Pushing at the Wound: Sex in Lola Clavo’s ‘No Love Lost’ and Maria Llopis’s ‘El Belga’

A few years after I first saw it, I wrote a character in my novel Vitrinerie who described Lola Clavo’s film No Love Lost (2006):

She thought about Lola’s film constantly. In it, a woman and a man in a dilapidated factory. The man is beating the woman, lushly, taking his time. He has no expression on his face. It hurts to watch. The shot is long and steady. After a while, the camera pans out to reveal a second man, sitting on a chair, watching, and masturbating. By now the woman’s face is swollen and she is staggering. It hurts to watch. The shot is long and steady. In the last few moments, the men stop and stand next to the body of the woman, slumped on the concrete. She pulls a pair of white envelopes out of her pocket, stuffed with cash, hands them to the men, and they nod and exit the frame. No words are exchanged. She lies there alone on the ground breathing steadily, eyes burning. Cut.

I had written it how I remembered it, and when Lola read the book she called me, laughing, saying “Maybe that should have been my ending!” When I asked her if that’s not what really happened, she skirted the question: “Just don’t watch it again!” Actually, I’m scared to watch it again, to demolish my imagined version of the film for the genuine object. It was a long time ago, and beloved objects change and shift with time, light, weather and the movement of feeling. In The World Viewed (1971), Stanley Cavell elaborates on the connection between film and dream: “It is tempting to suppose that movies are hard to remember the way dreams are, and that is not a bad analogy. As with dreams, you do sometimes find yourself remembering moments in a film, and a procedure in trying to remember is to find your way back to a characteristic mood the thing has left you with.”¹ Aside from pure mood, the cinematic gaze also purports to tell what ‘really’ happened. What really happened is what the structures we have erected around violence claim to be able to deduce. This is something to keep at the front of your mind.

I’d like to write an essay about two films I haven’t seen for two years, and saw only once: Lola Clavo’s No Love Lost and Maria Llopis’s El Belga (2007). Although the films have different intentions, both culminate in a feeling of radical uneasiness, hinting towards an ethics that is separate from what is conventionally deemed ‘moral’. What is it about these films that attracts me so much? It is about their shared willingness to go over an edge? They operate within a mode of questioning that illuminates the performativity of acceptable behaviour. Both films have been seen as belonging to the category of ‘post-porn’, a movement of artists, performers and educators loosely grouped around exploring how images of desire function and expanding notions of what it is to make representations of sex. As a category, post-porn explores how these societal expectations variously permeate not only mainstream society but deeply inform activist, feminist, queer and political scenes. Sex is one of the ways we can see the bones of power operate in situ. In order to unpack how sex and sexualities function, it is also necessary to consider how imagination functions. There is an ungendered desire to push at a wound, to see how far you can take it. Some desires at their root are about pushing.

No Love Lost opens on an abandoned factory, or industrial space. Blood on the concrete floor and the sound of violence off-screen. The back of a blonde torso flicks in and out of view, smacking down methodically. Neither the sound heard nor the body shown can be attached to a gender, and the viewer is even unsure which limbs belong to which bodies. There are long pauses where the screen goes dark and only the sounds of grunts and impact can be heard. A fight scene without the fight: just sounds, flickering images of limbs and hair. Finally, the camera pauses on the face of a woman, her face bloodied, peering up through her hair at her attacker. A moment later the shot pans back to reveal a third figure in the factory. A man in a black suit and shiny shoes sits nearby, his back to the audience, masturbating furiously to the sight of the woman breathing heavily on the concrete. The man who has been beating her stands back, recovering from his exertions. As the masturbating man finishes, the aggressor turns away and begins to retch, throwing up into a pile of disused car parts.

Lola Clavo’s No Love Lost (2006)

At this point there are three different kinds of bodily expulsion in the frame: the man ejaculating, the woman bleeding, and the man vomiting. They are lined up in a diagonal across the frame, but each is in their own moment, unacknowledged by the other two apart from through the triangulation of cause and effect. After a moment the man in the suit puts his cock away and reaches down to help the woman off the floor, embracing and kissing her tenderly. He rifles in his pockets and thrusts a fat envelope of cash at the blonde. The woman’s expression is difficult to read. Is it relief, or is this a routine performance? Is she fearful or triumphant? In film, unlike in life, you can rewind. You can watch the gaze shift, slow down the blow, focus on a gesture. But a face can still refuse to give itself up, rippling like the surface of water.

In my memory, “She pulls a pair of white envelopes out of her pocket, stuffed with cash, hands them to the men…” In a kind of wishful thinking, I had recalled the woman gaining her agency in the final scene, claiming a desire for the violence that had been done to her. Instead, the viewer is left with a murkier proposition. What happens to violence off-screen, heard but not seen? It ripples out in the mind. Films take the pictures from one head and put them in another. They are the most like dreams, encompassing, building atmospheres and worlds from very little. The narrative action of both No Love Lost and El Belga has the queer and predetermined quality of a dream, of an indecipherable event. In El Belga, the film’s namesake – ‘the Belgian’ – does not tell the story, and so the story of the female narrator is the only one. In its affect, El Belga is the opposite of No Love Lost. Llopis’s narrator faces the camera and speaks to the audiences in a style closer to that of YouTube webcam confessional videos. The artist tells the story without verbal flourishes or excitement. There is nothing to arouse the audience. The speaker, young and boyish, tells us a story about how on her way to work she sees a lost Belgian tourist at the train station. She tells him that the trains have finished and invites him to spend the night with her, in the factory where she works as a night guard. She’s searching for any distraction from the pointless task of guarding property. “The job was horrible – twelve hours alone in a dusty factory, dying of boredom and disgust. There was no way I felt like spending another night in the factory… There wasn’t light and it was full of rats.”

