Sometimes I think that perhaps the desire that makes us aware that love is born with its days numbered requires that an Arcadia exist only under the condition of finitude. I believe this tension between the desired and the temporal can be beautifully glimpsed in Nus Masculins, a short film François Reichenbach shot in 16mm color in 1954, which seems to capture an ephemeral splendor of an Arcadia possible only because it can be imagined as temporal.

Nus Masculins has no sound or narration, only simple editing that resembles the intimate diary of a day with friends, surrounded by bucolic scenes of youth. There is a nostalgia in it that recalls the Arcadia as a splendor born to vanish from the moment of its inception. Watching it is like remembering a summer never lived, yet with elements that feel real: young bodies, becoming mythic as they merge with desire. It is neither memory nor invention; it promises no eternity but offers a climax that seems perfect precisely because we know it has an end, herein lies its difference from utopia.

In utopia, desire seeks eternity, to attain a form of immortality. In the Arcadia, by contrast, fullness lies in its temporal limit: one chooses to die in a sublime instant as a way of fulfilling oneself. For me, Nus Masculins evokes a time and youth condemned to disappear, yet whose transience does not diminish intensity; rather, it elevates it.

Tradition places the Arcadia in an ideal past, like a lost Golden Age. Marcel Proust associates it with memory: true beauty lies not in the present, but in what was and is lost. Yet I believe Arcadia is possible even without a past. Perhaps because I grew up in an era when memories were still captured in silent, grainy films, not unlike Nus Masculins, this film awakens in me a nostalgia for an Arcadia that I feel almost real, even though it never occurred.

This short film was made in a context where open representation of homosexual affection was uncommon, not very different from my own experience. I remember that one of the first times I found something resembling a free expression of the kind of affection I sought in adolescence was in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, where the protagonist Charles describes the relationship with his friend Sebastian as an “Arcadia with the days numbered.” Perhaps for this reason, from an early age I understood that Arcadia requires limitation to be complete.

Watching Nus Masculins stirs in me the memory of searching for that Arcadia, propelled by desire and by the need to find something I could call love. Not as a confusion between the real and the imagined, but as a conscious construction coexisting with the frustration of what was not, yet persisting as part of desire. It is not about what might have happened, but about the enduring need to dream that it could have, a necessity that transcends one’s own finitude. This possibility of the impossible and temporal is what makes me feel Arcadia more as a need than as inspiration.

With this short film, Reichenbach may not have intended to reflect philosophically on finitude, but he did aim to capture the “ephemeral beauty of things,” in his own words. That ephemeral beauty is also life’s climax, just as Bataille understood in eroticism: the harmony of bodies and nature that affirms the sublime in the very instant it declines.

Nus Masculins does not promise a utopian “someday,” but affirms a “now.” An ecstasy that we know will perish both in the image we see and, in the memory it awakens of something that may never have existed. It is an impossible desire, yet real precisely because of its impossibility. Watching it, one cannot help but experience, in that finitude, both fullness and loss simultaneously.