Carnal carnival

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From Greek statues to athletes in the Olympics, the human body is more often than not represented in a manner that is aesthetically pleasing in form and flawless in functionality. But what if it is less than perfect? What was it like before it was tamed by language and etiquette?

Body Song, the latest installment in the POP Cinema (國民戲院) program, takes these questions as the starting point in its observation of the body, which is both the eternal motif in our aesthetics-obsessed society, while also subject to censure, taboo and suppression.

In Balkan Baroque and Orlan: Carnal Art, the body’s ugliness and imperfection is manifested through the disturbing arts of Orlan and Marina Abramovic, two heirs of the Vienna Actionism, a short movement in the 1960s best known for its bodily transgression and violence. Abramovic self-mutilates with needles and knives in Balkan Baroque, and in Orlan: Carnal Art, Orlan uses her body as the raw material of her art as she undergoes a series of physical alterations through plastic surgery.

Treated as something grotesque that needs to be concealed and quarantined, the diseased body is the focal point in Trying to Kiss the Moon, an autobiographical film by experimental and feature filmmaker Stephen Dwoskin composed of home videos, unfinished works and edit-outs. Having been wheelchair-bound since a bout with polio rendered him paralyzed at age 7, Dwoskin takes the abnormal body as the subject of his film, with each zoom expressing an extension of his desire toward women.

“In Dwoskin’s film we see a desire to watch, but this is always interrupted and suspended. This is why his works were used by Laura Mulvey for her study on the male gaze,” festival curator Wang Pai-chang (王派章) said.

The compilation of video works by Donigan Cumming takes an intimate look at the body that is aged, unsightly and deteriorated, as opposed to the youthful and lithesome body worshiped by the mainstream society. The often intrusive and manipulative approach Cumming adopts to documenting ailing and elderly men and women raises questions about the ethics of documentary filmmaking, yet it is exactly through the director’s intimacy with the people he documents that audiences can come closer to a realm so private and real that it is rarely seen by the outside world.

The body is an ambiguous subject in mainstream cinema. It’s taboo and desired at the same time. To curator Wang, Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris and Lolita by Stanley Kubrick are not about the erotic but the corporeal, a longing for a flawless carnal form to which we, with a civilized and tamed body, can never return.

Like Werner Herzog’s Even Dwarves Started Small, Freaks presents an unfamiliar world of the dwarf, Siamese twins and other circus freaks. A popular genre director in Hollywood, Tod Browning had wanted to mark another high point in his career with this film, but the candid display of the deformed bodies in Freak caused such controversy on its release that it was subsequently banned in the UK for 30 years.

In Fernando Arrabal’s Long Live Death and Carmelo Bene’s Our Lady of the Turks, the narrative is carried forward through the language of the body rather than that of words. A leading Spanish surrealist, Arrabal abandons narrative conventions and chooses to tell the story through what the body represses and repels in his debut feature centered on the themes of youth, sex, crime and punishment.