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W I D E R SCREENINGS TM presents...
WORLD EROTICA INDEX
SEX EDUCATION DOUBLE FEATURE (1978)
After Hours DVD (region 1)
d. John Lamb; pr. John Lamb; scr. John Lamb; ph. Finn Thomsen; cast. Karen Biller, Lizzie Bundgaard, Dorrit Frantzen, Ron Gans (narrator) (240 mins)

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AFTER HOURS DVD COVER ART

Although the sexploitation movie proliferated well into the 1960s, any representation of explicit sex was still considered “obscene” in America.

Transgressionism originates with documentary interest in humanity's
process of conception

That was to change in the early 1970s thanks to a number of imported European documentaries which combined sexual explicitness with a sociological study of sexual mores and behaviour. The Scandinavian countries were the first to produce these films, the most notorious being Sexual Freedom in Denmark, which caused a storm of controversy when it was imported and exhibited uncut in the USA. Within a year after the release of this film in 1970, porno loops and features began to proliferate amongst even more explicit documentaries extolling the virtues of the sexual revolution in such titles as Sexual Freedom Now! Both of these documentaries are collected in the new After Hours DVD Sex Education Double Feature, with comes with an informative, well-researched booklet outlining the history of this particular porno subgenre. Indeed, After Hours outshines its competitors in the "grindhouse" / vintage porn stakes for the care, dedication and archival respect awarded the often disreputable but culturally influential films it releases , usually in DVD deluxe Collector's Editions, with video-on-demand opportunities.

As documentaries, these films were considered to have the all-important “redeeming social value” which the US courts insisted distinguished acceptable films from obscene works.

Thus freed to include sex as long as the context of socially redeeming merit was addressed, hardcore was now permissible, no longer confined to the underground stag film. A generation of American pornographers headed by Alex DeRenzy began making documentaries featuring explicit sex: generally about contemporary mores or the history of pornography as a genre, these films paved the way for the development of the adult X-rated narrative feature film. Indeed, just a couple of years after the doors of perception were opened in America by the sex documentaries, themselves descendents of sex education films dating as far back as the 1920s, director Gerard Damiano legitimized the fictional sex film for sophisticated adult audiences with Deep Throat and The Devil in Miss Jones.

Secular Humanist Sexual Explicitness links Sexual Morality, Sex Education and Sexual Socialization

From Conception to Essential Humanism:
self-assertion in sexual desire

1970’s Sexual Freedom in Denmark is based on interviews conducted by sex researcher and actor Ole Lassen. Beginning with a look at Danish permissiveness, with interviews with models and people on the street about sexual attitudes, the film then segues into a look at the American sex culture scene, which the Danish had been exposed to thanks to adult men’s magazines imported from America, before finding a discussion of venereal disease and sexual hygiene.

The most controversial aspect of the film is the explicit sex starring Suzanne Fields, who would subsequently develop a career starring in sex loops termed “one-day wonders”. Its opponents labelled this film evidence of the moral decline of Western civilization typical of the so-called “age of permissiveness” and indeed it documents attitudes which are a challenge to the conservative, Judeo-Christian values that conservatives and related moralizing hypocrites cling to even today.

An evocation of Adam and Eve begins Sexual Freedom in Denmark with a Christian revisionist context before profiling then modern Copenhagen, whose residents the narrator says have outgrown all taboos and are fighting for sexual freedom by campaigning against the censorship of adult material: indeed, at that time, the censorship of pornography was outlawed in Denmark.

Pornography as Humanist Genre based on sexually free woman as Subject in definace
of Patriarchal Christian moral propriety

Examination of the consequences of the legalization of pornography upon sexual mores and behaviour thus propels the remainder of this documentary, which explores a sexuality in which marriage as a social institution, so central to Christian morality, is simply irrelevant and antiquated, especially to young people. Interesting views are raised here, especially the Danish governments statistically verifiable assertion that rape declines with the legalization of pornography (in contrast to what a subsequent generation of radical feminists led by Andrea Dworkin espoused in their efforts to ban pornography in America) and the interviews with nude models offer an intriguing view of the morality and the business of the adult industry at its incipience.

Sexual Freedom in Denmark makes a case for the correlation between sexual freedom and the progress of civilization (Western and Eastern): sex and human culture are inseparable and pornography is the only form expressing the diversity of human sexuality, making its censorship a regressive and repressive act. Christianity is the real enemy here, and it is justifiably held in contempt as the film quotes Nietzsche’s pronouncements of religion and Eros.

