Willard Maas, Ben Moore, Mechanics of Love, 1955

Mechanics of Love
Image from the movie
(source: Alex on Film)
no copyright infringement intended

She is waiting for him naked, he takes off his clothes to join her in bed. That's porn you'd say. No shit? Here's the thing: during five minutes (presumably the intercourse duration), what we see on the screen is a chaotic float of mundane household objects, and what we hear is a chaotic dialog (or rather two intertwined monologs, each one chaotic in its own right) about very mundane activities. Well, we can talk about the way in which the choice of the household objects could suggest a correspondence with different moments of the intercourse, but I'll leave that to connaisseurs. The male personage is perhaps right, love in some ways is not always simple.

It was the third movie made by Willard Maas (this time co-director was Ben Moore, a constant collaborator of Maas). And putting Mechanics of Love in relation with the first film created by Maas (Geography of the Body - as the second seems difficult to find), both try to respond to a question tormenting many modern artists: what is the correpondence between image and the reality that it claims to represent.

Better said, what is the reality of the image? Magritte enonciated it in his famous Ceci n'est pas une pipe: the image of a pipe is just an image, you cannot smoke with it. Kiarostami and Panahi also are preoccupied in their movies with that question (to the point that Kiarostami's movies seem sometimes meta-movies).

Here, at Maas, it is about what image to be chosen by the artist to represent the intimacy of the body (Geography of the Body), or the intimacy of a couple (Mechanics of Love). The couple gets intimacy both in sex as in their day-to-day routines. We are very far from a porn movie, indeed.

Here is a link to watch the movie on youTube:

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XqqaSno6EoI

(Maas and Menken)