RE-PRESENTING
SEX WORK
by
Elizabeth Bernstein
Even
in an unlikely place, it is possible to find traces of recent history.
--William E. Jones, "The Fall of Communism as Seen in Gay " Pornography
We are living in a cultural moment in which representations of the sex trade abound. While the figure of the prostitute has been a staple of American and international cinema for over seventy years--from Shanghai Express (1932) to Belle du Jour (1967) to Pretty Woman (1991)--the last decade has produced an unprecedented spate of images and narratives about sexual commerce.
Hollywood has, of course, played a key role in this, churning out films like Leaving Las Vegas (1995), Jade (1995), Showgirls (1995), Striptease (1996), The People vs. Larry Flynt (1997), and Boogie Nights (1997)--to name but a few. Meanwhile, independent filmmakers have been no less interested in the sex industry, and have often focused on aspects of the business that extend beyond the usual hetero-normative bounds--e.g. My Own Private Idaho (1992), Star Maps (1997), Johns (1997). Finally, enterprising documentarians have issued exposes ofvarious facets of the industry, such as Stripped Bare: A Look at Exotic Dancers (1988), The MaleEscorts of San Francisco (1992) and Fetishes (1996). With such an abundance of material, it becomes important to be able to sort out the insightful from the vacuous, and the artistically innovative from the unreflexively sensationalistic.
The
San Francisco Sex Worker Film and Video Festival breaks new ground, not
only by presenting us with a vast array of new, original, insightful and
innovative material, but also by being only the second film festival to
feature numerous works produced, directed, scripted, and acted by women
and men who have themselves worked in the industry (the first sex
worker film festival was held in Portland, earlier this year). As
Annie Sprinkle has written, "The sex industry is actually a very large
funder of the arts, probably several times bigger than the NEA."
This means that there are a lot of people who are now well situated to
be at once the authors and the subjects of commercial sex-work depictions.
The Festival provides a forum for these industry veterans to represent
their own professional and personal lives.
Of
the narrative works presented at the festival, perhaps the most stunning
is Gun for Jennifer (1996), the 35 mm feature presentation. Gun for
Jennifer was directed by Todd Morris, and scripted and produced by Deborah
Twiss--a former stripper. Evocative of Russ Meyer's Faster Pussycat,
Kill, Kill (1966), the film melds irony, humor and righteous political
diatribe to tell the tale of a band of feminist stripper-vigilantes.
Though the violence is often brutal and graphic, it is never gratuitous.
Rather, it is in the service of generating a strong emotional response
in the viewer, and then channeling those sentiments into a highly focused--and
deeply political--rage. The film might even produce a nostalgia for
a second-wave feminist political ethos that, in the 1990's, has all but
disappeared. In many ways, Gun for Jennifer harkens back to earlier
decades of feminist militancy, when "women" and "men" were regarded as
more or less homogenous categories, when male systemic privilege was not
only questioned but strongly resented, and when there was a viable, strident
(and angry!) feminist movement ready to be mobilized.
Powerful,
too, is Machiko Saito's experimental film, Premenstrual Spotting (1997).
Saito's piece is an unusually imaginative and emotionally compelling account
of one "good girl"gone "bad." Snapshots of childhood innocence are
interspersed with footage of Saito's contemporary high-femme drag, alcoholism,
and elaborate sexual experimentation.
The Festival's documentary films are extremely diverse in both substance and style. The second feature presentation, Cass Paley and Chris Rowland's Wadd: the Life and Times of John C. Holmes (1998), provides an exceptionally thorough history of the rise and fall of the famed porn-star, while recounting the emergence of the American hardcore film industry. Through meticulous interviewing and research, Wadd reveals many of the uglier truths--battery, pimping,addiction, infirmity--that lurk beneath the glossy surface of a film like Boogie Nights. Annie Sprinkle's Herstory of Porn (1999), co-directed by Festival director Carol Leigh, provides a more heterodox--and at times, quite amusing--socio-hstory of three decades of hardcore film-making. Leigh's original documentary style can also be seen in her witty exploration of women and auto-erotica, Masturbation Memoirs(1995).
Other
sex industry documentaries of particular merit include Hima B's Straight
for the Money: Interviews with Queer Sex Workers (1994) and Susana Aikin
and Carlos Aparicio's The Salt Mines (1990). Both films provide windows
into facets of the industry that are often ignored: largely middle-class
lesbian and bisexual women in the former case--and Hispanic transgendered
street prostitutes in the latter. Angie Coffin's heterosexual strip-club
documentary, Behind the Door: Inside a Gentleman's Club (1998), retraces
some familiar terrain, but includes rare interviews with male sex-club
managers and clients. Fascinating, too, is Michelle Handelman's Blood
Sisters (1995), a documentary exploration of the (not-specifically-commercial)
San Francisco leather dyke scene.
The
hot-button issue of the moment, global trafficking, is treated provocatively
by Ellen Bruno's Sacrifice (1998)--on the trafficking of Burmese girls
to Thailand--and by the Global Survival Network's Bought and Sold (1997)--on
the trafficking of women from the former Soviet Union into the West.
The latter, in particular, features some highly adventurous investigative
reporting, with the film-makers going undercover as would-be traffickers,
learning from those in the industry where to go, who to bribe, and what
to pay in order to set up and maintain an illegal business. It should be
noted that the film constructs the Russian Mafioso as the sex industry's
new arch-villain--a symbolic position formerly occupied by the African-American
pimp. .William E. Jones's The Fall of Communism as Seen in Gay Pornography
(1998) similarly deals with the implications of Soviet collapse for
sexual cultures. Though analytically sparse, it provides striking
footage of the emergence of the gay pornography industry in the former
Eastern bloc.
Finally, the terrifying impact of the U.S. prison-industrial complex is presented implicitly in Carol Jacobsen's Street Sex (1993)--based on interviews with just-busted-and-released Detroit street prostitutes--and more overtly in Carol Leigh's Blind Eye to Justice: HIV + Women Incarcerated in California (1998), narrated by Angela Davis. The film is replete both with gripping interviews and devastating statistics ("Women constitute the fastest growing population of prisoners...72% of women are incarcerated for drug and property offenses...African Americans constitute 46% of the population of women prisoners, but only 12% of the national population").The film packs a punch in its 34 minutes, constituting a incredibly moving cry for action.
If
the figure of "the prostitute" has been so compelling in this era, it may
be precisely because she (almost always, she) has stood-in for broader
cultural anxieties: globalization, changes in gender roles and kin networks,
the specters of social disorder and crime. The films presented at
the San Francisco Sex Worker Film and Video Festival make thse linkages
explicit,transforming sex-workers from empty Hollywood icons into complex,
contradictory, and historically-rooted beings.
3