Stag Films Research Articles

Smokers, Club Films, and Blue Movies

Aesthetic histories of the stag film tend to place it in a straightforward lineage of pornographic imagery such that the film genre emerges more or less fully formed. Discursive histories, however, have noted that the term does not concretize in relation to the film form until approximately 1930. Yet this marks only the beginning of generic stability and thus overlooks the mechanisms of genrification that played out in America in the previous decades and that propelled the terminological transformation of “films for smoking concerts,” “club films,” and “blue” movies into “stags.” Approaching the films as new media in their historical moment and focusing specifically on exhibition contexts, this article places stag films in a multifaceted rather than a singular ancestry of visual culture, broadens the intertextual field of cinema beyond explicit representations of sex to trace the broader composition of male-dominated viewing traditions, and finally, argues that the genre becomes ultimately concentrated into the familiar gendered, alternative viewing spaces of stags as a function of both the increasing moral restrictions and the industrial reorganization of Hollywood cinema. Studying the films and genres on the margins, such as stags, helps us more precisely assess the shape of the center and the forces responsible for determining the boundaries between the two. Finally, this investigation of stags demonstrates the importance of the dispositive, or reception context, as a critical piece of generic development, one that is given little attention in the study of most other film genres.

Smut, novelty, indecency: reworking a history of the early-twentieth-century American ‘stag film’

As many film historians have noted, there are serious problems in understanding what have been labelled ‘stag films ‘during the first half of the twentieth century. While scholars have been able to use a more-or-less agreed upon definition of ‘stag films’ within the scope of histories of pornography, a crucial level of nuance is lost by grouping films from the early 1900s to 1970 under one common moniker. This article works to deconstruct traditional understandings and definitions of a ‘stag film’ by focusing on the want adverts and public announcements of American periodicals such as The Billboard between 1907 and 1930. By doing so, the article explores and complicates traditional histories of ‘stag’, finding new evidence that suggests the ‘stag film’ before 1930 was not a cohesive genre.

Costume or Dress? The Use of Clothing in the Gay Pornography of Jim French's Colt Studio

It would seem that one of the intentions of the viewer of gay pornography would be to see the sexual engagement of the participants (and perhaps the “money shot”) with a focus upon the gymnastics and writhing of bodies that constitute the practice and representation of sexual activity within the film. However, before nudity or nakedness is presented the “characters” are dressed. Using the films and photography of Colt Studio and its founder Jim French from the period 1967–81 as a focus this article explores the ways in which the “characters” are constructed through their clothing and costuming. It will address the ways in which these “icons” of masculinity that had developed in the pre-liberation physique magazines and stag films reflected the prototypes, archetypes, and stereotypes of post-liberation gay identity and dressed appearance in the fifteen years following the Stonewall riots and gay liberation. Colt Studio was famed for its particular presentation of hypermasculine images and a “stable” of masculine actors that included Clone superstar Al Parker. This article will offer an analysis of the use of particular items of clothing and the iconic styles of leatherman, motorcycle cop, and gay clone in Colt's output of this period.

Sex in Context: Space, Place, and the Constitution of Images

This paper examines the changing context for sexual images and the spaces that give law meaning. The details are evident in Congressional efforts to regulate sex on the Internet and the Supreme Court’s response as well as changing contexts for encountering forbidden images from the old stag films and peep shows to the local public library and sex sites on the web. The paper is part of a larger project on seeing law and the idea that Lady Justice is blind.

Cut‐Pieces as Stag Film: Bangladeshi Pornography in Action Cinema

This article discusses the ‘cut‐piece’, short strips of celluloid containing sexually explicit imagery that are spliced in and out of Bangladeshi feature films, even during screening. Such cut‐pieces came into existence in Bangladesh in the mid‐1990s and are made in Bangladesh with Bangladeshi actors and crew. The article outlines the generic conventions of such Bangladeshi hard‐core cinematic pornography found in Bangladeshi action movies and focuses on four generic characteristics: production values and the representations of female nudity, rape and class difference. To analyse this imagery, the author relies on the discussions of the American stag film by Thomas Waugh and Linda Williams. This article aims to open up discussions of pornographic cinema in South Asia, especially its Muslim majority societies.

