Not a Love Story: A Film About Pornography
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
|
Susan Griffin (probably citing her own Pornography and Silence): This, maybe, is a mystical truth we can gain from pornography. You can't suppress the feelings of the heart, you can't suppress the spirit in flesh without ending up hating life, hating what you are. Because these things aren't, aren't separable. --[first lines] Susan Griffin: "Hustler" magazine, which is a pornographic magazine, had a Valentine's Day issue in February. There's a glossy red cover, and there's a woman on the cover and she's wearing chains. She's semi-nude of course, she wearing chains and one of those collars around her neck, and she has glasses in the shapes of hearts. Pornography reveals itself, its real purpose, you know, there you have the heart imprisoned, the heart on its knees, you know, and if necessary the heart rendered silent." --[last lines] |
|
Related e |
|
Featured: |
Not a Love Story: A Film About Pornography (1981) is an anti-pornography documentary. It was directed by Bonnie Sherr Klein, mother of Naomi Klein.
It remains one of the landmark works from the Studio D, the women's studio of the National Film Board of Canada. The film was banned in the province of Ontario on the basis of its pornographic content - a decision that was later reversed.
Klein says that the porn industry is controlled by organized crime and that these women often work for "marginal incomes."
Robin Morgan says: "The first things that the Nazis did when they moved into Poland was to engineer a huge proliferation of pornography, because the more that you could encourage isolated sexuality, sexuality that had very little to do with real communication and outreach to other people, the more that you could encourage it to be violent and isolated, i.e. one person alone in his room with pornographic materials, jacking off. The more you could do that, the more people would be isolated each from one another in other areas, namely political ones; the less eager they would be to get together to talk about anything — including resistance."
On engineering of "a huge proliferation of pornography" by the Nazis, Morgan perhaps cites from Take Back the Night (1980) by Laura Lederer who ultimately references Pamela Hansford Johnson's statement "when the Nazis took on the government of Poland, they flooded the Polish bookstalls with pornography," recorded in On Iniquity (1967).
Ed Donnerstein shows a reel of a woman fellating a gun. He then mentions Deliverance. Klein asks, is there a level of satiation to which he says that there is on the contrary, desensitization. He then shows some violent porn (a black and white shoot with a darth vader kind of figure) and the June 1978 Hustler cover of a woman in a meat grinder.
Margaret Atwood reads her poem "A Woman's Issue".
Robin Morgan starts crying around 61', her gay husband Kenneth Pitchford and their son comfort her.
Contents |
Participants
- Lindalee Tracey (Fonda Peters)
- Bonnie Sherr Klein
- Kate Millett
- Kathleen Barry
- Susan Griffin
- Robin Morgan
- Margaret Atwood
- Kenneth Pitchford
- Edward Donnerstein
- Suze Randall
- Marc Stevens
- David Wells
- Robin Morgan
- Susan Griffin
- Kenneth Pitchford
- Ron Martin
- Richard Snowdon
- Patrice Lucas, Rick Lucas
Footage and stills
- "Beat the Bitch" reel
- Little Girl... Big Tease
- The Private Afternoons of Pamela Mann
- Carnival Strippers (1976) by Susan Meiselas
- June 1978 Hustler cover of a woman in a meat grinder
See also
Namesakes
