Destricted (er), v,
1. To unlimit restriction
2. To bring objectivity by putting out of restriction
3. To deconstruct within bounds, to unconfine
Short films exploring the intersection of sex and art

“A must-see for afficianados of cerebral smut.”
Karina Longworth, Cinematical.com

Larry Clark
Gaspar Noé
Sam Taylor-Wood
Matthew Barney
Marina Abramovic
Marco Brambilla
Richard Prince

‘Destricted’ is the first short film collection of its kind, bringing together sex and art in a series of short films created by some of the world’s most visual and provocative artists and directors.
Explicit in content they reveal the diverse attitudes by which we represent ourselves sexually.
Formed in 2004, Destricted is a platform for all forms of uncensored artistic expression; manipulating and embracing the expression of sex through art. The Destricted brand is the first in a continuing series. The seven films presented explore the fine line where art and pornography intersect. The films highlight controversial issues about the representation of sexuality in art; opening up for debate the question of whether art can be disguised as pornography or whether pornography can be disguised as art or something else altogether. The result is a collection of explicit, stimulating, challenging, provocative, strange and sometimes humorous scenarios that leave it up to the viewer/voyeur to decide.
Destricted will premier at the Tate Modern, London in (Revolver Entertainment) September 2006 before being released on DVD and digital platform viewing. The series has been overwhelmingly well received at select theatrical screenings, which have become events and experiences in themselves, provoking much debate within the shared audience environment.

Each film maps its territory in dramatically different ways:
Performance art legend Marina Abramovic delves into Balkan folklore to create an instructional series of mis-en-scenes that explore the crude, magical and mysterious rites of ethnic fertility and virility. American fabulist Matthew Barney stages the erotics of sexual encounter as it takes place between ‘green man’ and the lubricated drive shaft of a customized deforestation vehicle destined for the Carnival de Bahia. American artist and filmmaker Marco Brambilla ransacks porn-film archives to produce a witty, fastmoving montage of money-shots. Larry Clark, cult anthropologist of American adolescence, directs a sensitive yet frank investigation into how, for the generation growing up in the 1980’s pornography has shaped the way they think about sex and sexual fantasy. The result is a riveting documentary about desire and sexual initiation. Gaspar Noé, maker of ‘Irreversible’, the controversial art-house movie whose brutal depiction of rape that left audiences physically sick, now promises to turn you on with a cinematically erotic journey into masturbatory fantasy. American iconographer Richard Prince appropriates a segment video that captures the generic gold standard of ’70’s porn – big tits, big cock and cumshot – re-shooting it in the manner of the cowboys, girlfriends and outlaws that first made him famous. British art star Sam Taylor-Wood directs a porn star in a droll elegy to masturbation and the great American outdoors.

‘Hoist’ Synopsis:
Hoist was shot in Bahia, Salvador as one facet of a longer film titled DE LAMA LÂMINA. Hoist is the literal underbelly of that project: a non-site through which the history, ritual, mythology, and deities invoked in DE LAMA LÂMINA have been refracted and processed. It is a film about the meeting of chthonic libidinal energy and the destructive forces of technology. Hoist describes the encounter between the two central characters of the film; the so-called ‘Green Man’ and a fifty-ton deforestation Caterpillar truck under which he is suspended. Following the three acts of traditional film narrative, it is structured according to the three phases of description, situation and condition. While the initial two phases relate to the definition of Hoist as ‘an apparatus or method for lifting a load and shifting it laterally by an elevating means applied through a support from which a flexible member freely suspends a load engager,’ the third or final condition of the film suggests the imperfect consummation of the human and the mechanistic. Suspended beneath the vehicle the ‘Green Man’ is both part of and subservient to the undercarriage of this vast machine. Yet, like the deity, Ogum to which DE LAMA LÂMINA is dedicated, the sexuality of Hoist is ambivalent. It is an exploration of the idea of the sexual transmission of man and machine, flesh and metal, will and submission for which the film itself becomes an autoerotic vehicle transporting the viewer towards the possibility of such unlikely union. Imagined as the ultimate strap-on, the truck is the physical fetish that allows the expectations of pain, danger and gratification it carries to be transformed into the psychosexual prosthetic essential to all pornographic fantasy.

Director : Matthew Barney
Duration : 14 minutes
Director of Photography : Peter Strietmann
Format : HD
Music by : Jonathan Beplet
‘Hoist’ © 2005, Matthew Barney

‘Balkan Erotic Epic’ Synopsis:
Through eroticism, the human attempts to make himself equal with the gods. In Balkan folklore, men and women sought to preserve indestructible energies through the use of the erotic. They believed that erotic energy was something non-human that could only come from higher forces.
Various explicit acts were performed for a variety of purposes; to promote the growth of crops, to heal a sick child, to protect against evil spirits and so forth.
Abramovic’s interest lies in what can be learned from these ancient traditions viewed now in a contemporary context.

Director: Marina Abramovic
Title: ‘Balkan Erotic Epic’
Duration: 13 minutes
Format: Super 16mm
Director of Photography: Aleksandar Ilic

‘Balkan Erotic Epic’ © 2005, Marina Abramovic

‘House Call’ Synopsis:
‘House Call’ is a re-recording of a twelve minute mis-en-scene culled from the golden age of video porn. It harks back to an era before pornography had entered the mainstream, when pornographic pleasure was still encased in taboo, an era distinctly at odds with that described by the in Larry Clark’s film ‘Impaled’. By recording and re-recording the clip Prince adjusts the sensory bias, further disintegrating the video and its claim to sexual reality. The narrative shares an obsession that first appeared in the nurse paintings, describing as it does an illicit encounter between strangers whose professional intimacy is based on knowledge of bodily function and fluid.