The Obscenity Bargain: Ralph Ginzburg for Fanny Hill

The Obscenity Bargain: Ralph Ginzburg for Fanny Hill L.A. POWE, JR. The next-to-the-last witness at the July 1968 hearings on the nomination of Abe Fortas to replace Earl Warren as Chief Justice was James Clancy. Along with another attorney, Charles Keating, who would later gain infamy in the savings and loan scandal of the 1980s, Clancy appeared on behalf of Citizens for Decent Literature, an anti-smut organization that had filed amicus briefs supporting censorship “as essential to the development of good family living”1 in the Supreme Court’s important obscenity decisions.2 Clancy asserted that everyone should see the materials Fortas had held were entitled to First Amendment protection, and so he had assembled a thirty-minute compilation ofthem for the Judiciary Committee’s viewing. Fortas had voted to reverse fifty-two ob­ scenity cases in the previous two years, and Clancy made much of the fact. But so had Hugo L. Black, William O. Douglas, and Potter Stewart, joined the previous year by Thurgood Marshall. Indeed, these four Jus­ tices always voted that the First Amendment protected whatever materials were before the Court. Before Marshall joined the Court, the fifth vote to reverse an obscenity conviction was as likely to come from William J. Brennan as it was from Fortas. Furthermore, all the key opinions—Roth? Jacobellis? Ginzburg? and Memoirs6—were written by Brennan. Indeed, his was the law of obscenity.7 Clancy did not know it, but in a deeper sense he was correct about how important Fortas’s influence was. Although Fortas was only one of two Justices who did not write in the 1965 Term cases,8 from inside the Court, Fortas dictated the results in Ginzburg and Memoirs. Everyone knows that Justices bargain over the wording of opinions. We know there is strategic voting on whether to hear cases.9 We also know that they bargain over outcomes— for example, Douglas telling Stewart he would join Stewart’s draft opinion in Swann v. Charlotte-MechlenburgBoardofEducation?0 the first busing case, if Stewart would switch the result from affirm to reverse.11 The story that follows is about a differenttype ofa pact— different because it explicitly, albeit clan­ destinely, denies equal justice under law—a THE OBSCENITY BARGAIN 167 Charles Keating (left) partnered James Clancy who testified on behalf of their anti-smut group—Citizens for Decent Literature—at Abe Fortas’s confirmation hearings to be Chief Justice in 1968. They showed the Jud­ iciary Committee materials from fifty-two obscenity cases in which Fortas (right), as Associate Justice, had ruled that the works were protected by the First Amendment. Keating was later convicted of swindling small investors in the savings and loan debacle of the 1980s. bargain whereby a Justice changed his vote in one case in exchange for another Justice changing his vote in a separate case.12 Specifi­ cally, Fortas proposed and Brennan, with War­ ren’s tacit consent, agreed to swap votes in two obscenity cases. As a result, Fanny Hill (as Memoirs is typically called) and its rep­ utable publisher, G.P. Putnam’s Sons, escaped the censor’s ban, while a human being, Ralph Ginzburg, was sent to jail without even a fig leaf of due process from the highest Court in the land. Memoirs John Cleland penned Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure while in debtors’ prison in mid­ eighteenth-century England. It was published after he was released, and publication found him back in court again where he renounced Fanny Hill as “a Book I disdain to defend, and wish, from my Soul, buried and forgot.”13 Fanny Hill was neither buried nor for­ got. Instead, it had a “wide” but “clandestine” circulation, culminating in the open publica­ tion at issue in Memoirs.14 It is, by all ac­ counts, a very well-written book that lacks a plot—in essence, a “literary stag film.”15 It is inconceivable that anyone would read the book for its supposed “elegance and energy,” “un­ doubted historic value,” and “definite literary appeal.”16 As the New York Herald Tribune book critic noted, one could have a long career “searching for anyone who read the book...

