Two short black and white films by Clive Barker from the time when he was a student in Liverpool with a couple of friends who will become associates later on in Hollywood. Salome is a reference to the Bible, John the Baptist and King Herod. John is shown as a young beardless angel who is of course loved and tortured by Salome. The Forbidden is a work that could and should stand all by itself. It does not bring anything to it to say it is an illustration of Faust. In fact it is a revealer about Clive Barker's imagination and interests more than anything else. Both films have in common that they are pocket money films, done with so little budget that they could have been a pure waste of time. But they are not because of Barker's fantastical (as he says) imagination. He is interested in the body, its suffering, its confinement, its torturing, its structure, looks, excitement and excitation, etc. He is particularly fascinated by the male body as a direct representative of human destiny, human lot, man's history. Salome is a great evocation of the Bible playing on essentially shadow and light. Salome's dancing is pure movement amplified by the veils and magnified by the bathing suit she is wearing under the veils. She is supposed to titillate and fascinate, in one word entrap you through your eyes into her own domination. Woman is shown as a temptation that only leads you to enslavement, or even worse if we think of John the Baptist. The Forbidden is another story. This time it is entirely centered on two men, with an accessory woman. The first bearded man is imprisoned behind bars. But here appears the fundamental pattern of Barker's imagination : the square with a window that is cut up into small squares shaped with crossing bars. Then he works on this pattern and turns it into a nail board cut up into square with nails at each corner. To get to this board he has introduced a fast flitting picture of the complete square pattern : a square, the two diagonals and the four nails at each corner. This pattern will be recurrent in Barker's novels and films and will be basic with the famous Pinhead from Hellraiser. But this imprisoned man dreams of the outside world with birds, nature and some kind of masked and heavily dressed figure following a naked young man crawling in grass. The masked figure will undress completely and become the young male figure in the nude. And here the prisoner is kind of rejuvenated by the dancing young man with a powerful and lasting erection. There we can easily see the voyeur in the prisoner who looks at a young man and desires him, to be as young as him, or to be him, or to possess him ? Probably all of them though Barker will not push further this question. The prisoner will not touch the young man. But Barker is going to punish the prisoner for his desire by having him peeled on a table by several pairs of hands, one belonging to a woman. This part is extremely powerful, poignant, impressive. Then the man will stand and dance in his turn, skinless like a live écorché, which he is literally. These old films have to be seen and pondered upon to understand Clive Barker's later art.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University of Paris Dauphine & University of Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University of Paris Dauphine & University of Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne