Bondage blog pointed me at a long but fascinating interview with John Blakemore. He was one of the very early producers of bondage movies back in the 70’s, shooting stuff for HOM and Cal-Star. The original material was before my time, but various stills and fuzzy video clips have been floating around on usenet for years.
All his movies are M/f and a world away from any kind of female dominant aesthetic. However, for anyone interested in the history of porn and BDSM, it’s an informative glimpse behind the scenes and back in time. As he makes clear, he was operating in isolation, in very murky legal territory and with old fashioned technology.
At the time, the laws in the United States prohibited any form of penetration, or sex with bondage, or actual torture and so I made these films expressly for the European market, to be taken out of the country. They were not even edited here. I had to hand deliver the raw footage. It was never out of my possession. I put it in Barbara’s hands; she in turn put it in the hands of someone from Europe. And even then, it was probably risky, although the film had not yet even been developed. It was raw footage that had not yet been developed. And it went out of the country and it did not come back. I was rather shocked to find out a couple years ago that some of this stuff is available.
While I do find it fascinating, it’s not an interview that makes me warm to the man. His approach and attitude comes across as pretty disturbing. He’s not big on concepts like SSC (Safe, Sane and Consensual) and some of his views are fairly ludicrous.
The simple fact of the matter is that in the Western world for the last 2000 years, if you take a young man that’s full of testosterone…and you put him in a situation where he has the place, the equipment and the ability to do anything to a gorgeous young woman that he wants to, with absolutely no repercussions of any kind, he will torture her and rape her.
Clearly technical issues areas like picture quality and the production values aren’t the only things that have improved since the bad old days of BDSM porn.
Given his work is all male dominant, I’m not going to feature any shots from it here. Fortunately he mentions the artist Bishop in the interview, who also used to do work for HOM. That therefore gives me an excuse to feature some of his wonderful artwork.
paltego,
Very interesting. Never realized he had such a view on BDSM. Thank goodness we’ve made progress in that regard.
Thanks for sharing your “research.”
Suzanne
Hi Suzanne,
Glad you found it interesting. In some ways I have sympathy, given he pretty much had to make up an approach as he went a long, working in isolation and without the internet or local groups. I think a lot of the progress we’ve made has been a result of all free communication mechanisms we now have (like this one for example). On the other hand some of the comments (like the one I quoted) are pretty crazy whatever the context.
But whatever the personalities involved, I always find it fascinating to read this kind of historical background to people working in the sexual taboo area’s of their day.
-paltego