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MichaelB wrote:

Numero Trois wrote:Maybe the real story of this compilation is that decades after the lifting of censorship no one has yet figured out how to make a great pornographic movie.

Jan Svankmajer arguably managed it with Conspirators of Pleasure - but it's unlikely anyone would use it as masturbation material. Which is ironic, given that that's the central theme of the film.

I think the great success of the film is that Svankmajer understands there's nothing stranger than other people's (and our own, naturally) sexuality. Arousal is absolutely idiosyncratic, and most pornographic films only aim for generalized, generic scenarios, which are really only suited to the generalized, generic aspects of individual sexualities. At the other extreme - the art film end, maybe, and the one represented by several of the films in Destricted - there are filmmakers who are generalizing their own sexually arousing images ("I find this erotic, but it's so wacky let's call it art") or worse, are using 'transgressive' sexual imagery simply for arid aesthetic ends ("it's sexually explicit, therefore it's porn, therefore I'm so damn edgy"). Both seem like dead ends to me. The difference with Svankmajer is that he's making the leap into envisioning other people's sexualities, in all their ridiculous detail. Maybe only one in 100,000 actually find it erotic (I bet there are some absolutely delighted carpists out there!), but as artistic spectacle it's much more rewarding for the rest of us.

vogler wrote:I think it's more the case that decades after the lifting of censorship practically everyone has forgotten how to make a great pornographic movie. There have been many great pornographic movies but one has to look away from tripe like Destricted towards the real auteurs of adult cinema from the pre-video-era Golden age. Many of these people were far greater artists than any of those involved with Destricted could ever hope to be. Gerard Damiano, Radley Metzger, Gary Graver, Lasse Braun, Jonas Middleton, Armand Weston, Anthony Spinelli, Cecil Howard, the Mitchell Brothers, Shaun Costello, Stephen Sayadian, Zebedy Colt and many others produced films that were very genuine, and often quite successful, attempts at creating erotic/pornographic art.

If that's the case, then it sounds like a job for Criterion....

... and a good topic for another thread, if anyone would like to start one.

vogler wrote:What often shows in 1970s and early 80s adult cinema is the artistic freedom that these film-makers had. As long as the films fulfilled their purpose - to show explicit sex - they seemed to be able to get away with producing whatever kinds of films they liked. This led to all kinds of strange amalgams of pornography and bizarre surrealist inspired imagery. At their very best classic porn films most closely resemble some kind of experimental underground cinema. For me it is a very important area of creative independent film-making.

This is a good description of Japanese Pinku cinema as well. Of course, the funny thing is that it seems Pinku cinema is relatively better represented on DVD than those American porn directors you mentioned. I've seen pinku DVDs for sale in mainstream stores, but not any American guys except for Metzger.

zedz wrote:At the other extreme - the art film end, maybe, and the one represented by several of the films in Destricted - there are filmmakers who are generalizing their own sexually arousing images ("I find this erotic, but it's so wacky let's call it art") or worse, are using 'transgressive' sexual imagery simply for arid aesthetic ends ("it's sexually explicit, therefore it's porn, therefore I'm so damn edgy").

Opinions definetly vary, but I thought Catherine Breillat was able to break at least some legitimate ground with "Romance" and "Anatomy of Hell." Those films do have their moments, although as a whole they don't work terribly well, to say the least. Just like with so many other of the well known recent pornographic tinged movies.

Numero Trois wrote:This is a good description of Japanese Pinku cinema as well.

Yes, absolutely, although one major difference would be that many of the Japanese Pink films came out of the Japanese studio system, whereas the adult films I'm talking about were independent productions (sometimes with some very shady sources of funding). I don't believe it was strictly legal to make them even after censorship was relaxed. Some of the pink films I like very much, especially some work by Noboro Tanaka, Chusei Sone and Masaru Konuma. Akio Jissoji's Nikkatsu film Prosperities of Vice is a good example of a director using the system and the format to make a personal artistic statement. There's also the Independent side of the pink cinema with directors such as Tetsuji Takechi and Koji Wakamatsu, who clearly had artistic intentions.

