Let's Go Stag!

A History of Pornographic Film from the Invention of Cinema to 1970

Dan Erdman

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9781501386473
• eBook ISBN:
  9781501333026
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

For much of the 20th century, the underground pornography industry - made up of amateurs and hobbyists who created hardcore, explicit "stag films" - went about its business hounded by reformers and law enforcement, from local police departments all the way up to the FBI. Rumors of this illicit activity circulated and became the stuff of urban myth, but this period of pornography history remains murky.

Let's Go Stag! reveals the secrets of this underground world. Using the archives of civic groups, law enforcement, bygone government studies and similarly neglected evidence, archivist Dan Erdman reconstructs the means by which stag films were produced, distributed and exhibited, as well as demonstrate the way in which these practices changed with the times, eventually paving the way for the pornographic explosion of the 1970s and beyond. Let's Go Stag! is sure to point the way for countless future researchers and remain the standard work of history for this era of adult film for a long time to come.

1

The Earliest Stag Films: To 1923

Though the focus of this project will be the production of, traffic in, and screening of pornographic films in the United States, a few words about how pornography was received elsewhere will be necessary. First, because it seems as though the earliest stag films were produced outside of North America, and thus I think are deserving of some special consideration. The two oldest films in the collection of the Kinsey Institute, according to their records, are Am Abend (1910) and El Satario (c. 1907–12), from Germany and Argentina, respectively. Furthermore, it seems as though distinctive regional practices were developed for the exhibition of these films, based on the particular state of a given local economy, legal climate, and various other social factors. These I offer as a contrast to what I have found in the United States, simply as a way to illustrate the variance in the ways that different societies treated sexually explicit cinema. All of them tended to restrict it in various ways, or to at least allow them to be shown only under certain circumstances, and I think that the examples here can add some kind of perspective to my main story.

The consensus among most historians is that the earliest stags were European productions. We cannot attribute dates to the earliest screenings of pornographic films there with any precision, a matter which is complicated somewhat by the fact that some overzealous chroniclers confuse merely risque films with the early hard-core reels. For example, Le Bain, an 1896 short showing dancer Louise Willy taking a bath while purportedly in the nude (she in fact wears a fairly obvious body stocking) is often cited as an early example of a hard-core stag film. Another short starring Willy, Le Coucher de la Marie, is supposed to have been a filmed record of her striptease act. Many sources seem at pains to prove that these works are the earliest examples of a nascent craze for pornography in the early cinema. Stephen Bottomore, in Who’s Who of Victorian Cinema: A Worldwide Survey, has tried to insinuate that Albert Kirschner, allegedly the director of both films, and known professionally as Lear, was involved in the trade in pre-cinematic pornography (he doesn’t record the titles of any other of Kirschner’s films that might have qualified for this designation, but he optimistically writes that “it is just possible that this is the man behind a company called Lear and Co. in Cairo which was prosecuted in 1901 for exporting pornographic pictures to Europe.”¹), and thus establish guilt by association. Elsewhere in the same volume, he writes that Le Coucher’s producer, Eugene Pirou, inaugurated “an entire genre of risque films, known in France as scenes grivoises d’un caractere piquant. Such films were not always welcomed, and one of them (probably Le Coucher de la Marie) had to be withdrawn from a London music hall in January 1897 after protests from the more respectable clientele.”² Predictably, mass-market newspapers have been the most eager to brand these works as stag films; the opening sentences of a 1996 Observer report on the then-recent discovery of a fragment of Le Coucher reads: “Amid the hullabaloo over the first hundred years of cinema, one crucial aspect has been forgotten. The first public film screening took place in December 1895. Before the year was up, man was making porn.”³

In fact the kinds of films mentioned above are wholly separate from the ones which will be the main focus of discussion in this chapter. Even at the time, the very legal reasoning that gave rise to the earliest movie censorship was based on an implicit distinction between hard-core stag films showing unsimulated, clearly visible sexual acts and the merely provocative. This latter kind of spectacle is what Slade is referring to when he writes:

Major cities in America and most countries in Europe passed regulations forbidding “immoral” or “indecent” films, [but] these laws were directed at the legitimate or mainstream industry. Various films were prosecuted for revealing a naked breast or including suggestive situations, although they were much more likely to be charged with depicting a prize fight or gambling or some other social rather than sexual transgression.⁴

By contrast, true stag films were an entirely different class of cinema, so outside of the mainstream as to be beneath the notice of authorities. “Official censorship rarely touched, nor was it ever intended to regulate, the truly pornographic film … Pornographic—rather than merely ‘indecent’—films were so clearly ‘obscene’ by standards of the period that they occupied a realm of their own.”⁵ As a general rule, if a film from this era features credited performers or personnel, it is overwhelmingly likely to not have been pornographic, whatever contemporary (or even present-day) commentators may have alleged.

Nevertheless, films which did include unsimulated nudity and sex were produced in this period and, although the historical basis for this has never been made clear in anything that I’ve read, the consensus among scholars is that the earliest examples came from France. Slade estimates that the “first filmed act of intercourse was probably shot in France.”⁶ Curt Moreck, writing in the 1920s, claims that stag films were being made in France as early as 1904.⁷ Di Lauro and Rabkin, surveying two influential early attempts at the history of stags, find agreement on the question of French origin, though not necessarily on that of what the first title might have been.

Lo Duca dates one film, Le Voyeur, as early as 1907. Ado Kyrou’s filmography of scenarios of “un certain cinema clandestin” in the film journal Positif offers a full description of a film called A l’Ecu d’Or ou la Bonne Auberge (“At the Golden Shield or the Good Inn”), definitively dated 1908. Kyrou describes it as “the oldest pornographic film having a scenario.”⁸ (Frank Black and Josh Frank’s interesting novel The Good Inn takes the production of this film as its subject, though it plays somewhat fast and loose with the historical record).

Also enjoying broad consensus is the notion that these early French stags were screened in brothels. As Tom Waugh explains, such places were “unofficially tolerated by the police and apparently visited by vacationing American bon vivants. In France the films were called ‘radiant’ and the Madames of both high-class establishments (‘maisons closes’) and their more grubby counterparts would ceremoniously announce ‘les projections.’”⁹ Assuming that this claim has basis in fact, this is a somewhat more significant observation than it might first appear to be. The association of stag movies with brothels is the earliest example of a relationship which will be something of a constant throughout this book, namely, the piggybacking of pornographic exhibition upon already-established performance practices, including not only those established by other types of cinema but also, as in this case, pre- or extra-cinematic forms of entertainment. French stag films did not just migrate to the brothel arbitrarily; for decades, such places had already staged live performances for the delectation of their customers. As Di Lauro and Rabkin point out:

Brothels have traditionally presented erotic “entertainments” of various kinds to stimulate recalcitrant energies (eighteenth and nineteenth century brothels often staged elaborate erotic spectacles), [thus] it is logical that such films must have been presented as soon as technologically feasible. Indeed, before the Second World War in France and other countries the showing of pornographic films in brothels was customarily and officially permitted.¹⁰

This dynamic found many different types of expression depending on prevailing local practices. Stag screenings in Germany, for example, appear to have occurred as early as 1904.¹¹ However, due to a complete absence of exhibition regulations, films in that country were simply screened after the fashion of any other type of cinema, albeit in spaces devoted exclusively to such fare. There is testimony (from journalist Kurt Tucholsky) suggesting that stags were shown in small spaces put to use exclusively for the projection of pornography;¹² “not,” as Jack Stevenson puts it, “in a bordello as such but in a secret room attached to one of these fabled dive bars that live in legend.”¹³

Far fewer films seem to have been produced in Germany during this period than in France, or at least far fewer survive, either as references in accounts from that time or as reels in an archive. The only film that has been definitively traced to Germany is Am Abend, which the Kinsey Institute dates from 1910. This film seems to have been an amateur production, which, if the few accounts of stag screenings from this period are anything to go by, was typical. In one such incident from 1910, four years after the establishment of film censorship in that country, Martina Roepke notes that “Berlin police arrested some 200 men from the upper class for watching films of ‘obscene content.’ … While most films were said to be of French origin, the rest were identified, on the basis of the ‘peculiar width and perforation’ of the gauge, as ‘amateur productions.’”¹⁴ Note that “French” here is meant to stand in as a synonym for “obscene”; even in 1910, the French film industry had a reputation for excessive eroticism.

