Genet in the Arena

genet1.jpg

In the summer of 1985 he also gave a televised interview to the BBC. It was to be his last public statement. Genet demanded £10,000 in advance and in cash. In return he agreed to be filmed for two days in the house of Nigel Williams, a young novelist, television presenter and the translator of Deathwatch. At the time of the student uprising in May 1968, Genet had been very critical of the form the students’ debates took, especially during the occupation of the Théâtre de l’Odèon. As an experienced playwright he knew that the form is more communicative in a live or filmed event than what anyone manages to say. Accordingly, he constantly interrupted the formula of the television interview. He genuinely believed that he was no more interesting or important than the camera crew and insisted on asking the technicians questions. This reversal of the ordinary television format infuriated many viewers, but none forgot the show.

Edmund White, from Genet: A Biography (1993)

I didn’t forget the show. In fact this particular programme, Saint Genet, has been in the top five of those I wanted to see again ever since copies of old TV recordings started circulating on the internet. The film is another from the BBC’s Arena arts series, and one the corporation is proud of judging by their inclusion of clips in celebrations of Arena‘s history. This pride hasn’t extended to repeat screenings of the entire interview, however, apart from a single occasion a few weeks after Genet’s death in 1986. The days are long passed when the BBC would devote 50 minutes of its evening air-time to a writer who didn’t have a book to plug or some attachment to a popular film or TV drama. In 1985 you could expect as much while also being offered a programme that countered the reactionary tenor of the time: an author whose novels were filled with gay sex, and populated by all manner of social outcasts, from male prostitutes to thieves, murderers and the like.

genet2.jpg

Genet in later years refused to discuss his novels or plays so co-director/interviewer Nigel Williams oriented the discussion around the author’s life (many details of which informed his fiction) while augmenting this with readings from the novels along with extracts from films and plays. I didn’t remember the extracts at all even though this would have been my first glimpse of scenes from the only film that Genet directed (and which he typically disowned), Un Chant d’Amour. More memorable was the sight of Genet himself sitting there for the best part of an hour, rolling cigarettes and verbally jousting with a pair of nervous interviewers in a mood of mingled amusement and exasperation. In the past I’ve been uncharitable about Williams’ handling of the situation but he ought to be congratulated for having inadvertently given us a film that’s so typical of its subject. Genet spent most of his life biting the hand that fed him, and always chaffed at the attention he received from the educated middle classes, even though these were the people who were most interested in (and paid for) his novels and plays. Edmund White’s biography tells us that Genet was unimpressed with Williams’ home (which he compared to something out of a Miss Marple story), and was annoyed when he saw the technical crew eating at a separate table to the producers. This annoyance was translated to the second half of the interview which he described as being like a police interrogation.

In his introductory comments Williams says that this was the first interview Genet had given to a major TV network, but it wasn’t Genet’s first filmed interview. The 52-minute film made by Antoine Bourseiller in 1981 contrasts strikingly with the Arena programme, demonstrating that Genet could talk with ease and at length before a camera. The reason, as White once again explains, is that Genet had planned the film in advance with Bourseiller, selecting the topics for conversation and even helping to edit the footage later. So the difference in attitude was all about control, or the lack of it. Wresting control from the BBC meant directing the questions back at the interviewers while drawing attention to the power relations and the intimidating nature of the interview process.

All of this begs the question as to why Genet agreed to place himself in a situation that he found so uncomfortable when he could easily have refused. We’re left to guess but he certainly didn’t do it for the money; he continued to live frugally despite the international success of his literary works. Large sums such as the £10,000 he extracted from the BBC he regularly passed on to needy friends or to political groups who he felt could put the funds to better use. Whatever the reason behind Genet’s participation, I think Williams and co. would agree that their money was well spent.

Previously on { feuilleton }
Covering Genet
Notre Dame des Fleurs: Variations on a Genet Classic
Genet art
Flowers: A Pantomime for Jean Genet
Querelle de Brest
Jean Genet, 1981
Un Chant d’Amour (nouveau)
Jean Genet… ‘The Courtesy of Objects’
Querelle again
Saint Genet
Emil Cadoo
Exterface
Penguin Labyrinths and the Thief’s Journal
Un Chant d’Amour by Jean Genet

Weekend links 629

vallee.jpg

UFOs: The Psychic Solution (1977) by Jacques Vallée. A retitled reprint of The Invisible College (1975) with cover art by Peter Tybus.

• “In the summer of 1992…a curious experimental interstellar ambient-house album, made it to number one in the UK charts, promoted by a top ten single that was almost forty minutes long.” Darran Anderson navigates the noösphere with my favourite Orb album, U.F.Orb.

• Among the recent arrivals at Standard Ebooks, the home of free, high-quality, public-domain texts: Hope Mirrlees’ strange fantasy novel, Lud-in-the-Mist (1926).

• James Balmont’s guide to the intricate cinema of Hong Kong’s crime auteur, Johnnie To.

Shortlisted photos from the Astronomy Photographer of the Year Contest.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Spotlight on…Jean Genet Miracle of the Rose.

• Steven Heller’s font of the month is Ambicase.

• New music: Two Sisters by Sarah Davachi.

• RIP Peter Brook and James Caan.

Unidentified Flying Object (1970) by UFO | Psychic And UFO Revelations In The Last Days (1994) by Bill Laswell & Pete Namlook | UFOnic (1995) by Sabalon Glitz

The art of Eduardo Hernández Santos

santos1.jpg

From the series Aproposito los flores.

