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Song of Love
Un Chant d’amour
The work of French activist, novelist, and essayist Jean Genet was considered controversial in the forties and fifties, because of its explicit homosexuality. Genet made only one film in his entire life, but A Song of Love went on to inspire both David Bowie and Rainer Werner Fassbinder.
The black-and-white film depicts the horny fantasies of some prisoners and their guard. A Song of Love is at once arousing, poetic, and implicitly political. After being banned from the big screen for years, the film was finally shown publicly for the first time in 1954, albeit stripped of any bare chest or penis.
Bio Jean Genet
Jean Genet (1910–1986) was born in Paris. Abandoned by his mother at seven months, he was raised in state institutions and charged with his first crime when he was ten. After spending many of his teenage years in a reformatory, Genet enrolled in the Foreign Legion, though he later deserted, turning to a life of thieving and pimping that resulted in repeated jail terms and, eventually, a sentence of life imprisonment. In prison, Genet began to write—poems and prose that combined pornography and an open celebration of criminality with an extraordinary baroque, high literary style—and on the strength of this work found himself acclaimed by such literary luminaries as Jean Cocteau, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Simone de Beauvoir, whose advocacy secured for him a presidential pardon in 1948. Between 1944 and 1948, Genet wrote four novels—Our Lady of the Flowers, Miracle of the Rose, Funeral Rites, and Querelle—and the scandalising memoir A Thief’s Journal. Throughout the 1950s, he devoted himself to theater. After a silence of some twenty years, Genet began his last book, Prisoner of Love, in 1983. It was completed just before he died. (New York Review Books)
There is a close relationship between flowers and convicts. The fragility and delicacy of the former are of the same nature as the brutal insensitivity of the latter. My excitement is the oscillation from one to the other.
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- This film was #10 in the “Greatest” Short Films of All Time 2025