Andrea Dworkin

Morning coffee. Google alerts. Technoroti pings. Who’s saying what where about Comstock Films? I hope it’s good.

Well this morning Ms. Naughty is writing about the Feminist Porn Awards that Peggy will be going to next weekend. This catches my eye:

“…an x-rated celebration of the next generation of feminista porn.”

Sandinista, fashionista, feminista; there’s an evolution for you. Let’s put it into google, which a few clicks later gets you to Lucky Nickel’s essay “On Sex Positiveness”:

“Sex-Positive? A new buzz word to start off the millenium? Hardly. It’s nothing more than the same old, same old. Patriarchally constructed gender roles and sexual exploitation of women wrapped up in cleverly disguised new packaging (which isn’t even new), in order to maintain the status quo of male dominance which is designed to further enhance their sexual freedoms and obfuscate their violence towards women.”

I don’t have that much to say about Ms. Nickel’s essay. Whereever one might stand on women’s rights and gender equality, her arguments will be familiar, and whereever one might stand, she’s offered plenty to get your hackles up.

Which brings me back to the title of this post, “What do Pornography and Feminism Have in Common?” Sort of a post-modern zen kōan, isn’t it? Zen kōan. Let’s put “Zen kōan” in google:

“Zen teachers and practitioners insist that the meaning of a kōan can only be demonstrated in a live experience. Texts (including kōan collections and encyclopedia articles) cannot convey that meaning. Yet the Zen tradition has produced a great deal of literature, including thousands of kōans and at least dozens of volumes of commentary. Nevertheless, teachers have long alerted students to the danger of confusing the interpretation of a kōan with the realization of a kōan. When teachers say “do not confuse the pointing finger with the moon”, they indicate that awakening is the standard — not ability to interpret.”

“Do not confuse the pointing finger with the moon.” Hmmm. Sounds like kōan for pornographers and feminists both.

In his Slate column about a Dove TV spot, Seth Stevenson writes:

[T]his Dove ad is just atrocious. It uses a cheap video camera and murky lighting, and stars an average-looking woman being filmed as she takes a shower. The result bears a queasy resemblance to amateur pornography—though I’m told that even bargain-basement porn features flashier production values and more compelling actresses.

Please note, Seth doesn’t watch “bargain-basement porn”, but someone close to him does. Also note that in using the word “porn” to put down the ad and the woman in the ad, Seth hasn’t really told us anything about the ad, but he’s told us a little, maybe too much, about him about himself.

I’d also like to get a look at Seth’s porn stash. If he’s got a cache of porn that’s a lively, fun-loving, and easy on the eyes as this Dove spot, I’d like to borrow it!

Today Newsweek’s asking Hard Times for the Porn Industry?

“The adult film industry is unlikely to be worth as much as it claims—and the Internet that made porn so pervasive is driving a sales slump.

“Contrary to the popular maxim, what happens in Vegas doesn’t always stay there. Like the two big stories that emerged from the Adult Entertainment Expo in Sin City last month: 1) the adult film industry is large enough to potentially be the deciding factor in the battle for format dominance between Blu-ray and High Definition (HD)-DVD, and 2) the adult film industry may be in its worst sales slump in recent memory. Taken together, the two just don’t add up.”

Time for a dip into the Comstock Films archives. From July 1, 2005

The Porn Monster

So the last 24 have had me corresponding with a few people in the sex-blogosphere and elsewhere about HD and HDV and focal length and focal plane and zits and razor-burn and genital herpes, and what it all might mean to the collision of sex and the moving image.

Well guess what? It’s time to back up again.

I’m old enough that I can remember when seeing a shaved pussy in a girlie magazine was a still a novelty. I remember thinking, “Wow! That’s so brazen! That’s so hot!” The idea that a woman would purposely remove her pubic hair to afford me a better look at her so secret place was positively captivating. There was wonderful lewdness about a carefully depilated pussy presented for my enjoyment, and sometimes there still is.

Just not as much as there used to be.

Shaved beaver has become de rigor in porn. Women with pubic hair have been come a specialty item, what ‘the industry’ calls a fetish; so much so that that sites featuring “natural models” frequently feature women who quite obviously use a razor on a daily basis. (I guess what that means is that it’s natural to have the pubic hair off your thighs, but unnatural to shave it off your cuntlips.)

