Summer. Sweat. Sex. Such are the routine pleasures of New York’s silver screen come summertime. While recent years have seen the city’s repertory audience rally around Alain Delon classics like La Piscine (1968) and Purple Noon (1960), this year’s offerings—through pure serendipity and programmers’ well-intended hard work—showcase a greater sense of adventure. This time around, many of the city’s most frequented repertory cinemas have lent their screens to films that feature unsimulated sex—of the arthouse, experimental, and pornographic variety—as well as queer cinema that’s often shirked in favor of tried-and-true summer flicks like the aforementioned French sex-and-summer dramas. Series like the Museum of Modern Art’s “Queer and Uncensored,” much like Nitehawk’s “Fix Your Hearts or Die: A Trans Cinema Celebration,” demonstrate a sense of daring that must continue in this dire political climate, the very same climate in which a film as insipid as Celine Song’s The Materialists (2025) is upheld as a sexy and subversive update on the romance film.
At first glance, these matters may seem unrelated, but it’s hard to miss the fact that present-day politics, where sex and its representation appear to be in decline among younger audiences whose relationship to sex is so often tied to the atomized rituals of online porn-viewing or over-exposure to sensuous content on social media, would find it difficult to stomach sex in a public setting. Thus, how a film as sex-less as The Materialists, in which sultriness never comes into the equation of its love triangle and sex often figures as a menace discussed vis-à-vis its major subplot about assault, can become a hit. The Materialists is the result of a culture in which sex has been cut off from the public imagination, maligned as an un-representable act on the big screen. That’s why screenings in the aforementioned series, alongside recent viewings of Barbara Rubin’s Christmas on Earth (1964), Andrew Noren’s Huge Pupils (1968), and John Waters’s Pink Flamingos (1972), have put into sharp relief for me the need for sex to be seen in a public forum: for sex to be experienced as a reality; for sex to be seen as a normal, social act; for sex to be understood as a source of liberation.
Though audiences across the country have flocked to see the will-she-won’t-she shenanigans of Song’s simple-minded rom-dram, New York audiences—in a fit of usual thoughtfulness—have stuck with the offerings of their local repertory houses, attending screenings of films where sex is on full display. I’d add that these attendees understand that their ticket purchase, and the scenes they’ve decided to sit with, represent something important, whether it be political or spiritual. The decision to see and support sex on screen carries a certain valence to it. It reflects a viewer who is unwilling to conform to the standards of propriety expected from a conservative administration, and a viewer who believes in a free art that hinges on confident and untampered self-expression, rather than feeble, workshopped filmmaking.
Now, it’s worth discriminating that when I write about The Materialists, and when I write about films like Huge Pupils or Christmas on Earth, I am writing about wholly distinct art-objects—films of different eras and scenes with distinct aims and provocations that have only come together in my mind through the unique constellation that is New York’s city-wide film programming on any given month. And though I watched Huge Pupils and Christmas on Earth in the context of J. Hoberman’s recent series at Anthology Film Archives, “J. Hoberman Selects: Everything is Now: The 1960s New York Avant-Garde,” it became impossible to separate those viewings from other thoughts I had about the representation of sex on-screen and how absent it is in today’s film world. While one might rejoinder that last year gave us both Halina Reijn’s Babygirl and Robert Eggers’s Nosferatu, I must respond that such films manifest the staid state of the modern-day sex film: heavy with innocuous class commentary and low on palpable eroticism. Hoberman’s curation did not deal with these matters, as it did not have to. But, what it did do was present audiences with a portal to an era of openness that seems almost unimaginable today—an era worth remembering and learning more about through the lucid writing in his new book, Everything Is Now: The 1960s New York Avant-Garde—Primal Happenings, Underground Movies, Radical Pop.
As Hoberman stated in his introduction to Huge Pupils at Anthology Film Archives, Noren was a filmmaker whose frank and graphic work often pit him against the law. And while there’s a degree of self-importance inherent in the mind of someone willing to make a film that shows them and their partners fully naked, cooly on drugs, having sex, there’s also a marvelous, uninhibited quality to the work such a mind can produce. What’s on display in a film like Huge Pupils is the admirable gall of an artist who is willing to sacrifice his entire body to the screen.
Something quite different is at play in Barbara Rubin’s Christmas on Earth. The film consists of two reels, one projected atop the other. Both feature a series of sex acts; one of them with people painted-up, as though part of an elaborate ritual; the other, with couples as naked as can be, their every bit of flesh a bright swath before the camera. The repeated couplings—in this instance, accompanied by radio snippets and a free jazz score—take on a transcendent quality, with Rubin showing the numerous possibilities two bodies can offer: as sites of desire, shapeshifting figures, hidden landscapes, and much more. It’s no wonder the film, in spite of its rarity, has accrued such a mythic status among cinephiles. In less than half-an-hour, it bares all that is possible when two people come together—in its simple depiction of flesh meeting flesh, and its more fantastic vision of a naked dance of decorated bodies. There’s a directness to Rubin’s work, a simple desire to depict “cocks and cunts” (as the film was once titled), and a latent magic too, as alluded to in its current title. In researching this piece, I spoke to Amy Taubin, who chronicled the history of the film’s screenings to me, among other things. “People turn out for Christmas on Earth. I’ve shown it several times, including at The Kitchen and on the West Coast, and it’s always been well attended,” she said. “Part of it is that it’s very hard to see, which attracts audiences. But, it’s hard to say why people turn out for Christmas on Earth, or any avant-garde film for that matter.”
