The following interview was conducted in December 1997, in Portland, Oregon. What follows is an abridged version of an essay from Jack Sargeant's forthcoming book SUTURE (Creation Books) due for publication in August, 1998.

Set within the clinical confines of an operating theatre, Jacob Pander's and Marne Lucas's 13 minute short film The Operation, depicts a sexual encounter between a female surgeon and male patient, as a row of onlookers dressed in protective clothes look on. The film opens with the patient (played by comic book artist Pander under the porn-name Otto Wrek) being brought into the theatre from what appears to be a cargo lift. Once in the theatre a masked and suited surgeon (Gina Velour aka model and photographer Marne Lucas) strips off her clothes - notably leaving her rubber gloves on - and fucks the patient on the gurney. The visual reservoir of pornography is clearly present within the sexual activity depicted in the film (oral sex, the cum shot, penetration, etc.) yet is simultaneously expanded beyond its traditional space via the usage of an infrared camera which responds to heat, rather than light. The infrared renders the protagonists bodies as translucent. The familiar territory of the flesh is re-negotiated as a vein delineated web of continual transmutation, in which hot and cold zones fluctuate according to changes in temperature, itself dictated by erogenous stimulation. The folds of the labia and the flesh of the penis - no longer the pink/ red/ purple of video pornography - are instead white hot , while teeth, and the colder extremities appear as black. The Operation is a film not about light, but about heat. It does not seek to reproduce a representation of `reality', rather it creates a phantasmagorical trope based on the bio-physical response of the body to stimulation. The film is an exegesis of fuck manifested via a thermo-physiological cartography of the body.


Jack Sargeant: Where did you find out about the camera? Because this was during the Gulf War, or immediately after, and that technology was very contemporary, and hardly available.

Jacob Pander: It wasn't super-available. Basically Arnold Pandar and I, when we were down in San Francisco, we had friends down there who were working in the multi-media industry, and there was a trade show happening, on the outskirts of the city. And we went to this one trade show, which was ostensibly a computer trade show, but next door was this very expensive high imaging technology trade show going on. It was like $150 per ticket, but security was lax and casual, so we just walked in with our little bags and pamphlets and stuff, and we started looking around. And there was all kinds of just all kinds of mysterious, weird technology in there, half of it you couldn't even decipher. We were just grabbing pamphlets, and just collecting stuff, and we were walking through one of these isles, we looked up and saw this incredibly grotesque image of this ghoulish looking face on this big television monitor. And we realized as we looked to the side of this monitor there was this huge silver fish-eye lens, starring at us. And we were basically in these computer monitors looking like the most bizarre fiendish ghouls you could imagine.. and we were just "what the fuck is this?" And basically all these laced veins, black teeth, and glowing eyeballs where just staring back at us. And we were like "this is a trip" and we just hung out there for a bit - and I grabbed a pamphlet of information that I thought might come in handy, I thought it could be interesting to use in a music video or something sometime down the line. So that was like 1992. Basically that whole year went by - we inked Triple X, moved back to Portland. Started talking about stuff, and it was all the way through until 1994, when I suddenly remembered that camera. and I thought "God, you know if I could get this camera, we could do a film with it". So we had talked about it, and we'd talked about doing different kinds of stuff, but that seemed like it would be unique enough to warrant going that far, in a sense. And Marne was like "Yeah, that sounds really cool".

Marne and I have come into the collaboration from different perspectives, mine being more from background of wanting to be a filmmaker and making short films, Marne as visual artist and designer…came together on this project at a time when both of us were starting to look into eroticism as subject we wanted to explore.

Marne Lucas: I thought it would be a year before we would get around to doing it. It sounded fantastic. Then he calls me a couple of days later: "Hey, you know that camera that I was telling you about… well it's on the way here!" I panicked "Oh no, wait a minute, what am I getting into". And there was no time to back out, no time to change our minds. The situation was: this technology is on its way. We have managed to get hold of it. We'll have to make this film. We had to get everything together in a week, the story-boards, the concept, the costumes…

Jacob: And it's also one of those things where we were trying to work out, how could we shoot this thing without anybody knowing it, even or friends. Because it was such a personal thing to do in a way.
It's certainly not our norm. So we were trying to wrack our brains, as to how we could pull it off with the most minimal crew possible. And then my friend Steve Doughton came to mind, who used to live in Portland ten years ago, and is a twisted state of mind artist living in New York.

