Editor's Introduction

Abstract

It sounds like a setup, but it is adult film history: three women filmmakers meet in an adult novelty store in Coconut Grove, Florida. The year is 1994. One is Peggy Ahwesh, the New York–based avant-garde filmmaker. In works like Martina's Playhouse (1989), The Scary Movie (1993), and The Deadman (1989), her feminist, sexually provocative, Bataillean, punk-inflected cinema embraces bricolage, found footage, performance, and portraiture, often of women in states of abandon, refusal, and jouissance . With her is M. M. Serra, experimental filmmaker, curator, teacher, director of the Film-Makers' Cooperative, and advocate of and pedagogue on the cinematic possibilities of female sexuality. They are there to see the third: sexploitation auteur Doris Wishman, then a historical novelty for a coterie of cult video collectors. Wishman had been profiled in the RE/Search book Incredibly Strange Films (1986) and was one of few women working in the largely male-helmed cottage industry of New York–based sexploitation production in the 1960s.1 Beginning with a copious string of nudist-camp romance films in the early 1960s, Wishman steadily proceeded to make sex melodramas with the quotients of nudity that sexploitation's box-office formula required, yet infused them with her own preoccupations and sensibilities, delighting in the promise of a unique title, premise, or gimmick. Her films often featured women trapped in scenarios of maddeningly patriarchal design, taken to dysphoric, absurdist extremes. Swirling, spiraling camerawork; a copious array of women sporting black lace undergarments; cutaways to shoes, stockings, and marginal decorative objects; and loose post-synching produced films with great dynamism and a touch of delirium. Wishman's works were testimony to the ways women's bodies and spirits were shaped by the demands of a rigid patriarchal order, internalized as ineluctable law. Over the course of the next four decades Wishman produced thirty sex films, varying across genres …