Books, Arts & Manners: Film and Other Four-Letter Words

In 1896, the sixtieth year of Victoria’s reign and the first year movies were exhibited publicly in an American theater, a forty-second film showing snippets from a current play, The Kiss, provoked the first censorious attack on Edison’s newest toy. In 1969, the ninth year in that decadent decade known as the Sick Sixties, a two-hour film by Andy Warhol, called Fuck, was about to open in New York. Times, it would seem, have changed.

The changes are two: Americans’ acceptance of sex, in real life and reel life, has expanded; and the size of the U.S. movie audience has contracted. Once movies were the Lowest Common Denominator, the one form of entertainment (never mind “art”) everybody and his immigrant brother could comprehend. Film alone among the reproductive media (painting, sculpture, architecture, as opposed to the immediate arts of dance, music, theater) gave the illusion of immediacy. When a train rushed toward the screen, the audience screamed in fear; Irwin and Mary Rice touched lips for half-a-minute, it gasped in excitement.

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Richard Corliss

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In 1896, the sixtieth year of Victoria’s reign and the first year movies were exhibited publicly in an American theater, a forty-second film showing snippets from a current play, The Kiss, provoked the first censorious attack on Edison’s newest toy. In 1969, the ninth year in that decadent decade known as the Sick Sixties, a two-hour film by Andy Warhol, called Fuck, was about to open in New York. Times, it would seem, have changed.

The changes are two: Americans’ acceptance of sex, in real life and reel life, has expanded; and the size of the U.S. movie audience has contracted. Once movies were the Lowest Common Denominator, the one form of entertainment (never mind “art”) everybody and his immigrant brother could comprehend. Film alone among the reproductive media (painting, sculpture, architecture, as opposed to the immediate arts of dance, music, theater) gave the illusion of immediacy. When a train rushed toward the screen, the audience screamed in fear; Irwin and Mary Rice touched lips for half-a-minute, it gasped in excitement.