A still from documentary The Showman, available on BFI Player in the Pleasure Principle collection
This article originally appeared on VICE UK
You're at a carnival, with all the usual bits. Kids scream on a ferris wheel in the distance. Tinny carnivalesque music plays from speakers hidden on a carousel. And two young women in wigs, wearing bikini tops and tiny skirts thrust their hips and wiggle about on a raised stage under a twinkling sign that reads "STRIPTEASE GOLDEN GARTER."
It's not quite the sort of fairground entertainment you'd find today, but sets the scene in a short 1970s documentary called The Showman. The titular character "really is one of the last showmen in England," according to his frequently knitting wife, and he spends his nights enticing passersby to his adults-only show in a fake American accent before throwing axes and flaming swords at a wall, inches from the faces, necks, and boobs of those two young women. One of them starts off in her bikini and ends up completely naked, bar the blond wig and a smearing of glittery eyeshadow. Again: not quite your regular carnival.
Another shot from The Showman
This is just one of many films from the BFI's Pleasure Principle collection. It's part of a five-year Britain on Film project, where 10,000 films are being digitized and put online by 2017 in collaboration with the UK's national and regional film archives. With a mix of short burlesque reels, documentaries, and feature-length films from the 1980s to 1990s, this particular collection goes back and considers what used to be an accepted depiction of erotica onscreen, and how far filmmakers could push against the censorship of the time. When you look at the wide smiles and twinkling eyes of the young men in the audience—and the blank stare from one young woman near the front—you get a sense of what more than a century of sex in film teaches us about society. First, that nudity still makes some of us giggle like school-kids.
"As a nation, we've always had a bit of a problem with how we think about and talk about sex," says Vic Pratt, a curator at the BFI who put together this selection. "The British way of life, perhaps, historically has been more about sniggering about sexual innuendos than being open and honest about sex and sexuality."
We've all been there: awkwardly laughing through sex ed lessons, chuckling when your biology teacher went into detail while describing the evolution of our reproductive organs. As a general litmus test, sit down and watch a long, graphic sex scene—say, from Nymphomaniac—with your dad and just really let the dynamic between you sink in. I'm sure there are plenty of you out there who grew up telling your parents about who you slept with at a house party the night before, but for the most part we still struggle to talk about sex without the masks of bravado, humor, or a squeamish nervousness.
The way we used to watch erotic film lay down the groundwork for our attitudes today. "Originally, short 35mm films were the only ones you could really get," Vic says, "and they would've been shown in back rooms or halls. Nudity was not allowed on screen at all." The rules were so strict, once the British Board of Film Classification (formerly the British Board of Film Censors) was set up in 1912, that filmmakers had to get creative.
"One of the films in the collection is made for artists, from the 1940s, with a disclaimer in the beginning that, 'if anyone supplies this without it being strictly for artists, they're liable for prosecution.'" Others got around the censors by sticking to the rule of only being able to show bums and boobs in a "naturist" setting, or one that resembled a nudist camp. It worked wonders for the filmmakers. "You could only really show breasts, and people's flabby bottoms, so it wasn't really an erotic experience – but no one had seen this before, so they were suddenly doing dynamite at the box office."
A still from the 1961 short film 'Burlesque Queen'
The public screenings were just one part of the erotica canon. "The others being sold were under-the-counter striptease reels, on 8mm home cinema reels that you'd run on your own projector in your back room," Vic says. "You'd buy it and be given it in a brown paper bag, maybe from the sex shop in town where you'd also buy your dirty books, then take the reel home. It would be someone taking their clothes off in sort of burlesque-style dance, stripping down in her bedroom—something you'd consider quite mild now, but was seen as very disgraceful then."
It's mostly hilarious to imagine a cutesy five-minute burlesque video being seen as the moral rot decaying civilized society. Nowadays, cam girls represent an interactive, specialized and more intimate version of those take-home 8mm reels. There's the old-fashioned strip club for anyone who can't be bothered to watch an erotic dance on film, and your average rom-com, fantasy drama, or mumblecore TV show now depicts pseudo-realistic sex in high definition and with an unwavering eye.
An old 1890s film designed for titillation
"I think you can examine the way a society functions at its deepest levels by looking at what it censors, what it chooses not to show," says Barry Forshaw, journalist and author of Sex and Film: The Erotic in British, American, and World Cinema. I ask where he thinks our sexual awareness stands today. "Everyone is influenced by the morals of the time and what's acceptable. So we are chuckling at the idea of censorship, but if you look back at Tchaikovsky's letters to his brother—after he'd had some encounter with a nobleman or young rent boy—they'd say: 'I am the most loathsome creature that ever walked the Earth.' And he's full of self-loathing because he's gay.
You think if only Tchaikovsky had lived today, he wouldn't have needed that self-loathing. You think, well why didn't he say what later gay men have done, 'I don't care what society says'? I'm not sure any of us are that liberated. You and I are having this conversation and we are laughing about the absurdity of censorship but we are still slightly formed by the attitudes of society. Maybe our job is to liberalize and fight against that."
The government seems to have other ideas. We're living in a time when, since 2014, the state has considered female ejaculation and face-sitting too taboo to show in porn. And with last month's news of the Digital Economy Bill looking to create a database filled with personal information from everyone who has to verify their age to watch porn, we're entering a strange state of contrast.
On the one hand, there's more visual objectification of both women and men's bodies available, from billboards to music videos to Tumblr porn accounts. On the other, the government's trying to crack down on the types of porn starring consenting adults that people can watch. At the root of it all sits the sort of moral panic that arises from a lack of substantial sex education and the vocabulary with which to express thoughts of desire, lust, and just wanting to get off. If we grew up with a healthier understanding of our bodies and selves, maybe the health secretary wouldn't be in a flap about trying to stop 17-year-olds from sexting each other.
"It's easier than ever to find any kind of pornographic image that you'd want," Vic says. "But at the same time have we, as you say, developed a vocabulary with which to talk about this? Are we any further down the line? Are we now this incredibly liberal society? I don't think we are. If anything, you might suspect that in the general shift to the right, it's going to get harder to talk about these kinds of things in culture, to openly understand and expect our shared differences and beliefs. And maybe sex is one of the areas where, more than ever, we need to be open."
Click here to watch some of the films from the BFI's Pleasure Principle collection
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