As with France, however, figures from the world of “mainstream” (i.e., non-pornographic) production have been alleged to have been involved in the German stag scene; Slade names cinematic pioneer Oskar Messter, who created an early sync-sound system in the first years of the twentieth century, but I haven’t been able to unearth any other evidence of his involvement in the making of pornographic films. (He cites as evidence a passage in Wollenberg’s Fifty Years of German Film to this effect, but the pages in question only credit Messter with some assorted street scenes and news films.¹⁵) A much stronger link implicates Fridolin Kretzschmar and Otto Dedertscheck, who evidently produced pornographic films, as in the case above, on amateur-grade 17.5mm film. The two men “were sued in 1910 for having produced morally offensive films, of erotic and ‘obscene’ content. These films had been taken in a forest nearby as well as in their office, then shown in the Dedprophon Theater in Dresden to a male audience. The film list for the Kretzschmar-Kinemetograph contains 12 titles under the heading ‘Pikant! Nur für Herrenabende!’ (Only for gentlemen’s evenings).”¹⁶

It is also in Europe that we find the beginning of a surprisingly robust urban legend, one that will recur throughout this book, in which one’s social betters are said to habitually indulge in a taste for moving image pornography. In Europe, of course, this could only refer to aristocracy and royalty. Roman Gubern claims, for example:

The Russian aristocracy was among the most avid consumers of French pornographic cinema, according to Jay Leyda, while it has been said that the Barcelona-based production company Royal Films, founded in 1916 by Ricardo de Baños, supplied films of this type to the cinephile Alfonso XIII, a detail that would agree with the anecdote about the monarch recounted by Anita Loos in her memoir Kiss Hollywood Goodbye.¹⁷

The two figures under discussion to this point—the mischievous professional technician and the bored aristocrat—come together nicely in the person of Count Kolowrat, who was rumored to have opened his own studio in Vienna for the sole purpose of producing his own stag films. (Slade points to two separate Marlene Dietrich biographies for evidence of the Count’s involvement in pornographic films, though the pages he points to seem to demonstrate only that he was involved in film production generally, not in this specific niche.¹⁸)

These sorts of rumors would accompany the first stags to the United States, though they would eventually evolve to reflect that country’s own cultural biases more accurately. The slightly wounded sense of inferiority that was the animating force of this legend remained, but would be directed not specifically at louche gentry, but Europe as a whole. Although the nineteenth century saw undeniable American contributions to literature, art, philosophy, and technology, there remained a lingering sense that the United States was something of a poor relation, culturally; the salve for this was the notion that Europe, and specifically France, was, despite its pretensions, in a state of decadence, a veil of pompous pretensions serving only to conceal loose sexual behavior. Pornographic material of all sorts was often assumed to be of European origin, as euphemisms such as “French postcards” demonstrate, and films were no different; the earliest reports of stag movies in the United States were frequently said to have been “from Europe.” While this may have been strictly true in the very first years of this phenomenon, this designation survived well past the point of having any descriptive utility, into the era when the majority of pornographic films shown in the United States would have been produced there as well.

In the Western hemisphere, Latin America, particularly Argentina, seems to have been both a source of production and a destination for exhibition. We are fortunate to have access to contemporary first-hand testimony on screening practices ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents 
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 The Earliest Stag Films: To 1923
• 2 The Stag Scene and the Debut of 16mm Film: 1923 to the Second World War
• 3 Stag Films during the War Years: 1941 to 1945
• 4 Postwar: 1945 to 1970
• Conclusions and Directions for Further Research
• References
• Index
• Imprint