Whatever Happened to Sex in Scandinavia? I Am Curious (Yellow)

Abstract

Such read the headlines appearing in American newspapers when the film directed by Swedish director Vilgot Sj?man was seized by customs officials upon its arrival in the United States in 1968, with a subsequent highly visible trial around allegedly obscene content. The film, primarily political in content but containing scenes with full frontal nudity, was billed within the American media as a pornographic film. Rejecting the indictment, Sj?man argued that it was the film's explicit male nudity that troubled US Customs censors, underscoring the ironic regard of male nudity as less permissible than the overt female nudity prevalent within film and advertising at the time. Iam Curious (Yellow) and its companion film lam Curious (Blue), released in Sweden in 1966, were intended to be one integrated film. Sj?man amassed substantial footage and decided to create two versions of the same film (Blue) developed into a sober film about state, church, prison camps and other aspects of Swedish society. (Yellow), the more sensational counterpart, unfolds around Lena Nyman, a radical student activist who engages in a public inquiry about social, political and sexual questions relevant to Swedes at the time. The film evolves ambiguously, never resolving whether the real-life Nyman has been cast to play herself or a role created by the director. In this way, Sj?man further complicates the reading of the film as either documentary or staged, while posing sexual encounters as a set of intimate relations involving distrust, anger, envy and betrayal, rather than offering a simple staging of sexual wares. Contradicting the claim put forth by US censors, reviews by renowned critics such as Vincent Canby from The New York Times described the film as containing 'scenes as explicit, honest and so unaffectedly frank as to be non-pornographic'. 'By acknowledging the existence of genitalia and their function in the act of love/ Canby added, 'the movie salvages the depiction of physical love from the scrap heap of exploitation, camp and stag films.'2 The decision of a New York court in May 1968 to uphold the US Customs ban on obscenity grounds only reaffirmed Herbert Marcuse's prognosis about the Establishment's methodical strategies to prevent politically critical and explicit material from wider distribution. Marcuse set forth a critical analysis of society in his Essay on Liberation from 1969 to reaffirm the obscenity card as a 'a moral concept in the verbal arsenal of the Establish ment, which abuses the term by applying it, not to expressions of its own morality but to those of another. [...] Obscene is not the picture of a naked woman who exposes her pubic hair but that of a fully clad general who exposes his medals rewarded in a war of aggression,' writes Marcuse in an expansion of his investigation of the possible juncture between the erotic and political that he had initiated in Eros and Civlizationin 1955.3 In a revisionary reading of Freudian theory that resonated with 1960s leftist student movements and their call for both social reform and erotic liberation, Marcuse's critical re-evaluation of Freud's concept of sexuality contested the latter's original claim that