Not let’s back up again.

Once upon a time I used to be a food photographer. Not a great food photographer, but not a bad one either. I was good enough at it that my food photos in magazines and books and I got paid decently do to it. Food photography is persnickety. Cheese and chocolate take on a weird look if they’re left out too long, meat looks an unappetizing pinkish grey if it’s not styled and lit properly, and a zillion other little things that can make food photos look positively revolting.

At the same time that I was a food photographer I was also making a lot of rude pictures of my girlfriend. She liked spreading her legs for the camera and I liked turning the Hasselblad on her and making Penthouse-like images of her lovely, uncoy nakedness (Playboy was too tame, Hustler was too over-lit,) and that included taking close-ups of her very beautiful, very pink, very delicately formed pussy (which, rather daringly back then, was sometimes shaved.)

Pussy (and other sex parts for that matter,) are like food. Photographed beautifully and all you can think about is eating the picture. Photographed poorly and you lose your appetite. A beautiful food photograph will change your shopping list. A beautiful pussy photo will give you a boner. But an unflattering, uncrafted image of pinkish-grey meat won’t do either. It’s off-putting, or even revolting.

One of the easiest solutions is simply not to show things that aren’t any fun to look at. That’s why some actors are only show in close-up from one side. That’s why some pornstars forever seem to have something around–a corset, a scarf– around their waist. It covers the c-section scar, or appendectomy scar, or whatever.

Do you suppose the hideous gaze of HD(V) is going to mean we’ll see more pubic hair in porn? Will porn finally turn corner and start experimenting with eroticism of (at least sometimes) showing less?

“Omagawd! Now we’re going to see that pornstars have pimples and razor burn!”

Apparently that’s news enough for the New York Times to run yet another late to the party, misinformed and disinforming story about porn. Again I’m left wondering just what sort of porn the article’s author has been watching that the fact that you can see razor burns, pimples and celulite is news. Again I’m left with the suspicion that this in more of the mainstream media freebasing porn with precious little interest in the real story, or even the basic facts.

Let’s back up.

That HD is a bitch is not news. With the strong backing of the Japanese electronic giants, HD came roaring in the film and television industry about a half dozen years ago promising “almost as much resolution as film” but without the cost associated with shooting photo-chemical emulsion. But along with the convenience of a magnetic cassette form-factor, HD came with a host of production gremlins that started vexing people from the start.

Skin
Yes, HD video is higher resolution than SD video, but it’s still video. And guess what? Video doesn’t render skin very well. That’s why professional programs that are produced on video come in three basic varieties: a) the heavily made up, low-contrast world of the telesion studio (think nightly news, soap opera, or Cher infomercial, or b) the world as it happens of ENG (that’s electronic news gathering,) and, c) sports.

The harshness of HD doesn’t really matter in ENG and sports (except when they show the sportscasters). Sports and ENG are the world as it happens. If HD renders Quarterback’s or insurgent’s furrowed, wrinkled, sweaty, bleeding brow in ultra detail it just looks like more, not worse. And while HD cameras are on the heavy and expensive side to bring into a war zone (not that it doesn’t happen) HD is great for sports, and that’s where HD has had the biggest successes so far.

HD in the televison studio is another matter. Right off the bat, everyone from set designers to make-up artists were distressesd by the way HD rendered their world. But where set designers could do easy things like start using real wood and real metal instead of plastic veneers and tin-foil, make-up artist were stuck with the same flesh and blood upon which to practice their craft, there in lies the problem.

The problem is that video, whether it’s SD or HD, hates flesh and blood. If you want to make someone look terrible, there’s no better way to do it then to level a video camera at them. Where film is warm and lustrous, and takes pleasure in rendering the details that make each of us individuals, video hates skin, video hates people.

In fact, when you shoot people on video, you don’t actually shoot them at all, you cover them up with powders and lotions and pastes. With video, you don’t shoot people, you shoot their make up.

