De Profundis

Banned & Censored Cinema

De Profundis

Lawrence Brose, USA, 1997, 65 min.

De Profundis is a three part, hand/alternative-processed experimental film based on Oscar Wilde's prison letter De Profundis. Incorporating home movies from the 1920's and early gay male erotica along with images from Radical Faerie gatherings, queer pagan rituals, drag performances and images of confinement, this 65 minute film sets up a haunting investigation of queerness, masculinity, history and sexuality. These images are buttressed against a soundtrack composed of Wilde's aphorisms, a voice and piano setting of Wilde's prison letter, and multi-tracked interviews with a diverse group of contemporary gay men. - John Palattella

De Pofundis has an original score by the American composer Frederic Rzewski.

Brose makes film itself into the protagonist of his exploration. With images and sounds constantly decaying and shifting and contaminating each other, film becomes a metaphor of the transforming self that Wilde prized for corrupting a sense of sexual normalcy. De Profundis embraces Wildesque deviance and cautions that the desire for normalisation prevalent among contemporary gays threatens to contain it.
- John Palattella

Art has no influence upon action. It annihilates the desire to act. Art that the world calls immoral is art that shows the world its own shame. - Oscar Wilde

Wilde understood and exploited the artifice of identities and social positions. It is the idea of the artificial nature of wealth, privilege, and class that Wilde used in his writings to lampoon and expose the moral conflicts at play in the high society of Victorian England. In fact, I believe that Wilde was imprisoned not for buggering boys but for freely crossing class lines with rent boys and lower class faeries and not upholding certain codes of upper class appearances. We must remember also that he was an outsider by virtue of being Irish. - Lawrence Brose

The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.
- Oscar Wilde

REQUIRED READINGS & WEBSITES

• Lawrence Brose, De Profundis website, online http://www.lawrencebrose.com

• Lawrence Brose,"Why I did Wilde", VOICES (Sept 1998), course reader

• John Palattella, "De Profundis", online http://www.hi-beam.net/mkr/lb/lb-bio.html

• Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (read ch. by the same name) (University of California, 1990), course reader

• Jonathan Dollimore, "Ch. 4: Wilde's Transgressive Aesthetic and Contemporary Cultural Politics", "Ch. 5: Re-encounters", "Ch. 7: Tragedy and Containment--The Art of Expiation: Wilde in Prison", Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault (Oxford, 1991), course reader