The history of the pornographic film and the status of sexuality in modern societies

Résumé du document

The word pornography originates from the Greek word porné (harlot, prostitute, or female captive) and graphos (writing about or description of). Thus, pornography means the writing or the description of female sexual activities with a commercial motive. However, recently pornography has become a political issue as a result of different interpretations of pornography has come into existence. The ?Nationwide Festival of Light' claims that pornography is a representation which isolates one's physical activity ? sex or violence ? from the social context, which would justify it as an activity or portray its consequences. The argument is that pornography ?stimulates the kind of behaviour of the audiences that may lead to violence'.

Extraits

[...] For example the film: The Virgin with the Hot Pants (ca. 1923-25). The film begins with sex-cartoons - “series of ‘lesbian' activities as two or three naked woman dance, kiss, and play with a dildo. A title card addresses a member of the audience directly: there in the front row, spread those lips apart for us'. We see a close-up of a man's hand spreading apart the labia of one of the woman. ‘Turn over honey so we can see how it looks from behind.' The woman obliges and displays her genitals from the rear, as if for an inspecting eye. [...]

[...] Another striking feature is the breakdown in narrative coherence. In stags there is usually built a consistent story around some kind of encounter nun meets monk in the garden/man picks up to woman in car but when it comes to the actual sex the story-line breaks down with unexplained couplings followed by misplaced close-ups and by radical time-shifts. Narratives that are already rudimentary become truly primitive during their hard-core sequences. Stag was primitive and pockmarked by its technical limitations, and it did not invent, such as the mainstream cinema, creative new narrative strategies along the way. [...]

[...] The invention of the video spread pornography and its truth about sexuality over the private home, in the smallest unity of society. The video was also based on the same principle like the stags and the hard- core narratives, on permanent penetration. However, the video offered new possibilities to show more methods of sexual satisfaction, which was in the public cinema impossible. New genres of sexual intercourse were produced, like Anal-, Transsexual-, or Bondage and Discipline-porn's, but just to get more audiences and to spread over a bigger market to sale the products. [...]

[...] The history of the pornographic film and the status of sexuality in modern societies 1. What is pornography? The word pornography originates from the Greek root porné (harlot, prostitute, or female captive) and graphos (writing about or description of). Thus, pornography means the writing or the description of purchasable female sexual activities. However, recently the word has become, political issue; the consequence of this is that there are now different interpretations of pornography. I want to provide a brief summary about the main contemporary definitions: the conservative view, exemplified by the British right-wing ‘Nationwide Festival of Light', the feminist view, and the liberal view. [...]

[...] The history of pornography was and is determined by social powers which have the ‘will to knowledge' and its definition of the truth of sexuality. They were and are still supported by a pornographic material producing industry, which confirm the truth of sexuality in order to sell its products. The result is that the pornographic industry made sexuality to a commodity for the capitalistic market and expanded its influence from a separated social group (visitors of smoking rooms and brothels) to the smallest social group (in the private homes till the children). [...]