The work of French activist, novelist, and essayist Jean Genet was considered controversial in the forties and fifties, because of its explicit homosexuality. Genet made only one film in his entire life, but Un Chant d’amour went on to inspire both David Bowie and Rainer Werner Fassbinder. 

The black-and-white film depicts the horny fantasies of some prisoners and their guard. Un Chant d’amour is at once arousing, poetic, and implicitly political. After being banned from the big screen for years, the film was finally shown publicly for the first time in 1954, albeit stripped of any bare chest or penis.