-The Arts Fuse
A Body To Live In is not trying to be a conventional biopic — this is an atmospheric reminiscence of an underground movement.
Angelo Madsen’s films are steadfast in how they unapologetically portray queer otherness. His latest effort,A Body To Live In, is a documentary on Fakir Musafar, a pioneer of extreme body modification. It is a loving, clear-eyed portrait of a complex icon as well as a celebration of the communities — interested in exploring transgressive sexuality and spiritual seeking — that gathered around him.
Musafar was a central figure in San Francisco’s underground kink scene in the ’70s and ’80s. He came to national prominence when the punk ‘zine RE/SEARCH profiled him in its 1989 “Modern Primitives” edition, anointing him a shaman-like visionary who believed that tattoos, piercing, ritual scarification, and flesh hook suspensions were vehicles for ecstatic experiences.
The filmmaker met Musafar in 2004 and they remained friends until his death in 2018. He was given full access to the artist’s archives, including photographs, writing, and hundreds of hours of film, video, and audio recordings.
Dexterously collaging this material with interviews with Musafar’s wife, Cléo Dubois, performance artists Ron Athey and Annie Sprinkle, as well as other surviving elders, the documentary is an immersive dive into what had been a thriving subversive culture — before the moral panic of the ’90s and AIDS obliterated so many of its enthusiasts.
Musafar constructed a complicated persona, whose contradictions the film explores. Born Roland Loomis, he began his adventures early on; we see photos of him, as a teenager, in his parents’ basement, staging clandestine explorations of bondage and piercing that he hoped would produce out-of-body experiences.
Influenced by magicians and carney freak shows, Loomis appeared at tattoo conventions and fetish balls in the ’70s under the pseudonym Fakir Musafar, the latter a 12th century Sufi mystic. His notoriety spread through writing, lectures, film, and photography exhibitions, In 1992, Musafar opened his own piercing school for acolytes.
The documentary deals with Musafar’s followers along with his skeptics. Footage of joyous participants piercing each other, drumming, chanting, and dancing in outdoor fields is juxtaposed with criticism about appropriation of indigenous sacred rituals. Television talk show hosts are left aghast, asking Musafar how he could do these things to his body. Musafar — usually in a suit — calmly responds with a beatific smile.
Musafar’s wife discusses how her husband existed between genders (“being in the cracks,” he would say). There are ample segments of him cross-dressing. Leathermen, radical faeries, dykes, and gender non-conforming folks were welcomed into this subculture, which was dedicated to the quest for corporeal transcendence. A Body to Live In‘s memorable culminating scene shows Musafar and his wife suspending a male partner on hooks as the three tenderly embrace.
Serving as director, producer, and editor, as well as creating visual effects and the sound score, Madsen delivers an emotionally propulsive journey. A Body To Live In is not trying to be a conventional biopic — this is an atmospheric reminiscence of an underground movement. Madsen’s technical and aesthetic approach here is in the mode of what French New Wave director Agnès Varda called cinécriture: using “the cutting, the movements, the points-of-view, the rhythm of films and editing” in the same way a writer chooses “adverbs, paragraphs, asides, chapters which advance the story or break its flow.” The camera rarely lingers on interviewees; instead, they function primarily as voiceovers accompanying the plentiful historical footage. Abstract interstitials are used to effectively represent trance-like states.
Interspersed throughout the documentary are poignant excerpts from audio interviews that were made in the last weeks of the subject’s life. The film concludes with Fakir Musafar stating: “I’m ready to give the body up and just be spirit for a while, consciousness.”
Massachusetts College of Art and Design is presenting two evenings of Madsen’s previous works as part of their Ciné Culture Series on October 1 and 8. A Body To Live In will receive its New England premiere on October 19 at the Vermont International Film Festival in Burlington. His work can also be seen on Criterion, Mubi, and New York Times Op-Docs.
Arts Fuse 2022 interview with Angelo Madsen.