>i as well have not followed the entire discussion on
>this topic, but i would offer that pornography is an
>area that truly transgresses boundaries and
>stereotypes unlike any other film form. Within
>pornography one can view representations inclusive of
>all groups. One can find pornography specific to any
>marginal group. By example go to google and simply
>type in 'porn' with anything your heart desires.
I can imagine why the seemingly endless variety of
porn would seem to indicate an inclusive spirit in the
field; and how, to judge by the 'forbidden' subjects
featured, the form/genre would appear transgressive,
or tacitly permissive (while it is actually
exhortative, in performance and reception both); but
I'd submit that, almost counter-intuitively, porn has
yet to break from fetishistic obliquity and from the
quaint, self-aware, synthetic, and nostalgic
celebration of 'polymorphous perversity'...Newfangled
porn is as marked by this tendency as is any retro
form cast in erotic/pin-up/peep-show styles...
Black porn, fat porn, midget porn, mature porn -- Even
now, they are all predicated on stereotype (and I must
cop to having seen a bit of each)--by which I
specifically mean circumscribed speech and behavior,
age-old tropes, etc...Porn allows precious little
latitude in performance style, in its scenarios,
directorial styles; and its production is straitened
by haste, technical carelessness, and mercenary
efficiency (the source of the dreariness which puts
some people off of porn)...No sexual gesture of any
breadth, no potentially transgressive act, is possible
- and certainly not desirable or necessary - under
those conditions...
Perhaps mainstream cinema is superior to porn by dint
of its failure to hold to such ultra-efficient
professional standards of production: mainstream
cinema 'indulges' in lassitude in composition &
revision, multiple takes, reshoots, subtle performance
tuning, long post schedules, archival care...Porn's
'defection' from film to video was efficient; as was
its adventitious 'pioneering' of home video via VHS
and DVD formats; and its efficiency even registers
thematically, in content - e.g. the gang-bang video: a
manifest example of quantitative efficiency in media!
Which leads me to reflect that films urging political
critiques via the devices of sex, of sexual brutality
and degradation - e.g. Pasolini's _Salo_, Dusan
Makavejev's great film _Sweet Movie_, Giancarlo
Giannini's submission to the camp Commandant in
Wertmuller's _Seven Beauties_, Visconti's _The
Damned_, the sentenced gang-rape in Greenaway's _Baby
of Macon_ - aren't in the least bit 'begging the
question' with regard to the depiction of outre sexual
conduct, they aren't only offering an
aesthetic-pessimistic brand of sex-spectacle 'twisted'
by political ideology or satirical
imperatives--rather, in *not* being hamstrung by
strict fetish conventions, their portrayals of sex
extend even so far as to reveal the affective &
practical back-lashes, sequelae, etc.
peripheral/proximal to sex...
- Greg Little
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