Described (rather cheekily) by director Michael Snow as a musical comedy, this deft probing of sound/image relationships is one of his wittiest, most entertaining and philosophically stimulating films. In his words, the film “derives its form and the nature of its possible effects from its being built from the inside, as it were, with the actual units of such a film, i.e. the frame and the recorded syllable. Thus its ‘dramatic’ element derives not only from a representation of what may involve us generally in life but from considerations of the nature of recorded speech in relation to moving light-images of people.’”
One of the very few films made by Etienne O'Leary, all of which emerged from the French underground circa 1968 and can be very loosely designated 'diary films.' Like the contemporaneous films by O'Leary's more famous friend Pierre Clementi, they trippily document the drug-drenched hedonism of that era's dandies. O'Leary worked with an intoxicating style that foregrounded rapid and even subliminal cutting, dense layering of superimposed images and a spontaneous notebook type shooting style. Yet even if much of O'Leary's material was initially 'diaristic,' depicting the friends, lovers, and places that he encountered in his private life, the metamorphoses it underwent during editing transformed it into a series of ambiguously fictionalized, sometimes darkly sexual fantasias. - Experimental Film Club
The film is a series of images, shown in short takes (anywhere from a few frames to 30 seconds), of more or less fetishistic imagery (something Bouyxou was particularly fond of). After a credit and title sequence written on naked human flesh, the viewer sees the brilliant Molinier standing sanctimoniously in front of a screen. Soon he is joined by a woman, and he fondles her breasts while retaining his signature grin. Molinier seems to almost be the 'ringmaster' of the incidents, with almost every minute episode cutting back to him. His presence is one thing that makes this film remarkable; the same sort of aura that exists in Moliniers famous self-portraits and cut-ups is present here, on screen. (esotika.blogspot.com)
