Men have landed on the moon, but to many, I Am Curious (Yellow),
I Am Curious (Blue) will be the event of 1969.¹

Such read the headlines appearing in American newspapers when the film directed by Swedish director Vilgot Sjman was seized by customs officials upon its arrival in the United States in 1968, with a subsequent highly visible trial around allegedly obscene content. The film, primarily political in content but containing scenes with full frontal nudity, was billed within the American media as a pornographic film. Rejecting the indictment, Sjman argued that it was the films explicit male nudity that troubled US Customs censors, underscoring the ironic regard of male nudity as less permissible than the overt female nudity prevalent within film and advertising at the time.

I am Curious (Yellow) and its companion film I am Curious (Blue), released in Sweden in 1966, were intended to be one integrated film. Sjman amassed substantial footage and decided to create two versions of the same film (Blue) developed into a sober film about state, church, prison camps and other aspects of Swedish society. (Yellow), the more sensational counterpart, unfolds around Lena Nyman, a radical student activist who engages in a public inquiry about social, political and sexual questions relevant to Swedes at the time. The film evolves ambiguously, never resolving whether the real-life Nyman has been cast to play herself or a role created by the director. In this way, Sjman further complicates the reading of the film as either documentary or staged, while posing sexual encounters as a set of intimate relations involving distrust, anger, envy and betrayal, rather than offering a simple staging of sexual wares.

Contradicting the claim put forth by US censors, reviews by renowned critics such as Vincent Canby from The New York Times described the film as containing scenes as explicit, honest and so unaffectedly frank as to be non-pornographic. By acknowledging the existence of genitalia and their function in the act of love, Canby added, the movie salvages the depiction of physical love from the scrap heap of exploitation, camp and stag films.² The decision of a New York court in May 1968 to uphold the US Custom ban on obscenity grounds only reaffirmed Herbert Marcuses prognosis about the Establishments methodical strategies to prevent politically critical and explicit material from wider distribution.

Marcuse set forth a critical analysis of society in his Essay on Liberation from 1969 to reaffirm the obscenity card as a a moral concept in the verbal arsenal of the Establishment, which abuses the term by applying it, not to expressions of its own morality but to those of another. [...] Obscene is not the picture of a naked woman who exposes her pubic hair but that of a fully clad general who exposes his medals rewarded in a war of aggression, writes Marcuse in an expansion of his investigation of the possible juncture between the erotic and political that he had initiated in Eros and Civlization in 1955.³ In a revisionary reading of Freudian theory that resonated with 1960s leftist student movements and their call for both social reform and erotic liberation, Marcuses critical re-evaluation of Freuds concept of sexuality contested the latters original claim that sexual repression was necessary for a civilisation to survive. Rejecting Freuds ahistorical reading of the human condition, Marcuse argued that the opposition between society and sexuality was historically and economically contingent, conceding to basic sexual repression in times of scarcity to maximise the productivity of workers. In such times, the delay of ones own sexual gratification for the sake of society as a whole would result in a period when the body would be de-eroticised. Given the surplus of capital and libidinous energy created by post-industrial capitalism, one could unleash the libidinal instinct from its historical repression without fear of economic ruin.

In this sense, Marcuse proposed a widened experience of sexuality through the embrace of Eros, in general within polymorphous sensuality, fantasy and the arts. His influence on the intellectual discourse about popular culture contributed to his reputation as the father of the New Left, although he denounced his affiliation with the hippie and free-love movements. In his preface to the 1966 reprint of Eros and Civilization, Marcuse writes:

In defence of life: the phrase has explosive meaning in the affluent society.

It involves not only the protest against neo-colonial war and slaughter, the

burning of draft cards at the risk of prison, the fight for civil rights, but

also the refusal to speak the dead language of affluence, to wear the clean

clothes, to enjoy the gadgets of affluence, to go through the education of

affluence. The new bohme, the beatniks and hipsters, the peace creeps all these

decadents now have become what decadence probably always was: poor refuge of

defamed humanity.⁴

Marcuse maintains that to speak of a juncture between the erotic and the political dimension is to be proactive against the deadly efficient organisation of affluent society, but not in the way of radical protest that is articulated through ridiculous buttons reading MAKE LOVE, NOT WAR.⁵

