Word: cinemae
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...Galipettes, a compilation of vintage French blue movies. Art or pornography? That's a question neither Michel nor her boyfriend had the opportunity to discuss that August evening in 2002 because Michel, who suffers from brittle-bone disease and gets around in a wheelchair, was barred by a cinema employee from entering the MK2 Beaubourg theater next to the Pompidou Center. The discussion that did ensue was about access rights for people with disabilities. And Michel is taking her case all the way to the French courts by suing the MK2 movie theater chain for discrimination. According to MK2 general...
...Movies were getting sexier in the 60s. I mean films. European ones, Scandinavian ones: Bergman's The Silence, Vilgot Sjoeman's I Am Curious Yellow, that not-so-arty art-house hit I, a Woman. Cinema eroticism came with subtitles, until a renegade Hollywood faction got the word and married social and sexual issues in Medium Cool, Easy Rider and the Oscar-winning Midnight Cowboy -all rated X, back when that designation simply meant a film for adults, not a porno film. Back when sexually urgent films were made for thinking adults. As I say, this was a long time...
...There was also a healthy substratum of what were called avant-garde movies, shown at college film societies and, in New York, at Amos Vogel's pioneering Cinema 16 film club. Oh yes, it was instructive and ennobling, watching the elliptical 16mm films that some of us thought would take cinema into the post-narrative age and make it a truly modernist art. We also had to admit that movies like Bruce Conner's Cosmic Ray (a naked woman dances to a Ray Charles song) and Stan Brakhage's Window Water Baby Moving (birth, in gynecological closeup) were also, relatively...
...carpeted floor. (I should say had love, since three Film Department liaisons, Mary's and mine included, ended in late-60s marriages, and all of them are still going strong more than 35 years later.) One MoMA staffer and spouse had a brief business connection with blue cinema: they rented out their brownstone as a location for the porn epic Inside Jennifer Welles...
...Film Comment, associate editor Melinda Ward and I put together a special issue on Cinema Sex (January-February 1973). It included Donald Richie's report on Japanese eroductions, Ray Durgnat on Jess Franco, Stephen Farber on sexual censorship in California, my long interview with Metzger and Ebert's definitive study of Meyer (which is quoted in the first pages of The Other Hollywood. My favorite essay, a real startler, was Brendan Gill's on porno films. Brendan, a New Yorker staff writer for a half-century, and author of the magazine's unofficial history, Here at the New Yorker...