Wonderful Pornography | Cinema Paradiso

But let's come back to my projection of Boulevard St Michel, in which, unfortunately, the great Claudine did not appear. After a quick glance outside, at the programming and the two or three posters, displaying the same type of huge fonts on a background of bright colors, I opted, a bit randomly, for one of the films. I had previously, as I was leaving the metro, carefully checked my spy gear in a café. I took a ticket and entered the magnificent lair. Stupidly, in spite of the working spirit in which I was venturing into this limbo, I didn't write down the title and didn't keep the ticket. At the time, I was much less advanced in my work and was still unaware of the poetic archival value of such memories.

It was exactly as I imagined it would be. After passing in front of the elderly lady, indifferent behind her counter, I walked down a dimly lit corridor, although enough to see the decrepit state of the carpet. I walked a few meters between some rare small format photos hung here and there on the walls and finally reached the entrance of the room at the bottom of a small staircase. Nothing other than a neighbourhood cinema after all, but as promising by its atmosphere, as those broadcasting extraordinary treasures of Z series, with improbable titles that I sometimes discovered at the cinema Le Brady. I pushed open the thick swinging door and entered. No usher. The movie had already started. I remember from a distance, a girl, with her green skirt rolled up, being taken from behind by a man whose only thing I could see on the screen was the sex coming and going in her, alternating with a few wide shots and close-ups of the ahanant woman. I stood there in awe. It was already beautiful. The sound was very loud. A few words of encouragement in French, sticking well with the movement of the lips, confirmed the national origin of the production. Although the screen was modest in size, the image seemed enormous to me, no doubt because of the recurring close-ups. Before I continue, I want to point out to the readers that I was 28 years old at the time and that during my life, as a more complete beginner, I had modestly, but equitably, experienced love and sexuality with both sexes. It is therefore out of the question here to report a first emotion and to put on the account of the total discovery, the impression that I received in these moments. It is all the more important for me to stress this, as I would not want to leave any possible anchorage for any interpretation in the sense of the distressing literature narrating the rites of deflowering, which I judge most of the time to be dubiously old-fashioned, making the apology of a "new" sexuality. family heterosexuality, if you understand what I mean by that. None of that in my case. No character in the style of Victor Lanoux's previous jobs in our good French cinema. And at the risk of surprising, not even among the spectators sitting in the room, I would say. There were twelve of them. I remember counting them. Men, of different sizes, immobile, silent, in whom no agitation indicated masturbatory gestures. Undoubtedly some of them were doing it, but in such a way that we didn't know anything about it.

In places with a boastful and saucy atmosphere, the atmosphere was one of meditation.

So much the worse if some will laugh at the reading of these words, but I felt in their presence, in a church, a temple, not specifically dedicated to sex, but to fascination. I was at the movies.

After a time that seemed to me suspended out of reality, standing in this way in this nave, I remembered that I was there on a mission and sat at the back of the room to unpack my equipment. The gravelly consonance of this expression can, I suspect, also lend itself to a smile. I only mention it to evoke the serious parallel between the camera as a voyeur's organ for the cinephile, and the gesture of freeing his penis from the grip of his trousers and underwear for the one who is about to come. I felt in complete symbiosis with these men whose backs I could only see, although possibly unlike them, not at all physically aroused by the pornography of the scenes that followed one another on the screen. My heart, however, was beating as fast as on a date. I opened the zipper of my bag as discreetly as possible to allow access to the microphone. Perhaps those of my neighbors who heard me despite my efforts took the familiar sound as its equivalent of a zipper being pulled down. This thought made me smile inwardly, accentuating my feeling of a spy operating without anyone's knowledge. I began to film. Fearing the sudden entrance of a spectator, I didn't dare to take my camera out of the bag completely and was content, at first, to shoot by raising the camera, resting the whole of my makeshift system on my forearm. But I felt well that the orientation of the lens thus held, did not allow him to avoid the back of the chair in front of me.

