Eclipstick on Your Collar

Can we get a Francophone lipreader to work on Melies’ 1907 film L'Eclipse du Soleil et Pleine Lune? Though Hedy Lamar’s writhing in Ecstasy (1933) gets bandied about as the screen’s first sex scene, this one gets there first with a revolutionary same-sex coupling between heavenly bodies. As the pouting moon (a man’s actual face haloed by a silvery disc) slips in front of the furiously mugging sun (a bald-capped bloke’s head, encircled with cardboard flames), the foreground face registers ecstasy more explicitly than even Hedy (whose director was pricking her feet with a pin to get the, ahem, correct reaction). What’s going on back there? Either anulingus or buttfuckery, one presumes. The sun and moon seem to have no bodies, which makes the thing logically hard to explain, but the moon would hardly be moved to such raptures by simply having the back of his head nuzzled. It’s shockingly explicit even without nudity, without even bodies.

by David Cairns