Love hurts

Kirby Dick - Sick: the life and death of Bob Flanagan, supermasochist - 1997 ICA and selected cinemas

Good cinema like good art is uncompromising or inspiring: if you are lucky it is both. Sick falls into the latter category. It is not easy viewing, delving into a very marginal and challenging area of human sexuality. Bob Flanagan was a performance artist and self-styled supermasochist who died in 1995 following a long battle with cystic fibrosis. The film documents the final years of his life.

Flanagan was a fighter. Sick from birth, he was given only six or seven years to live. Against the odds he survived into his 40s. His art focused unapologetically on his condition and his supermasochism.

In a strangely humourous scene, Flanagan relates the difficulty he had simulating excreta for his - autobiographical - sculpture, Visible Man. This see-through statue had cystic fibrosis phlegm oozing from its mouth, semen from its penis and excreta from its anus. Flanagan recounts how he experimented for a year before finally settling on an unlikely mixture of VO5 shampoo and paint.

The film is dotted with interviews with Flanagan's family. His parents' reaction to their son's sexuality is a mixture of confusion and deep insight. His father likens Flanagan to a trapeze artist who challenges death with every twist and turn yet lands on his feet each and every time. His masochism was affirmation of control over a body damned and distorted by cystic fibrosis.

The film is not for the squeamish. Nor for the narrow-minded. Inserting a large steel ball up someone's rectum as an act of love could easily be dismissed as, well, sick. Driving a nail through the head of your penis even more so. And yet this is a truly human film. Warmth and humour shine through. Definitely one to see.

Andy Hannah