THE FALL OF PORN CINEMA AS MINOR ART.
Foreword
Yesterday I saw the wonderful images of Corto Maltes in a film made about the fantastic Hugo Pratt's images. I rejoiced, since I am from a generation where Hora Cero, Frontera and Rayo Rojo were the daily bread and warm pan that was eagerly awaited. Because the Comic, did it fill the void of literature for the middle class? Hugo Pratt, wasn't he less than nothing, a man born in a nearby town to Rímini, nothing more or less than Fellini's cradle, taken from childhood to live in Venice, nothing more, or less than Venice, and at fourteen years old, already recruited as a police cadet in Tripolitanian Italy in North Africa. We cannot help but envy some of Hugo Pratt's experiences. We cannot think that many of his images poured into the comic were empty of content and low critical level. On the contrary, time was revaluing it. What for my era the Comic, which was a minor art. It was gradually becoming an art, more linked obviously with painting, as it seemed to be digging up the most docile associative fantasies of human beings. Pratt, later Oesterheld with Eternauta and some of Argentina's epic comic strips like Sargento Kirk showed that not. The minor art, became a popular manifestation of an order that today we can say that Moebius, Quino, Fontanarrosa, Oesterheld, Caloi, or the same Hugo Pratt, become Classics. With apologies to those who forgot me on the way like Dante Quinterno, Divito, and many other wonderful men from Argentine graphics who came photographing reality like Hermenegildo Sabat, slowly with a task of years and years.
Key Milestones
In Pornographic Cinema something similar happens. First things first, exposing people's intimacy with crudeness. Use the means and done. The evolution by saturation is exhausting forms and manners, according to the Aristotelian criterion. Because sexuality for voyeurism has a limit and a captive market, simply voyeurism. Therefore, the idea of including an argument in pornographic cinema did not seem like a mistake. The Devil in Ms Jones is Gerard Damiano's first approach to this intention. Miss Jones is a 40-year-old woman bored with life who decides to commit suicide. With a straight and moral life, she is rejected in heaven for being a suicide, the devil sends her back to earth so that she can indulge in various forms of pleasure. With this simple argumental idea Damiano develops the film that begins to calibrate porn cinema linked to cinema with an argument in the 1970s. We would say that porn cinema seeks its place in cinema as an art form. Perhaps the vain recognition of the moment it was achieving the comic strip. The way of El Último Tango en Paris with Marlon Brando and Marie Schneider by Bernardo Bertolucci, although anticipating much of its time, had nothing to do with what Damiano was trying to do in 1973. Bertolucci, bold but not explicit, showed a tendency, with known actors, did not speculate on reaching the depth of the scenes. Damiano, with porn artists, dedicated himself to seeking the impact of the plate, trying not to make a class B movie, inevitable in its making.
Calígula, ascenso y caída del imperio de Tinto Brass.
Recently in 1979 Tinto Brass promotes an original idea that could combine the wonderful situations proposed by Bertolucci and Damiano. A cinema of artists and explicit pornography. Solution, costume and montage. It is thus that he hires Malcom Mac Dowell, who had made the success of El Topo, Peter O'Tole, a consecrated actor since Lawrence of Arabia, and Helen Mirren, who will be easier to remember for her brilliant interpretation in a recent film like The Queen, the Queen of England, to develop the argumental plot of movie. And the explicit sex scene developed by adult film actors directly in Cinecitta, Rome. To later make a perfect montage that results in the movie. Caligula may be the only exponent of that last attempt at argumentative and porn cinema, where porn sought its place in minor arts. Later movies by Tinto Brass such as The Key, with strong explicit sex, did not achieve the strength of Caligula. The reasons are more than concrete. The advancement of new technologies left no room for direct investment in film production like that proposed by Tinto Brass.
