This remarkable film was made in 1954, and is far more sexually explicit than ' Last Spring '. It is made in colour and there is no sound coming out of the mouths of the youths and men Reichenbach has silently filmed. I find this poignant as all those romantic or fun words are lost and the impact of this is of a world lost to us but recalled by images. And the images blaze at us over the decades, full of life and in juxtaposition with constant images of flowers and nature in a seemingly constant Summer the men appear fragile. This fragility of flowers and youth show that this Summer cannot last, but must die to renew itself for other Summers and other young men. There are distant and close ups of the penis, and this is neither arousing or shameful, but simply part of the context of our natural world. The total impression is one of a garden of freedom and play and of as I said before transience. Then Reichenbach astonishes by showing the viewer a gay cruising park of the times, women only occasionally breaking up this world of men. How do I interpret this ? It is in contrast to the flower world of total nature, and with a certain melancholy it perhaps shows that heterosexuality has its own laws and must break up the world men can find in total freedom among themselves. But that is my interpretation and who knows what Reichenbach felt as he let his camera linger and play among this world of young and very beautiful men, who in the homophobic years of the 1950's could cast off their clothes with such ease and an aching tenderness of vulnerability. See it if you can with ' Last Spring ' for an historic view of homosexuality in a hostile world that Reichenbach refuses to allow to intrude upon this Eden that fades with the flowers and dies with the grass. Both this and ' Last Spring ' excellent portraits of a lost world. A cinematic poem.
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