Known Unknowns

o credits ever rupture the cloistered world of (1980), the lone feature directed by the artist Francis Savel, working under the pseudonym “Dietrich de Velsa.” A gay pornographic odyssey through end-of-the-’70s Paris, the film is a universe unto itself, its title written in chalk on a concrete underpass, linking a hustler’s graffiti to a mathematician’s scrawl, and the names of its various players whispered over a closing bike ride like some sweetly savoured memory. Hardcore action notwithstanding, its atmosphere is one of hushed, almost ceremonial remoteness—fitting enough given that the film inhabits the vanished spaces of a bygone era. premiered at the Dragon Club, a now-shuttered gay porn cinema that once counted Roland Barthes among its regular patrons—though “premiere” is perhaps too ostentatious a term for what was reportedly a rather lonely affair, if also a fittingly elegiac one in retrospect. The year following saw the first recorded cases of AIDS, and before the decade’s end, Paul Vecchiali’s (1988) would boldly broach the subject for the first time in French cinema, distilling the sea change of the era into a single pronouncement: “I hope to die from you.” The world had changed irrevocably, practically consigning Savel and his film to obscurity. It only remained