Watching Graphic Sexual Horror, Anna Lorentzon and Barbara Bell’s nonfiction look behind the rise and fall of heavy BDSM porn site Insex.com, the first thought that came to my mind was from my film critic’s perspective: “How’s this gonna play in Peoria?” And the second thought was inevitably from my submissive’s perspective: “Is this gonna give my lifestyle a bad name?”
There is no pat answer to either question, which is why I was so thrilled that co-director Lorentzon found time to let me pick her brain prior to the film’s East Coast premiere at this year’s CineKink Film Festival, on Friday, February 27th at 11:10 pm at Anthology Film Archives. (Full disclosure: Un Piede di Roman Polanski, an homage to Roman Polanski’s foot fetish by myself and Roxanne Kapitsa, will screen the following evening as part of the festival’s “Twisted Knickers” shorts program at 6:45 pm. Stop on by!)
But as I finally sat down to discuss the doc with director Lorentzon, who worked as a producer at Insex.com from 1999 until the site was strong-armed by Homeland Security into closing, I found I didn’t have any questions for her – merely some very strong reactions that I hoped she could shed some light on. So it actually took me by surprise to discover that the issues I was struggling with as an audience member were the same issues that prompted the filmmakers to make the film, and ones that they still struggle with to this day. Frustratingly, there are no answers to the ethical questions “torture porn” raises – only a Pandora’s Box of more questions. So I guess the best one can do is approximate that struggle in image and word.
Perusing the lineup for the 2008 Cinekink Film Festival––Lisa Vandever’s annual celebration of sex, film and sex in film, which gets underway later this month in the East Village––I came across a title that looked familiar. I about Anna Biller’s Viva when it played the New York Underground Film Festival last year, but ended up not being able to see it. Judging by the above trailer, it’s a dead-on satire of the type of 70s sexploitation, falling somewhere between total psychedelic freak-out and semi-narrative porn. And Biller, who has a Masters degree from Cal Arts, saysViva is in part a reaction to contemporary romantic comedies, which makes it sound even better.
Cinekink begins on February 26. If you’re going to attend, you can track films and create your personal schedule at B-Side.
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
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