Killing For Culture – David Kerekes

The people weren’t “actors”, and you could tell right away: which porn actress would be hanged by her tits — and look like she’s into it? The movies obviously showed a dynamic, a relationship, and an action that would probably happen even if the camera wasn’t there. The shooting style was more documentaristic than porno, and it would occasionally zoom in to capture faces, not crotches.

The overall package, from the stark boxes to the bare credits and the abrupt ends, smelled like underground…32 Slightly less bare-bones and with the semblance of plot is Born to Raise Hell (1976), which revolves around homosexual men. Conceived and directed by Roger Earl, and taking as its inspiration Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising (1963), the film opens with the disclaimer that all scenes are performed by professional actors and that the theatre management ‘is not responsible for any psychological effects it may have on you as a viewer’.

A group of tattooed, leather-clad guys take their victims (identified as ‘police informants’) and suspend them upside down or tie them across a pool table. They drive studded dildos into their anal passages, which are then fixed in the chuck of a hand-drill and rotated. Steel hose-grips are slipped over cock and balls, then tightened with a screwdriver until the recipient urinates in pain/fear/excitement. There are many similarly outrageous loops from this time period,33 including some by Lasse Braun, as described earlier.34 But as puzzling and revolting as these films may appear to anyone outside of their designated audience, they nonetheless incorporate paid performers; celluloid prostitutes doing their thing for the right amount of financial incentive.

Or, in some cases, for kicks. Any physical harm being inflicted has been anticipated by the performers in the same way a boxer will tolerate the consequences of a twelve-round hell-for-leather bout.35 efore becoming a noted photographer of erotica, Richard Kern was an independent filmmaker, whose work, if not dissimilar, was altogether more edgy in tone.

He said of his film The Evil Cameraman (1990), “I wanted to make something ‘real’, you know? The Jap girl at the beginning of the film was scared. I didn’t tell her what was going to happen. It was an exercise in power, I guess.” Out of the New York punk scene in the late seventies emerged a small group of people who would turn their hand, and friends, to the Super 8 camera.

hroughout the history of film, a prurient imbalance has existed between observer and observed, driving the spools in the shadowy projection box. Since the dawn of cinema, images of death and destruction have run alongside the underground trade in explicit sex. At the turn of the nineteenth century, viewing boxes, such as the Kinetoscope, were found in penny arcades and dime museums, and any other place of leisure where crowds might gather.1 Popular testimony presents these peepshows as a form of vice, much as it would cinema that followed (and any form of popular entertainment after that).

A crank of the handle provides the lone spectator with a saucy diorama, a woman dancing, perhaps. But it might also offer scenes depicting calamity or a public execution. Cecil M. Hepworth’s Explosion of a Motor Car (1900), for instance, is a blackly comic film in which the passengers of the titular vehicle are blown sky-high. A police officer assesses the damage and collects body parts when eventually they return to Earth. There is nothing comic about Execution of a Chinese Bandit (1904), however, a scene showing the actual beheading of a criminal outside Mukden, China.

There was also a vogue for period drama and the re-enactment of historic executions, with scenes of female subjects put to death among them. In Joan of Arc (1895) and The Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots (1895) we witness a grave comeuppance for two women of strength and character, perhaps indicative of attitudes toward the fledgling women’s suffrage movement at the time of their production.2 Both these films were made by Thomas Edison and his Edison Manufacturing Company.

The Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, at approximately eighteen seconds, is presented in the manner of a stage drama. The deposed monarch is brought to kneel at a chopping block in front of a small crowd (we have prime position) and her head unceremoniously lopped off with a swift blow of the executioner’s axe. The head (replaced by a facsimile) bounces to the floor, before being retrieved by the executioner and held aloft for the audience to see. The ruthlessly entrepreneurial Edison, who has taken much credit for early cinema, produced many films of this stripe (essentially exploitation films).

This is a short excerpt from the opening of “” by Unknown, quoted for review and introduction purposes. All rights belong to the copyright holders.

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