Delta of Venus

The concept for ‘Delta of Venus’ came about when I became interested in constructing a film like a poem: based on a set of ideas instead of a set of plots. In particular, I wanted to make a film about the troubling legacy of fairytales, as well as the artificiality of desire itself in a culture that champions aesthetics but ignores its substance. The decision to borrow Anais Nin's title was an intuitive one. What was really on my mind was Shuji Terayama and his purple sunsets. What I really wanted to do was to create an atmosphere in the film with the same spontaneity that puts words into a poet’s mouth.

“Beauty will be convulsive or will not be at all.” If we are careful enough to look past the frivolous exterior of surrealism, there’s a lesson to be learned here, that is, if one picks up where the surrealists have renounced and muster the courage to reach beyond the fog of semiotics.

To quote Jameson: “New art forms seek to endow the individual subject with some new heightened sense of place in the new globalized system…The new political act (if it is possible at all ) will have to hold the truth of post-modernism that is to say, to its object – the world space of multinational capital – at the same time which it achieves a breakthrough to some, as yet, an unimaginable new mode of representing it, in which we may again begin to grasp our positions as individual and collective subjects and regain a capacity to act and struggle which is presently neutralized by…some social confusion.”

One cannot help but imagine Jameson’s solution of disruptive assimilation as a direct response to Sontag’s 1996 decry on ‘The Decay of Cinema’, for which she wrote:
“While the point of a great film is now, more than ever, to be a one-of-a-kind achievement, the commercial cinema has settled for a policy of bloated, derivative filmmaking, a brazen combinatory or recombinatory art, in the hope of reproducing past successes…The love that cinema inspired, however, was special. It was born of the conviction that cinema was an art unlike any other: quintessentially modern; distinctively accessible; poetic and mysterious and erotic and moral -- all at the same time.”

Original films will always exist – as long as filmmakers are willing to make them and reinvent the medium. More than ever, there is an urgent need for a minor lexicon within the language of mainstream semiotics (note: this set of ‘minor lexicon’ mustn’t be confounded with the ‘personal’ set of signs and symbols mentioned earlier. A minor lexicon is still made up of the vocabularies used by the mainstream, but its alternative usage has the potential to continuously broaden). I believe this is where the power of queer cinema lies - we have been inventing a minor lexicon for ourselves since the dawn of the medium.

At first glance, in a free-market society where human sexuality is deemed sacred to appease the ever-diversifying kinks of its consumer, the subject matter of eroticism no doubt belongs inside the domain of the personal and is therefore made untouchable (at least according to western standards). However, it is precisely because of the consecration of sexuality as something personal - via its commodification - that it becomes all the more rapturous when it’s finally revealed to be just as impersonal as a Vogue reading fashionista’s yearning for the latest handbag.

More than anything else, ‘Delta of Venus’ should leave the viewer feeling unsure as to what to make of the scenes they have just witnessed. Sure, there’s certainly an aesthetic appeal to the film's kaleidoscopic visuals. But the end goal is not to recombine but to deterritorialize.

“Is it authentic? Is it not authentic? Does it even matter? Why does it even matter when everything is inspired by something…does that mean I’m inauthentic too? If this is inauthentic, why is it that I still saw it through? This is a film about erotic fantasies, but why does it remind me of a perfume ad?” I’d consider the film a success if the audience starts asking those questions.