Deep Inside

In Deep Inside, Camille Henrot’s first film, a pornographic film is transformed into a voyeuristic, lovelorn ballad. Drawn frame by frame on the 35mm film stock of a 70s pornographic film, the sexual content is partially revealed and partially hidden by black animated forms that seem to be fugitive memories of an old love. The music is slow and harrowing like a howl for love. The artist works with marker as one might use a stencil, revealing part of the original film in the drawing’s negative space. By combining pornographic and sentimental expression, the film posits that emotional misery is also physical. Sexual excitation and heartache are both based on an alternation of empty and full, presence and absence, hidden and revealed things. This manipulated film creates ambiguous images where scopophilia is no longer based on tactile frustration.