Trent Film Society is excited to present an exhibition of moving-image pornography up to 1972. This event will be held at Artspace (378 Aylmer Street) from Thursday, August 28 to Saturday, August 30, 12pm – 6pm. On the Thursday we will have an opening reception from 6pm – 8pm.
At our exhibition a number of films will be screened throughout the gallery. Posters, screenshots, and other promotional materials will be on display as well.
Our exhibit begin with the photographer Eadweard Muybridge and his pictures from the 1880s of nude bodies in motion. From there we transition to the silent cinema. From 1905-1930, explicit shorts of copulating bodies were shown at stags for men’s enjoyment.
In the decades to follow, there was a brief lull of moving-image pornography. It was not until the 1960s that naked bodies reappear on the screen. Nudie cuties, sexploitation, art films, and blaxploitation flicks brought sex back to the cinema. These films were the pre-cursor to the hard core genre.
Hard core pornography broke into the mainstream with Gerard Damiano’s Deep Throat in 1972. Deep Throat was the first pornographic film to receive attention from both men and women alike, and the film entered popular consciousness, not without controversy.
We hope our exhibition presents a history too often unacknowledged. The proliferation of moving-image pornography is not a recent phenomenon – sex has always been part of the cinema. We also hope that spectators can draw connections between this history and our present day production and consumption of pornography.
For more information visit: www.facebook.com/trentfilmsociety, and email: trentfilmsociety@gmail.com.