Marcuses proposed linking of the political and the erotic is helpful in thinking of I Am Curious (Yellow) as a film about filmmaking in the field of political inquiry, and as a broader critique of capitalism, rather than a film celebrating sexual liberation. Disenfranchising the traditional iconological order of cinematic schema, Sjman utilises anti-acting as a kind of de-realisation of the scenic tableau and a rebellion against narrative. Lena, as the films protagonist, conducts endless interviews with citizens of Stockholm, asking them if they believe they live in a classless society. She also badgers members of the Labour movement as to why their party is so damn conservative, or confronts Swedish holidaymakers in the airport returning from Francos Spain to challenge their democratic ideals as hypocritical. Amid her socio-political inquiries, Lena participates in sexual exploration to reveal what Marcuse describes as libidinal rationality, a personal development by which one may order life in accordance with fully developed knowledge, so to once again ask what is good and what is evil.⁶

The seizing of the film by Customs officials led the American anti-censorship crusader Barney Rosset to initiate legal action against US courts in 1968 in an effort to contest the validity of the ban. As an eclectic publisher of the inluential offbeat literary magazine Evergreen Review and president of Grove Press, throughout the 1960s Rosset had issued the American editions of formerly censored publications such as Lady Chatterleys Lover (1928) and Tropic of Cancer (1934). Rosset battled against the US legal system and its propensity to label material otherwise critical of democracy, capitalism or Americas role in the Vietnam War as pornographic or obscene. In purchasing the distribution rights for I Am Curious (Yellow), he made possible a wider visibility for the film through independent cinema houses, rendering the US censors ban ineffectual and generating a nationwide debate that contested its premises.⁷

Rossets efforts to secure a publicity bonanza around I Am Curious (Yellow) contributed to the eventual dismissal of the initial ban, a decision that had been accompanied by a court ruling that found the film not without redeeming social values.⁸ Once released, Canby wrote that the film, having opened to long queues of largely middle-aged and ruly crowds, is a good serious movie about society in transition told in terms of recording devices, pads and pencils, posters, cinma vrit, interviews, tape recordings and fiction film.⁹ Four years later, in 1973, the US Supreme Court ruled that serious artistic, political or scientific value is required for finding that something is not obscene, although it added that a finding of some artistic, political or scientific value does not preclude a finding that a work is obscene.¹⁰

Marcuse foresaw this eventual shift in the attitude on the part of the Establishment in relation to erotic material as a necessary way to manipulate obscenity rules as a means to implement effective controls rather than to issue full-out restrictions. He recognised that the gradual liberalisation of sexuality would provide an instinctual basis for the repressive and aggressive power of affluent society.¹¹ In the aftermath of the debates that ensued around I Am Curious (Yellow), President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed a task force to investigate pornography and its effects on society. The resulting report was published in the autumn of 1970 as the first Presidential Commission on Obscenity and Pornography, in which its members concluded that pornography was harmless and even beneficial, identifying the financially endowed citizen as its typical consumer. The commission voted to recommend a repeal to all laws prohibiting consenting adults the purchase or consumption of sexually explicit material.¹²

The eventual decision on the part of the US government in its leniency towards material deemed pornographic reaffirmed Marcuses prediction that the consumer economy and the politics of corporate capitalism needed to create a second nature of man which tied him libidinally and aggressively to the commodity form.¹³ In this sense, the system manipulated the debates around politically enquiring material, erotic in content, to a full-out acceptance in the development of a pornography industry. Marcuse maintained that Marxist theory considers sexual exploitation as the primary, original exploitation, supporting the Womens Liberation Movements fight against the degradation of women to sexual objects. He also recognised that, historically, images of women as sexual objects and their exchange value on the market marks a devaluation of the earlier representation of women as mothers and wives. These images, essential to bourgeois Ideology during a period of capitalist development now left behind, cave in behind a present image of the woman as sexual object [that] is a de-sublimation of bourgeois morality characteristic of a higher state of capitalist development.¹⁴

I am Curious (Yellow), then, led to the repeal of existing pornography laws within the United States and ironically condoned the development of a pornography industry primarily for the enjoyment of middle- and upper-class consumers, whom the government study said would serve as the industrys best clients. Vincent Canby recognised the films significance in this development, noting in a reflective article entitled The Blue Movie Blues that it was especially Vilgot Sjmans I Am Curious (Yellow), whose successful exhibition has been responsible for a mini-revolution in the commercial movie underground, that twilight industry made up of producers of sexploitation films. The new genre of film, according to Canby, was a completely new commercially exhibited movie that imitates the style and content of the old stag film where the plot is predictable: every two or three heterosexual couplings are separated by a lesbian coupling, or tripling.¹⁵ The proliferation of this type of film, screened in converted cinemas along 42nd Street and other locations on West 43rd and 44th Street, resulted in the development of a parallel industry: the production of Scandinavian sexploitation films that responded to actual Scandinavian stereotypes films such as Joseph Sarnos Seduction of Inge(1969) or My Swedish Cousins (1970).

