Carnal
Knowledge:
The Sexual Revolution on Film 1967-1972
July 27–September 8, 2002
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Saturday,
July 27
2:00 p.m.
I AM CURIOUS, YELLOW
Sweden, 1967, 121 mins., 35mm archival print. Directed by Vilgot Sjoman.
Seized by U.S. customs officials upon its initial entry, Sjoman’s
film became a cause célèbre and cultural breakthrough because
of its graphic sexuality (which overshadowed its attack on Sweden’s
political establishment). An intricate narrative structure reveals a film
within a film, as Lena (Lena Nyman) plays an aspiring actress and political
activist attempting to land a role in Sjoman’s film.
4:15 p.m.
MIDNIGHT COWBOY
United Artists, 1969, 113 mins. Directed by John Schlesinger. With Dustin
Hoffman, Jon Voight, Sylvia Miles. This X-rated winner of the Best Picture
Oscar broke ground with its frank depiction of the life of a New York
“hustler.” After his dreams of big city stardom are shattered
(symbolized by his sighting of an ignored corpse on 5th Avenue), Joe Buck
(Voight) is introduced to the Big Apple’s seamier side by tour guide
Ratso Rizzo (Hoffman).
Sunday, July 28
2:00
p.m.
CARNAL KNOWLEDGE
Avco Embassy, 1971, 97 mins. Directed by Mike Nichols. With Jack Nicholson,
Art Garfunkel. A pair of college buddies approach middle age and grapple
with changing sexual mores in this lacerating dark comedy written by Jules
Feiffer and masterfully directed by Nichols in a stark minimalist style.
“Maybe you’re not supposed to like [sex] with someone you love,”
wonders the sensitive Sandy (Garfunkel) while the misogynist Jonathan
(Nicholson) lashes out at female “ballbusters.”
4:30
p.m.
COMING APART
1969, 110 mins. Directed by Milton Moses Ginsberg. With Rip Torn, Sally
Kirkland. Rip Torn gives a raw, ferocious performance as a Manhattan psychiatrist
who secretly films a series of sexual encounters—and his own emotional
breakdown—in this astonishingly bold, sexually explicit feature.
Recently rediscovered, Coming Apart is a powerful time capsule that combines
the rawness of cinéma vérité, the psychodrama of
Cassavetes, and the formal audacity of Warhol.
Saturday, August 3
2:00
p.m.
BELLE DE JOUR
Allied Artists, 1967, 100 mins. Directed by Luis Buñuel. With Catherine
Deneuve. Exploring her sexual fantasies by a day in a Parisian brothel,
and quietly living with her Doctor husband at night, Deneuve gives a coolly
startling performance as the enigmatic Séverine. Afternoons of
passion with a gangster (Pierre Clementi) provide sexual excitement and
unanticipated complications. As Buñuel’s camera worships Deneuve
throughout, the parade of ridiculous male clientele wryly subverts machismo.
4:00
p.m.
KLUTE
Warner Bros., 1971, 114 mins. Directed by Alan Pakula. With Jane Fonda,
Donald Sutherland. An aspiring actress turned prostitute, Jane Fonda’s
Bree, portrayed with nuance and nervous energy, epitomizes many of the
contradictions of the time. Distinctly modern in its sensibility, the
story of a detective’s anguished search for his a friend—a suburban
family man missing in the city—is presented in classic film noir
style, complete with Gordon Willis’s dark, moody visuals.
Sunday, August 4
2:00
p.m.
LONESOME COWBOYS
1967, 110 mins. Directed by Andy Warhol. With Viva, Taylor Mead. The denizens
of Warhol’s scandalous Factory stage a mock and mocking Western in
the wilds of Arizona. A seemingly drugged-out cast and crew improvise
a decadent genre- and gender- twisting parody filled with casual sex and
even more casual acting. The last film directed by Warhol (and a precursor
to Paul Morrissey’s films), Lonesome Cowboys epitomizes the camp
sensibility of the times.
4:00
p.m.
FLESH
1968, 105 mins. Directed by Paul Morrissey. With Joe Dallesandro. Preceded
by FUSES Carolee Schneemann, 1967, 22 mins. Paul Morrissey took the reins
of the Factory’s film production while Andy Warhol recovered from
gunshot wounds. Preceding Midnight Cowboy (and exceeding it in explicitness),
Flesh stars Dallessandro as a bisexual hustler. Schneemann’s kinetic
and painterly diary film Fuses is an avant-garde classic in its portrayal
of sex from a female perspective.
Saturday, August 10
2:00
p.m.
