Figured as an isolated and complete contour, the phallus as a symbol for cultural law, is an idealised body part. Pornography presents pleasure as a series of repitive gestures performed by stylised body parts. This pleasure is  a heterosexist narrative where one performer has the phallus and the other desires it.

 

Cutting out body parts that are usually secondary, recalls the camera´s pornographic mutilation of the body with irony: the phallus is equated with these body parts that now have a complete contour (completed by the cropped view) but they are castrated by the own normativity.

 

Alex Martinis Roe

 

In 1975 Laura Mulvey published her essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” to postulate the term “Mutilation of the Human Body” which concerns the treatment of leading actresses in Hollywood’s mainstream movies. Through certain film techniques in which the female lead part is introduced to the scene through a specific part of her body, the audience is forced to view the frameset from a traditional male perspective. To put it in other words, the inevitable “male gaze” is imposed on the viewer.

 

In dislocation the method of mutilation is literally demonstrated. Footage materials taken from the rawest of film genres - the hardcore porn - are put together; different parts of the female body are cut out and pasted collectively to form a landscape of moving bodies. Through the editing, the collage mutates into an absurd picture resembling heaps of nervously twitching worms. These specific parts can and are regarded as sexual fetishisms in and of themeselves. For example, various legs or feet belonging to female bodies are shown in an act of movement, each at a different speed or direction.

 

But in spite of that: the essential act - in this case the sexual intercourse - which is clearly absent becomes inevitable.

dislocation

2008, SD-Video, 03min 08sec