Glimpse 7

«I will not make any more boring art» : this resolution that appears in a sequence of Glimpse 7 seems to sum up Roy Stuart’s film projects. Filming sex in all its aspects, without falling into a verbal discourse and without succumbing to the comfort of porno. It doesn’t fit into films about ordinary, smooth sex that makes the covers of popular magazines and advertisments. Nor into films that are made for increasing rows of viewers who come to view a throw away blue film, perfect for a quick gratification but poor in imagination…
Glimpse 7 escapes all these stumbling blocks. Avoiding all detours and babble, girls undress in staircases of apartment buildings, wear sperm on the tips of their lips, let themselves be mistreated with clothes-pegs, or honor an unknown erection exiting a hole in a wall….But these raw situations don’t ever fall into the brutality or a boring mechanic of simulated pleasure (the whole world however seems to believe in blue films….). The sequences are brief and seem to liberate the frames from narration. The counterpoint of it is that a moist narrative (…this evening the guard dogs of your father will guard our secrets) always brings the film back to the heart of fantasy. The basis of this erotic art is spontaneous pleasure and not an unecessary attempt at creating fiction. Roy Stuart’s work is like virgin territory

slicing through the media of sex and video. The imaginary realm is explored and unveiled, codes and established representations of sex are shaken up as the male is not forcibly the master of the situation. Here, he seems to be totally powerless at times, as in the SM sequence where a sad master exclaims in front of his victim : She doesn’t cry enough, she pretends to be in pain, she’s acting, it’s not enough.
As in the scene where a shoe seller discovers that in fact the Client is king, at the feet of a tight blond and a brunette with heavy open thighs, in a tailored outfit….there’s also the man who wears the stockings of his mistress and the performance of Madeleine Berkhemer who keeps a prisoner in an installation of colored veils, a poor fellow, his penis in the air….as in dreams, these inspirations are borrowed from reality, and though perhaps disturbing, upon waking up, everything is possible.

– Stephane Ruiz