Erotic Man By Jørgen Leth

After five decades of work as a poet, experimental film director and cultural critic, Danish artist Jørgen Leth goes personal with Erotic Man, a search for images of eroticism motivated by his own past relationship with an African woman. The quest leads this white European man to intensely seek images of very young, exotic girls in Brazil, Haiti, Panama, Senegal, the Philippines and other countries.

What follows in his search for eroticism could make any feminist - and many other people, I suppose - infuriated: he has these women lie on a bed or a couch, naked, spreading their legs while he shoots parts of their bodies, mainly breasts, vaginas and bottoms, under low, smooth light. They are sometimes told to recite poems and dialogues, to pretend to sleep or take a shower. They never become real characters, with a personality and a history; on the contrary, their names succeed one another on screen, accompanied only by their nationality. They are exotic products of a third world sex catalogue, almost all of them black, with Latin features or big tattoos on their Asiatic skins.

Jørgen will go as far as showing his sex tapes with one of them. He insists this is not pornography, speaking very slowly so that these girls, who barely speak English, can understand him. “Tell her we’ll make a movie, a movie”, he insists to a translator, simulating with his arm the handle movement of old cameras. “Do you think your life will change after this opportunity?”, he asks. Unsurprisingly, all of the girls answer affirmatively.

In common, they have the same empty look of a mechanic seduction, directly driven towards the filmmaker and the spectator. Let’s not forget that the title of the film is Erotic Man, in the masculine singular: the eroticism here does not come from all of the naked models, but from one man, the protagonist and filmmaker, who builds with this documentary an egocentric and libidinous reconstitution of his own erotic memories.

By Bruno Carmelo