The Measures Taken

Sexpol and Sexploitation in the cinema of the New Left
Part of a Porn Symposium with K-Punk, Infinite Thought, Poetix, Effay, Bad Zero, Bacteriagrl, The Impostume, Beyond the Implode, Carceraglio and Different Maps



There is a story of the permeation of pornography into mainstream cinema and into everyday life, and it goes much like this; a combination of American exploitation directors and French arthouse in the early 1970s, through a conjunction of fake orgasms and truck drivers on the one hand and soft focus and cod-philosophy on the other takes what was previously suppressed and places it in the heart of the multiplex. In this narrative the heroes are the hucksters behind Deep Throat or the faux-sophisticates of Emmanuelle, with even dissenting semi-mainstream directors like Russ Meyer considered too original to be relevant. These are two films from which one can trace a line to the frat film, the overlit horrors of most American porn and the ‘another round of whispering on a bed’ (Foucault) that is, the French sex drama, always aiming to reveal some essential truth or other. The confirmation seemingly of the Foucauldian admonition that ‘sex is boring’.



But in these histories, credit or precedence is often given to Russ Meyer for 1968’s Vixen!, one of the earliest soft-porn films to break through. It’s worth watching this, not only for the usual pile-up of demented Eisensteinian montage, stupid men and huge domineering women, but also for how it reveals what actually opened the door for the film’s acceptability. One montage juxtaposes Erika Gavin's physical preposterousness with an intense conversation between an Irish revolutionary and a black American draft dodger, the former of whom is attempting to persuade the latter of the merits of the Cuban road to socialism. This use of the tropes of the New Left is a possible reaction by the always canny Meyer to the huge success the previous year of I am Curious Yellow, a film now rather difficult to imagine.



This film by the former Bergman collaborator Vilgot Sjoman is a cut up of detailed, lengthy documentary discussions of the Swedish road to socialism, its attempt to introduce passive resistance in its armed forces, its government’s opposition to the Vietnam War, and a fictional story of the love affairs of a psychologically conflicted young woman, which is occasionaly interrupted by interjections from the domineering director unsatisfied with the veracity of the film’s many sex scenes. These interjections help the film avoid what is the pitfall of sexploitation and of arthouse eroticism, the notion that within sex is some kind of eternal verity. The film tempts this by the determined anti-romanticism of its sex, which is usually depicted with the flawed bodies and uncomfortable emotions that porn generally attempts to excise. That this could begin to imply it as the site of the real is why it has to be violently interrupted.



Where the film dissents from what would become the theoretical orthodoxy is that it implies a correlation between the political radicalism and sexual adventurism it depicts- even if neither are unproblematic depictions of the actual they do point out possibility. The film takes all kinds of closed off inter-war battles- principally those stemming from the verfremdungseffekt of Brecht, the kino-pravda of Dziga Vertov and the sex-economy of Wilhelm Reich, and attempts to re-activate them. Whether all this was considered relevant though by its US audience in 1967 is an arguable point, but for whatever reason the film caused a furore more notable than the many similarly titled bits of Swedish smut found in the more dubious backstreet cinemas- narrowly avoiding a total banning, the film is still considered pivotal in US censorship history, being one of the first to receive an X certificate. Something was happening here outside of the acceptable form of natural prurience that was already making inroads to the mainstream. Rather, what made I am Curious Yellow so notorious was the return of the spectre of Sexpol.



The early Wilhelm Reich, in books like The Sexual Revolution, The Invasion of Compulsory Sex-Morality and the pamphlet written for the Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands Dialectical Materialism and Psychoanalysis advocates many ideas which have since become wholly, boringly acceptable, namely the release from the alleged repressions and prohibitions on sexuality that marked bourgeois society. And the decline in birth rates, marriages and the acceptability of the genital prosleytised here have all become normal features of European late capitalism. However to regard this as a victory is to ignore Reich’s most central point, namely that the freedom from sexual repression is meaningless without freedom from economic, ie that sexual freedom is a condition of communism and vice versa.



