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Porn. The beginning

Porn. The beginning

We know that porn drives the world. Whatever they say about “space exploration”, “technological progress”, “human race advancement” is bullshit. Because everything people want and everything people need is to jerk off on a naughty naked lady. Or a gentleman, all in all, we live in a tolerant society. So how did it all start?

Before “how”, let’s guess “when”. A hint for you, you little curious thing: the cinema itself as a genre and even technology was created in 1896 by Lumiere brothers. Now the question: when do you think the first pornographic film was made? Aaand you guessed it! The very same year. Yeah, people are neither the most patient nor the most innocent creatures.

The pioneers

The first erotic silence film was created in France (it’s obvious from the previous paragraph, duh) in 1896 (in case you have already forgotten). The movie was given the name Le Coucher de la Mariée, which in human language means “Maria is going to bed.” It depicted, who would only think, a lady who was getting undressed on camera. Unfortunately, by now there got saved only first a minute and a half out of a seven-minute movie, so we have a chance to see the prelude only. Fun fact: the director of this film was Albert Kirchner, better known under pseudonym Léar and who was noted for producing erotic and religious films. I wonder if he had a one-in-two movie, hmm.

If you don’t like seeing couples kissing in public today, imagine what was the people’s reaction back in the 1890s! Don’t need to imagine, there is historic evidence.

In the same 1896 (what a fruitful year) there was made a short film titled “The Kiss”, where actors May Irwin and John Rice were kissing on screen for full eighteen seconds! Outrageous! It was first shown to the public in Ottawa on the 21st of July in 1896. It was created as part of a musical comedy “The Widow Jones.” 

At that moment critics called the short film “the demonstration of a bestial lust that can not inhere in a civilized person”. Another morally upstanding critic wrote: “The spectacle of the prolonged pasturing on each other’s lips was beastly enough in life-size on the stage but magnified to gargantuan proportions and repeated three times over it is absolutely disgusting.” A hundred years later the film was deemed “culturally significant” by the United States Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry.

XX century presents

If you, while reading this article, keep yelling in full voice that a kiss and a little bit of nudity is not yet porn, welcome to the twentieth century! 

It was after the 1900s when people of art started to record on film the hm, the action itself. You know what I mean. The bang-bang. Making babies. Sex, ok, sex!

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One of the first hard-core, real and dirty porn films was made in Germany. Oh, they have a long-living tradition of adult-films making. So, a film titled Am Abend (In the evening) was created somewhere around 1910. Linda Williams, an American professor of film studies, says that porn at that time had very much in common with the modern look on adult films — they showed a close-up view of genitalia (can you imagine how they filmed it with the primitive cameras they had? Hilarious), and a medium shot of people fucking. For example, an Argentinian film El Sátiro (Satyr) made somewhen between 1907 and 1915 and an American one A Free Ride, around 1915. Now, these films are in the collection of the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction. Yes, there is such an institution. I told you, everything is because of porn.

Filming and editing and post processing took a lot of time and effort. This is obvious, they didn’t have the magic of Photoshop and did everything, every little thing by literally gluing and drawing the frames by hand. The lengths they had to go to enjoy some nice porn was outstanding. 

And erotic films, as well as straight pornography, was illegal. So a nudity lover had a real chance to have problems with the law if somebody finds a curious film in his pocket. But, nevertheless, movies spread and people were getting them on the quiet from trustworthy men. Sometimes they were shown in brothels or private men’s clubs.

In 1940s things got less regulated and the topic of sex was used to raise (you got it, raise, hehe) the battle spirit of soldiers. But as it was too expensive to make moving pictures, they mostly used printed images.

The high noon of the industry

Today! Today is the high noon of the industry when you can find everything your little perverted mind wants to jerk on. But seriously, it started getting to what we have today after the Second World War.

History of porn

After the war cameras and film became less expensive and there started porn mass production. Film mass production, but who cares about boring westerns. Professional directors got involved in making porn. For example, George Harrison Marks started his career as a nude photographer, but in the 1950s started making what we today call softcore — erotic and pornographic films with female models as main characters. Mmm.

The side-effect of loosening regulations regarding adult film was private movie theaters reviving. For example, in the 1960s people who were in charge of American strip-clubs understood it was cheaper to run films than to pay to dancers. Clubs started printing advertisements in newspapers to attract new viewers. Can you imagine it: a porn film advertised in a newspaper! God, what a wild time it was.

1972 became the beginning of the golden era of the phonographic industry when the world saw the cult and iconic Deep Throat. Made by Gerard Damiano the film starred Linda Lovelace and Harry Reems. After the sexual revolution in the 1970s, the digital camera invention and theWorld Wide Web spreading, porn became everywhere! Literally, everywhere. And the limits have almost gone. Almost.

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