Contesting that his film was about pornography, Vilgot Sjman explained in a New York Times¹⁶ Within the opening scenes of I Am Curious (Yellow), Sjman incorporates a fragment from a film documenting the Soviet poet Yevgeniy Yevtushenko addressing a revolutionary student organisation in Stockholm. This documentary clip is followed by a staged scene which takes place within the audience that sits before Yevtushenko. Aspiring actress Lena Nyman turns toward the real-life Sjman, who has cast himself as the director, and flirtatiously asks if he might consider casting her in a love scene. Here Sjman lays out Lenas entire relationship to the film both as an actress who relies on her appearance (at one point reflecting on her chubby figure and sagging breasts) and as a real person in the form of a political agent. The move introduces one of the films critical claims by bifurcating Lena as a woman and a subject (as both sexual and political) and cinema as documentary and staged (as both real and fiction). These purposeful dichotomies are further reflected in Sjmans introduction to the film: This film is one about Swedish Socialism about its two heads the big, self-satisfied one and the little shrunken one.

interview conducted on the occasion of the films release that he had aimed to dismantle the narrative form in order to instigate the film as a medium for political inquiry, a way of conveying the truth from the left-wing angle. He said: I am sort of portraying, from a Marxist point of view, a society where people are using their jobs and even their personal life their bodies in order to use each other, in order to get ahead in society.

Sjman resorts to forthright nudity within the film in order to divert nudity from its traditional treatment as charged and eroticised. In a candid scene, Lena lies next to her lover Bjarne, caressing his flaccid penis.¹⁷ In casting the male actor in a role conventionally assumed by an actress (as the passive receiver rather than the active partner), Sjman introduces sexual difference within a structure in which the phallus is already privileged, returning to the psychoanalytic concept of disavowal to redefine it. The question of sexual difference succumbs to the recognition of the phallic reference by revealing how a woman is structured as an image around this reference, Sjman introduces the possibility of collapsing the whole system through the loss of sexual difference itself. In the film, Lena is not reduced to a mere body sexually frozen into spectacle, the object of phallic desire. This empowerment anticipates an artwork by Lynda Benglis entitled Self Portrait with Dildo¹⁸ Sjmans film was also released at the same time that Carolee Schneemann, an artist known for her performances related to discourses of the body, sexuality and gender, made Fuses (1964), a film documenting the artist having sex with her then-boyfriend James Tenney from the point of view of Kitsch, their cat. The collaged and painted sequences referred to the materiality of the film rather than straightforwardly documenting the sexual intercourse.

(1974), a poster in which the artist stands naked holding a large double-sided dildo against her crotch in an effort to attack patriarchal hierarchies.

SIN, SUICIDE, SOCIALISM AND SMORGASBORD

The polemic around the release of I Am Curious (Yellow) in the United States developed amidst a generalised perception of Scandinavia as an area with a long history of liberal sexual policy. American intellectuals saw Scandinavia as balancing the needs of community with those of the individual, and as immune to the Judeo-Christian concerns about the body. International audiences had already seen Ingmar Bergmans The Silence, a film that as early as 1963 depicted the carnal desires of two competing sisters against the backdrop of an absent God. However, those same intellectuals exaggerated their perception of Scandinavia as a free and utopian sexual zone. In 1969, the chief foreign-affairs correspondent for The New York Times, C.L. Sulzberger, published an article titled Foreign Affairs: Sex and Sense addressing Denmarks 1967 decision to abolish its censorship laws. Sulzberger wrote: There is nothing in the least bit either unwholesome or immoral about the Danes, who simply share with Benjamin Franklin that honesty is the best policy, adding that the Danish experiment was admirable for its bold effort to sweep aside the shibboleths that have been confusing mankind for centuries.¹⁹ Sulzbergers article continues with extraneous information, adding that the Danish Socialist Peoples Party had proposed a bill which called for legal marriage between persons of the same sex, between brother and sister, or between one man and an unlimited amount of women. Although the bill was overturned, Sulzberger continues to cite Denmarks structure of megafamilies groups of unrelated adults of both sexes and their children of which fifty were known to exist at the time as an accepted phenomenon on the contemporary scene.

