FILM.

Photo: Original frame from the 1905-1930 French film.

But Reilhac's film is more social history than pornography, showing an uninhibited side of working-class life from the beginning of the century not captured elsewhere. It gives us a relationship with long-dead people who would have otherwise only been represented by highly formal photo ]graphs, if at all. And since the average French man has always been able to look at naked women without exploding into fits of giggles or frenzied lust, The Good Old Naughty Days has been accepted in its native country as the valid historical document that it is. The story of The Good Old Naughty Days begins in the attic room of what Reilhac coyly terms "the house of a very respectable family in Paris" - so respectable that the family have remained anonymous for fear of scandal being attached to their good name. Following the death of the patriarch, relatives discovered a stash of 30 one-reel dirty movies, dating back to the turn of the century, hidden in a secret cupboard in his study. None of the family had known about the existence of these films, which were hurriedly turned over to the National Film Archive. "I was organising an international festival of film archives," says Reilhac on how he heard about the old man's private passion. "We had invited the French actor Pascal Gregory to do some programming and he wanted to screen a pornographic movie. It sounded like cheap provocation to me, but a friend mentioned these porn films from the silent days that were really funny. So I called up the National Film Archive and began to learn about this world that none of us knew about."

The films have very little in common with conventional pornography and a lot to do with the frank but double-sided attitude towards sexuality in early 20th-century France. The crew of conventional films made the blue movies on their days off: they would borrow some costumes, a camera and a reel of film, find the nearest whorehouse and pay a couple of prostitutes a few francs to star alongside them in comic but extremely explicit sexual farces. The prostitutes' fee made up the entire cost of the movie. One of the films, The Musketeer's Dinner, features a French infantryman who has a meal in an outdoor restaurant before two waitresses decide to make his lunch a highly memorable one.

 

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