You know it when you see it. And beginning in the 70s, you could see it everywhere in San Francisco. By 1970, SF became the first US city to allow hardcore pornography to be shown in theaters.
Last month, I discussed smut savant Michael Stabile’s documentary short Smut Capital of America. In a mere 15 minutes, the short encompassed a decade’s worth of SF porn history.
Now through August 25, our own Yerba Buena Center for the Arts will host a series named after Stabile’s film and centered on SF’s golden age of pornography.
This smut spate is YBCA’s 6th Bay Area Now series, yet it’s not merely a “porn” series, says YBCA curator Joel Shepard, but a showcase of “an authentic counterculture in San Francisco that has just been poorly documented because of its sort-of-underground nature.” Though YBCA will be showing genuine pornos of the period, “long scenes of grinding genitals don’t really work in this setting,” Shepard says.
Kicking off with Stabile’s Smut Capital short tonight at 7:30 pm in the screening room, as well as a discussion with Stabile and Shepard to follow, the series boasts an array of narrative features, shorts and documentaries.
On Thursday, July 21 at 7:30, YBCA screens SF porn auteur Alex de Renzy’s Pornography in Denmark (1969), a quasi-documentary about Denmark’s lift of the ban on pornography in 1967, making it the first world nation to enact such legislation. Denmark basically set the balls rolling, transporting the porn industry from the stuff of the demimonde to a mainstream cultural commodity. Clearly, audiences were hungry for this kind of representation, since the film allegedly grossed over two million. Without this film, porn might not have been legalized in SF the following year.
While De Renzy’s film has some explicit content — mostly archival footage of vintage porn and salacious still images — it is ultimately a serious documentary and the essence of an era. My favorite quote from the film? “In Danish porn, the vibrator appears early and often.” Judging from contemporary porn (not that I watch the stuff! filthy filthy filthy!) I would call that a case of cinematic antecedence.
The third film screening in the series is Arthur Bressan Jr.’s Passing Strangers from 1974 (Thursday, July 28 at 7:30pm). A seminal filmmaker — in both senses of the word — of queer cinema, Bressan blurs the line between erotica and arthouse in this surreal and lyrical smut flick. Two men named Robert meet through the personals section of the Bay Area Reporter. In his ad, one of the Roberts copies Walt Whitman’s “To a Stranger,” where the film gets its title and the two men soon share more than their love of literature.
In the film’s central sex scene, where the Roberts sound their barbaric yawps in the woods, Bressan scores a passionate session of butt sex with Erik Satie’s “Trois Gymnopedies No. 1.” This track is typically used for funerals or more elegiac situations yet it works curiously well in concert with this particular little death.
There’s something strangely arty about Passing Strangers: a scene where the younger Robert imagines himself as a tragic clown and masturbates in slow-mo to an ecstatic audience is kind of… Fellini-esque. Bressan’s haphazard use of montage and jump cuts — a bummer for formalist porn-goers but a boner for cinephiles — elevates Strangers above the status of mere jack-off material. This is how you do sex in 16mm right. The film’s sublime treatment of gay eros amid the hustler crowd of Polk Street offers more provocative and honest gay representation than most contemporary queer films I can recall. For a slice-of-life window into the life and times of a roaring counterculture, look no further.
Passing Strangers is not the only film in the series with “lit’rary” inclinations. The Mitchell Brothers’ Resurrection of Eve (1973) — the last film shown in the series — opens with a William Blake quote as prelude to the much less enlightened material that follows. In an unsavory opening scene, Eve begins with a 12-year-old girl (played by an adult, thankfully) being forced to blow a toothless hick. The frank creepiness of this moment suggests something out of John Waters or, maybe later, Todd Solondz (re: 1998’s Happiness… or don’t).
Then we see Frank Paradise (played by Matthew Armon, a less attractive Kris Kristofferson lookalike) depositing in his cumdumpster du jour, Candi, and later dumping her in the street. The film’s barrage of excessively Aquaneted brunettes makes it difficult to distinguish who’s who if you’re not a connoisseur of 70s porn actresses. But the standout is Marilyn Chambers, probably the most famous SF adult film actress. She plays Paradise’s wife, whose facial reconstruction makes her unrecognizable after a car accident, and whose libido is then lifted from the fetters of female repression, those so-called “hang-ups.”
None of these films is pure male-directed fantasy, either. Before they became the name of the Mitchell Brothers O’Farrell Theatre in the Tenderloin (note the classy “-re” ending to theatre — the equivalent of masturbating with your pinky out!), the Mitchell Brothers made films with men and women in mind. In Resurrection of Eve, Chambers’ character is initially left cold by her husband’s idea of group sex. But soon, she gets sucked into that world and grows increasingly tumescent at the prospect of orgies.
The discomfort and clumsiness of the film’s sex scenes — with an emphasis on natural light and extreme close-ups rather than full-body shots — suggest something more complex than a pandering to perverts. A few Bergman-esque shots of women looking pensive on the beach make this film an especially un-erotic experience. Clearly there’s some psychological penetration at play here, rather than just that other kind.
While Resurrection of Eve seems like a kitschy relic today, it remains an indelible artifact of 70s cultural fetishes while teasing out many of the YBCA series’ themes. Porn was still porn back then, but it was also something else, a legitimate cinematic experience intended for viewers who got off on more than just a few minutes of hump-and-pump. Like Passing Strangers, the film offers a genuine story and a probe into other people’s sex lives, which we were so curious about. And we still are.
These films will all be shown in their original rather than digital format. YBCA curator Shepard says some of these films are “impossible to see” and that few historians and curators have really tried to assemble this material “to put it all together and make sense of it.”
Shepard also added that “the novelty of San Francisco being this wide-open place for this material became less of a novelty because [pornography] really spread across the country.” This is where it all got started.
That said, consider this series an arthouse exhibit, an embrace of a golden age in San Francisco. Bring a date — but maybe not a first date.
For a complete list of films showing, check out YBCA’s website.
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