Despite, I say without exaggeration, my happiness to be there and to live this experience, I risked being strongly disappointed if I didn't manage to capture some images that I could use for my film, which is why I came. So I decided to first hold the bag over my head, and then quickly, feeling my arms go numb and imagining that my posture could look very strange, I resolved to get up quietly, squelching the squeaking of my seat as it folded down. With no one watching, I took the camera out of the bag and started to frame the screen. In spite of this, incessant footsteps and squeaks coming from the other rooms were stressing me and I couldn't keep this frank attitude for very long. In a hiccoughing frame, as I was constantly taking my eye off the viewfinder to check that no one was entering or that no one was getting up in the room to leave, I nevertheless recorded a few images and decided that this would be enough to make up the trace I was looking for. I sat down, meticulously stowed the camcorder in its bag between my legs and decided to stay until the end of the projection that was about to take place, to savour my chance to be there and the last moments of this journey, which I thought was out of the ordinary. The room was re-lit. I saw the dozen men, for the most part, pass through the same door I had entered through. Two or three of them, closer to the emergency exit, rushed in, quickly escaping. The ones I saw passing by had grave faces and were not in any particular hurry. All of them must have been in their fifties. They openly assumed a just loneliness, neither good nor bad, in body and face. Nothing to do with the shameful, grotesque and nervous caricatures of the jokes I had heard, which described them as disturbing perverts. Like characters in a Burroughs novel, they had taken their dose and were leaving. We weren't talking about shame here, but perhaps the opposite of what the same people would do later, when they were faced with the subject in front of the family or at the local café. Perhaps they would use this easy argument to keep things from being said. For the time being, I did not blame them for this attitude of supposed denial and saw only a handful of true men, who had come here to relax their unsatisfied minds and bodies to the rubbing of fantasies spread out on the neutral page offered by a blank canvas of prejudices.

Married, lovers or singles, the moving image had offered them what the bodies enclosed in their codes cannot give, unless perhaps they go to the real pornography of parties, which is always less adequate than the imaginary of an object made to make the pleasure last, without the relationship polluting it with its inevitable annoyances. I, in my turn, went out, proud of those few moments spent in their secret company, and strolled the boulevard with an open mind, inhaling at full lungs for a few more precious minutes, the pure and fresh air that this breath of freedom had, for a time, brought me. The work would take over, later, in front of my editing table, reminding my conscience and my sensory memory of the images and sensations that the trip had given me.

Today, I have kept this short hour of ordinary pornography in me as one of my most beautiful moments as a moviegoer.

Just as, as a child, I was going to discover alone, swollen with a similar emotion, the impatiently awaited weekly programming offered by the theatres of my city, I felt that day the exhilaration and upheaval that only art, intimate life and the exoticism of departures to other cultures can produce. What was this unspeakable and dangerous porn that the civilization of my world had so badly wanted to protect me from? Only this? But no; I could only agree with the stupidity of established morals. They were only there to dull and make invisible the real potential danger that this cinematography concealed. Better than current production, porn could only produce masterpieces of upheaval. Or rather, he created only one from film to film, continuously. His images, all similar, tirelessly relayed one another, repeating to our subjugated gaze only one thing essential to our lives: beyond the stories and plots of surfaces, the best iconographic representations of our world show what we need to look at without understanding, through the prism of a focal length irremediably obsessed by the act of desire in action. In the end, we only see the person filming, invisible behind his or her object of desire. It is this desire, not to be, but to grab, to capture, to penetrate, to merge with the inaccessible existence of the other that is the subject of all films, all literature, all painting.

"Take me! I'm here for you. I am you!", seem to whisper all the sex images to us, yet we can never grasp them.

Never does the tangible body of the other, through its excitement and immediate desire, tell us anything else.

All the pornography in the world is forever the Bible that holds high the inalienable truth of the moving and sacred words: "Take me! »