Sex on the Screen: Eroticism in Film

by Herard Leene and Gérard Lenne

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• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0312713355
• ISBN13: 9780312713355
• Release Date: January 1985
• Publisher: St. Martin's Press
• Length: 245 Pages
• Weight: 1.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 8.4" x 10.7"

Customer Reviews

A look at film eroticism as the gauge to society

Gerard Lenne's main point is that sex is an irreplaceable gauge of the moral and social attitudes of a society. Furthermore, the state of cinema reflects the society producing the movies. A movie reveals all that society's taboos, inhibitions, degree of censorship, and sexuality. But apart from being a mirror on society, it can also serve to influence a society's conscience. For example, when a "perversion" is tolerated, that causes a shift in society's definition of normality. Lenne's book thus takes a look at cinema from the erotic angle to examine contemporary mentality.The question of why sex and nudity have been taboo in Western cinema is answered by equating nudity with nature, innocence, and health. Nature, normality, and health is good, whereas anti-nature, abnormality, and unhealthiness is bad. However, the onset of Judeo-Christianity, the ideological foundation and moral backbone of Western Civilization, condemned pleasure and condoned chastity, equating the suppression of pleasure with a virtue. On one side, there was the Immaculation Conception, the miraculous virginity, which meant sexual pleasure became equated with Satan and evil. Further, the consequences of repression leads to frustration and thence to madness, and that has been translated into film. Looks at frigidity, nymphomania, and fetishism, among others are examined, with many films used as examples.Lenne does get into a brief history of Hollywood, the star system, and the Hays Code that was imposed in the wake of scandals such as Fatty Arbuckle/Virginia Rappe and the Desmond Taylor murder. The result was that vamps like Jean Harlow and particularly Mae West were defanged, something that killed Mae's career and would've for Jean had she lived beyond 1937. It was from the late 1950's that the Code began to crack, with explicit dialogue relating to an assault in Anatomy Of A Murder (1959), the onset of the nudie film genre with Russ Meyer's The Immoral Mr. Teas, and Thelma Oliver baring her breasts in The Pawnbroker (1965) and the allowing of miscegenation that led to the Code's disintegration in 1966, replaced by a system of auto-regulation. Things began from softcore in the 60's, with Russ Meyers' Faster Pussycat and Vixen heralding a transition to hardcore in the 1970's. Films like Deep Throat, The Devil and Miss Jones, and Behind The Green Door exemplified the newfound liberation in films until October 1975, when regulation reared its head by giving an X to any film with "pornographic content." This also meant the envelope being pulled away, a retreat back to softcore.The 1970's was when the cinema became more daring in France, enhanced by the various youth, gay, and feminist movements in Europe. In fact, much of the photos, most of them, full-frontal, are of Italian and French films. France is a centerpiece in this book, given Lenne's examination of the French New Wave, Vadim's And God Created Woman and Louis Malle's The Lovers, up to the 1970's with er