by Patrick Zaia
Salt, Saliva, Sperm and Sweat was the debut featurette of Australian polymath Philip Brophy. Released in 1988, the film is an experimental and essayistic exploration of the body, specifically the physiological reality of the body as a messy soup of urges, sensations and emissions – “a soft machine” as William Burroughs famously described. When the film premiered at the Sydney Film Festival it proved to be incredibly divisive, with some critics dismissing it as boring and juvenile while others praised Brophy’s project as audacious and fascinating. One of the film’s most notable defenders was the revered critic David Stratton, who vividly described it in the press as “ a film with balls!” Because of its provocative content and polarising character, combined with the film’s relative obscurity, Salt, Saliva, Sperm and Sweat has garnered a thrilling aura of mystique and intrigue in certain circles of underground film and art culture. This alluring spell of anonymity, however, was ruptured roughly a year ago when a copy of the film suddenly surfaced from the tumultuous depths of the internet, appearing (of all places) on the popular video-sharing site YouTube. Finally, Brophy’s fluidic vision of the body is available for public consumption.
In terms of plot and structure, the film consists of a single story repeated four times: an unnamed man wakes up alone in his apartment, goes to work at a sterile office, takes his girlfriend on a date and meets her two children before heading back home to sleep. Each repetition, however, filters this unremarkable story through the lens of a different bodily function or substance, turning the mundane events of the narrative into intense corporeal experiences. These four interlocking repetitions or variations are respectively titled Salt, Saliva, Sperm and Sweat. Salt, the first section of the film, is concerned with orality and consumption, where the narrative is primarily conveyed through mouths eating, stomachs digesting and anuses defecating. Saliva, the proceeding chapter, focuses on language, specifically vulgar or lowly expressions of speech, where the peaks and valleys of the film’s action is communicated solely through characters hissing obscenities at one another. Interestingly, this is the only part where any of the characters actually speak. In the third iteration of the story, titled Sperm, the narrative is filtered through a heightened awareness of sexual desire and arousal, whereby the sexual undertones of the scenarios depicted in the previous chapters are accentuated and made graphic, manifesting within the film in all manner of bizarre and disturbing sexual behaviours. In the concluding section of the film, titled Sweat, the dramatic arc of the story is expressed through assorted acts of violence and bodily harm, ranging from a razor cut to a head gruesomely exploding. Taken as a whole, the film confronts us with the brute materiality of the human body, shorn of any romantic idealism, revealing it to be a gurgling, oozing, humping and twitching mass of abject and volatile matter. For Brophy, the human form isn’t stable and solid but rather liquid and fluid.
This physiologic focus is further reinforced by the film’s unique score and sound design. Composed by Brophy himself, the film’s soundtrack is made up of sampled coughs, breaths, grunts, burps, slaps and other bodily sounds. Digitised and distorted into alien yet recognisable aural textures, these samples are ordered throughout the film into strange propulsive rhythms, which at times recall the early work of industrial band Throbbing Gristle. Its impact is visceral and uncanny, lending the film a churning momentum that is simultaneously mechanical yet organic, which is no-doubt a sly gesture to the biological processes which surreptitiously shape and propel us beyond our conscious control. Indeed, this is emphasised even more by the film’s hyperbolic sound-design, where the diegetic acoustics of ordinary actions and movements are exaggerated to an absurd degree. Through the excessive use of over-dubbing in post-production, the sound of characters chewing, breathing, walking, touching or vomiting are dramatically magnified and augmented. By doing so, the sound design concurrently ruptures the naturalistic performances of the film’s actors, making the characters appear more like puppets than humans, whilst reinforcing the all-encompassing presence of the body. Again, the film asserts the inescapable nature of the human body and how we are forever ruled by it. In this way, perhaps the film contains no real characters, or people for that matter, only bodies and the biological functions which fashion and drive them.
Another interesting aspect to Salt, Saliva, Sperm and Sweat is the way it recognises and plays with genre. Heralding each of the four sections which comprise the film are looped snippets from Pier Pasolini’s Salo, Jean-Marie Straub’s Othon, Russ Meyer’s Beneath The Valley of the Ultra Vixens and Sean Cunningham’s Friday The Thirteenth. Each of these movies – which are shown fleetingly on a television screen towards the beginning and end of each section – act as a commentary on the cinematic language of ‘the body’ and its attendant functions. Within the context of Brophy’s featurette, these movies presage not only the actions to come in each of the four sections but also the filmic vocabularies that will be employed to convey said actions. Thus, Salt, Saliva, Sperm and Sweat has an awareness of its own construction, which it announces through the inclusion of the looped movie snippets aforementioned. However, in a metatextual game, the film subverts the intended effect of the cinematic methods it knowingly utilises through subtle but effective alterations. This is particularly evident in the supposedly climatic scenes of the Sperm and Sweat sections, where we see an extended close up of a man’s genitals during intercourse (Sperm) and a gory shootout between an unnamed man and woman (Sweat). In both of these sequences, the film follows the formal conventions of the genre its aping – the framing of the action, the movement of the camera and the use of close-up photograph all recall the aesthetic approach of many horror and pornographic films. However, whatever libidinal charge or catharsis promised by such provocative scenarios is disabled by the film’s intentionally awkward sense of timing, which is exaggerated further by the odd sterility of the scene’s lighting and the disconcerting nature of the film’s soundscape. Devoid of any emotional release or seductive tease, these depictions of sex and violence appear weirdly cold, vacant and mechanical, squeamishly so. In this regard, what we are left with is simply the cinematic vernaculars of sex and violence, horror and pornography, bluntly re-presented to us with an icy remove, which, in the final analysis, appear to be one and the same.
Despite its brevity, Salt, Saliva, Sperm and Sweat presents a number of perplexing yet beguiling enigmas and observations to the viewer. Straddling intellectual art-house cinema and body-horror exploitation, the film reconfigures the body as an undulating mass of fluids, liquids and moistures. Layering this, however, is an awareness of the various cinematic languages that have been used to depict the body and bodily functions, which the film knowingly plays with and deconstructs. Despite a few humorous moments, the tone of the film is bleak and ultimately nihilistic, almost to the point of excess and absurdity. Indeed, there is no notion of love, fertility, pleasure or shared sensuality in Brophy’s fluidic vision. Nevertheless, despite this slight oversight, Salt, Saliva, Sperm and Sweat is a thoroughly original project. Conceptually dense and extremely well crafted (for an underground featurette), Brophy’s film is both intellectually intriguing as well as, dare I say, entertaining and fascinating in its weirdness. Without a doubt, this film has balls! And in our contemporary moment, where so much of the art and film produced is depressingly bland and turgid (particularly in Australia), I am grateful that Salt, Saliva, Sperm and Sweat exists and am hopeful that its online resurfacing will ignite (however minimally) a flicker of genuine strangeness in the increasingly homogenised worlds of independent art and cinema.
Patrick Zaia is an artist, writer and musician based in Queensland, Australia. He has previously written for Horror Homeroom on Bret Easton Ellis’s The Shards, Panos Cosmatos’ Mandy (2018), B.R. Yeager’s Negative Space. and We Met in the Forums by Rob Ulitski.
