don’t feel histrionic now.

Of all the films the OFLC might target for censorship, DAMON AND HUNTER seems like a particularly inappropriate choice. Aside from the recognition the film has so far received as an outstanding work of cinema, it’s also been recognized for it’s value as a life-affirming and educational document. DAMON AND HUNTER is held in the Kinsey Library at the world renowned Kinsey Institute at the University of Indiana. It’s already being used by the Gay Men’s Health Crisis in New York, and by the San Francisco Sex Information Hotline. Just this week it’s been being passed around by deligates at the 16th Annual World AIDS Conference in Toronto Cananda. Why? Because DAMON AND HUNTER is singular in it’s compassionate, humane, frank, and erotic depiction of gay love and gay sex.

And apparently that’s something that the government of Australia needs to keep the people of Sydney, especially the gay men of Sydney, from seeing.

“Western man, especially the Western critic, still finds it very hard to go into print and say: ‘I recommend you to go and see this because it gave me an erection.” — Kenneth Tynan

Yesterday’s post about DESTRICTED drew a post from Ms. Naughty which I’ve excerpted:

“I would say [DESTRICTED’s] definition is fair enough…“If society was OK with porn’s place as a masturbatory tool, we wouldn’t have to talk about art being “disguised” as porn or vice versa.

Certainly attitudes toward sexuality and masturbation have their effect, but in the case of film it’s worth looking at this from a producer’s point of view.

When it comes to dollars and cents, the label “porn” is extremely marginalizing. Witness John Cameron Mitchell’s recent comments RE: SHORTBUS. “No one got a hard-on watching this film” says Mitchell. That’s a way of reinforcing the position that SHORTBUS isn’t porn. And with a budget of $2.5M — more than any porn film ever made — Mitchell and his backers can’t afford to have SHORTBUS shoved off into the porn ghetto, where returns are measured in thousands, not millions.

What I have noticed recently in reading reviews of films like THE DREAMERS, 9 SONGS, etc. is how venomously critics use the word “porn” - derision indeed. Whatever these movies’ failings, they look and feel nothing like any of the porn I’ve ever seen, and it makes me wonder just what sort of porn these critics have been watching that they feel a comparison is appropriate.

In fact it’s not, and in much the same way that “faggot” is used to dismiss a person’s sexuality as inappropriate and as the ultimate and overriding aspect of their humanity, these critics use the word “porn” to dismiss explicit sexuality as inappropriate subject matter and label the director’s interest in making such films questionable, and likely the product of a quirk or defect in the director’s psycho-sexuality.

In that respect, I would say that DESTRICTED’s and similar definitions of porn and erotica are anything but fair. At best it’s a useless construct that doesn’t really tell us anything about the work labeled “porn” or the work labeled “erotica”, save the economic ambitions of the person doing the labeling. (For some reason the phrase “straight looking/straight acting” pops to mind.)

More often such definitions are divisive, poisonous even; perpetuating a sort of Krafft-Ebing continuum for sexually explicit art, only instead of having poorly framed discussions about where the line between healthy and unhealthy sexuality lies, we have no less illuminating debates about where the line lies between porn and art. While this might lead to a lovely academic wank fest, it’s the wrong question, or at least a question I find utterly banal.

Let me lay my cards on the table about hanging the label “porn” on our work:

On one hand I have no qualms with being labeled “porn” because it lets people know in no uncertain terms that these films are absolutely frank in the way they depict sex and absolutely intended to arouse. If Mitchell proudly states that “all of the orgasms and all of the semen is real” but “no one got a hard-on watching SHORTBUS”, I am no less proud of the fact that my films also have real orgasms and real semen. Additionally, I am proud that my films have inspired countless happy erections, orgasms, and ejaculations. I’m please and happy that my films make people feel good about themselves and make them feel good about sex.

But along with the proclamation of sexual frankness, the word porn comes with a wagon-load of baggage and restrictions that I hope won’t be applied to my work. Like any artist, I want to have my work widely seen and widely respected. And like any business, we need to make money off the the work we do. The label porn is an obstacle to wider distribution of our films.

And just as I’m sure that directors who contributed to DESTRICTED don’t want to be lumped in with MEATHOLES, THROAT GAGGERS or CUM DUMPSTERS, I don’t want to be lumped in there, either. These are extreme examples, but by and large porn is cynical and poorly crafted; an insult to both sex and cinema. I am nothing if not sympathetic to filmmakers who do not want their work labeled as porn.

But what’s so very wrong about the the Porn vs. Art/Erotica vs. Porn question is that it supposes that whether or not SHORTBUS has crossed the line from art to porn (or whether our own DAMON AND HUNTER has crossed the line from porn to art.) is a relevant question.

It’s not; at least not if we’re evaluating the work without concern for its commercial potential.

Like Krafft-Ebing’s PSYCHOPATHIA SEXUALIS, this porn/art nonsense supposes a continuum where there is none. It separates sex from the rest of life, porn from art, and then tries to draw a line, or at least define a grey area. (Lest we go too far!)

