Altered Innocence releases A BODY TO LIVE IN (Angelo Madsen 2024) nationwide
ANGELO MADSEN: A BODY TO LIVE IN (2024)
Now released nationwide by Altered Innocence*
TRAILER
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"Suddenly compelled to lay on a bed of nails and meet god" - Letterboxd comment on Rituals Sacred and Profane (Dan Jury, Mark Jury 1985)
This interesting and certainly unusual and rather freakish documentary film starts as a visual journal for Roland Loomis, the man born in Aberdeen, South Dakota in 1930 who became a pioneer and leader in piercings and BDSM rituals who took the cult name Fakir Musafar. Eventually the film goes on to become the story of a movement of which this man was a leader and the history of half a century seen from an outsider standpoint.
As a young teenager, when his parents were away for the weekend, Loomis fasted for two days and covered his body with wooden clothes pins, later training his waist with belts to be tiny so his body looked feminine. As he narrates his own voluminous film footage, he also wanted to be a photographer and his mother gave him a darkroom, where he also sneaked off to do body piercings and other proto-BDSM rituals, all on his own: in 1940's and 1950's America, you could get put in a mental institution for doing this kind of sttuff. Later he was to lie on beds of nails before an audience, performing like a carnival freak show. Later still he was to be part of a spiritual ritual, but also he was a performance artist. Sometimes these rough black and white photographs of strange contortions reminded me from the start of the surreal staged art photographs of Joel-Peter Witkin.
This film touches on these themes and also later, when it all came together and became okay, at least in Northern California, in the 1970's, moved on to well-attended group piercing rituals that led practitioners to call themselves "Modern Primitives" and see themselves as putatively "blending global spiritual practices with sexuality."
All this has social interest and historical interest as part of queer culture - the main practitioners are white gay men. But while for the outsider viewer it mostly seems curiously unsexy (even if pracitioners were wildly turned on by it sometimes, and certainly moved), and it's also not as beautiful as it might have been, kink seen this way feels inherently artistic, it turns out. The sheer wealth of wild, kinky, distressed, old, bad film clips and photos from Fakir's and his friends stashes exploring gender fluidity and enlightenment through extreme body modification turn out to have a funky visual appeal.
And this is possible because, be assured, all the period footage in this film, even up into the 1980's, is bad by normal photographic standards. But there's something curiously reverse-stylish in the sheer badness of it, because it contains an endless stream of fat or scrawny pierced people, dancing with little balls hung all over their torsos, driving long nails through their flesh, or hanging from a square frame suspended from their nipples. The freaky kinkiness of it all reminds me of the appeal to my childish self of old copies of Riipley's Believe It Or Not. Around the corner, Roland/Fakir is a conventional looking guy. He was in the army in the Korean war, got a GI educational loan. His sense of triumphant body torture as ritual came from studying anthropology and pouring over copies of National Geographic - ignoring the captions of the photos, which he thought detracted from the true meanings.
There is the feeling that Fakir and his "leather winged" gay bondage brethren are all folks with the same innate kink: they just liked distressing their own flesh in all kinds of ways, at a time when the first piercing studio was the only one. Later they figured out what it might mean; doing it in a group made it a ritual; and doing it as a ritual made it take on a spiritual meaning. And a healing one: A close associate of Fakir's, a French woman with a heavy accent, has a clitoris ritual surrounded by a warm crowd of supporters to cleanse and strengthen herself against the memory of being raped when she was young.
Inevitably, though, all this causes people who come from spiritual and ritual traditions, particularly Native Americans, to see this as artisanal, improvised bullshit, and the term they use for ways the piercing BSDM kink geeks claim ritual and spiritual elements for their practices is "cultural appropriation," which is a nice way of saying violation, theft.
So this film goes in various directions, becoming bigger than its central figure. The story of Roland Loomis morphs into that of Fakir Musafar; that morphs into the personal narratives and photo-film troves of his friends and fellow kinkers and piercers; these morph into group gatherings in the joyous blooming of Age of Aquarius-Me Generation self realization, sexual liberation, drugs, and general loose Seventies having-a-good-time; and then the dying begins. Many if not most of these folks are gay, and they are waylaid by the AIDS plague.
Despite that derailment of the tale, the mythology that Roland Loomis embodies and all these amazing funky clips and snapshots provide viewers of the film with haunting hints and echoes of childhood memories of our own. We all, or nearly all, play with taboo as kids at some point, did naughty things, made the little girl down the street do something naughty. We all pushed and pulled our own skin. Girls get their ears pierced. Tattoo and piercng parlors are on the streets of every town. It has gone from vulgar and underclass to everywhere and acceptable. But everything we humans do takes us from nature. We tease and work our bodies into wondrous shapes to become ballet dancers, professional athletes, and those lead to magic rituals crowds participate in, too. Looking at kink with a sympathetic eye shows us we are all one family. But as a film, A Body to Live In lacks polish, though that may be part of its charm.
Even as the queer community is being decimated by AIDS, the later Eighties saw the piercing, kink, and festish communities become more more active and more artistic, and the film and photo quality - and the looks of the performers - become more attractive in the film and sexier. As it became more out there, we see and hear conservative poiticians being outraged and calling for defunding of public media (an old cry coming true now).
At the end, there is a lot of footage of "late" Fakir in piercing rituals where we see him more and more taking on the role of a not only a cult leader but a shaman or priest - perhaps with some of the Lutheran he was born into, and then preparing with Cleo Dubois, his life partner, to leave his physical body, as he was dying of cancer. This film contains a lot of things and can't be understood fully by outsiders, or maybe anybody. It's a trail-blazer.
A Body To Live In, 98 mins., showed at True/False, Columbia MI Mar. 2025. It premiered internationally in BFI London at that time. It was screened for this review as part of the Frameline San Francisco International LGBT Film Festival, Jun. 18-28, 2025.
*March 2026 national release.
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