01.01.70

Is often a astonishing film, not simply because all illusion is immediately stripped away, but because something fully more complex emerges in its place. Beneath the pitiless gaze of a stationary camera's all the way-angle lens, humanity in all its bored, sad, woebegone frailty peeks out like a snail from its fa.

In between takes, there isn't much to do except sit and wait, which is what the men and women of the porn world do. They simply hang about around, for the lights to get set up or shot sequences to be arranged. The fact that they do so stark pure, shaved and implanted, or gussied up in black harness gear, becomes malapropos after a while. Naked bodies are pretty much all the same no matter how much surgical and plastic intervention they've endured, it is the eyes of the people that you end up watching. Low the blank bored expressions, flickers of inner life are like shy forest creatures. You gap with bated breath to see if they emerge from the undergrowth. In the moments between the action, surprising gentleness ensues as distress invades bodies wrung out and softened with exhaustion, spiritual and otherwise. Ashamed gestures of kindness, such a glass of water offered, or a brief pat on the back somehow have more occult impact than the endless pounding endured by every possible orifice on the benefactor body.

Source: TheTyee.ca