Denmark was more liberal in respect to sexual policy than its Nordic neighbours. Norway proved the more conservative of the constellation, as late as 1966 having banned Uten en trd (Without a Stitch), a book written by Jens Brneboe criticising the sexual mores of the time.²⁰ Despite the differences in legal approach to sexual policies in Norway, Denmark and Sweden, an international image placed the entire region as an undifferentiated zone of sin, suicide, socialism and smorgasbord.²¹ The stereotype reflected a conscious political strategy on the part of the United States to curb the proliferation of expanding welfare states in Northern Europe. In 1960, President Eisenhower warned against the consequences of an extended domestic welfare policy in the United States, denouncing those fairly friendly European countries where socialism has brought about a sharp increase in suicides, twice our drunkenness and a lack of moderation, discernible on all sides.²² Articles in the US frequently accused Scandinavia as being a haven of sin where birth control, abortion and promiscuity reigned, perhaps because social democracy and the welfare state were threatening to America as a market economy.²³ Herein existed two very different approaches to the democratic process a democracy rooted in direct participation and in the increased equality in the distribution of economic power versus a democracy constructed as a representative system, rooted in the participation in political power through elected representatives.

I Am Curious (Yellow) was seized by US Customs during a period in which Scandinavia experienced unprecedented economic prosperity, with the implementation of an active labour policy in the 1960s designed to maintain full employment, in addition to a strong mobilisation of sentiment against the referendum votes for membership in the European Economic Community. More problematic for American authorities than the frontal nudity in Sjmans film was perhaps the cameo appearance of Olof Palme, a politician who led a generation of radical Swedish Social Democrats that politically stood much further to the left than their predecessors. A controversial figure on the international scene, Palme was outspoken on many issues, expressing criticism of the United States for the Vietnam War, opposing the Soviet crushing of the Prague Spring, campaigning against nuclear weapons proliferation and supporting, both politically and financially, the African National Congress, the Palestine Liberation Organisation and Fidel Castro. Publicity of Palmes persona, as a representative of the radical economic democracy goals of the Social Democrats after 1968, and of his ideas about the breakdown of organised social capital, was not welcome in a United States already seeped in political conflict with its student movements.

SEX, PSYCHOTHERAPY, AND THE SOCIALIST AGENDA IN SCANDINAVIA

Sexual liberation throughout Scandinavia evolved through radical social reform structures and political initiatives in the areas of healthcare and gender equality that took shape at the start of the twentieth century, during the period of nation building. The pursuit of civil, political and social rights initiated at that time was adopted by the Labour Party in the 1940s in the context of welfare policy initiatives and social engineering, producing what Marcuse understood as the development of a social wealth for shaping mans world in accordance with life instincts.²⁴ The drafting of post-War social welfare policies based on altruism, self-insurance against individual economic risk and solidarity as a common responsibility reflected what Marcuse projected as a truly human city, state and nation, constituted through the construction of a society that protects, perpetuates and enlarges life.

The construction of gender through social policies was at the centre of the efforts implemented by the umbrella organisation of the Womens Federation of the Labour Party Movement, which, as early as 1901, integrated the campaign for sexual reform into the struggle for national independence and sovereign statehood. The movements key leaders, Elise Ottesen Jensen and Katti Anker Mller, lobbied for the emancipation of motherhood by facilitating welfare benefits for mothers and assistance for single mothers, promoting motherhood as a voluntary choice and urging women to learn about their reproductive organs in an effort to treat such knowledge as unshameful. By 1910 an exemplary set of social rights by international standards was established within Norway to provide equal political rights to men and women. At around the same time Katti Anker Mller and Henrik Bergegren, through their association with the Norwegian Youth Socialists, presented their views on sexual mores in a publicised speech in Stockholm entitled Krlek utan barn (Love without Babies), outlining the benefits for the working class of limiting their families through the use of contraceptives.²⁵

The terms of these socio-political achievements by the early womens movements, located within a larger political agenda toward statehood and the formation of social democracy, were eventually challenged with the introduction of psychoanalysis and cinema both of which simultaneously provided new views on interiority and displaced women to a secondary role. Throughout the 1930s, many of the feminists and activists who had achieved important strides in gender reform for women vehemently criticised psychoanalysis as a predominantly patriarchal construct that introduced a fossilised concept of the unconscious without taking into consideration historical contingencies, while privileging the phallus and neglecting the importance of the unconscious in bringing into play images of sexual difference.