Marne: With fantastic visions.

Jacob: Yeah, he has a great aesthetic. And he was in New York, but I knew that he often came to Portland to visit his parents, and it was kind of around Spring time. I called him up to ask if he was coming to Portland, and pitched the project to him, and he basically just started laughing incessantly on the other end of the line, "Yeah, this sounds twisted and great". So it worked out really well, he would just happen to be coming into town so we could grab him for three days.

Jack Sargeant: What role did Steve Doughton have in the project, was he the director of photography?

Jacob: He was the cinematographer… although it was fairly well story-boarded, just to have a sense of how to execute it in such a short period of time. Once I was in front of the camera it was really difficult to bare down the list of all the shots, and Steve really took the reigns and just did an incredible job of shooting it. He was somebody I really trusted to make it work.

Marne: He was the only person that we both felt absolutely comfortable to work with on this project.

Jack Sargeant: Who else worked in the crew?

Jacob: It basically became more apparent to us, as time went by, and as Steve came into the picture, that we were going to need more people on set, because just the shear amount of work, the physicality of it, and Steve's work was also very physical…

Marne: Everyone had about four jobs each.

Jack Sargeant: Right. I know you all doubled up, especially during that scene in the lift, and also that in the shots of the people watching the operation…

Jacob: Exactly. So essentially we had my brother Arnold…

Marne: Rowland Gunther

Jacob: Arnold worked really closely with Steve, basically because the camera doesn't have an eyepiece, you have to watch a monitor, which is kind of over here away from the set. So they worked together, just logistically.

Jack Sargeant: The whole shoot lasted three days?

Marne: We had to return the camera in seventy two hours, we built the set and shot everything in three days.

Jack Sargeant: Where did you build the set?

Marne: In Hank Pander's studio.

Jacob: I looked around for a space for quite a while. My Dad is just constantly working in his studio, and he is always really open to helping us out and letting us use his space, but this is such an enormous project and he's doing these enormous oil paintings. I looked all over for a space, but it was just impossible for the fact we had no budget. He let us take his studio over for three days, and he happened to be out of town, so we built this whole set, and we were able to shoot it in there which was fantastic.

Jack Sargeant: You shot some of the other sequences in other locations?

Marne: The elevator scene was in the same building as the sex scene. The observer scene was in a separate building…

Jacob: Right. It was actually an old school gym, which is now used for storing stuff… a friend of mine was using it… he was actually shooting a film, and the were using it as a space to store sets and props, and he got us in there, and that is actually where the gurney was being stored - and we got that, and he said there was a balcony at the school gym, and we checked it out and it was just absolutely perfect… it had this nice curve to it. So we dressed it, we gave it the tile look and what not. And actually, there is this shot in the film, which was never story-boarded or planned from the beginning, which was really an accident which happened on that location, which was essentially we were setting up to shoot the observers up there, and I happened to walk by the camera. And Steve saw that happen and said "hold on a second, come back here, stand right here". And we got it set up so it was the shot where I'm in the foreground - Otto's in the foreground - and you can see the observers in the background, and that one shot really fused those two locations together…

Jack Sargeant: Yes, it really matches up the two levels of activity within the narrative, and creates a stronger sense of verisimilitude.

Jacob: It was kind of funny, because almost none of that footage was usable, because I was laughing so hard, because Marne wasn't there, and I was…

Marne: He was standing there with his shirt off, and he was wearing jeans from the waist down, writhing around. And the observers up above were laughing… there is so much footage that was unusable, because we were laughing so much during the entire filming.

Jack Sargeant: When you were doing it did you actually have to shoot in total darkness?

Jacob: Actually we tried to light it, we lit it with a Lowe light kit, which was almost impercievable

Jack Sargeant: But presumably the light could cause problems with the infrared camera, because of the heat the bulbs would generate.