I think this issue goes beyond adult films and pink films to almost all genres of exploitation, sexploitation, horror etc. There's a lot more creativity and artistry to be found than many people believe.

Numero Trois wrote:Of course, the funny thing is that it seems Pinku cinema is relatively better represented on DVD than those American porn directors you mentioned. I've seen pinku DVDs for sale in mainstream stores, but not any American guys except for Metzger.

With a few exceptions classic porn has always been horribly treated on DVD. They're still releasing DVDs from very poor video masters made in the early 80s. Things seem to be changing slowly though. One of the most bizarre experimental porn films of all time, Through the Looking Glass, will soon be released in a very special edition. It may even be blu-ray. The old DVD was hideous.

But the reality is probably that most people would hate these films with a passion, so it'll always remain a specialised market.

Numero Trois wrote:

zedz wrote:At the other extreme - the art film end, maybe, and the one represented by several of the films in Destricted - there are filmmakers who are generalizing their own sexually arousing images ("I find this erotic, but it's so wacky let's call it art") or worse, are using 'transgressive' sexual imagery simply for arid aesthetic ends ("it's sexually explicit, therefore it's porn, therefore I'm so damn edgy").

Opinions definetly vary, but I thought Catherine Breillat was able to break at least some legitimate ground with "Romance" and "Anatomy of Hell." Those films do have their moments, although as a whole they don't work terribly well, to say the least. Just like with so many other of the well known recent pornographic tinged movies.

In relation to Destricted I understand what Zedz is saying, though I definitely wouldn't put Catherine Breillat in the same bracket. It seems very clear to me that Breillat has always been very genuine about what she is doing. This comes across very clearly in the interview on the Tartan DVD of Anatomy of Hell. I think it's important to remember that she was using explicit imagery in her films way before it became a trend in modern art cinema. This goes right back to her first film Une vraie jeune fille in 1976. To me all of her work feels like a very personal expression of her interests and ideas. Of course they're not the kind of ideas that are going to appeal to a mass audience. I like all of her films to varying extents, although I particularly enjoyed Une vieille maîtresse and I look forward to seeing where her work will go in the future. I think she's a talented film-maker, and if she keeps going on her current less sexually explicit route then I have a feeling many more people will start to feel the same way.

I wasn't intending to tar Breillat with that brush. Although I think her more 'transgressive' films (Romance and Anatomy of Hell are the ones I've seen) aren't good, I don't doubt they're sincere, and she's made some great films that are in line with their concerns. I don't think either of those films would conceivably count as pornographic - they're almost prudish in their shunning of arousal.

I think that Breillat is worth bringing up in this thread since she has proven to be far more successful in her 'art or porn?' explorations than any of the directors of these shorts. Romance and Anatomy of Hell are especially rewarding in the way that they tackle fantasy and reality, particularly in the focus on the rather arbitrarily defined 'psychic split' between them and who acts to control that split - is it society in deciding what is currently acceptable to fantasise about and what isn't? (i.e. classical censorship) Is it men limiting their partners options or forcing consideration of ideas a woman would ordinarily be uninterested in? Or is it a personal thing, where it is up to you to decide what boundaries apply, what you will and won't do, or what you will fantasise, or fear, about? Or is it a combination of all of these factors, and others?

Romance is mostly the fantasies and reactions of a frustrated woman taking in rape, tender bondage, sex with a well hung hunk, gynaecological examination, etc that is triggered by the seeming disinterest in sex by her boyfriend, all of which feeds into larger issues of motherhood and death - the two poles of human experience. The ghostly Anatomy of Hell is very interesting for the way in which the Rocco Siffredi character feels like a character willed into existence, or possessed, by the woman as a gay man willing to help our heroine out in her clinical, intellectual experimentations until the entire extremely rigidly defined and proscribed world around them feels similarly detached from reality - there is an emotional connection there but at a remove, like a modern version of a gothic romance (this of course allows me to make the 'rakish hero' pun!)

