Will Christopher Nolan consider the idea that Odysseus did not desire to return home to Penelope simply because he was more interested in the bulging biceps of his oarsmen? I doubt he will, tragically.
A homoerotic exploration of the Odyssey mixing black and white, color, and old film clips.
Pink Ulysses is showing in 1 cinema in London - next screening Tuesday 20 October at 20:15 at Close-Up Cinema.
Next screenings: Tuesday 20 October.
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Will Christopher Nolan consider the idea that Odysseus did not desire to return home to Penelope simply because he was more interested in the bulging biceps of his oarsmen? I doubt he will, tragically.
Taking cues from Mizer’s beefcake photos, and offerings by the likes of Pasolini, Schroeter, Bidgood and Jarman, Flemish-Belgian and Dutch writer, semiologist, art critic and film director Eric de Kuyper loosely adapts the Odysseus myth into a formally daring, deliberately artificial experimental feature centered around the theme of homoeroticism. As Penelope waits for her beloved’s return to Ithaca, her home draped in many warmly hued layers of fabric, the hero’s adventure is broken into a series of sthenolagnia-inspired vignettes some of which presumably represent his visions. Glued with the cleverly inserted found footage – including, inter alia, the hammock sequence from ‘Battleship Potemkin’ – these often anachronistic ‘sketches’ betray the author’s keen eye for striking visual composition, as well as his penchant for amped-up melodramatics reflected in his obsession with classical music and vintage ballads. De Kuyper’s intention is, apparently, not to retell the legend, but rather to explore the cinema’s painterly potentials, unapologetically objectifying the male body.
A pastiche of a spoof of a parody of an original... Eric De Kuyper's tableau on the myth of Ulysses might be easy on the eye but it doesn't have an original thought inside its pretty little Calvins. And there's the rub: by 1990 this sort of homoerotica was so commoditised it was on billboards and TV commercials everywhere.Start referencing your antecedents as mere pretty pictures and you risk being shown-up in their company: dollops of Jean Cocteau, Werner Schroeter, Pink Narcissus, Steve Reeves, George Kuchar... You can't elevate washboard abs and pouty puckers that were already so xeroxed as to be the stuff of pop videos.De Kuyper includes a clip from Battleship Potemkin where a sailor's buttocks protrude through a hammock: you get the history, the erotica and the intent in that unexpected couple of seconds in a manner this too-intentional Ulysses can't locate in what feels like the whole ten years.
It is an experimental, homoerotic reinterpretation of the Odyssey that mixes classical myth with stylized tableaux, music, and archival film clips.
It was directed by Flemish-Belgian filmmaker and semiologist Eric de Kuyper in 1990.
