Curious Sex and Cinema Curious Sex and Cinema Remember ...

Remember your first sight of the opposite sex's gift? Many in the Pop generation got their first peek through media?Playboy, Penthouse, but especially the movies: Zeffirelli's Romeo & Juliet, Jan-Michael Vincent in Buster and Billie, Phoebe Cates in Fast Times at Ridgemont High. I liken this release from adolescent sexual ignorance to walking on the moon?one of the key events of 1969?because that year also saw the U.S. release of the Swedish import I Am Curious (Yellow), a film that definitively opened up popular culture. In particular, it released American moviegoers from the puritanism they had held on to since Hollywood's 1930 Hays Code institutionalized hypocrisy.

In its story of a 22-year-old Swedish actress, Lena Nyman, having an affair with a director while making a film, I Am Curious (Yellow) demonstrated the era's inquisitiveness?a sign of a young adult waking up to the world as the world wakes up to itself. Lena goes through the film asking questions about politics ("Is there a class system in Sweden?" "Does non-violence solve anything?") while conducting her own, personal, explicit sexual survey before Vilgot Sjoman's camera. Lena's inquiries struck a chord. Her curiosity turned out to also be America's. I Am Curious (Yellow) was booked into mainstream movie theaters across the country after a couple of years of court battles over "obscenity" led by the film's American distributor, Barney Rosset, of the pioneering Grove Press.

A still-remarkable summer memory is the tv and newspaper coverage of crowds lining up outside theaters?largely to see what all the fuss was about, but also because, like Lena, they were ready to make sense of their personal interests in public. It was a major step in the sexual revolution, but filmgoers had been crawling toward it ever since WWII when European films showed American audiences a more adult, less prudish approach to sex?that is, to the human body. A resonant phrase from that period?"the thighs of Silvana Mangano"?came from the release of the 1948 Italian neorealist film Bitter Rice; a big hit not because it looked honestly at Italy's postwar social struggle but for its frankly provocative, irresistible adoration of Mangano. In the mid-50s, Roger Vadim's collaboration with Brigitte Bardot?highlighting her animal appeal in And God Created Woman?caused even greater cultural shockwaves and no doubt established the model for Sjoman and Nyman's project.

Seeing I Am Curious (Yellow) so many years after its local debut in a new DVD package that also contains the sequel, I Am Curious (Blue), one is struck by its inextricable sexual and social content. The film's now-past phenomenon is absolutely all about release from prevailing strictures of behavior?it catches the connection between personal life and political life, sexual life and cultural life. The movies have always brought those things together, and probably the reason people continue to gravitate to the movies (as both a private and social event) is that the combined sensual and intellectual aspects of films fulfill our curiosity about the world and ourselves.

Of course, this is an intuitive curiosity; Hollywood has trained audiences to never consciously admit that their attraction to movies is at all serious?only the Supreme Court did when insisting in the I Am Curious (Yellow) case (and before that, in a case about Rosset's unexpurgated publication of D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterly's Lover) that art have "socially redeeming" value. I remember sitting in the backseat of my parents' car, driving past the Six Mile Theater in Detroit, gawking at the crowds queuing up. It didn't look like an anthropological field trip or even one of the era's political demonstrations. They were going for sex.

In 1969, a lot of movies were helping moviegoers unharness themselves from the secrets?and lies?that abounded about American sexual life. Haskell Wexler's Medium Cool (about a news photographer stumbling upon the riots at the previous year's Chicago Democratic Convention) featured both Robert Forster and Marianna Hill's full-frontal nudity; Midnight Cowboy revealed Hollywood's awareness of hustling and public sex. (Both of these films were rated X by the Motion Picture Association of America, then unfazed by a proximity to raunchier, sexploitation movies.) It was a hot summer at the movies. My own adolescent awareness would not be unleashed for a while. In fact, it was some years after seeing Robert Altman's 1970 film M*A*S*H that I finally "got" that the cheerleading chant ("69 is divine!") for the football player who had just made a touchdown had only a little to do with the number on his jersey.

Naivete is what the advent of I Am Curious (Yellow) helped relieve. Release?sexual, political, artistic?was part of that era's Reichian cultural mandate. Schoolboys furtively traded paperbacks of Iceberg Slim's Pimp; John and Yoko posed nude for Two Virgins, De Palma had begun his semi-documentary film Dionysus in '69. As things proceeded, art and pornography were no longer "mutually exclusive," as the Supreme Court had decreed. Yet, the excitement of this cultural release comes directly from the phenomenon of artists taking sexuality seriously?as a crucial part of human and social experience, not simply as the exploitable element used in a Gaspar Noé, Adrian Lyne or Mike Figgis movie.

Invention and interrogation?the creed of every serious artist?was the order of the day. Criterion's release of the I Am Curious films revives that attitude toward movies. Knowing I Am Curious (Yellow)'s rep for all these years, it is surprising to finally see it?and see what it really is. By today's standards, the sex scenes are tame (though Hollywood is still shy of Sjoman's casual view of the penis). Sjoman broke through repressive conventions but only as part of a larger design to remake/remodel cinema. His influences include Godard's journalistic interpolations as much as fellow countryman Ingmar Bergman's intimate interventions with actresses. Lena's interviews with Olof Palme (Sweden's future prime minister) and with Martin Luther King Jr. give the film its serious context.

Most revelatory is the quote that explains Sjoman's methods: "Fiction has enormous political importance and political economics and visual impressions [are] a good mixture." I Am Curious (Yellow) has been forgotten as an erotic film (Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris was superior in every way), but its eccentric example of mixing fiction and political economics is most recognizable, surprisingly, in the recent, supposedly revolutionary movement of Iranian films. Release, like history, is a gift. It now comes in small packages.