Sex Film

Pornographic films (pornos), erotic films, sex films, and 18+ films are films that present sexually explicit subject matter in order to arouse and satisfy the viewer. Pornographic films present sexual fantasies and usually include erotically stimulating material such as nudity ( softcore) and sexual intercourse (hardcore). A distinction is sometimes made between "erotic" and "pornographic" films on the basis that the latter category contains more explicit sexuality, and focuses more on arousal than storytelling; the distinction is highly subjective.

Pornographic films are produced and distributed on a variety of media, depending on the demand and technology available, including traditional film stock in various formats, home video, DVDs, Internet download, cable TV, in addition to other media. Today, pornographic films are sold or rented on DVD; shown through Internet streaming, special channels and pay-per-view on cable and satellite; and viewed in rapidly disappearing adult theaters. By law, they are generally not permitted to be shown in mainstream media, or on free-to-air television.

Films with risqué content have been produced since the invention of motion picture in the 1880s. Production of such films was profitable, and a number of producers began to specialize in their production. Various groups within society considered such depictions immoral, labeled them "pornographic", and attempted to have them suppressed under obscenity laws, with varying degrees of success. Such films continued to be produced, and could only be distributed by underground channels. Because the viewing of such films carried a social stigma, they were viewed at brothels, adult movie theaters, stag parties, home, private clubs, and night cinemas.

In the 1970s, during the Golden Age of Porn, pornographic films were semi-legitimized; by the 1980s, pornography on home video achieved wider distribution. The rise of the Internet in the late 1990s and early 2000s changed the way pornographic films are distributed, complicating censorship regimes around the world and legal prosecutions of "obscenity".

Classification

Pornographic films are typically categorized as either softcore or hardcore pornography. In general, softcore pornography is pornography that does not depict explicit sexual activity, sexual penetration or extreme fetishism. It generally contains nudity or partial nudity in sexually suggestive situations. Hardcore pornography is pornography that depicts penetration or extreme fetish acts, or both. It contains graphic sexual activity and visible penetration. A pornographic work is characterized as hardcore if it has any hardcore content.

Pornographic films are generally classified into subgenres which describe the sexual fantasy which the film and actors attempt to create. Subgenres can also be classified into the characteristics of the performers or the type of sexual activity on which it concentrates and not necessarily on the market to which each subgenre appeals. The subgenres usually conform to certain conventions, and each may appeal to a particular audience.

History

Early years: 20th century

Production of erotic films commenced almost immediately after the invention of the motion picture. Two of the earliest pioneers were Frenchmen Eugène Pirou and Albert Kirchner. Kirchner (under the name "Léar") directed the earliest surviving erotic film for Pirou. The 7-minute 1896 film had Louise Willy performing a bathroom striptease.Richard Abel
''Encyclopedia of early cinema''
Taylor & Francis, 2005, , p.518 Other French filmmakers also considered that profits could be made from this type of risqué films, showing women disrobing.

Also in 1896 ''Fatima's Coochie-Coochie Dance'' was released as a short nickelodeon kinetoscope/film featuring a gyrating belly dancer named Fatima. Her gyrating and moving pelvis was censored, one of the earliest films to be censored. At the time, there were numerous risque films that featured exotic dancers. In the same year, '' The May Irwin Kiss'' contained the very first kiss on film. It was a 47-second film loop, with a close-up of a nuzzling couple followed by a short peck on the lips ("the mysteries of the kiss revealed"). The kissing scene was denounced as shocking and obscene to early moviegoers and caused the Roman Catholic Church to call for censorship and moral reform - because kissing in public at the time could lead to prosecution. Perhaps in defiance and "to spice up a film", this was followed by many kiss imitators, including ''The Kiss in the Tunnel'' (1899) and ''The Kiss'' (1900). A tableau vivant style was used in short film ''The Birth of the Pearl'' (1901) featuring an unnamed long-haired young model wearing a flesh-colored body stocking in a direct frontal pose that provides a provocative view of the female body. The pose is in the style of Botticelli's ''The Birth of Venus''.

In Austria, cinemas organised men-only theatre nights (called ) at which adult films were shown. Johann Schwarzer formed his Saturn-Film production company which between 1906 and 1911 produced 52 erotic productions, each of which contained young local women fully nude, to be shown at those screenings. Before Schwarzer's productions, erotic films were provided by the Pathé brothers from French produced sources. In 1911, Saturn was dissolved by the censorship authorities which destroyed all the films they could find, though some have since resurfaced from private collections. There were a number of American films in the 1910s which contained female nudity in film.

Because Pirou is nearly unknown as a pornographic filmmaker, credit is often given to other films for being the first. In '' Black and White and Blue'' (2008), one of the most scholarly attempts to document the origins of the clandestine 'stag film' trade, Dave Thompson recounts ample evidence that such an industry first had sprung up in the brothels of Buenos Aires and other South American cities by the turn of the 20th century, and then quickly spread through Central Europe over the following few years. However, none of these earliest pornographic films are known to have survived. According to Patrick Robertson's ''Film Facts'', "the earliest pornographic motion picture which can definitely be dated is " made in France in 1908. The plot depicts a weary soldier who has a tryst with a servant girl at an inn. The Argentinian , whose original title could have been (''The Satyr''), might be even older; it has been dated to somewhere between 1907 and 1912. He also notes that "the oldest surviving pornographic films are contained in America's Kinsey Collection. One film demonstrates how early pornographic conventions were established. The German film (1910) is a ten-minute film which begins with a woman masturbating alone in her bedroom, and progresses to scenes of her with a man performing straight sex , fellatio, and penile anal penetration."

