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Fuses
A silent film of collaged and painted sequences of lovemaking between artist Carolee Schneemann and her then partner, composer James Tenney, observed by their cat, Kitch.
Pornography is an anti-emotional medium, in content and intent, and its lack of emotion renders it wholly ineffective for women, among others. This absence of sensuality is so contrary to female eroticism that pornography becomes, in fact, anti-sexual. Schneemann's film, by contrast, is devastatingly erotic, transcending the surfaces of sex to communicate its true spirit.
Significantly, Schneemann conceives the film as shot through the eyes of her cat—the impassive observer whose view of human sexuality is free of voyeurism or morality. In her attempt to reproduce the visual and tactile experience of lovemaking, Schneemann spent some three years marking on the film, baking it in the oven, even hanging it out the window during rainstorms on the off chance it might be struck by lightning. Much as human beings carry the physical traces of their experiences, so this film testifies to what it has been through and communicates the spirit of its maker. The red heat baked into the emulsion suffuses the film, a concrete emblem of erotic power.
Bio Carolee Schneemann
American multidisciplinary artist Carolee Schneeman (1939-2019) used film and video since the 1960s. Shattering taboos and redefining the notion of the erotic, she confronted sexuality, gender, and the social construction of the female body. Her seminal performances of the 1970s were as transgressive as they were influential. Schneemann continued to provoke, exploring female sexuality in relation to art-making, ritual, and culture.
In the midst of developing my kinetic theater works, I began an erotic film, Fuses (1965), because no one else had dealt with the image of lovemaking as a core of spontaneous gesture and movement. I hesitated to suddenly teach myself a complex and demanding medium, but I was compelled to make this film myself, much as I had been compelled as a painter to increasingly incorporate dimensional materials: to structure found film footage and slides, to compose sounds, design electronic systems, and to train performers for my theater and environmental pieces.
In Fuses, pleasure is abundant, everywhere. The joy of saying yes, and yes, and yes again is achingly evident. To proclaim yes to pure being, which is to say, to pure belonging, is to lock with another at the moment of climax which obliterates all shape and sensation. Language crumbles away like a plum in your mouth. You don’t need to understand, just to love, ravenous with the want of it. The dyes on the film cirrus from lavender to teal to deep red. The whole heart of the image pumps the film forward: energetic, optimistic with its excess. More is more. Insatiable rapture occludes shame. As a spectator, you sit in darkness, imagining the sounds that have been lost to time. Dynamism’s suction is silent, as are pleasure’s screams. The frame fades to black, then flares again. Light, dark, torso, window: the subjects undulate, never still.
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- This film was #78 in the “Greatest” Short Films of All Time 2025