(It takes my make-up artist about easy 5 minutes to get our subjects ready for the parts of our films that are actually shot-on-film (the sex), while it takes her 30 laborious, very detail-oriented minutes to get the ready for the shot-on-vidio interview portion of our film. And while she leaves the set while we shoot the rough and tumble, sweaty, make-up smearing sex, she sits right on my shoulder during the interviews, dashing in and touching things up throughout. That’s why, despite the fact that 35mm film has vastly more resolution that HD video, there’s was never a zit and wrinkle crisis on the set of Fraiser and other shot-on-film productions.)

This fact that video (both HD and SD) sees the make-up, not the person has given rise to entirely new techniques. Brushes and puffs are too course for the all seeing eye of HD, so where photographs used to be airbrushed, now it’s the make-up is applied with an airbrush. The cost, both in time and money, for the ultra-high-end make-up you need just to make things look credible is one of the reasons I tell ultra-low-budget filmmakers they’re better of shooting film.

But it’s not the only problem with shooting HD, and maybe not the worst.

Back Focus
Michael Mann is one of the Hollywood directors who has been experimenting with HD. COLLATERAL was a hybrid production, shot on a mix of HD and film, and MIAMI VICE was shot entirely on HD. But if you know how to read between the lines, you can see how much cinematographer Dion Beebe struggled with shooting in HD.

When you combine the intense heat generated by CCD in HD camera with the ultra-critical back-focus tolerances that are part and parcel of shooting with a camera with a small focal plane, and the low-resolution view-finder, it’s hard to actually know if your keeping your image in focus, and critical viewers will notice that about half of MIAMI VICE is slightly out of focus.

Depth of Field
But even if you get the make-up right, and even you get critical focus on all your footage, the same short focal length lenses that have such critical back-focus, have nearly unlimited depth of field. Why does this matter? Because cinematography is (among other things) an excercise in controlled depth of field. Any DP’s kit includes a complete set of neutral density filters so that even the longer lenses used in 35mm cinematography can be set to wider f-stops to get the (usually) more pleasing effect of shallow depth of field. But the HD lenses used on normal and especially wider angle of view shots are so very short that even wide open they have nearly infinite depth of field

What this means is that instead of the background being pleasingly soft behind the subject, everything is razor sharp (if you haven’t lost back focus!) What that means for Michael Mann’s production is that incongruous elements in the background that could be ignored now half to be art-directed and designed.

(”Deep Focus” was a fast lens/fast stock fad cinematography style in Hollywood in the film-noir era, and in interviews Beebe did a good job of playing up how much he enjoyed working with Deep Focus, but scuttlebutt from the set says otherwise. It’s more time, it’s more money, it’s more hassle, and it still doesn’t look as good as shooting on film.)

So if all these HD headaches aren’t new, why is it suddenly news in the world of porn? Why is the Times writing about it now? The answer comes in the form of a camera that you can buy at any electronics store for $3,500.

HDV isn’t HD
For the last several years some very few porn higher-end productions have been shot on HD, and they’ve struggled with the same HD gremlins as the rest of the film and television industry. But the $1000/day it costs to rent an HD camera package was out of reach of 99% of porn productions. 99% of porn is shot on a $2,500 DV camera, like a Sony PD150 or similar. With no bargain basement imaging tool to ply their trade, the vast majority of pornographers were stuck in SD land while the rest of the film and television world marched steadily toward HD.

But in 2006 something happened that saved their asses.

In early 2006 Sony released the Z1, the HDV successor to the Sony VX1000, the $3,500 DV camera that launched a thousand extra shabby, shot-on-video porn productions. Like the VX1000, the Z1 is a $3,500 hobbyist camera dressed up to look a little like its professional siblings that cost five or ten or 20 times more, and it’s marketed to people who want to have the latest and in consumer electronics, and a veneer of professional features, but aren’t really in the market for a professional camera. (In the bizz the category is known as “prosumer”.)

The porn industry couldn’t wait to get their hands on the Z1. Porn directors snapped up the Z1 and overnight “shot on HD” started appearing on boxcovers. (The ‘adult industry’ has never been shy about putting misleading or false information on their boxcovers.)

