Transfigured Nights

WELCOME TO THE WEB'S LABYRINTH OF TRANSGRESSIVE CINEMA

TRANSFIGURED NIGHTS (2007)
DAVID BLYTH DVD (region 0)
d. David Blyth; ph. David Blyth; ed. Chengye Yan; snd. David Blyth; m. Jed Town; cast. Miss Piggy, Mr. Jeffus, Michiko, Kuniko, Motoko, Deeba Bint Thomas, Angel MacLeod, Stephannie, Misty, Selena Honey, Kigurumiloopy, Xkyacha, Tied-InHogtied-InLatex, More Rubber Please Sir, Lady of the Mask (49 mins)
.

Transfigured Nights is transgressive New Zealand filmmaker David Blyth’s latest anthropological documentary exploring the outer extremes of human sexuality.

In previous works such as Angel Mine, Blyth used a non-linear, surrealist approach to narrative to explore the Freudian implications of the anarchic social potential of the fusion of Eros and Thanatos. After several cult excursions into the horror genre where he vented a Freudian intent towards genre deconstruction – including Death Warmed Up – Blyth by the beginning of the 21st century turned his attention to documentary with Bound for Pleasure, often in his explicit recording and rendering of sexually explicit human behaviour accused of exploiting the documentary format for mere titillation. Nothing could be further from the truth and Transfigured Nights is again proof that Blyth is one of the most insightful chroniclers of transgressive humanity operating –as all transgressive filmmakers are forced to do – within the underground fringes of world cinema.

WEBCAM MASKING AS
PERFORMANCE ART

Transfigured Nights is a study of mask-wearing webcam sexual performers: individual from various (and surprisingly often conservative) backgrounds who adopt a persona in a webcam performance to free their self-expression from the confines of the behavioural codes of socialization and “proper” conduct that otherwise govern their normal daily existence.

With the interrupted motion and tendency to free frame that comes with webcam, Blyth reveals these people’s masks on film, letting them speak for and explain themselves in the accompanying voice-over. Blyth is well aware of the nature of persona, the paradoxically exhibitionist freedom and liberation from social constraint possible when performing with a mask, costume and sense of self as freed “other”. There is a sense of continuity here with Bound for Pleasure in that it is the sense of role-play which the participants find personally satisfying, one rubber-wearing man encouraged by his girlfriend to experiment with cross-dressing when he would appear masked on his webcam transmission.

Ideally Transfigured Nights should be viewed as a follow-up to Bound for Pleasure. Although a self-contained work, much of its exploration of human sexual psychology (as distinct from pathology – as once again Blyth refuses to judge his subjects nor imply that their behaviour is in any way “abnormal” in a Krafft-Ebbing way) gains from the insight into male masochism Blyth revealed in Bound for Pleasure. Interspersed with shots of a full moon on a cloudy night, Blyth subtly alludes to metamorphosis (with Blyth’s background in horror, the moon symbolism here denotes the werewolf myth’s concept of human transformation at night). But his very human subjects do not metamorphose in the traditional mythic sense so beloved of horror mythology since Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde so much as alter their identity in a process of self-actualization – transfiguration as a psychological trait. Yet, Transfigured Nights is more confronting that Bound for Pleasure: by using actual uncut webcam footage of the masked performers doing what they do, Blyth captures the sense of grotesque, fetishistic voyeurism that underpins transgressive sexuality in the internet age.

Director David Blyth at the Fantasia Film Festival

Transfigured Nights presents the fetishistic “grotesquerie” without moral judgment, Blyth as far back as Angel Mine jettisoning any responsibility to Christian codes of morality in his studious assessment of sexual “perversity”.

