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EDUARDO CEMANO (1969-1971)
After Hours DVD (region 1)
d. Eduardo Cemano; pr. Eduardo Cemano, Doris Wishman; scr. Eduardo Cemano; ph. Eduardo Cemano; ed. Eduardo Cemano; cast. Dolly Sharp, Fred Lincoln, Harry Reems, Tina Russell, Angel Spirit, Arlana Blue, Gerta Demerung (180 mins)
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Director Eduardo Cemano is one of the visionaries of adult film. A former commercial artist he segued into pornographic features in 1971, just as New York City (and 42nd Street) were about to be flooded by a wave of “one-day wonders”, cheap sex films from the West Coast shot in a day, edited together and distributed to makeshift cinemas and sex shops.
Cemano was fascinated by the possibilities of including explicit sexual imagery into a narrative feature – or, more specifically, introducing plot and character into an explicit sex film – and when approached by nudist-movie legend Doris Wishman to make some original one-day wonders in New York to compete with the material sent over from California, Cemano eagerly directed two of the first porno feature films to emerge from New York: Millie’s Homecoming (aka Lady Zazu’s Daughter) and The Weirdos and the Oddballs (aka Zora Knows Best). Both of these films have been collected, along with a bonus West Coast feature one day wonder, for release as a 3 DVD set by the ever reliable adult film archivists After Hours Cinema.
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The Incest Fantasy as Parody of American Socialization
Millie’s Homecoming begins with a psychiatrist delivering a lecture direct to the camera: he talks of the importance of the film about to unfold as contributing to a seldom discussed matter of American socialization – incest.
He also adds that the examination of incest is in terms of satire lest it be taken as offensive. The blend of mock-sociology, satire and self-reflexive awareness here sets up Cemano’s first film as a thorough debunking of the Supreme Court idea that “socially redeeming value” distinguishes sexually explicit art from obscenity, a moral constraint upon erotic cinema also mocked by director Henry Paris (Radley Metzger) in The Private Afternoons of Pamela Mann. The joke here is that the film is a public relations promotion of the joy of incest, presented so as to completely subvert any idea of social merit at the same time as it enacts the pretence of such. The subsequent film – a comedy of manners and mores which relentlessly mocks the hypocrisy of the upper classes (just the type who condemn pornography) – emerges as a highly self-conscious satire on the absurdity of sexual freedom as a political movement. Incest is the last taboo here – a taboo broken in the name of sexual freedom, making Millie’s Homecoming a precursor to the adult feature film classic Taboo.
Caricaturish class stereotypes abound in Millie’s Homecoming, from the petty uptight mistress of the house (Dolly Sharp) to the obedient maid (Tina Russell) who releases her distraught employer’s tensions with a little cunnilingus and a vibrating dildo.
Looming angles distort facial features and the film emerges a warped parody of sexual socialization with lively hand held camerawork, fluid rather than fixed – a technique Cemano brought to porn from his commercial shorts – and often clever improvisation in which the maid reveals herself a sexually independent woman who balances the moral obligations of her duty with her own desires. In the maid’s portrayal, Cemano’s over-riding theme emerges – sexual indulgence liberates women, and as the medium in which such is celebrated, pornography is the only art form which seeks to remove women from the moral hierarchy to which they have been socialized. All women here are sexually uninhibited and adventurous, including the title character Millie (Angel Spirit), the daughter of a rich couple, who after inadvertently having sex with her father (Fred Lincoln), realizes the joy of incest – signified in one of the great cum shots in adult film – and initiates her extended family in a group orgy.
Dolly Sharp, dancer,
with her Broadway chorine cohorts
Sarcastic and contemptuous of conventional morality, Millie’s Homecoming is a comical treat: a satiric indictment of both traditional mores and the values of the free love generation. Neither endorsing nor condemning its (immoral) liberation, the film acts as a demonstration of the political comment found in the best of the one-day wonders, sexually exciting, full of joy at the prospect of sexually uninhibited and independent women, and sharp in its appraisal of the ironies of art’s legal association with socially redeeming merit to avoid the taint of obscenity: it is an outright mockery of the idea that erotic art must have socially redeeming value, and a sardonic look at the role of sex within familial love. Still, in its view of a servant class catering to the sexual needs of the master class, there is a satiric view of Capitalist exploitation underlying the film’s mockery of familial socialization: the orgy (the typical climactic scene to many one day wonders) is thus a set-piece symbolic of a classless, sexually free utopia completely devoid of moral prohibition or restraint.
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Sexuality, Sociology and Screwball Comedy
Sexual obsession is the driving force behind The Weirdos and the Oddballs, a film of relentless energy in Cemano’s trademark hand-held camera work. Set in New York’s artistic hub, Greenwich Village, this film is more concerned with manipulation and sexual exploitation than was Millie’s Homecoming, in which the idea of sexual love between father and daughter was treated with comic verve and free from any moral judgement.