Self-reflexivity in the juxtaposition of naturalistic sexual behaviouralism
and post-modern "construct" of same

Likewise, women’s liberation and women’s sexual freedom are considered symbiotic, nudism, sex outside marriage and pornography being a truly liberating cultural movement. American prudishness is also at issue here as the film raises the proliferation of sex culture since the legalization of full frontal nudity in the 1940s. Openness in sexual attitudes indicates a more vibrantly humanist existence in this film as it advocates a new sensual and sexual morality in defiance of stagnant Christian ideals, finding war and violence far more “obscene” than pornography. Modernism in sexually explicit cinema evolving out of the transgression of Christian moral absolutism through "pornographic" behaviourism stressed the subjectification of women especially, no longer subject to the Madonna / whore & wife / mother dualism: women's individuality was expressed in their actions as sexual subjects - the demonstration of a woman's carnal desires in sexually explicit imagery freed women from Patriarchal Christian moral accountability.

Educating the public on sexual morality essentially reclaimed "pornography" from being a genre kept from women on the grounds that it would corrupt their purity to being a genre specifically devoted to their individual sexual expression as a rejection of Patriarchy's inherent subjugation of women: a psycho-analytic inversion of traditional cinematic point of view regarding objectivity and subjectivity which later anti-porn feminism led by Andrea Dworkin and Catherin McKinnon failed to acknowledge or assess in their assumption of a masculine subjectivity framed the depiction of women - Dworkin and MacKinnon superimposed Patriarchal construct upon the one genre - pornography - that specifically sought to deconstruct, subvert and transgress Patriarchy. That is why the anti-porn feminists, though rejecting Patrirchal conventions of marriage as institutions devoted to the subjugation of women, would side with Patriarchal Christian fundamentalists in opposing pornography on the mutual grounds of pornography being "harmful" to women. The feminist concept of "harm" was based on an erroneous analysis of the genre as the essence of Patriarchy's subjectification of women while Patriarchal authority felt pornography "harmful" to women in that it emabled them an independence and power based on their sexuality, which threaten to subvert Patriarchy's dependence on Christian moral absolutism.

ORIGINAL POSTER ART:
Politicizing Obscenity as Free Speech

Sex before marriage is considered essential and sexual education a necessity in an age of over-population as Sexual Freedom in Denmark advocates the open teaching of sexual hygiene so that prostitution and promiscuity can be practiced without health repercussions.

Celebrating the Semiotics of Human Sexuality - Interpersonality and the kiss

Ironically, the screen’s first legal cum-shot is that of a penis into a test tube: either way, sexual explicitness as both scientific fact and erotic stimulation is the agenda behind this truly pioneering documentary which addresses the gulf between what Michel Foucault would call the “scientia sexualis” (the obsession of the West) and the taboo art of Eros, exactly the balance between explicitness and stimulating narrative / fantasy scenarios that would dominate the porno movie as it evolved out of the stag film in the wake of the immense popularity of Sexual Freedom in Denmark. On the evidence of this film, 1970 saw the birth of the modern adult film industry: indeed, a wave of similar documentaries proliferated, each offering more explicit sexual content.

Released a year later in 1971, Sexual Liberty Now! was one of the last sex films to feature a documentary context as by then explicit hardcore loops and features were readily available.

Sexual Liberty Now! was another feature from the producer behind Sexual Freedom in Denmark, John Lamb. This time, Lamb tackled American politics, looking at the President’s Commission on Obscenity and Pornography and the bastion of the moral majority conservative movement in the USA – the Christian right. Hence, Lamb insists on taking to task such notorious anti-porn campaigners as Fr. Morton Hill and Charles Keating (later arrested for defrauding the elderly). Beginning with another religious evocation of sex’s natural status under God, Sexual Freedom Now! is much more immediately explicit, going right into the obscenity-pornography debate in America during the sexual revolution focusing, as one would expect, on California.

Sexual Liberty Now! develops the suggestion that Americans have been socialized into associating pornography and obscenity with evil and sin by its Christian socialization, all challenged by the Presidential Commission on Obscenity and Pornography which recommended the legalization of pornography and the abolition of censorship.

