[RonTheLogician]

Hey Dani,

In your video log d522.wmv you discussed how you get ideas for shoots, and brought up the notion of sticking a wooden egg inside yourself for Easter.

Because of your youth, I suspect you don't know that sticking a (chicken) egg inside herself and forcing it out was a stunt a woman undertook in a landmark film released a full dozen years before you were born! Let me tell you about it by quoting largely from a 2008 book of the famous sex film academic Linda Williams:

...as we have seen, American movies only tackled the representation of hard-core explicit sex within the genre of pornography. Moving-image pornography as practiced since the seventies has had the primary goal of arousing viewers through the maximum visibility of normally hidden organs and acts that often verge on the clinical, with aesthetic considerations secondary. The rule of maximum visibility did not mean that pornography outlawed all aesthetic concerns; nor did it mean, on the other side, that erotic art necessitated a corresponding lack of graphic content. Yet what we might call hard-core eroticism tempered graphic display with more subtle effects of line, color, light, and - in the performing art of film - subtleties of sexual performance that were much harder to achieve. In the end, moving-image pornography proved relatively easy to make and has flourished since the seventies in its own parallel universe in which art is not necessary (but can occasionally happen). In contrast, hard-core moving-image erotica proved difficult to make and did not flourish in this same time period...

One film of the 1970s, Oshima Nagisa's Japanese but French-produced In the Realm of the Senses (1976), fully succeeded in combining hard-core sex with erotic art. As perhaps the only work of seventies international cinema to actually do what Anglo-American and European critics and directors had only dreamed of doing, this single film occupies the whole of chapter 5... Pornography or not, Oshima's film has garnered important critical discussion among Western critics who know a great deal about Japanese culture... [Its] great influence has perhaps only begun to become evident since the late nineties, when a critical mass of new hard-core art cinema from Europe, Asia, and even, finally, from America, emerged to demand critical attention...

[This sadomasochistic-themed film] concerns the amour fou of a wealthy Japanese merchant, Kichi, and his woman servant, Sada... The film's reception in the West was influenced by the knowledge that it was based on a true story, already well known to the Japanese public, that had already served as the basis for another feature made the previous year.

I wouldn't be surprised if you were interested in viewing the film, given the subject matter and its importance. No doubt the Internet holds at least one copy of an English subtitles file (e.g. .srt) It seems that Hulu makes a version of the film (Is it cut at all?) available online here.

Further, since you are such a bookworm, perhaps you might like to read the aforementioned chapter 5, and the other commentary on sex films in that book and others. To this end, I'm listing a couple of handfuls of such books below, in publication date order. Note that the majority of these titles are published by university presses.

1. Hard Core - Power, Pleasure, and the Frenzy of the Visible [by Linda Williams] (U California, 1989)
2. Porn Studies [ed by Linda Williams] (Duke U, 2004)
3. Soft in the Middle - The Contemporary Softcore Feature in Its Contexts (Ohio State U, 2006)
4. The Other Hollywood - The Uncensored Oral History of the Porn Film Industry (Harper-Collins, 2006)
5. Black and White and Blue - Adult Cinema From the Victorian Age to the VCR (ECF, 2007)
6. The History of Sex in American Film (Praeger, 2007)
7. Screening Sex [by Linda Williams - this has chapter 5!] (Duke U, 2008)
8. Carnal Resonance - Affect and Online Pornography (MIT, 2011)
9. Hard to Swallow - Hard-Core Pornography on the Screen (Columbia, 2012)
10. Cult Film and the Cine-Erotic (Wallflower, 2012)