Take One (1977)

Directed by Wakefield Poole

****1/2

I decided to watch Take One because of Evan Purchell's Ask Any Buddy podcast. I've been following him and his film for a little while, desperate to see it and to seek out some of the films used to create it. Gay erotica is an interest of mine, especially this vintage stuff which I think can tell stories about sex in a way that mainstream cinema and even porn nowadays refuses to do. So, I was delighted to see that he was releasing a podcast where he would discuss each of the 186 films he used at length. I'll be trying to watch and listen at roughly his pace.

WARNING: For your enjoyment, do not try to understand this film: there is nothing to understand. It is only real people doing reel things and making them reel together.

Poole's delightful, dreamy Take One feels distinctly un-porn like. Yes, there are the requisite sex scenes, but structurally, Poole plays with levels of reality and fantasy, the two constantly intermingling and undermining one another. At one point, there's at least five levels of sexual fantasy so it's hard not to be confused. Eventually, you give yourself over to the horny colourful fantasy unfolding before your eyes.

This is easiest to do at the beginning where a young man discusses his sexual fantasy (he's obsessed with his car) then proceeds to 'have sex' with his car, like Kenneth Anger's Kustom Kar Kommandos taken to its most extreme ends. This is inherently ridiculous of course, but there's something also weirdly thrilling about it. Helps that it's BEAUTIFULLY shot, lit with a gorgeous pink filter. The next sequence features two actual brothers doing it onscreen which is shot with such sweetness that the taboo nature of it falls distinctly behind. The taboo is not the aspect that's sexy, but rather what these two men are doing to one another.

After that, the sexual fantasies are more mundane. A man has an S&M fantasy which doesn't get very S&M, a loving couple have a simple sex scene and gay porn superstar Richard Locke has oiled up sex on a rooftop, watching him and his partner in a big mirror. I love what Evan says is the film's trajectory on the podcast, that it starts out with these extreme fantasies, having sex with your car or your brother, before eventually settling down to just having sex while someone watches, or with your lover, or on a rooftop. I'd argue this was a flaw, but I can see the emotional trajectory behind that.

Roughly the final third of the film is a big orgy at the famous Nob Hill theatre. These sequences were amazing to me, seeing such a beautiful, classy building made me crave something similar nowadays. I know the internet has porn more easily accessible, but I do think we've lost something by moving away from porn theatres; a sense of loss around the sex part of gay sexuality. The orgy itself is really hot but cinematically dull, feeling the most traditionally porn-like part of Poole's film.

What I kept thinking about as I watched Take One was how so much of it was performative, interested in how gay men see themselves, their sexual fantasies and each other. So many of these desires have an element of voyeurism, coming across almost like a pornographic version of Rear Window, a film that invites us to look deeper behind the relationship between the pornographer and the spectator. They also come across as narcissistic. The man fucking his car speaks of wanting to meet a man just like him who he could have sex with, one of the brothers wants to be watched and Locke spends much of his sex scene looking in the mirror. To be a porn star almost requires a level of narcissism and it's interesting to see a film that confronts that so directly.

The Vinegar Syndrome DVD looks beautiful. As usual, their restoration work is stunning. Also included on the DVD is a short film examining Poole's time in San Francisco which has a number of fun little anectdotes and details about the gay scene in 70s SanFran. As well as this, there are two other short films Wakefield Poole shot in San Francisco at the same time. I'd highly recommend watching the short doco first, as it provide important contextualising information to Roger, Poole's 1977 short. The film, which features a man masturbating for 12 minutes, was projected onto the theatre, while the real Roger was warming himself up before he masturbated in front of the live audience. To hear the people in the doco describe it, it definitely seems like an experience.

The other short is 1974's Freedom Day Parade. I always love looking at old gay Pride footage and this is no exception, completely lovely and heartwarming. What's most interesting about this (other than the very eclectic soundtrack including Carmen Miranda and The Beatles), is how overtly sexual it is. The latter half of the film features a bunch of men, naked and frollicking in a fountain, completely overjoyed. They are surrounded by huge crowds on every side, watching bemused and smiling. If you're big on gay Twitter, you'll have seen people complaining that Pride parades are too sexual and should be toned down to make them more family friendly. It's genuinely sad to think that this parade in 1974 might have been more open and accepting than the ones now.

Also included on Vinegar Syndrome's DVD is Wakefield Poole's apparently very raunchy 1974 film Moving!, which I'll be watching at a later date.

Listening to the podcast afterwards was a fun experience. It's so rare to hear people talk so openly about erotic queer cinema, let alone something as obscure and arty as Take One. Filled with a number of fun little tidbits of info including how gay movies were the most expensive movies at the time (a character in Take One pays $5, while most others averaged around $2-3), that the car sex man nicknamed his car K8 (Kate) and a fun description of how the film is like Altman's Nashville, a self-contained universe. The perception around gay porn, as Evan and Tyler described it, as "disreputable and disposable" is only just beginning to change and it's stuff like this podcast this is really helpful. I look forward to listening to more in the coming weeks. Next up Jack Deveau's Drive!