Rather than being dismissed as cranky, his ideas had some currency in the Weimar Republic’s Communist movement, as can be seen in the none more sachlich treatement of sexual matters in Kuhle Wampe, amongst other films and artefacts. The 1929 pamphlet he wrote specifically for this audience suggests a kind of psychoanalytical unravelling that any Lacanian would find more than suspicious (though while anticipating his critique of American ego-analysis), through the total dismantlement of the Oedipal triangle: ‘the Oedipus complex is a socially conditioned fact which changes its form with the structure of society. The Oedipus complex must disappear in a socialist society, because its social basis, the patriarchal family, will itself disappear, having lost its raison d’etre. Communal upbringings, which form part of the socialist programme, will be so unfavourable to the forming of social attitudes as they exist within the family today- the relationship of children to one another and to the persons who bring them up will be so much more many-sided, complex and dynamic- that the Oedipus complex with its specific content of desiring the mother and wishing to destroy the father will lose its meaning.’ The decline of bourgeois sexual mores via this communalisation was seen by Reich at the time to be tentatively bearing fruit in the USSR, as quoted elsewhere on this blog, ‘the economic outlines of a future sex hygiene of the masses’, sexually matter of fact without prurience, which was halted by Stalinism. That this returns in the tentative steps to socialism of the Swedish mixed economy in the late 60s is unsurprising- so too, in the culture of Yugoslavian ‘self-management socialism’.

‘Only by liberating both love and labour can we create a self-regulating worker’s society!’
Milena in Makavejev’s WR

The censorship battles faced by I am Curious Yellow were paralleled by Dusan Makavejev’s films The Switchboard Operator (1967) and WR- Mysteries of the Organism (1970), which similarly resurrect the Reichian spectre along with the techniques of the Constructivist avant-garde, though very much in contrasting ways. The two films were sporadically banned, with the latter having the rare honour of suppression in both communist and capitalist countries (as did Reich himself) and is still only available in the UK in a bowdlerised version. The earlier of the two films is bracing in its combination of perversity and sobriety. Given the somewhat cumbersome original title Love Dossier- the Tragedy of a Switchboard Operator, it plays constantly with official discourse, be it police or medical. Open with the question, asked again after its abandonment after the 1920s; ‘will man be remade?’ Cut to an (actual) lecture by an ageing diminutive sexologist, giving what will become the New Left orthodoxy of the naturalness of sexuality, to be demolished by Foucault a few years later with much glee. With a tone that suggests the discussion of the finer points of flora and fauna as much as it does human sexuality, we are told of the freedom from repression of other cultures- who even have a place for sex in their religions- of how sexuality has always been a subject for artists- not out of pleasure, mind, but out of ‘an interest in man’s environment’- to a montage of pornographic engravings and Roman phalluses (these, presumably, would be what stopped the film getting a certificate on its first release in Britain). Cut from this to the nominal story.



We are now in the heart of mid-60s consumer sexuality, listening in on two fashionably dressed young women, working in the centre of (now obsolete) communications technology that is the switchboard, facilitating technologically the old stories of amores and interrupted dialogues. The two girls walk around gossiping about their sexual history, in a city marked by traffic noise, glass and steel, noticeable only as non-‘western’ when the girls see a poster of Mao, having his tie put on by some adoring children, then a huge banner of Lenin being unfurled over a building. While over the soundtrack a deafening Party anthem plays, we see an odd parade, the street being lined with floats of consumer goods, a giant tube of toothpaste. Cut again, this time to one of these young women being pulled naked from a well, then to a criminolgist, whose manner, though somewhat more swaggering, evokes that of the sexologist- the same list of data, the same collections of curios in the service of the argument. So we already know what is going to happen to one of these women, and we are asked to make the assumption that their obvious sexuality is in some way the cause of their demise.



Particularly, we begin with a mistrust of the lover she takes, Ahmed, who is a shy Bosnian party member and former partisan now working as a ratcatcher. Our immediate suspicion and association of sex and death, become more and more difficult to sustain in the calm serenity of the film’s sex scenes, depicted with an undemonstrative slowness, the two suspended from the Party festivals going on outside. In the scene where Isabella, who we know is imminently going to be killed, seduces Ahmed, she uses a ‘wonderful old Soviet film’ being shown on television as bait of some sort. Cut to the film, which is, in fact Dziga Vertov’s behemoth of factography Enthusiasm, and specifically its montage of the destruction of churches. While we know the two are fucking in the background,the film plays and we see the steeples of churches, pointing at phallic angles via Mikhail Kaufman’s vertiginous camera, shaking until being torn down to huge cheers, punctuating until the final hoisting of a red flag over the church- and Isabella and Ahmed, sated.



