Kenneth MacKendrick:
>It now has the artfulness of a bad
>commercial. It's actually a fairly degraded form of what Catullus, Ovid,
>Hokusai, ...even Sade practiced.
Yeah, but there are counter-currents to consider in the staleness of contemporary porn:
'There's no reason why a porn film can't also be a good film' Wednesday August 28, 2002 The Guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,3604,781548,00.html
Into the office in a backstreet in the 11th arrondissement walks a slim and beautiful young girl in jeans, open-toed sandals and one of those cheese-cloth smock things that are unaccountably back in fashion this summer. "Ah, here's Ally," says John B Root, rising bespectacled and beshorted from behind his desk to give her a peck on the cheek. "Ally's our star. Here's some of her work." He clicks a mouse and the screen fills with sudden and shocking close-ups: Ally toying with something pink and plastic; Ally impaled on two tattooed men; Ally loudly taking her pleasure with a blonde from Budapest.
Odd, this face-to-face confrontation between Ally's shy real-life grin and Ally's outrageous video antics. But Root is nothing if not odd. Before he became France's most highly-acclaimed producer of hardcore porn, he wrote bestselling children's novels.
It's difficult to know what to make of him. He is an eloquent, intelligent and apparently principled defender of a trade generally considered indefensible; he dares to have ideals in an industry defined by its lack of them. On the other hand, he makes a living (though not much of one) portraying men and women engaged in explicit sex acts, in films that he happily recommends should be watched "with one hand on the remote control, and the other one where it shouldn't be". ...