Let Me Love You Down: Disobedient Adaptation and the Afterlives of “Desire and the Black Masseur”

With attention to adaptation/translation and jouissance, the presentation focuses on Claire Devers’ Noir et Blanc (1986). An uncredited adaptation of Tennessee Williams’ “Desire and the Black Masseur” (1946), the film restages the conceit of the Williams short story with a consequential shift from the banks of the Mississippi River in the 1940s to a Parisian suburb in the 1980s. As a disobedient adaptation, the film details the silent encounters and escalating sadomasochistic relationship between a French accountant and an African masseur in an upscale health club. This talk considers how the film’s languid quality suggests a European art cinema with a Fanonian inflection that enacts an exquisitely brutal sense of queer intimacy. As a conceptual circuit, the talk will recount the ways the Tennessee source piece has been invoked in other forms.

Michael Boyce Gillespie is author of Film Blackness: American Cinema and the Idea of Black Film (Duke University Press, 2016) and co-editor of Black One Shot, an art criticism series on ASAP/J. His work focuses on black visual and expressive culture, film theory, visual historiography, popular music, and contemporary art. His writing has appeared in Regeneration: Black Cinema 1898-1971, ASAP/J, Film Quarterly, Film Comment, liquid blackness, Journal of Popular Music Studies, as well as other journals and collections. He was the consulting producer on The Criterion Collection releases of Deep Cover, Shaft, and Drylongso. He is Associate Professor of Cinema Studies in the Martin Scorsese Department of Cinema Studies at New York University. He is currently working on a monograph entitled Dreams and False Alarms: Ambivalence, Pleasure, and the Art of Blackness.