The blue revolution in the film industry

by Bruce Stewart
IT used to be said in the heyday of the Third Programme that if all the beards in the BBC were laid end to end, they would reach from Sodom to Gomorrha. That was when it was fashionable to blame the artist-intellectual for such elements of pornography as infiltrated our Puritan culture.
But now something else is happening.with which the artist-intellectual — who only ever wanted greater freedom of expression anyway — has nothing whatever to do. Within the next year, this country is in for the highest wave pornography it has ever see , and those responsible for it will be ordinary businessmen. it is bourgeois five o'clock shadows you can lay end to end now if you will, and they will reach from Wardour Street to the outermost limits of the outermost city.
For the attack will be mounted principally in the cinema industry. Now it is fairly well known that from a business point of view, films have been in a bad way for some time. Big spectacular movies can cost millions of pounds to make, and even a "modest" production will require a capital investment of several hundred thousand.
Such money is not easy to come by. even harder to get back, since cinema audiences have declined and are more fickle than ever before. The big companies, like Twentieth Century Fox and M.G.M., are in declared difficulties. For every Sound of Music, which romped home with its profit, there has been :A Doctor Dolittk, which lost heavily.
The Longest Day may have justified its expenditure, but Mutiny on the Bounty (the Brando re-make) as good as bankrupted everyone concerned. A cut-back in production is everywhere evident. Big-name stars and directors are unemployed. Everything is in doubt. But meanwhile, there has to be something to put in the cinema on the High Street corner, which cannot wait on the sombre financial deliberations of movie executives.
The answer, in such circumstances, is plainly and simply sex. Already in the United States, where the crisis was first felt, hundreds of little cinemas have felt themselves obliged to convert exclusively to pornographic films, or what are called in the trade "skinflicks". There_ is an audience, after all —the disappointed middleaged, who feel the excitements of this world are passing them by, and the curious young, who wish to be instructed in "Life".
And the films make a mint of money for their producers. Outlay on production is negligible, compared to that of standard films. Since no established actor could risk his reputation by appearing in a skinflick, that means there are no star salaries to be paid. A coherent story is the last necessity, which removes any need for a high-priced writer.
As for a director and technical staff—why, someone to roll the cameras and produce good, clear pictures will do. The audience simply wants to see what is going on. Subtlety is for the art houses. The very cheapness of the article is part of its appeal; nobody wants truly expensive pornography, which is only laughable, like gold-plated privvies.
There seems no reason to believe this pattern of affairs will not' now be repeated in Britain. The little cinemas find themselves in precisely the same difficulties as their counterparts in America, and the homegrown British skinflick. has already begun to emerge.
Censorship is in chaos. I am not myself in favour of any dire revision or tightening of the censorship arrangements as ;they stand, but those who are shad better be aware just how hard it is to legislate adequately in this area. Whatever is laid down will somehow ter other be circumvented by the establishment of more and more "cinema clubs".
It is not generally understood that the British Board of Film Censors itself was set up by the cinema industry, and exists in the first place to serve the industry. Any local council can over-ride its decisions if it so chooses. The G.L.C. is particularly good at this. The chances of a prosecution brought by any concerned body or individual against a given film succeeding are slim.
It may well be asked what is the Christian reaction to all this? First of all, I should think, one of sadness. In as much as "whatever is true. whatever is good" is all part of the Christian heritage, it must surely be a cause of grief to men of goodwill to see one of the greatest cultural forces in our midst so deformed.
For it is not only public morality that is at stake in this matter — whatever that may mean nowadays — but the cinema itself. A form which has given shape and point to the various talents of Eisenstein, Griffith, Garbo, Olivier, Bergman and Antonioni is being reduced to the squalid proportions of a peep-show in a fun fair.
The facile will say that this is in the nature of things, and that even pornography will pass away in time. I devoutly hope they are right. But what, meanwhile, of those who love the cinema? Where in fact is the film audience of tomorrow if there is supply nothing showing at the local today that you can take a child to?
It is said by researchers that pornography does less social harm than the smoking of cigarettes. I take this to be true enough. There is no evidence that pornographic films drive people out of the cinema into an orgy of wife-swapping, much less sexual crime. But on the other hand, there is an insidious cheapening of lifequality.
