ABSTRACT
In her study Screening Sex, which traces the historical development from the very first film kiss in The Kiss (Thomas Edison, 1896) to the online possibilities offered by cam.whore experiences and Virtual Sex Simulators, Linda Williams introduces the concept of ‘on/scenity.’ According to her, the obscenity of the public display loses its scandalous impact the more that display becomes familiar (Screening, 260). At the time, The Kiss caused quite a stir when the short film, initially made for the small format of the Kinetoscope with its peephole device, was projected on the much bigger film screen. Williams suggests that it probably gave offence that the intimacy of a kiss was ‘monstrously enlarged’ (Screening, 30), but for a present-day audience The Kiss is no more than an innocent ‘attraction.’ Over the decades, the (adolescent) kiss has shifted to presumably more adult displays of what happens between the sheets in mainstream movies, as in the controlled interlude of the spectacle of sex in The Graduate (Mike Nichols, 1967) (Screening, 21, 84), leading up to the ‘erotic modern art’ of Last Tango in Paris (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1972) and the ‘crass hard-core pornography’ of Deep Throat (Gerard Damiano, 1972), in which the ejaculation of the male performer functions as visual evidence of ‘the orgasmic bliss of the female’ (Williams Hard Core, 101). 1 Whereas the latter film, as befits conventional pornography, had the overt intention to arouse viewers, Williams uses the term ‘hard-core art’ for those films which merge visibility of genitals with the (narrative) conditions of art cinema, considering the Japanese film Ai no korida [In the Realm of the Senses] (1976) as one of the early ‘benchmark’ films. Though a great number of hard-core art pictures foreground that sex can have humiliating and alienating effects or even induce boredom, like Intimacy (Patrice Chéreau, 2001), Shame (Steve McQueen, 2011), or the second part of Nymph()maniac (Lars von Trier, 2014), hard-core scenes in some other art films with explicit sexual content, can be loving, playful or joyous – as in 9 Songs (Michael Winterbottom, 2004), Shortbus (John Cameron Mitchell, 2006), La vie d’Adéle [Blue is the Warmest Color] (Abdellatif Kechiche, 2013), L’Inconnu du lac [Stranger by the Lake] (Alain Guiraudie, 2013), and in several episodes from part one of Nymph()maniac (Lars von Trier, 2013).
