International House explores the sexual cinema revolution

Pornography became a chic topic this summer with the release of Lovelace, a biopic starring the brilliant young actress Amanda Seyfried as hard-core porn actress Linda Lovelace, who shot to fame in 1972's Deep Throat.

Lovelace's film was so popular at the time that mainstream threaters did the unthinkable and began screening it.

For good or ill, pornography was inextricably tied to the reshaping of America's sexual mores during the sexual revolution of the 1960s and '70s. That evolution is explored in "Free to Love: The Cinema of the Sexual Revolution," a program of two dozen features and 40 shorts from that radical era, to be screened at International House in University City Friday through Feb. 15.

An eclectic melange of hallucinogenic erotica, sober documentary, experimental shorts, hard-core sexploitation - plus a few mainstream classics from Woody Allen and Paul Mazursky - "Free to Love" is the brainchild of I-House program curator Jesse Pires.

"I wanted [the films] really to reflect this era that saw such a radical shift in ideas about sex and sexuality," he said in a recent phone chat. "I wanted this to be an intellectual challenge, not a dirtfest."

Pires said the sexual revolution was one of an interconnected series of social upheavals that came to define the era, including second-wave feminism, civil rights, and the antiwar movement.

That connection is explored in two films that bookend the I-House series, Swedish director Vilgot Sjoman's I Am Curious (Yellow) screening on Friday and I Am Curious (Blue) on Feb. 15. The movies take a hard, critical look at the political, social, and religious institutions in Sweden through the eyes of a liberated young woman (Lena Nyman) whose quest also includes an exploration of her sexual nature.

"Somehow radical politics led people to explore their own bodies and their sexuality," Pires said.

Sjoman's films, like those of Nagisa Oshima, whose 1975 stunner In the Realm of the Senses will screen Saturday, contained an explosive mix of radical politics and sex, said Eric Schaefer, who teaches film and media studies at Emerson College in Boston.

"Think about what was deemed socially acceptable at the time: Sex was supposed to be only within marriage. . . . it was straight sex, never gay. Homosexuality was considered a deviant practice or an illness, and certain sex acts were outlawed in many states," said Schaefer, who edited the forthcoming collection of essays Sex Scene: Media and the Sexual Revolution.

Middle America was assaulted in the 1960s by a new generation of filmmakers who not only questioned the validity of the prevailing political order, but also attacked traditional moral principles, Schaefer said.

Paul Mazursky's 1969 comedy Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (to be shown Jan. 25) and Jane Fonda's comic-book striptease Barbarella (Feb. 1), no less than Yugoslav radical Dušan Makavejev's WR: Mysteries of the Organism (Feb. 8), challenged traditional belief that humans are fundamentally different from animals, that our spirituality transcends our physical selves.

Not every 1960s filmmaker was a crusading (im)moralist, said director Radley Metzger, whose soft-core sexploitation movies are cult classics.

"I would like to say I was a pioneer and a sociologist and . . . [that] I reshaped the culture," Metzger said from his Manhattan home. "But I don't think any of that is true. We just wanted to tell a story."

Metzger, who turns 85 this month, will make an appearance at I-House Jan. 24 for a screening and discussion of his 1972 classic Score.

Based on an Off-Broadway play, Score was in the vanguard, depicting two straight couples who explore bisexual sex.

Its message would have been terrifying to some: that sexual orientation isn't fixed or permanent, it's shifting, elastic, changeable.

"We felt that to antagonize the status quo was kind of the responsibility of the filmmaker," Metzger said, "and I think that's why I gravitated toward adapting Score."

Homosexual sex, all but ignored by Hollywood, was explored by an increasing number of films, including Frank Brittain's The Set (Jan. 23); Rosa von Praunheim's It Is Not the Homosexual Who Is Perverse, But the Society in Which He Lives (Feb. 8); photographer James Bidgood's wild, surreal Pink Narcissus (Saturday), an episodic look at a gay man's fantasies; and Los Angeles actor, musician, and director Pat Rocco's shorts, which will be screened Jan. 31.

Writer Whitney Strub, who teaches sexual politics at Rutgers-Newark, said Rocco's frank look at gay love rankled people who considered homosexuality a sin or an illness. He was working at a time when "homosexual identity was defined only from a straight medical context as a pathology," said Strub, whose books include Perversion for Profit: The Politics of Pornography and the Rise of the New Right.

Rocco rejected that point of view, making films that defined homosexual identity from the perspective of gays themselves. He also refused to shoot explicit sex scenes. "He was really committed to an ethos of romance," said Strub, who said Rocco currently bemoans the single-minded focus in today's erotica on the sex act itself.

Schaefer said today's erotica also lacks an appreciation for the diversity of body types. Whether they're hard or soft, romantic or comic, mainstream films today suggest that sex happens only between men and women who have impossibly perfect - slim, etched, well-toned - bodies.

The films in Free to Love may not be shocking for their sexual content - most are tame by today's standards - but they may rock you because they feature people with imperfect physiques. People like yourself.

215-854-2736

Free to Love: The Cinema

of the Sexual Revolution

Friday through Feb. 15 at International House, 3701 Chestnut St.

Tickets: $9 per screening; $7 for students.

215-387-5125, www.ihousephilly.org/

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