In Sexuality in the Field of Vision (1986), Jacqueline Rose describes how psychoanalysis and its patriarchal structures effectively stunted developments within the feminist movement between the 1930s and 70s. Rose notes the importance of Otto Fenichel, a psychoanalyst who lived and worked in Oslo in the 1930s, and who exposed the reductivist tendencies of psychoanalysis and its inability to integrate political analysis. In Drive to Amass Wealth (1934), Fenichel writes:

The study of modifications of instinct is in no way an essential bagatelle, but

is of the greatest importance theoretically as well as practically. The

statement that the production and dissemination of ideology in society must be

understood from the actual economic conditions of this society, the

superstructure of which is the ideology; that further they are to be understood

from the fact that this superstructure by means of the actions of human beings,

reacts back again upon the foundation, the economic conditions modifying them

these statements are correct but general. They become more specific when we

succeed in comprehending scientifically the details of the mechanisms of these

transformations, and only psychoanalysis is able to help us in that.²⁶

Rose elaborates on Fenichels thoughts about the psychic forces of the ideological process, while avoiding the weaknesses of sociological and psychological reductionism: sociologists dismiss the psychic investments of social life as mere bagatelle, while psychoanalysts fall into the trap of identifying the psychic as the primary determining factor of social mechanisms. Fenichels arguments anticipated the claims of later feminist writers, such as Juliet Mitchell in her seminal 1974 book Psychoanalysis and Feminism.²⁷ Both Fenichel and Mitchell introduce sexuality into the historical links between psychoanalysis and the understanding of ideology. Rose attributes to Fenichel the first contribution to this discussion, and argues that within this context sexual difference is analysed as a fundamental, if not the most fundamental of human laws. In citing Mitchell, Rose claims that the question of femininity is inserted back into the project which, as long ago as the 1930s, had considered psychoanalysis as the only means of explaining the exact mechanisms whereby the ideological processes are transformed, via individual subjects, into human actions and beliefs.²⁸

Revisionist thinking around Freudian psychoanalysis throughout the 1930s was prevalent in Oslo, a haven for dissident psychoanalysts who fled to Norway looking for a climate of tolerance, rare in the rest of Europe at the time. The socio-political climate was dominated by Mot Dag, a revolutionary student organisation associated with the labour movement, responsible for editing the Periodical for Sexual Education from 1932 to 1935. The organisation and its periodical represented a convergence of Marxism and psychoanalysis, and provided a radical departure from other contemporary journals in relation to topics like masturbation, abortion and homosexuality. These views were shared by the political and cultural elite, who welcomed figures such as Wilhelm Reich who had recently been expelled from the International Psychoanalytic Association in Berlin and from Denmark. Reich had gained international recognition for the socio-psychological theories he had presented in The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933), providing a then-new approach to the study of the relations between the social structure and the individual character, and foreshadowing thinkers such as Marcuse. During his stay in Oslo from 1934 to 1938, Reich developed radical approaches to the sexual struggle, focusing primarily on an orgasm theory that had important implications for psychotherapeutic and political activities. Although Reich maintained that his research limited itself to what he referred to as sex-economy, he lobbied for the formation of a movement that would alter social conditions so as to replace the prevalent negation of sex by a general sex affirmation, including all its economic prerequisites.²⁹

Reich undertook experiments to measure and demonstrate the physical reality of sexual energy, whose suppression played for him a key cause of individual and social misery. He began to seek out the origins of life in the form of physical energy that he called the orgon, which, in his hypothesis, permeated the atmosphere and all living matter. Amid rumours of semi-nude patients, bio-electric experiments with naked couples kissing, pulsating vehicles and an overall departure from traditional scientific systems and methodology, Reich became the subject of a slanderous press campaign in Norway throughout 1937, with more than one hundred articles appearing under titles like Quackery of Psychoanalysis.³⁰

