Original Climax Films: historicizing the British hardcore pornography film business

This article presents findings from my research into the British hardcore pornography business. Porn studies has given little coverage to the British pornography business, with much of the academic literature focusing on the American adult entertainment industry. Recently, there has been a rising interest in the historical framework of porn cinemas both in popular culture and in academic work. This article contributes to this debate, taking both a cultural and an economic approach to explore the conditions that led to the emergence of British hardcore production as an alternative economy in the 1960s. In this economy, entrepreneurs make use of new technologies to produce artefacts that are exchanged for an economic benefit, while circumventing laws to distribute their artefacts. To historicize this economy, I draw on ethnohistorical research, which includes interviews with people involved in the British hardcore business and archival research. I argue that a combination of glamour filmmaking, a relaxation of political and cultural attitudes towards sexuality, the location of Soho, London, and emerging technologies for producing films collectively contribute to the emergence of an alternative economy of British hardcore production. I focus specifically on the practices of two entrepreneurs within this economy, Ivor Cook and Mike Freeman, considering how their actions inadvertently created the British hardcore film business, and played a significant role in the development of hardcore production outside of the United Kingdom

Drawing the Line : Generic Boundaries of the Pornographic Film in Early 1970s Sweden

The article focuses on the advertising for, and reception of, sexually explicit films following the removal of the obscenity clause in the Swedish penal code in 1971. Many films released at this time have gone down in Swedish film history as “more or less” pornographic, although from a present-day perspective they would most probably not be described that way. While pornographic films – so called “stag films” – had been produced since the early twentieth century, it was nevertheless not until the 1960s that sexually explicit material could be shown publicly and not until the 1970s that pornographic films became available to a wider audience. As a film genre then, pornography underwent an important transformation at this point in time. If, prior to this point, it had been clearly defined by its forbidden and clandestine circulation, and more or less exclusively directed towards a male audience, in the early 1970s, those clearly defined boundaries dissolved under a more relaxed attitude from authorities. This led to a re-negotiation of the genre, which is discussed in the article with the aid of film scholar Rick Altman’s theory of how genres are shaped and how they develop, through mutual and complex processes in which producers, audiences, and critics are involved. Mapping the use of generic labels in advertisements, articles and reviews, and censorship records for a few case studies such as for instance More From the Language of Love, Anita – Swedish Nymphet (Anita – ur en tonårsflickas dagbok, 1973), and Flossie (1974), as well as exhibition practices, the article traces the development of the pornographic film as a genre during the first half of the 1970s

Skenet som bedrog: Mai Zetterling och det svenska sextiotalet

Mai Zetterling (1925-1994) was a popular actress in the 1940s. In the 1960s, she directed four feature films. The films ? Loving Couples (1964), Night Games (1966), The Girls (1968) and Dr. Glas (1969) ? were met with increasing hostility by Swedish critics, however, and after the 1960s, Mai Zetterling only directed two more feature films in her life, the British Scrubbers (1982) and the Swedish Amorosa (1986). In the present dissertation, the director Zetterling functions as a starting point for a critical study of the Swedish art cinema institution and its historiography. Informed by a gender perspective, the dissertation deals with the films Zetterling directed during the 1960s and their reception. It also deals with the film cultural climate in Sweden during the period, and how the image of and the narratives about Zetterling have changed over time. Zetterling's star persona as an actress and eventually her biographical legend is described and analyzed in chapter one. In 1963, a reform changed Swedish film policy and the Swedish Film Institute was founded. This influenced the national film culture, which is discussed in the second chapter. In chapters three and four, narratology and gender theory are utilised in analyses of the four films Zetterling directed in the 1960s, whereas the fifth chapter deals with the reception of them and Zetterling's position in Swedish film historiography. A major point of the dissertation is that the encounter between Zetterling and the Swedish art cinema institution in the 1960s was problematic. On a very tangible level, she was a woman who tried to make her way into a male-dominated profession. Furthermore, as a popular actress she transgressed the boundary between mass culture and modernism when she made a claim to be accepted as an art film auteur. And in addition to this, as she had left Sweden for England in late 1947 and lived abroad for the rest of her life, she was also an expatriate who turned a critical gaze on the Swedish welfare state, the familiar who became the Other

Drömmen om den goda pornografin : Om sextio- och sjuttiotalsfilmen och gränsen mellan konst och pornografi

Mariah Larsson diskuterar den komplexa relationen mellan konstfilm och pornografisk film och de könspolitiska implikationerna av drömmen om den goda pornografin.The dream of the good pornography today, draws its argument from a feminist anti-porn analysis that concludes that pornography is an expression of the patriarchal society where women are being obejctified and degraded. However, in the 1960s, there was another dream of the good pornography, one which claimed that the existing pornography was bad from an aesthetic point of view. It had to do with the fact that pornography was forbidden in Sweden until 1971, and one argument for legalization was that porn would then become much better. The article examines the dream of the good pornography, the relationship between art (cinema) and porn (film), and what happens to the issue of gender when the dividing line between the two categories is questioned. Historically, the relationship between art cinema and the pornographic film is complex and the two categories that at a first glance are so easy to distinguish, have lived in a mutual dependency of each other. Art films with sexually explicit material pushed the limits for censorship during the 1960s, but at the same time, the success of art films with sexually explicit material often relied on a censorship that allowed sex in art but not for pornographic purposes. The undefined border between art and pornography also bring to the fore a discussion of the gender ascribed to each category. Art, belonging to the realm of modernism and high culture, has, by some theorists, been regarded as masculine, whereas porn, belonging to what has sometimes been regarded as the feminine mass culture, is often discussed and analyzed as a male genre. At the same time, one point of departure for the dream of the good pornography in the 1960s as well as in the late 1990s and early 2000s, is woman, her sexuality and her consumption of pornography

Drömmen om den goda pornografin : Om sextio- och sjuttiotalsfilmen och gränsen mellan konst och pornografi

Mariah Larsson diskuterar den komplexa relationen mellan konstfilm och pornografisk film och de könspolitiska implikationerna av drömmen om den goda pornografin.The dream of the good pornography today, draws its argument from a feminist anti-porn analysis that concludes that pornography is an expression of the patriarchal society where women are being obejctified and degraded. However, in the 1960s, there was another dream of the good pornography, one which claimed that the existing pornography was bad from an aesthetic point of view. It had to do with the fact that pornography was forbidden in Sweden until 1971, and one argument for legalization was that porn would then become much better. The article examines the dream of the good pornography, the relationship between art (cinema) and porn (film), and what happens to the issue of gender when the dividing line between the two categories is questioned. Historically, the relationship between art cinema and the pornographic film is complex and the two categories that at a first glance are so easy to distinguish, have lived in a mutual dependency of each other. Art films with sexually explicit material pushed the limits for censorship during the 1960s, but at the same time, the success of art films with sexually explicit material often relied on a censorship that allowed sex in art but not for pornographic purposes. The undefined border between art and pornography also bring to the fore a discussion of the gender ascribed to each category. Art, belonging to the realm of modernism and high culture, has, by some theorists, been regarded as masculine, whereas porn, belonging to what has sometimes been regarded as the feminine mass culture, is often discussed and analyzed as a male genre. At the same time, one point of departure for the dream of the good pornography in the 1960s as well as in the late 1990s and early 2000s, is woman, her sexuality and her consumption of pornography