Fragments of Desire.

A Narrative Rupture Revealing the Lack of a Historical Ontology of Homophobia.

Text. Gerardo Vizmanos

Our inner life is neither linear nor logical; it is a succession of impulses, interruptions or insistences, composed of fragments. It does not follow ordered patterns like a coherent narrative, but rather is made up of scattered moments, sudden impulses, thoughts. It is more like a collage than a novel. "Fragmentation" presents itself in opposition to the idea that the past accumulates in a progressive and deterministic manner. We are not condemned by a previous history, nor does everything have to follow a logical sequence of cause-and-effect. Instead of being determined by the past, we construct our reality in real time, moment by moment, including the stigmas and the need to classify that these produce in some. Experience is always immediate and alive, not an inevitable product of what came before.

This fragmentation can be seen by joining the film "Christmas" from 1949, by Gregory Markopoulos (one of the most relevant American experimental filmmakers of the mid-20th century) to the music "Fragmente – Stille, an Diotima," by Luigi Nono composed between 1979 and 1980. This effect is produced, with evident lack of synchronization, that opens a common space from which to think about desire, repression and freedom. Nono's music is constructed through silences, sound fragments, interruptions that create tension not through conventional melodic development, but through insistence and pause. The musical work rejects the "historical accumulation" of traditional sonata form.

Although "Christmas." has that more traditional narrative structure (the Christmas visit, family rituals), Nono's music gives it a completely different temporality. Moments of silence intensify visual details that were originally transitional, turning subtle gestures into declarations. By losing linear narrative, Markopoulos's images become pure present, pure visual construction in real time. Nono's silences function as spaces where desire can exist without having to explain itself or follow causal logic.

Something similar occurs with the film "Un chant d'amour" that Jean Genet shot in 1950, in silent version to which Simon Fisher Turner added a soundtrack in 2003 for the BFI. In this combination we also find an interesting dialogue. In Genet's "Un chant d'amour," desire is articulated through fragmented gestures. The smoke that passes through the hole in the wall, the gazes, the seduction rituals that do not follow traditional narrative logic but rather a logic of impulse and interruption. Fisher's music moves away from traditional narration, opting for a sensorial atmosphere that complements the visual and symbolic nature of the film.

A scene from the film "100 days" by Hussein Erkenov serves to bring us closer to that reality of bodies in which desire also manifests in fragmentary moments and in gestures that need no narrative explanation, although for Western audiences there may be situations like communal showers with erotic elements that might be foreign to the context of the film itself. From a gay and homoerotic perspective, fragmentation presents here as a way of approaching bodies as desiring subjects that seek freedom today and suggests treating bodily experience and desire as operating in the present, not as a linear narrative.

These are three films that move in very different registers. American bourgeois domesticity and family codes in Markopoulos's, carceral institutionalization and codes of confinement in Genet's, and Soviet military discipline and military codes in Erkenov's. These representations of desire distance themselves from the intellectualist idealism that, between the late 19th and early 20th centuries, allowed many artists to express their drives under the protection of the academic, thus escaping the morality of the moment that would have condemned them. Against this model (also visible in authors like Cocteau, certain symbolists or even in some Soviet or German avant-gardes) Markopoulos, Genet or Erkenov break with that strategy. Their desire does not camouflage itself in oneiric keys or erudite references, but presents itself as vital, immediate, embodied impulse.

This clear rupture in the way of expressing desire in turn questions the historical ontology of homophobia: that idea, still so present, that it is an inevitable inheritance, almost natural, that we drag as a weight from the past. Homophobia is often presented culturally as something "always existing," an anthropological constant that justifies discrimination as "natural" or "traditional" with a linear and permanent historicity, which is not true. With the fragmentary character that this composition of image and sound presents, non-linear of subjective experience, it helps to subvert this falsehood and any attempt to insert the rejection of desire into a closed historical narrative, highlighting that it is something that manifests in the present, now. The fragmentary aesthetic experience demonstrates that both desire and its rejection exist as present forces, actualized at every instant rather than treated as historical questions.

The simultaneous projection of these films and music is an aesthetic form that rejects the logic of historical accumulation. There is no past that condemns us, but a present that is constructed and lived in real time. It speaks of desiring bodies that seek freedom today, not allegories of the past that presents itself as a radical critique of the historical naturalization of homophobia. We are not witnesses to an inheritance, but actors of a present. Reality is not accumulated past: it is always current.