Zero Girls and Lesbian Stylites: From Solar Sexuality to Camp in the Early Films of Roberta Findlay

Using Michel Tournier’s 1967 philosophical novel Friday, or, The Other Island, this chapter analyses the early films of Robert Findlay as journeys towards attaining a solar sexuality, an elemental, deindividuated jubilance free of language, categories, and rationalisation. The lesbians in later Roberta Findlay’s films long for transcendence. But they exist in a world that will not leave them alone. Pimps, psychiatrists, lecherous fathers, and all manner of derelicts subjugate them to sexual violence and/or attempt to correct their lesbian tendencies. Given how these later titles still lack a strong diegetic interiority, a viewer can take their horrors with a grain of camp. They seem to hail a self-actualised lesbian subject prepared to reject any oppressive realism. But Take Me Naked and Mnasidika seem to hail no one despite intimations in the latter of a lesbian Eden, making for a more avant-garde cinematic experience.