The problem is that the Z1 and other HDV handicams suffer from most of the same limitations at the VX1000 and it’s decendents (PD150, DV100, etc). They have the same tiny focal plane with the attendant back-focus and depth of field problems, because it’s video, it sees make-up not skin, etc. By and larger, footage produced on the Z1 is indistinguishable from footage produced on similar SD video cameras like the PD170 or DVX100. Because the cameras used are virtually the same, and the people using the cameras are the same, these HDV-shot porn films are practically indistinguishable from their DV-shot counterparts.

Except when they’re worse.

HDV is not HD. In fact, it’s no wherenear HD. Because the HDV codec only has as much bandwidth (25 mbps) as the DV codec to try and fill the HD pixel matrix, HDV is compressed six times as much as DV. Like the DV codec, the HDV codec has massive spacial compression, but in addition it also has massive (and not very effective) temporal MPEG compression, that has to be done in real time, in the camera. The only way to achieve cheap, real time MPEG compression in handicam is to sacrifice quality.

Compounding the HDV codec’s low-quality compression, the Z1 uses a “witch’s brew” of field doubling and interlacing to achieve 24fps footage. (The same frame rate as film and real HD cinematogphy.)

What this means is that high motion footage (like people having vigorous sex) will often have more (highly visible) compression artifacting than equivalent DV footage. It’s bad when HDV acquired footage is shown in SD, and even worse when HDV acquired footage is shown in HD-DVD or BlueRay, which you can expect to start happening soon.

No one outside of porn (except apparently the NYT) regards HDV as HD. No one outside the porn industry confuses HDV with HD. And just as cheap DV handicams have overwhelmingly been the tool of the porn trade, cheap HDV handicams will weapon of choice as the porn world moves from DVD to HD-DVD and/or Blueray.

But you won’t read that in the Times article. The prospect of titillating their readers with “serious reporting” on razor burn on pornstars’ pussies and pimples on pornstars asses is too much for even the Old Grey Lady to resist. Even my buddy Andrew Sullivan couldn’t resist.

Now, thanks to the Old Grey Lady’s porn habit, 99% of the public thinks that porn is on the very cutting edge of imaging technology, while the fact is that 99% of “HD” porn is shot on a hobbyest HDV camera – a camera that is more or less the same as the one your uncle pulls out and embarrasses you with at any and all family functions. (The exact same if your uncle is one those people who has to have the latest and greatest consumer electronics gadgets.)

Who wins? Well the Times wins. Their porn articles are well-read, and that’s more ad dollars. The “adult industry” wins; thanks to the Times it’s now on the record that porn is on the cutting edge yet again. And the consumer electronics companies win. Go Get Your HDTV Now!

Who loses? Well maybe nobody, or at least nobody who matters.

There’s no saying for sure how fast player prices are going to come down, but if I had to guess, I’d say our films will be available on Blueray and/or HD-DVD by next year. Next to shot on these HDV or even HD productions, our shot-on-film/mastered in (real) HD films are going to look better than ever!

Maybe the only person who loses is the viewer who goes out and gets a 42 inch plasma screen and HD-DVD player, loads up the latest HD(V) porn production, and then wonders why porn looks worse than ever.

Answering the question “Does the pornography industry throw up unrealistic images of women, sex and sexuality?” Susanna Paasonen says:

“Basically, porn exaggerates everything. It is not concerned with realism. I think Steve Marcus’ term ‘pornotopia’ is really useful in untangling the specificity of the world depicted in porn: abundance of sexual pleasures unlimited by the conditions of everyday life. In other words, porn as a genre does not have much to do with realism.”

Yet again I wonder, what sort of porn is Ms. Paasonen, and others who write about the unrealistic “porntopia” are watching. If someone out there is making porn that (convincingly) depicts “abundance of sexual pleasures unlimited by the conditions of everyday life,” I’d like to see it!

No, the problem with porn isn’t that depicts an unrealistic fantasy, it’s that porn depicts an unappealing reality.

From the Nina.com Forum. Says Nina:

“Percentage-wise, I’d conjecture that less than 15% of women have real orgasms at all. Five percent or so have them regularly, as they are women who come easily. Aria is in this catagory. Her orgasms are real, as she can have them several different ways.

“Remember, I’m a performer. I love what I do, and that what I do is sex, but the mission objective is to leave behind a good, hot, fun, timeless scene that will please viewers always.”

