Here is a strange, stark documentary from Austrian film-maker Ruth Beckermann, first presented at last year’s Berlin film festival: somewhere between a lab experiment and a practical joke, featuring the kind of non-professional performers who could easily crop up in a movie by Ulrich Seidl, that renowned Austrian chronicler of male grotesqueness.
The film’s purpose is to challenge the gendered nature of erotica and pornography through the simple but effective expedient of making men the object of the porn gaze. Beckermann puts men on camera as they read aloud – at various levels of excruciating discomfort – the female narrative voice from Josephine Mutzenbacher, a once-scandalous Viennese novel that contains the fictional confessions of a prostitute, published anonymously in 1906 and now thought to be the work of Felix Salten, who bizarrely also wrote the original Bambi books.