BARBARELLA
Paramount, 1967, 98 mins. Directed by Roger Vadim. With Jane Fonda. Preceded
by THE BED James Broughton, 1968, 20 mins. “A kind of sexual Alice
in Wonderland—in the future,” was how Vadim (then Fonda’s
husband) described his adaptation of a popular French comic strip. From
its infamous opening striptease, Barbarella revels in her go-go boot-clad
physicality and celebrates her discovery of sex. Broughton’s short
is a merry, erotic allegory celebrating the cycle of life.
4:15
p.m.
VIXEN!
1968, 71 mins. Directed by Russ Meyer. With Erica Gavin. Preceded by LOVEMAKING
Scott Bartlett, 1970, 14 mins. EYETOON Jerry Abrams, 1967, 8 mins. FLY
Yoko Ono, 1971, 25 mins. Meyer’s self-satrizing and politically-minded
skin flick was a theatrical success, paving the way for the “Porno
Chic” boom of the early 1970s. Its simple plot chronicles the visits
of a black draft dodger, Scottish communist, and freespirited American
couple to Vixen’s remote Canadian cabin. The shorts include two visually
dazzling portrayals of sex and Yoko Ono’s beautiful film of a fly’s
traversal of a naked woman’s body.
Sunday,
August 11
2:00 p.m.
BOB & CAROL & TED & ALICE
Columbia, 1969, 104 mins. Directed by Paul Mazursky. With Natalie Wood,
Elliot Gould, Dyan Cannon, Robert Culp. “Consider the possibilities,”
teased the ads for the opening-night film at the 1969 New York Film Festival.
Mazursky’s directorial debut is an old-fashioned comic romp about
such new-fangled fads as wife-swapping and group sex. Culp and Wood play
a swinging couple trying to initiate their friends into their liberated
ways.
4:00
p.m.
A CLOCKWORK ORANGE
Warner Bros., 1971, 137 mins. Directed by Stanley Kubrick. With Malcolm
McDowell. Billed as “the adventure of a young man whose principal
interests are rape, ultra-violence and Beethoven,” and opening to
enormous controversy, Kubrick’s explosive social satire was pulled
from public exhibition in England following a series of alarming “copycat”
crimes. A truly revolutionary film, that as Vincent Canby put it, is “dangerous
in a way that brilliant things sometimes are.”
Saturday, August 17
2:00
p.m.
FELLINI SATYRICON
United Artists, 1969, 129 mins. Directed by Federico Fellini. Adapting
Petronius’ account of sexual decadence in Nero’s Rome, Fellini
creates his most spectacular film, defined by excess and inspired by Jack
Smith’s Flaming Creatures. We follow the journeys of two students
with slave-cum-lover Gitone, as they encounter and often participate in
feasts, orgies, murders, and the like across the Empire. A fragmented
narrative reveals the film as a world unto itself, ruled solely by the
pleasure principle.
4:30
p.m.
THE DECAMERON
United Artists, 1970, 107 mins. Imported 35mm print. Directed by Pier
Paolo Pasolini. Adapted from Giovanni Boccaccio’s 14th Century classic,
Pasolini realizes a series of bawdy vignettes, framed by his own turn
as Giotto painting a portrait of Madonna and Child. This first of the
director’s “trilogy of life” was rated X for, as Variety
noted, running the gamut “from lust to deception, jealousy to cuckoldry,
revenge to deceit, etc.”
Sunday, August 18
2:00
p.m.
SWEET SWEETBACK’S BAADASSSS SONG
Cinemation, 1971, 97 mins. Directed by and starring Melvin Van Peebles.
Released with the tagline “Rated X by an All-White Jury,” this
revolutionary film—both formally and thematically—was a major
box office hit, inspring the 1970s “blaxploitation” boom. Producer,
director, editor, and composer Van Peebles stars as Sweetback, whose legendary
sexual power is revealed in the film’s opening, and whose violent
encounter with the police sends him on the run.
4:00
p.m.
W.R.—MYSTERIES OF THE ORGANISM
Yugoslavia, 1971, 86 mins. Imported 35mm print. Directed by Dusan Makavejev.
With Milena Dravic. Celebrating the life and theories of Wilhelm Reich,
the Marxist Freudian who preached revolution through sexual enlightenment,
W.R. is a bawdy plea for all manner of liberation. With his trademark
collage style, blending documentary and experimental techniques, and hopping
between Eastern Europe and the United States, Makavejev simultaneously
celebrates and spoofs utopianism.
Saturday, August 24
2:00
p.m.
