The release of Sam Taylor-Johnson’s Fifty Shades of Grey offered an intriguing insight into contemporary Anglo-Saxon attitudes to erotic cinema. Pre-release, there was lively speculation as to its presumed transgressive qualities. Post-release, there was an equally keen sense of deflation at the unanticipated modesty of what the Guardian film critic Peter Bradshaw called “the most purely tasteful and softcore depiction of sadomasochism in cinema history”.
Barry Forshaw examines this complicated attitude to depictions of sex in film – a kind of simultaneous dreading and hoping to find something nasty in the sexual woodshed – in Sex and Film, his study of British, US and world cinema from the early 1900s to the present day. The skirmishes between film-makers’ desire to depict eroticism and the constraints of public morality began with the advent of moving pictures, but the battle lines were formally set with the imposition of official film censorship in 1912 in the UK and 1909 in the US.
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