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Thompson's trail of sex film history is fascinating
We live in an age when we are back to the future. Music and film critic Dave Thompson's new book, Black and White and Blue, is a history of adult cinema and it opens up a simple truth, that the need for sex is so basic that the age of the internet is now a moment of rediscovery, that the best and most exciting sex is again between ordinary people. The underground sex film industry proliferated through amateur production before it became a glamorous mainstream business in the '80s. Today, the internet has reclaimed the sex film for amateurs once again.
Beginning from the late 19th century when the motion picture was invented, Thompson shows how the early pioneers such as Thomas Edison and the Lumiere Brothers all produced sex films. After all, if people were so entranced by just watching a train arriving at a station or seeing workers leave a factory, what better moving picture than a woman undressing?
Called stag films, a generational term for sex films dating until the '70s which were made underground, amateur and mostly black and white, the commercial mainstream industry finally took form when many countries allowed for sexual expression in cinema (Sweden and Denmark in 1967 and the US in 1968).
Thompson's trail of sex film history is fascinating, from the prototype turn-ons (stag films about nuns, voyeurs, and intruders), the impact of World War II (how demilitarised film equipment made it cheap for producers), technological progress (when home movie technology of the '50s made retailing of sex films possible) and legal reforms (when societies decriminalised sex films).
As one sex actress said: "we took pride in making these pictures, because no matter how secretive we had to be about what we were doing - because it was against the law at that time... we still knew that our films served a purpose, and were capable of touching people in a way that no other film was... We could have just made boring films with bored people having bored sex in the shadows but what would have been the fun of that?"
And yes, $ingapore gets a mention. Thompson repeats Edward R Murrow's quote from the book, Going to Kansas City: "If you want to see some sin, forget about Paris and go to Kansas City. With the possible exception of such renowned centres as $ingapore and Port Said, Kansas City probably has the greatest sin industry in the world." But wait up, there's got to be a survey somewhere that says $ingapore is number one. Even in sin.