Despite his extradition from Norway, Reich succeeded in completing his book Sexual Revolution, which addressed the need to relieve sexual repression in order to prevent all kinds of moral and aesthetic defences: When patients regain contact with their sexual needs, these neurotic differentiations disappear.³¹ The Sexual Revolution, when it was published in the United States in 1951, became a cult classic for the dispirited student movement in the late 1960s just like Marcuses Eros and Civilization, although their approaches were remarkably different. Reich also became an important figure for the radical student movements in Paris in the 1960s, when Reichian symbols depicting human conflicts produced by societal repression of sexuality were crudely painted on the walls of the Sorbonne. Students seized upon Reichs thoughts on change, especially his notion that any real change in society could be achieved through sexual education and sexual freedom.

In direct opposition, Marcuse offered an alternative theory around the juncture of the sexual and the political, and characterised Reichs proposals about sexual liberation as a panacea for individual and social ills.³² He faulted the notion of sexual repression that Reich had elaborated in Der Einbruch and Sexualmoral (1931, translated to English as The Invasion of Compulsory Sex-Morality) as undifferentiated and neglecting the historical dynamic of sex instincts and of their fusion with destructive impulses, rejected that any progress in freedom appears as the result of a mere sexual release and accused Reich of primitivism.³³ Contesting Reichs theories on unbound genital energy, Marcuse wrote in his 1966 preface to Eros and Civilization:

Affluent society has already foreseen that it must adopt a new language to

prevent dissonance it therefore organises the desire for beauty and the hunger

for community, the renewal of the contact with nature, the enrichment of the

mind, and honour for creation for its own sake. The false ring of such

proclamations is indicative of that fact that, within the established system,

these aspirations are translated into administered cultural activities,

sponsored by government and the big corporations an extension of their

executive arm into the soul of the masses.³⁴

Recognising the Establishments increased interest in co-opting a liberal language, Marcuse warned against the system of social institutions and relations, laws and values that would transmit and enforce a modification of life instincts. Specifically, he shunned what he understood as restrictive controls arising from these institutions, such as the perpetuation of the monogamic-patriarchal family, the hierarchical division of labour or the public control over the individuals private existence to effectively prevent spontaneous relationships and natural, animal-like expressions.³⁵ These control mechanisms lead to a de-sexualisation of the organism required by its social utilisation as an instrument of labour, and result in a repressive organisation of sexuality that alters its very nature from an autonomous principle governing the entire organism into a specialised temporary function, into a means for an end.³⁶

A COMMODIFICATION OF SEX

How did these thoughts of resistance appear within the cultural products of the time? In Sexuality in the Field of Vision, Rose identifies film as an ideological apparatus that rests on the mechanisms of identification and sexual fantasy which we all seem to participate in, but which outside of cinema are, for the most part, only ever admitted on the couch.³⁷ I Am Curious (Yellow) approached the imaginary, within the debate on realism, with the goal of revealing the construction of reality and defying the notion of posing. The film was not shrouded in an illusive narrative; rather, it was a vehicle to help relate the unconscious way lives were being lived and to expose how ideological processes could transform those lives. Sjman aimed to produce a film that pursued the interests he developed during his studies at UCLA in the mid-1950s, and investigated further the Hollywood production code: how it developed, where it came from; how it was possible to say something within a context that claimed to be without censorship when, in fact, it existed.³⁸

Shortly after the release of I Am Curious (Yellow) another Swedish film, Torgny Wickmans Language of Love (1969), was seized by US Customs in October 1969. In contrast to Sjmans film, which remained the focus of national debates about obscenity for years thereafter, Wickmans film was quickly released from the censorship edict. As a straightforward sex-education film, Language of Love revolves around a panel of experts who openly discuss sexual issues with the aid of volunteers who function as real-life models as wella as performative examples illustrating the experts observations. The panel of experts, all of whom wrote popular columns in many Scandinavian newspapers including Norways Dagbladet, speak about sexual anxieties and misconceptions, petting, masturbation, contraceptives and the sexual organs in a form that recalls an instruction manual.³⁹⁴⁰ In comparison to the politically and socially engaged I Am Curious (Yellow), Language of Love was deemed a new kind of film a sexploitation film of the white coater variety, a pornographic film masquerading as a documentary or scientific film prior to the introduction of hardcore productions such as Deep Throat (1972) and the long series of sexploitation films that were produced in Sweden throughout the 1970s.