WOMEN IN LOVE
United Artists, 1969, 129 mins. Directed by Ken Russell. With Alan Bates,
Glenda Jackson, Oliver Reed. With 1920s England standing in for the free-spirited
1960s, Ken Russell’s adaptation of the D. H. Lawrence novel about
two intertwining love affairs is a successful stylistic match; Russell’s
exuberant and operatic visual style meshes well with Lawrence’s fulsome
prose. The film amplifies the book’s homoerotic subtext, most famously
in the nude wrestling scene between Bates and Reed.
4:30
p.m.
SUNDAY, BLOODY SUNDAY
United Artists, 1971, 110 mins. Directed by John Schlesinger. With Glenda
Jackson, Peter Finch. In this thoughtful and groundbreaking drama, a young
bisexual designer is the love object of a middle-aged Jewish doctor and
a divorced businesswoman. Penelope Gilliatt’s richly textured, highly
literate screenplay treats its sexual content with emotional depth and
matter-of-fact honesty. “The movie is a novel written on film…in
a pungent, slangy style that sounds accurate, not bookish.” (Pauline
Kael).
Sunday, August 25
2:00
p.m.
A Pinewood Dialogue with Radley Metzger
THE LICKERISH QUARTET
1970, 90 mins. Directed by Radley Metzger. Hailed by Andy Warhol as an
“outrageously kinky masterpiece,” Lickerish is one of the most
beautifully photographed and formally daring films by soft-core impressario
Radley Metzger. An Italian couple and their son, fans of erotic films,
spot a woman at a carnival who they recognize as a porn actress. An invitation
to their villa leads to sexual—and filmic—experimentation.
4:30
p.m.
CARMEN, BABY
1967, 91 mins. Directed by Radley Metzger. With Uta Levka. Modernizing
Prosper Mérimée’s classic tale, Metzger establishes
his Carmen as a chic, independent woman of the 1960s. On the Mediterranean
Coast, a strait-laced young policeman falls hard for the irresistible
Carmen (Levka), but she prefers pop star Baby Lucas (Walter Wilz).
Saturday, August 31
2:00
p.m.
HI, MOM!
1970, 87 mins. Directed by Brian De Palma. With Robert De Niro. Preceded
by CROCUS Suzan Pitt, 1971, 7 mins. The worlds of New York underground
theater and hard-core filmmaking are among the targets of De Palma’s
pleasantly scattershot satire starring De Niro as a Vietnam vet trying
to make it in Greenwich Village under the mentorship of a porno director
played by Allen Garfield. (It was also released as Confessions of a Peeping
John.) Crocus is a baroque animated fantasy about marital sex.
4:00
p.m.
IS THERE SEX AFTER DEATH?
1971, 97 mins. Directed by Alan and Jeanne Abel. With Buck Henry. Preceded
by PAGAN RHAPSODY George Kuchar, 1970, 23 mins. Inspired by Candid Camera
and Laugh-In, this documentary spoof was called “the only really
funny movie since Bananas” by The New York Times. A nudity-filled
grab-bag, it features Buck Henry, Robert Downey, Marshall Efron, and Warhol
superstar Holly Woodlawn. The Kuchar short stars underground love goddess
Donna Kerness.
Sunday, September 1
2:00
p.m.
EVERYTHING YOU ALWAYS WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT SEX (BUT WERE AFRAID TO
ASK)
United Artists, 1972, 87 mins. Directed by Woody Allen. With Gene Wilder,
Burt Reynolds, Tony Randall, Lynn Redgrave, Regis Philbin. Purchasing
the rights to the best-selling book, Allen infuriated the author with
this bawdy and hysterical parody of the “science of sex.” Seven
vignettes, introduced by such questions as “What happens during ejaculation?,”
deflate the supercilious tone of the source material.
4:00
p.m.
FRITZ THE CAT
American International Pictures, 1972, 77 mins. Directed by Ralph Bakshi.
Based on the characters of Robert Crumb, Bakshi’s X-Rated animated
feature contains equal parts social satire and bawdy sexual antics. On
a Homeric journey through a New York night, the eponymous feline (an NYU
student by day) encounters a motley bunch of characters—Black Panthers,
Bikers, Hippies, and finds herself in provocative scenarios that take
full advantage of the freedom of animation.
Saturday, September 7
Screenings of WANDA and LAST TANGO IN PARIS have been cancelled.
Sunday, September 8
Screenings of FRENZY and DEEP THROAT have been cancelled.
Carnal
Knowledge:
The Sexual Revolution on Film 1967-1972
July 27–September 8, 2002
Program Introduction
The revolution came from overseas. The occasionally
explicit and often anxiety-ridden depiction of sexuality that occurred
in mainstream American cinema in the late 1960s and early 1970s was largely
inspired by the influence and popularity of European art films.
