We just got the word this morning; Damon and Hunter (in handy DVD form!) have been invited to the world famous Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction at the University of Indiana in Bloomington. When they get to the institute, they’ll take up residence in the Kinsey Library and Special Collection along side Marie & Jack and Xana & Dax.

Without Dr. Alfred C. Kinsey’s ground-breaking work, it’s unlikely Comstock Films would exist, and we are honored to add another film to the collection that bears his name!

Peggy and I watched 9 Songs last night, and whatever it is or isn’t as a movie, let me start off by saying 9 Songs is the most credible and craftsmenly cinematic depiction of sex I’ve yet to see. It was lovely and illuminating to see sex depicted by a filmmaker, and it left me envious and inspired.

It’s not a perfect movie by any stretch. The production, while rich compared to a Comstock film, is as paper thin as its characters. There’s barely a plot, and what little plot there is is not very interesting. In fact, at the risk of sounding like I think too much of myself, 9 Songs is confined by very much the same things that impose limits on what I can aspire to with my work.

There’s precious little precedence for how to show people having sex in a movie. You can pick up a clue here and there from porn, but it’s mostly a lesson in what not to do. Creatively, Winterbottom is in terra incognita.

More limiting, there isn’t much of a market for explicit films. By making the decision to show sex, Winterbottom caps the potential returns on 9 Songs from the start, and thereby restricts himself to what can be done on a tiny budget. (Reported as USD $160,000 with deferrals.)

This is the reality of making a sex film, and as a result, neither 9 Songs, nor our own “hardcore love stories” are really full-blown productions. They’re more like etudes, concise cinematic studies of what sex looks like on film, and how sex can be rendered and contextualized within the limits of the business and the medium, and how that can be shaped into a satisfying experience for our respective audiences.

To my mind this differs from both Bertolucci’s The Dreamers, a fully realized film that includes a lot of nudity and implied sex, and a typical porn film which is simply for-hire sexual encounters recorded on video tape. The Dreamers or porn are what they are, and invite judgment by that alone.

By contrast, 9 Songs and our own work invite the viewer to appraise the films not only by what ends up on the screen (still the most important aspect), but also as musings on filmmaking and for our (earnest) intentions. The hope is that by capturing the audience’s sympathy, the rough patches in the production might get the benefit of the doubt. It’s not an uncommon gambit for the low-budget filmmaker, and sometimes works.

Of course etudes can be wonderful in their own right. I don’t know if there’s a classical guitarist that hasn’t recorded Fernando Sor’s lovely Etude #5, and you don’t have to be a guitar student, or even a devotee of classical music to enjoy it.

But an etude isn’t a symphony, or even a concerto. For the enthusiast, an interesting, but unlovely etude can be just as charming as Sor’s #5. An unlovely symphony, as interesting as it might be, is grueling for all but the most devoted audience to sit through (and often for the musicians to play as well!)

I didn’t particularly enjoy 9 Songs, at least not in the same way or with the same depth that I enjoy a movie like Cinema Paradiso. I felt like a barely knew the characters, let alone liking them, so beyond how pretty they looked (which was very nice), I didn’t really care about seeing them have sex. But I did think 9 Songs was an interesting and worthwhile etude; far, far more ambitious than anything I’ve had the nerve to attempt. I expect to learn a lot from it on repeated viewings, and wish it wasn’t singular in the cinematic landscape.

That wish calls to mind something that film critic Richard Corliss wrote while praising Mike Nichols’ Closer, and lamenting the demise of the very adult cinema of the late 60s and early 70s, and wishing more of today’s filmmakers would tackle the subject of sex in a truly adult manner. Said Corliss:

“It’s terrific that a part-time moviemaker [Nichols] has directed so many films that cogently explore the language of sex. But it does suggest that the rest of Hollywood isn’t really trying. Seeing “Closer,” teetering from empathy to exasperation with each of its characters as one would with a real lover, a moviegoer has to wonder: Why can’t there be a dozen, a hundred films like this? Where’s the good and bad sex in movies? Why can’t directors locate where we live, how we love and lie to each other, and get closer to it?”

If the rest of Hollywood isn’t trying, perhaps it’s because there’s no money for the doing and little praise for trying. Indeed 9 Songs must be evidence of some sort of minor sexual pathology in Winterbottom’s psyche. Why else would an accomplished filmmaker subject himself to the trials of trying to make a movie on a low six figure budget, with the likely reward being the sort of snarky condescension that Winterbottom’s received for giving it a go?

I wish there were a dozen, a hundred more movies like 9 Songs. Not because Winterbottom seems to be getting closer to where I live or how I love, but because with 9 Songs Winterbottom is exploring the questions about sex and cinema that interest me, only with the benefit of more money and more talent. Will there be a 9 More Songs Mr. Winterbottom? Please?