Thus, his work here functions as a Freudian deconstruction of the mystique of “perversity”, looking beyond the costumed performers to reveal the studied deliberation behind their choice of costume and of action – persona freeing their ego from the socialized constrains a superego must contend with. Like in the analysis of BDSM in Bound for Pleasure, Blyth’s interest is in the nature of persona and performance: the internet as sexual theatre, a factor behind the efforts of such as Kevin Rudd and Stephen Conroy’s Christian Australian government to censor the internet with a mandatory internet filter giving Christian moral judgment the censorial power of Communist China. The legacy of Judeo-Christian moral totalitarianism first exposed by Freud is exactly what is liberated through the transfiguration of the psyche through persona and sexual performance in Transfigured Nights.

While the performance is a very real experience for its participants, the reality of an online interaction is the ability to switch off / disconnect and return at will to “reality”. In this way, the internet allows an online sexuality which frees human fantasy and human behaviour from all socialized moral constraint.

The fetishists thus can fulfil their sense of self by projecting it (both psychologically and metaphorically through the actual webcam recording apparatus) into a cyberspace of unrestricted, unregulated (secular) humanist experience where anything is possible and anything is accepted. By exploring this in the form of a non-judgmental anthropological study, director Blyth is effectively the first director to imply the moral-sexual liberation of online communication – in total contrast to the mythology of romantic populism surrounding internet communication and self-expression found in such as Nora Ephron’s execrable You’ve Got Mail. But where Ephron’s vapid characterizations embodied stereotype, Blyth’s real subjects comment on the pop-culture origins of their influences – Manga, Hentai and Japanese art in the case of one cross-dressing webcam performer – as Blyth probes the relationship between pop-cultural “construct” and fetishistic “persona”.

Persona and costume allows these subjects a sensual expression, inherent in the fetishist’s delight in such textures as rubber and latex, which feature heavily in the private pleasures of these internet fantasists. Indeed, the aphrodisiacal nature of fetishistic performance is twofold: both a form of self-actualization and a sexual self-indulgence – the expression of the erotic self, a theme of Blyth's since his surrealistic examination of narcissism and homosexuality enabled through mirror-gazing in Circadian Rhythms.

But just as Blyth explores the pop-cultural basis for these sexual transfigurations, so too – in the instances of transvestism and trans-sexuality that very often underlie the desire for sexual self-actualization through the transfiguring aspects of web performance – Blyth assesses the role of religion in fetishization.

Thus, one trans-sexual webcam performer prefers to dress in the Burqa and other concealing Islamic fashions. The dialectic between the concealment of the body and the liberation of the fetishistic ego makes for a fascinating psychological treatise on the sexual liberation made possible by the internet. Although looking at these performers may be a voyeuristic act, they are in control, aware they are being looked at and in that sense become sexual subjects, the internet empowering the expression of their sexual subjectivity as they perceive and enact it beyond all social-moral conventions.

Disguise, persona and exhibitionist urges underlie the study of webcam fetishism in Transfigured Nights. The transfigurative aspect of masking and performance is that is allows the recreation of self as an art form – pure self-actualization (albeit paradoxical in that the erotic self is fused with the "other" of persona).

However, the nature of the internet – that afore-mentioned ability to be switched off and the real world returned to – makes it an inherently transitive and addictive experience for the persona fetishists. Yet, as Blyth makes clear here, such persona-fetishism is a unique development of the internet age and makes for a fascinating into the inter-relationship between technological advance and the liberation of human sexuality. Working through a succession of individual profiles, Transfigured Nights culminates with “Miss Piggy”, a cross-dresser capable of insightful self-reflection and completely uninhibited in his/her appropriation of masking as a form of sexual self-actualization. Here, the fusion of fetishism and exhibitionism underlying the masking movement is made clear, as is the deviance from hetero-sexual norms that are permitted through the performance of persona allowed by masking as a phenomenon.

Uninhibited self-indulgence and self-expression coalesce in such webcam masking, an exhibitionistic freedom of the ego from all normalized constraint, made possible only through the internet. This is a sexual expression of humanity without shame and that in itself makes Transfigured Nights a radical documentary in the ongoing cinema of transgression.

HOME

IF YOU ENJOYED READING THIS FREE INTELLECTUAL CONTENT,
THEN PLEASE CONTRIBUTE: