W I D E R SCREENINGS TM presents... in association with THE AUSTRALIAN SEX PARTY
ADULT / EROTICA / X-RATED CINEMA
FILM & DVD SCHOLARSHIP OF ADULT CINEMA FROM AN ATHEISTIC, RATIONALIST PERSPECTIVE
EMBEDDED VIDEO ARCHIVES OF WORLD EROTICA WITH INTERVIEWS, PROFILES AND RARE SCREENSHOTS
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Pioneering an Australian Hardcore "Porn" Adult Film Industry in 1989-1990
*March 21st, 2010
Shortly after then Labor Australian Attorney-General Gareth Evans legalized adult video distribution in Australia by creating the X-rating, Australia's Festival of Light representative, arch-wowser Fred Nile spent over $10,000 to sponsor the visit to Australia of the FOL's UK representative, Mary Whitehouse.
Whitehouse was a self-righteous Christian moralizer who had galvanized the British censors into prohibiting a series of violent horror videos she dubbed "video nasties". Whitehouse claimed that the so-called "video nasties" would cause irreversible damage to children who viewed them. The subsequent campaign to ban these videos pre-supposed that protecting children had precedence over both civil libertarian principles and UN Human Rights decress protecting the right of the individual to seek out information regardless of "frontiers", the moralizing Christian Church and its values being now the frontier. Nile and Whitehouse visited every state Attorney-General and showed them a series of film extracts they claimed would be allowable in Australia under the X-rating. The scenes contained horrific violence - of the sort akin to the British "video nasties" and the state Attorney-Generals promptly vowed to ban all X-rated material in the states. When Nile and Whitehouse were through, X-rated adult films remained legal only in the ACT (Canberra) and the Northern Territory.
However, according to the Australian Sex Party's Fiona Patten, the Eros Association's Robbie Swan and others, Nile and Whitehouse deliberately misrepresented the X-rating in their visits to the State Attorney-Generals.
In Australia, the X-rating categorically prohibited all depictions of violence and sexual violence. Thus, the film scenes that had so revolted the Attorneys-General were not from adult X-rated films at all but rather were edited selections of violence from R-rated films, a category in which simulated violence and sexual violence was allowed. Nile and Whitehouse obfuscated clear distinctions between simulated violence and non-simulated actual sex in order to mis-represent X-rated material. As a result of their efforts, X-rated films became synonymous with not simply "pornography" but "violence": while X-rated films in Australia were merely non-violent erotica (described and acknowledged not as "pornography" - despite the efforts of arch-wowser and avowed Christian, Catholic Senator Brian Harradine to have all erotic material banned as pornography - but as "sexually explicit material") in the UK and the USA the X-rating applied to films often of a violent and horrific nature, which was never the case in Australia.
Resultant censorship guidelines as practised by the Office of Film and Literature Classification (the OFLC) regarding the X-rated continued the obfusctaion - although all violence was banned from sexually explicit material, no distinction was made at a legislative level between actual violence in which the perpetrators on film were harmed and representative violence, in which the "offensive" scene was a dramatized fantasy between consenual adults. Indeed, political correctness was so absurd on this notion that the mere presence of a gun as a prop was judged a symbol of violence and any sexually explicit film with such a context banned from Australia, whether or not the "violence" featured in the sexually explicit scene or not. Australia's subsequent increasingly restrictive censorship - which would extend bans on adult film material into such celebrated film festival acclaimed works as Salo, Baise Moi and Ken Park - though based ostensibly on the principle of "offense to a reasonable adult" in effect created a certain set of aesthetics (centred around sexual explicitness) which were taboo in any kind of filmed artistic representation. In effect, Australia defined as offensive an entire artistic discourse which its practice of censorship banned as what might be termed "the aesthetics of offense" - constituting transgressive art.
But much of this transgressive art was merely non-violent sexually explicit fantasy between consensual adults. Thus, in 1989-1990 when Nile had returned Whitehouse to the UK and state Attorney-General Lionel Bowen (another Catholic) was calling for the nationwide repeal of X-rated adult cinema in Australia, Aussie adult industry entrepreneur John Lark formed the Adult Video Industry Association and promptly hired political lobbyist Robbie Swan.
Swan would shortly thereafter form the Eros Association (then known as the Eros Foundation) which would soon see independent sex industry activist Fiona Patten as its president. As Swan began a political lobbying campaign that would keep the adult industry (and the X-rating) alive over the next twenty years until he and Patten would jointly form the Australian Sex Party, Lark formed Down Under Productions and immediately contacted US adult industry entrepreneur John T. Bone to produce some local Australian adult feature films. Bone would direct and produce while Lark executive produced and held a casting call that would attract several local starlets - including Alice Springs and Sunny McKay - to star alongside imported American male adult actors in Australia's first explicit hardcore porn feature films, beginning with Australian Connection and progressing through arguably one of the finest Australian films ever produced - sexually explicit or otherwse - Dial A Sailor.
