Tessa Hughes-Freeland’s “Baby Doll” is a tiny slice of cinéma vérité from 1982 about the girls working the now defunct Baby Doll Lounge on Church and White St. in downtown Manhattan. It captures a moment before NYC got sanitized.
A group of physicians sets out on an international expedition to study the causes and spread of sexually transmitted diseases. Through encounters across Europe and Africa, the film examines how modern lifestyles, social change, and human behavior intersect with public health. Presented as a semi-documentary drama, it delivers a stark warning about a global medical and moral challenge.
Hilariously bogus “documentary on the film capital of the world” inspired by the Italian mondo movie genre. A look at adult book stores, grindhouses, strip joints, “Figure Model Photography Studios” and midnight pool parties. This is more cynical sexploitation from director Lee Frost and producer Bob Cresse, the loveable hucksters.
A documentary on the island off the French Riviera where ‘bathing in the buff’ isn’t just practiced, it’s highly encouraged!
A Norwegian exploitation travel documentary in color from 1952.
The definitive documentary on the history of nudity in feature films from the early silent days to the present, studying the changes in morality that led to the use of nudity in films while emphasizing the political, sociological and artistic changes that shaped that history. Skin will also study the gender inequality in presenting nude images in motion pictures and will follow the revolution that has created nude gender equality in feature films today.
A group of transgender individuals are struggling to make their way in every stratum of 1980s America. From finding employment to finding acceptance, the first question the world forces them to ask is always, “What Sex Am I?”
A visual exploration into the origins of witchcraft in the UK and in particular the demystification of symbolism still embedded today within many modern religious artefacts and rituals. X-rated upon its original release, this documentary looks in detail at previously hidden magic rites and rituals. Sharing the secrets of initiation into a coven, divination through animal sacrifice, ritual scrying, the casting of a ‘death spell’, and the chilling intimacy of a Black Mass.
Very rare mondo-style film in which a psychiatrist explains to his students several stories of sexual deviants. Each vignette begins with the doctor citing a fact-based newspaper/magazine story of abhorrent sexual behavior.
Jayne takes us on a review of her last world tour. She takes us through Rome, shares a fantasy about Roman athletes, and then is off to Cannes. She takes a trip to the nudist colony on the Isle of Levant, where she almost kind of joins in. Then it’s off to Paris, where she gets a beauty treatment from Fernand Aubrey, and attends some racy dance revues. In New York and Los Angeles, she visits some topless clubs and listens to a topless all-girl pop band. The film wraps up with some posthumous footage of her family in mourning.
A stark and graphic portrayal of the conditions that existed at the State Prison for the Criminally Insane at Bridgewater, Massachusetts, and documents the various ways the inmates are treated by the guards, social workers, and psychiatrists.
Before there were home video formats and the internet, the “Bahnhofskinos” (“Train station cinemas”) in West Germany regularly showed trash and erotica movies. Various filmmakers and especially contemporary witnesses recount in the documentary “Cinema Perverso – the wonderful and broken world of Bahnhofskino” their experiences and impressions.
The film is a study of Anton Szandor LaVey, leader of a cult of devil worshipers in San Francisco. He and his Church of Satan are shown performing a black mass, in which a nude woman serves as an altar and a boa constrictor wraps itself around a naked witch. Newsreel footage is included in which LaVey’s neighbors are interviewed about the lion which he kept in his house until complaints resulted in the animal’s removal to a zoo. The ideology of the Church of Satan is discussed–guilt rejection, sexual freedom, and self-indulgence.
Experimental film that, through two narrative lines—dance and photography—reimagines The House of Bernarda Alba by Federico García Lorca.
A castle on a island: while television broadcasts ridiculous images of the presidential campaign, three characters – a couple and a visitor – exchange radical views on France, cinema, censorship and the proletarian world revolution.
