Pornosophy
As the porn film season at the Cornerhouse in Manchester has drawn to a close, the article looks at what heights porn filmmakers are hoping to reach for, and how likely they are to succeed.
(First published at Exzibit.net on 05 August 2005)
The porn film season at the Cornerhouse in Manchester was altogether a good treat to all cinema fans. Of 11 tours de force in the nude three are already in the golden fund of the world’s cinema. A Russ Meyer’s 1965 thriller Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (USA) was no. 6 in Jonathan Ross’s Top Ten. Catherine Breillart put In The Realm Of The Senses (Ai No Corrida, Japan, 1975) as her top film. In her words, without it she would never have made Romance. The third was Last Tango In Paris (Italy/France, 1978), which sadly is increasingly becoming a pornographic commonplace due to a certain bizarre scene. Other unconditionally successful films included Variety (USA, 1983), Inside “The Deep Throat” (USA, 2004), and a tragicomic Torremolinos 73 (Spain/Denmark, 2003). The rest was more or less disappointing: a currently much publicised 9 Songs (UK, 2004), a “very controversial” Baise-Moi (France, 2000), a very politically active Raspberry Reich (Canada/Germany, 2003), and a very bizarre La Bete (France, 1975).
The panel discussion held at the Cornerhouse on July 31st included John Hoyles, a retired teacher of English and Related Literature at Hull University, Anna Span, the first British porn director, and Paul Navarro and David Hyman, both from the BBFC. Set out to provide the porn season with a closure, the panel has ultimately failed to do so. It has nonetheless proved that pornography needs more supervision because it is shrewder and less life-bursting than the films by Tinto Brass, none of which was included in the retrospective. For Brass, pornography was a myth, the Venetian blinds designed by the hypocrites in order to deny the audience access to the forbidden fruits and joys. In his films pornography is a discovery of the beauty of the body and the complications it involves. Apparently having enough of this Epicurean joie de vivre, pornography today walks the extra mile, becoming a wacky conceptual movement.
The fact that in the past few years porn directors have been trying to make a film-statement stands for pornography’s desperate attempt to define its artistic form. So, what is the goal of the porn feature films that choose pornographic action as the focal point of the plot? Is pornography simply trying to access the general viewer by making ‘deep’, serious films? Or does it actually have something important to say, which is best conveyed through the medium of a sexual act?
Raspberry Reich is by far THE illustration to this dilemma: you can concentrate either on copulating people or on political messages that go across the screen and are read by the voice-over. You may think about Iraq gazing at G. W. Bush’s grin in place of penis glands, or you may pursue a more carnal purpose, by looking at the shaft. And so Bruce La Bruce indirectly suggests that it’s up to a viewer to be offended. In the end, throughout the film there is so much talk against capitalism, imperialism and the war in Iraq that seeing an occasional erect penis shouldn’t probably bother you.
Moreover, a female protagonist invites you to join the homosexual intifada. For the sake of self-liberation, of course: you must turn gay in order to explore yourself and to become a free man. One important “but” – women are not invited to this frenzy of homosexual revolutionary love. It is a very proactive and philosophical film, indeed.
In its turn, Baise-moi is sending a socially acute message: these poor girls who ruthlessly kill other girls and boys are in fact driven to do so. You are invited to presume that the only response to this rotten world is the warm gun. Is it really? The answer depends on your belief in mankind, but the film equally fails to arouse you and to make you sympathise with these poor things. Not because we’re heartless – rather because we could be their victims.
The efforts of pornography to define itself as a paradigm have not yet reaped any benefit. We must admit that our life is quite pornographic as it is, with current vocabulary, fashion and behaviour. On the other hand, surrealists, for example, had pronounced sexual activity as the most important among all of the man’s activities, and pornography is, in the end, sex. Add to it the yearning of the porn filmmakers to fill the gap between ‘cheap’ porn and expensive but prudish mainstream cinema, and you’ll see that the status of these pornographic feature films is marginal. As stories, they rarely go beyond the expectations of the viewer, while artistically they often leave a lot to be desired.