Sharp here again plays a sexually insatiable woman looking to lure and use underlings for her own sexual gratification, aided by a comical Fred Lincoln as her neurotic sexologist partner. With the zest expected of genuine screwball comedy, The Weirdos and the Oddballs is an immoral satire. Here director Cemano actually takes a complex theme – sexual liberation and sex therapy – and exposes the ambivalent morality he sees underlying it. The couples who contact the bogus sexologists are undeniably exploited, their vulnerabilities plundered by Sharp in her nymphomaniacal desire for sexual fulfilment. But they are also liberated by this exploitation. Indeed, in Sharp’s work for Cemano is the sense of the sexually active woman as exploiter and liberator, her morality governed by her sexuality. But that is the over-riding theme in Cemano’s one day wonders: the inter-relationship between sexuality and morality.
Drug use (marijuana) as communal experience
Sexual pleasure as humanist epiphany
In Millie’s Homecoming, sexuality ultimately transgressed morality (hence the film’s depiction of incest as sexual transcendence) and in The Weirdos and the Oddballs, sexuality ultimately transcends morality.
Hence, the sexologist plot (a common one in the hardcore porn features of the early 1970s where usually male sex experts initiate women into the joys of sex denied them by Patriarchal socialization) is used once again as the transgression of morality. The exploiter here becomes the liberator. The complete and utter inversion of any sense of moral propriety is the transgressive impulse behind Cemano’s work in general and the dominant force behind The Weirdos and the Oddballs – screwball perversity. Yet, and this is an important consideration in the way that transgressive art would develop in the years since the initial flood of explicit sex films in the 1970s, sex here, despite the context of exploitation, is completely non-exploitative: women’s sexual needs and independence are the dominant concerns. It is that aspect which makes Cemano’s art truly revolutionary – the celebration of women unbounded by Patriarchal moral codes and conventions and in charge of their own sexuality, prepared to educate others as to the liberating joy of sex. But Cemano once again is a sly pornographer and satirically obfuscates the distinction between liberation and exploitation – a dialectic that would indeed continue to dog pornography as a genre.
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Early Pornography & the Transgression of Sexual Morality
Both Millie’s Homecoming and The Weirdos and the Oddballs are fascinating examples of the unique ability of pornography to transgress moral convention, offering both erotic entertainment and sly socio-political satire, with Cemano a talented enough filmmaker to even allude to mainstream film genres, most notably in the screwball farce of The Weirdos and the Oddballs, which mocks the ethos of sexual liberation it presents, resulting in a work of dense moral ambiguity though again always celebratory and non-exploitative.
Sex and drugs feature in the trippier aspects of The Weirdos and the Oddballs, some scenes of which are distinctly psychedelic drug-inspired, with distorted soundtracks and almost floating free camera work offering a fragmentary pastiche of the genre’s traditional group sex scene. Seen back to back, Millie’s Homecoming and The Weirdos and the Oddballs capture the joyous, artistic, visionary enthusiasm with which talented men and women equally responded to the freeing of the erotic arts made possible only by pornography. Like Deep Throat, these films demonstrate that despite the bad reputation pornography has as a result of religious (usually Christian) hypocrites and radical feminists, it was never about the exploitation of women but rather the equal and honest expression of unbridled sexual fantasy. With plot, humour, wit, satire and enthusiasm, the Grindhouse Director Series: films of Eduardo Cemano is a valuable reminder of a time when pornography was a liberating art form, and as evident in The Weirdos and the Oddballs, capable of hilarious improvisational work.
The third disc on this 3 DVD set has Cemano present a sample, more representative one-day wonder from the West Coast, a parody of the Hollywood hit by Paul Mazursky Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, about wife-swapping amongst couples. In addition are some 8mm film loops featuring Harry Reems, who made The Weirdos and the Oddballs shortly before leaping to fame as a genuine actor after his work for Gerard Damiano in Deep Throat and The Devil in Miss Jones. On both the feature DVD presentations are additional special features – an interview with a still enthusiastic Angel Spirit in which she talks of Cemano and her career, a candidly anecdotal interview with porn legend Fred Lincoln about the birth of loops and feature porn, and two intriguing interviews with Cemano in which he talks of incest as the last taboo, the role of love and sex, the use of drugs by the actors during the shoot (pot basically) and the role of voyeuristic and exhibitionist drives in the pornographic impulse. A further Cemano interview for Midnight Blue can be found on the third bonus disc. The interviews give a cumulative profile of the early days of feature film porn, the performers, the films and the jargon.
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