Content area
Full text
The British once took their titillation from heavily censored softcore films. Forty are now in the BFI's new erotic archive
Long before 1970s sexploitation comedies such as Eskimo Nell and Come Play With Me brought bawdy humour and copious T&A to the commercial theatres of Britain, the country's smut industry comprised an informal economy of club impresarios, carneys and photographers. Their work was part of a long lineage of stag films, 8mm home movies, mondo and nudist documentaries, and filmed stripteases exhibited to select audiences of men via cinema clubs or on private reels. Often produced on zero budget and distributed through an illegal network of magazine subscriptions and black market retailers, these motion pictures were mostly disposed of or forgotten in short order.
The BFI's new collection, The Pleasure Principle, the most recent addition to its massive Britain on Film online initiative, has digitised more than40 such examples of reclaimed erotica. Their duration spans from the late 19th century to the advent of home video, often seen as signalling the death of the softcore genre. Divergent in style and fetish but tame in imagery (at least by later hardcore standards), the collection provides a fascinating history of Britain cinema's evolving and often transgressive relationship with the body.
"In Britain, we have always been slightly ashamed of our sexual impulses," says BFI curator Vic Pratt, who organised the film collection. "The British as a nation were culturally, perhaps, more inclined to laugh at sex, or mock it, or make a smutty innuendo, rather than address it head-on. I think this has always been reflected in the way we have produced our erotic or sex cinema here."
Some of The Pleasure Principle's earliest silent examples, such as A Victorian Lady in Her Boudoir (1896) and Nude Woman by Waterfall (1920), bear out this observation, revealing female models in a modest petticoat or in brief flashes of toplessness using highly choreographed, if not pictorialist, tableaux. Such innocuous images were far from the full-frontal nudity and genital penetration shown in American and European "stags" of the era.
The 1907 sight gag reel Merry Moments in France similarly removes any lubricity from its Folies Bergere-inspired cabaret,...