3 - Zero Girls and Lesbian Stylites: From Solar Sexuality to Camp in the Early Films of Roberta Findlay

Summary

The sway of Roberta Findlay’s career mirrors film history’s general trajectory from a Cinema of Attractions to a mode of filmmaking centered on narrative. In such early sexploitation titles as Take Me Naked (1966) and Mnasidika (1969), Findlay created an oeuvre of extreme externality, showing bodies writhing in myriad combinations instead of telling stories driven by three-dimensional characters. However, beginning with Janie (1970), The Altar of Lust (1971), and Rosebud (1972), she quickly accrued more narrative capabilities so that her hardcore features and later horror films, while decidedly low-budget and grungy, conveyed an ease with using film to invoke a consistent diegetic time and space.

Given that Findlay’s early films are aligned as much with avant-garde practices as with sexploitation norms, they elicit different responses than her later, more narrative-driven work does. They point to a possible world, one where the women and lesbians who populate her films might flourish. Excruciatingly dull, obnoxious, and even flat-out unwatchable, they nevertheless become energizing when bearing down on them, built as they are on what Deleuze calls a “perverse structure” at odds with how cinema is traditionally supposed to work. As such, they elicit confusion, boredom, even rage at each rule-flouting movement. By contrast, the later films evoke the world we know now and thus elicit a camp response, especially given how camp functions as a survival strategy for living in the world as it is. Where an aptitude for camp allows the viewer to decode the norms of cinema (as well as gender and sexuality) operative in the later films, the early films transmit an alien code that requires more active, even depletive, decoding on the part of the viewer.

To that end, after discussing precedents to the early films, I strive, borrowing Deleuze’s words, to manifest their perverse structure using Michel Tournier’s 1967 philosophical novel Friday, or, The Other Island (French: Vendredi ou les limbes du Pacifique) with particular emphasis on Mnasidika. A sensation among the French intelligentsia upon release, Friday retells the story of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe as a journey toward attaining a solar sexuality, an elemental, deindividuated jubilance free of language, categories, and rationalization.