Cinesexual
2014
16 mm double projection
Colour, silent
3.44 min
Mayer cites experimental filmmaker Michael Snow’s ‘Two Sides to Every Story’ (1974) as a point of reference for ‘Cinesexual.’ Mayer’s film, originally conceived as two projections on either sides of a suspended screen, features transgender model Valentijn de Hingh and musician JD Samson, who also performed in her films ‘Medea’ and ‘Gonda.’ ‘Cinesexual’ completes a trilogy of Mayer’s other films ‘Medea’ and ‘Gonda’, bringing together de Hingh and Samson into the same filmic space. A space where the apparatus of film shares the screen with the fiction it simultaneously produces. This co-existence of film fact and film fiction produces a hybrid in which both formally discreet realities become interchangeable and mutually disrupting.
‘Cinesexual’ shares the same basic configuration as Snow’s piece, presenting differing perspectives, and thus perceptions, of the same event. Mayer takes Snow’s collapse of the single viewpoint found in typical film and the subsequent expansion of the cinematic space into the realm of the viewer. ‘Cinesexual’ uses this spatial expansion as a platform though which to interrogate the relationship between subject and object, and the roles of gender and representation meted out through film.
‘Cinesexual’ is a term developed by film theorist Patricia MacCormack to explain the erotic and intense pull of film, which collapses classical divisions between subject and object. As the viewer traverses the space in which Mayer’s ‘Cinesexual’ is displayed, so they navigate the converse and parallel worlds of reverse camera perspectives. They become embedded in the accompanying perceptional fields the film generates. As the viewer’s body becomes implicated in this expanded filmic space, they become inducted into the sensuous world of the cinesexual.