When I was a small child, in the Summer when the hot Santa Ana winds would blow the sea flat, my mother would take me down to the beach and she’d swim me out to look down through the clear water at the fish. I still remember how much I dreaded the sting of the windblown sand, and how much more I loved clinging to her back as she swam away from the beach; and seeing the leopard sharks, shovel nosed guitar fish, and schools of silvery green grunion.

A few years later, I started to learn to fish from my grandfather, and to surf from his son. I learned to row and to sail. When I was about ten I read The Boy who Sailed Around the World Alone, and began to dream about making journeys past the horizon and learned to navigate out of sight of land.

I still love to surf and sail and fish, and the last several years I’ve even taught myself a little carpentry and built a few simple boats. I love the beach and the ocean, and all things maritime. Partly because of this, Peggy and I are engrossed in another season of The Deadliest Catch, a Discovery Channel serial documentary.

The first season chronicled the last Alaskan King crab derby, a system of fisheries management that compels boats and their crews to work almost non-stop for days on end, in an effort to catch as much of the fleet’s total quota as they can. In the first season of the show, The Big Valley (a boat that did not have a camera crew on it) sank in the hours before the opening of Opie season, with the loss of five of her six crewmen. An investigation suggests the Big Valley was carrying more crab pots on deck than she was rated for, and that this was a key factor in her sinking.

This second season of the show is the first year of a per-boat quota system. Based on their previous years’ catches, the Alaskan Department of Fisheries allocated each boat in the fleet a portion of the total quota. The thought is that having a guaranteed portion of the catch will encourage captains and crews to be more measured in their calculus of risk and returns. Compared to the first season, the pace of the fishing in this second season of the show seems to have been slower and safer.

But this season the weather’s been worse. In a fierce storm during red crab season, one boat was hit broadside by an immense rogue wave that put her on beam ends. She came back to her feet, but both engines had shut down. For long minutes she was helpless in the face of the storm while her crew raced to restart the engines and regain control of the boat, all while the Discovery Channel’s camera rolls. The end of the derby system has lowered the incentive to fish as hard, or in the most marginal conditions, but it hasn’t tamed the sea.

The same year I got my first sailboat, the laker the Edmund Fitzgerald, an ore carrier over 700 feet long was lost with all hands in a late Autumn storm on Lake Superior. For someone who grew up on the ocean, it’s hard for me to imagine that conditions on an inland lake could ever become so severe that a 700 foot ship could disappear suddenly and without warning, yet it happened.

Of the several theories surrounding the sinking of the Fitzgerald, one is that when she lost her radar earlier in the storm made it impossible for her navigator determine their position with sufficient accuracy to avoid the Six Fathom Shoal north of Caribou Island, and that in the violence of the storm she scraped bottom and began to take water, which ultimately combined with the heavy seas to deadly effect.

So much has changed since then, making navigation easier, and boating safer. GPS can tell you your position within feet, anywhere in the word, and it’s inexpensive. I routinely carry a waterproof GPS and waterproof VHF radio, even when just rowing a few hundred yards off shore to fish. If I somehow ended up in the water or lost an oar and started to blow out to sea, I could could determine my position within feet, day or night, whatever the conditions, and call for help. Total cost for both units, less than $200. How different from the Fitzgerald. At night, in a fierce storm, their radar carried off by the wind, they were utterly blind; and the lake had become as vast and unforgiving as any ocean.

There’s no way to know if modern technology would have saved the crew of Edmund Fitzgerald. Some theories place the blame squarely on the crew’s failure to properly secure her cargo hatches, and that the gradual accumulation of water combined with the unexpectedly bad conditions to cause a sudden, catastrophic loss of buoyancy. At sea, like anywhere else, casual negligence kills more people that pure bad luck.

Where ever the blame lies, whether on the Big Valley or the Fitzgerald, it doesn’t lessen the shock or the sorrow.

“Does any one know where the love of God goes when the waves turn the minutes to hours?
And all that remains are the faces and the names of the wives and the sons and the daughters.”

What’s better than waking up to e-mail from the very sexy Taste Test Girl, telling you she’s just blogged about your movies and the title of the post is Best. Porn. Ever.

“I’m not entirely comfortable with contemporary porn movies. It’s not the idea of porn itself–I absolutely love watching couples having hot sex on the screen. It’s a total turn on to watch and fantasize about what you are watching. But, unfortunately, porn seems to draw emotionally damaged women–the exact kind of women who shouldn’t be starring in porn. Beyond that, the relationships on screen are so poorly represented that, even when the effort is made, they still seem absent of love and context. This is even true of porn made for women and couples. Perhaps the thing that depresses me the most about porn today is the focus on degrading women, whether it is a bus rolling around looking for women to “bang,” or sites that use terms like “anal humiliation” or “make her gag.”

