Private Vices, Public Pleasures  

"In this respect he is very much in line with such European contemporaries as Pier Paolo Pasolini in his “trilogy of life,” Walerian Borowczyk in La Marge, or Miklos Jancsô in Private Vices and Public Virtues."--The Films of Alain Robbe-Grillet (1981) by Roy Armes

"When European obscenity laws were liberalised in the late sixties and early seventies, countless auteurs wanted to push the boundaries off the map, with decidedly varying motives. Some bordered on pure prurience. Walerian Borowczyk was one of the world’s foremost avant-garde animators in the sixties; in 1977 he directed Emmanuelle ’77 and Behind Convent Walls. Others, however, mined gold in this new territory, or at least staked a claim to their own swath of ground. Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris (1972) and Oshima’s In the Realm of the Senses may be the best known taboo-busting films of the period, finding something worthwhile in the anonymous or obsessive character of the overexposed relationships of their protagonists. But there are other forgotten gems to unearth.

In Claude Chabrol’s La Rupture (1970), pornography becomes a brainwashing device, which makes for interesting parallels with Kubrick’s infinitely less restrained A Clockwork Orange (1971). Dusan Makavejev, central to the Yugoslavian Black Wave, was one of cinema’s true anarchists, and his WR: Mysteries of the Organism (1971) is an insane blend of faux Communist propaganda and documentary footage of Wilhelm Reich’s Orgone Accumulator boxes, designed to capture libidinal Orgone energy. There are dozens of other auteurs who dabbled in the sexplicit in the seventies, from Godard (Numéro Deux) to Pasolini (Salo) to Miklos Jancso (Private Vices and Public Virtues), and some, like Jean Rollin and Radley Metzger, made their careers blending soft-focus erotica with quasi-artistic agendas.

In 1980 it all stopped. The last semi-serious (to be generous) attempt before the mid-nineties was Tinto Brass’s Caligula (1980), a misguided big-budget epic produced by Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione, with Fellini’s production designer, a Gore Vidal script, and the crème of English thespianism. It was a mammoth aesthetic and commercial failure, but the hardcore art film had gone mainstream. At the dawn of the home-video age, pornography was easy to find, and screen sex was no longer radical. Arthouse sex died out quickly."[1]