Bringing porn to the big screen: A history of sex on film

Pornography on film has been around nearly as long as moving pictures themselves. The oldest surviving pornographic movie dates back to 1886, a mere year after moving pictures were developed. Since that time, sex on film has had a long and often controversial history.

When movies first began to have public showings, prior to the outbreak of World War I, there was an atmosphere of relative freedom. Advanced Filmmaking Professor Charlie Egelston explained, "The average American was beginning to turn to the silver screen to fulfill their sexual fantasies. Hollywood began to symbolize a new sexual 'openness' both on the screen and in the private lives of its stars."

Things changed in the post-war years, however. "Into the 1920s, social factors such as prohibition and the post-WWI depression contributed to a more 'right'-leaning public opinion, and given the types of films Hollywood studios were producing at the time it was obvious that they were falling out of touch with the paying patrons of their films. If the early days of American cinema had been rooted to the raunchy 'turns' of a Vaudevillian production, the later part of the silent era saw the birth of cinema as a form of middle-class art," Egelston said.

The 1920s experienced a boost in public showings of pornographic films. Brothels often featured back rooms, places where men could go and watch porn for a small fee.

In 1930, after a number of incidents, including the arrest and murder trial of silent film star Fatty Arbuckle and the rise of the Catholic Legion of Decency (whose purpose was to combat objectionable content in films), mainstream movie producers took action. "(They) hired an outsider — William Hays (a Republican politician) — to lead the first real attempt to self-regulate or censor the world's largest film industry," Egelston said. Hays suggested a censorship code that had specific guidelines in terms of sexual content. Among the acts banned on screen when the code was implemented in 1934 were scenes of adultery, passion and seduction.

It wasn't until the sexual revolution of the 1960s that porn became more widely accepted and that the mainstream industry ditched the Hays Code. During the 1960s, America legalized sex specialty shops and granted them permission to screen porno flicks to adult customers.

When the VCR and home videos achieved mass popularity in the 1980s, pornography on tape followed suit. Customers could now buy pornographic films and view them in the comfort of their own homes, instead of in a seedy, crowded back room. The 1980s also brought the rise of California's porn industry, which, according to the BBC, produces 85 per cent of the world's pornographic films, generating billions of dollars in revenue.

In 1993 when the Internet went live, the medium of porn was changed yet again. Full downloadable films, streaming videos and a vast amount of clips were now available at the click of a mouse.

And what about sex in mainstream films? The censorship code in Hollywood has now been replaced by film ratings, a less strict set of rules for showing sex on film. There have always been films that seemed to sneak past the rating boards and show us more, particularly in the 1979 film Pink Flamingos, which features multiple sex acts, and the more recent Zach and Miri Make A Porno, in which director Kevin Smith has admitted that a shot featuring full female nudity was not noticed by the raters.

Now, with the advent of smartphones and laptops, and Internet access available virtually everywhere, pornography videos are fully accessible any time and any place. A stark contrast from its humble beginnings, pornography is accessible to the masses at their convenience. Who know where porn will head next...