GERRY HARANT presents a different slant on the argument about pornography versus eroticism in film.
The world's first publicly screened film was called Train arriving at a station. It caused a sensation — not because of what it showed, but because the notion that pictures could be made to move appeared unbelievable. However, soon "motion pictures" were used to present fictional and actual events. From being sneered at as the "poor man's theatre" and forming part of vaudeville, by the second decade of this century film had became an art form of its own, even if only a handful recognised it as such.
Film is a technological medium, and attempts at impressing audiences rather than involving them have persisted ever since. Multiple screens were used to present 360 degree panoramas; sound was added; colour, initially produced by tinting, became "mandatory"; we had 3-D, Cinemascope, Dolby stereo. The impetus was always money, but many film-makers also felt that the closer we could get to "reality", the "better" films would be.
In practice, each of the additions involved a setback for the art of film, even if only temporary. For instance, just about the time Griffith, Eisenstein, Pudovkin and others had developed artistic means of conveying complex emotions by images alone, the "all-singing, all-dancing" sound film took the art back to the "photo-play" of the early 1900s, where much of it has remained since.
Massive early Technicolor cameras restricted the movement of cameras, which had become relatively mobile in black and white work. Even now, powerful effects of composition and lighting, possible only in black and white, are ruled out by colour. Cinemascope, while ideal for presenting horizontal sex or the life of the dachshund, and moderately useful for showing the wide-open spaces, restricted composition while expanding the view.
Luckily, all this playing with gimmicks didn't prevent talented film-makers from relying on content rather than technology. Many stories were artificial or slight, as one would expect from a mainly commercial medium; heavy censorship tended to prevail both under the front office in Hollywood and under Zhdanov in the Soviet Union after the dissipation of the initial revolutionary artistic and political freedom. Nevertheless, great films continued to be made. Intelligent audiences developed, film festivals and film societies helped to train critical faculties — in short, there was progress.
Because serious artists are almost always humanists, if not socialists, political values tended to be progressive, even in the US. The McCarthyite anticommunist persecution of Hollywood personnel was not entirely paranoid; the galaxy of writers Hollywood kept captive by the lure of regular income included some of the better humanist novelists and playwrights of the US and Europe. Hollywood's moguls, alongside the CIA and FBI (ASIO too), always equated humanism with communism.
The censors
Australian censorship in the immediate postwar period mirrored our hypocritical political value system. Apart from overtly political bans on films from China and the Soviet Union (quickly defeated by major campaigns), we had the strictest "moral" censorship after Ireland. The system was bizarre; the rules forced the censor to view films scene by scene (sometimes frame by frame).
The anti-censorship argument pointed to the absurdity of looking at the "dirty bits" in film when — or so we claimed — audiences saw it as a whole. The censor became a target for ridicule and, when Don Chipp became minister for customs, censorship parameters and personnel changed radically. In the long term, not all the changes turned out to be positive.
Removing censorship meant that, in the eyes of financiers, sex scenes became mandatory in feature films. Audiences were attracted not by the content but by the dirty bits. For people of the '70s raised in a sexually repressive environment, screen sex became the new revelation and the latest gimmick.
The popularity of gratuitous sex and violence didn't surprise those who had campaigned against censorship. We predicted that it would, like other gimmicks, settle down after a short while. We were wrong, because the market changed. More than half the world's film production is now pornographic: quickies turned out in as little as four days for peanuts. The greater part of the income from all films — porno or other — comes from the video market, where the "dirty bits" can be lovingly inched backwards and forwards.
Constantly improving technology can create previously undreamt of realism. As well, the industry constantly ups the ante in terms of the bizarre, the violent and, worst of the lot, the grossly sexist. Audiences are once again being conditioned to an attention span of no more than the length of a TV ad as more and more films rely on effects and sensationalism rather than story and characterisation. In many ways we are back at Train arriving at a station.
Those of us who had hoped to see sexuality take its rightful place in feature films as an additional and essential means of depicting the total human situation are more than ever short-changed, as both film-makers and censor-conditioned audiences see sex scenes as an obligatory adjunct. Instead of marvelling at the power of the medium to expand human horizons, we are dragged back to the arid question, "What harm does it do?".
What harm does it do?
Of course, as one of GLW's recent contributors so perceptively pointed out, pornography doesn't cause rape; nor, incidentally, is there any other single cause of rape I am aware of. But pornography does help to generate a "culture", if that is the word. One of the effects of this culture is the difficulty some people have in separating pornography and eroticism. I believe differences exist; here are some of the them.
Pornography depends on viewers seeing the performers as sex objects; recognising the characters would be embarrassing. Eroticism, on the other hand, relies on viewers identifying with the people shown. Pornography is about acts committed on and by these objects; eroticism is about sexual thought. Pornography forces viewers to limit themselves to primary sexual characteristics: sex organs and positions or juxtapositions; eroticism lies in behaviour, and is independent of nudity or sexual simulation. Pornography is about sex; eroticism is about sexuality. Pornography is about being "naughty"; eroticism is about being human.
Pornography is invariably humourless; eroticism is generally light-hearted. Pornography feeds on violence; violence is anathema to eroticism. In short, pornography is about power, overwhelmingly male power; eroticism is about communication.
The sad thing is not that some people don't know the difference, but that the subject should be discussed in terms of these alternatives. Used in context, cinematic depictions of sexuality don't have to be either pornographic or erotic. That either/or assumption itself denotes the mind of the pornographer/censor — the dirty bits mentality which pervades the topless bar, the tabletop dancing, the strip joint and other manifestations of male minds kept forever at the adolescent level by and for the capitalist system.
It is the culture of rape, of oppression of women, of molestation and of the denigration of human relationships — hardly a climate acceptable to feminists or to socialists desiring a non-exploitative society. The manufacture of the pornographic product is in itself often far more demeaning and exploitative than other forms of prostitution and frequently involves violence against women, as documented by Linda Lovelace.
No wonder the debate of censorship versus civil liberties is simmering once again. It is largely a bourgeois debate; the suppression of a commercial product considered harmful should hardly be taken to constitute censorship. Censorship means the abrogation of thought and expression, political or artistic, and is nowadays generally exercised by managements. Commercial pornography embodies no more artistic initiative than a Benson and Hedges commercial, and the production values are generally vastly inferior.
The reason for rejecting the banning option is far more practical: it doesn't work. Better ways can be found, as in the case of People magazine some time ago, which involved making the product commercially non-viable. The methods employed can involve setting low admission and hiring rates, high taxes and less conspicuous display. Of course, this will involve bureaucratic decisions. These should involve representatives of interested and affected groups, because they are political decisions.
Meanwhile, with money for serious films shrinking, it is up to us to support humanist film-makers, of whom there are quite a few. The low cost of high-grade video also once again allows serious film-makers to bypass the money-grubbers.
Changing the violent nature of the culture engendered by capitalism, however, is a forlorn hope unless we have a revolution; and, as the women's movement has shown, even then it will require a major struggle requiring far more than a tinkering with censorship.