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3/8/2002

Carnal Knowledge

Museum of the Moving Image, Astoria

Wide-Ranging Film Series Includes Hollywood films (CARNAL KNOWLEDGE, BOB & CAROL & TED & ALICE), European Art Films (I AM CURIOUS (YELLOW), W.R.: MYSTERIES OF THE ORGANISM), Underground Features (COMING APART, FLESH), and Avant-Garde Shorts (THE BED, FUSES).

A recent wave of sexually explicit art-house films, including Y TU MAMA TAMBIEN, INTIMACY, and ROMANCE, has been heralded as a return to the on-screen openness of the late 1960s and early 1970s. However, unlike the movies made during the sexual revolution of that time, these new films are not part of the commercial mainstream, and do not fit into a wider counterculture movement.

The American Museum of the Moving Image will present a thirty-five film, seven-weekend series Carnal Knowledge: The Sexual Revolution on Film, 1967-1972, which reflects a period of sexual and stylistic experimentation that was evidenced in a wide range of films, from the New York underground to Hollywood.

Including screenings of foreign and underground, Hollywood and hard-core features, this retrospective surveys the broad effect of the changing culture on movie content. The series is book-ended by two rarely screened films that were among the most influential for their victories against censorship and enormous box office success: I AM CURIOUS (YELLOW) and DEEP THROAT.

"The revolution came from overseas," said the Museum's Chief Curator of Film, David Schwartz, who organized the series with Curator of Film Peter Dowd. "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. The Swedish film I AM CURIOUS (YELLOW) was seized by the U. S. Customs Service for "obscene" sexual content. After a group of writers, 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 Motion Picture Association of America introduced a self-regulatory ratings system in 1968. Yet 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, 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.

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 BAADASSSS 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 sexploitation 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. As the ultimate Hollywood-foreign film hybrid, it was also the last commercially or critically viable X-rated feature.

SCHEDULE

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 importation, Sjoman's film became a cause celebre 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. Grove Press, which had previously bucked censorship laws with such scandalous novels as Lady Chatterly's Lover and Naked Lunch, imported this film and paid exhibitors' legal fees; the attention arising from indecency trials and press coverage made this a breakthrough film as well as a major hit.

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, Candice Bergen, Ann-Margret. 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 cinema verite, 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 Bunuel. With Catherine Deneuve. Exploring her sexual fantasies by day in a Parisian brothel, and quietly living with her Doctor husband at night, Deneuve gives a coolly startling performance as the enigmatic Severine. Afternoons of passion with a gangster (Pierre Clementi) provide sexual excitement and unanticipated complications. As Bunuel'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 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 to her orgasmic torture in the Pleasure Organ, BARBARELLA revels in Fonda's 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-satirizing 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 free-spirited 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's film 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, inspiring 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, Murray Head. 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 impresario Radley Metzger. An Italian couple and their son, fans of erotic films, spot a woman at a carnival whom 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 Merimee'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 hardcore 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 himself in provocative scenarios that take full advantage of the freedom of animation.

Saturday, September 7 2:00 p.m.
WANDA
1970, 100 mins. Directed by Barbara Loden. Loden (who was married to Elia Kazan), wrote, directed, and starred in this impressive shoestring feature about a young woman from a mining town who gives her husband a divorce and custody of her children, because "I'm just no good," and wanders into a world of one-night stands and petty crime. One of the few major American features of its time directed by a woman.

4:00 p.m.
LAST TANGO IN PARIS
United Artists, 1972, 129 mins. Directed by Bernardo Bertolucci. With Marlon Brando, Maria Schneider. "Many of us had expected eroticism to come to the movies...what nobody had talked about was a sex film that would churn up everybody's emotions," wrote Pauline Kael in her legendary rave proclaiming LAST TANGO a landmark in movie history. As an aging American who throws himself into a consuming sexual affair, Brando gives his most soul-searching performance.

Sunday, September 8 2:00 p.m.
FRENZY
Universal, 1972, 116 mins. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock. The master returned to top form and took advantage of relaxed censorship standards of the time with his suspenseful, comic thriller about the chaos surrounding the rampage of a British "necktie murderer." The explicit depiction of sex and violence is capped by a lengthy and disturbing scene of seduction, rape, and murder. As the ads proclaimed: "From the master of shock! A shocking masterpiece!"

4:30 p.m.
DEEP THROAT
1972, 73 mins. Directed by Gerard Damiano. With Linda Lovelace, Harry Reems, Dolly Sharp. As talked-about as LAST TANGO IN PARIS, DEEP THROAT premiered with a packed opening day at New York's World Theatre, expanded to seventy screens nationwide, grossed millions, and became a cultural phenomenon. Professional production values and a satiric script earned attention from critics, while Linda Lovelace became a household name. Dolly Sharp, crisply delivering one-liners, previously enjoyed a long career in Hollywood musicals (GIVE THE GIRL A BREAK) as Helen Wood.

MUSEUM INFORMATION:
Gallery Hours: Tuesday through Friday, 12 p.m.-5 p.m. Saturday and Sunday, 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Group tours by appointment, Tuesday through Friday, 9:30 a.m.-5 p.m.
Museum Admission: $8.50 for adults; $5.50 for persons over 65 and for students with ID; $4.50 for children ages 5-18. Children 4 and under and Museum members are admitted free.
Film Programs: Screenings are free with Museum admission unless otherwise noted. Reservation privileges are available to Museum members only. Location: 35 Avenue at 36 Street in Astoria.
Subway: R or V trains (R or G on weekends) to Steinway Street. N train to Broadway.
Program Information: Telephone: (718) 784-0077

The Pinewood Dialogues, an ongoing series of in-depth conversations with creative talents involved in film, television, and digital media, are made possible by a generous grant from the Pinewood Foundation.

The American Museum of the Moving Image occupies a building owned by the City of New York. With the assistance of the Queens Borough President and the Queens Delegation of the New York City Council, the Museum receives support from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs. Vital support is also provided by the New York State Council on the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Natural Heritage Trust (administered by the New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation), the National Science Foundation, corporations, foundations, and individuals.

Black and white / color images are available.

The American Museum of the Moving Image 35 Avenue 36 Street in Astoria New York, 11106

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