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Reviewed by:
  • Lewd Looks: American Sexploitation Cinema by Elena Gorfinkel
  • Hilary Radner
Lewd Looks: American Sexploitation Cinema. By Elena Gorfinkel. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017. Pp. 320. $112.00 (cloth); $28.00 (paper).

Lewd Looks: American Sexploitation Cinema by Elena Gorfinkel joins a small number of scholarly publications that seek to understand the ways in which moving image technologies (from medical imaging to home movies) have been put to use outside cinema as a socioeconomic institution that scholars typically define as centered around the feature-length fiction film and theatrical release. Gorfinkel argues that “sexploitation films”—a form of soft-core pornography addressing adult males in the period roughly between 1960 and 1970, later to be replaced by hard-core feature-length films—are “documents of changing attitudes regarding gender and sexuality and manifestations of ideological resistance to these nascent transformations” (16). She explains that they “elaborated excessive scenarios of social change represented through changes in sexual practices” (7). The volume thus focuses on the film text, positing the sexploitation film as a symptom of a changing society in which the transformation of sexual mores under the influence of social movements such as the sexual revolution and second-wave feminism played a fundamental role. The thread provided by this particular argument constitutes a strong unifying element that pulls together Gorfinkel’s broadly based reflections on the sexploitation film, offering an irrefutable justification for her interest in this genre—a genre (or cycle) that has been largely ignored by film studies scholars as outside a canonical definition of cinema while being treated as inconsequential ephemera by most historians.

The volume is both thematic and chronological in organization. Chapter 1, “Producing Permissiveness: Censorship, Obscenity Law, and the Trials of Spectatorship,” offers a history of industry practices and their relations with “regulatory and censorship” bodies. Chapter 2, “Peek Snatchers: Corporeal Spectacle and the Wages of Looking, 1960–65,” describes “the shift from the early-1960s ‘cutie nudies’ . . . to the darker, more violent variegations in the mid- to late-1960s films, often called ‘roughies’” (25). Chapter 3, “Girls with Hungry Eyes: Consuming Sensation, Figuring Female Lust, 1965–1970,” traces the evolution of the “roughie” as it comes to depict “forms of sexual ‘deviance,’ such as lesbianism and sadomasochism,” and to reflect “the countercultural zeitgeist of more liberatory attitudes,” resulting in subgenres such as “swinger films” (25). [End Page 159]

A recurrent concern in both chapter 2 and chapter 3 revolves around what Gorfinkel describes as the ways in which “the sexploitation films consistently allegorized their conditions of reception” (196). Gorfinkel hypothesizes that this self-conscious reflection on the nature of sexuality and its relations to seeing and being seen, underlined by the cinematic medium, constituted a response to a prevailing anxiety about the emergence of a new sexual culture. These new practices and attitudes accorded female desire a more prominent place than it had historically enjoyed and encouraged women to participate more actively in pursuing their own sexual satisfaction.

Chapter 4, “Watching an ‘Audience of Voyeurs’: Adult Film Reception,” reflects upon attitudes toward these films during the decade in which they dominated the adult movie market and details the shift from soft-core to hard-core feature-length films in the early 1970s, a development that led to the demise of the sexploitation film. Gorfinkel quotes noted film reviewers Andrew Sarris and Richard Corliss in order to highlight what she feels is the inherent utopianism of the sexploitation film. She explains that “Sarris’s ode to the ‘golden days’ of sexploitation as a unique node of 1960s filmgoing experience and Corliss’s lament for the fundamentally romantic and narratively driven experience of sexploitation” foreshadowed the subsequent discovery of the genre by a range of cinephiles (243).

This position, which ultimately valorizes the sexploitation film, is reiterated in the volume’s conclusion, “Skin Flicks without a Future?,” and suggests an unresolved problem inherent in Gorfinkel’s methodology: she approaches the films as film texts, as opposed to as a specific experience—by a group of men gathered together briefly in order to enjoy some form of sexual arousal and satiation within a limited time frame—in which the film itself may have...

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