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an exhaustively illuminating look at a subject that tends to get short shrift.
Of all the industries in the world, no one takes to new innovations or technologies quite like the folks who make porn. So it should come as no surprise, really, that from almost the minute there were movie cameras, there were people using them to film something sexy: even Thomas Edison, when he wasn’t having his workshop spit out more straight-laced patents, had a few racy films sneak their way out the laboratory doors.
British-cum-American journalist Dave Thompson chronicles the history of sex on film, from Edison right through to the video cassette , in his latest book Black and White and Blue: Adult Cinema from the Victorian Age to the VCR. It’s an exhaustively illuminating look at a subject that tends to get short shrift: after all, even in our porn-saturated age, most people would rather keep sex on the sheets rather than the screen.
“It was certainly fairly scandalous in its day, although plenty of people who could get quite annoyingly moral were caught watching in stag films,” Thompson explains over the phone from his home in Delaware. “Still, it’s probably better to have a group of people watching porn together than having some Family Values senator tapping his foot in men’s washrooms.”
Though the fact there’s always been anti-porn crusaders should come as no surprise, exactly what they were up in arms about quite probably does. Far from bathing beauties showing some ankle, stag films—even from as early as the turn of the century—weren’t terribly different from what we’re seeing now. Sure, there was less in the way of niche market films, but Thompson chronicles films rampant with everything from hardcore penetration to bisexual threesomes, and most everything in between.
“I think in some ways it’s actually more shocking, because it’s much more real,” he says, pointing out that, most of the time, films were made by two willing participants who just wanted to see themselves in pictures. “It’s just like looking through a keyhole: you certainly don’t have these kinds of positions that no one would ever try, or women striking a face at the camera or whatever—you might get one sighing because her partner can’t get it up, but that’s a different story.”
Another curious quirk of the era was the common viewing arrangement. Thanks to the scarcity and expense of film equipment, most stags, as the name implies, were watched in groups—a setting, according to Thompson, that kept stags markedly different from their modern cousins.
“These were a chance for some of the boys to get together and blow off some steam by watching a few sexy films,” he explains breezily.
“I really think it’s been replaced by something like getting together to watch the big game, like a Superbowl party or something like that,” Thompson continues. “That’s all well and good, I suppose, but I really think society would be a much better place if we just got back to communal porn viewing.” V
Black and White and Blue
Adult Cinema from the Victorian Age
to the VCR
By Dave Thompson
ECW Press, 350pp ($19.95)
