A Song of Love

Un chant d’amour (1950) is an early defining classic of GLBT Cinema, and the only film made by novelist, playwright, ex-criminal, “saint” (according to Jean-Paul Sartre), and all-around provocateur, Jean Genet (1910-1986). With just this one film, Genet stands as a central figure in gay cinema, inspired by Cocteau (especially Blood of a Poet, 1930) and Kenneth Anger (Fireworks, 1947, which he had seen a year before making his own film), and paving the way for such later rebel artists as Andy Warhol and Paul Morrissey (Flesh, 1968), Derek Jarman (Jubilee, 1977), Rainer Werner Fassbinder (Genet’s Querelle, 1982), Todd Hay- nes (whose ingenious triptych Poison, 1991, includes a prison seg- ment that transplants Genet to Louisiana), and many others.
Genet combined eclectic influences into a work that is not only unmistakably his own — drawing on his signature motifs of prison, unabashed gay male sexuality clashing with hypocritical repression, violence, not to mention floral imagery — but arguably the greatest instance of a literary author (including even Samuel Beckett, Marguerite Duras, Yukio Mishima, and Alain Robbe-Grillet) transforming their fictional voice, with imagery intact, into purely cinematic terms. Stylistically, the film is nearer to the experimental films of the 1930s — such as Cocteau’s Le sang d’un poète or Man Ray’s surrealist shorts — than anything else produced in 1950. Whilst it may have a reputation for being one of the most notorious pieces of gay erotica, it is also probably the most effective fusion of existentialist philosophy and cinema.