Author | Annie Malamet | Visual Arts Editor
Sex, grime, sweat, and longing are some the words I would use to describe the experimental films of Thunska Pansittivorakul and Aimee Goguen I saw this past week at “Escape from Witch Mountain,” a screening hosted by DIRTY LOOKS NYC at White Columns in Chelsea. Both artists work within the short film medium, creating queer psychosexual narratives that are both profound and unsettling.
Thunska Pansittivorakul is an internationally recognized Thai filmmaker best known for the heavy amount of censorship his work as been subjected to. Pansittivorakul has made five feature films and many shorts. Three of his older shorts were featured in this screening: Love Sickness (2000), You Are Where I Belong To (2006), and Middle-earth (2007). My favorite of the three was Love Sickness. The narrative focuses on a man alone in his apartment with no company but a pet fish, which he subjects to various tortures including washing the animal with soap in the sink and ejaculating into it’s bowl. Pansittivorakul uses atmospheric qualities of silence and heat to convey a sense of longing, loneliness, and desperation. The metaphor of the fish is obvious; in trying to possess something, or someone, we often suffocate and abuse the subject, resulting in their ultimate departure (in this case, the fish’s death).
All three of Pansittivorakul’s films express the slow passage of time, the wet heat of his country’s landscape, and the clandestine sexuality of his Thai male subjects. We are allowed glimpses into his world and are shown that ultimately it is one of friction and desperation hidden beneath a hushed façade.
Aimee Goguen’s background is in animation, but the works at this screening were short films featuring live subjects, all shot with a Hi8 camera. In each work, Goguen documents the subjection of her friends to various uncomfortable experiments. For example, two friends spank another while pouring cream on the receiver’s ass. Another friend forces a large bundle of straws into another’s mouth, which he then tries to drink orange juice through. The use of the outdated Hi8 camera adds to the gritty, grimy quality of the works that reminds me of Harmony Korine’s Trash Humpers or Julien Donkey-Boy, Lukas Moodysson’s A Hole in My Heart, or even the anthology horror film V/H/S.
The world Goguen creates is one populated by dirty fingernails, stained t-shirts, chapped lips, and playfully rough sex. When we think of kink we tend to imagine chains and whips, old leather daddies in biker caps. Goguen’s shorts focuses on the sex practices of the younger generation, one who brings the DIY sensibility into kink practices. She seems to show people who slap and bite each other just as much for fun as they do to feel any kind of connection. It’s almost as if it’s a way to be close to one another. The performative quality of these acts, the way you can hear Goguen’s voice in the background of some of the videos directing her subjects, adds an eerily impersonal and disconnected element to the sexuality depicted.
Yet the works are intimate. In one video a point of view shot shows Goguen slapping a female subject in the face over and over again. The audio of the two conversing is left into the video so you can hear the two negotiating the scene, Goguen asking if the camera is still taped to her head. The unabashed clumsiness of this, the intimacy of one person on top of another in a dark room speaking in hushed tones, keeps the work from being exploitative or purely shocking. I was reminded of the early Jennifer Reeves film Monsters in the Closet (1993) or some of Sadie Benning’s intimate narratives. Although Goguen doesn’t appear in any of her works, her presence and her preferences are strongly felt. Add to this an ambient soundtrack consisting of ominous tones, scratching, biting, licking, and sucking sounds, and you have a complex, frightening (yet funny) work.
Make sure not to miss their next event. Details below:
Dirty Looks NYC + The Museum of Transgender Hirstory and Art in collaboration with Northside Festival present: Transexual Menace
What: Rosa von Praunheim, Transexual Menace, video, 75 min, 1996
Who: Justin Vivian Bond and Chris Vargas
When: Thursday, June 19 | 9:30pm
Where: UnionDocs | 322 Union Avenue, Brooklyn, 11211
Cost: $13
Website: http://dirtylooksnyc.org
Contact: [email protected]
