kvarterakademisk - Akademisk kvarter - Aalborg Universitet

akademiskacademic quarterkvarterDoes the Porn Star Blush?Charlie BlakeBeth Johnsonthe first line as fantasy: ‘One day O’s lover takes her to a placethey’ve never gone before – Parc Monceau – Parc Montsouris,somewhere around there. They stroll along a luminous road surroundedby dark, dangerous forests. Twilight is approaching andautumn is in the air.’ Alongside this narrative which deliberatelytaps into a schema of fairy story telling via the opening ‘One day…’(an opening address echoed by Bunuel - ‘Once upon a time’ - in UnChien Andalou) and the underspecified setting, the on-screen focusof a well-dressed couple, non-diegetic music and brilliant sunlightpoints to a lack of consensual reality. The scene is also shrouded inmist indicating a fantasy setting.A distinction between these films and modern real-sex cinema canthus be drawn on two levels: firstly, the sex represented in theseolder films is not real. Secondly, the temporal distance betweentransgressive acts/scenes in the 1970s and present day eradicatessome of the transgressive status of the films if they are consideredout of context. Despite this, such films have been instrumental in theprocess of making anew real-sex films today – films in which desiresignals excess. This excess however is not always spectacular. Indeed,excess here pertains not to a transgression but to a post-transgressivestatus. Actors in the real-sex films discussed in this articleengage in real sex as recourse to go beyond transgression – to reallyengage in an event which signals the post-transgressive status a newtype of sex on screen. As Linda Williams notes:Acting implies artifice, being precisely what one is not,though drawing on what one has been in order to createan appearance that is credible. To ‘act’ in a scene in whichthe action is sex is, in these explicit moments, to really engagein sex. (Williams, 2001, p.22)Williams observation raises once again the contemporary hesitationthat exists in both the actor and the viewer where real sex onscreen is concerned, and it is from the question of the flow of timeas image and its relation to the production of the false and the authenticas well as to the flow of images in film, that this hesitationemerges. It is a hesitation signalled by Baudrillard but never properlydeveloped, at least in part because he fails to deal in any significantway with the central image of time in the pornographicallyVolume03 203