Destricted

(Due to the 1000 word limit I've trimmed this review by over a third: apologies if some of the notes on films in this seven-film collection are therefore rather brief.)

Andy Warhol once said, "An artist is someone who produces things that people don't need to have but that he - for some reason - thinks it would be a good idea to give them." Destricted doesn't fit into convenient mainstream or even art-house niches, but is more like a Tate Modern exhibit. It would be hard to identify a 'market' for the film, yet it is undoubtedly of some merit.

Destricted is a collection of shorts linked by a common theme. Two of them are directed by acclaimed film directors and the other five are made by heavyweights (two of them women) from the world of contemporary art. All were invited to make films on their views of sex and pornography.

The films in Destricted are mostly iconographic or impersonal fabrications. They distil essential elements into images that remain long after they are viewed. Each uses different artistic techniques, and each is worthy of serious study - although cinema audiences' reactions may also include boredom and amusement.

The most accessible section of the film (and the most linear in format) is Impaled by Larry Clark. Clark examines the effect pornography has on youngsters, but his film goes further, looking at the human dynamics and insecurities of the porn industry and making a porn film. He interviews young male pornstar wannabees, in discussions that are almost like a shrink session, asking them about their sexual experience, preferences and use of pornography. One of them is a virgin. Many have quite understandable hang-ups about their bodies. Asked what sort of things they would like to do, they all express an interest in anal sex. When they undress, nearly all of them are shaved. These last two characteristics, although only evinced by a minority of the general population, are frequently the norm in pornographic films. The female porn actors interviewed are shown as human and genuinely sensual (unlike the way they are portrayed in porn films), although their comfortable attitude to sexuality threatens to bring out more of the guys' insecurities (a theme that was also explored well in Breillat's Sex is Comedy). The girls prove mostly adept at putting the young man at ease however and he selects the oldest of them (40yrs) to be his 'co-star'. Clark avoids the pitfall of making the film funny or sterile or missing the eventual sex scene. The result is a documentary about porn that is also seamlessly pornographic.

The sense of dislocation is felt even more strongly in House Call by Richard Prince (a twelve minute section). Almost an homage to a golden age of porn, Prince takes the naughty doctor-patient fantasy stereotype but reprocesses his film until the image quality is overrun with graininess and bad lighting. To this, he adds jangling, futuristic music so that, even though the images are very explicit, we are reduced to observing them in a distant, dispassionate way.

Hoist, the fifteen minute contribution by artist Matthew Barney, will be no surprise to fans of his acclaimed Cremaster Cycle. Barney develops cryptic, intricate symbols that draw you in to their artistry long before you decipher them, whether in Freudian or any other terms. He is a very visual artist and can be extremely unsettling, perhaps in the way Dali is. At the start of Hoist, we are not sure what we are looking at. It could be a slug. Very slowly it grows, like a painting that slowly changes. Gradually we become aware that it is in reality something very different to what we had expected. It is a human penis. The ultimate, dystopian contrast occurs in an onanistic union with a deforestation machine.

Balkan Erotic Epic by Marina Abramov is thirteen minutes of amusing but quite instructional scenes re-enacting ancient sexual rites for fertility, warding off evil and the like. It also provides some of the most memorable images, such as the bare-breasted woman repeatedly clutching a skull to her chest in the closing credits. One of the scenes - where men are seen from above, lying face down and copulating with the earth itself, is reminiscent of the work of the photographer Spencer Tunick who stages vast public gatherings of naked people around the world.

Sync by Marco Brambilla is the shortest contribution at less than 2 minutes. Brambilla uses sensory overload in the form of clips, each no more than a few frames in length, from typical hard core features. The resulting choreographed collage (set to loud drum music) is like being hit over the head with Dante-esquire force by images that once would have appeared sexual or arousing.

Death Valley by Sam Taylor-Wood is eight minutes long and puts a Marlboro man type character in one of the hottest infertile places in the world where he 'spills his seed'. Taylor-Wood's work often has the human figure isolated on film, as if she views the body in its most revealing moments as a work of art in itself. Death Valley conveys the loneliness and stigma attached to self-stimulation and is uncomfortable, almost homo-erotic viewing.

Gaspar Noé provides one of the longer segments with We F*ck Alone at 23 minutes. As with his earlier Irreversible, he uses strobes and a heartbeat-like thumping background score to create sensory disorientation. At one point a man puts a gun in sex-toy doll's mouth as he copulates with it. The scene maybe suggests the danger of sexual repression symbolised by solitary pleasure - if the psyche is unable to negotiate normal sexual relations with another person it tends towards force and a desire for dominance. The title is a play on the title of the director's first feature film, I Stand Alone (Seul Contre Tous), a controversial story about despair and loneliness and the resulting sexual pathology.

If anybody takes a brief look at the filmographies of the persons who directed the segments of "Destrictred", he or she will discover that only a few of them are full-time directors. Marco Brambilla, for example, made a couple of movies in the 1990s, while others had never directed a film. So it comes to no surprise that this is a worst-than-irregular film, and that there is little elaboration and sometimes no originality at all in the string of segments that pretend "to illuminate the points where art meets sexuality". Gaspar Noé and Larry Clark are probably the best known directors of the lot, but it is experimental artist Matthew Barney who in my opinion has made a visually striking erotic film piece (that deserves a much higher rating than the 2 points I have given to the whole film), that has little to do with narcissistic penetrations, oral somersaults and other jaded depictions of sex. His art works have already dealt with the matter on the table, and maybe he knows best. Not a good film if you ask me, and a little on the "waste-of-your-time" side.

