Salute Your Shorts: Isabella Rossellini's Green Porno

Salute Your Shorts is a weekly column that looks at short films, music videos, commercials or any other short form visual media that generally gets ignored.

There are stranger films then Isabella Rossellini’s Green Porno series of shorts for the Sundance Channel. But I challenge anyone to find any others that are as interesting as they are just plain odd, and unlike something thrown together for YouTube just to freak people out, Rossellini’s shorts have actually been shown on television. Hell, the series has even been mentioned on The Colbert Report, not an easy feat for any non-bear-related piece of entertainment. If anything, that more than a few people have watched and enjoyed the series makes the whole thing even weirder.

Green Porno focuses on the mating habits of various animals. Each short begins with Rossellini’s simple statement of, “If I were a mantis,” or, “If I were a starfish,” before quickly jumping directly into how her genitals would work in each case, what her turn-ons would be, and, with surprising frequentcy, how exactly she would defecate. Rossellini herself acts out each of these in a stunning handmade animal costume, mating with a giant prop partner and then ending abruptly when the act is finished. This brief description doesn’t do the series nearly the justice it deserves, though. Suffice it to say, if you wish to see Rossellini dressed as a snail crapping on her own head, these are the videos for you. And if, like the other 99.999% of the population, you never would’ve conceived of such a thing, there's a chance you’ll probably still want to check out the series.

The cumulative effect of all of these elements is somewhere between throwing your brain in a blender and, well, dressing up as a snail and crapping on your own head. In a certain sense, they’re very naturalistic, depicting animal mating in a way that would make Jean Painlevé proud. In a very real sense, they’re factually correct, and if it’s a bit disgusting, well, so is the world around us. In another sense, they’re related to surrealistic art cinema, with some influence from David Lynch, Alejandro Jodorowsky and Michel Gondry. The quality of the filming and props involved makes it easy to see what tradition Rossellini and co-director Jody Shapiro were interested in contextualizing themselves in, and compared with Matthew Barney, it’s not even overly obsessed with sex. In a third, perhaps most obvious sense, the films are kind of like an elementary-school play. In fact, they’re a lot like an elementary-school play, and this is probably the most disturbing part of Green Porno.



All of this is done with the assistance of Rossellini’s acting, if it can really be called that, and more importantly, her sweet, thoughtful, highly accented and infinitely cultured voice...talking about the importance of penis shape. It’s a combination of high and low brow that really strains your thinking and makes developing coherent thoughts about the series, other than “Isn’t this just insane?” difficult. There is something more than shock value to the shorts, though, even if it can be hard to look past the insane costumes and sadomasochistic snails.

Rossellini is concerned partially with equality and the role of the sexes in nature, like Painlevé before her. To emphasize this, she primarily plays male characters and frequently features shorts with dominant women. It’s odd to see Rossellini hump a giant inanimate fly, but at least there’s a point. I think. More than equality, though, Rosselini is interested in the seemingly infinite sexual variety offered by nature. Sexual or asexual, none of the mating in Green Porno's shorts is like any of the others, and the roles between the sexes are just as varied.

   

It’s important that Rossellini isn’t just the narrator for the series and that she actually acts out each of the strange configurations. The shorts point not only to the variety within animals, but also within humans. After watching the series for the first time, the first question I found myself asking was if Rossellini were to do one of these shorts on humans, what would follow her, “If were a human...” introduction? Sure, the basics are there, but beyond that, the mating habits of humans, regardless of gender or orientation, are just too varied for such a film, and not just because Green Porno has given furries a whole slew of new ideas.

The entirety of Green Porno is available online, and the shorts also feature occasionally before some of IFC’s theatrical releases. Season One focuses on insects, Season Two is on marine animals, and a third season that focuses on farm animals we eat is set for production, which sounds likely to be somehow both more and less bizarre than its predecessors.