“The real irony is that there is no plot, and a rich plot is one of the things that is supposed to mark “women’s porn.” But what these movies have is is better than a plot: These are real people discussing their sex life and then demonstrating it for us on screen. You can almost taste the passion they have for each other, and it is so much better than watching pretty porn stars with augmented bodies taking three cocks at once.”

I’m going to wash this review down with a big glass of pineapple juice!

Some few weeks ago I came across this exchange on a thread about women and porn in Violet Blue’s section of the J.T. Stockroom Forums:

Opined Sage:

“What about all those dime-store “Romance” novels? Those are porn, just wrapped up in a cute, easy to digest form. I remember getting my hands on one of those when I was 15, way before I even knew what porn was, and just getting aroused out of my mind at some of the sex scenes in those books. Sad that some women never get farther along in their sexuality than the watered down versions in romance novels.

“I love porn- I think that, with everything, it just depends on how you approach it. Sure, there’s girls in porn who are being victimized by the people who make the porn, but that boils down to a problem of education- these girls just didn’t know what they were getting into. Personally, I love porn! I think most women have huge hang-ups about their bodies and their own sexuality, and so porn becomes taboo because “If s/he really loved me he’d stop looking at porn and pay attention to me!” The problem of misunderstanding between sexual partners compounds into a hatred of porn, because porn is then seen as a wedge driving partners apart. The porn watcher feels ashamed, because they don’t see anything wrong with porn, and the other person in the relationship feels angry and neglected because they don’t understand the fun, playful aspect that comes with watching porn.”

I had a lot to say about this post, most of it not very nice, but I held my tongue. My dear friend Ell did not:

Sage, I don’t know if I’m misunderstanding you on the romance thing - forgive me if I am. I think I could safely say that the majority of those “romance novels” are better crafted, with greater respect for the reader than most porn DVD’s. If they represent some kind of “watered down” version of sexuality it certainly sells well. I’m not sure if sexuality exists on a continuum — that you need to move from soft core romance to more explicit versions to achieve some kind of sexual growth or saying that you don’t enjoy a lot of porn is somehow because you’re less sexually advanced, adventurous or insecure. I’m almost sure that readers of romance are able to have and do have really good and wild sex. I think I get a bit disappointed with porn because it very rarely depicts anything that’s as good as the sex I have in my bedroom.

“In the last couple of years I think I like the idea of porn, more than I like most porn I’ve watched to be honest”

(On of the reasons I like Ell so much is because she can express herself with a gentle resolve that challenges people’s ideas without attacking them personally. I wish I could be more like her.)

This exchange has been rattling around in my brain, knocking things loose until today when I visited Ms.Naughty’s blog. Her entry is ostensibly a warm review for Candida Royalle’s Eyes of Desire, but it’s got a few sharp words for the phrase “Good for couples and beginners”. Says Ms. Naughty:

“Candida’s films feature fairly vanilla sex, and she’s less interested in close-up, gynecological shots than she is in depicting realistic, emotionally engaged sex. Not many other porn filmmakers do this, so I always wonder why reviewers consistently expect her to create the same stuff as everybody else.

“Perhaps it’s just me. I’ve seen far too much porn in the last few years and now all I want to see in a porn film is something different and engaging. It’s entirely possible that some women will find Eyes of Desire to be boring because it’s so vanilla. That’s fine. But I liked it, and I would recommend it - even if you’re not a beginner or a couple…”

Amen, Ms.Naughty, Amen.

Perhaps (perhaps) Candida Royalle’s films (or dime store romance novels) are a little like wine spritzer, or a dacquari, or some other sort of “girlie drink” with a paper parasol in it.

Perhaps. And maybe that’s not to everyone’s taste.

But it does not follow that “the hard stuff” is comparable to a 20 year-old single malt scotch, or even a bottle of cheap red table wine.

I’ll leave the rest of the analogy to you, dear readers; I don’t trust myself to continue. I don’t have Ell’s gift for gentleness, and I don’t want to insult anyone over their taste in porn. Not today at least….;-)

“I am not a gay man.”

That’s how our first customer review of Damon and Hunter: Doing it Together begins. Indeed, the film’s first customer review is from a married woman living somewhere in the middle of the US. She continues:

“You did know that, right? I’ve had my share of doubters, those who have felt the need to email or comment wondering about the veracity of my girlie-ness. I assure you that I was indeed born with two “x” chromosomes and all of the appropriate womanly hormones.“Nevertheless, when it came to choosing which movie from Comstock Films I wanted to sink my eager eyes into, I chose the one featuring gay men. Go figure.

