Sexploitation film
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Sexploitation or "sex-exploitation" describe a class of independently produced, low budget feature films generally associated with the 1960s and serving largely as a vehicle for the exhibition of non-explicit sexual situations and/or gratuitous nudity. The term is often considered to designate a subgenre of exploitation films as a whole. Sexploitation films were generally exhibited in urban grindhouse theatres, the precursor to the adult movie theaters of the 1970s and '80s that featured hardcore content. The term soft-core is often used to designate non-explicit sexploitation films after the general legalization of hardcore content. Nudist films are often considered to be subgenres of the sex-exploitation genre as well.
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History
A series of United States Supreme Court rulings in the late 50s and 60s had enabled increasingly explicit sex films to be distributed. In 1957 Roth v. United States had established that sex and obscenity were not synonymous. The genre first emerged in the U.S. around 1960. There were initially three broad types; "nudie cuties" such as The Immoral Mr. Teas (1959), films set in nudist camps like Daughter of the Sun (1962), and somewhat more "artistic" foreign pictures such as The Twilight Girls (1961). Nudie cuties were popular in the early 60s, and were a development from the nudist camp films of the 50s. The Supreme Court had previously ruled that films set in nudist camps were exempt from the general ban on film nudity, as they were deemed to be educational. In the early 60s producing films that purported to be documentaries and were thus "educational" enabled sexploitation makers to evade the censors. Nudie cuties were soon supplanted by "roughies", which commonly featured male violence against women, including kidnapping, rape and murder. Lorna (1964) by Russ Meyer is widely considered to be the first roughie. Herschell Gordon Lewis and David F. Friedman's Scum of the Earth! (1963) is another film which is cited as the first in this genre. Other notable roughie directors include Doris Wishman.
Sexploitation films initially played in grindhouse theatres and struggling independent theaters; however, by the end of the decade they were playing in established cinema chains. As the genre developed during the 60s, films began showing scenes of simulated sex. The films were opposed by religious groups, and by the MPAA, which was concerned sexploitation was damaging the profits of major film distributers. Customers who attended screenings of sexploitation films were often characterized by the mainstream media as deviant, "dirty old men". In the mid 60s some newspapers began banning adverts for the films. By the late 60s the films were attracting a larger and broader audience including couples, rather than the single males who originally made up the vast majority of patrons. The genre rapidly declined in the early 1970s due to advertising bans, the closure of many grindhouses and drive-in theaters, and the growth of hardcore pornography in the "Golden Age of Porn".
White coaters
In the late 1960s, American obscenity laws were tested by the Swedish film, I Am Curious (Yellow). Because of the ruling by the United States Supreme Court, allowing the film on the basis of its educational context, the late 1960s and early 1970s saw a number of sexploitation films which were widely referred to as "white coaters" because of the fact that a doctor would give an introduction to the graphic content, dressed in a white coat. Language of Love and other Swedish and American films capitalized on this idea until the laws were relaxed.
Notable sexploitation directors
See also
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References
- RE/Search No. 10: Incredibly Strange Films RE/Search Publications, 1986 by V. Vale, Andrea Juno, ISBN 0-940642-09-3
- Immoral Tales: European Sex & Horror Movies 1956-1984 (1994) by Cathal Tohill and Pete Tombs, ISBN 0-312-13519-X
