November 8, 2004 Why Include Porn?

Readers have asked why I include a few porn films in my survey. Well, why not? They are cinematic, at least the ones I include. And they are watched; a lot.

Sure, they are goofy in terms of content and usually downright awful so far as production values. But if I judged that way, we'd have a very short list.

Seriously, the whole point is to discover narrative patterns in film. 70s and 80s porn films — some of them — are every bit as folded as other lousy mainstream films. What I'm after, the very core, is sophisticated narrative structure that is so easily understood it finds itself in all sorts of movies, even porn.

"Private Teacher" is a great example of folded filmmaking in porn, created by a collaborator of Orson Welles.