In 1966, censors for the Motion Picture Association
of America (MPAA), bound by the strictures of the antiquated Production
Code, asked Michelangelo Antonioni to cut a brief glimpse of pubic hair
from a scene in his English-language film Blow-Up, which was due to be
released by MGM. After Antonioni strongly objected to Hollywood’s
demands, MGM opted for an end-run, successfully releasing the film without
the Code’s seal of approval through a subsidiary company, Premier
Productions.
A year later, the Swedish film I Am Curious
(Yellow) was seized by the U. S. Customs Service for “obscene”
sexual content. After a group of writers (including Norman Mailer, John
Simon, and Stanley Kauffman), psychologists, and clergymen vouched for
the film’s artistic and social merit, the U.S. Court of Appeals allowed
the film’s release. The controversy, of course, guaranteed its success.
Bowing to the reality of court decisions against
censorship, and acknowledging the growing trend towards permissiveness
sweeping through American society, the MPAA introduced a self-regulatory
ratings system in 1968. Films with explicit violence or sexual content
could be released with an X rating (nobody under 17 admitted). Before
it was feverishly adopted as a marketing tool by the adult film industry
(“XXX!”), the X rating came with no stigma attached. Midnight
Cowboy, released by United Artists in 1969, won the Best Picture Oscar
(over Hello, Dolly! and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.)
Hollywood’s open flirtation with sexuality was as uneasy as it was
inevitable. While imported films such as I Am Curious (Yellow) and W.R.:
Mysteries of the Organism were defiantly revolutionary in their politics,
linking sexual liberation with a Marxist critique of political oppression,
Hollywood struggled with just how to blend old, conventional formulas
with new realities. When Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, a comedy
about wife-swapping and extramarital sex, seasoned with glimpses of nudity
by extras, was selected to open the 1969 New York Film Festival, Vincent
Canby excoriated the choice in The New York Times. “If Bob &
Carol… has any purpose in the festival, it is to show contemporary
Hollywood’s debt to television…to TV’s comedy formulas.”
Indeed, compared to the joyous, explicit, raw, and decadent visions of
sex in such varied underground films as Carolee Schneemann’s Fuses,
Andy Warhol’s Lonesome Cowboys, and Milton Moses Ginsberg’s
Coming Apart, true liberation was rarely to be found in studio films.
Instead, distinct notes of anxiety, misogyny, and backlash were evident
in such aggressive movies as A Clockwork Orange, Klute, and Carnal Knowledge.
In her 1973 assessment of Hollywood’s treatment of women in movies,
Molly Haskell despairingly wrote that the past ten years “have been
the most disheartening in screen history. The growing strength and demands
of women in real life, spearheaded by women’s liberation, obviously
provoked a backlash in commercial film.”
Although free to be shown as sexually active and independent, women were
more likely than not to be portrayed as prostitutes, victims, or anonymous
sex objects. Reflecting the perspectives of their writers and directors,
most of the movies of the time (and in this series) are dramas by and
about troubled males.
It was at the margins, and on the outside, where progressive views of
sexuality could be found. Changing economics in the industry allowed for
commercial theatrical runs by independent features, including Paul Morrissey’s
Flesh, Barbara Loden’s Wanda (that rare film from the period actually
written and directed by a woman) and Brian DePalma’s raucous satire
Hi, Mom! Maverick director Melvin Van Peebles achieved startling box-office
success with his sexually, racially, and aesthetically groundbreaking
film Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, which earned nearly ten million
dollars—and sent Hollywood scrambling into the blaxploitation era.
The success of these independent films also paved the way for such softcore
and hardcore entrepreneurs as Russ Meyer, Radley Metzger, and Gerard Damiano,
whose relatively high-class (and amusing) pornographic feature Deep Throat
became a box office success and cultural phenomenon in 1972, immortalized
(and linked forever with its sociopolitical background) by the Watergate
scandal.
Rather than leading the way to a new era of openness
and candor, the “sexual revolution” of this period can be viewed,
looking backwards and not ahead, as a fascinating artifact of its time.
When Pauline Kael proclaimed Last Tango in Paris to be “the most
powerfully erotic movie ever made,” and declared optimistically that
“it may turn out to be the most liberating movie ever made,”
she could not have foreseen that its screening as the closing night film
of the 1972 New York Film Festival was not so much the beginning of an
era as the end of one, a last tango indeed.
—David Schwartz, Chief Curator of Film
