Peter Strickland's Blank Narcissus (Passion of the Swamp) is now showing exclusively on MUBI in most countries starting December 7, 2022, in the series Brief Encounters.
The DVD commentary is already becoming an antiquated supplement to home entertainment with the dominance of streaming, but during its brief few decades, the revelations and confessions from directors along with assorted colleagues unlocked a hitherto closed world for the majority of viewers. The director’s commentary not only functioned as a nuts-and-bolts technical and thematic dissection of what was on the screen, but more revealingly, it veered into the confessional. A lot of commentaries, especially when it comes to reissues/restorations, are recorded many years after filming, and directors no longer have to be in promotion mode, which usually involves pretending everyone got along and everything went perfectly. With the safety buffer of a few decades, mistakes that were made in any given film can be candidly pointed out in a commentary along with arguments and regrets. There’s also an unwittingly funereal perspective due to the passing of time with old directors looking back on youth long since gone. This format seemed ripe for incorporating into a narrative. The mockumentary is an established genre, yet the mock commentary is something that (to my knowledge) hasn’t been utilized. “Mock” isn’t the term in this context, as mimicking a DVD commentary was a vehicle in which to tell a love story devoid of any irony. The commentary seemed like an apt format in which to tell a story of love and loss. Even though the device of a fake commentary is distancing and self-reflexive to some degree, the intention was to immerse the viewer in something raw and mournful. I wanted the commentary in the film we made to aim for roughly the same feel as a Lou Reed song on his Berlin album, with the melancholic grit of Michael Brandon’s New York drawl filling the room with enough of a dose of reverb that suggests his loneliness as he records his director’s commentary.
Blank Narcissus (Passion of the Swamp) came about through the Australian video arts company, Prototype. Lauren Carroll Harris commissioned me to make something, but the remit was completely open. I could do whatever I wanted and it’s rare to be afforded that level of trust and freedom. The commission came about in late 2019, just prior to the pandemic. Plans were inevitably scuppered, but within that time I realized I wanted to make something preoccupied with the need for love and physical connection. I was already veering in that direction, and that was exacerbated by various expectations and requests in the film industry persuading me to go further into horror territory, which I didn’t want to do. I knew the loneliness of the heart was what I wanted to convey, but I was yet to find an original way in which to communicate that. As with many people, lockdown didn’t allow me any time to write or even watch films. I had a few hours to myself at night, and if I was able to stay awake, I’d just watch a small selection of ’70s porno films with the commentary on. I knew I wouldn’t be up to the demands of a Lav Diaz or a Chantal Akerman (even though she partly owes the beginning of her film career to the stolen box-office takings of Fred Halsted’s porno film, L.A. Plays Itself). I almost regarded the commentaries to these films like podcasts, and when I was between slumber and the real world, the hedonistic visuals watched through half-asleep eyes felt as if they were beamed in from a distant, hazy world with no threat of coronavirus or even AIDS.
Wakefield Poole’s commentaries to his films were the spark for my short film. Here was an old man looking back at deceased stars along with former lovers and speaking with great affection, occasionally littered with flippant remarks about “balling that guy in a backroom” or something along those lines. I wanted to mimic that viewing experience by making up my own commentary that reflected my preoccupations, but also by trying to recreate that insular, half-asleep feel to the proceedings that was true to how I saw these films late at night as opposed to the reality of what I watched. The budget we had was low, but that never stopped the filmmakers whose passions influenced me. Many of these films utilized cheap recreations of exotic locales in the directors’ apartments and it seemed specific to New York during the ’60s and ’70s. Wakefield Poole, Jack Smith, and the Kuchar Brothers are just some of the directors who come to mind when it came to conjuring fantastical worlds at home. However, the ultimate purveyor of heady bedroom artifice had to be James Bidgood, whose Pink Narcissus was an inspiration for the look of Blank Narcissus (Passion of the Swamp). As with Michael Brandon’s director in the film we made, Bidgood used to put up window displays in a department store and use material from there for his domestic erotic reveries. The construct of artifice in the film we made was not only a nod to Bidgood, but also a way of hinting at the unpeeling of fantasy, as we witness a relationship coming to an end. The dichotomy between the fantastical and the domestic is what I wanted to grapple with. Even without the commentary to counter the orgasmic onscreen glow, one senses the disruption of the everyday with lamps left in the shot and shaky camera moves.
The nature of a commentary from an aging director adds a solemn dimension to a type of film that is otherwise meant to function as erotic and euphoric. It changes the meaning of those films from half a century ago just by the gravel and crack in an old person’s voice, even if the words they speak are largely full of fond nostalgia. That counterpoint between sexual abandon and the recognition of the joys of life coming to an end is where I hoped Blank Narcissus (Passion of the Swamp) would find its intensity.
—Peter Strickland, 2022.