OPPOSING PORNOGRAPHY:
PATRIARCHY AS ESTABLISHMENT
The Man who Reversed the Humanist Liberation
of Sexuality & Restored the Moral Lies of
Pernicious Christian Values in the Ragean Era's
now discredited Meese Commission

This view that pornography was not harmful was, however, sometime later rejected by President Nixon and a decade later President Reagan launched another Commission (the infamous Meese Commission) which came to the opposite conclusion and begat the conservative 1980s crackdown on that material legally available in the 1970s and considered by Sexual Liberty Now! as essential to true American freedom. The profile of American moralizers and their religious basis is insightful, as they resort to fear-mongering in the effort to demonize essentially “safe” films distinguished only by their sexual explicitness. Sexual Liberty Now! accepts the findings of the Commission – that pornography is not harmful, though may be shocking to some.

TRANSGRESSIONISM:
OBSCENITY AS GENRE
Sexually Explicit "Pornography" becomes a Legitimate Discourse
in Educative, Behaviouralist emphasis on Humanism's
Challenge to Christian Moral Orthodoxy

Sexual Liberty Now! profiles the wave of pornographic films then flooding American screens and posits that the individual, not the State, should be the censor in such instances, that it is wrong to legislate against pornography.

As it focuses on pornography in America, the film develops the Danish focus in the effort to contextualize a specifically American sexology, seen as wanting in comparison to the Danes specifically because of the Christian hostility towards pornographic expression. Sexual Freedom Now! is far more politicized than Sexual Freedom in Denmark which was more concerned with cultural celebration: but then religious hypocrisy saturates an America where violent films are rated G but anything to do with sex is considered taboo, a repugnantly hypocritical Christian value system according to these filmmakers. While Sexual Freedom in Denmark was explicit, much of the explicitness was coated in scientific terms: in Sexual Freedom Now! by contrast, the sexual explicitness is clearly meant to arouse – the point being that erotic stimulation is a valid means of aesthetic expression, despite the American Christian political climate that would have it suppressed – and many sex film extracts are shown, live action and animation.

Consequently, the explicit sex scenes here abound with smiles, fun and laughter – stimulation and enjoyment being the point here in contrast to the religious view that sex is dirty and wrong.

Indeed, far more so that Sexual Freedom in Denmark, Sexual Freedom Now! concerns itself with the American campaign to stamp out pornography, which it sees as misguided moralism, a throwback to the values which the youth of Denmark (and America) have rejected in droves. Christianity is relentlessly mocked here, as interview footage with a priest saying that pornography is boring is inter-cut with orgiastic cum shots. After exposing the sham of censorship, Sexual Freedom Now! looks at the ways in which explicit sex culture and its study is beginning to infiltrate the USA, with information and art concerning human sexuality considered a vibrant and essential form of discourse if America is to truly modernize. Erotic entertainment is beneficial to society according to this film, and it gives examples of vintage erotica to reveal the harmless nature of pornography in contrast to the Christian view that has it a sign of America’s moral decline.

Pornography as Genre: the Birth of Transgressionism in Sexually Explicit Imagery

Marriage, sexual repression and frigidity are considered in Sexual Freedom Now! the results of a traditionally Christian socialization in which sex is sadly a secondary concern. Significantly, this Christian socialization is imposed by men upon women. By contrast, pornography, celebrating women’s sexual self-expression, is considered the liberation from the repressive Christian dogma that enslaves women to servitude and frigidity in the guise of “marriage”.

The view that pornography is liberation from Christian dogma saturates this film: pornography is freedom! It is in this transgression of Christian morality through explicit sexual discourses, cemented best in Sexual Freedom Now!, that the subsequent adult industry gets its true impetus, not the exploitation of sex but the celebration of sexuality and the liberation of women from the oppressive religious doctrine of old, possibly celibate, men. In that, Sexual Freedom Now! reflects an idealistic view of pornographic art as a key step in the road to complete honesty in sexual morality – an idea which the American Constitution must protect over and above issues of religion and so-called “obscenity”.

The American adult movie industry began with the release of Sexual Freedom in Denmark.

The film’s collection alongside Sexual Liberty Now! makes the 2-disc Sex Education Double Feature a valuable, insightful and fascinating record of the genesis of pornographic art in America, a problematic and much lamented genre that After Hours Cinema studiously chronicle with archive-worthy, historically-focused DVD releases like this one. Debates about obscenity and pornography recur in conservative times and it is essential to put this material into the kind of historical perspective which attends the Sex Education Double Feature, making this DVD an essential collector’s item for those interested in the origins of adult cinema – the expression of people who felt that pornography was not only harmless but beneficial to society.