FILM

 It was made during the filming of a 1920 film, The Three Musketeers, in the Paris suburb of Redon, and its happy star would have been a jobbing electrician or a cameraman taking advantage of his boss's day off. The men and women who took part in the films were not professional actors. They had no concept of the camera as something that could make their image live outside of themselves - there is none of the self-consciousness that you might have expected because they had no idea that anyone would ever see these films, and they did not have the relationship with a camera that we have today. The most artful it gets is the way the women make themselves alluring by arching their arms behind their head and languidly reclining on sofas; a likely nod to Manet's nudes of the same period.

 Photos: Original frames depicting erotic scenes and lovemaking from the quasi homemade French film at the dawn of the twentieth century. And today, this forgotten film has been recognized as the first erotic, intellectual porno masterpiece!

"The films give a perspective on our great-grandparents' attitudes to sex, which were that it's very much like eating and drinking," says Reilhac. "Sexual desire was a natural thing, and whatever was at hand to satisfy that desire was fair game." The films poke fun at authority figures. In 1925's Abbot Bitt at the Convent two nuns forget their sacred vows over a church altar; a youth spies on them through a hole in the wall and when Abbott Bitt arrives to discover this sacrilegious scene he starts buggering him. In 1920's School Spanking a teacher finds novel ways of disciplining her girls, before the headmaster arrives to prove himself equally ill-equipped to restore order While lesbian scenes are often provided for the titillation of straight men in modern porn films, homosexual ones are rare. But these films were an extension of the clandestine world of the brothel, where society's conventions were overturned. At a time when there was no formal concept of homosexuality as a lifestyle choice, most brothels offered young men as well as women. And the films show strong women in control, leading the way, and apparently taking as much pleasure as the men. Perhaps inevitably, the films were co-opted by the brothels themselves. Knowledge of the blue movies filtered out through the prostitutes borrowed from the huge Parisian whorehouses that the vast majority of French men visited. The brothels were a legal and important part of society that was accepted if not necessarily talked about, and most men had two sexual lives: with their wives and with their prostitutes. As young men were expected to know what to do with their (in theory) virgin brides come the wedding night, elder relatives would take them to the brothel to receive their sexual education. There are letters from Marcel Proust to his grandfather in which the great novelist complains of his father's refusal to fund his weekly visit to the whorehouse. The films were to provide an important function for those yet to be initiated into the sexual life. "The films started to be shown in Paris brothels," explains Reilhac.