Makavejev uses Vertov’s own methods of defamilarisation and disjunctive montage, his marshalling of fact into obviously formed works, and suggests the elements of society Vertov himself didn’t quite mention. Another element of the Soviet avantgarde might be a correlative, in the eroticised montage of Dovzhenko’s Earth, specifically the curious section where a seemingly sexually explosive naked woman tearing at the contents of a room symbolises the class struggle. Only here our couple’s sexual ease is what is remarkable, such as in the rather touching scenes of quotidian life that make up much of the film- cooking, showering together, and memorably pottering around a courtyard to the sound of Ernst Busch, star of Kuhle Wampe, stridently singing a Mayakovsky poem set to music- this Constructivist known for a decidedly sachlich attitude to sexual rectitude, as his famous relationship Lili Brik attests- ‘Time Forward’. Hanns Eisler’s strident and swinging music and the declarations that the movement is going ‘forwards in time!’ sit rather appropriately with the carnal idyll set up here.



This matter-of-fact carnality is interrupted again and again, here by the details of Isabella’s autopsy, there by some found footage of prettily innocent 1900s porn in mythological poses, through to the eventual denouement, the death of Isabella- which is not quite what we expect- the implication is constantly that here, on these mundane everyday levels, is where the struggle is most important, as opposed to the demonstrative official showcases of solidarity we occasionally glimpse. That this ends so unhappily is the end result of Makavejev’s schematicism- here is the missing element, without which socialism is meaningless. This critique at vastly more explicit level and a conception of montage that even Eisenstein (and Russ Meyer!) would have found a little overenthusiastic is what marks the subsequent WR- Mysteries of the Organism.



The film is so dense with allusions, groaning under the weight of its own intertextuality, that it’s almost impossible to truly encompass, particularly as the critique is here widened to the totality of late 60s society, in particular in the USA and (naturally) Yugoslavia. But a divide could be made roughly between a first section on Wihelm Reich and a second fictional segment. We open with footage of a ‘Filme der Sexpol’, a portmanteau showing the sylvan fucking of a Weimar couple over quotes from Reich himself and a song trilling ‘Communist Party, to me you are as fragrant flowers’, then onto a reasonably straight documentary on our hero. This evokes Chris Marker in its density of montage and refusal to impose an interpretation of its footage. Small town shopkeepers discuss Reich’s haircut. An orgone accumulator is demonstrated. Orgone therapy is documented, its calmness and sudden ferocity disturbs. We hear the story of Reich’s conversion from Communism to his own anti-Stalinist conception of work democracy, to the orgone experiments and his death partly at the hands of the American state (and after he’d voted for Eisenhower!). A collaborator from Reich’s Orgonon commune confronts Makavejev, accuses him of being a Stalinist. He asks her if she’d prefer the American model of freedom. ‘No! The American dream is dead!’ We see a man dressed as an urban guerilla running round New York, past utterly unfazed citizens.



The film’s centre then emerges, the figure of the heroic Reichian prophet Milena, who we first see reading a party paper, dumping her unreconstructed proletarian lover (‘remnant of our glorious past!’), and benignly noting her flatmate fucking a young conscript crying ‘forward, people’s army!’ We see the consumer communist society of The Switchboard Operator completely collapse, as her ex-lover builds barricades against the ‘red bourgeoisie’, fights police, and she turns a walk round her apartment block into a Reichian sermon against Stalinist sexual oppression. Dressed in a uniform, she calls at a growing crowd ‘free love is where the October revolution failed…politics attracts those whose orgasm is incomplete!’ The tenants link arms and sing ribald versions of party anthems and she is carried aloft as Communist heroine. Cut to the frenzy of Chinese red guards. Cut to the sound of ‘Lili Marleen’ and a piece of tinted film footage. This is The Vow, from the period of Soviet filmmaking where Stalin was the obligatory hero- (‘the difference between Stalin and Tarzan is that people don’t consider films about the latter to be factual’, as Andre Bazin put it). Stalin looks resolute. Cut to a horrifying, lingering shot of electroshock therapy. Cut again to (another) sexologist. ‘I don’t have a body, I am a body’, he says after this depiction of terrible physical extremity.