I understand exactly where Nina is coming from on this. Films, even documentary films, are illusions. They are shadows dancing on a wall, or phosphores flickering on screen. They have an effect on us not because they are real, but because they they appear to be real. A performer’s job, whether she’s a hoofer on Broadway, or an adult actress is to make it look like she’s having the time of their life, even on the days when she’d really rather be doing anything else. The thrill comes as much, or more from making the audience happy as it does from the dancing, or the sex.

When I first set out to make erotic films my “mission objective” was to create an entertaining, explicit, convincing, and arrousing depictions of sexual pleasure. From there I took into consideration my limitations of talent and resources, the limitations of the market for sexually explicit films (especially for sexually explicit films made with the intent to arouse,) and the formal effects of explicit depictions of sexuality on various film genres.

That’s a fancy way of saying I decided to make movies of real couples having (and enjoying!) real sex it was because I didn’t think I had the talent or the money to fake it in a convincing and entertaining way!

To that end, I find people who see working with us as a chance to share something about themselves and their sexuality with the world at large. I do my best to make my set (both the love-making set and the interview set) a place where people can relax and be themselves, a place where what is unique and special about them, as a sexual being and as a human being, is valued, indeed prized.

It all sounds embarrassingly touchy-feely, doesn’t it? It makes our set sound like some sort of encounter group or other relic of the 70s; before herpes, before HIV, before sex became so fraught. (In 1975 I was nine years old, so I’m really just going by what I’ve read or been told by people who were in the thick it.)

Well in a way I suppose it’s true. I try to create a set that is insulated as possible from all the worries that can make it hard to relax and enjoy sex. The thing I always tell my crew is that we have to make the set a safe place. We’re going to be asking people to reveal themselves in the most intimate ways, and we have to create an environment where it is easy, even pleasurable for them to open up; to each other, to me, and through that, to the audience.

Come to think of it, that’s what couples do for each other when they make love, and maybe that’s what makes the lovemaking in these films feel so wonderfully intimate and private, even what it’s happening for the whole world to see!

Last year, porn legend Nina Hartley revealed the secret formula for making boring porn.. But Nina was talking about the creative side, and no discussion of the creative side is complete without looking at the business side. Like any good detective will tell you, follow the money and you’ll usually find out why people do what they do.

Well as it happens, the same day the New York Times declares that porn is a $13 billion/year business, over at Adult DVD Talk Oren from Anarchy Films blows the lid off the business side of the skin biz. Says Oren:

An average gonzo cost about $13,500. Than editing hard and soft is about $1,200. Design a sleeve is about $600, authoring is about $700, sleeves are about $500, replication is about $1,500 for 3000 pcs. So if you do the math right you looking into a $18,000. A good distributor will bring you back about $19,000 in the first 45 days of release. To keep a company going you need to release about 50 movies a year with an invesment of at least 1,000,000 in cash. (do the math).

Do the math indeed!

If the average gonzo flick (the mainstay of the industry) costs $18K out the door, with 12,000 +/- titles/year, that puts the total annual production, post-production, replication and packaging costs somewhere around $216M/year. The Times is asking us to believe that $216M investment is generating annual revenues of $13B. How’s that for a return on investment! Even with promotion and overhead you’ve got to like those numbers!

The only problem is, the figures that actually make sense and are supported by any evidence are Oren’s. Look at any porn video and it’s easy to see the producers didn’t spend a lot of time or money on it.

But the numbers reported by the Times are complete fabrications that have be reported as fact without the journalist even taking the time to run them through a calculator.

If Americans are spending “90 cents on porn for every dollar they spend on Hollywood movies” where are the $12M/picture stars with homes in Malibu and East Hampton? Where are the the $10K/day cinematographers or the $2000/day steadicam operators? Where’s the craft-services table piled high with an endless supply of Heineken and Perrier? They’re nowhere to be found because there’s not enough money in porn to pay for them.

Yes, I know, I know. The money flows to a secret cabal of ultra-discreet distributors. As PBS reported, “That’s why you don’t see most of them running around in the Rolls they keep that in the garage and take out on weekends.” Talk about a porn fantasy!

