Director: Jean Genet
Year: 1950
Country: France
Language: Silent
Length: 25 mins
Format: PAL | R2
Colour: Black & White
Aspect Ratio: 1.33: 1
Certificate: 18

Synopsis

Jean Genet wrote and directed his only film, Un Chant d'Amour, in 1950. Set in a French prison, this silent, poetic, and intensely physical vision of homosexual desire reveals the recurrent themes that unite Genet's work and the cinematic techniques – of collage, flashback and close-up – which he adopted to his novels, plays and poetry.

Shot on 35mm by an established cameraman and professional crew, the cast was chosen by Genet from his circle of Montmartre associates and lovers. Initially, Genet and his circle were pleased with the film, but he later denounced it and refused the prize for 'Best New Film' of 1975 awarded by the Centre National de la Cinmatographie. Author Edmund White, in his Preface to Criminal Desires: Jean Genet and Cinema by Jane Giles (Creation Books, 2002), comments:
His rejection of Un Chant d'Amour may have its roots in his fear that unlike his first novel Our Lady Of The Flowers 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.

The subject of ceaseless controversy and international censorship, Un Chant d'Amour was unseen for many years yet has influenced a generation of film-makers, becoming a cause celbre of gay rights and freedom of expression, as well as being recognised as a masterpiece of underground cinema in its own right.

This DVD is now available for the first time in the UK, digitally remastered from a print of the original, uncut version of the film, with a vibrant new music score by Simon Fisher Turner. Turner's film music credits include Derek Jarman's Caravaggio, Mike Hodges's Croupier, Michael Almereyda's Nadja and Paul McGuigan's Gangster No.1.

Special Features

- Commentary by writer Jane Giles and film-maker Richard Kwietniowski (Love and Death in Long Island).
- Biographies of Jean Genet and Simon Fisher Turner.