READ MORE: DIAL-A-SAILOR & AUSSIE PORN AS SUBJECTIFYING RATHER THAN OBJECTIFYING AUSTRALIAN WOMEN
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Surrealism, BDSM & Webcam Fetishism Underlie work of New Zealand Filmmaker David Blyth
*March 9th, 2010
Best known for the cult horror film Death Warmed Up, anthropologist David Blyth segued into cinema with the bizarre and surreal Angel Mine, New Zealand's first "pornographic" movie, and government funded to boot.
Although the offending scenes were cut out of the film before it could secure a mainstream release in Australia, Blyth was hooked on the exporation of transgressive cinema. Balancing his documentary experiments in the field of "perverse" fetishism with more mainstream horror genre work, Blyth cultivated an unusual filmography. Finding affinity for the shocking audience dislocation of horror cinema narrative manipulation and the self-conscious semiotic destruction of surrealism, Blyth made two radical underground documentaries exploring forbidden, taboo and rarely-examined sexual fetishes, in both cases setting aside his horror-meister's sense of the sensationalist provocateur to give vent to his anthropological curiosity in matters of the supposedly unseemly. His first major underground fetish film was Bound for Pleasure, a rare look up close inside the dungeons of several of New Zealand's most highly skilled and highly paid Dominatrixes. Recently, in time for the 2009 Brazil film festival where it played to a sold-out audience, Blyth completed Transfigured Nights, another fetish documentary, this time on the webcam performance art known as "masking". Together Blyth's sex trilogy forms a unique body of working, qualifying him as one of New Zealand's finest auteurs, and certainly one of the most knowing of transgressive filmmakers to emerge since the popular legitimization of "sexually explicit imagery" so often referred to as "pornography".
READ MORE: ANGEL MINE; BOUND FOR PLEASURE; TRANSFIGURED NIGHTS
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The Koran of Sex: the Sex Life and Afterlife of the Prophet Mohammad
*January 7th, 2010
The Prophet Mohammad married his last (and favorite) wife Aisha when she was a pre-pubescent child. He "acquired" her from a devoted believer by saying that it was Allah's will that he take the child as a wife and sex partner.
The marriage was consummated when Aisha was 9 years old and from the severity of the damage done to her tiny body by the Prophet Mohammad's "rape" by Allah's divine will, Aisha would never have children. Islamists who believe in the strict example of the Prophet Mohammad frequently marry child virgins, with any number of clerics decreeing it Allah's duty that wives service their husbands sexually at least 3 times a week. One conclusion is inescapable: Islam exists for the sexual sublimation of women and the cultural regimentation of paedophilic sexual desires, legitimized by the example of the Prophet Mohammad.
Yet, representations of the Prophet Mohammad are strictly forbidden in Islam and no recognition has been forthcoming of the promise of sex in the afterlife, the Paradise that motivates every Muslim suicide bomber - the prospect of life eternal with the virgin houri, the rewards Allah provides for martyrdom.
The resultant film, Sex Life of the Prophet, is the ultimate blasphemy to Islam -
the Prophet Mohammad as a porn star!
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The Biggest Investment Ever in a Porn Movie! US$17-21 million!!
Sexual Frolics in Pagan Rome
*January 1st, 2010
In the mid 1970s, successful Penthouse entrepreneur Bob Guccione raised an enormous budget, commissioned vast sets in Italian studios and hired noted essayist Gore Vidal to write the definitive script on Pagan Rome, concentrating on the notoriously demented Emperor Caligula, 37-41AD.
Caligula's exploits had been written about and filmed for television in the epic series I, Claudius but nothing like what Guccione envisioned had ever been attempted on film before. This was pre-Christian sexuality: orgies, incest, urination, necrophilia, torture and more, much, much more with an all-star cast of British thespians including Malcolm McDowell, Helen Mirren, Peter O'Toole and John Gielgud. Under the direction of controversial Italian maestro Tinto (Salon Kitty) Brass, Caligula outraged audiences worldwide.
Immediately banned in its uncut form in Australia, it has remained on the Office of Film and Literature Classification (OFLC) watchlist for almost thirty years - the longest continuous ban on any adult X-rated movie! But: it is now on DVD - UNCUT!! (read more)
The success of Caligula was such that it ushered in a rash of low-budget sequels and ripoffs. Most notable amongst them was the sex-comedy Messalina, Messalina (read more) which starred the Penthouse Pet duo of Anneka DiLorenzo and Lori Wagner from the original Caligula and made use of left-over sets from the Guccione-Brass movie before they were torn down forever. Far more disturbingly, Italian horror maestro Joe D'Amato took a break from his successful Black Emanuelle series with the gorgeous Laura Gemser to essay Pagan Rome again, introducing bestiality and the persecution of Christians in Caligula - the Untold Story (read more), a film which has rarely been seen in its fully uncut version (which included both heterosexual and homosexual explicitness), D'Amato having first essayed bestiality in the notorious horse-cock stroke sequence of Emanuelle in America (read more).
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