“It’s very innocuous material, but the fact that there is moving nudity would have been considered quite dangerous,” Pratt says. Other post-first world war artefacts such as The Uncharted Sea (1928) and The Irresponsibles (1929), both produced by British Instructional Films, an “educational” studio closely linked to government and imperial interests, are little more than propaganda shorts on the ruinous lifestyles of promiscuity and feminism.Ī slightly later example in the collection, Action in Slow Motion (1943) provides the first extended nudist scenario, with a woman frolicking on the beach in real-time and then at a more sensual, half-speed. The 1907 sight gag reel Merry Moments in France similarly removes any lubricity from its Folies Bergère-inspired cabaret, allowing the patrons only to drink and then cavort off-screen with the hostess. Such innocuous images were far from the full-frontal nudity and genital penetration shown in American and European “stags” of the era. Some of The Pleasure Principle’s earliest silent examples, such as A Victorian Lady in Her Boudoir (1896) and Nude Woman by Waterfall (1920), bear out this observation, revealing female models in a modest petticoat or in brief flashes of toplessness using highly choreographed, if not pictorialist, tableaux. I think this has always been reflected in the way we have produced our erotic or sex cinema here.” “The British as a nation were culturally, perhaps, more inclined to laugh at sex, or mock it, or make a smutty innuendo, rather than address it head-on. “In Britain, we have always been slightly ashamed of our sexual impulses,” says BFI curator Vic Pratt, who organised the film collection. Divergent in style and fetish but tame in imagery (at least by later hardcore standards), the collection provides a fascinating history of Britain cinema’s evolving and often transgressive relationship with the body. Their duration spans from the late 19th century to the advent of home video, often seen as signalling the death of the softcore genre. The BFI’s new collection, The Pleasure Principle, the most recent addition to its massive Britain on Film online initiative, has digitised more than40 such examples of reclaimed erotica. Often produced on zero budget and distributed through a network of magazine subscriptions and black market retailers, these motion pictures were mostly disposed of or forgotten in short order.
![erotic films erotic films](http://waytooindie.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/the-strange-little-cat.jpg)
![erotic films erotic films](https://static1.colliderimages.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/lust-caution.jpg)
Their work was part of a long lineage of stag films, 8mm home movies, mondo and nudist documentaries, and filmed stripteases exhibited to select audiences of men via cinema clubs or on private reels. L ong before 1970s sexploitation comedies such as Eskimo Nell and Come Play With Me brought bawdy humour and copious T&A to the commercial theatres of Britain, the country’s smut industry comprised an informal economy of club impresarios, carneys and photographers.