Jacob: Well, the light is absorbed of flat surfaces, just like the white paint, it just absorbs into it. But on chrome the hot bulb of the light reflects, so those things came out really intense, the physical bulb you see, but the incidental light you don't. What happened was the lights lit up the chrome, and - once there was liquid and we were hot and sweating - it reflected the sheen off of the moisture. What we ended up doing was just trying to pump as much light onto the back wall to get that grid to be visible.

Jack Sargeant: You story-boarded all the sexual action too?

Jacob: Yeah.

Marne Lucas: He story-boarded the entire thing. The film we were originally going to make was about half an hour long, in the end we realized it was better to keep it really concise. The whole story really is told in the thirteen minutes.

Jacob: Yeah, it was very heavily story-boarded. It was really planned as a formal type of film. But, I generally really like to story-board, I guess that's the way I naturally function, really drawing it out, feeling that whole arc of movement, and what the compositions are going to be The other thing we had to deal with is that I wanted it to be a whole lot of different angels, I didn't want it to be three shots, where you keep coming back to the same three shots. I wanted to have a sense of a visual narrative unfolding. And therefore needing to catalogue different set-ups, so we story-boarded it so that we could shoot - since we didn't have more than one camera - we had to shoot the sequences all from one angle, the scripted sex, then move the camera, shoot all those sequences again, in that same order. So we could get all those angles, and you get the sense of that camera being everywhere. So in that sense it needed to happen that way for planing, so we could keep track of where we were. And as we were shooting it we were just `X-ing' off sequences that were just impossible to get to.

Jack Sargeant: What kind of scenes did you lose? Sex sequences, or narrative…?

Jacob: We shot a lot, but it was just angles, stuff that we just didn't get to…

Marne: There is narrative stuff, the female surgeon is the dominant character, she is in control. The two characters, as they progress through the sex act, obviously, they get very intimate, and very aquatinted, and they seem more like equals at the end of the movie, also there was a very different ending.

Jack Sargeant: Its interesting that you made a film that people feel is so intimate and erotic, given that you have used a technology that many would see as cold and perhaps even alienating.

Marne: Yeah. That's where our sick and twisted interests come in. No, seriously, I think the film is very intimate and erotic, because we as both performers and creators have a long history of being intimately involved. We obviously have an interest in sexuality, and as Gina and Otto, our chemistry permeates the film. My work is specifically about sexuality, I've spent alot of time breaking down what desire and attachment versus immediate gratification and pornography means to women and society. The contrast of the cold detached security camera style with infrared invading the body is an intentional juxtaposition. When you think of porn, you think of garishly lit flesh tones, and bad dialogue. Black and white infrared, heat sensing technology and sex on a gurney in a surgical theatre are a deliberate departure from the consumer porn formula.


Jacob: It's a frightening film, a lot of people have looked at it and thought it was like corpses having sex, or perhaps souls making love, or some alien race impregnating itself via sexual operations. Often people are aroused by The Operation but are in conflict about that. It is surreal and creepy, but they are drawn into it.

Marne: People think we have no skin, or layer of skin removed. The bodies reflect a fetishistic edge, they could be made of latex manufactured skin.

Jack Sargeant: Why did you choose to hang the narrative on the cyber-punk kind of angle, with the people all wearing gas-masks and so on? Why didn't you just market it as a sex film?

Marne: Well, part of it was because of the infrared technology we needed to come up with some sort of costume that would mask the infrared, so at the beginning when they are coming down the hallway, your brain says "Oh I get it the films in negative" and then later it says "Maybe it's not negative, what is this?" It's not until she cuts open the sheet, and pulls out the patient's cock, you think "This is something else". We needed to mask the bodies heat, so we had to drive all over town prop shopping, asking ourselves, what kind of costume would work in a hospital setting - that isn't going to totally mask the body, so you can tell that they are people, but that did mask the sex of the observers, you can't tell if doctor was male or female. So we came up with these heavy tyvec plastic suits and gloves and goggles to mask the technology, we wanted it to be really special when she unzips and steps out: this is a totally different way of looking at the body. Ultimately we had to hide the gimmick - the entire film was shot in infrared but you don't get that impression until you start seeing flesh.

