VIKTOR ZAHTILA

PUBLIC DISPLAYS OF AFFECTION

Viktor Zahtila (b. Pula, Croatia) is an activist, a journalist and a filmmaker. In his teens and early 20's he was a prominent LGBT activist in Croatia. He also worked as a political journalist in various print and digital media. In 2017 he was named the best young film critic by the Croatian Society of Film Critics. In 2018 he received a B.A. in Film and TV Directing at the Academy of Dramatic Arts in Zagreb. His short student film After-party, where he documented the last days of his romantic relationship, had a healthy run in the festival circuit and won several awards.

Viktor uses his artistic practice as a vehicle to explore sexuality, including his own, advocating sexual and emotional liberation and a cultural shift, especially in the audio-visual representation of sex, bodies and interpersonal relationships, as a precondition for any kind of progress and transformation of our sexuality.

laerem@gmail.com

To be a gay kid in a central European country like Croatia in the late nineties and early aughts meant having fear as your most intimate companion. Any masculine figure I encountered during nighttime on one of my solitary walks back home felt like a potential threat. The paranoia was palpable, but not all that irrational. You really had to take extra precautions when you would meet someone; even the sensation of arousal could make your body feel treacherous. To show affection in public meant risking your own life. I paid a dear price, more than once, for disregarding that fact. To make things worse, effeminate boys were routinely beaten straight and the culture sexually exalted a brutish sort of man, exactly the type that tended to engage in homophobic violence. And when puberty hit, the first encounters with a naked male body was in the boys locker room, a place pungent with sweat and hormones, mixed with violent machismo.

I came out as gay publicly when I was 17, after a brutal homophobic attack. When someone is hitting you it's hard to say “fuck off”. That's what activism represented to me at the time - not social change, not emancipation, but an opportunity to stand up for myself and say a giant fuck you to a society that fermented this type of violence. I appeared on TV and in the press, which, for a while, made me the public face of homosexuality in Croatia. Having people from my neighborhood know who and what I was, meant that I had to take certain precautions. My route back home from school was full of winding detours and sudden turns, so as to avoid any possible confrontation.

I often took a path that led through a dimly lit park with a single yellow tinted light. As I was returning home one night I spotted a man in his 20's or 30's – it was hard to tell because a hoodie obscured his face – standing by a tree, his head turned towards me. It took me a moment to realize that he was holding his cock in his hand. “Come hold it while I piss”, he said menacingly, his voice stopping me in my tracks like a rabbit in the headlights. I so desperately wanted to go down him that my knees were shaking, but fear got the best of me. After a moment of hesitation that seemed like an eternity, I walked away.

When I came home I was so horny that I masturbated until my cock got sore. I imagined him forcing me to suck him off, as a ‘punishment’ for being gay. For the next few nights I gradually expanded my fantasy: he would cum all over my face, then would piss in my mouth, then call me a fag and even threaten to beat me up. Now, how did this fantasy develop? Who directed it and who wrote the script? The mise en scene is typical of horror or thriller: a dark alley, a potentially violent man. But in the end there is a surprise twist and we are suddenly in an almost-romantic comedy, in which a teenage boy gets the man of his dreams, someone who looks and acts like a bully, but is really a sweetheart, and the film ends in a heartwarming golden shower scene. Of course this scenario is absurd. Of course it is unrealistic. But to me this willful suspension of disbelief is a testament to the power of human sexuality to digest traumatic encounters and snatch pleasure from the jaws of something terrifying. It would be too neat to say that fear turned me on; rather, it is the overcoming of fear and humiliation, mediated by my own sexuality, which is the true source of pleasure. This movement is what I call the erotic arc, singular to each individual, and in my artistic practice I strive to find methods and aesthetics to give it shape.

If we imagine fear to be this grand, ominous, monolithic tree, then our sexuality entwines it like a vine, gradually sucking the life out of it, with peculiar kinks and fetishes as its fruit. In a future video piece I plan to use various types of plants, flowers, their buds and petals, foliage in general, and aesthetically fuse them with body parts, especially erogenous zones, so as to reimagine various sexual acts – rimming, pissing, bleeding, eating cum, you name it – in a more natural light and to observe it as an ecologist.