John Hoyles expressed a wish to see more “pornographic imagination”, and it is the lack of such that had made some films of the season unbearably dull. One of the problems is that pornography has always been walking from the genital close-ups and copious ejaculations towards their ‘context’, as was the case of La Bete. But if you take the year 2005 as the 30th anniversary of this film, it will appear that very little has changed, as one can deduce from watching 9 Songs.
9 Songs has obtained an 18 certificate because, as David Hyman said, it was not meant to arouse. A puzzling comment, surely. Yet it is pornographic exactly as outlined by Anais Nin: it is a dull, boring repertory of copulations that do not start to wind into a coherent plot well until the middle of the film. Despite some good cinematographic moments, it is an uninspiring and emotionally bare movie.
As one journalist put it, it is great to have a film that is just about sex. But that’s exactly the point: 9 Songs is not JUST about sex. It is about love, Antarctica, exploration of the libido, and the hunks on stage. When the story stumbles, a hunk steps in, until the next bedroom moment. Margo Stilley has already featured in the British VOGUE, but it is still better to have a scene like the one in Don’t Look Now than the entire 9 Songs, even so incomparably explicit.
Compare all that to Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965) – it’s electrifying all the way through, but the only sex scene the film contains is pathetic by modern standards. It’s the emotional intensity of the film that turns you on incredibly. Not sexually arouses, but urges for an enterprise. Like the films of Tinto Brass. Or take Torremolinos 73. This film is hilarious at one time and heartbreaking at another. It has a plenty of innuendos and quite explicit sex scenes, and it raises your spirits. As what is exactly the aim of art – to inspire.
The more persistent is pornography in becoming ‘serious’, the bigger is the problem of censorship. In the words of Paul Navarro, the films are being awarded the 18 or R-18 certificate by the degree of obscenity in them. But what’s the criterion? Where there were de Sade and Miller, there are now The Vagina’s Monologues. And it is not uncommon for an adult feature film to use pornographic vocabulary or verbal descriptions of pornographic scenes. Think about Festival (UK, 2005) with its open use of a word “cunt” throughout, or The Bitter Moon (France/UK, 1992) with its graphic description of a man’s orgasm caused by a woman urinating on him. None of these have been cut. Yet the BBFC is currently twisting its brains over Taxi To The Toilet (Germany, 1980), which fragment was shown at the panel in Manchester. It contains both flagellation AND urination, but because these are the actual scenes, not verbalised images, they must be cut out.
Paradoxically, a pornographic film may be a good proof of the bright side of multiculturalism. And certainly, by introducing censorship we are potentially curbing the imaginative power of a man, as well as threatening multicultural relations in society. In this case Hoyles’s wish may never come true because a really good product of pornographic imagination will be cut. However, there remains a possibility that something imaginatively poor but accurately formulated may well access the audience, as it currently is doing.
Strictly speaking, nothing of what has been shown or spoken of during the Pornerhouse season in Manchester was more obscene than what you can read in 120 Days Of Sodom. The only difference is the mediums and the speed by which this obscenity reaches us. By the time de Sade and Henry Miller have finally reached their audiences, they had become outdated. The difference with today’s practice is that we witness everything that is happening. The reason why we are so concerned about pornography is because we can no more turn our back to it. We have to deal with it, yet we don’t know how, because it’s everywhere.
And this fact alone shows our fundamental delusion about today’s cinematic art. Probably better than any other genre, pornography shows that cinema fails as a manipulative agent. At the beginning of the 20th c. it was perceived as this omnipotent force that can influence every single species. Nowadays every single species influences cinema, which may well be a proof of what Ortega y Gasset had written about the all-powerful masses back in 1930. Ever since pornography has become a commonplace, it has also become the best check on the ability of the masses to make their way into art. The pornographic cinema, as much as it can be inartistic or artless, nonetheless falls into the same artistic category since it is being produced by the same means as non-pornographic films.
The sad fact is that all this pornosophy doesn’t take us anywhere where we haven’t yet been. The Cornerhouse porn season has offered a huge choice of mental and cultural journeys, from homosexual intifada through a grim rampage over Ile-de-France and sexual mutilation in Japanese style to the adventures of a salesman-turned-Bergman. But ultimately the choice is still very much between erotica and robotic hardcore. It is the choice between “philosophy in the boudoir” and the absurdity of Sodom. It’s up to you to decide.