1920s–1940s suppression

Pornographic movies were widespread in the silent movie era of the 1920s, and were often shown in brothels. Soon illegal, stag films, or blue films, as they were called, were produced underground by amateurs for many years starting in the 1940s. Processing the film took considerable time and resources, with people using their bathtubs to wash the film when processing facilities (often tied to organized crime) were unavailable. The films were then circulated privately or by traveling salesmen, but anyone caught viewing or possessing them risked a prison sentence.

1950s: home movies

The post-war era saw technological developments that further stimulated the growth of a mass market and amateur film-making, particularly the introduction of the 8 mm and super-8 film gauges, popular for the home movie market.

Entrepreneurs emerged to meet the demand. In Britain, in the 1950s, Harrison Marks produced films which were considered risqué, and which today would be described as "soft core". In 1958, as an offshoot of his magazines, Marks began making short films for the 8mm market of his models undressing and posing topless, popularly known as "glamour home movies". To Marks, the term "glamour" was a euphemism for nude modeling/photography.

1960s: Europe and United States

On the European continent, sex films were more explicit. Starting in 1961, Lasse Braun was a pioneer in quality colour productions that were, in the early days, distributed by making use of his father's diplomatic privileges. Braun was able to accumulate funds for his lavish productions from the profit gained with so-called loops, ten-minute hardcore movies which he sold to Reuben Sturman, who distributed them to 60,000 American peep show booths. Braun was always on the move, and made his hardcore movies in a number of countries, including Spain, France, Sweden, Denmark and the Netherlands.

In December 1960, American female director Doris Wishman began producing a series of eight pornographic films, or nudist films without sex scenes, including ''Hideout in the Sun'' (1960), ''Nude on the Moon'' (1961) and ''Diary of a Nudist'' (1961). She also produced a series of sexploitation films.

In the 1960s, social and judicial attitudes towards the explicit depiction of sexuality began to change. For example, Swedish film ''I Am Curious (Yellow)'' (1967) included numerous frank nude scenes and simulated sexual intercourse. In one particularly controversial scene, Lena kisses her lover's flaccid penis. The film was exhibited in mainstream cinemas, but in 1969 it was banned in Massachusetts allegedly for being pornographic. The ban was challenged in the courts, with the Supreme Court of the United States ultimately declaring that the film was not obscene, paving the way for other sexually explicit films. Another Swedish film ''Language of Love'' (1969) was also sexually explicit, but was framed as a quasi-documentary sex educational film, which made its legal status uncertain though controversial.

In 1969, Denmark became the first country to abolish all censorship laws, enabling pornography, including hardcore pornography. The example was followed by toleration in the Netherlands, also in 1969. There was an explosion of pornography commercially produced in those countries, including, at the very beginning, child pornography and bestiality porn. Now that being a pornographer was legal, there was no shortage of businessmen who invested in plant and equipment capable of turning out a mass-produced, cheap, but quality product. Vast amounts of this new pornography, both magazines and films, needed to be smuggled into other parts of Europe, where it was sold "under the counter" or (sometimes) shown in "members only" cinema clubs.

In the United States, producers of pornographic films formed the Adult Film Association of America in 1969, after the release of ''Blue Movie'' by Andy Warhol, to fight against censorship, and to defend the industry against obscenity charges."10th Annual Erotic Awards," ''Adam Film World'', January 1987, p. 7

1970s: adult theaters and movie booths in the United States

In the 1970s, there was a more tolerant judicial attitude to non-mainstream films. Mainstream theatres did normally not screen even softcore films, leading to a rise of adult theaters in the United States and many other countries. There was also a proliferation of coin-operated "movie booths" in sex shops that displayed pornographic "loops" (so called because they projected a movie from film arranged in a continuous loop).

Denmark started producing comparatively big-budget theatrical feature film sex comedies such as ''Bordellet'' (1972), the ''Bedside''-films (1970–1976) and the ''Zodiac''-films (1973–1978), starring mainstream actors (a few of whom even performed their own sex scenes) and usually not thought of as "porno films" though all except the early ''Bedside''-films included hardcore pornographic scenes. Several of these films still rank among the most seen films in Danish film history and all remain favourites on home video.

In 1969, ''Blue Movie'' by Andy Warhol was the first adult erotic film depicting explicit sex to receive wide theatrical release in the United States. The film was a seminal film in the Golden Age of Porn and, according to Warhol, a major influence in the making of ''Last Tango in Paris'', an internationally controversial erotic drama film, starring Marlon Brando, and released a few years after ''Blue Movie'' was made.

The first explicitly pornographic film with a plot that received a general theatrical release in the U.S. is generally considered to be ''Mona the Virgin Nymph'' (also known as ''Mona''), a 59-minute 1970 feature by Bill Osco, who created the relatively high-budget hardcore/softcore (depending on the release) 1974 cult film ''Flesh Gordon'' and later, in 1976, the X-rated musical-comedy film ''Alice in Wonderland''.

The 1971 film ''Boys in the Sand

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