De Profundis.

by Lawrence Brose distributed by Lawrence Brose, 1997 P.O. Box 819, Buffalo, NY 14205

De Profundis, independent filmmaker Lawrence Brose's most ambitious film to date, is 65 non-narrative minutes of dizzying sensory excess. This cinematic treatment of Oscar Wilde's prison letter is almost exclusively interpreted as a bravura defiance of gay assimilation into "normal" society. But what is most uncompromising about the film - and for me what leaves the most lasting impression - is Brose's intensive use of cinema as physical sensation and spectacle. Every formal element is multi-layered; there is always more to see, to hear and to comprehend than seems possible at a given moment. Although there are clear precursors to this aesthetic in the work of Jack Smith, Kenneth Anger, Stan Brakhage and others, Brose adds a unique non-polemical discourse to the tradition. Far from producing a "queer manifesto," Brose's complex interweavings of sound and imagery prompt a number of diverse aesthetic, sociopolitical and emotional interpretations. The situation is further enriched by the presence of avant garde composer Frederic Rzewski's commissioned composition, which serves as a soundtrack for most of the film. The latest in a series of such collaborations initiated by Brose, De Profundis is part of an important body of work that deserves its own critical treatment. It continues a 1990 series of works, "Films for Music for Film," that includes Everbest, Virgil (with Virgil Thomson), Long Eyes of Earth (with Yvar Mikhashoff), Ryoanji (with John Cage) and Study #15 (with Conlon Nancarrow).

De Profundis is divided into three distinct sections. The first combines a fragmented montage of imagery from 1950s-era home movies and early gay porn with a soundtrack of Wilde's aphorisms, spoken by performer Agnes de Garron. They include such familiar Wilde sayings as "Being natural is simply the most irritating pose I know," "No crime is vulgar but all vulgarity is a crime," and "I would sooner have 50 unnatural vices than one unnatural virtue." The readings are looped and mixed to become a medley of sound similar to Steve Reich's 1965 composition "Come Out." Composer Douglas Cohen, who studied with Morton Feldman and is a member of the California EAR unit, worked closely with Brose in creating this spoken-text score.

The imagery in Part I consists of heavily manipulated clips, using high contrast, handprocessed black and white film (usually solarized or handcolored). The home movie clips are often bizarre. A much-repeated scene includes a heavyset older man standing next to a much shorter and smaller teenage boy; both are in vintage bathing suits and smiling. Brose exploits the surreptitious feel of this early transgressive media by feeding it to us in glimpses. He has said he feels that cinema itself is an underworld, and given the cinematic lineage of his aesthetic, it's no surprise that his film is saturated with this sense of the private made momentarily public. It is also saturated with chemical manipulations and other technical interventions that heighten our sense of Brose's intensely personal relationship with the material qualities of film. Much of the imagery pulses with color; figures emerge and recede into the spreading pools. Brose also uses such timehonored strategies as scratching and solarizing, demonstrating that there is still visual pleasure and technical innovation to be gleaned through working with the physical skin of film.

For Part II, the longest segment and the heart of the film, Brose asked Rzewski to create a musical setting for the Wilde prison letter. Rzewski's composition is the sole soundtrack for this segment, dramatically slowing the film to a somber and elegiac pace. The composer reads sections of the letter over a steady piano piece, punctuating the instrumental work with rhythmic breathing, piano slapping and other percussion elements. In contrast to the Part I soundtrack, Rzewski's measured reading of the Wilde text weighs with repressed emotion. The despairing lament ("Suffering is one very long moment . . .") is reined in by Rzewski's heavily structured, intermittent presentation, but still finds room to cast its melancholy shadow.

If Rzewski is mildly working against the Wilde text, strengthening its impact by downplaying its gloomy extravagance, Brose is quite obviously subverting Wilde's repentant meaning through his liberal footage of drag queens and Radical Faeries, a Tennessee-based queer pagan group founded by Harry Hay in the '60s. The visuals include notable performances by de Garron, Japanese pop singer Leon Ko, and Faeries' Mark Miller/Aleksandra and Keisha Lorraine. On the screen, the outcasts celebrate their difference, while on the soundtrack Wilde bitterly regrets his folly in asserting his own. In sharp contrast to the Faeries footage, Brose also includes footage of de Garron in male drag, walking through a deserted industrial landscape; this brooding, poetic imagery melds seamlessly with the Wilde text, particularly in its strongest moments: "Morality does not help me . . . I am one of those who are made for exceptions, not for laws . . . Religion does not help me. The faith that others give to what is unseen, I give to what I can touch and look at . . . Reason does not help me."

By including Bacchanalian celebration and lonely despair, Brose acknowledges the essential dichotomy of both Wilde and the film: the light aphorisms versus the doom-laden letter. On one hand, Wilde's despair was brought about through outside persecution; if not for his imprisonment, he might have been writing another Lady Windemere's Fan. But another equally valid conclusion is that Brose and Wilde revel in the dark. The film starts in a dark movie theater (a spoken prologue is heard over what looks like animated drip painting but is really porn clips buried in chemical manipulation), and goes on to include obscure footage from the past, staged solitary walks, words smuggled out of prison, and midnight dances, ultimately returning to the private footage of people presumably long dead.

While the pace of the central segment of the film allows the viewer to enjoy its visual beauty, Part III presents a visual and sonic cacophony. The earlier home movie and pom elements of Part I return along with some drag clips, but they are now sped up with rapid-fire editing and an extremely busy soundtrack containing simultaneous narrations from de Garron, Faeries' Ken Cooper and filmmaker Tom Chomont. In comparison to what has come before, the sound is nearly incomprehensible, and the imagery is repeated enough to dull sensation. This section tears us abruptly away from Wilde's world, bringing us into the media-overloaded pace of the present. It also takes the more sedately paced sound composition of Part I to a radical extreme.

The striking differences between the central section and Parts I and III of De Profundis are a significant testament to Brose's attitude toward interpretation. His complex offerings force the viewer to accept paradox. Probably the strongest-felt principle in Brose's working philosophy is his determination to allow multiplicity, to resist defining ideologies or parameters of homosexuality. The first and second sections of the film most successfully and beautifully express this commitment to multiplicity. Brose's ending strategy provides a stark contrast with the subverted romanticism of the Wilde prison text, but the contrast serves to showcase the depth and power of Rzewski and Brose's collaboration. Their approaches to Wilde both differ and complement. The filmmaker - as in his earlier "Film for Music for Film" series - demonstrates a brilliant sensitivity to composers' works, creating a visual accompaniment inextricable from the soundtrack, yet presenting exciting alternatives.

Anyone who has seen Brose's films with Cage, Thompson, Mikhashoff and others in the 1990 series knows his ability to complement a score with imagery that is consummately personal yet equally responsive to the compositions. With the second section of this film, Brose hits a high point in his successful achievement of such difficult collaborations. Viewers will have very different reactions to De Profundis. That, too, is Brose's triumph.

ELIZABETH LICATA is a Western New York writer and curator.

Fall 1998 screenings of De Profundis

CineMayence, Mainz, Germany Filmmuseum, Frankfurt, Germany Filmmuseum, Munich, Germany Hong Kong Film Festival Los Angeles Filmforum LUX Center, London, England Vancouver Queer Film & Video Festival