I am not a gay man either. In fact I’m rather a caricature of a middle-aged straight man; slightly overweight, not much of a dresser. I have a lawn I mow wearing black socks, and a Weber Kettle on my (cracked) poured concrete patio.

Watching Damon and Hunter turns me on, too.

It turns me on because it makes me think about how much I like sex, how much I like looking at it and how much I like doing it. It turns me on because seeing Damon and Hunter touching each other makes me think about how much I love my wife and how much I love making love with her. It makes me think about how lucky I am to have someone I love and want and need as much as Damon and Hunter love and want and need each other. And when I think about all of that, I get hard. (I’m getting hard right now.)

Of course a lot of our pre-orders went out to gay men, and we’ve had some private e-mail back from them as well. I’m pleased (relieved!) to report they like Damon and Hunter too!

The first commandment here at Comstock Films is, “Thou shall not ruin the evening.” By that I mean that we and several other couples we know have had the experience of renting a porno flick with the expectation that it would help raise the temperature of the evening, only to have it be be a complete buzzkill. In fact, in our experience, this is the rule rather than the exception with porn, and that sad fact is a big part of why I started making my movies.

By that measure, Bertolucci’s “erotic film” The Dreamers was a failure, at least here at Casa Comstock.

Between the fact that Spring has finally sprung, and Damon & Hunter is finally out the door, the sap has been rising around here, and last night probably would have ended in a tangle of arms and legs, save the fact that at 9PM we put Bertolucci’s ode to late 60’s Paris in the DVD player and settled in to see what a master of the medium might do, unburdened by proscriptions against full frontal nudity, or handling a cock in full view of the camera. But after the movie, instead of tumbling into bed together, it was more of a slump. Watching The Dreamers exhausted us.

In fairness to Bertolucci, I’m not sure he intended for The Dreamers to be a mood enhancer for us or anyone else. In fact, we woke up this morning still trying to decipher what his intentions were in making The Dreamers.

The nearest I can tell is it’s a movie not unlike Ridley Scott’s White Squall, which seemed mostly like an excuse for Scott to linger endlessly on young boys’ lithe and tanned bodies, dripping with beads of water. Substitute Eva Green’s lovely, but jarringly miscast tits as the object of the director’s lecherous gaze, and voila – The Dreamers.

Of course the movie is beautifully made. Bertulucci is a visual stylist on par with Scott; at one point I turned to Peggy and asked, “What do you suppose it would be like to make a film where not one fold of cloth was out of place?” Bertolucci’s eye for art-direction photography is unerring. There’s more craft, style and talent in one shot that you’ll find in my entire career.

But lovely as it was to see nakedness rendered so well, (including a couple of pitch perfect muff-nuzzling shots that are conspicuous in their absense from the entire rest of the catalog of cinematic depictions of lovemaking), for us the movie fell flat. It moved us only to discussion of how fractured and unsatisfying the film was, and how the nudity and sex felt forced and inflicted, which only added to our disappointment and dissatisfaction.

Now keep in mind that I come to films like this from a particular and perhaps narrow perspective. The Dreamers is part of a long line of European arthouse films that step well accross traditional American boundaries of how, and how much sex is depicted. Along with her tits, Eva Green’s sparsely furred cuntlips make an appearence in this film; the first time I think I’ve seen a twat in a “legitmate” production, and it was wonderful to see just how beautiful a naked woman and her naked sex parts can look with the full force of a studio production gazing upon them.

But like so many films that have come before it, The Dreamers wraps its sexuality inside a tale of darkness and despair. A disquieting and decidedly unerotic incest theme runs throughout the film, coating the entire movie with a glaze of sticky shame. Perhaps for some viewers that makes it more interesting, more dramatic, or even more tantalizing, but for me it’s just tiresome. I am weary of the notion that sex need be rendered so darkly and joylessly to be worthy of serious cinematic inquiry.

(Side note: Over on Tiny Nibbles Violet’s been blogging about the movie The Bridge, a production which purposely set out to, and does depict the very real, very violent deaths of several people. Do you suppose there’s any risk that Eric Steele, the film’s director will be sent to jail or have his house taken away?)

Of course I’m not sure what the answer is. As I said in a previous post No Sadness, Anguish, Pain, or Suffering, with or without sex, happiness is not particularly dramatic. But I don’t think that means that sex has to be sick, twisted, or sad to make a good sex movie. A documentary “portrait of a couple” is one answer; not perfect, but servicable. It is, however, terribly limited. I don’t expect doing what I do would hold Bertolucci’s interest for very long. But I have some other ideas too…

What shall it be next? I Am Curiuos? We have it in both Blue and Yellow. Nine Songs? Intimacy?