Although i'm trying very hard, i can remember only three segments of the movie. This fact alone might give you an overall impression, despite the fact that i was mainly interested in their authors.

Marina Abramovic offered a pseudo-ethnographic study about the relation between sex and language, in particular bad language, in the Balkans. The result is a literal translation of curses into English. Try the same thing in a bar with friends and you'll get a couple of laughs, but no-one would call it art.

Matthew Barney was on the trail of his Cremaster series, with less costumes and plain mise-en-scène, though. What happened on screen was at the same time obvious and difficult to explain. In line with modern art where the act (masturbation) precedes the context (if any), it leaves you to read-in the meaning you might associate with it.

Larry Clark, on the other hand, made an audition for a porn movie. Due to it's sheer realism, this segment was the only one to make sense, but left me wondering why should i watch it instead of browsing the internet for free porn.

Art aficionados, in particular those into modern art, will probably love Destricted. Others would have other films to watch...

I came across this compilation due 2 directors that I knew and have in my collection. Larry Clark, controversial due using kids picked up from the street and let them do things normal kids won't do or are forbidden to do. His most famous flick is Kids (1995° made in the grunge heydays and Ken Park (2002) were a teenager goes down beneath the mother of his friend to give her some pleasures. A lot of viewers were shocked and the film was never released in the US.

The other director is Gasper Noé which I knew due made also some controversial flicks like Irréversible (2002) and Enter The Void (2009).

Both directors are always on the edge of explicit forbidden nudity (Clark with 18 year old girls going full frontal and Noé by showing a rape going on for minutes) but here in Destricted they go beyond that together with some other directors.

This compilation is called an art-erotic flick but all i can say is that some were indeed art, one short flick is just a fast editing, cut every second of porn flicks. you just don't see anything but it works. To be honest, it only clocks in over 2 minutes and it's worth seeing for the editing alone. But the rest isn't art at all. Maybe Noé's entry is a bit arty. But it's pure porn for minutes made with a strobo. But it's downhill with the art from here. For example Clarks entry clocks in at 39 minutes and it's just guys talking about porn. One guy is ready to talk with porn actresses and while talking to the girls they take of their clothes talking what they do best. But one of the girls wants to show the 22 year old one what it's all about so she seduces him and asks to undress. From their on the guy doesn't know what is going on, first she gives him a blow job, then he may go inside her and even goes in her brownie, then he may do what he wants to end with another blow job.

The worst entry is the Death Valley part, 9 minutes of jerking off and that's it, is that art?

The other entries except for the Balkan story are pure porn. The Balkan story is a bit funny to hear and see and isn't believable even as it is true what the girl is saying.

Overall pure porn here and there and a bit of art. Kleenex lovers will enjoy some parts but again people who thought like me to see an art compilation as promised will be shocked. Hard core it is.

Gore 0/5 Nudity 5/5 Effects 2/5 Story 0/5 Comedy 0/5

I came across Destricted via an interest in the films of Matthew Barney, most of which I have seen and enjoyed. What I discovered was an extremely mixed bag of films. Through from the ersatz-revelatory documentary of Larry Clark to Richard Prince's House Call, which is quite literally in my opinion, the porn equivalent of Meshes of the Afternoon (whether or not that's a good idea or not is another matter). I've rated the whole movie 6/10 but we're really moving from 1/10 to 10/10 during different segments.

I felt Marina Abramovic's segment "Balkan Erotic Epic" contained some sort of interest, but it felt more like an alternative school history lesson, and lacked any sort of cinematic virtuosity. Simply put the film is about Balkan sex superstitions of the past.

Sam Taylor-Wood's segment is quite simply a man masturbating in Death Valley, what is up with that? I'm sure something was going on for Sam but she quite simply left me almost devoid of context.

Matthew Barney film about a man (The Greenman) 'using' (I am not allowed to write the appropriate word due to the comment guidelines) the drive-shaft of a massive suspended truck is interesting more in concept than in adaptation for the screen where it becomes merely pornographic rather than a thesis on sexual energy. To be fair it's also ripped from the womb of Barney's film De Lama Lamina and is so out of context here that it makes little sense. The driveshaft was lubricated with the faeces of a golden lion tamarin. Those of a nervous disposition stay away!

Marco Brambilla's very short piece was entirely devoid of interest to me, a flutter-by of pastel-coloured porno shots. Perhaps he achieved entirely what he aimed for. It was not exactly engaging. Quite astonishingly this is the guy who directed Demolition Man.

Gaspar Noe's section 'We **** Alone' was perhaps the most interesting of all the films, sex in this piece seem like an adjunct of solipsism (if you want to take each of the individuals involved as masturbators then you can, but for me they are having sex, it's just that we are being shown a visual metaphor of that process, which Noe sees as narcissistic; indeed if you accept the duality then the film is quite potent). He makes the film both numbing and alluring through his use of strobe effects and his soundtrack of heartbeats, breathing, and a baby eerily crying. It's clear that he is also passing a judgement, artistically and politically, which I don't think any of the others achieved (although they may have attempted), specifically with his use of match-cutting with TV porn when he's showing the man.

With Richard Prince's 'House Call' we have another film that is sonically intriguing. The material is almost certainly found footage. But his added value is the way he manipulates it with sounds, in an astounding manner. The story of a woman having sex with a house-visiting doctor becomes psychosexual rather than merely pornographic.

I wouldn't recommend Destricted to anyone I know, because it is extremely sexually graphic and people I know would think I was a weirdo if I started talking to them about it. But if what I've said has piqued your interest, see it by all means.