Flesh Need Not be Mute: The Pornographic Videos of John Leslie

Abstract

One of the major challenges for the hard-core filmmaker has been the placing of acts of intercourse within the narrative. In the thirties the director Marcel Pagnol once caught his cameraman with some pornographic footage that the latter was shooting on the sly. Wasn't it difficult to shoot naked people for a stag film? asked Pagnol. No, said the cameraman, the problem was creating a story to make the sex credible. 1 In a sense a naked body makes its own story, but sex can halt it: however much taboos have dissipated, the sight of actual sex still disrupts continuity. Linda Williams, following Richard Dyer, suggested that heterosexual hard-core films are structured along the lines of musical comedy, with ejaculations climaxing quasi-musical rifts; hers is a useful, charming interpretation. 2 Few critics, however, have improved on the theoretical succinctness of Roberta Findlay's comment on the construction--or deconstruction, since pornography has always "deconstructed" itself--of pornographic scenarios. According to Findlay, hard-core porn films resemble opera: "You have the opera story, but then everything stops when the soprano has to sing. It's the same thing in sex films. The story goes on, then it stops, then they have to screw." 3