Johnny Minotaur

Johnny Minotaur
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Year Released:	1971
MPAA Rating (USA):	X
Director:	Charles Henri Ford
Starring:	Nikos Koulizakis (Nikos) Yiannis Koutsis (Johnny) Chuzzer Miles (Karolos) Shelley Scott (Shelley)

Johnny Minotaur produced in 1971 by surrealist poet Charles Henri Ford, features "impressive narration by such artists as Salvador Dali, Allen Ginsberg, Warren Sonbert, Dan Basen and Lynne Tillman [...] Its original premiere was a celebrity event. Andy Warhol was there; Viva was there; Taylor Meade was there. [...]" The film was later described as "a diaristic exploration of the ethics of pedophilia featuring critical voices of notable poets, painters, and writers discussing Greek mythology over images of frolicking, nude teens." More that that, "the film depicted adolescents masturbating" and "the actors were underage". One account claims that MOMA restored the 16mm film, but then declined to project it.

Reviews

A search for the film title in newspaper archives finds it was shown in cinemas in at least New York, Boston, Los Angles and San Francisco. Reviews varied.

The New York Times said:

JOHNNY MINOTAUR, written, directed and photographed by surrealist poet Charles Henri Ford on the island of Crete, “more often suggests something the cat dragged in from Port Said,” says Howard Thompson. “Most of the time the camera rivets to the groins and backsides of Greek boys and young men involved in making a backyard movie about the Minotaur legend. The Greeks had a word for this.”

Gus Trebay said in the Village Voice that

Like his poetry the film is frank, American, homoerotic, mystically giddy and somewhat undervalued. The thin plot involves a middle-aged expatriate living in Crete, the pliancy of local youth, and a grasping niece who appears to threaten the dully domestic bliss…..As image poem, the film is inspired. A horny youth masturbates in a hollowed melon, a naked woman wraps and unwraps herself in the folds of a swinging hammock; three adolescents who could only have been dreamed of by Van Gloeden wash each other in an outdoor shower.”

Treatment of Sexuality

Kyle Harris, discussing the film in Afterimage in 2014, concentrates not so much on the film but on institutional hesitancy to engage with the film, almost pretending it does not exist:

"the film depicted adolescents masturbating
[...]this controversy of the film—that the actors were underage and that it certainly covered some taboo material.
[...] a diaristic exploration of the ethics of pedophilia featuring critical voices of notable poets, painters, and writers discussing Greek mythology over images of frolicking, nude teens.
[...]What is notable in the Village Voice article is that the issue of child pornography is not on the table. The anxiety around underage sex is a more recent historical preoccupation.
[...]For today's audiences invested in a gay history sterilized of all traces of intergenerational desires that might compromise LGBT assimilation into mainstream culture, Ford's pedophiliac discourse shoves Johnny Minotaur into a curatorial black hole where programmers seem compelled to distance themselves from the film's very existence."