Long before 1970s sexploitation comedies such as Eskimo Nell and Come Play With Me brought bawdy humour and copious T&A to the commercial theatres of Britain, the country’s smut industry comprised an informal economy of club impresarios, carneys and photographers. Their work was part of a long lineage of stag films, 8mm home movies, mondo and nudist documentaries, and filmed stripteases exhibited to select audiences of men via cinema clubs or on private reels. Often produced on zero budget and distributed through a network of magazine subscriptions and black market retailers, these motion pictures were mostly disposed of or forgotten in short order.
The BFI’s new collection, The Pleasure Principle, the most recent addition to its massive Britain on Film online initiative, has digitised more than40 such examples of reclaimed erotica. Their duration spans from the late 19th century to the advent of home video, often seen as signalling the death of the softcore genre. Divergent in style and fetish but tame in imagery (at least by later hardcore standards), the collection provides a fascinating history of Britain cinema’s evolving and often transgressive relationship with the body.
“In Britain, we have always been slightly ashamed of our sexual impulses,” says BFI curator Vic Pratt, who organised the film collection. “The British as a nation were culturally, perhaps, more inclined to laugh at sex, or mock it, or make a smutty innuendo, rather than address it head-on. I think this has always been reflected in the way we have produced our erotic or sex cinema here.”
Some of The Pleasure Principle’s earliest silent examples, such as A Victorian Lady in Her Boudoir (1896) and Nude Woman by Waterfall (1920), bear out this observation, revealing female models in a modest petticoat or in brief flashes of toplessness using highly choreographed, if not pictorialist, tableaux. Such innocuous images were far from the full-frontal nudity and genital penetration shown in American and European “stags” of the era.
The 1907 sight gag reel Merry Moments in France similarly removes any lubricity from its Folies Bergère-inspired cabaret, allowing the patrons only to drink and then cavort off-screen with the hostess. Other post-first world war artefacts such as The Uncharted Sea (1928) and The Irresponsibles (1929), both produced by British Instructional Films, an “educational” studio closely linked to government and imperial interests, are little more than propaganda shorts on the ruinous lifestyles of promiscuity and feminism.
A slightly later example in the collection, Action in Slow Motion (1943) provides the first extended nudist scenario, with a woman frolicking on the beach in real-time and then at a more sensual, half-speed. “It’s very innocuous material, but the fact that there is moving nudity would have been considered quite dangerous,” Pratt says. So much so that a certified disclaimer prefacing the film warns its content is “expressly for ‘Artists and Students’ and failure to comply with this condition will make exhibitor liable to penalties imposed by the authorities.” The more risqué Beauty in Brief (1955), traced to the anonymous Pin-Up Productions, is an early instance of a glamour film, in which the model is recorded disrobing and trying on various outfits for a “hidden” camera.
“These kitschy cheesecake films were about as extreme as you could get,” Pratt says. “They would never have been submitted to the censors. They were advertised in the backs of newspapers or ‘glamour’ magazines. So you would write off for these films, which would probably be sent in plain, brown wrapping, or they would be bought discreetly from the nearest dirty bookshop.”
The restrictive limitations over the production of erotic films through the war era were both juridical and logistical. Victorian-era legislation including the Obscene Publications Act of 1857, which famously compared pornography with poison, still provided the framework for censorship during the first decades of British film exhibition.
The British Board of Film Censors (BBFC), founded in 1912, a full two decades before Hollywood’s Hays Code, assumed the role of arbiter by requiring that all motion pictures be reviewed and certified prior to release. Added to which, 35mm film stock ensured that the recording and projection of films was prohibitively expensive to all but large, commercial studios and cinemas. These restrictions were only changed with the liberalisation of obscenity statutes and the developments of 16mm and then 8mm movie cameras and projectors, which proliferated by the late 1950s.
One of the first commercial motion pictures to break the BBFC’s strict nude “barrier” was not British, but rather an American film on the subject of naturism. Naturist, or nudist, films had enjoyed occasional popularity with American audiences since the 1930s, but the Garden of Eden (1954) established the financial and legal viability of the genre in the US, and in UK theatres by 1958.
“Breasts and buttocks, but not genitalia [would be accepted] provided that the setting was recognisable as a nudist camp or nature reserve,” wrote BBFC censors in response to the new wave of erotic pictures that capitalised on the T&A craze. The online collection includes an amusing 1957 episode of Out of Step hosted by Daniel Farson who interviews (mostly) clothed men pontificating on the aesthetic and ethical merits of nude women.
The new, permissive climate inaugurated by nudist films encouraged a larger diversification of erotic styles and personal artistry. Film-makers such as Harrison Marks, Arnold Miller and Stanley Long, as well as media impresarios such as Paul Raymond and Tony Tenser and models including Pamela Green and June Palmer used naturism as an opportunity to further push the boundaries of censorship with depictions of stripteases and naked stage revues, mondo documentaries and horror-exploitation. Marks’ Xcitement! (1960) casts girlfriend and co-publisher Green in a very erotic striptease, while Vampire (1964) uses the Gothic stock character to seduce a bare-breasted damsel. Both short films were produced and sold alongside Marks and Green’s Kamera magazine, a popular series of nude portfolios originating in 1957.
Green, who became the face (and the body) of the 60s nudie cutie, would also have a starring turn in Michael Powell’s thriller Peeping Tom (1960), the most controversial entry in the BFI collection. As the legend now goes, the film’s press screenings, which preceded fellow Brit Alfred Hitchcock’s American slasher Psycho (1960) by three months, were met with excoriations from critics. The Spectator reported it as “the sickest, filthiest film I remember seeing”, while the London Tribune memorably suggested that “the only really satisfactory way to dispose of Peeping Tom would be to shovel it up and flush it swiftly down the nearest sewer”. The film’s narrative of a serial killer who stalks Soho’s smut industry and records snuff films of his victims (including a bare-breasted Green) realised the very nightmare of sex and violence that threatened English social mores.
The explosion of Soho’s nightclub industry (members’ only strip clubs were reported to number 200 in 1960 according to the Spectator) and the burgeoning flickers of youth culture supplied a modish style for erotic image-makers. The popular Miller-directed “mondo” docs, London in the Raw (1964) and Primitive London (1965), which were “part tit-show, part satire, part tabloid editorial” according to the writer Iain Sinclair, highlighted the voluptuous glamour of a new decade fascinated by fashion and sexual spectacle.
London in the Raw is a sort of psychogeographic dérive of the Soho underworld complete with a harem of topless showgirls and strippers; but it also features various slice-of-life sequences (many of which are scripted performances) in brothels, casinos and other dens of iniquity. Still, as Sinclair so aptly recognises, for all of Miller’s images of sex and frivolity, the narrative formula is more indebted to John Betjeman than Michelangelo Antonioni.
Whatever countercultural pretensions Miller’s films held for audiences would be swiftly supplanted by the more iconoclastic Repulsion (1965), Blow-Up (1966) and Tonite Let’s All Make Love in London (1967). When Antonioni captured the unprecedented image of young actress Jane Birkin’s pubic hair in Blow-Up, the pornographer’s sly game of hide-and-seek was finally exposed – and the so-called “golden age” of erotic cinema would soon follow.
As an alternative history of British film-making, The Pleasure Principle finally recognises the aesthetic contributions of the home-movie models and backroom peddlers who plied their erotic wares in secret. These louche relics still manage to provoke and titillate a n internet-era society struggling to come to terms with its own overexposed sexuality.
• The BFI’s collection The Pleasure Principle is live now. Erik Morse is the author of Bluff City Underground: A Roman Noir of the Deep South.
