FILM
AN OLD FRENCH PORNO FILM HAILED AS A MASTERPIECE
Woman's erotic presence as a pivotal necessity in art films and documentaries. A secret stash of naughty silent films turned up in a Paris attic, and producer Michel Reilhac knew he had to put them on the big screen. By Will Hogkinson
Photo: Original frame from the 1905-1930 French film.
Photos:
The Good Old Naughty Days: 'Everyone looks to be enjoying themselves'. The
film is also knows as "Polissons et Galipettes".
Our great-grandparents were rather less prudish than we might imagine. Decades before pornography became big business, naughty French people were making dirty films for the fun of it. In The Good Old Naughty Days, a collection of 12 silent films from the earliest years of the 20th century, nuns, priests, teachers - even a dog - play out sexual dramas in a wide variety of inventive positions, locations and logistical arrangements. And, unlike the stars of today's films for the one-handed viewer, everyone looks like they're enjoying themselves. Even the dog. "The difference is money," says Michel Reilhac, the French director and producer who put The Good Old Naughty Days together. "These films were made as a joke by people who had no idea of performing to the camera, and you can tell: the way they carry themselves is entirely natural. By the 1930s people realised that they could make money with these films and they became another thing entirely. The charm and innocence was gone." Reilhac He shares an immaculately smart converted warehouse in Paris's chic 9th arrondissement with his wife and three teenage children, who are all about to leave for their second home in Kenya.
It
was made during the filming of a 1920 film, The Three Musketeers, in the Paris
suburb of Redon, and its happy star would have been a jobbing electrician or a
cameraman taking advantage of his boss's day off. The men and women who took
part in the films were not professional actors. They had no concept of the
camera as something that could make their image live outside of themselves -
there is none of the self-consciousness that you might have expected because
they had no idea that anyone would ever see these films, and they did not have
the relationship with a camera that we have today. The most artful it gets is
the way the women make themselves alluring by arching their arms behind their
head and languidly reclining on sofas; a likely nod to Manet's nudes of the
same period.
altar;
a youth spies on them through a hole in the wall and when Abbott Bitt arrives
to discover this sacrilegious scene he starts buggering him. In 1920's School
Spanking a teacher finds novel ways of disciplining her girls, before the
headmaster arrives to prove himself equally ill-equipped to restore order
While lesbian scenes are often provided for the titillation of straight men in
modern porn films, homosexual ones are rare. But these films were an extension
of the clandestine world of the brothel, where society's conventions were
overturned. At a time when there was no formal concept of homosexuality as a
lifestyle choice, most brothels offered young men as well as women. And the
films show strong women in control, leading the way, and apparently taking as
much pleasure as the men. Perhaps inevitably, the films were co-opted by the
brothels themselves. Knowledge of the blue movies filtered out through the
prostitutes borrowed from the huge Parisian whorehouses that the vast majority
of French men visited. The brothels were a legal and important part of society
that was accepted if not necessarily talked about, and most men had two sexual
lives: with their wives and with their prostitutes. As young men were expected
to know what to do with their (in theory) virgin brides come the wedding
night, elder relatives would take them to the brothel to receive their sexual
education. There are letters from Marcel Proust to his grandfather in which
the great novelist complains of his father's refusal to fund his weekly visit
to the whorehouse. The films were to provide an important function for those
yet to be initiated into the sexual life. "The films started to be shown in
Paris brothels," explains Reilhac. 
We
found printed programmes that showed how they were screened at regular hours
in the waiting rooms - young men would find out how sex went by watching them
before losing their virginity to a prostitute." Wealthy private collectors,
who in turn commissioned more dirty movies, bought some of the films - the
grandfather of this respectable family house was one, as was King Alfonso XIII
of Spain, who had a passion for women with enormous breasts. In this way the
pornographic film industry was born. The reactions to Reilhac's film say a lot
about the sexual mores of the countries it has been shown in. French audiences
have been made up of couples and friends who have found the film hilarious,
but in Spain it has been predominantly single men who have gone to see it in
secret. "The word of mouth publicity that we were relying on didn't happen
there," sighs Reilhac. 