This, of course, is sillly.

Sex is not apart from the rest of our lives, and in this context “porn” is merely an inflammatory, and largely meanless descriptor. (So is “erotica” for that matter.)

Either SHORTBUS is or is not a worthwhile viewing experience; either you are comfortable or take issue with the methods JCM used to achieve his vision. Either you enjoy watching DAMON AND HUNTER and are comfortable with the way it was produced or you’re not. Whether or not you got wet or hard only matters in as much as it helped or harmed your enjoyment of the film.

The rest is marketing spin or sophistry, or both.

Peggy and I watched 9 Songs last night, and whatever it is or isn’t as a movie, let me start off by saying 9 Songs is the most credible and craftsmenly cinematic depiction of sex I’ve yet to see. It was lovely and illuminating to see sex depicted by a filmmaker, and it left me envious and inspired.

It’s not a perfect movie by any stretch. The production, while rich compared to a Comstock film, is as paper thin as its characters. There’s barely a plot, and what little plot there is is not very interesting. In fact, at the risk of sounding like I think too much of myself, 9 Songs is confined by very much the same things that impose limits on what I can aspire to with my work.

There’s precious little precedence for how to show people having sex in a movie. You can pick up a clue here and there from porn, but it’s mostly a lesson in what not to do. Creatively, Winterbottom is in terra incognita.

More limiting, there isn’t much of a market for explicit films. By making the decision to show sex, Winterbottom caps the potential returns on 9 Songs from the start, and thereby restricts himself to what can be done on a tiny budget. (Reported as USD $160,000 with deferrals.)

This is the reality of making a sex film, and as a result, neither 9 Songs, nor our own “hardcore love stories” are really full-blown productions. They’re more like etudes, concise cinematic studies of what sex looks like on film, and how sex can be rendered and contextualized within the limits of the business and the medium, and how that can be shaped into a satisfying experience for our respective audiences.

To my mind this differs from both Bertolucci’s The Dreamers, a fully realized film that includes a lot of nudity and implied sex, and a typical porn film which is simply for-hire sexual encounters recorded on video tape. The Dreamers or porn are what they are, and invite judgment by that alone.

By contrast, 9 Songs and our own work invite the viewer to appraise the films not only by what ends up on the screen (still the most important aspect), but also as musings on filmmaking and for our (earnest) intentions. The hope is that by capturing the audience’s sympathy, the rough patches in the production might get the benefit of the doubt. It’s not an uncommon gambit for the low-budget filmmaker, and sometimes works.

Of course etudes can be wonderful in their own right. I don’t know if there’s a classical guitarist that hasn’t recorded Fernando Sor’s lovely Etude #5, and you don’t have to be a guitar student, or even a devotee of classical music to enjoy it.

But an etude isn’t a symphony, or even a concerto. For the enthusiast, an interesting, but unlovely etude can be just as charming as Sor’s #5. An unlovely symphony, as interesting as it might be, is grueling for all but the most devoted audience to sit through (and often for the musicians to play as well!)

I didn’t particularly enjoy 9 Songs, at least not in the same way or with the same depth that I enjoy a movie like Cinema Paradiso. I felt like a barely knew the characters, let alone liking them, so beyond how pretty they looked (which was very nice), I didn’t really care about seeing them have sex. But I did think 9 Songs was an interesting and worthwhile etude; far, far more ambitious than anything I’ve had the nerve to attempt. I expect to learn a lot from it on repeated viewings, and wish it wasn’t singular in the cinematic landscape.

That wish calls to mind something that film critic Richard Corliss wrote while praising Mike Nichols’ Closer, and lamenting the demise of the very adult cinema of the late 60s and early 70s, and wishing more of today’s filmmakers would tackle the subject of sex in a truly adult manner. Said Corliss:

“It’s terrific that a part-time moviemaker [Nichols] has directed so many films that cogently explore the language of sex. But it does suggest that the rest of Hollywood isn’t really trying. Seeing “Closer,” teetering from empathy to exasperation with each of its characters as one would with a real lover, a moviegoer has to wonder: Why can’t there be a dozen, a hundred films like this? Where’s the good and bad sex in movies? Why can’t directors locate where we live, how we love and lie to each other, and get closer to it?”

If the rest of Hollywood isn’t trying, perhaps it’s because there’s no money for the doing and little praise for trying. Indeed 9 Songs must be evidence of some sort of minor sexual pathology in Winterbottom’s psyche. Why else would an accomplished filmmaker subject himself to the trials of trying to make a movie on a low six figure budget, with the likely reward being the sort of snarky condescension that Winterbottom’s received for giving it a go?

I wish there were a dozen, a hundred more movies like 9 Songs. Not because Winterbottom seems to be getting closer to where I live or how I love, but because with 9 Songs Winterbottom is exploring the questions about sex and cinema that interest me, only with the benefit of more money and more talent. Will there be a 9 More Songs Mr. Winterbottom? Please?