Sex-Positive Films

Two excellent essays

This and your essay on "Unsimulated Sex in Mainstream Film" get right to the problems of expressing eroticism on film. The movie that, in my opinion, best solves the problem is "Last Tango in Paris." It has an actor, Marlon Brando, who is able to express his own sexual feelings, drives, hangups through the character, and a director, Bernardo Bertolucci, who structures the film so he can do it. As critic Pauline Kael put it in her famous review, they bring "realism with the terror of actual experience still alive on the screen." It's extraordinarily intimate, extraordinarily real (when I first saw it, I was stunned, thinking "I didn't know that anyone else knew this.") Instead of being estranged from the action on screen, which, as you say in your other essay, is what happens when other actors have sex in front of a camera (you find yourself watching the actors having sex, not the characters), you're pulled into it. That no one else has been able to do anything near it since shows how rare the talent of a Brando is.