Newish Pornography: Old French smut for modern screens

Movies that have no moral purpose are pornographic. That goes for Bruce Willis, John Travolta, William Friedkin and Neil LaBute movies as much as any clearly presented as pornography. These facts are borne out by The Good Old Naughty Days, a compilation of hardcore shorts made in France between 1905 and 1930, collated by Michel Reilhac from a cache of 300 one-reelers recently restored by France’s National Center for Cinematography and now being distributed in the U.S. by Strand Releasing.

My interest was aroused with an "inspired by" credit for the contemporary mainstream actor Pascal Greggory, whose participation in Patrice Chereau’s Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train and Queen Margot have made him a bellwether among France’s most sophisticated gay filmmakers. Like his role as the astute, dissolute historian François in Those Who Love Me, Greggory confers fastidiousness on this sexually inquisitive project. These 12 clips can be examined primarily for the authentication of obscure sexual practices that one might have thought were modern, and for the realization that in every age, socially circumscribed behavior (desires deemed improper) will inevitably find an outlet.

That’s a less facetious view than the press notes’ blather about "transgressive sexual footage" and "the secret history of cinema." Fact is, these movies were made to be shown in brothels–to warm up and insinuate customers participating in hidden social customs. Reilhac says, "It seems that from the beginning of silent films, the camera was already used as a voyeuristic tool to film sexual acts as means to fulfill one’s sexual fantasies. At the turn of the century, a profitable industry had already started producing these films for the delight of collectors of erotic films."

The exploitation purpose behind these films cannot be denied whether approaching them dispassionately or even passionately–if searching these artifacts for the same groundbreaking humanism as Those Who Love Me. The variety of sex acts–largely oral, frequently bisexual, even some bestial–attest to the continuation of Rabelaisian, Sadean excess throughout human history. Feats that might seem the trademark depravity of Rocco Siffredi or Kristen Bjorn are actually not new. Rather, each clip offers illicit evidence of how common lust is–despite decades of innuendo, double entendre and hypocrisy. It’s like receiving postcards from Sodom that move.

In spite of a humorous early porno-cartoon, Eveready Harton in Buried Treasure, this is an eerie collection. It illustrates the lack of emotional affect that separates erotica from art. No skit has a premise richer than a limerick, and the compulsory bum-tonguing and money-shots are less than imaginative. Reduced to sex, the anonymous performers appear at their most desperate. Limited to sex, they even lose the humanizing element of longing. One jolting moment shows a male voyeur bent backwards in horny-goat jacking off and then his frenzied collapse. Male spectatorship has rarely looked more pathetic–a truth that Reilhac’s presentation ignores, but that the inclusion of Greggory’s name forces one to notice.

Carrying Greggory’s imprimatur, these shorts are meant to do something more than titillate. Calling this compilation The Good Old Naughty Days (the original French title is Polisson et Galipettes) suggests that early pornography was nicer than today’s, but the films themselves prove otherwise: Belief in one era’s innocence is as specious as the social codes that force desire underground or outside of "proper" behavior. Feeling oppressed, gays commonly seek a form of confirmation–as well as release–in pornography. Surely that’s something Greggory and Strand Releasing understand well. But Reilhac’s slim historical context never moves beyond fueling that desperation. About the same time these clips were shot, experimental surrealist filmmakers made the crucial connection between illicit desire and repressive ideology. A masterpiece like Luis Buñuel’s L’Age D’Or (1930) got its power simply from alluding to sexual impulse. You might even say Buñuel respected it–thus forever disturbing and subverting propriety.

The Good Old Naughty Days Compiled by Michel Reilhac

Femme Fatale

AN UNFORTUNATE cliche, stemming from the writing of DePalma’s most perceptive American critic, Pauline Kael, holds that his filmmaking is naughty, sexy stuff. Well it is, but Femme Fatale proves there’s more to it. A great DePalma film crosses that surrealist line where art transcends pornography. The new Femme Fatale DVD confirms DePalma triumphing over sex-kitsch with a remarkable, spiritually advanced deconstruction of genre movies. Old ways are not always the best ways, and DePalma’s Femme Fatale calls for a new era in movie-watching–or to be more precise, movie-thinking. It isn’t enough to get off on the sensations; DePalma’s story of Laure (Rebecca Romijn-Stamos) an American girl in gangland Paris deconstructs the film noir to see a greater vision of life and human interaction. In this film about the lures of sex and aggression (the very world Michel Reilhac rounds up), DePalma rubs our skin to get under it–to get at moviegoers’ subconscious.