This will be supplemented – or perhaps this supplement will eventually grow into a separate project – by conversations that strive not just to flesh out a multitude of sexual histories, but to eroticize the very act of speaking about them. These conversations are experimental and have several stages, but their central aim is to create a safe space wherein a physical manifestation of desire could emerge.

After a preliminary talk with my subjects about their intimate lives, I engage in role-play by embodying a particular object of their desire, whether from their past or present, or even from their imagination. While my interlocutor is describing somebody he or she is attracted to, I ask them to look directly into the camera and speak in the second person

– addressing the person they are talking about as ‘you’. (“I love how every time you cum your body trembles” / “I get goose bumps when you look at me that way”). This has the potential to create sexual and emotional tension between the person behind and in front of the camera. It can also change the quality of a person’s voice and steer the conversation in a completely different direction.

Every individual sexual fantasy tells a personal history. The approach to them is archeological: an attempt to excavate all the strata of shame, guilt, fear and humiliation that is at the base of the sexual desire of so many gay men, so we can fully embrace it as what it is, and not just discard it as a simple kink. Perhaps it seems outdated, in our proudly progressive era, to (re)connect sex and trauma. And of course the link between a certain life experience and sexual pleasure is never a straight line. But my wager is that, regardless of sexual orientation, there is always some form of societal pressure exerted upon us that our sexual energy assimilates and transforms.

The artistic holy grail for me would be to capture the physical manifestation of shame in my subjects, and then witness as it dissipates. Shame is like mold – it subsides in the light of acceptance. This can be a beautiful, transformative experience, because it fundamentally changes your self-image. And for many LGBT people, especially gay men, that image is disfigured by shame - primarily sexual shame. To overcome it is not only moving – it can be deeply erotic.

Eventually, I plan to film experimental porn films which would have emotional depth, a formal curiosity and fully fleshed human beings. They would reintegrate and eroticize all the parts of our sexuality which are not conventionally considered to be erotic, and are sorely missing from most porn, giving us an unrealistic view of sex. Most gay porn completely disregards and eliminates all insecurities, vulnerabilities, hesitations, discomforts, mid-sex conversations, the great care you invest for someone to feel safe, the sudden realization that the sex is cold and mechanical, the ever-present contradiction between the need for tenderness and the desire for ruthlessness, to be loved as a human being and simultaneously treated as a mere sex object. But for me this contradiction and ambiguity between tenderness and ruthlessness, the maturity not to force an orgasm, the expression on your face when you are doing something out of love, the complicated and multifaceted meanings sex can suddenly take - there is so much to explore that I think we’ve barely touched the tip of the iceberg.

Visual experiment: in collaboration with samonikla Thanks: Tajana Bakota, Marko Juričić, Nikola Pezić, Dino Topčagić, Goran Zgrablić

