Herstory of Porn:Reel to Reel

Annie Sprinkle's Herstory of Porn: Reel to Real
Based upon the stage show directed by Emilio Cubeiro

Director: Annie Sprinkle & Scarlot Harlot
Category: Documentary/Sex Education
Running Time: 69 minutes

Reviewer: Olivia de Court

Annie Sprinkle's "Herstory of Porn: Reel to Real" chronicle's Annie Sprinkle's nearly three decades in the Adult Entertainment Industry. The style of the film is essentially Art House Theatre with Annie's typically amusing and penetrating repartee interjected amongst dozens of film clips projected behind her. There is a campy, light-hearted interaction with the audience and the camera throughout the film, helping to make the occasionally disquieting subject matter to go down a bit easier.

The film begins with Annie's clips and recollections of her work in porn films in the 1970's. It is mostly your run of the mill, low budget male-centered porn out- takes. What makes them highly entertaining is Annie's narration. As the montage of images of her early work progresses, the subject matter becomes more, well . . . kinky, sometimes extremely so. The most disturbing for me was the rape scenes. Annie discusses her rape fantasies and finds that when one of the scenes got "out of hand," she became very frightened and has never had a rape fantasy since. This section of the film includes, massive dildos, vomiting, dwarfs, labia piercing, you name it. As I was viewing this portion I thought to myself, "Some of my fellow feminist friends would go completely mad over this." Just then, Annie interjected that this is a long journey and to stay with her as there will be a resolution point (Annie is a long-time feminist activist). She also discusses the First Amendment of the U. S. Constitution at this point, lest we forget what the alternative would be to not allowing such material to be produced and consumed.

As we follow Annie into the 1980"s, there is a distinctive shift in the tone of her work. There are two memorable scenes at this stage; one is from Annie's film "Deep Inside Annie Sprinkle." This was the first known "Porn Film" to be produced by a woman, and not just any woman - it's Annie herself! The scene involves her going into a seedy porn theatre to view one of her films. She sits near several men and starts to masturbate. The expressions on the men's faces are priceless. You can guess what follows I'm sure. The other scene is a very intense vibrator orgasm. Annie contrasts this femme-centered orgasm with women's orgasms, if you can find them, in standard male-porn fare. Then it's off to New Age Sex; tantric cum spiritual orgasms. There is a nice clip from a film Annie did with Candida Royalle, another great girlphoria.com pioneer (see our interview with Candida in this issue), and a lot of San Francisco, post hippie imagery. There are some very nice erotic art stills, mostly Asian if memory serves, cut into the sequence.

The 1990s bring the devastation of AIDS and Annie's work to bring safe sex to the porn film industry. She admits, regretfully, failure here though from this point on, all of her films feature safe sex. Brava Annie!. The male porn establishment never picked up the theme, "living to fuck another day." There are once again scenes that could cause brief upset for the squeamish here. Blood sports, Shemale/Transexual sex, Post Nuclear sex, Female Group Masturbation and toys (read dildos) are featured. Annie discusses her rebirth as a lesbian and the concept of "Meta-bation" (masturbation as meditation). Now that's a spiritual concept I can go with, or cum with, as the case may be.

In one of the final clips, there is a lovely erotic Mermaid scene where she passes the torch to her teenaged protege' to carry on the fight for Freedom of girlphoria.com Expression. In summing up her career in the Adult Entertainment Industry Annie quips, "If you've got to work, it's not a bad job. . ." She goes on to say, ". . . the answer to really bad porn is not no porn but to try to make better porn." I'll drink to that. Cheers Annie!