PORNOGRAPHY: THE SECRET HISTORY OF CIVILISATION
Produced & Directed by: Fenton Bailey (Episode 5), Chris Rodley (#2 & 4), Dev Varma (#3) & Kate Williams (#1 & 6).
Series Produced by: Fenton Bailey & Randy Barbato.
Director of Photography: Ira Brenner, Sandra Chandler, Douglas Hartington, David Kempner, Robin Risely & David Scott.
Edited by: William Grayburn (#5), Robert Hargreaves (#3), Cliff Homow (#1), Kieran Smyth (# 2&4) & James Whitehorn (#6).
Music by: David Sinclair.
Released by: Koch Lorber.
Country of Origin: UK. 312 min. Not Rated.
With: Marilyn Chambers, John Leslie, Lasse Braun, Seymore Butts, David Horavitch, Marc Warren & Phyllis Roome.
Narrated by: Marilyn Milgrom.
DVD Features: Koch Vision Online website connection DVD-ROM. Trailers.

Though ours is supposedly a liberated age, puritan values constantly play out on the cultural landscape. In fact, according to this frequently insightful 1999 British TV documentary, society’s stigmatization of erotic images developed historically as a way of regulating carnal knowledge. While being deemed unsuitable for women, children, and the lower classes, erotica would be available to a privileged elite, who were thought to be of strong enough moral fiber not succumb to an inevitable inducement of depravity. Given such hypocrisy, and that pornography has today become a billion-dollar global industry, this two-disc series traces in a compellingly resonant fashion pornography’s evolution as a business that has popularized technological innovations.

The series is most fascinating when discussing the encounter that ensued after Europeans discovered the ruins of Pompeii in the mid-18th century. Forced to grapple with abundantly public images and objects commonplace in ancient Roman culture depicting bestiality and other sexual activities considered taboo to even discuss, Victorians systematically categorized the findings in “secret museums,” thereby setting the stage for the new genre of pornography.

However, the section chronicling the rise of pornographic motion pictures is unfocused, due to the juxtaposition of adult industry figures in long, rambling tangents alongside more abstractly conceptual interviews. This aimlessness might result from the doc’s appealing to an overly wide audience and being enthused with, rather than detached from, its subject. The enthusiasm works when conveyed less heavy-handedly, in the form of lively explanations by such scholars as John Clarke and Simon Goldhill, both appearing in the program’s first episode, or the evocative readings of writings from the French Revolution era and the Marquis de Sade.

Unfortunately, the series, while offering some flashes of genuinely refreshing perspectives on the industry, features elements that just end up being distracting: ominous-sounding music; gestures by some of the intellectual commentators that feel forced (such as two, an art historian and a writer, who appear naked or semi-naked, making it difficult to take what they say seriously); and a reenactment of amateur adult video that feels so glossily executed that it belies the documentary’s stated reason for video porn’s popularity: that it strikes the viewer as authentically raw. The developments relating to video and the Internet could have been covered succinctly in one episode, instead of two. (Furthermore, there are, inexplicably, no subtitles translating the remarks of some French historians.) Finally, any history of porn that omits a section on the Playboy empire cannot be considered truly exhaustive. Reymond Levy
March 7, 2006