William E. Jones has a history of smartly appropriating or deconstructing footage.
Filmmaker and artist William E. Jones distills footage from 90′s Eastern European gay pornography to examine and further document a culture’s introduction to capitalism. The Fall of Communism as Seen in Gay Pornography is a brief, insightful look into the moments in-between and utilizing the tense powerplay of exploitation inherent in pornographic audition tapes. Both explicit and introspective, Jones has woven a visual metaphor for a society’s identity crisis and exposed a subconscious vulnerability.
A segment of Jones’ statement on the piece: “As I watched Young Russian Innocents, as well as dozens of other post-communist pornos, and I realized that the atmosphere of coercion in these videos accounted for much of their erotic appeal. The fantasy of making another person do whatever one wishes is fairly common, and many get to realize such fantasies, if only in a limited way, in the sex tourism of the third world. With the collapse of socialism in Eastern Europe, it became possible to enact these fantasies on a whole new group of people: young men who were white, educated, relatively well-fed, and suddenly with no prospects whatsoever.”
WILLIAM E. JONES – THE FALL OF COMMUNISM AS SEEN IN GAY PORNOGRAPHY
You can read about his work here.
by JC Gonzo