Jacob: I think another part of it was again based on the infrared, in that we were getting what was, in essence, a security camera. So what kind of narrative would be most logically viewed through a security camera - not necessarily an operation, but some kind of institutional…

Marne: Institutional facilities

Jack Sargeant: The medium is the message?

Jacob: Right. And so that is reflected as well in a setting where there are observers, and in an operating room there are often observers…

Marne: And the observers are a play of the viewer of the film. The viewer of the film and these observers within the film are watching this sex act. Its kind of like a mirror.

Jack Sargeant: Did it change the way you perceived your own relationship towards your bodies?

Marne: Absolutely.

Jack Sargeant: Not just because of the sex, but also by seeing it that way.

Jacob: Yeah. Definitely.

Marne: It really changed my entire life to appear in this film. It changed my relationship with my body. One point that I've been preoccupied with about having been in the film is that, regardless of what role I am playing, I am still the one being penetrated. That fact affects me on a level that is beneath any narrative or debate about female power. Gina Velour is a brainiac surgeon, yet for all her instruments, she is pierced in her reproductive vessel, a sacred place. Somehow the penetration affects how I think I will be perceived by society. It's an automatic social signifier: the slut. `She is getting fucked', even if she instigates or directs it. Primal law dictates how much power and acceptance women have. If a man is in adult films he's a stud, not a slut. I am the penetrated one, and therefore judged by society, reduced. I battle with this definition, but I can't shake it's grip.

Previously I had no problem posing nude for arty photographs, but seeing yourself in a film is different. I don't see myself being in more sex films. It's changed my impression about how I am viewed in using my body in film or photography. I don't care what other people think of me now. It's sort of like, you have to give up worrying about other people's perceptions of you if you are going to take on this kind of project. A lot of people are going to see it, you do lose a certain level of privacy in your life. So it has really made me buck up, and walk my talk… it's very liberating.

Jacob: Because you have to confront yourself…

Marne: With your opinions about your body, technology, pornography. And for me, I am always trying to be an example for other women.

Jack Sargeant: But if the body is constructed through contemporary discourses - and we have come to know the body in modern society through the narratives of medicine and medical technologies - then how do you see you are constructing a view - or a new view - of the body? You must think you are doing something - or trying to do something - different from that which already exists.

Jacob: I think that it is a relationship between the body and the environment, and in this film… I don't know that we necessarily set out to create this way of looking at it, but one of the things that comes across in the closeness of Marne and I, and our intimacy coming through, is about, to a degree and could be perceived as about the bodies survival through this technology. And I think that is a real major thing right now, surviving through invasive technology. I mean on one level the body survives because of technology, yet on another level it has the potential to destroy everybody. Those are kind of idealistic ways of perceiving it.

Jack Sargeant: There is also an extent to which you are fetishizing that technology as well.

Marne: Yeah. I can't wait for the amateur infrared video porn market to develop!

Jacob: Well, I think a lot also breaks down to the level of like, it just makes sense. Like, that camera, you see that imagery now, quite often, looking at cold cement buildings, walls, and fences at night. And what would be far more interesting is to look at the human body, and it is fascination, it is voyeurism, it is curiosity… like looking at a car accident. How freaky it is to look through that camera. There is an aspect of it that is pure fascination, even from the level of making it. I think that within that, then of course you bring in a little more complex idea of how the film will present that, which is eventually how we put it together. But a lot of the root of it is just the sick and twisted curiosity of how the body looks
that's probably based on where we are in this time.

Jack Sargeant: But that does say something that the way you choose to look at the body is via a method of security technology, it says something about the construction of the body in the late-twentieth century.

Marne: We are prisoners in our landscape, which is buildings and cement, and security cameras. In Singapore you have these cameras in public areas that can identify anyone… Surgeons go spelunking inside the body with video assisted laproscopy…

Jack Sargeant: It's interesting, because you seem to have this very liberal view of the body, but it seems to me that you are saying something far more radical in a sense. You seem to be doing something far beyond what you are saying you are doing.

Marne: I think we are still learning what the meaning of the film is to us. We are still really learning about what our relationship is to it.

This was originally published in Fringecore magazine.


©Jack Sargeant