That ineffable attraction to the avant-garde that Taubin gestured at in her comment might as well be applied to most, if not all, films that put sex on display. It would be reductive to call the instinct to watch a sex film salacious, as there’s often something else at work motivating the viewer. For Paul Attard, who recently interviewed Hoberman and has written about Andy Warhol’s sex films for our publication, that drive is based in a “desire to know and learn more about films that aren’t represented in the canon.” Unsurprisingly, sex-focused films are often the first to be shunned from the canon, and so whatever formal ingenuity or political insights they might harbor, are cast into obscurity. “Things that don’t have immediate institutional support need to be championed, to be taken out of obscurity,” he said. “If I don't write about or care for these films, who will?”
A similar instinct motivates Liz Purchell’s film programming, who put together “Fix Your Hearts or Die” for Nitehawk. “Whenever you look up the hottest sex scenes in film on Google, you always find the most depressing lists,” she told me. “Wherever you see these lists, there’s no porn. I want a cinephile culture that’s willing to be more exploratory and willing to take a chance on films that might test them, that might prove uncomfortable.” But, it’s not a desire to test audiences that drives Purchell, insomuch as an eagerness to demonstrate that cinema has so much more to offer than what’s come to be expected of it. The marginalization of an entire cinematic history naturally casts a whole gamut of feelings and sensations into oblivion, not to mention people. Purchell’s continued focus on programming queer cinema, and pornographic film, recovers this history, while treating contemporary audiences to something that feels genuinely unexpected in today’s world. Per Thomas Beard, co-founder of Light Industry, “For a younger audience, seeing pornography in a room full of people is a novel experience.” Case-in-point, the experience of that strange, seductive stretch of time Purchell simply calls “porn time.” “There’s this weird thing that happens,” she told me. “I can’t describe it, but people who have seen porn in a theater will know what I’m talking about.”
To relate my own experience of “porn time,” I’ll fall back on my recent viewing of Warhol’s Blue Movie (1969). It’s the closest thing to “porn time” I’ve experienced in the cinema as of late, unless you count the blowjob in Pink Flamingos. And though distinct from proper porn, as seen in recent showings of Fred Halstead’s work at MoMA and Nitehawk, Blue Movie still has much to offer with regards to “porn time.” The film documents a couple, Warhol regulars Viva and Louis Waldon, over the course of a day. It begins with the couple in bed, whispering sweet nothings to one another; then, it sees them have sex; soon after, they watch some TV and talk politics; they finish the day off with a shower. Of importance here is that second act, which passes by like a blur. Part of that is the film stock Warhol is working with, which is so bright it renders Viva and Louis more like shapes than people at times; but, the other part of that is the enchantment that comes with seeing sex on the big-screen. Documented in real-time, captured in patient long takes, the footage accrues a hypnotic quality the longer it goes on, reflecting the love on-screen and the power of a private act made public. In the theater, it results in a silent audience gazing up—a communal ensnarement in a beautiful scene.
Speaking with Shelby Shaw, who recently wrote about the porno classic The Opening of Misty Beethoven (1976, pictured at top) for Screen Slate, it came to my attention that such a tranquil scene of sex as that in Blue Movie cannot be found in contemporary cinema. “You don’t see a good, healthy relationship with sex in it [on film] today,” she said. “It’s gotten to the point that sex on screen just feels like a repertory thing… Healthy sex is hard to find in new films, it feels more comfortable in rep films.” After a month’s worth of watching sex films from the ‘60s and ‘70s on the big-screen, you start to have the feeling that the representation of casual sex on-screen only belongs to said decades. I’ve already written about Community Action Center (2010) in a previous edition of this column, and there are plenty of other films that continue to uphold the depiction of sex on-screen, but I still cannot shake the feeling that the cinema of today, especially in the United States, remains afraid to deal with sex and its emotional effects on the viewer. And for that reason, it also remains incapable of imagining sex as a normal part of life that can produce both feelings of ecstasy and boredom.
But, as with all of the critics and programmers cited in this piece, it’s also on audiences to look beyond the mainstream for honest sex on-screen. For New Yorkers, that change can start with a trip to the Roxy’s upcoming screenings of Louise Weard’s Castration Movie Pt. 1 (2024). This 275-minute introduction to Weard’s often surprising, always sensitive filmmaking is forthright about sex—and because of it, manages to uncover a treasure trove of truths about the complicated relationship between young people and sex nowadays. Rather than dance around the nature of inceldom, or carve out sex work into an easily-digestible genre narrative, Weard tackles both matters straight-on. Her frank storytelling is refreshingly sincere—an antidote to the sham of timid filmmaking that presently dominates multiplexes.
Feedback Loop is a column by Nicolas Pedrero-Setzer reflecting on each month of repertory filmgoing in New York City.
Special thanks to Paul Attard, Thomas Beard, Ed Halter, Liz Purchell, Shelby Shaw, and Amy Taubin.
