FILM
A secret stash of naughty silent films turned up in a Paris attic, and producer Michel Reilhac knew he had to put them on the big screen
By Will Hogkinson
Photo:
The Good Old Naughty Days: 'Everyone looks to be enjoying themselves'
Our great-grandparents were rather less prudish than we might imagine. Decades before pornography became big business, naughty French people were making dirty films for the fun of it. In The Good Old Naughty Days, a collection of 12 silent films from the earliest years of the 20th century, nuns, priests, teachers - even a dog - play out sexual dramas in a wide variety of inventive positions, locations and logistical arrangements. And, unlike the stars of today's films for the one-handed viewer, everyone looks like they're enjoying themselves. Even the dog. "The difference is money," says Michel Reilhac, the French director and producer who put The Good Old Naughty Days together. "These films were made as a joke by people who had no idea of performing to the camera, and you can tell: the way they carry themselves is entirely natural. By the 1930s people realised that they could make money with these films and they became another thing entirely. The charm and innocence was gone." Reilhac He shares an immaculately smart converted warehouse in Paris's chic 9th arrondissement with his wife and three teenage children, who are all about to leave for their second home in Kenya. 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into fits of giggles or frenzied lust, The Good Old Naughty Days has been accepted in its native country as the valid historical document that it is.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. 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.