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

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

The hypersexuality of race: performing Asian/American women on screen and scene

In The Hypersexuality of Race , Celine Parrenas Shimizu urges a shift in thinking about sexualized depictions of Asian/American women in film, video, and theatrical productions. Shimizu advocates moving beyond denunciations of sexualized representations of Asian/American women as necessarily demeaning or negative. Arguing for a more nuanced approach to the mysterious mix of pleasure, pain, and power in performances of sexuality, she advances a theory of “productive perversity,” a theory which allows Asian/American women—and by extension other women of color—to lay claim to their own sexuality and desires as actors, producers, critics, and spectators. Shimizu combines theoretical and textual analysis and interviews with artists involved in various productions. She complicates understandings of the controversial portrayals of Asian female sexuality in the popular Broadway musical Miss Saigon by drawing on ethnographic research and interviews with some of the actresses in it. She looks at how three Hollywood Asian/American femme fatales—Anna May Wong, Nancy Kwan, and Lucy Liu—negotiate representations of their sexuality; analyzes 1920s and 1930s stag films in which white women perform as sexualized Asian characters; and considers Asian/American women’s performances in films ranging from the stag pornography of the 1940s to the Internet and video porn of the 1990s. She also reflects on two documentaries depicting Southeast Asian prostitutes and sex tourism, The Good Woman of Bangkok and 101 Asian Debutantes . In her examination of films and videos made by Asian/American feminists, Shimizu describes how female characters in their works reject normative definitions of race, gender, and sexuality, thereby expanding our definitions of racialized sexualities in representation.

"Frenzy of the visible," Indeed!

When first published my book on hard-core pornography in 1989 (Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the Frenzy of the Visible,'1) was talked out of including pictures by my editor and the press. At that time books with pictures about sex in movies tended to be rather exploitative--just an excuse to bring together the pictures. The press wished to avoid that stigma and so eschewed illustration altogether. Indeed, that edition had everything it could to make the book look safe, including a cover that gave the title soft pink lettering. succumbed to the press's wishes though especially lamented the loss of a whole series of images from Eadweard Muybridge's Animal Locomotion around which had built careful arguments. What was worse was that in this book's very pages then had the bad faith to defend myself with the following argument: there is no getting around the ability of such images, especially if quoted out of context, to leap off the page to move viewers and thus to prove too facilely whatever 'truths' of sex seem most immediately apparent. Rather than run that risk, wrote with what now seems to me to be a very false nobility: I forgo the luxury of illustration. note, however, that nearly all the feature-length hard-core films, and some compilations of stag films, are readily available for rental in the adult sections of many video outlets.2 Even then knew better. knew that it was important to run the risk of readers and students experiencing the pleasures and/or the shock that such images are designed to elicit. Already, in this very same book had cited the emboldening example of the beautiful magazine called Caught Looking: Feminism, Pornography and Censorship.3 Part feminist tract against censorship with a number of lively polemical essays and part porn magazine for women with a mix of old and new pictures, ranging from turn-of-the century French postcards to contemporary bondage and domination, lesbian and gay explicit images, it was a beautifully produced collage that titillated at one moment, shocked at another, and mixed the experience of being caught looking at the images. It was interspersed with provocative essays by Kate Ellis, Barbara O'Dair, Abby Tallmer, Pat Califia, Lisa Duggan, and others. This new kind of dirty picture magazine was my model for a new kind of feminist writing about moving-image pornography that could counter

