People these days take pornography for granted. Anybody with an internet connection and enough literary prowess to type the word “porn” into a browser can find more of the stuff than they could ever hope or want to see. And it’s all free of charge. But looking back at the development of this lowest of lowbrow art forms will show that it hasn’t always been that easy. Rock biographer Dave Thompson’s Black and White and Blue traces the origins of pornographic film back to the end of the 18th century up until the 1970s when its legalization in America pushed it out of the underground and into the mainstream.
Pornography certainly didn’t begin in the era of the Industrial Revolution as some might think. Anybody who has studied art history will know very well that the ancients had a fascination for sexually explicit imagery in their visual arts. It wasn’t limited to Western countries either. Plenty of medieval Japanese art leaves nothing to the imagination as far as bodily pleasures go. Hindu art has a long tradition of erotic imagery. Even some prehistoric cave paintings have been found that portray female genitalia in ways that might bring to mind the kinds of things you see on men’s public restroom stalls. If you’ve ever wondered who draws that variety of graffiti while sitting on a restaurant shitter, just find the most cavemannish looking dude in the diner and draw your own conclusions. Then the invention of the printing press brought a flood of erotic literature with it as literacy rates grew rapidly. In fact, one response to major technological changes tends to be sexual in nature. The invention of the daguerreotype was no exception.
The difference with the advent of film is that, for the first time in history, real humans instead of artistically rendered representations could be used as subjects for erotic art. The controversy over the exploitation of human subjects has been with us ever since the first nude photographs were produced. But film and sex have been engaged in a figurative type of intercourse from the start. Eadweard Muybridge, Thomas Edison, and the Lumiere brothers all used nudes and burlesque dancers in their earliest experiments with the medium of the moving image. Flip card films in nickelodeon arcades showing dancing women and strippers began appearing around the turn of the 20th century. As the silent film era revved up and camera equipment became more readily available to those with enough money, the cultural phenomenon of ten minute stag films displaying people indulging in the pleasures of the human reproductive system emerged.
A large portion of this book is about the actual films, primarily in the stag film era that lasted roughly up until the 1960s, while the main side issues explored are the technological changes that influenced pornography production and the culture and business practices that surrounded the viewing of these films. The subject of still photography is left almost untouched.
Antique technology buffs who are interested in the history of film making equipment might find this book interesting simply because it says so much about the progression of movie cameras, darkroom development, and how those changes influenced the techniques of movie making in general. Today we take things like zoom lenses or film splicing for granted, but when these changes were introduced, they profoundly altered the way things are done. The introduction of 35mm film and remote film processing laboratories were significant too. Thompson doesn’t get too technical about these matters, but he does show how important film making gadgetry is in the medium’s history. A lot of these changes applied to non-erotic films just as much as they did to the stags, with the exception of color film and sound. Stag films got stuck in the black and white silent film era, complete with inter-title cards for dialogue, until the time of the sexual revolution, mostly due to budget restraints, but also because patrons of the underground cinema were solely interested in the visual portrayal of physical intimacy more than how it sounded.
There is another reason why the sound might not matter. Stag movies were shown to groups of men in secretive locations. Usually they were drunk, raucous, and constantly shouting and whistling at the screen. They smoked a lot too, so much that a slang term for stag films was “smokies”. This gets into the culture surrounding the exhibition of these films. One of the ways they were shown was by traveling salesmen who brought them into town, quietly announced to patrons of bars that they had stag films to show, and then led their customers to some place like a field outside city limits or a remote parking lot. There they set up a tent and played their reels. Other times, stags were rented and shown in the halls of fraternal orders like the Elks, Odd Fellows, or Moose Lodges. If you’ve ever wondered what secret the Freemasons are guarding so carefully, you might have found your answer here. There is no telling what these brothers were doing while watching these films and maybe it’s best left to the imagination. But seriously folks, a lot of these men watched the stags because there was no such thing as sex education in those days. They simply didn’t know much about how to do it. It was a time when condoms were illegal and oral sex was not a part of anybody’s marriage. Even the vice squads that chased after pornographers were in the dark when it came to stag cinema; one officer issued an arrest warrant for Dick Hard and Lotta Cum because those were the performers’ names listed in the credits of a movie they seized. Forensic science was still in its infancy then, I guess.
The author has spent far more time watching and analyzing stag films than I would ever care to. Porno movies aren’t exactly high concept works of art and there is only so much you can do with the ins and outs of the subject matter. Large portions of this book describe the contents of stag films and Thompson comes close to over-indulging in it, but at least he had the decency to alter his critical evaluations with other peripheral information like anecdotes about the performers and viewers, the technology, and the cultural context. The forays into rarer forms of stag films break up the monotony too; while most stag films showed ordinary vanilla sex, a small number catered to fetishes like BDSM, lesbianism, group sex, and interracial love making. Although Mexican or Cuban produced bestiality films showed up on occasion, other subjects that are illegal now were rare and violet porn almost non-existent. In fact, riots sometimes broke out at screenings when the men in the audience though the female performers were being treated too disrespectfully. Gay stag films were almost non-existent until the 1950s.
The final chapters dealing with the Sexual Revolution shows how the booming post war economy and rapid technological development contributed to changes in the viewing of pornography. Peep shows came back and privately viewed 8mm film loops became popular as well as super 8 movie projectors that made home viewing possible. Handheld cameras came on the market for private film making too. The combination of changing attitudes towards sex and the legalization of porn in the 1960s resulted in everybody letting it all hang out for the world to see. For the first time, talk of a porn industry became common as it virtually exploded, first in Europe, mostly in Scandinavia, and then in New York City and San Francisco, both epicenters of the hippy counter culture scene. Then along came Deep Throat and that is about where Dave Thompson’s story ends.
What the author gets right is in the blending of the production and content of stag films with the culture surrounding them. He shows how the wider society influenced stag films and they reflected the progressive changes in society along the way. The style and content of these movies marked cultural and technological shifts in ways that other mediums do not. This really is not a sociological study though. It is a work of film history put into a sociological context so that we don’t get bored to death with endless descriptions of people doing the horizontal hokey pokey in front of a camera thereby allowing us to draw conclusions about the nature of human societies during the 20th century.
In conclusion, Black and White and Blue is a good book providing you are interested in the subject matter. It has always been a curiosity to me that so many people like watching others having sex on film, and yet porn is universally popular and the industry never ceases to thrive. The social and psychological reasons for that deserve to be taken up in other studies, but I do have a theory that relates directly to medium itself. Film was invented for the visual depiction of motion. The two most important forms of motion for human survival, sex and violence, are probably the most common and fascinating selements in film. Violence is exciting to us because of our fight or flight instincts that we are genetically programmed with to save our lives, while sex is important for the continuation of the species. As mammals, sex is also a way of forming communal bonds and fulfilling needs for acceptance. When these activities are portrayed in film, it arouses emotions associated with our deepest, most fundamental primal instincts. As Sigmund Freud would say, we need to repress these instincts in order to function in a civilized society which leads to them being sublimated or disconnected from ourselves. With the advancement of technology and the changes it has brought about, it is probably impossible to return all the contents to Pandora’s Box. Reverse orgasms are impossible. Once that ejaculatory spasm has happened, the sperm can not go back to its origin. Like it or not, despite what Andrea Dworkin thought, pornography is here to stay.
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