Movie Gazette

While most filmmakers want you to come and see, pornographic filmmakers want things very much the other way round, which is why blue movies have always constituted the most unapologetically functional branch of cinema, defying all the normal standards of aesthetic criticism. Acting, direction, mise-en-scène, script, soundtrack – in porn these elements are largely disposable, since all that really matters, when it comes down to it, is the film's capacity to arouse the viewer sexually. If you are watching porn but do not want to get your juices flowing, your time would be better spent watching something else.

Which is what makes seeing 'The Good Old Naughty Days' on the big screen such an odd experience. A selection of twelve silent French single-reel porn films, mostly from the 1920s, these were made to be viewed in brothel waiting rooms or by private collectors, and now, in their restored and compiled form, and in a mainstream cinema, seem a long way from their original audience and function. The R-18 certification of 'The Good Old Naughty Days' is not for nothing – even if they do not quite descend to the freakish double-vaginal double-anal depths of today's sex movies, these films are unmistakably hardcore, with graphic depictions of mouths, tits, cocks, cunts and arses being variously licked, stroked, slapped or stuffed by various combinations of men and women – and in one hilarious scene there is even a rather unenthusiastic-looking dog called upon to poke its snout about in a hairy bush and lick a fleshy bone. In short, this is not your typical multiplex viewing.

While there is no voice-over commentary, many of the films are introduced by a silent-era style projected message which supplies contextual information – albeit written less in the dry language of the historian than in the nudge-nudge register of saucy seaside postcards – including lists of quaint nicknames for sexual parts, both male ('Rumpleforeskin', 'Mr Happy') and female ('butcher's window', 'boy in the boat'). Some (although not all) of the films have unexpectedly inventive narratives compared to the porn of today, but what is perhaps even more surprising is their casual depiction of male sexual ambidextrousness – in current porn, by contrast, where female bisexuality is a requirement, male bisexuality is a taboo. Still, the similarities between the porn of then and now are more striking than the differences, and poor scripts and bad acting have apparently been an essential part of the genre since its very beginnings.

These films are, at least occasionally, very funny, in part because of the now strange-seeming conjunction of very strong sexual scenes with 'innocent' Chaplinesque over-acting, but mostly just because porn, whether from the 1920s or our own naughty noughties, always seems ridiculous when it is divorced from its functional setting. Unfortunately, porn is also, when viewed with the hands away from the genitals, always boring, and I suspect that many viewers will not have the patience to see 'The Good Old Naughty Days' through to its end. This is a pity, as the best is very definitely kept till last – the hardcore animation of 'Buried Treasures' which closes the colection is itself a buried treasure of ithyphallic surrealism, not so much 'Fritz the Cat' as his older, wiser ancestor Felix.