1968: jo sweet and uta erickson in “daughters of lesbos”

title: daughters of lesbos, scene 2
performers: jo sweet, uta erickson
production credits: peter woodcock (dir.), max busche (d.p.)
studio: chancellor | running time: 15:00
release date: 1968 | purchase

uta erickson, jo sweet

well, i lied.

i said, in the revision of my entry for 1977 , that i wasn't going to go back any further, that i wouldn't chase girl/girl porn down to its roots in stag films, peepshow loops, and softcore skin flicks, but i can't help myself, i guess.

a few things made me reconsider. first, and most irrelevant to anyone who finds this blog later and reads it in the appropriate order, was the urgency of putting off tackling 1984, for which i have compiled such a massive longlist to whittle down from that it's just too daunting every time i think about it. going back further in time felt easier than moving forward. second and most urgently, i kept running across terrific (or at least meaningful) early porn scenes that predated my earliest cut-off date, and it felt unfair and incomplete to not give them their due. and finally, least importantly but for some reason most persuasively to me, i had edited this blog's subhed to “reviewing fifty years of girl/girl scenes,” and i was planning on ending with 2018, since i been have chronicling 2019 and onwards elsewhere. but 1972 to 2018, inclusive, is only 47 years. to be accurate, we really should start in 1969. and what the hell, throw in '68 too since i've had daughters of lesbos kicking around on my hard drive for years.

so we begin here. (and we really do, no more backdating. although i have earlier work in my collection, either it is too tame to really be considered pornography by 21st-century standards, or it's undated and probably undateable. maybe someday i'll add an appendix of worthy kinetoscopes, stag films and peepshow loops heavily sprinkled with the annotation "ca.")

daughters of lesbos is the most softcore of softcore skin flicks, in which the action barely proceeds past getting topless and gently caressing one another's arms and abdomens. it's barely porn, and almost too staid to be considered erotica even by the standards of 1968, where pulp in text form was already conjuring the most vividly depraved perversions.

filmed hardcore pornography did not legally exist anywhere in the world in 1968; there was, of course, an underground trade in anonymous, untraceable stag films, but showing unobscured genitals, let alone doing anything with or to them, was impossible for anyone who wanted to get their work seen rather than impounded. and yet there was a clear public appetite for pornography, for films that were only and exclusively about sex, even if it all took place off camera, out of frame, or by implication. it was the glory years of the international sex comedy, of the carry on franchise and lurid sexploitation potboilers and the i am curious (yellow) arthouse wing. small-time producers joined in the feeding frenzy, and one of the key fetishes that kept cropping up in these works, both because there was a proven market for it and because it spoke to certain widespread masculine fears, was lesbianism.

i'm referring, of course, to lesbianism as it existed in the 1968 pop-culture imagination rather than as a political or personal identity, and what existed in the pop-culture imagination was a roiling fever-dream composed of postwar masculine anxiety (lesbians are coming to corrupt your daughters, steal your women, undermine your authority, and render you unnecessary), of psychosexual sadomasochism (yes please to all of the foregoing, emasculate them/me harder), of dreary culture-war sensationalism (the predatory lesbian as a longstanding symbol of western cultural decadence), of bog-standard prurient interest (hey, one naked chick is great, now you're telling me i can see two of 'em?), and at its most faux-sophisticated, of indulgent, paternalistic sentimentalism (ah yes, that precious temporary waystation in the full sexual development of an adult woman).

this is the atmosphere that produced a work like daughters of lesbos, a 61-minute black-and-white movie in which there are no on-camera speaking roles. this was not unusual in the cheap junk (or indeed art) cinema of the era; silent filmmaking with a voiceover soundtrack was, for practical purposes, easier to record on the fly with readily available equipment, and could be used to obscure defects in untrained actors' performances, to spruce up banal visuals with overheated music and prose, or (at its best) to create a disjunctive, dreamlike effect in which visual and sound can act as separate trains of thought that only occasionally intersect.

not that this film reaches any such heights: it's a grubby and obviously cheaply-made little piece that opens with a meeting of sapphists, each of whom tells a story. one recounts how she was drugged and raped by a man; the second (the scene i'm including here) how her sexual experimentation led to being joyfully deflowered by an older woman; the third, how she picked up a cute hitchhiker, and the fourth, how she was masturbating thinking about that cute hitchhiker when she was attacked by the same man from the first story. the fever-pulp kicker at the end is that they have that man tied up and they are going to torture him. fade out.

