Polissons et galipettes
France,
2002, 69 min
Shown in 2003
CREDITS
- editor
-
Olivier Lupczynsky
- mus
-
Eric Le Guen
- source
-
Strand Releasing, 1460 Fourth St., Ste. 302, Santa Monica, CA 90401. FAX: 310-395-2502. EMAIL: strand@strandreleasing.com.
OTHER
Watching these silent hardcore French pornographic shorts from the 1920s, brilliantly assembled by Michel Reilhac, is a revelation. It’s as if someone had set out to illustrate erotic fantasies uninhibited by social restraints à la Freud and the Surrealists: People meet, take off their clothes and have sex; it’s all so direct and natural as to be absurd, but also not without charm. We can almost imagine Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali in the room next door shooting An Andalusian Dog, that great visualization of the untrammeled libido projected on the world. These films make contemporary pornography with its breast implants, artificial tans and shaved pubic hair look neurotic. Here instead we have guileless soft, round tummies and fleecy nether regions, and even a cultured sense of humor, as in Miss Butterfly, a parody of the tragic opera. Abandoned by Pinkerton, lonely Butterfly finds relief with Suzuki, her female companion. When Pinkerton returns, it is first to have sex with a male servant. Then all are reunited in a flood of bodily fluids. In other shorts, horny schoolteachers are a popular subject as they give naughty pupils well deserved spankings and indulge freely among themselves. Mailmen, servants, nuns, monks, passersby, dogs—everyone is fair game in this parade of wish fulfillment. No one under 18 will be admitted to this film, naturellement.
—Miguel Pendás
FACTOID #4
2006 New Italian Cinema tributee Marco Belocchio’s debut film Fists in the Pocket screened at the Tenth San Francisco International Film Festival in 1966.