Volunteers cooperate (via hidden cameras) to demonstrate the experts instructions. Accompanied by music by ABBA, the film became an eventual classic.

Language of Love appeared within a cultural climate in which sex was much more openly discussed, even incorporating a conservative element, with the production of marriage manual films such as Man and Wife (1969), He and She (1970), Black is Beautiful (also known as Africanus Sexualis) (1970) and The Art of Marriage (1970). The first three were directed by Matt Cimber in the US, known for his production of how-to-do-it movies films that explained how sex could be both functional and pleasurable. Among these were Sexual Practices in Sweden (1970), Danish BluePornography in Denmark: A New Approach (1970), all directed by an American, Alex de Renzy. Pornography in Denmark combines a travelogue of the 1969 pornography fair in Copenhagen, a tour of sex shops and the red-light district, interviews with people working in the sex trade, and the filming of a pornographic film. De Renzy adopts Sjmans technique and appears as the director within the film, at times interviewing and other times filming the filming of the hardcore pornography. The film also includes a discussion by de Renzy about the relative advantages of using the cheaper 8mm film over 16mm.⁴¹

(1970) and

This merging of sexual radicalism with conservative capitalist politics, in the wake of the failure of the international protest movements of 1968, became the subject of the 1971 film WR: Mysteries of the Organism, directed by the Yugoslavian Black Wave director Dusan Makavejev. The film shows how sexual liberation, following the critical debates of the late 1960s, were commodified, becoming part of the processes of marketing, advertising, branding and economic circulation. Makavejev also weaves in a hallucinatory version of Wilhelm Reichs life story, integrating excerpts of newsreel footage and interviews in parallel to a fictional story about a Yugoslavian beautician who attempts to liberate a repressed Soviet ice-skater. The director underscores Reichs passionate belief that no political or social revolution can succeed without simultaneous liberation from hang-ups about sex, love, freedom and truth. As an erotic political comedy satirising the 1970s exaggerated level of sexual freedoms, the film epitomises the state of the world immediately after the release of I Am Curious (Yellow), echoing Marcuses words:

Sexual freedom has unquestionably increased. At the same time, sexual relations

themselves have become much more closely assimilated with social relations:

sexual liberty is harmonised with profitable community. The fundamental

antagonism between sex and social utility itself the reflex of the conflict

between the pleasure principle and the reality principle is blurred by the

progressive encroachment of the reality principle on the pleasure principle...

The relaxed sexual morality within the firmly encroached system of monopolistic

controls itself serves the system. In their erotic relations, they keep their

appointments with charm, with romance, with their favourite commercials.⁴²

Although it was deemed a powerful denunciation of the Communist Party, Makavejevs film illustrated an equally unflattering and unjust life in the West, ironising both the existing socialism and capitalism of its time, and, for that matter, any kind of idea of porn-utopia. His message was that American countercultural ideas of self-realisation via sexual freedom were as short-sighted as the Yugoslavian ideals of samouprovljanje (self-management or work democracy, as the film refers to them). Marcuse recognised that the development of late capitalism would lead to the organisation of sexuality under repressive conditions and consequently to the social organisation of the sex instinct taboos in the form of perversions. He wrote:

