Overview: Two prisoners in complete isolation, separated by the thick brick walls, and desperately in need of human contact, devise a most unusual kind of communication.

DVD Verdict: I first became aware of this film back in 1991 when the British Film Institute published The Cinema of Jean Genet by Jane Giles, a book which included many gorgeous stills from this legendary short film. After reading a review of one of my favorite 80's films Mala Noche in which Pauline Kael compared the visual style of that film to Un Chant D'Amour I knew I just had to see it. So I made a special trek to the UCLA Film Archives in Los Angeles just to watch a terribly muddy, washed out VHS copy on a little 12 inch monitor.

Un Chant D'amour was filmed in 1949 under somewhat secretive conditions with actors who would not allow their full names to be used. Once you see it you will understand why immediately...it's far and away the most sexually explicit film of its kind that would be seen until the new explicitness ushered in during the end of the 1960's with the Andy Warhol/Paul Morrissey films.

The British Film Institute released a restored version of this film on DVD a few years ago with a modern instrumental soundtrack. The score is fine but I've had mixed feelings about it because the crisp, clean modernistic sound is somewhat at odds with the 50 year old black and white images one sees flickering before one. For that reason, and perhaps because I'm a believer in films being seen in as close to their original form as possible, I'm not bothered by the fact that this new release appears to leave the score off.

It's interesting that Kenneth Anger is doing a commentary for the new set. Much as I like most of Anger's work, I do consider Un Chant D'Amour to be superior to any other short film I've ever seen...from any director. Anger's work was extremely innovative in its use of image, sound and montage but it's also emotionally cool and drenched in irony. Un Chant D'Amour on the other hand is earnestly heartfelt and completely lacking in cynicism and contains some of the most romantic and erotic images you will ever see in any film. Pauline Kael put it best when she described the style as having an "authentic grungy beauty". The photography is blatantly fetishistic and the many close-ups of armpits, feet and faces should not be surprising to anyone familiar with Genet's visceral writing style. His visual style is a close approximation of it.

I think one of the reasons I find Un Chant D'amour so effective (apart from the images) is that despite its short length it remains committed to the tradition of narrative storytelling. I've never been overly enamoured of abstract filmmaking and Genet's film is more in keeping with something like Zero For Conduct (Jean Vigo) than more experimental, abstract works such as Scorpio Rising (Kenneth Anger), Meshes in the Afternoon (Maya Deren) and Blood of a Poet (Jean Cocteau). This is a Widescreen Presentation (1.85:1) enhanced for 16x9 TVs and comes with the Special Features of:

Introduction by Jonas Mekas
Commentary by Kenneth Anger
"Genet," a 1981 documentary directed by Antoine Bourseiller
"Jean Genet," an interview from 1982 conducted by Bertrand Poirot-Delpech
Booklet with stills