Sex Films at ybca

Among Thursday's local amateur porn movies, His Father's Call-Girl is an interesting curiosity. The title, for one, seems to suggest a 1910's nudie and has little to do with the actual content of the film. In it, young lovers Larry and Lola hit the magazine rack of a Sixth Street sex bookstore. They hold pictures of naked genitalia over their mostly clothed ones, which leads to frottage, which arouses the attention of the store's proprietor, Harry. Soon they are showing huggably pervy Harry a black and white sex film they made, which we see in its entirety while Harry provides lewd commentary and offers to show them how to do it right. When he takes the amorous couple to the back room to shoot them himself, we expect to see Larry and Lola at long last go at it without the intervention of proxy privates or the remove of film-within-film, and we do. But under Harry's gleeful direction they are reduced to his pimply flesh-and-blood sex toys.

Saturday's "film", Flaming Striptease: A History of Live Sex Performance, is a bit of an enigma. I put "film" in quotes not to question its filmic pedigree, but its identity as a standalone work. It is in fact a hodgepodge of preëxisting trailers and short films including dancing girls, some involving nudity, but most considerably more innocent (sexually, if not politically). Highlights include a film of Gary Lewis and the Playboys performing (miming) Little Miss Go-Go and some other no-name group playing a medley of "do the such-and-such dance" songs poolside, both with the requisite gyrating bikinis. And both in lovely technicolor. Other bits are black and white or variously faded color, and typically cut a bit short at the ends. And that's perhaps the most interesting thing: these films are literally spliced together, not reprinted. The assemblage is a unique artifact. Flaming Striptease wasn't shown to me in its entirety, but I think I can safely say that there is no didactic thrust penetrating this time capsule of late '60's girlie gawking. And that is enough.

Also on the sex-film front (sort of):

Anna Biller's Viva (2007) is a masterpiece of retro-kink and film-fetishism (the film, probably last year's most visually arresting, was made entirely in the analog domain). This Wednesday (October 8) her 2001 short A Visit from the Incubus will screen at the Roxie as part of the Dead Channels program "Viscera & the Incubus" (whose other shorts will be video, unfortunately). While this film seems more like a monster film than a sex film, I mention it because Ms. Biller's modus operandi is so well-aligned with the FOFF agenda.