Why did Jean Genet make only one movie?
In the era before television, the cinema was the only dramatic art form available to the poor. Jean Genet was extremely poor - a foundling brought up by foster parents in the village of Alligny in the Morvan, a remote rural area in France so impoverished that it survived only by raising cattle and sending its young women off to Paris as wet nurses. But even in Alligny a travelling company set up a screen from time to time and showed silent films. Genet lived in the village from shortly after his birth in 1910 until his departure some 12 years later.
Genet kept coming back imaginatively to the cinema and/or the village in his work. By the time in the early 1940s when he was working on Our Lady of the Flowers , his first novel, he had already written several plays and at least one film script. (They have been lost, and we know little about their contents.) In Our Lady, much of the action occurs in the village where a lonely, poetic boy - who will grow up to be Divine, the drag queen and prostitute - is in love with a snake tamer. There are ecstatic descriptions of people and places right out of Genet's village life.
In his novel Funeral Rites, the action begins at a cinema as a French audience watches a newsreel and reviles the militiamen shown on screen, traitors collaborating with the Nazis. And in 1947 Genet was apparently working on a script called The Revolt of the Black Angels based on his childhood. The film was never made, and the script has been lost.
In 1950 he directed his only film, n Chant d'Amour, and though it had a large budget and was shot in highly controlled circumstances, Genet - this master of words, this silver-tongued novelist - decided to make it a silent film. Though it is a prison film, the fantasy romantic sequences between two of the prisoners were shot in the countryside. The location was near Cocteau's country house at Milly-la-Forêt, but the hills and flowering trees seem characteristic of anywhere in northern France, and certainly don't "read" as somewhere as built-up as that area actually is. The blossoming branch shown emerging out of the older prisoner's chest is an image Genet borrowed from his own novel Querelle; certainly the contrast between a tough sailor or prisoner and an extravagantly beautiful branch of flowers is typical of Genet, just as the play of the branch's shadow on the younger prisoner's puckered lips is symbolic of fellatio.
If Genet chose to make his one and only film silent, that is consistent with his desire to reinvent himself over and over again. His poetry is non-narrative and derived from Cocteau's "surrealist-lite" verse. His three full-length plays never deal with the subject of homosexuality, though that is the unique focus of his novels. His last book, published posthumously in 1986, The Prisoner of Love, is a non-fiction, non-linear memoir that treats politics (the Black Panthers and the Palestinians) in a prose that in no way resembles the language of his novels.
In other words, Genet was constantly evolving and never repeating himself. In his last years, he told an Austrian journalist that he never reread himself nor wanted to discuss his earlier works because he didn't want to resemble himself. Thus it is only consistent with this policy that Genet's one film should be silent and, like the films he saw as a boy, black and white, gestural, mannered, even melodramatic.
Of course, there is some continuity in his concerns - inevitably, since he was one man and he had a deep but limited number of themes to which he responded. Indeed, a close look at his novels reveals that he was profoundly influenced by the cinematic. Jean Genet was interested in the cinema from the very beginning of his career as a writer. Whereas Jean-Paul Sartre postulates that Genet progressed from the solipsism of lyric poetry to progressively more social (and socially concerned) forms of fiction, drama and film, by 1942 Genet had already completed Our Lady of the Flowers and a first draft of his play Deathwatch (called Pour la Belle ). He was also hoping to direct a film.
A close look at the composition of his novels reveals that he was profoundly influenced by the cinematic techniques of collage, flashback and close-up. Just as Un Chant d'Amour intercuts the warder's sexual fantasies with realistic scenes of the prisoners in their cells as well as one prisoner's daydream of a woodland erotic romp, each of the five novels juxtaposes two or three separate plots. For instance, in Our Lady, Divine's life in Montmartre as a transvestite prostitute is interpolated with scenes of his life as the boy Culafroy in a village, and also with scenes of Our Lady's crimes and trial. In a characteristically cinematic rearrangement of sequence, the novel begins with Divine's death and interment, then leads us through his life and hundreds of pages back to this conclusion.
Close-ups of gestures are also essential to Genet's conception of the novel, since in his ontology accidents determine fate, gestures form character and costume triggers events. A Genet film script states: "In effect the cinema is basically immodest. Let us use this faculty to enlarge gestures. The cinema can open a fly and search out its secrets..."
Un Chant d'Amour , the only film Genet both wrote and directed, reveals in a pure form the techniques he adopted to fiction and the theatre. In addition, this film shows his lyric vision of homosexual love, at once highly physical and romantic. Like the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, who knew of Genet through the singer Patti Smith, Genet presents acts of homosexual love in a light that seems at once offensive to the naive and ennobling to the initiated. Neither Genet nor Mapplethorpe, however, could be considered sexually stimulating, since both make abstractions out of the male body.
Genet never completely resolved, even in his own mind, to what degree his writing was pornographic. Our Lady of the Flowers was originally published in 1943 in a limited deluxe edition intended primarily for the homosexual market. When the same text was later reprinted by Gallimard for the general public, Genet removed many shocking details (such as the dimensions of the characters' penises). Many years later, he was capable of asking a friend if he regarded his work as mere pornography.
Genet maintained an unstable relationship with all of his work. He did not let Nico Papatakis make a film out of his one-act play The Maids because one of his female friends had convinced him the text was badly "dated", although he endorsed Les Abysses, Papatakis's filmed version of the original real-life murder and trial that had inspired the play.
Similarly, Genet was certain his poetry was valueless, and constantly asked friends if they thought his fiction would live. He disliked the end of The Balcony, and long after The Screens was premiered he was still tinkering with the script. His rejection of Un Chant d'Amour may have had its roots in his fear that it, too, was botched or that it was merely pornographic. Certainly by the time he denounced it definitively in the 1970s he had written several other film scripts, and his ideas about cinema as an art had evolved. Perhaps he feared the short early film would be considered amateurish and would compromise his chances to find funding for new projects. (Some of these projects could be extravagant, as the late scenarios reveal.) In the case of La Nuit Venue, Genet worked with a collaborator on a full-length fiction scenario over a long period and through several drafts, only to block the production himself when everything was ready to go.
The curious thing is that Genet thought about cinema early and late throughout his long writing career. He wrote more pages of film scenarios than he did of any other literary genre. But Un Chant d'Amour is the only testimony we have of what his cinematic taste and style might render.
To some extent, it may be seen as a response to Cocteau. In 1943 Genet had been discovered and launched by Cocteau, who arranged for Our Lady of the Flowers to be published and who circulated the manuscript among many important Parisian writers and taste-makers. In the 1940s Cocteau, who was living with film actor Jean Marais, was involved with many major film projects, including most notably his postwar international success, La Belle et la Bête. Genet watched Cocteau's activity with a mixture of envy, admiration and irritation. Indeed, in the early 1950s, Genet, assuming what Cocteau called a "Jansenist" stance, denounced Cocteau for his disgusting involvement with the "industrial cinema".
Could it be that Un Chant d'Amour might be seen both as an echo of Cocteau's mythic, magical cinema and as a criticism of its crowd-pleasing use of linear narration, traditional plot and famous actors? As the sole realisation of Genet's persistent love of the movies, Un Chant d'Amour is an unclaimed pledge in the vast pawnshop of his imagination.
· This is an edited extract from Edmund White's introduction to Criminal Desires: Jean Genet and Cinema by Jane Giles, published by Creation Books on October 24, priced £11.99.