The Key
The Key is the first movie after Caligula, in which Tinto Brass may already be warning about the difficulties of developing technologies for domestic use. In the case of the same, what's interesting is the imprint of an Italian husband in Venice who discovers the seductive side of his wife from his own perversion. The trigger is the appearance of a Polaroid-type American instant camera that Lazlo, the character acting as his daughter's boyfriend, gives to him, and with which he photographs his naked wife after putting her to sleep with alcohol and drugs. Although there are scenes of nudity for both sexes in the same movie, the voltage is reduced compared to what happened in Caligula, as if Brass were trying to retake narrative cinema. Therefore, the pre-war criticism, religious context, and obsessive passion of conjugal love convert the movie into a true B-movie, if one recognizes the effort made by the director to elevate the genre slightly higher than before and after it.
New technologies
Parallel to these events, although there existed Super 8, the dependence on revelation that linked private or commercial home pornography to a third group that revealed the roll, which either made the situation public or made it result obtained by that means. But since the launch on the market by Sony of Video Betamax both in TV-connected recorders and in independent handheld cameras with a battery in the palm of one's hand, or in a room, freed the cameraman from all previous knowledge of framing. Voyeurism became voyeurism without fear, not just for the spectator of the result, but also for the same scene captor.
The appearance of VHS videos in their NTSC and PAL versions later gave life to this dream. The formats of the first series reduced to around five encounters, three heteros, and two lesbians, where one of the major problems was showing male ejaculation. The model was of toned bodies and spectacular blonde women. The porn actresses of the early video era generally looked like Barbie, modestly copying the successes of films on the big screen at the time, such as E.T., Back to the Future, Rambo, etc. The selection was meticulous, there were no flaws, no stretch marks, no cellulite. They turned women into a true archetype. The design shared by a voyeur couple left doubts for those women who did what they did, never reaching those exuberant measurements that their potential partners would be denied of those delirious images of perfect women.
The endless development of the digital video camera and the appearance of the cellular phone with camera and video.
By 1996, when the red-light district in New York was moved from 45th Street to 8th Street, where the houses of art accessories and porn videos that miraculously survived were already openly searching for amateur videos. Explicit sex, in its pure nature, was much more exciting than Barbie's. This is how it has been preserved with certain production parameters until today. The appearance of the Web phenomenon and the creation of a market with preview and then downloads, and the use of credit card, with a saga of other collateral activities that don't come to case of genre, there is an unimaginable deployment of inventiveness. Because from the itinerant camera and home video became a type of video by sketch type, very low narrative level and much erotic tension, with fascination in the middle according to theme. The milf housewives seduced by a plumber, students, etc., etc.
The domestic video and diversification of genre.
About this essay and that it also see light on internet pages, I'm interested in collecting a comment made to me and referring to gay porn cinema, now I won't differentiate between feminine or masculine. Since the Home Video and open offer of daily life was opening up imagination of potential cameras trying to initiate themselves in the art of their own contemplation of pleasure. Therefore, the aesthetic objective of beauty passed to a second place, so images of dwarfs, fat women, big breasts, milfs, old women, old men, mature people, swingers, fat people, mutilated, zoophilia and pedophilia emerged (something really repulsive). Similarly, each subgenre divides into a specific activity, which led to infinite searches for fantasy stimulated from the Web.
Conclusion:
Unfortunately, porn cinema has not achieved the category of minor art, without being able to see in the past that it was attempted to overcome with explicit sex, the limitation of the coarse. Perhaps it wouldn't reach an aesthetic filmography like Luchino Visconti's, but it shouldn't deny it the category of minor art. Today, porn cinema is waiting for a director to relaunch it towards a site where it has an aesthetic value above sexual evaluation. The camera phone seems to have destroyed all hope.
Cited films Original Title: Caligola (1979), Director Tinto Brass. Bob Gucchione and Giancarlo Lui (Additional Photography). Source IMDb.
Original Title: La Chiave(1983) Director Tinto Brass. Source IMDb
Original Title: Ultimo Tango a Parigi. (1972) Director Bernardo Bertolucci. Source IMDb.
