A stag film (also blue movie or smoker) is a type of pornographic film produced secretly in the first two-thirds of the 20th century. Typically, stag films had certain traits. They were brief in duration (about 12 minutes at most), were silent, depicted hardcore pornography and were produced clandestinely due to censorship laws. Stag films were screened for all-male audiences in fraternities or similar locations; observers offered a raucous collective response to the film, exchanging sexual banter and achieving sexual arousal. Stag films were often screened in brothels.
Film historians describe stag films as a primitive form of cinema because they were produced by anonymous and amateur artists. Today, many of these films have been archived by the Kinsey Institute; however, most stag films are in a state of decay and have no copyright, credits, or acknowledged authorship. The stag film era ended due to the beginnings of the sexual revolution in the 1960s in combination with the new home movie technologies of the post-World War I decades, such as 16 mm, 8 mm, and Super 8 film. Scholars at the Kinsey Institute believe there were approximately 2,000 films produced between 1915 and 1968.
American stag cinema in general has received scholarly attention first in the mid-seventies by mainstream scholars, such as in Di Lauro and Gerald Rabkin's Dirty Movies (1976), and more recently by feminist and gay cultural historians, such as in Linda Williams' Hard Core: Power Pleasure, and the "Frenzy of the Visible" (1999) and Thomas Waugh's Homosociality in the Classical American Stag Film: Off-Screen, On-screen (2001).
History
Before the abolition of film censorship in the United States and a general acceptance of the production of pornography, porn was an underground phenomenon. Public presentation of such films were itinerant and were via secret exhibitions in brothels or smoker houses; or the films might be rented for private usage. Stag films were an entirely clandestine phenomenon; not until the "porn chic" era of the 1970s would sexually explicit cinema gain any recognition or discussion in mainstream society. Unlike today, the on-screen display of satisfaction, such as male or female orgasm, was not a convention of stag cinema. Instead there was what Linda Williams called the "meat shot", which was a closeup, hardcore depiction of genital intercourse. As there are no direct quotes or oral histories by participants in this underground cinema, film scholars understand what they know of these stag films mainly through written accounts. Stag films persisted for such a great length of time, as Williams argues, simply because they were cut off from more public scrutiny of sexual behavior.
The German film Am Abend, the Argentinian film El Satario and the American film A Free Ride (or A Grass Sandwich), produced between the years 1907 and 1915, are three of the earliest hardcore pornographic films that have been collected at the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction.
Study and analysis
Feminist critiques
Patriarchal culture
According to Williams, the American stag film demonstrates the obsession of patriarchal culture in a desperate search for what film scholar Linda Williams calls "the unknowable 'truth' of sex". In her chapter on the stag film, Williams focuses on highlighting the anonymous male filmmakers' obsession with the unknown wonder of female sexuality. Williams also argues that a female point-of-view is rarely shown within the stag film genre, resulting in the female body becoming an object. However, in her analysis she does take into account the flickers of female sexuality and points out that sexuality is not problematized, unlike 1970s hardcore pornography.