Of Freaks and Men

Sharon Walsh

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This film made for a very unusual experience. It is the story of Johann who directs films featuring all manner of unusual people, from Siamese twins to a bourgeois young lady having her bottom smacked. It is his relationship with the young lady which cuts an entry into this weird sepia toned world where Johann sets about exploiting as many people as possible in his hunger for what? This film offers clues, leaning toward the oedipal, but no absolute answers. Which is sometimes just the way we like it.

The film runs like an old movie, from the first and second decade of the twentieth century. The look, as I've mentioned, is decayed and yellowed. The action has a stop motion feel about it. Because this 1998 film apes an old movie we get the effect of watching a movie of a movie. It sounds complicated but it works wonderfully because it contributes to the feeling that there is more going on than meets the eye. And that is not to say that the film is not interesting. It is.

Si in what feels like a film within a film the photographer is actually shooting a film, or a series of minor films. The Saimese twins appear naked and exposed for the gawping audience, as does the girl having her bottom smacked by an old woman. Not what you'd call sexy, really. However an older man sitting near me in the cinema seemed deeply moved by this experience. Possibly that was because of the pornographic nature of the film being shot but that wouldn't be to everyone's taste.

A young woman being spanked across her bare bottom is not so racy as it once was. And the thing is that in the early days of the movies they didn't have stringent ¡®don`t do¡¯ laws so anything went and the envelope of pornography would not have been overworked by this behavior. It is only more recently that we have become ¡®oh so proper¡¯ and proto Victorian. So I think the film-maker is trying to tell us something about how we view media products and perhaps entering into a discourse on time.

Could all of our reactions be learnt or is it in man¡¯s nature to bully, to prematurely sexualize others, at times against their will. If we consider the temporal inconsistencies of human laws, and reactions to perceived ill-doings, can we suggest that the world is a chaotic place or a highly organized maze of human endeavor. What I mean is will the patterns be reproduced over time, and will the reactions fluctuate accordingly.

The film assumes the style of its object ¨C the home made, harmless mini porn flicks. And it is not necessarily the films produced which are harmful but the method of production. It is dangerous to get involved in this man`s strange world. He never lets go once he has his claws in you. The young bourgeois lady finds Johann forcing himself on her and taking over her life, her inheritance, moving his family into her home. It is his grandmother who is the phantom spanker. She is a wrinkly old woman. Euch! Our heroine goes along with it. Why does it seem so inevitable to her?

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