Original Title: The Devil in Miss Jones (1973) Director Gerard Damiano. Source muchocine.net
Foreword
Yesterday I saw the wonderful images of Corto Maltes in a film made about the fantastic Hugo Pratt's images. I rejoiced, since I am from a generation where Hora Cero, Frontera and Rayo Rojo were the daily bread and warm pan that was eagerly awaited. Because the Comic, did it fill the void of literature for the middle class? Hugo Pratt, wasn't he less than nothing, a man born in a nearby town to Rímini, nothing more or less than Fellini's cradle, taken from childhood to live in Venice, nothing more, or less than Venice, and at fourteen years old, already recruited as a police cadet in Tripolitanian Italy in North Africa. We cannot help but envy some of Hugo Pratt's experiences. We cannot think that many of his images poured into the comic were empty of content and low critical level. On the contrary, time was revaluing it. What for my era the Comic, which was a minor art. It was gradually becoming an art, more linked obviously with painting, as it seemed to be digging up the most docile associative fantasies of human beings. Pratt, later Oesterheld with Eternauta and some of Argentina's epic comic strips like Sargento Kirk showed that not. The minor art, became a popular manifestation of an order that today we can say that Moebius, Quino, Fontanarrosa, Oesterheld, Caloi, or the same Hugo Pratt, become Classics. With apologies to those who forgot me on the way like Dante Quinterno, Divito, and many other wonderful men from Argentine graphics who came photographing reality like Hermenegildo Sabat, slowly with a task of years and years.
Key Milestones
In Pornographic Cinema something similar happens. First things first, exposing people's intimacy with crudeness. Use the means and done. The evolution by saturation is exhausting forms and manners, according to the Aristotelian criterion. Because sexuality for voyeurism has a limit and a captive market, simply voyeurism. Therefore, the idea of including an argument in pornographic cinema did not seem like a mistake. The Devil in Ms Jones is Gerard Damiano's first approach to this intention. Miss Jones is a 40-year-old woman bored with life who decides to commit suicide. With a straight and moral life, she is rejected in heaven for being a suicide, the devil sends her back to earth so that she can indulge in various forms of pleasure. With this simple argumental idea Damiano develops the film that begins to calibrate porn cinema linked to cinema with an argument in the 1970s. We would say that porn cinema seeks its place in cinema as an art form. Perhaps the vain recognition of the moment it was achieving the comic strip. The way of El Último Tango en Paris with Marlon Brando and Marie Schneider by Bernardo Bertolucci, although anticipating much of its time, had nothing to do with what Damiano was trying to do in 1973. Bertolucci, bold but not explicit, showed a tendency, with known actors, did not speculate on reaching the depth of the scenes. Damiano, with porn artists, dedicated himself to seeking the impact of the plate, trying not to make a class B movie, inevitable in its making.
Calígula, ascenso y caída del imperio de Tinto Brass.
Recently in 1979 Tinto Brass promotes an original idea that could combine the wonderful situations proposed by Bertolucci and Damiano. A cinema of artists and explicit pornography. Solution, costume and montage. It is thus that he hires Malcom Mac Dowell, who had made the success of El Topo, Peter O'Tole, a consecrated actor since Lawrence of Arabia, and Helen Mirren, who will be easier to remember for her brilliant interpretation in a recent film like The Queen, the Queen of England, to develop the argumental plot of movie. And the explicit sex scene developed by adult film actors directly in Cinecitta, Rome. To later make a perfect montage that results in the movie. Caligula may be the only exponent of that last attempt at argumentative and porn cinema, where porn sought its place in minor arts. Later movies by Tinto Brass such as The Key, with strong explicit sex, did not achieve the strength of Caligula. The reasons are more than concrete. The advancement of new technologies left no room for direct investment in film production like that proposed by Tinto Brass.
