Many might wonder why anyone would want to watch a film about someone who turns a Panasonic video camera on himself when he was so emaciated that one of his lovers referred to him as “Auschwitz Baby” and who died before the result’s first broadcast. Yet with the daily suck of mendacity and ignorance that is life in these barely United States a homemade example of unwavering attention to the actual données of existence, which is exactly what Hervé Guibert provides in Modesty or Shame (1992), his only film, might prove salutary. No pious Oscar-winning perfs by straight actors as in Philadelphia, which debuted a year later, just a fag showing his life as it is, point-blank.

Crucial novelist, tender photographer, photography critic for Le Monde, Guibert won a César for writing the screenplay to the erotic tour de force The Wounded Man (1983) with Patrice Chéreau, its director. No naïf, Guibert, for his impudent stress-test of the genre “home movie,” shoots himself talking on the phone, getting a massage, having the runs, almost breaking down. He rides a stationary bike. He consults with nurses. He dances and shadowboxes. He tosses and turns. He has an operation, films the procedure, and then watches the playback. He flies to Italy. He suns and swims. He’s carried on his lover’s back, too unstable to make it over the craggy shore back home. He plays a version of Russian roulette with two glasses of water, one dosed with poison. He eats stone fruit on a patio and reads Walter de la Mare’s Memoirs of a Midget. He films a little lizard leading its lizardy life. Modesty or Shame is a makeshift cinematic sequence of still lives of the second horrible wave of the AIDS epidemic that is still life, still living, not nature morte.

Guibert’s third book, 1980’s Suzanne et Louise, was a photonovel that juxtaposed forty-some of his photographic portraits of his two great aunts—their poise and twinkle, the unwound tresses of their hair—and his exacting prose printed in facsimile of his handwriting. Steadfast inspirations, the aunties shine in Modesty or Shame, not only tutelary spirits in perseverance and humor but also examples of what he will never (get to) be: old.