What happens when a filmmaker actively strives for an affective discord, a disjoining of filmic techniques from emotive and affective intent, an undermining or rejection of narrative—as with Brynntrup’s provocational ineffable? Certainly the analysis of narrative film— the dominant mode of film production—is primary in Plantinga’s work. Nevertheless he notes that through non-narrative work, the “rhetorical, ideological, and aesthetic uses” of filmic representations are opened to investigation. Such possibilities appear if we attend to the 5’30” short ALL YOU CAN EAT, which relies on found footage from 1970s gay male pornography. Brynntrup did not seek to create a pornographic film himself, but to highlight and underscore the activities of the frame and framings of desire. Instead of allowing the spectator to enter into a familiar narrative context, Brynntrup reworks the images into unfamiliar patterns.

EAT selectively edits the images of the material, extracting a series of shots that focus primarily on a man’s face. In EAT, Brynntrup does not create a narrative pattern or emotion system out of the found footage; rather, he picks up on a theme first explored in Andy Warhol’s 1963 classic Blow Job and revisited in his lesser-known Eating too Fast (1966). In those films Warhol focused on the face of the recipient of the act of fellatio. It is a study in reaction. Where Warhol’s films encourage a desiring identificatory relationship to the image, even establishing what Smith describes as “mood,” Brynntrup dismantles the structures of that relationship.

Brynntrup’s film offers single faces in a sexual encounter. Pornography, the genre from which Brynntrup drew his found images, is a genre the emotion system of which is certainly designed to allow the spectator to enter into a desiring relationship with the image. It is often referred to as a “body genre,” promising to excite, entice, move the spectator. Given the film’s background in this genre, its early reviewers expected scenes from pornography. The description of the film and its source material predisposed them to a certain mood. Smith speaks of “emotion markers” in a film’s narrative.[26] In Brynntrup’s case, the markers toward a particular system pre-formed the experience, and instead the reviewers got a rapid series of faces with 1970s-style electronic music. Their anticipation of something “more” confused and disappointed a number of the reviewers and critics: having expected something sexually explicit, they assessed the film negatively. Peter Goddard, a reviewer for the Toronto Star, had to explain to potential viewers, “By the way, anyone coming to . . . to see more porn than its bad hair, will be disappointed. Brynntrup may start with what’s on top of the head, but what he’s really interested in is what goes on inside.”[27]

Here the ineffable in ALL YOU CAN EAT comes out as affective discord or dissonance. It is important, however, to underscore that this discord is not without its own form of pleasure. A few reviewers praised the focus on moments of ecstasy from a pre-AIDS period of freedom. Christina Nord from the Tageszeitung found in the film a sophisticated play with the dialectic of seeing and revealing.[28] The spectator of pornography expects to be moved, but this movement is not typically associated with the face. The “money shot” is the quasi-star of the porn film. Seeing ejaculation is a sign of a consummation of some form of desire-effect on the part of the actor while the face plays a decidedly minor role in the porn shoot. Brynntrup once humorously noted that he had to go through a large amount of porn film material to find enough shots solely of faces. Out of the eight hours he had at his disposal, there was only enough for under five minutes. When Plantinga focused on the face as site of affective congruence and emotional contagion, he noted that narrative film relies on attention, duration, and allegiance to establish a scene of empathy. The reduction in EAT to the face brings to bear an attention and duration that is otherwise not in the original. This focus ultimately frames out all that is anticipated in pornography; nevertheless, it underscores that while the face shot may appear infrequently, it is in the editing of the face shot that the emotional relationship between spectator and image develops the rhythm to crescendo. The face is essential, not incidental.

Nevertheless, regardless of the specific frame of the found shots, by body movement and posture, or by facial features and gestures, it is still clear that the faces presented are part of a sex act. It is also clear that the images derive from male-male sex. The film offers its viewers a pleasure of recognition. Through the film the spectators can become aware of the larger social conventions and presumptions about male (hetero)sexuality that infuse the frame. This play with recognition counters the typical presumption that imagination leads desire; the film allows spectators to experience how desiring expectations form imagination.

Unlike Blow Job, these images were embedded in a larger narrative context where “more” was shown. This leaves the spectator in a quasi generic awareness of the source of the image, aware of what is missing, not shown, outside the focus on the face. The partner, sexual positions, location, erotica, all the elements of pornography, become an unseen other outside the frame but essential to the experience of the film. The spectator of Blow Job imagined how the blowjob was proceeding outside the frame; the spectator of EAT speculates on what is happening, how bodies attach to the face shown, how the genre scenario played out. Through genre expectations, the imagination fills in and expands the frame but the spectator is overwhelmed not by emotion or desire, but by the “rhetoric” of the face.

(Randall Halle, "Toward a Phenomenology of Emotion in Film: Michael Brynntrup and The Face of Gay Shame", In: Modern Language Notes, Volume 124, The Johns Hopkins University Press, April 2009)

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[26] Smith 117.
[27] Peter Goddard, “Shaking the city’s culture; Filmmaker’s series critiques gay sensibilities,” The Toronto Star 18 November 1999: 1.
[28] Cristina Nord, “Einblicke ohne Offenbarung: Die Kurzfilme des Experimentalfilmers Michael Brynntrup im Filmkunsthaus Babylon,” Tageszeitung 31 Oct. 1998: 29.