Carte blanche to Christophe Bier: French Pornography, a cinema genre to (re)discover
Pornographic cinema is viewed as a whole block with no auteurs, no peculiar films and no aesthetic trends: a flood of images that bring shame, make the number of rapes rise up, corrupt the youth and degrade woman’s image. In the ‘70s, its emergence in France was rapidly controlled by the “Law X”, which heavily taxed the emerging pornography, marginalised it by confining it to specialised movie theaters and brought about its disappearance 15 years later.
In 2005, the Conseil supérieur de l’audiovisuel français cited public health as a reason to forbid films without condoms, thus erasing 35mm films and denying the historical dimension of the genre. To defend it, one has to abandon the moral point of view in favour of critical analysis: “The important thing, writes Julien Cervois, is not whether or not there is piss, but to know how it is being shot and why” (Le Cinéma pornographique, Vrin). One couldn’t express oneself clearer.
This demand incited me and my redactors to begin in 2000 a Dictionnaire des films français érotiques et pornographiques 16 et 35 mm. 1800 titles counted and analised, from A bout de sexe to Zob, zob, zob, from the very first sexy films to the last hardcore ones, from the orientalising Sultane de l’amour in 1919 to Belle Salope de 30 ans in 1996. 1500 pages of puritan work that will (at last) be published in April/Mai 2011. We hope that we will thus participate in the acknowledgement of a genre in the cultural inheritance of French cinema. It is time that film archives take inventory of the porn tapes in their collections and show them, just as simply as we would show a Duvivier or a Bergman. And also, let’s say it, to embark upon a vast restoration work.
Porn-phobic people say: “when you’ve seen one porn movie, you’ve seen them all”. The Luff and the Swiss film archive will prove them wrong, excavating some French porn movies, resounding proofs of the unbelievable richness of a genre that did not wait for the post-porn theorisations and the experimental recovery to deliver some fascinating, beautiful and sometime ambitious pieces.
Christophe Bier, redactor in chief of the Dictionnaire des films français érotiques et pornographiques 16 & 35 mm, to be published in April 2011 by Serious Publishing.