This is the second essay in a new Reverse Shot column that focuses on the dynamic or below-the-surface nature of queer representation in international cinema.
The Pleasure Principle:
A Body to Live In
By Mackenzie Lukenbill
In Gilles Deleuze’s deathbed conversations with Claire Parnet, Deleuze purports that it may be preferable to live in a “weakened state,” such as one brought on by illness or injury, to look beyond one’s own body and into the realm of theory and philosophy. The body’s sutures, tears, wounds, and holes become sites of access and transference rather than vulnerability. In 2018, during another deathbed interview, Fakir Musafar—a pivotal figure in the body modification, or “modern primitive movement,” of the 1980s—told his close friend Patrick Mulcahey that ”the whole purpose of life is to finally get out of your physical condition.” Submitting to Deleuze’s “weakened state” was a fixation for Musafar, in both private and public; in the ways he contorted his body, and in his art.
Musafar, born Roland Loomis in South Dakota in 1930, is the subject of filmmaker Angelo Madsen’s feature documentary A Body to Live In, which had its American premiere at the True/False Film Festival in March, before playing at New York’s Prismatic Ground in May. Madsen’s previous films reveal his predilection for self-mythology, truth emerging from fiction, and his regard for the moving image as a porous conduit for the transgender body, typically his own. Within the context of Madsen’s other work, one may have expected A Body to Live In to be an explicitly trans film, and Musafar an explicitly trans subject. I initially approached this with a degree of caution, despite what I knew of the body modification movement, piercing and tattooing, emerging from San Francisco’s gay BDSM underground. A Body to Live In has the prickly task of drawing a connection between the hooks, binders, needles, and daggers and queer identity, or the overlap between “body play” (as Musafar titled his autobiographical photo book) and gender play.
A Body to Live In makes a point to explicitly portray Musafar as both gay and “in between genders.” His wife and creative partner Cléo Dubois says he called it “being in the cracks.” Some of Musafar’s earliest work, created in the basement of his parents’ farmhouse in South Dakota, were self-portraits of cross-dressing; the youth feminized himself using belts and pins to severely pinch his waist. In his twenties, he continued this practice in a series of photos he dubbed “Anima,” a female analog of himself in bras and garters. Upon using his GI bill benefits to move to San Francisco, Musafar took a job making corsets for San Francisco State University’s theater department. While he kept his primary practice, his self-portraiture of the “remolding of his body,” a secret, he soon made the acquaintance of piercing enthusiasts Jim Ward and Doug Malloy, with whom he would throw discreet naked piercing parties in Los Angeles. These parties, as documented in the film, are irrefutably gay. Later in life, Musafar began having relationships with men, which he saw as a revelation after a lifetime of “dominant women.”
In the hours of audiovisual archival material gifted to Madsen by Dubois, Musafar is a soft-spoken but confident subject. V. Vale and Andrea Juno, in their seminal RE/Search issue on body modification in 1989, describe him as looking like a diminutive advertising executive (he was one at the time) when they meet him in a Chinese restaurant, only for Musafar to insert a bone in his nose and two small daggers in his chest at the table and proclaim “there—I feel much more comfortable.” In 1977, Musafar was invited to give a keynote address at a tattoo convention in Reno, Nevada, an event he terms his “coming out.” Still unsure about going public with his physical and artistic activities, he gleaned his moniker from “this Sufi mystic [in Persia, circa 1800] that was misunderstood about using piercing as a way of opening your consciousness.” While he only intended to adopt the name for that night, it was thereafter branded upon him.
The young Fakir cribbed most of his ideas for bodily experiments from the pages of National Geographic. “The act of doing this slow piercing and surrendering to the experience is a transcendent spiritual event,” Musafar told Vale and Juno, “but people in this culture have few precedents for such an exercise in self-transformation.” Dubois defends this ethnographically touristic approach to ritual practice in the film—Indian flesh hook ceremonies, tribal dressings from New Guinea—by stating that in the 1940s and fifties ideas around cultural appropriation had not yet formed (for viewers at Prismatic Ground the appropriation was hard to ignore—the same Indian hook ceremony appears in the opening night film, Rajee Samarasinghe’s Your Touch Makes Others Invisible, shown in its proper cultural context). Musafar was drawn to the androgyny of the figures in the photos, and obsessively studied the rituals being portrayed, as well as their meaning. “Modern Primitives,” to him, is an ironic term: “It’s a denigration, a cultural conceit to label someone who does these kind of activities a ‘primitive.’”
The film does dedicate a substantial amount of time to the controversies around appropriation that eventually arose as Musafar became a public figure, specifically after the wide release of Dan and Mark Jury’s 1985 documentary Dances Sacred and Profane, in which Musafar leads a group in a Sioux Sundance ceremony. (In 1986, Michael Bronski wrote in Gay Community News that the film “will be of special interest to the SM community, not only because of the body piercing but because Musafar speaks at length of the connection between physical pain and psychic transcendence.”) Sioux spokespeople took public offense to the ritual being performed out of its intended context. Musafar lamented that there was no outlet for rituals of pain in western culture beyond freak shows and carnivals, recollecting that only “the circus, sideshow aspect was socially acceptable.”