TOWARDS A MORE HUMANE PORN I am an average consumer of gay porn. But even a moderate amount often feels like too much. It is, for the most part, joyless, self-serious and utterly conventional. There is much talk about the so-called male gaze, especially about the sexual objectification of women in the visual arts, but very little is said about what it actually does to men and their own sexuality. Representation is key, not only for what kind of bodies we might find attractive, but also in how we look at them, what we look for when we look at them, and for how long we look at certain parts of them. Of course, I can only talk about how I feel it affects me, but I also assume there are other men who are affected similarly. And the way gay porn guides my attention feels exploitative of my own weaknesses, especially in how it fortifies, through repetition and lingering fixation, a certain compulsive behavior and lack of imagination. But a critique is impotent without an example of how one would do it differently. Therefore, I have devised a set of instructions that strives to transcend this impasse, a kind of Dogme 95 for porn. But porn is already austere enough in its form. So, in opposition to Dogme, which reads like a set of prohibitions, I want to utilize every possible filmmaking tool to pierce through the stale and depressing images of sex that made our imagination so rigid, unexciting and prone to repetition. 1. Use a narrow lens and/or small depth of field. Most porn is shot in wide lens, so everything is visible and sharp. But this has a dehumanizing effect, because in sex we are usually so close to someone that we only see a small fragment of their bodies. Try it now, get within a few inches of someone. What do you see? When you are physically close to someone, most of their body is not visible or it is out of our focus. That is why tighter lenses feel more intimate. Also, the devil is in the details. Using a tighter lens allows you to focus on the subtlest of movements, little facial tics, changes in expression, the way a finger teases an asshole, the way a mouth contorts from the initial pain of penetration, little droplets of passion that often go unobserved. 2. Avoid artificial lights. Porn is in awe of artificial lights, of everything being ironed out by megawatts of light. But shadows don’t only obscure, they also reveal a certain texture, curvature, mood. It also visually brings sex closure to nature. Not to mention that most people don’t find it comfortable fucking under these conditions. 3. Do not linger. Nothing fuels fixation of certain body parts as does porn’s insistence on prolonged closeups on the point of penetration. You’re making a film, when nothing new happens in a shot, you cut. When in doubt, think like Dreyer: More faces, less genitals. 4. Do not use actors, use lovers. One of the main reasons porn is so dispassionate is that it pairs professional porn actors without any regard to their personal chemistry and it never gives them enough time to develop it. This lack of chemistry is visible in cringe inducing overacting and poorly simulated moans of pleasure that teach us nothing but how to only pretend we are enjoying ourselves. That is why even amateur porn oftentimes feels as fake as the professional one. Search for passionate lovers, who have something to bring to the table. It is the same as in filming an observational documentary – you have to find subjects who spark your interest. 5. Do not follow the script. Even if you have one. Which you absolutely do not need. I cannot stress how important this is. True eroticism cannot be scripted. It does not follow a linear narrative thread: kiss, blowjob, penetration, ejaculation – the formula for unrealistic expectations in sex. It depends on the moment and the mood between all the people involved. This means that a humanistic porn film is always, to a certain extent, a documentary. 6. Do not cut the ‘unerotic’ parts out. Rather, make them erotic. It is practically impossible to see a penis go limp in a porn film. One cannot stress enough how often this happens in real sexual situations. As does taking a break, smoking a cigarette, eating something, cuddling, slowing down, wiping shit off your dick in anal sex, feeling vulnerable, unsure, insecure, selfaware... these moments are essential and revealing. 7. Take your time. Slow down! Getting people to relax enough to fuck in front of the camera takes a lot of time. Trust is not just intellectual, it is emotional, physical, it grows at its own pace. This is where the porn industry fails miserably - the ticking time clock kills all passion. You cannot produce a porn film as you would a regular fiction film because you cannot expect people’s desire to follow an itinerary. You cannot ‘plan’ what you will get from shooting days. Shoot long. You’re in no hurry. 8. Build anticipation. The worst thing about porn is that it hurries to get to the point – which is usually ejaculation. But eroticism doesn’t have a single point. It doesn’t need to ejaculate. It appreciates every moment. It is curious. It explores every nuance. It looks you in the eye until you start to feel vulnerable. It revels in the act of undressing. It is as patient as a Buddhist monk. It remembers to breathe. It flows. 9. Use all filmmaking tools. Porn oversaturated our minds with images of sex so much it is difficult to watch a sex act on film for long before succumbing to tedium. This requires us to use all the available filmmaking tools - costumes, set design, CGI, editing techniques – to make these images unfamiliar enough to truly arouse, not only for our genitals, but also our intellect, our compassion and our sense of beauty. 10. Set boundaries. But not borders. When shooting people having sex there has to be an extraordinary amount of trust for the filmmaking process to work. What are your subjects comfortable with? What are you comfortable with? Perhaps you are filming your own lovers? Are you merely observing or are you participating? Every situation demands a new set rules, so be honest and respectful.