Then we have a romance. Milena meets a people’s artist. His name is Vladimir Ilyich, and he’s a Russian dancer. Though her friends don’t approve of his ‘revolutionary art in the costumes of Tsarism’ she is smitten. So we see her and friends try and convert him to their self-management sexpol. What’s your name, he asks one of them. ‘Yagoda'. Milena tries everything to shock Vladimir Ilyich, she compares Reich and that other Soviet unperson Leon Trotsky, Yagoda waves her legs in the air. He calmly says ‘this sounds like the theories of Alexandra Kollontai’, implying the USSR has transcended such frippery. ‘You want permanent revolution and permanent orgasm. God forbid!’ Her ex-lover crashes through the wall and locks Vladimir Ilyich in a cupboard, as if to confirm his distrust of the ultra-leftism of the Yugoslav road to Socialism. Cut again. We’re back in New York, and a radio DJ is advocating eliminating the Black Panthers via ethnic cleansing. as ‘they breed faster than us’.



Makavejev’s picture of the US is one of the most fascinating of outsiders’ perspectives, gleefully taking down what others wouldn’t notice- the inanity and ideology of advertising, especially the one for ‘beautiful blinkers’, montaged over the figure of the transexual and Warhol superstar Jackie Curtis eating an ice cream. Makavejev notes the promises of utopia of figures like Curtis, awesomely glamorous, trashing the limits of gender and impossible anywhere else- depicted holding his/her fist aloft in front of the Stars & Stripes- and the idiocies and insanity of the Vietnam war and the pointless abundances of US capitalism. A song playing over the footage implores ‘kill, kill, kill for peace’. Interestingly, the respect he has for Curtis isn’t mirrored in his treatment of the mock-sexpol of parts of the New Left. We see rather too much of Jim Buckley, the editor of Screw, a porn mag which he is at pains to impress upon us is quintessentially American, is all about freedom. Though the intersection of porn and politics is what makes these films so interesting, the more dubious end of post-68 sexpol is suggested here. The notion that somehow wanking is a part of the struggle. We see (or rather in the current English version we don’t see) Buckley having his cock plaster-casted to a bit of grotesquely misogynist hippy blues, then cut again to The Vow and the sombre yet heroic and upright ‘Stalin’. Power cutting across the alleged dividing line of the Iron Curtain.



Above all, WR is an internal debate within socialism itself, against its repressive proponents and for its original promises. One especially wonderful scene has Milena and Vladimir Ilyich arguing with each other entirely in quotes from Lenin; she throws at him the famous lines from The State & Revolution that ‘when freedom exists there will be no state’, he fires back his line about listening to Beethoven making one want to hug one’s enemies rather than destroy them. Another scene from The Vow makes plain the evils linking the two societies, as ‘Stalin’, to the glutinous music used at pivotal scenes in 1940s Hollywood, to an adoring crowd in Red Square, is handed a note by a little old lady asking him to fulfil Lenin’s work- then another harsh edit to Milena crying at V.I ‘you love all mankind, but you’re incapable of loving an individual’.



Subsequently there’ll be another of Makavejev’s autopsies, a severed head calmly denouncing Soviet ‘red fascism’, but declaring ‘even now I am not ashamed of my Communist past’. Cinema’s experiments in sexpol are now as distant as the Reichian Communism that runs through all these films, except in the more detailed histories of banned films. This ignores the fundamental point that the sexual ‘honesty’ we all now take for granted is part of a wider political project and is completely meaningless without it. The films titilate, and are very much designed to do so- no invocations of the category ‘art’ here- though one would find the digressions on political morality and psychoanalytic theory somewhat distracting if used as straightforward skinflicks, they are all part of the same totality, part of an easily dismissed movement that has within it the hints of what is missing from our current body politic.