5 mins, video
Transition & Influence
The film aims at spinning out a seriality of stills rather than using specific images to connect a storyline. Ming Dynasty Chinese erotic poems are employed as verbal backbone, enriching the visual pace of abstract cloth and relating aspects of this consequently eroticised cloth to the ‘Lotus’ (bound) feet of the female lover and the lovemaking described poetically through repetition, juxtaposition and movement. The title refers to the Jane Birkin- Serge Gainsbourg duet from 1969; Je’aime…moi non plus, (‘I love you…me neither’), that caused a sensation and was fabled to have been recorded live during sex with much heavy breathing, in a studio in Marble Arch. The film conjures three elements: William Hogarth’s pornographic diptych, Before and After, a voice over of poems translated by Robert van Gulik, that accompanied erotic colour prints of the late Ming period, and footage of cloth either at rest or in syncopation, including palimpsest footage of cloth in movement projected onto cloth in motion.