A Life in Dirty Movies (2013)
Profiling sexploitation film director Joe Sarno, A Life in Dirty Movies plays as a bittersweet eulogy not only to the man, but to the type of movies he preferred to make, namely softcore films that pushed the boundaries in the 60s but would be left behind in the 70s, upstaged by increasingly hardcore films. Aside from glancing back at his history, the documentary details an attempt to make a new film and encounters the technological havoc that the internet has been to the industry, aside from the changing tastes of consumers. So in this way, it is a quiet, slightly oblique exploration of the history of mainstream erotica/porn.
It is a pretty gentle film, dominated by Joe's wife Peggy and plenty of supportive talking heads like John Waters. This isn't a film aspiring to present a complete, warts and all, view of its subject. Sometimes this is a weakness. As much as it talks about Sarno's distaste for hardcore, it kind of buries any discussion of the dozens of hard core films he made under pseudonyms. Having seen one of his credited soft films and one of his uncredited hard films, it is actually the latter that stands out more as representing the intriguing, progressive approach Sarno took to the genre in tending to make the films centered on female character drama and female pleasure. That said, its biggest problem is that which Sarno and others note, the requirement to have a certain number and duration of explicit scenes tends to get in the way of story and threaten its ability to be viewed as artistic.
Perhaps the best thing I can say about the documentary though is that unlike Broadway Idiot which stripped my interest in seeing the featured musical, A Life in Dirty Movies did a great job in piquing my interest in watching more of Sarno's films by placing them in a particular political and social context that seems intriguing.
B
P.S. Index is now updated thanks to a major assist from 1SO.