There is an ungendered desire to push at a wound, to see how far you can take it. Some desires at their root are about pushing.

The description of the material conditions of the factory, aside from placing the narrator in a landscape of depressed post-industrial Spanish countryside, also serves to situate the characters in a space unseen by civilised urban life – in this respect, the setting is similar to the industrialised ambiguity of No Love Lost. After she and the Belgian are installed in the factory with sandwiches, condoms and a mattress, she tells us: “I went into attack mode, but he completely rejected my advances. I couldn’t believe it. Why had he come if he didn’t want to fuck?” She becomes increasingly irritated when he doesn’t respond to her advances: “I saw that he was afraid, that he was uncomfortable, that he didn’t know what to do. And finally I got my way. Against his will, of course. He got a half-erection and it was enough for me. I got what I wanted…” The story ends with Llopis dropping the boy off at the station and continuing onwards, hitchhiking to a rave and “taking a couple of lines of speed along the way”. The narrative opens into a wide landscape, and rather than offering a narrative of redemption or regret, the woman continues on her way. The credits of No Love Lost run over a single shot of an idyllic exterior landscape that’s similarly ambivalent in its hugeness, with birdsong and a light breeze. In a statement about the film, Llopis describes El Belga as “the story of a rape” and says that one of her reasons for telling this story is “because I don’t want the issue of women and violence to only be a discourse about women as victims and men as aggressors”.

Maria Llopis’s El Belga (2007)

Both Lola Clavo’s No Love Lost and Maria Llopis’ El Belga were screened at an event in Barcelona in April of 2007 called ‘Muestra de cortos de mujeres y lesbianas sobre violencia’ (Screening of Shorts by Women and Lesbians about Violence) at the now-defunct autonomous feminist space, MAMBO. Clavo, in response to a question about the films’ reception, said: “What happened at MAMBO is that neither film was well received, as they created conflicting feelings for the attendees. Also, they were the only two films that had a more critical view towards female responsibility with regard to violence. The other films were, you know, totally self-complacent. All about how awful straight gynecologists are, and so on.” It’s interesting to think about these two films as symbolic of the militancy of a certain era in a certain place. There remains a queer and feminist silence around certain issues, particularly to do with victimhood and violence, and the capacity of women and queer people to employ violence upon others. It is difficult to discuss these things publicly for fear of muddying the waters or presenting a scattered programme rather than a united front, so they remain discussed behind closed doors, like rumours. What are the ethics of creating and showing such films? Llopis states that “all of us are capable of having crossed the line at some point in our lives”. In her book El Postporno era eso (Post-porn was that, 2010), Llopis writes that she and Clavo felt united because their films were controversial and describes her feelings on watching No Love Lost: “Me quedo muerta. […] La fantasía de que peguen a mi chica hecha realidad. No sé qué pensar del vídeo.” (“I’m dead. […] The fantasy of hitting my girl made reality. I do not know what to think about the video.”)

To whom does it matter what really happened, and why? To whom does historical truth belong? Common knowledge says that it belongs to the winners, but if the idea of winning is complicated by the intersection of oppressions, then who is permitted to tell and be believed? People who are on the receiving end of violence are not exempt from feeling ambivalence as to its effect. The position of the filmmaker is to show, and to select from the world a directional gaze. To offer an ambivalent or undecided gaze to the viewer is a decisive act, acknowledging the history of the camera’s eye as a device purported to tell truth. A community names an act acceptable or unacceptable and responds accordingly. This can be more fraught in radical communities, where groups of people come together on the basis of shared antipathy to the dominant ideology along with shared identities and political aims. For a group that lives against the grain of wider society, the scaffolding for new ways of living are torn down as quickly as they can be built, so there is little pre-existing structure to learn from. The intimacy between people who share a certain belief is very tenuous. Perhaps this is why I find these films so interesting as a pair. What does a community look like? Like an act retold, it exists as something that flickers in and out of view. These films exist in a different landscape: one beyond disclaimers and populated only by the initiated, that moves towards an illegibility stemming from the attempt to communicate problems that are necessarily unanswerable, contradictory and incomplete. This position is sometimes called ‘post-’. What takes precedence is intensity of feeling. Perhaps the characters are bored. They seek new sensations, are hungry for experience. Pain, blood, flesh, and women are used to incite emotion and arousal. The contemporary coding of the word violence does not fit snugly with Clavo’s narrative of mutual, layered responsibility, because it folds in ‘quick violence’, that of a body being beaten by another body, with ‘slow violence’, the violence that is hard to see. Here the cinematic gaze passes no judgment, because no character is clean.

Most views of sexuality in mainstream pornography, including kink and S/M culture, seek to re-inscribe and thus reformulate the power relationships that usually fall into binary definitions: top/bottom, domination/submission. But what evades naming is the spreading beyond these binary relationships, or the ways that one can be implicated in positions of aggressor and victim simultaneously. Where do we locate authenticity of speech? Must that authenticity by necessity always lie with the victim, as a balancing response to the history of power and its wilfully elided acts?

When disturbing desires are expelled from official record, there is a closing of what is an acceptable utterance. To desire what is taboo, or to be seen as complicit in your own degradation, is to reject norms of acceptable behaviour. In the examples of Clavo and Llopis’ work, the highly-charged reception was as telling as the acts onscreen. There is no such thing as community when it relies on exile as a punishment for wrongdoing. When formulated as such, community can only ever exist as a proposal. The discomfort felt by an audience when the social contract is shown – in this case, by an artwork – to have deep and untenable contradictions at its heart creates a disjuncture, breaks the sense of communion. A ripple of disagreement passes through the crowd. In the darkness of a film screening, this murmuring is even more pointed.

1 Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film, Enlarged Edition, Harvard Film Studies, 1971 p. 16