Jess Franco's XXX Files #1: The Architecture of Porn in the realm of lethal desire. A Hardcore Sampler.

Lina Romay is the nameless object of interest of the voyeur in the apartment block across from her highrise. EL MIRON Y LA EXCIBICIONISTA is Jess Franco's sharply essay focused on the dynamics of pornographic cinema and the mise en scene which it entails. This under 60 minute hardcore actually ended up being sold in DVD format at newstands along with a flood of other once banned titles after intitally being screened in 1980s era Spanish fleapits. It opens with telezoom high angle views of residents of a high rise relaxing by a large swimming pool, recalling similar telezoom shots of a hotel pool in the 1973 FEMALE VAMPIRE.

Franco himself sometimes appears as a voyeur in his own films as in the above image from his 1975 hardcore DE SADE'S JULIETTE, which was lost after being re-edited by Italian porn king Joe D'Amato. On the other hand there's the 1976 DAS BILDNIS DES DORIANA GRAY aka DIE MARQUISE VON SADE, a film of exqsuitely composed images of refracted light and ugly hardcore porn close-ups. Art lies in the balance between "an eternal to-and-fro from lethal boredom to wild desire" or something which can't be evaluated by conventional journalist prose. In the softcore cut of the film the hardcore footage is replaced with oneiric images of Doriana smoking opium and repeatedly walking down a spiral staircase while clutching a large flower. "Nude Descending a Staircase" comes immediately to mind. Producer Erwin Dietrich claims to have never seen the hardcore cut.

DORIANA GRAY, in any of its editions, is overlain with a visual elegance which far exceeds its template LA COMTESSE NOIRE (1973), a poetically inclined film which is also titled FEMALE VAMPIRE, and which also has a longer version with hardcore inserts. The longest version of LA COMETSSE NOIRE was released as a hardbox DVD by X Rated Kult. Reflecting the lifetime cigarette habit of the director, the most interesting scenes in the 1978 hardcore COCKTAIL SPECIAL, a XXX version of EUGENIE, THE STORY OF HER JOURNEY INTO PERVERSION (1970) are scenes of the main characters sitting around smoking cigarettes. a favorite Jess Franco pastime. The nothing gained by watch the crassly filmed hardcore material except that this version ends with Eugenie having sex with her father. That outcome is presented as a "happy ending" in the otherwise fetid proceedings. This was Franco's final film for producer Robert De Nesle, who passed away the same year.

By the time the 1980s unfolded and hardcore became legal in Spain Franco was there again as director and voyeur in UNA RAJITA PARA DOS (1984), featuring micro-close ups of scat playing spies at a highrise hotel. Scenes of the cast relaxing by the swimming pool are the only relief from the relentless hardcore close ups.

Returning to hardcore with EL MIRON Y LA EXCIBICIONISTA in the mid 1980s the architecture which surrounds the hardcore close-ups is more of interest than the close-ups of genitalia. Lina Romay's exhibitionist lives in a cement apartment block fitted with huge windows through which the voyeur watches her from his adjacent cement apartment block. The architect was not Ricardo Bofill this time, but the asethetic and perceptual distance between characters. After all, Franco himself once suggested his films were about the "distance" between people.

Thanks to Francesco Cesari for sending the rare "Spanish kiosk DVD" of Jess Franco's 1985 ENTRE PITOS ANDA EL JUEGO, a delightfully airy, witty and self reflexive hardcore feature con "Candy Coster", directed by "Lulu Laverne", produced by Fernando Vidal Campos' Fervi Films. It's obvious that Franco took these micro-budgeted hardcores as seriously as his non-erotic, more mainstream, linear mid 80s Fervi Film projects. The erotic film, even hardcore, is another legitimate genre for him. A brief (approx. 70 m) venture, this is a minimalist (by necessity), almost Godardian take on the demands of Spanish hc consumers in that era. The telezoom images of high rises over Alicante [?] under the credits remind me of similar images in Godard's TWO OR THREE THINGS I KNOW ABOUT HER (1966), also about sex, architecture and is the kind of film snobs hate. The same kind of snobs who jeer at Demofilo Fidani "westerns" and Jess Franco hardcore assignations. And remember, Orson Welles also worked on at least one hardcore film late in his career.* And it's always good to see "Mona Lisa"*... . Obviously, I take a certain attitude as a default mode when dealing with Franco's hc portfolio, and this is one that bears the scrutiny.

The ever-active telezoom is used to focus on the architecture of the highrise across the plaza from the XXX action. Franco is quoted in OBSESSION: THE FILMS OF JESS FRANCO (who also list this item as a Lina Romay film "with Franco's collaboration"; I think, "ghosted" by JF) as saying at Cannes '92 that, "This film has one of the best comic sequences in the history of pornographic cinema...." Jess could never be accused of false modesty in guiding potential customers through his sideshow of hardcore.

The Agfacolor DVD print is really nice. Good luck in finding one! Stay tuned for more Jess Franco XXX Files! (C) Robert Monell,2023