I also like the way that in the more explicit films it seems that Breillat is suggesting that it is this exact split that is the problem, more than the explicitness in itself. The division into what is acceptable and what is not creates the illusion of safety but also allows a fear of the unacceptable beyond its boundaries to be created, which only grows the more insulated a person becomes. There is an interest in the way that we have rules created to clinically distance an object (i.e. the tampon scene from Anatomy of Hell), to remove any sexual connotation from it and leave just a functional object (Cronenberg's Dead Ringers also gets into this idea with the Mantle brothers creating tools that may function better than those currently used but which are too new to have that functional societal distance placed on them yet to make them feel acceptable for gynaecological examinations - they still seem too much like devices of torture or works of art to be acceptable). Much as the splitting off of pornographic cinema from the rest of film allows the mainstream films that are left to show sex but only as long as it has a function and significance within a larger plot, not just purely for the sake of the sexual gratification of the viewer (or at least keep up a pretence that this is what they are doing!)

To be released in the USA by Revolver Entertainment in October. For those who care.

Interesting - Balkans Erotic Epic, Sync and Death Valley have been swapped out for Cecily Brown's Four Letter Heaven, Marilyn Minter's Green Pink Caviar (trailer) and Sante D'Orazio's Scratch This. A shame really as Balkans... and Sync were the most fun of the films. I wonder if copyright for all the film clips caused the problems with releasing Sync (and maybe Death Valley is being held back for an unexpectedly eye-popping DVD extra on the US disc for Sam Taylor-Wood's recent John Lennon biopic Nowhere Boy!)

Here's a quote from the Observer profile of Cecily Brown:

The last thing I saw in the exhibition was a short, frisky film made by Brown in 1995 and said to have influenced her work. Four Letter Heaven flickers like an old movie (or judders like an old bed) and tells a hyperactive story about sex. It is a watercolour -animation, a New Yorker's version of What the Butler Saw. Pérez Prado's Latin music suggests a fairground and the film involves all the (sexual) fun of the fair (penises dished up like so many ice lollies). It is playful, skilful, funny, but, in contrast to the paintings, slight.

And here's a description from an artdaily.org article about Scratch This:

The work of photographer Sante D'Orazio serves as one of the central inspirations for “In Dialogue". In addition to contributing his large-format photographs of painters Matthew Barney and Damien Hirst, D’Orazio contributes the sole installation featured in the show. Viewers will enter a small, custom-built interior space that houses his abstract work titled "Scratch This.”

The purpose-built, intimate room will showcase a deconstructed pornographic film from the 1970s, which has been transformed into a dynamic, painstakingly manipulated installation. Says the artist,

"The porn is an excuse to scratch out peoples faces and privates as a found guide to place marks on the surface of each image. As the film moves, these marks move and dance around the screen and create a moving abstraction, a moving painting if you will. The movement or abstraction is the subject, and the porn serves as the backdrop. By scratching out my figures I am eliminating identities and the individuals’ existence as in "scratch him out", a term used to 'kill or cause the death of'. Symbolically a 'momento mori' and/or, the ancient theme of 'Sex and Death'.

Hmmm... :-k

That's odd. I'm pretty sure I saw that scratched film as part of Destricted years ago. Were there different versions of the film in circulation?

At any rate, it was pretty mediocre. Most found-porn-footage films die twitching in the shadow of Peggy Ahwesh's Color of Love.

That Peggy Ahwesh film is in this compilation. "Xperimental Eros" - Has anyone seen it? Looks promising. Just snagged me a copy.

colinr0380 wrote:A shame really as Balkans... and Sync were the most fun of the films.

Maybe Marina Abramovic is saving "Balkans" for a future DVD.

Numero Trois wrote:That Peggy Ahwesh film is in this compilation. "Xperimental Eros" - Has anyone seen it? Looks promising. Just snagged me a copy.

I didn't even know that disc existed. The Naomi Uman film on it is very good as well, but none of the other stuff rings a bell.