When I think about cinema, movies and film festivals, porn isn’t the first thought that comes to mind. Porn is the film genre with most releases per year. Even though RIFF doesn’t show the same percentage of porn films in their selection, porn is part of this year’s festival. So I decided to have a porn film day starting with ‘All Boys’ a documentary about the Czech porn industry followed by ‘Final Flesh’ an artsy pornocalypse.
The Happy Porn Family
In the beginning of the documentary a consumer of gay porn says that he only gets pleasure from watching porn if the porn stars had fun making it. But how will he ever find out?
The film ‘All Boys’ accompanies a “porn family” in Prague for a few years starting in the mid-nineties. Producer Dan Komar has up to seven boys living in his house, “exclusive models“ as he calls them. Dressed up as cowboys or as sport buddies in a bowling alley, they appear in his movies, and every ridiculous storyline leads to – sex. The boys have to be available at all times, in exchange for that they get a little money and a place to live. All the exclusive models from the Czech Republic, Russia or the Baltic countries are very poor and in desperate need for a money. They join Dan’s “family“ to get the chance to have a life without poverty and maybe even make their way to the West.
The film focuses on one of Dan’s exclusive models named Ruda. Street scouts on their hunt for fresh blood, found him sleeping under a bridge. This homeless boy reminds porn producer Dan of the actor Ethan Hawke, so he renames him to Aaron Hawke and also makes him his lover. Dan doesn’t keep it a secret that boys who show him affection get some extra money. As Ruda reaches his mid-twenties he is not longer interesting to the porn industry and ends up where he came from – the streets of Prague.
‘All Boys’ shows the sad side of the porn industry, including injections in the penis for a continuous performance and general exploitation. But the one watching porn on the consumer side of this business, believes what they are told to believe: that they the porn stars are having lots of fun.
Pornocalypse
Accompanied with live music, the presentation of ‘Final Flesh’ showcased another, shall we say, special way of dealing with pornography. The porn experiment by Director Vernon Chatman, a TV producer best known as the voice of Towlie, the marijuana-smoking towel on South Park, was presented to a full house. Chatman sent bizarre scripts with cryptic dialogue to four different US-companies specialized in turning private fantasies into their own personal porno films. The basic story of the scripts: the atom bomb is about to drop and humanity’s last hour has risen.
The result I witnessed on the screen is a wild mixture of porn, trash and art elements. I saw a lot of boobs, moaning and ridiculous reasons to start having sex (you see a hard dick, but no actual intercourse though). The trashy element was provided by porn actors actually acting in a setting which looked like someone’s living room (not unlike many porn film settings). On the other hand, ‘Final Flesh’ works with a absurd, almost philosophical, concept of time, space and reality. Á la David Lynch people are remembering dreams they are going to have in the future and characters observing themselves in the next room. Watching ‘Final Flesh’ was a grotesque experience – a total mindfuck!
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