Snobs will scoff; they never see beyond the surface of DePalma’s mixed-genre capriccios anyway. They treat DePalma’s alluring surfaces as mainstream porn. In the new edition of The Devil’s Candy (DaCapo), Julie Salamon’s production record of DePalma’s 1990 The Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe voiced his perplexity about DePalma’s art: "Visually it is so spectacular that it’s a real test of your senses to get it all in at the same time." Wolfe stayed at the door, not venturing to admit the significance of DePalma’s imagery: DePalma’s gliding camera automatically connects to one’s dreams. Though porn, like Hollywood, simply exploits one’s fantasies, DePalma applies moral purpose to the expression of our fantasy lives.

Appreciating DePalma’s films starts with understanding that movies–and not just the high-minded ones–are works of art. People who are irritated by pop art, who don’t enjoy the complex sensations and intellectual challenge of modernism, will probably miss Femme Fatale’s thrilling play with the potentialities of high and low culture. Like Jean Cocteau’s 1930 surrealist masterwork The Blood of a Poet, Femme Fatale’s story also takes place in a single instant (the 3:33 of all the clocks throughout the movie)–that’s how long it takes to raise the bar of modern art.

Last fall, a reviewer dismissed Femme Fatale as "elegant nonsense." Such criticism is anti-esthetic because it makes people devalue their pleasure; they’re not encouraged to explore what is innately engaging that may lead to deeper reflection. They’re used to treating movies as escapist mechanisms, as pornography. But DePalma knows more about genre than most movie reviewers, which explains why Femme Fatale left so many in the dust. In this era, people have looked at a lot of movies without really seeing any. After so many years of meaningless Hollywood exploitation, the trash they impute to DePalma is in themselves. Why do they even go to the movies if they don’t enjoy the things DePalma does so well–that only cinema can do? (In a breathtaking/hilarious moment, Laure falls off a moral precipice into a situation of domestic reprieve; tripping into rich, rich fantasy and deeper obligation.) Dismissing this is like complaining when sex doesn’t end in impregnation. They don’t enjoy the ride or the communication.

Femme Fatale provides an enlightening dialogue with movie conventions. Everything that happens in Laure’s dream life is familiar from our experience of film noir, yet DePalma goes farther. Being both coherent and provocative, he uses familiar conventions to seriously address Fate, Destiny, Redemption. Watching the events in Laure’s mind exposes our own responses to genre conventions; her paranoia, greed and lust reveal our own. DePalma’s sexual and racial symbols are so powerful that the sight of Laure’s fully nude baptism has an ecstatic fascination that holds the two halves of the movie together.

Romijn-Stamos’ submerging crucifix-like into the Seine is the one movie image from 2002 that made me say, "I can’t believe my eyes!" The shock of this baptismal scene is not just its head-spinning beauty but DePalma’s ravishing sincerity. Cynical Laure is depraved ("You don’t have to lick my ass, just fuck me!") She needs redemption–not from sex but from selfishness and self-degradation. And DePalma provides redemption in classic visual terms that not only show his virtuosity but justify his idealism. No longer a nihilistic whiz kid, he’s like the Antonio Banderas character, a photographer and photo-montagist who looks for a ray of light (according to Keith Gardner, one churchyard shot is a pointed reference to the work of Garry Winograd). DePalma’s baptism scene also evokes and reproves Andres Serrano’s controversial 80s photo art–as much a deliberate revision as is Femme Fatale’s deconstruction of noir. The scene’s Christian connotation may be out of favor with most critics but they also refuse to account for its audacity.

Laure’s nakedness (she’s a sex doll, a thin body with sculpted erogenous zones) disrupts the sanctimonious pose. DePalma’s water-and-flesh hues challenge the preeminence of our modern pornographic imagination (alluded to in a man’s conspiratorial death’s grin). The worried look on Laure’s face personalizes her; it’s not just a body on display but a human in crisis, a soul in suspension. As she struggles upward, DePalma’s artistry also seems to be striving–to connect with the highest moral heritage of western art. Unafraid of cinema’s visual potential, DePalma remakes the experience of movie watching into a moral exploration. He dares to do what pornographic Hollywood won’t.

Femme Fatale Directed by Brian DePalma