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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
BY VIEWING THIS SECTION YOU ADMIT TO BEING OVER 18 AND NOT OFFENDED BY ITS CONTENTS
ALL FILMS FEATURED & SCREENSHOTS USED CONCERN ADULT CONSENSUAL SEXUAL FANTASY

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".

Transgressive Art in Censorsial Australia finds new home in Adelaide Underground Pornography / Poetry / Girl-Punk Locus
*January 11th, 2010

Arts Grant recipients Recyclopath and Teri-Louise Kelly have been blazing new ground in the underground punk-porn-poetry scene, alongside cult girl-punk outfit Legless.

Together, these performance artists are spearheading the revivial of transgressive art, the last significant outburst of which was the 1980s Cinema of Transgression movement pioneered by punk-poet queen Lydia Lunch and underground filmmaker Richard Kern. The traditions of Kern & Lunch are alive and well in these performers, along with a dose of vibrant Rocky Horror Picture Show style camp, in a beginning series of punk-porn loops, e-books and YouTube shorts by Australian Stag films, registered Thorpe-Bowker e-publisher Transgressor and infamous "pornographer" The Porno Poet, whose work was denounced as witchcraft by conservative Christians in 2007, the first time a poet had been accused of witchcraft in Australia since Rosaleen Norton (the original witch of Kings Cross) and poet Gavin Greenlees in the 1950s - a fact which clearly indicates Australia's Arts sensibility as so far behind the rest of the world that the efforts of current Communications Minister Stephen Conroy (a devout Catholic) to introduce a mandatory internet filtering system have led to Australia being denounced in Europe as the "global village idiot", something current Australian politicians Kevin Rudd, Stephen Conroy and new opposition leader Tony Abbott (another conservative Catholic) seem quite proud of. However, their efforts make Australia's claim to be "the clever country" an irony worthy of the most extreme mockery.

Former Sex Worker Examines Transgressive Nature of Sexual Performance in Public and Private Spheres
*January 9th, 2010

First in leading the revolution against Patriarchal Christian censorship in Australia was former sex worker turned multi-media performance artist Recyclopath, always interested in the transgressive nature of sexual performance in both the private sphere (prostitution) and public sphere (prostitution).

Recyclopath contacted the notorious Adelaide figure The Porno Poet (whose transgressive art was so extreme and yet Academically sound as to alienate even radical underground publishers Paroxysm Press) and asked him to collaborate on a transgressive film. Ekeing a living as a freelancer since being cast out of the Adelaide literary scene and branded a "pornographer", The Porno poet seized on the challenge, the both of them braving Australia's restrictive Christian censors to star in and co-produce the first adult film short made in Australia since ex-censor John Lark's pioneering sex films of the 1980s - unavailable anywhere in Australia except the National Film & Sound Archive. The resultant punk-porn documentary The Queen of Skank! extended the punk-aesthetic of Richard Kern, the sexual performance art of Recyclopath into the world of political agit-prop, Australian censors being so restrictive as to force the filmmakers to exhibit the film on video-on-demand hosted in the USA. Meanwhile, Teri-Louise's latest book Girls Like Me chronicles the trans-gender performance artist's' foray into poetry, her spoken word alongside co-worker Recyclopath at Adelaide underground poetry venue Hard Boiled being filmed with permission from event organizers Paroxysm Press for a series of developing YouTube experimental film shorts. So too her work with girl-punk band Legless was also filmed by The Porno Poet.

This transgressive revival, spearheaded by The Porno Poet but forced underground after his dismissal by the Adelaide Arts scene, began to find a correlative at a local Adelaide underground performance poetry venue, Hard Boiled, organized by Matthew Smith in association with radical underground publishers Paroxysm Press whose head, Daniel Watson, had devoted himself to getting the underground voice heard but who had languished into re-printing 10-year-old has been Bukowski wannabe obscurity pushed as "bad-boy" lit. Although Paroxysm Press were initially interested in Recyclopath, their lazy incompetent means of doing business ensured that they lost all publishing momentum and Recyclopath looked elsewhere - to the hardcore, transgressive reputation of The Porno Poet, not a "bad boy" but an intimidating bad man who was equally comfortable writing underground pornography and peer review discourse for Academic publishers in the USA. After documenting the early sessions of Hard Boiled for a YouTube retrospective on the Adelaide underground scene (now available exclusively on the Wider Screenings YouTube channel - see original programming here) and putting Australia's first truly transgressive film The Queen of Skank! on video on demand (forthcoming - please check back regularly for updates), Recyclopath went back to sex work and The Porno Poet started to document the work of trans-gender author Teri-Lousie Kelly and her developing association with cult girl-punk outfit Legless, beginning with their joint Christmas Horror Show gig.

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.

With the exceptions of Theo Van Gogh and Ayaan Hirsi-Ali, few have dared to explore and expose the bizarre sexual delusions that underlie Islam's monstrous oppression of women. The least seen exploration of Islamic sexual authority as fantasy occured when maverick pornographer John Coil (ed- the subject of the only successful obscenity prosecution in recent US history) attempted the ultimate transgressive blasphemy - the explicit depiction of the Prophet Mohammad's sex life both on Earth and in the Paradise of the afterlife promised him by Allah bringing blasphemous pronography to daringly provocative levels in what he termed The Koran of Sex. (read more)

The resultant film, Sex Life of the Prophet, is the ultimate blasphemy to Islam -
the Prophet Mohammad as a porn star!

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).