Kirby Dick
Aligning himself more with artists and writers than filmmakers, Dick Kirby has brought his views to bear on his film about S&M aficionado Bob Flanagan
Kirby Dick doesn't have a problem. It's other people who have the problem - a problem with the S&M and the body-piercing and the raw physical and emotional pain evinced in his film, Sick: The Life & Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist.
For Dick - articulate, soft-spoken but passionate about the film - 'There is an audience that really wants to see this film: young people, people who are familiar with S&M, people for whom that really doesn't pose a problem.'
The official festival programme, it seems, doesn't come into that category. They've used the film's main still: a portrait (higher than it's wide) shot of Flanagan in oxygen mask, pierced and manacled, his pierced dick chained to his nipple, his pierced scrotum pulled down by a weight towards the floor. But they've cropped it to a landscape (wider than it's high), showing only Flanagan's upper body, cutting off just millimetres above his dick.
Unveiled at Sundance, where it won the Special Jury Prize, and screening here in the Panorama, the Flanagan film arrives toting a rave review from Variety's Emanuel Levy, who describes it as 'undoubtedly the most wildly original and audacious documentary in this year's [Sundance] Festival'. But there is a slight sting in the tail of the review. The film, says Levy, is 'always brilliant, if sometimes tough to watch…' That is the sort of thing that might easily scare away certain people, myself included, who have a Big Problem with anything - from documentaries about open-heart surgery to hard-core porn movies - that involves penetration of the body in a repeated, intrusive, in-your-face fashion.
But that is the point about Sick. The word 'flinch' must surely have been unknown to Flanagan, who was born in 1952 with hereditary cystic fibrosis, and who combined the wasting effects of that disease with his own fascination with S&M into a series of video performance pieces - including Gross Revisions (1981), Body (1989) and Nailed (also 1989) - worked on and produced with his partner Sheree Rose.
'Most of the time,' he wrote in 1990, 'it's as though I come from another solar system. I was born with a genetic illness that I was supposed to succumb to at two, then 10, then 20 and so on, but I didn't. And, in a never-ending battle not just to survive but to subdue my stubborn disease, I've learned to fight sickness with sickness.'
'The weird thing is,' says Dick, who knew Flanagan for six years before his death in January of last year, 'people in their fifties and sixties relate to the film, too, because it is about illness and pain - which they know all about - and because it makes clear the one inescapable thing about pain: that you have to find your own way of living with it.'
Dick first met Flanagan in the early 80s, as part of the avant-garde literary scene in Venice, California. 'He was a poet and there was a very strong contemporary culture scene in Venice,' he recalls. 'Bob was a part of that organisation, and I was a part of it, too, coming out of Cal Arts. We just became friends through that.'
By 1991, Flanagan's fame had grown through his performance pieces and books. But the cystic fibrosis had taken hold to the extent that he permanently needed an oxygen tank to live - and to perform.
'I shot over a two-year period, beginning in 1994, finishing in 1996, when he died,' says Dick, 'and then I edited for about a year.' During the shooting process, the director gradually overcame Sheree Rose's resistance to letting anyone other than her film Flanagan and, in the end, her own taped footage was made available to the film.
Openly admitting that he had often wanted to make a film about the process of dying, Dick finally found himself doing just that, as he worked through the mass of material. 'That was a kind of interesting experience,' he says, choosing the word carefully. 'After he died, I had about 150 hours of material and I edited for about a year and, in a way, I was the only person for whom he was still alive.
'It was kind of ghoulish, but it was also very intense and emotional to be still working with this man whom I loved and whose work I really respected. And there was a great deal of responsibility, I felt, to put his work on, to put this film out. So, in that regard, it wasn't sad. It was very emotional, but it wasn't sad.'
Although Dick followed his time at Cal Arts with a period studying film at the American Film Institute and has three films to his credit - the 50-minute Men Who Are Men (1981); the documentary Private Practices: The Story of a Sex Surrogate, which won a couple of festival prizes in 1986; and Guy, the 1996 Vincent D'Onofrio movie that he wrote but did not direct - he still aligns himself more with artists and writers than with filmmakers, claiming that indie film has become as formulaic as the Hollywood mainstream. Above all, he is aware of the dangers of success.
'Look,' he says, 'at Steven Soderbergh.'
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