In this 28-minute short film, “amateur” filmmakers Watson & Webber focus in on the story of Lot’s visitation by angels and his escape from the city of Sodom just before its destruction. The film is pretty experimental, using montages and split screens and what I think are double exposure techniques to create a disorienting effect. The film has very minimal sets and is silent with Biblical intertitles. It also, and this is the main reason it’s survived as a film of interest, contains a lot of explicitly queer content. When I say explicit, I don’t mean graphic sex. It’s a lot of shots of shirtless or almost nude men embracing, posing seductively, etc. A lot of these shots are repeated throughout the film and even though the print I watched isn’t in the best shape and the film is visually very dark, it’s obvious that the camera is treating these male bodies as objects of desire, focusing on them in a way that feels very intimate.
This kind of avant-garde cinema isn’t really my thing, I have to say, and even at only twenty-eight minutes, it felt a little long to me (*rimshot*) because it really is just two scenes worth of dialogue. You know, I understand what you’re doing with all the trumpets, but even phallic symbols get boring when you spend so much time just focusing on people raising them and then lowering them. So, this isn’t that great. If you’re into avant-garde cinema or experimental film, you might respond to it on a purely aesthetic level better than I did. But I am glad I watched it once. There’s enough stuff going on here that’s interesting. There’s something subversive about using a story from the Bible (especially one that is often used as a condemnation of homosexuality) as a way to get queer content on screen in the 1930s. And, I’ll tell you this, after watching several more or less traditional Biblical epics in a row, I found the weirdness and aesthetic tone of this film to be at the very least refreshing, if not ultimately all that compelling. 2 stars.
tl;dr – avant-garde experimental short film is notable for its unique treatment of a Biblical subject and its explicitly queer content, but it doesn’t add up to much. 2 stars.