Juliet Bashore’s groundbreaking docu-fiction Kamikaze Hearts is very much a product of a very specific period of the late 80s – not only in content, but also cinematic and cultural legacy. Released just prior to the more marketable and popular New Queer Cinema of the 1990s, Kamikaze Hearts’s taboo subject matter (pornography, graphic sex, and drug use), not to mention unstable genre categorisation and potted release history, scuppered the film’s from achieving canon status. But a 2022 release from Kino Lorber and rounds on various festivals’ restoration circuits courtesy of such organisations as Cinema Rediscovered (also known as CineRedis) have brought the film a new audience – and deserving so, because it’s a film that should be seen by a wider audience. 
 
In Kamikaze Hearts, Sharon ‘Mitch’ Mitchell and Tigr Mennett navigate their relationship as two active participants in the adult entertainment industry while filming a porn parody of Bizet’s opera ‘Carmen’. The production is riddled with set backs and problems, and we see how the filming impacts the couple’s relationship alongside the manipulation, abuse, and the excesses of the underground porn world during the 1980s. 
 
Bashore conceived the idea for the 1986 American quasi-documentary film as a filmmaking student working as an assistant director on a documentary about the porn industry in San Francisco, which is where she met Tigr. Tigr was head over heels in love with Mitchell, and in Bashore’s words, Tigr’s ‘idea of doing this homage to this woman that she was in love with—just came together perfectly. And that’s how it started.’
 
While multiple elements of Kamikaze Hearts are genuine, the ‘Carmen’ parody and the leading couple’s arguments were scripted and storyboarded, which assists to blur the line between truth and reality. The film straddles a fine line between fact and fiction – its alternative title is ‘Fact or Fiction’ – and this remains a thorough line throughout the film. Plus, Mitchell never appears to be “off” and is constantly performing. At one point she says, ‘I get paid to wait around between shots. I don’t get paid to act. I do that all the time.’
 
Bashore spoke to ScreenSlate in 2022 about the film’s fluctuating perceptions, and it’s tease between documentary and fiction, saying, 
 

‘I’ve learned to describe it differently depending on who the audience is because, from the very beginning, it was totally misunderstood. And I finally just gave in and said, Okay, it’s a documentary. I mean, people wouldn’t understand that it wasn’t really a documentary. When it first got picked up on the festival circuit it was stuck in the documentary section, and there was nothing I could do. They insisted that it was a documentary. So, I’ve learned to describe it in a way that I think the audience is gonna be able to understand, but that’s transformed. The audience is so different now and, in a way, I’m not used to talking to an audience that totally gets the way in which it is a documentary and isn’t a documentary. That’s not confusing at all to audiences now.’

 
The initial critical response for Kamikaze Hearts was varied, but Bashore’s filmmaking was consistently lauded, and the film has achieved something of a reappraisal in recent years. Some of the positive reviews included Kevin Thomas for the Los Angeles Times, who praised Bashore for ‘wisely’ allowing individual viewers to decide which portions are true. Liz Galst of Boston’s Gay Community News called Kamikaze Hearts “amazingly powerful,” notably Mitch and Tigr’s relationship and how pornographic performers navigate the lines between fiction and reality and went on to herald Bashore for being “at the forefront of U.S. non-fiction filmmaking”. But even the less favourable reviews could not deny the indelible images and people who linger long after the closing credits role.
 
As Bashore told ScreenSlate, ‘my film is about the layers of fantasy that surround that. It’s not about the the pornographic image so much as it is [about] all the layers, this other kind of striptease that’s going on, this psychic striptease.’
 
Aside from being an time capsule of a very specific time and an insightful depiction of the porn industry, part of Kamikaze Heart’s enduring nature – aside from Bashore’s lens – is due to Sharon Mitchell, who is one of the most charismatic screen presences you’ll encounter: glamourous, uninhibited, charming, cosmopolitan, a woman in command of her power who knows how to use her power. Mitchell made approximately 1,000 pornographic films over a 20-year career, including 38 as a director, but in 1996 she quit drugs, became a certified addiction counsellor, and obtained a MA and a PhD from the Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality. Now a credited sexologist, in 1998 Mitchell founded the adult industry’s first mass testing service, which served practically every working performer in the US for 15 years, testing over 1000 performers per month (before being shut down due to data leak in 2011). That’s a film in itself.

*Film introduction for at Midlands Arts Centre, Birmingham, January 13 2024.