50 years of moving Image

Bodies and video, bodies represented on the screen, the audience’s bodies in the cinema (and now in front of their own screens at home), the body of the device. So many relationships defined and redefined, reflected and imposed by videomakers and thinkers. From its beginnings, the seventh art has brought attention to the human form. Voyeurism combined with a fascination for resemblance. Egocentric urges found in the frame of a moving image; the projection is two-fold. In his work, Le corps du cinéma. Hypnoses, émotions et animalité,¹ Raymond Bellour proposed the beautiful image of a hypnosis in which ‘a viewer’s body [is] caught in the body of the film’.² While Bellour celebrates this idea of cinema’s hold over the bodies of his audience, Linda Williams reminds us in ‘Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess’³ that the cinematographic genres recognized for creating strong ‘corporeal’ reactions in audiences have long been categorized as sensational forms deriving little interest from the cultural intelligentsia and its cinephiles. One of three genres chosen to exemplify this theory is pornography.⁴

As a privileged space for the consideration of the relationship between the body and audiovisual mediums, the study of pornography is enjoying a golden age today.⁵ We offer our reading of Libidante (1972, Mousse Guernon), the ‘first erotic animated video’,⁶ within the context of a proliferation of studies on the links between body, eroticism and moving images.

Libidante is a 14-minute work without dialogue. Using a simple narrative thread portraying the meeting of two lovers, Guernon explores the videographic medium through an erotic story. The opening images are frescos of Michael Angelo’s The Creation of Adam (1508-1512) (the man’s finger touches the title ‘Libidante’ rather than God’s finger) and Sandro Botticelli’s Birth of Venus (1485). Two of the most famous nudes in the history of art. The tone has been set.

We enter a room where a naked woman, seen from behind, sits at a window, daydreaming. A man calls at the door, they leave together. When he puts his arm around her neck, a diegetic image appears for several seconds: against a black backdrop, we see a frontal view of the naked woman who looks into the camera with a smile.⁷ A flash of insight into the protagonist’s psyche. The couple continue on their way. Sitting with a coffee, the lovers hold hands. With skin-to-skin contact, the image changes again. The videomaker inverts the lighting to signal the crossing over to a fantasy world. The lovers’ bodies now float in another space. As philosopher Michel Foucault says: ‘We do not live in a homogenous and empty space, but, on the contrary, in a space thoroughly imbued with qualities, and perhaps thoroughly fantasmatic as well; the space of our primary perception, the space of our dreams and our passions, hold within themselves qualities that seem intrinsic’.⁸ It is in this heterotopia that the lovers’ bodies will come together again, but this time via the videographic process of superimposed images: the characters appear one on top of the other through a trick of editing. The movement is two-fold: the independent motion of the bodies in their own diegetic space, and the imprecise movement of the images superimposed in post-production.⁹

Guernon also made use of a second videographic process that was even more surprising and frankly unprecedented in her exploration of the staging of desire: video feedback. Artist and theorist Sam Meeche describes the technique this way:

A simple looped arrangement of video camera and display produced a fascinating mise-en-abyme of infinite real-time recursion - pictures within pictures. Careful manipulation of the camera allowed artists to gently push the video signal into abstraction, and coax a myriad of self-sustaining patterns.¹⁰

This myriad was skilfully used as a way of materializing the protagonists’ bodies’ sexual excitement.¹¹ In 1972, video feedback was not a new technique. It has been observed since 1963.¹²The innovative aspect here is its use in the imaging of sexual excitement. Guernon succeeds in materializing the emanation of the body’s desire on the screen. She allows the bodies to overflow their ‘envelope’, to question the regulated contours of materialized bodies.¹³

This texturing of superimposition, of rhythmic disjunction and return, the scratching, painting, and dyeing, the fusing and refusing of represented flesh, is thus both correlative in its visceral energy to the sexual encounter it reproduces (its dalliance with memory) and itself the site of a textural eroticism in which the work (or play) on the body of film renews the congress, coming back to it (its encounter with desire).¹⁴

Secondly, through the video medium: in an interview, Robet Forget tells of a reticence on the part of the technical services at NFB to take the new portable video technology seriously in the early 1970s.¹⁶ And finally, through the staging of sexuality and nudity: at the time, the popular success of pornographic films on Quebec’s screens left little room for artistic experimentation intended to inspire prevailing reflections on the sexual revolution. In 1972, an erotic video made by a woman exploring the sensuality of the medium was unparalleled in Quebec. Libidante is a fascinating work that nourishes a somatechnic reconsidering of the links between technology, sexuality and the body.