The Real Life of Their Fantasies

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

It’s not uncommon to find a film festival packed to the brim with titles that will never make it to the mainstream public. But it’s a bit unusual to find a film at a festival whose creators never meant for anyone to see it in the first place. That’s the irony that has made “Made in Secret: The Story of the East Van Porn Collective” and its current festival tour a “minor miracle,” in the words of one critic. Set to make its New York premiere tomorrow night as part of the Crown Point Festival (crownpointfestival.org), “Made in Secret” is the brainchild of Todd Peterson, a Vancouver-based artist who made the film with his friends and originally intended to screen it only for a small gathering of friends in Canada.

But as the list of festival invitations and DVD sales has grown (including overseas orders from countries where the movie has not even screened theatrically), “Made in Secret” has become a cross-continental work of genre-bending creativity. The film was made over the course of three years by a group of friends, led by Mr. Peterson, who wanted to make a documentary about their local anarcho-feminist porn collective. The only obstacle was, there was no such collective. So in order to make the movie, they actually became the porn collective. When one of Crown Point’s programmers saw the film at the San Francisco Independent Film Festival, he approached Mr. Peterson about bringing the movie to the East Coast. Thus, come Friday, a movie that was never intended for the public breaks into America’s biggest movie market.

“If we knew then where things would go, there are definitely things I’d change about it,” Mr. Peterson said. “When we originally made it, we were planning to show it just once, at an underground theater, for some of our friends. We certainly didn’t expect it to ever play in New York, or really anywhere outside of someone’s living room.”

Instead, Mr. Peterson’s imperfect and unpolished film has become part of a serious cinematic discussion, dividing not only bewildered programmers, but polarized audiences. As Mr. Peterson describes it, “Made in Secret: The Story of the East Van Porn Collective” was created with three objectives in mind. Given the “porn” billing (one of the movie’s harshest critics dubbed it the most boring film ever made with the word “porn” in the title), he said the movie grew partly from a desire to create a new kind of sex film, one that would serve as a counterpoint to the derivative, derogatory pornography that has become the status quo.

“I was kind of looking out there, thinking that there must be something good going on on the porn front,” he said. “But the more I watched, the more I realized there wasn’t anything out there, nothing that I considered the least bit satisfying or interesting.”

But beyond thoughts of pornography, Mr. Peterson said, he had become obsessed some years ago with the concept of art and reality, and how an artist could willfully blur the line separating fiction and fact. It began one day when he was reading an article in the New Yorker and suddenly found himself halfway through a story, unsure if he was reading a work of fiction or an exercise in literary nonfiction.

“It was such an unusual experience, and I knew that if I flipped back to the beginning, it would be clarified instantly as to whether this was true or made-up,” he said. “But instead, I kept reading, and imagined two worlds: one in which this was a true story, and another where it was completely fabricated, and I loved that feeling of simultaneously keeping both those possibilities real.”

The other major theme that compelled Mr. Peterson to recruit his friends and to create “Made in Secret” was a passion for the philosophy of consensus that is central to so many art collectives. “It’s an idea that I firmly believe is overlooked,” he said, “as people turn instead to majority rule as a way of governing.”

With these three themes in mind, “Made in Secret” was born. In the film, the fictional (yet real) artist collective, comprising seven friends who spend their creative hours crafting a unique brand of emotional, empathetic, and liberating pornography, tethers its artistic endeavors to its commitment to consensus. It didn’t take long for life to imitate art, as the Vancouver cast went about creating the same pornographic works that their characters were supposedly crafting.

“I realized that for some of the movie’s reaction shots to be real, we had to actually film ourselves in a pornographic movie and watch it onscreen,” Mr. Peterson said. “It’s not something you can simulate — watching yourself for the first time on a TV screen.”

Audiences have varied widely in their responses to the docudrama. According to Mr. Peterson, some have seen it as a drama about the struggles of an art collective. Naftali Rutter, a programmer for the Crown Point Festival, said film buffs have been drawn to its ambiguous structure and its eagerness to remain open to interpretation. And some ecstatic audiences at underground festivals have gone so far as to pass around signup sheets during post-film question-and-answer sessions in an effort to replicate the collective in their city.

All controversy and irony aside, “Made in Secret” is by far the most surprising, seductive, and infuriating feature film chosen for the three-week Crown Point Festival, which closes shop on Saturday. It’s a sexual exposé that’s not particularly sexy, a documentary that’s not completely credible, and a work of fiction that seems less scripted than an act of raw, unfiltered realism. It’s unapologetically confused with itself, less interested in the final product than in the means of production.

It may be a bitter brew, but “Made in Secret” packs a lingering, complex aftertaste as viewers work to sort out what was fake from what was real, to untangle Mr. Peterson’s beliefs about sex and reality, and to consider their own thoughts on the subject.

ssnyder@nysun.com


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