director peter woodcock only has two other credits to the pseudonym: return of the secret society (also 1968) and monique, my love (1969). both use exactly the same credits card as this one, but only most of the performers are in fact the same. "jo sweet," for example, refers to an entirely different woman in secret society and monique than the thin, sharp-faced blonde that the process of elimination says she must be here, and who i have not been able to identify from any other concurrent work.

it's not jo sweet, or whatever her name is, that gives this scene its kick, though; it's norwegian softcore queen uta erickson (credited in the film as carla costa). part of this is no doubt that especially with her short wig she bears a striking resemblance to current pornstar kenzie taylor, but another part of it is that she is equal to the camera's gaze. unlike jo, who appears nervous and ill-at-ease throughout, uta has screen presence and confidence; she's excellent in the seducer role — although the voiceover is at pains to make it clear she's not a predator; jo is a willing adult, despite the youthful costuming and height difference.

once the two get down to business (in a field of tall grass that looks amazing on camera but can't have been comfortable on exposed skin) and the narrator coos rhapsodies about never wanting anything else while the jazz-combo accompaniment swells, the action is limited to some stripping and rubbing; uta buries her face in jo's ribcage as a substitute for going any lower. so as a piece of pornography it's a failure. but as a coherent aesthetic object, uniting performance, mise-en-scène, soundtrack, and theme, it's better than a whole lot of the 4k scenes that you can pause in order to count the pores on the genitals that get uploaded every day in 2023.

1968 runners up:

inger sundh and marie liljedahl in the seduction of inga, scene 5

cinemation (dir. joe sarno), 15:27

marie, inger

any overview of girl/girl softcore in the late 60s that doesn't give sexploitation maestro joe sarno's work pride of place is fooling itself. the seduction of inga was one of eight films he churned out in 1968, and there are significant girl/girl sequences in just about all of them; but his swedish work was allowed to be more dramatic than his stable of stateside performers could generally manage. here, marie liljedahl reprises her title role from the breakthrough sex melodrama inga (1967). it's late in the film; she repulses a suitor because she saw him committing incest with his daughter; he runs off and gets into a car accident; later, his daughter (played by ingrid) shows up, blaming marie for her father's death and threatening to kill her with a broken bottle of vodka; instead she kisses her. their subsequent sex is brief but, for the era, almost explicit. ingrid is in love and wants to run away together; marie agrees, but changes her mind to follow a hangdog musician to copenhagen. end credits over a pre-abba benny-and-björn number, as compulsory heterosexuality wins out in the end. a genuine filmmaker despite his tiny budgets and immense output, sarno can produce more aesthetic heat, even in dubbed english voices, than 9/10ths of his peers.

suzan landau and uta erickson in the kiss of her flesh, scene 2

afdc (dir. michael findlay), 10:09

suzan, uta

gentle, idyllic seductions as in daughters of venus have been commonplace in girl/girl porn for fifty years; more plot-oriented, acting-forward stuff, as in the seduction of inga, is rarer, but would show up across the 70s and 80s and stage a comeback in the 2010s. for genuine batshit pulp, though, there's still nothing like the zero-grade roughies of the 60s and 70s. actor/director michael findlay and his cinematographer wife roberta (who would go on to a more extensive porn directing career) produced a series of sicko slashers in the 60s, of which the kiss of her flesh was the capper to a trilogy that starred findlay as a psychotic serial killer targeting sexually active women. uta erickson has decided to track him down and end his miserable career; but first, she visits her sister suzan landau and revives memories of the sexual games they used to play together. the findlays' shadow-saturated camera work and just-barely-screenable angles pushes this encounter to the edge of softcore; suzan even simulates a fairly credible orgasm at uta's hands. the incest theme adds a sickening spice, one which would be pushed out of porn in years to come, but the findlays' control of their material makes it just a stylishly sick overlay rather than a grubbily fetishized main event.

also noteworthy:

scenes

• anna gael and essy persson in therese and isabelle, scene 5 | audubon (radley metzger)
• linda boyce and uta erickson in a thousand pleasures, scene 2 | afdc (michael findlay)
• geri miller, maria lease, and rita bennett in vibrations, scene 3 | distribpix (joe sarno)