I do not know 'precisely why it is that human beings seem to need to keep their standards as high as possible, and to discipline themselves sternly against what is called (is it still called?) self-indulgence. It may be perhaps that no one human action can be separated from a con text of actions.
If you at one and the same time steal for a living and tend the sick with great compassion, it would appear to suggest that either the stealing is an obvious aberration. or that the tending of the sick is an hypocrisy— for the one action denies love while the other affirms it.
In the same way, a man who on one level of his mind preserves a respect for sex as the most complete expression of human love and on another so despises it as to take surreptitious enjoyment from the observation of other people's acts of sex, is confessing to something dangerously like a split personality within himself. We are not yet such perfect creatures that we can assimilate everything with bland imperturbability.
I have not so far met an addict of pornography who was not in the end more or less cynical, world-weary and without hope for the race. {This is even allowing for the -fact that that is the way many people want to be these days.) There are also questions to be raised concerning the status of women in the modern world. The skinflick depends much more on the representation of women in the sexual situation than on that of men. A recent example, Tropic of Cancer (hopefully released as the film version of a literary "classic"), even went so far as to define women purely in terms of their sexual capacity, and while it featured some acres of naked female flesh, saw fit never to show a man with more than his shirt off.
I am not here hoping to provoke hysterical cries of "Unfair" from the denizens of Women's Lib. But I am thinking back to the generallyapproved stickers that appeared on the more sexy tube advertisements a while ago. "You Can Make More Money as a Real Whore", and wondering precisely how ordinary women see themselves at the present time, and what in fact they think of the whole business of sex in the cinema.
It is obvious to even the most casual observer that the skinflick trade would collapse tomorrow if there were not a steady supply of young women, ready and willing to be photographed in whatever attitudes and situations may -be required of them. No doubt economic constraint plays a certain role.
I was once accidentally present when a film director tried to persuade a newcomer to the profession to take her clothes off for a scene in his film. His sales-talk included subtle accusations of prudery, repression, lack of concern for the essentials of art.
If the girl held out to the end and refused much-needed work, it could only have been because she saw (as I did, to my growing embarrassment) that she was being
placed in a situation where she was required to be subject. There can be many and devious forms of male domination. Those women who regard all of them as un-Christian, not to say inhuman. should take heed and at length consider the problem as their own, and not just that of their sisters.
But protest, from whomever and wherever it comes, should be careful to be temperate and in no way related to a particular film. Skinflicks, just like films of any other kind. thrive on their publicity. An outcry against a given movie will virtually ensure that it has a long run in the cinema an4attracts a much wider audiencb than it would have done otherwise. Boycott, coupled with the calm but insistent repetition of disapproval, is a much more viable tactic.
People today are dreadfully afraid of appearing "square". I am a professional in the visual media, and if only I could -be regarded as "square" in this matter, I would feel that I -had achieved something. As things stand, I find I am simply ignored.
That is because the climate as yet is merely one of indifference. There is art obligation to speak one's mind in a free society. To -have said nothing at all is as foolish as to have said too -much. And to be laughed at for one's opinions (a likely consequence, be it understood) is to 'be at one with all the great social reformers and innovators from Wilberforce to Einstein.
As far as young people are concerned, I 'believe the schools have a jab to do which they are at present neglecting. Perental thunders will hardly keep the young out of the pornographic milieu once they have achieved the required age to enter the portals.
But a better understanding of what film is, and can 'be at its best, will. This means increased -facilities for visual education at all levels of instruction. Expense is an obvious problem. Yet I 'believe this is the kind of ground on which the authorities could be successfully petitioned. If we are to believe what we read in the papers, there are those in high office also worried about the growth of •pornography in our society, and -equally fearful of the outcome.
Open-mindedness of course remains always necessary. There is a remote danger of throwing out the baby with the bath water. A film should never be held suspect just because it deals 'frankly with areas of experience which the orthodox Christian, part of a scotional group these times, .might prefer to see treated with greater discretion.
In other words, you are not likely to understand just how trashy films like Lust in the Swamps and Sexy Susan Sins Again arc unless you have experienced and appreciated two profound, if fearless, examinations of the modern human relationship like Antonioni's L'Avventura and La Notte.