The factual connections between Jean Genet, Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Gus Van Sant are known. In 1982, Fassbinder adapted Genet's Querelle de Brest; in 1991, calling on Udo Kier to act in My Own Private Idaho, Van Sant recreated within his cinema some of the most fascinating scenes from Fassbinder's work, not only moments of homosexual pick-ups and prostitution, but also dance and music hall numbers that, each time, transform the body into a pure enigma in terms of its immersion in light and appearances.

One of several problems that seems to determine these encounters and filiations is the emergence and use of the classical body in the context of modern filmmaking. For these rebellious and polemical filmmaking styles, what is meant by the sudden recourse to a masculine figure that immediately calls to mind Phidias, Praxiteles and Michelangelo? Is this simply a matter of erotic iconography? Making room for the figure of a lost body, of vanished ideal beauty? Or playing with neo-classical conventions, like Roland Barthes agreeing to place Girodet's Endymion on the cover of a new edition of S/Z?

All this and much more: Instances of Attic bodies in the films of Genet, Fassbinder and Van Sant are, on a profound level, figures of the body opening itself up to the image. On the one hand of course, because the ideal body is an image in se or, as Winckelmann summarizes the tradition, a kind of beauty produced by “brain-born images.” On the other hand, especially, because in all three cases, the presence of a beautiful anatomy provides the occasion for a reversal and its radicalization. Erwin Panofsky has shown how, in the history of styles, a theory of physical proportions reveals the organization of the relationship between the anatomy, space and the intellectual world.