March 21, 1997

What would you do if you were given the opportunity to act out your fantasies with a stranger, in a bedroom, for half an hour?

The conditions: You wouldn't know what the stranger looks like nor their disposition, their sex or sexual orientation - in short, you'd know nothing about your partner. Oh yes, then add a couple of cameras, some lights, and one of the most renowned experimental filmmakers of the last two decades and ... well, what would you do?

In her latest film, a voyeuristic documentary called Visiting Desire, Beth B and a group of friends, and strangers, are alternately self-conscious, openly sexual, sadistic, masochistic, and tender. They even regress into childhood emotions as they spend a half-hour together in the filmmaker's bedroom.

The film opens with a series of psychologists waxing about the nature of desire and sexual fantasies, and then progresses through a series of encounters called Aggression, Flirtation, Control, etc. A couple of characters eventually dominate the film. Lydia Lunch - musician, former lead singer for Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, filmmaker, and long time B accomplice - who dominates every project in which she's involved, runs the gamut of emotions. And then there is Chloe Dzubilo, a transsexual, who becomes, alternately, the whipping girl and confidante to several of her partners.

The film, shot on Hi-8 video and transferred to 16 mm film stock, has the typical funky look of a Beth B guerilla film (e.g., Black Box and The Offenders ). But I can't help but feel that B's intent is truncated by the pedestrian nature of the encounters. I witnessed little of substance, save some titillating macho posturing gone awry or some perfunctory mutual masturbation. The participants don't seem to learn anything from their experiences, unless you consider maudlin psychobabble tantrums enlightening.

B's short films, Out of Sight Out of Mind and Belladonna, which preceded the feature, are better representations of what I like best about her work. The films use disjunctive techniques like repetitive flash cuts and temporal distortions, and the subject matter orbits around violent psychosis.

Anyway, any filmmaker who includes Jonas Mekas - the godfather of American avant garde and experimental cinema - in their film deserves some slack. It was worth the rare trip, especially to see an underground film icon in the flesh.

Ray Gunn Virus A.k.a.: Ray Gunn Virus; Mr. Ray Gunn Virus, Sir; Shinygodhead; J. Alvarez; sometimes even old plain Jorge (go ahead say whore-hey) never mind George will do. Stuff he like to do someday: Make a living out of writing "junk and stuff" and going places and seeing things ... Other Articles I've Written