In 1993 I made Homo-Ludens, which was the first homoerotic exhibition to take place in Cuban photography after the Revolution. This show was committed to a direct, frontal discourse, but very aesthetic. It was not intended to reflect great contradictions, but to propose to society that the male body was also an object to analyze, that it was a source of pleasure, and not only to women.

Cuban artist Eduardo Hernández Santos talking in 2016 about his career (here and here). In addition to straightforward photography, Santos favours collage as a technique, combining his own photographs with fragmented slogans and other imagery. The late date of the Homo-Ludens exhibition is a result of the slow evolution of attitudes towards sexuality in Cuban society. Fidel Castro regarded gay men as degenerates, a common sentiment in Communist circles in the 1960s, and one shared by many fascists. A striking thing about homosexuality is the way you can be despised by a wide variety of people who wouldn’t agree with each other about anything else.

santos2.jpg

From the series Corpus Fragiles.

It’s tempting to wonder what Jean Genet would have thought about Santos’s photographs of male nudes with flowers. Genet used flowers for their symbolic qualities almost as much as Oscar Wilde, so even though it’s unwise to try and second-guess him I imagine he’d appreciate their use here.

santos3.jpg

Untitled (2000).

santos4.jpg

From the series Palabras.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
The gay artists archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
The art of Gregorio Prieto, 1897–1992
Emil Cadoo

Covering Genet

pelham-genet1.jpg

While writing Monday’s post I came across this series of new cover designs for the most recent Faber editions of Genet’s novels. I hadn’t seen these before but I liked the way they look as a set. Jonathan Pelham is the designer. At first glance the covers infringe one of my personal rules for cover design, that you should try and create something that couldn’t easily be used on another book by a different author; this is more of a challenge when a design is minimal or tending towards abstraction as these are. But Genet’s covers from British publishers have veered from the featureless (the Anthony Blond hardbacks of the 1960s) to the bizarrely random (the 1971 Penguin edition of Miracle of the Rose with a detail from Max Ernst’s Europe After the Rain—see below), so anything that looks this smart and consistent is a plus. I still like the series of paperbacks that Panther published in the early 1970s (also below) but they only did three of the books, with the Rubens typeface being a carry over from the Grove Press hardbacks designed by Roy Kuhlman. The new editions from Faber also feature new introductions by Neil Bartlett (Funeral Rites), Terry Hands (Miracle of the Rose), Jon Savage (Querelle of Brest), and Ahdaf Soueif (The Thief’s Journal).

pelham-genet2.jpg

pelham-genet3.jpg

pelham-genet4.jpg

pelham-genet5.jpg

Continue reading “Covering Genet”

Notre Dame des Fleurs: Variations on a Genet Classic

genet1.jpg

Another week, another book release. Notre Dame des Fleurs is a collection of artistic responses to Jean Genet’s debut novel, compiled and published by Jan van Rijn, for which I contributed three pieces:

Based on the English translation of the unabridged original edition, published in 1949 by Edition Paul Morihien, it is by no means a consistent illustration of the book nor is it a cohesive interpretation in form of a graphic novel. It is a truly personal collection that throws highlights on a beautiful piece of literature, printed in a run of 150 signed and numbered copies. The participating artists in alphabetical order: Michael AmpersantAntoine BernhartWim BeullensSusie Bright – John Coulthart – Lauri ElexsenRinaldo HopfAnja MolendijkBrane MozeticJohn Thomas ParadisoRexApollonia Saintclair Jan van RijnVilela Valentin

Genet’s novel caused a considerable stir when it was first published in France in 1943. Part memoir, part fiction, part masturbation aid, the book was famously written by Genet on sheets of wrapping paper in his Paris prison cell, and is probably the first account of homosexual lives—especially of homosexual erotic lives—lived on their own terms, without any apologies made to straight society or, for that matter, the straight reader. (“Straight” here applies to criminality as much as sexuality.) Antecedents exist, like Teleny Or the Reverse of the Medal, but Teleny is more assertively pornographic, which means it wanders into the fantasy world that porn always creates, a place where desire is everything and introspection doesn’t exist. Genet was writing about the people he knew in Paris before the war, the thieves and pimps and male prostitutes of Montmartre, and doing so in a manner that had to be considered as literature however transgressive the content might be for the literary establishment of the day.

genet2.jpg

The unique qualities of the novel present difficulties for an illustrator. Literary fiction tends to look inside its characters much more than genre fiction, summoning thoughts, moods and feelings which resist easy depiction in a visual form. I’d first been asked to consider illustrating Notre Dame des Fleurs several years ago for a Graphic Classics collection of crime fiction, a request to which I agreed then had to turn down after deciding that the task of condensing the book into a few pages was a near impossibility. For Jan’s book, rather than illustrate a scene or two from the novel I opted for a conceptual approach. My three pages are intended to be promotional materials from a parallel universe in which Notre Dame des Fleurs was made into a French feature film some ten years or so after its publication, complete with hardcore sex scenes. The latter may seem unlikely but Genet was in the vanguard of presenting gay sex on the cinema screen in Un Chant d’Amour, the 26-minute silent film he made in 1950. He subsequently disowned the film, as he disowned—or “forgot”—many of his creations in later years, but it remains a pioneering and influential work.

Continue reading “Notre Dame des Fleurs: Variations on a Genet Classic”