Madsen has images of different materialities play out in the same frame, collapsing temporality and distance. Photographs, both digital and magnetic video, and hand-processed 16mm film are used simultaneously, often overlaid and blended, using the grammar of optical printing techniques via a digital intermediate. Coupled with Madsen’s tendency toward extreme close-ups of flesh, and the contemporary interviews being shot on muted and hazy 16mm color stock, the film has a porous, unconstrained corporeality of its own. One particularly affecting example is the usage of a strip of experimentally processed film that resembles red blood cells during discussions of HIV transmission. The filmmaker also plays with moments of stillness and suspension—sometimes literally, such as a body suspended by meat hooks—in conversation with Musafar’s photographs. The film quotes Susan Sontag’s assertion that photography is a participation in the morality of its subject: “Time's relentless melt… An incitement to reverie.”
Highlighting the passage of time and stillness in relation to S&M and bondage is also a tactic used in Swiss filmmaker Cleo Übelmann’s industrial lesbian art film Mano Destra (1986), a film that carries Musafar’s artistic influence. Writing about that film for Screen Slate, Ayanna Dozier references Deleuze’s description of sadomasochism’s relationship with time; pain and pleasure occur in the waiting. In that film, Übelmann portrays a dominatrix arranging bonded female submissives in cages and cabinets, and upon furniture. The camera rarely moves. Musafar was surely aware of Mano Destra, and its release coincided with Musafar’s realization that his work—both photography and performance—could be considered an artistic practice. In A Body to Live In, he states that this didn’t cross his mind until his work started appearing in art books and showing at museums. To him, the point was personal: ritual transcendence. As Musafar’s art career progressed, it opened the door to a more collaborative spirit and acceptance of art-making. Musafar appeared in multiple films by German lesbian filmmaker Monika Treut, best known for another queer dominatrix film, 1985’s Seduction: The Cruel Woman. He acted in Treut’s Virgin Machine (1988) and My Father Is Coming (1991) alongside his frequent collaborator, video and performance artist and sex worker advocate Annie Sprinkle. Sprinkle is heavily featured in Madsen’s film, and also wrote Musafar’s obituary in Artforum, where she marvels at the trajectory from his early experiments to the modern American acceptance of tattoos and piercings.
Übelmann, Treut, and Sprinkle are all, of course, gay women, and the interplay between their work and Musafar’s is noteworthy in exemplifying BDSM and “body play” as demolishing gendered power dynamics. (Elsewhere in the RE/Search issue, photographer and piercing expert Sheree Rose tells Andrea Juno, “We were trying to develop a subculture of dominant women and submissive men… we completely switched around the social norm.”) It was both welcome and unsurprising to see the filmmaker Michelle Handelman credited as a consultant on A Body to Live In. Handelman chronicled the lesbian BDSM scene in San Francisco during the height of the AIDS epidemic and ensuing “culture wars” in her documentary BloodSisters: Leathers, Dykes and Sadomasochism (1995), which follows its subjects from leather pageants in the Bay to the April 1993 March on Washington for Lesbian, Gay, and Bi Equal Rights and Liberation. Trans writer Patrick Califa, one of the main subjects of that film, states on camera that “We upset people on so many theoretical levels that our presence in the women’s movement was really intolerable… lesbian sadomasochism threw a monkey wrench into that simplistic theory of...what a world where women could be free looked like.” The “theoretical level” of queer BDSM is a resistance to reproductive futurity, as posited by the preacher of queer pessimism Lee Edelman in his seminal text No Future. Body play privileges pleasure, enlightenment, and personal fulfillment over producing children to continue greasing the wheels of capitalist society.
There is a long history of femme artists engaging both aesthetically and politically with body play. Austrian video artist VALIE EXPORT, who was making work at around the same time as Musafar, wrote in her manifestos on “feminist actionism” that “women have long preserved and sealed off their damaged identity under the emblem of pain’s deformations,” and suggested a feminist visual language that put into focus the “cracks,” tears, fissures, and pains of the human body, as seen in expanded cinema works like I Am Beaten (1973) and Cutting (1968). She credits the German surrealist Unica Zürn, a writer and artist who for a time was best known for appearing contorted and in bondage in the 1950s works of her partner, photographer Hans Bellmer, as the source of her inspiration. This lineage shows a long chain of women and queer artists attempting to break BDSM and body play through the barrier of private and public, using their own bodies both for political action and physical, personal transcendence.
Musafar eventually managed to recenter body play and its artistic lineage from an individual act into a communal one. Madsen includes several recordings in which Musafar recounts his early loneliness. He kept his practice private in the forties and fifties mainly to avoid the threat of being institutionalized; a very real concern for anyone who publicly upset gender and sexual convention. A Body to Live In is most powerful when Madsen successfully captures Musafar emerging from the underground towards a broader, freer community. One of Musafar’s friends and fellow practitioners, Yossie, says in the film, “Play tends to be egocentric—ritual expands that beyond the individual.” As beguiling as Musafar’s early film photography is, all the footage shot after Dances Sacred and Profane shows Musafar surrounded by others. His face expresses a relief and elation not present in the first few decades of his adult life. Ultimately, A Body to Live In is a “coming out” story—tracing the public acceptance and assumption of residing within a subversive body that rejects futurism, and the community and transcendence that follows. As one HIV-positive ritual participant late in the film describes his involvement, “This is me staying alive.”