The simple fact is, even Jenna Jameson — porn’s biggest superstar ever — doesn’t make as much as an ensemble player in a run-of-the-mill network sitcom, let alone rake in $1M/episode like each cast member of Friends did — for six seasons! “Big budget” in porn means high five figures. The budget for an “epic” like PIRATES still doesn’t top a million.

And if you think porn is making 60-fold returns on these films, just stop and think a minute. Do you think Hollywood (or Wall Street!) is so encumbered by ethics that they could resist a 6000% return? If there was that kind of return on investment in porn, the “mainstream” would get over its squeamishness pronto, and every single studio, including Disney, would have an “adult” division.

So why do the New York Times, and PBS, and the AP keep reporting this nonsense? For the same reason people make porn; because it’s fun to go slumming, because it’s titilating to take an “unbiased” look at the “adult industry” because putting something “trashy” in the business section spices it up a little. And mostly, because no one’s checking the facts.

Right now several dozen people are sitting together in the dark in a small theater in the Fitzroy district of Melbourne Australia. Along with the theater owners and the MUFF festival organizers they are about to become party to a crime. They are about to be party to the public exhibtion of Damon and Hunter: Doing it Together, a sexually explicit film that has been officially rated X by the Australian government. Because it is X-rated, it is illegal to present Damon and Hunter publicly, even to a theater full of adults who know exactly what they’ve come to see. Because it is X-rated, it’s even illegal to sell Damon and Hunter in many parts of Australia.

We could have challenged this rating (as 9 Songs did), but it’s rather costly (about $8,000) with no certainty of success – too much for a small studio like Comstock Films. So our lovely little film about love and sex goes into the world as a bit of a pariah, a scarlet letter X emblazened on its chest.

So as much as it is a celebration of sex and love, the public exhibtion and distribution of Damon and Hunter is a wilful act of defiance, a challenge to the status quo, a pointed question – why is the depiction of joyous, passionate, carnal love treated like a crime?

Meanwhile, in another part of the Common Wealth, The Tate Modern, one of Englands most prestigeous museums is preparing to show Destricted, a collection of sexually explicit shorts. Says the British newspaper The Telegraph:

“Destricted, an Anglo-American production, is a two-hour compilation of seven short films made by artists and independent film-makers who were commissioned to “explore the fine line where art and pornography intersect”.“It is supervised by Gaspar Noé, the French director whose 2002 film Irreversible featured a nine-minute rape scene. Critics who watched it at the Sundance and Cannes film festivals say it leaves little to the imagination.

A man rubbing his penis on the drive shaft of a 50 ton lorry? No, that doesn’t sound like it was intended to arouse, does it? But is it art? I suppose that depends on whether it’s presented in black and white or color.

But the gist of the Destrict ratings kerfluffle doesn’t seem seem to have anything to do with art or porn. It seems to have to do with whether or not the Tate Modern will be able to sell DVDs of Destricted in the museum gift shop. If Destrict is art (18-rated), they can. If Destricted is porn (R18-rated), they can’t. As is often the case, issues that are offered as questions of morality or aesthetics are actually questions of commerce.

My films are not about “the fine line where art and pornography intersect”, they are about the broad vista of love, sex, desire, and pleasure. I have said and will continue to say that my films are made with the absolute intention and hope that my audience finds them arousing. (Which is why it’s unlikely you’ll ever see rape, or lorries, or Death Valley in my films.)

It’s my sincerest hope that right now, in a darkened theater in Melbourne, people are getting turned on by Damon and Hunter. I hope jeans are getting stretched tight by hard cocks; I hope panties are being dampened by wet pussies. I hope people have smiles on their faces as they think about how wonderful it feels to love and be loved.

What do you suppose Sir Quintin would have to say about that? What would the Tate Modern say? What do you say?

Destricted

“The Destricted brand is the first in a continuing series. The seven films presented explore the fine line where art and pornography intersect. The films highlight controversial issues about the representation of sexuality in art: opening up for debate the question of whether art can be disguised as pornography or whether pornography can disguised as art or something else altogether. The result is a collection os sexy, stimulating, challenging, provocative, strange and sometime humorous scenarios that leave it up to the viewer to decide.”

Thanks for clearing that up. Can I have my hard-on now?