The Key
The Key is the first movie after Caligula, in which Tinto Brass may already be warning about the difficulties of developing technologies for domestic use. In the case of the same, what's interesting is the imprint of an Italian husband in Venice who discovers the seductive side of his wife from his own perversion. The trigger is the appearance of a Polaroid-type American instant camera that Lazlo, the character acting as his daughter's boyfriend, gives to him, and with which he photographs his naked wife after putting her to sleep with alcohol and drugs. Although there are scenes of nudity for both sexes in the same movie, the voltage is reduced compared to what happened in Caligula, as if Brass were trying to retake narrative cinema. Therefore, the pre-war criticism, religious context, and obsessive passion of conjugal love convert the movie into a true B-movie, if one recognizes the effort made by the director to elevate the genre slightly higher than before and after it.
New technologies
Parallel to these events, although there existed Super 8, the dependence on revelation that linked private or commercial home pornography to a third group that revealed the roll, which either made the situation public or made it result obtained by that means. But since the launch on the market by Sony of Video Betamax both in TV-connected recorders and in independent handheld cameras with a battery in the palm of one's hand, or in a room, freed the cameraman from all previous knowledge of framing. Voyeurism became voyeurism without fear, not just for the spectator of the result, but also for the same scene captor.
The appearance of VHS videos in their NTSC and PAL versions later gave life to this dream. The formats of the first series reduced to around five encounters, three heteros, and two lesbians, where one of the major problems was showing male ejaculation. The model was of toned bodies and spectacular blonde women. The porn actresses of the early video era generally looked like Barbie, modestly copying the successes of films on the big screen at the time, such as E.T., Back to the Future, Rambo, etc. The selection was meticulous, there were no flaws, no stretch marks, no cellulite. They turned women into a true archetype. The design shared by a voyeur couple left doubts for those women who did what they did, never reaching those exuberant measurements that their potential partners would be denied of those delirious images of perfect women.
The endless development of the digital video camera and the appearance of the cellular phone with camera and video.
By 1996, when the red-light district in New York was moved from 45th Street to 8th Street, where the houses of art accessories and porn videos that miraculously survived were already openly searching for amateur videos. Explicit sex, in its pure nature, was much more exciting than Barbie's. This is how it has been preserved with certain production parameters until today. The appearance of the Web phenomenon and the creation of a market with preview and then downloads, and the use of credit card, with a saga of other collateral activities that don't come to case of genre, there is an unimaginable deployment of inventiveness. Because from the itinerant camera and home video became a type of video by sketch type, very low narrative level and much erotic tension, with fascination in the middle according to theme. The milf housewives seduced by a plumber, students, etc., etc.
The domestic video and diversification of genre.
About this essay and that it also see light on internet pages, I'm interested in collecting a comment made to me and referring to gay porn cinema, now I won't differentiate between feminine or masculine. Since the Home Video and open offer of daily life was opening up imagination of potential cameras trying to initiate themselves in the art of their own contemplation of pleasure. Therefore, the aesthetic objective of beauty passed to a second place, so images of dwarfs, fat women, big breasts, milfs, old women, old men, mature people, swingers, fat people, mutilated, zoophilia and pedophilia emerged (something really repulsive). Similarly, each subgenre divides into a specific activity, which led to infinite searches for fantasy stimulated from the Web.
Conclusion:
Unfortunately, porn cinema has not achieved the category of minor art, without being able to see in the past that it was attempted to overcome with explicit sex, the limitation of the coarse. Perhaps it wouldn't reach an aesthetic filmography like Luchino Visconti's, but it shouldn't deny it the category of minor art. Today, porn cinema is waiting for a director to relaunch it towards a site where it has an aesthetic value above sexual evaluation. The camera phone seems to have destroyed all hope.
Cited films Original Title: Caligola (1979), Director Tinto Brass. Bob Gucchione and Giancarlo Lui (Additional Photography). Source IMDb.
Original Title: La Chiave(1983) Director Tinto Brass. Source IMDb
Original Title: Ultimo Tango a Parigi. (1972) Director Bernardo Bertolucci. Source IMDb.
Original Title: The Devil in Miss Jones (1973) Director Gerard Damiano. Source muchocine.net
5 comentários - Porn cinema stayed mid-course due to technology
Buena info che
Gracias por compartir
No me va a quedar otra que seguirte!