Update: Aug 24: pornography – symposium

Via girish again comes:

Terrific post by Owen Hatherley, part of the Porn Symposium (hey, there’s an idea for a future blog-a-thon): Russ Meyer, Vilgot Sjöman, etc, but mostly Dušan Makavejev.

Sexpol and Sexploitation in the cinema of the New Left

Part of a Porn Symposium with K-Punk, Infinite Thought, Poetix, Effay, Bacteriagrl and Different Maps. —Owen Hatherley

There is a story of the permeation of pornography into mainstream cinema and into everyday life, and it goes much like this; a combination of American exploitation directors and French arthouse in the early 1970s, through a conjunction of fake orgasms and truck drivers on the one hand and soft focus and cod-philosophy on the other takes what was previously suppressed and places it in the heart of the multiplex. In this narrative the heroes are the hucksters behind Deep Throat or the faux-sophisticates of Emmanuelle, with even dissenting semi-mainstream directors like Russ Meyer considered too original to be relevant. These are two films from which one can trace a line to the frat film, the overlit horrors of most American porn and the ‘another round of whispering on a bed’ (Foucault) that is, the French sex drama, always aiming to reveal some essential truth or other. The confirmation seemingly of the Foucauldian admonition that ‘sex is boring’. —Owen Hatherley

P.S.

[This post forms part of a symposium with bacteriagrl, k-punk, sit down man you’re a bloody tragedy (I still dream of orgonon), infinite thought (the money shot and vintage porn), effay, poetix.] —Different Maps

My two cents:

Related: 1971 – European cinema – Freudo-Marxism – Dušan Makavejev – Wilhelm Reich – the sexual revolution in the cinema

The ravishing sex reformer and radical in a provocative pose; composing sex and politics, it also reveals Makavejev’s “aestheticism”; the unexpected rabbit, the strong, two-colored vertical stripes and particularly the inexplicable empty frame. SC via Film As a Subversive Art (1974) – Amos Vogel

Update Aug 23 2006:

As you’ll recall, Ariel Levy snarled about porn studies in the confessional section of Female Chauvinist Pigs. If you are unfamiliar with the evil that is porn studies, you should check out the Porn Symposium going on now! You can see why Ariel Levy felt that this kind of feminism contributed to raunch culture and the gyrations and tough talk of female chauvinist pigs. –via blog.pulpculture.org