Porn History

Early years: 20th century

Production of erotic films commenced almost immediately after the invention of the motion picture.^[3] Two of the earliest pioneers were Frenchmen Eugène Pirou and Albert Kirchner.^[4] Kirchner (under the name "Léar") directed the earliest surviving erotic film for Pirou. The 7-minute 1896 film Le Coucher de la Mariée had Louise Willy performing a bathroom striptease.^[5] Other French filmmakers also considered that profits could be made from this type of risqué films, showing women disrobing.^[6][7]

Also in 1896 Fatima's Coochie-Coochie Dance^[8] was released as a short nickelodeon kinetoscope/film featuring a gyrating belly dancer named Fatima. Her gyrating and moving pelvis was censored, one of the earliest films to be censored. At the time, there were numerous risque films that featured exotic dancers.^[9] In the same year, The May Irwin Kiss contained the very first kiss on film. It was a 47-second film loop, with a close-up of a nuzzling couple followed by a short peck on the lips ("the mysteries of the kiss revealed"). The kissing scene was denounced as shocking and obscene to early moviegoers and caused the Roman Catholic Church to call for censorship and moral reform - because kissing in public at the time could lead to prosecution.^[9] Perhaps in defiance and "to spice up a film", this was followed by many kiss imitators, including The Kiss in the Tunnel (1899) and The Kiss (1900). A tableau vivant style was used in short film The Birth of the Pearl (1901)^[10] featuring an unnamed long-haired young model wearing a flesh-colored body stocking in a direct frontal pose^[9] that provides a provocative view of the female body.^[11] The pose is in the style of Botticelli's The Birth of Venus.

In Austria, cinemas would organise men-only theatre nights (called Herrenabende) at which adult films would be shown. Johann Schwarzer formed his Saturn-Film production company which between 1906 and 1911 produced 52 erotic productions, each of which contained young local women fully nude, to be shown at those screenings. Before Schwarzer's productions, erotic films were provided by the Pathé brothers from French produced sources. In 1911, Saturn was dissolved by the censorship authorities which destroyed all the films they could find,^[12] though some have since resurfaced from private collections. There were a number of American films in the 1910s which contained female nudity in film.

Because Pirou is nearly unknown as a pornographic filmmaker, credit is often given to other films for being the first. In Black and White and Blue (2008), one of the most scholarly attempts to document the origins of the clandestine 'stag film' trade, Dave Thompson recounts ample evidence that such an industry first had sprung up in the brothels of Buenos Aires and other South American cities by the turn of the 20th century, and then quickly spread through Central Europe over the following few years. However, none of these earliest pornographic films are known to have survived. According to Patrick Robertson's Film Facts, "the earliest pornographic motion picture which can definitely be dated is A L'Ecu d'Or ou la bonne auberge" made in France in 1908. The plot depicts a weary soldier who has a tryst with a servant girl at an inn. The Argentinian El Satario, whose original title could have been El Sátiro (The Satyr), might be even older; it has been dated to somewhere between 1907 and 1912.^[13] He also notes that "the oldest surviving pornographic films are contained in America's Kinsey Collection. One film demonstrates how early pornographic conventions were established. The German film Am Abend (1910) is a ten-minute film which begins with a woman masturbating alone in her bedroom, and progresses to scenes of her with a man performing straight sex, fellatio and anal penetration."^[14]