Ellen Cantor. Pinochet Porn. 2008–16. Super 8mm film transferred to video (black and white and color, sound), 123 min (Courtesy the estate of Ellen Cantor)
It’s quite a surprise that a film titled Pinochet Porn depicts a tender portrait of friendship. Granted, Ellen Cantor’s final film buries that theme under a shocking mélange of spank-heavy sex scenes, depressed clowns, descriptions of rape and torture over vintage Pepsi ads and disturbing archival footage of the Pinochet dictatorship, Hitler and September 11th. But looking beyond its violent and erotic imagery, the film is a celebration of a close-knit avant-garde community.
This became clear at the film’s premiere at MoMA on Monday night, part of the museum’s Modern Mondays film program. Playing to a sold-out theater, the screening also featured a post-film discussion between the Museum’s Chief Curator of Media and Performance Art Stuart Comer, Participant Inc.’s founding director Lia Gangitano, who appears in the film, and filmmaker John Brattin, who acted as Director of Photography. While this is common with MoMA’s screenings, it seemed particularly important on Monday. Firsthand accounts of the film’s production and posthumous completion, provided here by Gangitano and Brattin, seem irrevocably intertwined with any analysis or enjoyment of the film itself.
Started in 2008, the film was inspired by Cantor’s series of drawings entitled Circus Lives From Hell. Using these narrative drawings as an ad hoc script, the film progressed in bits and pieces until 2013 when Cantor passed away mid-production. According to Brattin, Cantor left her collaborators with “a pretty elaborate puzzle” of footage to put together. The film was finally finished this year after eight years of production.
Pinochet Porn feels like the culmination of Cantor’s creative life. It hits on almost all of her career-long interests including the intersection of love and violence, obsession, pop cultural references, dark humor and confusion between personal narrative and fiction. Because of this, MoMA’s premiere provided an apt cap on this fall’s multi-venue revival of the late artist’s work, which saw exhibitions and screenings at several institutions including Foxy Production, Participant Inc., Maccarone, Electronic Arts Intermix and 80 Washington Square East Galleries (which is the only exhibitions still on view until November 12, 2016).
Making sense of the narrative isn’t easy. The pseudo-soap opera loosely follows five characters as they grow to adulthood under Pinochet’s regime. Each protagonist is devoted a chapter of the film, delineated by an animated introduction mirroring Cantor’s intricate and whimsical pencil drawings. But as with a lot of art films, any semblance of this plot is muddied by layers upon layers of seemingly random images and narratives. I still feel like I need several more viewings to fully get my head around Cantor’s mixture of historical and personal trauma.
Taking a step back, though, the film gains merit as a record of a specific circle of artists and other creative who gathered around Cantor. The credits alone read like a Who’s Who of Lower Manhattan and London where Cantor lived for most of her life. Artists Spencer Sweeney and Michel Auder make appearances as Paloma (Gangitano)’s husbands (Auder even reportedly dons the suit he wore to marry Cindy Sherman). The film’s orgiastic opening scene, which is worthy of a Jack Smith film, includes notorious English DJ and nightlife personae Princess Julia and London-based artist Cerith Wyth Evans as a guru. Actor Jim Fletcher plays the Pinochet-like dictator and curator Pablo Leon de la Barra provides voiceovers throughout the film.
Ellen Cantor. Pinochet Porn. 2008–16. Super 8mm film transferred to video (black and white and color, sound), 123 min (Courtesy the estate of Ellen Cantor; image via Skowhegan)
Much of the casting decisions can be attributed to the freewheeling nature of the film’s production, which relied heavily on happenstance and the availability of friends. For example, during the talk, Brattin recalled Gangitano became one of the main actors because “people didn’t show up.” Gangitano also remembered accosting Jay Kinney with Cantor on Houston Street to ask him to be the film’s Art Director. She reflected how the film “started in a modest way…just getting friends together.” “We didn’t know what we were getting into,” she quipped.
Pinochet Porn’s recognizable cast overpowers their onscreen characters, preventing audiences from fully suspending disbelief. But it also created some unexpectedly poignant moments in the film. Take, for example, a scene midway through the third chapter, which focuses on Paloma–one of the twin daughters played by Gangitano. After leaving another husband, Paloma finds Cantor and they dance. The duo smile, goof off and twirl together under colored lights while Cantor, in voiceover, explains how Paloma became her “best friend” and “husband.” Even though this moment seems insignificant to the film’s plot, it’s a moving depiction of both a real and fictional friendship between the two women.
Cantor herself recognized the importance of friendship to the film. Introducing the screening, Gangitano quoted a passage from an article Cantor wrote in 2009 for Map Magazine about the film in process. She recited, “Walking through Tenerife wearing a hand drawn clown mask, nearly mad from grief, I realized I could no longer safely draw on love for inspiration…I tried to think what else interested me enough to engulf my life–perhaps my friendships.”
If the population of Monday night’s screening is any indication, these engulfing friendships remained even after Cantor’s death. Comer, at one point in the evening, asked anyone who was involved in the film to stand up and about fifteen people did, cheered on by their own friends. By witnessing the film’s communal power both onscreen and off, these continued connections between those involved in the film become an unanticipated but essential part of its–and Cantor’s–enduring legacy.
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