Director: Richard Prince
Title: ‘House Call’
Duration: 12 minutes
Format: DV
Portrait: Sebastian Piras
Courtesy Gladstone Gallery, New York
‘House Call’ © 2005, Richard Prince

‘Sync’ Synopsis:
Marco Brambilla’s ‘Sync’ is made up of sampled images from sex scenes in mainstream and adult films. The formulaic and often derivative nature of the way this subject is interpreted in cinema is emphasized, creating a strong subliminal impression which gradually builds to a state of sensory overload. ‘Sync’ uses samples as short as single frames edited together to create the impression of motion. The original continuity and narrative in the source material is eliminated, and a new visual choreography emerges.

Director: Marco Brambilla
Title: ‘Sync’
Duration: 1 minute 50 seconds
‘Sync’ © 2005, Marco Brambilla

‘Impaled’ Synopsis :
Everyone who was born after 1980 grew up with easy access to pornographic videos. Many children see explicit videos at a young age. Clark is interviewing people between the ages of 19 and 23 and asking how seeing pornography at such a young age shaped how they think about sex. What are their sex fantasies and how are they directly related to growing up with pornography ? This will be the background for acting out these fantasies.

Director : Larry Clark
Duration : 38 minutes
Director of Photograhy : Erik Voake
Editing : Alex Blatt
Format : 24 p
‘Impaled’ © 2004, Larry Clark

‘Death Valley’ Synopsis :
Death Valley is recognized as the lowest point in the Western Hemisphere and one of the hottest places on earth. The rocks tell a story of endless changes in the earth’s crust – vast depositions, contortions, alternate risings and lowerings, faultings, intense heats and pressures. It is here director Sam Taylor-Wood and cinematographer Seamus McGarvey chose to frame the film ‘Death Valley’. The story of a man exploring the experience of self-stimulation, pleasuring, the erotic satisfaction and possibilities with oneself. Simultaneously the film alludes to the Christian story of ‘Onan’, the brother-in-law who spilled his seed rather than copulate with his brother’s wife, the film subconsciously questions our cultural stigmatism attached to self-stimulation, and the condition of guilt weighed against the clear erotic value, relief and need.

Director: Sam Taylor-Wood
Title: ‘Death Valley’
Duration: 7 minutes 58 seconds
Cinematographer: Seamus McGarvey
Format: 35mm
Music by: Matmos and Andrew Hale
‘Death Valley’ © 2004, Sam Taylor Wood

‘We Fuck Alone‘ Synopsis :
Riffing of the title of his first feature (I stand alone) - an eloquent cinematic narrative about despair, loneliness and one man’s abandonment to pathologies of societal decay - ‘We Fuck Alone’ is a dark odyssey into violent masturbatory fantasy. The film opens with the image of a beautiful young woman being rimmed on TV. As we pull back we encounter a young teenager being eaten out by a large teddy bear before the narrative settles on a young man masturbating as he watches porn on the TV. The strobe lighting and deep pulsing soundtrack suggests as it creates something dark and hallucinatory, a strange cinematic space in which desire to continue watching is tapped directly into the brain. As the man grasps for fulfilment he reaches for a gun and begins to use it on his inflatable sex toy to fuck her in the mouth before both he and the film come to brutal climax. Like most of Noe’s films ‘We Fuck Alone’ suggests an altered state. Provoking a perceptual and visceral reaction to both what is seen and the way it is shown, we are drawn into a solitary self-referential world of simultaneous seduction and repulsion. Here sex, beauty and violence combine to create a mesmeric and unforgettable landscape entirely its own.

Director: Gaspar Noé
Title: ‘We Fuck Alone’
Duration: 23 mins
‘We Fuck Alone’ © 2005, Gaspar Noé

Biography:

British artist Sam Taylor-Wood works with film, video and photography, producing work that focuses on a range of human emotions, such as desire, anger, loneliness and boredom. Working with actors, amateurs and friends, she loosely orchestrates scenes, often focusing on moments of tension created when opposites collide. Taylor-Wood has had numerous solo shows including Fondazione Prada, Milan, Musée d’Art Contemporaine de Montréal , The Hayward Gallery, London and Matthew Marks Gallery, New York. In 1997 she received the Illy Café Prize for Most Promising Young Artist at the Venice Biennale and was nominated for the Turner Prize in 1998.

Seamus McGarvey: Internationally acclaimed cinematographer, known for his meticulously clean and measured imagery in such films as ‘The Hours’, ‘War Zone’, ‘High Fidelity’, ‘Butterfly Kiss’ and most recently ‘World Trade Centre’ and ‘Charlotte’s Web’.

Biography:

Richard Prince is the pre-eminent inventor-archaeologist of American iconography. Since the early ’80’s when he chose to show a re-photographed single image of the pre-pubescent Brooke Shield’s oiled, naked, and titled ‘Spiritual America’ Prince has led the way in the quest to expose the latent violence and sexuality that underwrites the American way. Appropriating images from the cultural fringes – bikers, surfers, potheads, cowboys, outlaws, pornographers, etc– and blowing them up large scale, he has described this type of photography as ‘practicing without a licence.’ Out of these unauthorized images Prince has created his own type of pulp-fiction. His recent series of nurse paintings slathered in drippy paint and sunset magenta hues have been exhibited worldwide. His interest in the deeply engrained stereotypes that surround the naughty doctor/nurse/patient relationship have lead him to photograph Kate Moss for W magazine and most recently to ‘House Call’. Best known for his sophisticated critiques of the insidious myths of American consumer culture. Prince’s ironic appropriations are both deconstruction of regressive stereotype and celebration of forbidden pleasure.