(original article published in the Australian Magazine SX News) - SX News Barry Lowe pays homage to a trailblazing, visionary auteur –
Jean-Daniel Cadinot, who has died, aged 64.
One of my all-time favourite gay porn movies is Chaleurs (roughly translated as ‘hot ones’), and in pre-DVD days I played it so often on video that its colour and quality deteriorated badly. When it was released on DVD I discovered it had lost none of its fascination.
The movie contains French and Dutch twinks, Arab studs, Moroccan landscapes, an aroused donkey, and rape fantasies. It is one of French director Jean-Daniel Cadinot’s early masterworks. So it was with some sadness to learn Cadinot died of a heart attack on April 23 at the age of 64.
One of the greats of the gay porn industry – yes, as much art goes into pornography as an episode of Dexter – was born February 10, 1944 in German-occupied Paris to parents who were men’s tailors.
He always maintained he knew he was gay by the age of 12 and wanted to become a painter but his parents objected. He ran away from home at 17 and, in the early 1960s, studied photography before tentatively tackling male nude portraits of the famous, such as writer Yves Navarre and singer Patrick Juvet.
His early gay photography appeared in Gai Pied and before the progression to movies he had sold around 170,000 copies of his 17 books of male photographic studies. In 1978 he set up his own company French Art.
He revealed: “The still photo became too limiting. I quickly reached its boundaries and I had a desire for action and movement. I wanted to go further, to tell our collective stories as gay men. Video enabled me to do just that”.
His first porn feature, Tendres Adolescents, was released in 1980. Outside Europe the titles were usually anglicised and credited to Tony Dark. His films were propelled by more realistic and human-scale storylines than was usual in gay porn of the period, and which he said were autobiographical, albeit not in a truly literal sense.
His preoccupations were apparent from his early films: young men in all-male environments, boys’ homes, religious schools and Boy Scouts, as well as a love of outdoor scenes, men from North Africa, fetishistic white underpants and non-consensual sex, particularly in Chaleurs in which a French twink is raped by two Arab men while asleep, and Les Minets Sauvages, which included a pack rape in a boy’s home. His mother also appeared in a small number of his movies in non-sexual roles.
When questioned about his use of young, usually non-professional, actors who did not fit the US gym-toned hairless American porn ideal, he said: “To me they represent the freshness and innocence of youth. They are provocative: a 20-year-old is more subversive than a 30-year-old; there is not yet the weight of socialisation and education on his shoulders; he is not yet moulded into society. I like the freshness but also the intelligence of these guys.
I do not choose Apollo-type men with big penises. I want men that could be your average next door neighbours – fresh, natural, without any complexes regarding their sexuality or their sexual tastes.”
The life-affirming exuberance of his films was acknowledged in the 1990s with numerous adult video awards acknowledging he lived by the motto: “An erect phallus is a symbol of life, a cross a symbol of death.”
His death was announced on his website: Dear friends, critics and others – If you’re reading these words I will have put down my camera, switched off the lights, drawn the curtains and taken my final bow.
May all the efforts and work of a whole life, the quest for the moment of pure truth in the sublime communion of two beings under the spell of undefinable desire for the other, inspire those who inherit my heart.
For more information contact the writer Barry Lowe via his email at:
barry-lowe@hotmail.com
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