Atomic Cinema: Essay 1970s adult

Belle de Jour
ART

Film writer Danny Perry has done as much as anyone to popularize off-beat movies. In his "Cult Movies" books he rejected arbitrary content distinctions and included a few of the most popular or interesting 1970s adult movies right alongside all the other types. He said that nobody has to love them but that anyone who really loves film should have some awareness of the best of the genre.

That seems very right to me. The counter statement that "all adult films can be discounted entirely" is an exultation of ignorance akin to saying "no western is of real interest." A good sex movie is a better work of art than a bad regular movie and visa versa.

This section is for a few of the more artistically or historically interesting 1970s adult movies that were made to be shown in theaters. Primarily adult theatres, though the occasional mainstream theatre would have late night or matinee adult film showings.

I don't know of a 1970s adult movie I would call a great film but some 1970s adult films are good movies. I'd guess that America and Europe combined to make about 100-200 adult movies that are better than the average movie. Hundreds more exceed the minimal "real movie" standard set by THE MONSTER THAT CHALLENGED THE WORLD (1957) or John Wayne's THE TELEGRAPH TRAIL (1932).

In their heyday these movies were influential. Formal Hollywood censorship had ended only a few years before and everyone was thinking about limits and possibilities. Hollywood always kept (and keeps) a fascinated eye on exploitation genres looking for stray bits of freedom to borrow.

[Some comments here are best read in conjunction with this essay about daring movies and this one about my suspicion that our standards of film decency are primarily designed to coarsen pornography while discouraging the development of more likeable erotica.]

The 1970s adult movie was really a sub-genre like the Spaghetti Western. It was one segment of the continuous line of independent movies made to fill the market niche created by the Hollywood production code, a line of movies that started in the 1930s and continues to this day.

For decades no Hollywood movie could show a bad guy defeat the police or show someone finding love or satisfaction in an adulterous relationship. For decades more Hollywood movies could not mention certain body parts or allude to homosexuality. Between 1935 and 1965 there was no nudity in a Hollywood film.

In any given year there was a demand for movies that exceeded the prevailing Hollywood standards of subject matter, violence, language and sexual candor. Whenever Hollywood standards loosened exploitation movie standards had to loosen the same relative amount just to remain viable. A bare breast was only definitive of an exploitation movie until Hollywood went topless, and so on.

The biggest single reason that adult films in 1973 were more explicit than adult films in 1963 was because 1973 Hollywood films were more explicit than 1963 Hollywood films.

Every penny made by the exploitation industry was a penny Hollywood missed out on, so Hollywood studios kept the gap between their standards and the legal limit as thin as possible. I doubt 1970s adult films were any more culturally excessive than their 1960s counterparts. 1960s "nudie" movies may have overwhelming to 1960s audiences.

It's relative. It's like asking whether roller coasters today are scarier than 1930s roller coasters. Roller coasters are designed within the framework of people's current expectations of roller coasters. Today's rides are definitely faster but are the people on them really more scared than 1930s coaster riders?

Were it not for the "adults only" genre LAST TANGO IN PARIS and MIDNIGHT COWBOY and CARNAL KNOWLEDGE and hundreds of other mainstream movies would never have existed.

I don't mean that to sound heavier than it is... it's just a fact.

Most of the 1970s directors were men and women with some experience with real film-making who wanted to make movies they could be proud of. It was still an open question whether you could use adult film as a springboard to more substantial work. As I never tire of pointing out, almost every single top director of 1970s adult films also made soft core art house or drive-in movies or low-budget horror movies.

I was recently watching a documentary about the late phase of Orson Welles' career and was surprised to learn that everything Welles directed after 1970 was photographed by Gary Graver. The documentary never mentioned that cinematographer Gary Graver directed over 100 films under the name Robert McCallum. When a film documentarian interviews someone who has directed over 100 feature films the fact usually gets mentioned, but the actors and actresses in most of Graver's films have sex with each other so it was as if the bulk of the man's creative career simply didn't exist! If the Robert McCallum oeuvre was a bunch of handheld video of junkies and runaways shot in bus station men's rooms maybe I'd understand, but Graver's adult films were some of the most professional and expensive adult movies ever made, and were the highest quality films Graver ever directed.

Recent video smut has almost nothing in common with the 1970s genre, yet some people consider them to be indistinguishable because of similarity of content. (Presumably they also consider GRAND ILLUSION and HOGAN'S HEROES to be indistinguishable because of similarity of content.)