The perversions seem to give a promesse de bonheur greater than that of normal

sexuality. What is the source of their promise? Freud emphasised the exclusive

character of the deviations from normality. The perversions thus express

rebellion against subjugation of sexuality and against the institutions which

guarantee this order. The eventual consequence is the fusion of Eros and

the death instinct that extends beyond a danger point. The perversions suggest

the ultimate identity of Eros and the death instinct or the submission of Eros

to the death instinct. The cultural task of the libido namely to make the

destructive instinct harmless here comes to naught. Civilisation has,

therefore, sanctioned danger.⁴³

Marcuses prognosis of the death instinct striving to gain ascendancy over life instincts was interesting for such film directors such as Bo A. Vibenius, who in 1973 released Thriller A Cruel Picture (also known as They Call Her One Eye). The film, featuring the then-famous centrefold star Christina Lindberg, was the first-ever film banned in Sweden, and tells the story of a young girl who takes revenge against a childhood of molestation and brutal sexual assault. Vibenius, who studied under Ingmar Bergman, created an unsettling and unglamorous account of sex with implications of cruelty, with the look and pace of an art-house film. Quentin Tarantino recognised the film as an inspiration for his Kill Bill films (2003 and 2004), expressing at the same time his interest in Scandinavian soft-porn and the way it commonly involved politics by featuring class-mixing, and Swedish soft-porn in particular with its displays of high-fashion home interiors.⁴⁴ Vibeniuss film was a commentary on the sexploitation film industry of the time, which took advantage of the freedom created by politically motivated and nevertheless provocative films, and produced reductive and simplified cultural artefacts that objectified women in the style of Playboy and Penthouse.

The consideration of sex as a weapon was instrumental for political organisations and communes such as Kommune 1 (or K1), which from 1967 to 1969 adopted a militant approach in Germany that proposed sex as a tool to combat bourgeois family values. With the increased availability of pornographic imagery within widely distributed publications, artists began to integrate this material into their production as a way to reflect counter-cultural impulses while seeking out distribution modes outside the art world. Sexfront, a collaboration between Gnther Amendt and Thomas Bayrle, was a popular leftist pamphlet produced in edition of 50,000. Masquerading as a teenage sex-education manual, Sexfront included politically motivated texts, cartoons, erotic illustrations and photo reproductions from erotic magazines, drawing upon Marcuses evaluation of the human body as commodity form:

The commodity form is universalised: it now invades formerly sanctified and

protected realms. The (female) body, as seen and plastically idealised by

Playboy, becomes desirable merchandise with a high-exchange value. This new

body image promotes sales, and the plastic beauty may not be the real thing,

but they stimulate aesthetic-sensuous needs which, in their development, must

become incompatible with the body as instrument of alienated labour. The male

body too is made the object of sexual image creation also plasticised and

deodorised ... clean exchange value. After the secularisation of religion,

after the transformation of ethics into Orwellian hypocrisy is the

socialisation of the body as sexual object perhaps one of the last decisive

steps toward the completion of the exchange society: the completion which is

the beginning of the end?⁴⁵

Whatever happened to sex in Scandinavia? In 1973, in his essay Acinema, Cinema, Jean-Franois Lyotard introduces the term Swedish posering to refer to the practice in which the erotic object is fixed and immobile, posed, locating the woman as the object of the spectators gaze to be enjoyed at distance. Lyotard writes:

Presently there exists in Sweden an institution called posering, a name derived

from the pose solicited by the portrait photographers in a practice whereby

young girls rent their services to these special houses, services which consist

of assuming, clothed or unclothed, the poses desired by the client. It is

against house rules of these houses which are not houses of prostitution for

the clients to touch the models in any way. [...] It must be seen how the

paradox is distributed in this case: the immobilisation seems to touch only

the erotic object, while the subject is found overtaken by the liveliest

agitation.⁴⁶

An increase in production and a wider network of distribution transformed pornography at the start of the 1970s into a mass-cultural genre, disrupting the relation that erotically charged material had in the past with radical movements in art or populist struggles. As Constance Penley writes her in her essay Crackers and Whackers (1997), an era of adult filmmaking was initiated, which met both with the sexual revolution and the Womens Liberation movement. But it did so countering the latter and focusing explicitly on women and their sexual odyssey, to eventually savage the middle class and professional codes of decorum, and in its raunchiness and sluttiness, to scream white trash.⁴⁷ In 1983, the filmmaker and artist Harun Farocki produced a short film titled An Image (Ein Bild), which attempts to relate how porn is manufactured. The film chronicles the process of shooting a Playboy centrefold, over the course of four days at Playboys studio in Munich. The film begins with the building of the set and follows through to the final dismantling, documenting the labour and orchestration behind the pictures. Throughout Harockis documentary, the naked model reclines in the background, anonymous, silent and still. In contrast to Lena Nyman, who in I Am Curious (Yellow) contests her manipulative, philandering and bourgeois lover by publicly displaying his potential impotency, the Playboy dream girl and, for that matter, the Lindas, Joannas and Eves fixated on throughout pornographys golden age during the 1970s becomes reinserted into a regressive, socially conservative context that lacks any subversive wit or campy grit, and which sanctions the woman back into an image, devoid of her empowerment as a political subject.⁴⁸

- Marta Kuzma