The Implacable Progress of 'Porn'

[gonzo]

Where do you draw the line between “erotica” and “porn”? The usual explanation for the split is economic: porn, with its low production values and attendant controversy, is for the proles, while erotica consists of slightly artsy romps, the type of stuff you can freely discuss at art gallery cocktail parties. Porn appears inherently inhospitable to subtext, context, or artistic aspirations, cruel, mechanistic, and antithetical to sustained narrative. Porn filmmaking is practically a contradiction in terms: any “artistic” obfuscation of the action on display risks alienating the genre’s core audience.

As demonstrated in First Run Features’ The Radley Metzger Collection, Vols. 1-3, Radley Metzger’s career might be understood to exemplify porn’s willful naïveté. For decades, sex films were poorly made and shoddily distributed; by the mid to late ‘60s, however, “sexploitation” films split the line between grindhouse and art house, with new distribution channels expanding audiences beyond the traditional stag-and-bachelor circuit. During this period, Metzger’s movies delivered a kind of impossible ideal, commingling of artistic ambition with a frank sexual appeal. He came on to the scene with movies like The Dirty Girls (1964) and The Alley Cats (1965), pushing the limits of sexual content as far as they could be pushed at the time, with very brief toplessness and mostly obscured softcore action. Just a few years later, the coy content of these films was superseded by the hardcore content of Score (1972) (fellatio! bisexualism! Amyl nitrate!), and final barriers fell.
Despite Metzger’s talent as a filmmaker, one man couldn’t fight the tides. For all the optimism that accompanied the early years of erotic filmmaking, the arrival of hardcore porn into the mainstream—heralded by the likes of Deep Throat—essentially destroyed the legitimate commercial and critical potential of “erotica”. Porn gave the audience exactly what it wanted: gratification. Sex and nothing else was front and center in the new pornography, without any artsy filigree to distract viewers from getting their rocks off. With the invention of home video, it became plentiful, even as its taboo production and distribution methods boosted the genre’s appeal and kept mainstream Hollywood from ever attempting any serious incursion into porn’s hegemony. To this day, the dreaded NC-17 remains a kiss of death for distribution and advertising.

Metzger came to prominence in the early days of international cinema, working for the legendary Janus Films when art house was still synonymous in many quarters with heedlessly risqué. He absorbed techniques from French New Wave (his Carmen, Baby [1967] and Therese and Isabelle [1968]) as well as Bergman, Fellini, and Bunuel (the latter two are represented in the styles of Camille 2000 and especially, The Lickerish Quartet).

read much more of this interesting article here