If you have only ever seen a contemporary porn video you would be astonished by how far the sex film concept has fallen in a short time. (Modern video porn offends me because its uniform crumminess and insincerity makes the whole concept of erotic film seem pointless. It discourages the development of more interesting erotic genres.)

The most distinctive (and ironic) trait of this genre is innocence.

The first wave of explicit performers had never seen an explicit feature film... they had nothing to guide them except the conventions of soft core films and their own sexual instincts and experiences. By the 1980s the gig had become a conventionalized and wholly insincere profession. (Even the amateurs in modern movies are phonier than the old-time professionals.)

In the 1970s the productions were professional and the performances felt amateur. (Using the word's original connotation; a thing done for the love of the thing itself.) Today the performances are ruthlessly professional while the productions are amateurish. (Using the word's modern connotation; incompetent.)

Barbara Broadcast
PORN

Final Note: The first wave of 1970s directors were improvising a visual vocabulary. The only difference between their movies and 1960s adult movies was the depiction of specific sexual content. Nobody had ever tried to film real sex using Hollywood standards of craft.

The best 1970s film-makers photographed sex in a way that made it look more beautiful than real life, and that's a serious artistic accomplishment. (The ugliness of incompetent sex films demonstrates just how much talent and craft went into the pretty ones. If this isn't an art form then why are certain director's movies always more beautiful than everyone else's?)

The problem with content classifications...

Art people consider style and period to be more artistically definitive than content. That's why art exhibitions tend to have titles like "Impressionist Painting in France: 1860-1890" rather than "Paintings of Windmills."

There's just nothing so obvious about the hard-soft distinction. It's not an artistic classification! No American court since 1970 has considered that distinction definitive of artistic merit. (Even Justice Scalia, a man who supports anti-masturbation laws, recognizes that the hard-soft distinction cannot be a measure of worth.)

My chief objection to our culturally widespread "xxx" content distinction is that it has rewritten 1960s-1970s film history, separating 1970s adult feature films from the 1960s adult feature films they so resemble and instead lumping 1970s features in with 1990s videos with which they have little in common. Equating the two based on a trait that's not artistically definitive is like a grocery store putting the cherries next to the ground beef because they're both red!

Unlike today, the 1960s-1970s adult film industry was an integral sub-set of the film industry and that broad adult/genre/exploitation industry made the great majority of all independently produced American motion pictures.

Any critic looking with her own eyes would divide adult films into pre-VCR and post-VCR because that's where you see a major stylistic break. There is a bigger quality difference between the average 1975 adult film and the average 2005 adult film than between RULES OF THE GAME and PLAN NINE FROM OUTER SPACE. We should not burden 1970s adult cinema with our post hoc impressions of 1985-2005 adult videos.

The comparative legitimacy of the 1970s adult film was an attempt to broaden the audience for adult films. There was an idea that sex movies would become mainstream entertainment for couples. It was a failed experiment and the 1970s adult feature went the way of 1950s 3-D movies. But knowing how things turned out doesn't mean we are free to read history backward. At the time nobody knew for sure whether or not these movies would evolve into mainstream theatrical entertainment for adults. I guarantee that when DEEP THROAT cracked the Variety list of top ten grossing films of 1972 every major Hollywood studio had secret internal discussions about the pros and cons of launching their own adult movie divisions.

Radley Metzger has had a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art but video stores only sell half of his films. Porn stores sell only his adult films. Regular stores sell only his softcore art-house films. Ironically, his softcore movies and his XXX films are quite similar in quality and style. Metzger made movies up to the prevailing standards of the day. In 1970 he made soft core movies because that was the mode de jour. In 1975 he made hardcore movies because that was the mode de jour.

And Metzger wasn't unique. Almost every single director of 1970s adult films also directed at least one non-adult movie. And why not? There was no technical difference between a high-end adult movie and a typical independent genre movie. The adult movies used the same cameras and lights and editing techniques. Mac Ahlberg is a significant modern Hollywood cinematographer and also the director of about four unusually good 1970s porn films. Over half of Jean Rollin's films were XXX movies. As I am typing this the Independent Film Channel is on in the background showing Abel Ferrara's THE FUNERAL. In the 1970s Ferrara made a somewhat artsy XXX film called NINE LIVE OF A WET PUSSYCAT that I suspect IFC will not be showing. And what about the New York underground or John Waters? Are we also supposed to lump PINK FLAMINGOS and Andy Warhol's BLOWJOB in with contemporary video porn? And if not then what standards are we using?