UNCOVERED

Work-in-process. 16mm and HD video.

 

Uncovered explores the human relationship to eros, desire, and creativity in aging bodies subject to illness, loss, and death. How do older bodies and psyches engage sexuality? How do we navigate loss of power, ability, vitality, and each other? How do we foster and feed creative power and erotic aliveness in long-term relationships? As single people? Alongside physical disability, hormonal changes and illness? How do we heal from sexual trauma to come into erotic wholeness? How do we face and weather the loss of loved ones? In a culture in which aging bodies are assumed to be sexless and considered neutered, how do we reclaim our erotic power and why does this matter? In what ways is creativity based in eros? How do we talk about these issues and can we normalize them? In Uncovered, the unspoken is voiced, the hidden unbound.

An ethnography in the form of a personal notebook, the film is unscripted, lyrical and essayistic. It unfolds conversationally and anecdotally between myself as filmmaker and my friends and intimates. It upends cultural biases about older bodies and lives. It provokes larger questions about the relationship between sexual and creative expression, providing evidence of their clear linkage. The role of the camera in looking and seeing, and the ability of the person being seen to choose and control access to their person and body, is a key theme in the film. The creative act of filmmaking is itself an embrace of eros.

In conversations with me, accompanied by imagery of the subjects engaged in activities core to their identities or simple daily acts of living (dancing, gardening, reading poetry, showering, preparing food), we explore our nature as embodied sexual beings, reflecting on and grappling with the dynamics of pleasure and its lack as we age. Surprisingly candid reflections offer new ways of seeing and understanding embodiment that include not only power and potency but also vulnerability and tenderness. These paired dialogues are central sites of intimacy that provide insight into the dynamics of co-creation as eros.