Male Sexuality and its Discontents:

Newly arrived Chicago resident Jeffrey Skoller will present his most recent film, The Malady of Death (1994, 43 min., 16 mm) an adaptation of a story of the same name by Marguerite Duras, about a man who hires a woman to spend several days with him in a room by the sea.

In this story, He hopes that through sustained contact with Her, he will experience love, intimacy and learn to accept the ?mystery of their difference.? But as the nights go on, the opposite happens: He becomes terrified at the realization that he is unable to feel anything. This sensually cinematic adaptation doesn?t dramatize the story, rather the film is fugue-like in its hypnotic interplay between Duras? remarkable text and the filmmaker?s own exploration of the male body as the site of sex. Skoller will discuss his film in relation to the recent Black Sheep Boy (1995, 37 min., 16mm), Michael Wallin?s moving rumination on desire, aging, and his own obsessions with the young male body. Ambivalent and contradictory, Wallin describes his fantasies of young male bodies as victim of the cult of youthful beauty and a celebration. Erotic and disturbing, Black Sheep Boy addresses philosophical and psychological implications of sexual yearning in unusually perceptive ways.