Eroticism and Technological Regression: The Stag Film

It is commonplace to observe that pornography drives the development of media technologies. Examples abound, from the mania for capturing naked bodies that led Charles Baudelaire to complain in 1859 that photography had been coopted, to the story of how American pornographers in 1976 decided that JVC’s VHS would dethrone Sony’s Beta videotape format. It is also common to assume that sexuality is more stimulating when it is most technological, most divorced from ‘nature.’ By severing sex’s connection with reproduction, says Georges Bataille, pornographic representations become more exciting than the real thing. The history of pornographic film, however, suggests that makers of both early stag films and modern videotapes and DVDs are highly ambivalent about the representational technologies they employ. Of the hundreds of stag films made before 1965, only five were shot in sound, and only four were shot in color. Although the whole point of a hard‐core genre would seem to be graphic realism, stags clung to primitive technology. Stag filmmakers deliberately subverted not only realism but also the medium through conscious ineptitude: the performers knocked over light stands, or the cinematographer intruded into the frame, for example, and they did so time and again. By choosing retrograde technology, producers asserted their outlaw status; cultivated amateurishness asserted the authenticity of human sexuality as well. Despite much better equipment, today’s more sophisticated pornographers exhibit similarly ambivalent postures. Complicating matters is the ostensible purpose of such films, which calls for performers to demonstrate techniques for management and control of unleashed desire. On the one hand, the pornographic filmmaker’s conflicted stance points backward to traditional issues of representation faced by any artist determined to depicit sexuality, and on the other, forward to more recent obsessions with hegemonic gazes, gender regimes, and old‐fashioned fetishes. But such contradictions also raise questions about the fundamental relationship of the technological and the erotic. Those questions in turn should give pause to those who are enthralled by pornographic movies and those who are appalled by them. This paper will, so to speak, flesh out the discussion.

"White Slavery" Versus the Ethnography of "Sexworkers": Women in Stag Films at the Kinsey Archive

"White Slavery" Versus the Ethnography of "Sexworkers": Women in Stag Films at the Kinsey Archive

Sex and Worldmaking: A Review of New York’s Museum of Sex

Conflicts over shifting social hierarchies, expression and repression, the moralists’ ongoing love affair with the things they hate, are represented within the artefacts, photos, magazines, posters, tabloid headlines, early 20th century stag films, pulp fiction covers, vintage gay pornography, and S&M equipment that make up the debut exhibition of New York’s new museum of sex NYC Sex: How New York City Transformed Sex in America. The museum establishes a historical context for the development of debates that continue to come up again and again over the rise and demand for sexual materials vs the moralist attack. Yet, by putting sexual culture on display in a museum, it successfully and critically establishes that sex is a complicated issue defined by various discourses.

Homosociality in the Classical American Stag Film: Off-Screen, On-Screen

The classical American stag film, a body of clandestine short pornographic films produced during the first two-thirds of the 20th century, has received scholarly attention in several quarters, first from heterosexual male scribes and beneficiaries of the `sexual revolution', and more recently by feminist and queer cultural historians. The present article pursues this study by developing the concept of homosociality in relation to the stag film corpus, both its contextual and textual aspects, and demonstrating its inextricable engagement in the social and specular relations along the continuum of masculinity within American culture. In conclusion, the author compares the stags to another quasi-underground corpus of short erotic films, mail order homoerotic `physique' films of the post-war period, and discovers unexpected parallels and dialogue between the two corpuses at the onset of the `sexual revolution'.

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

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

PbO-SiO<SUB>2</SUB>スラグ表面における固体SiO<SUB>2</SUB>の局部溶損機構

Experiments show the following facts: Local corrosion of solid silica at the surface of liquid PbO-SiO2 slag progresses in the area where the slag film, creeping up along the surface of the solid silica from bulk slag, moves actively by the Marangoni effect. Oxygen in the atmosphere does not affect the local corrosion. The local corrosion does not occur for the silica specimen which is wound tightly with platinum wire at the slag surface. The wire prevents the slag film from moving. Leading part of the local corrosion is in the portion where the specimen is washed vigorously with thin stag film which is rising up from the bulk slag. In this portion, the corrosion rate increases with increasing the film velocity.The corrosion rate in the leading part is well described by the rate equation derived from the assumption that the rate is controlled by mass transport of dissolved SiO2 in the slag film under the Marangoni flow of the film. The assumption is supported by the experiment made of the dissolution rate of rotating SiO2 cylinder into the bulk slag.The above results confirm that neither the volatile component in the slag nor oxygen in the atmosphere causes the local corrosion and the local corrosion results from the effective promotion of mass transport of the dissolved component from the specimen by the active Marangoni flow in the diffusion layer in the film.