Birkbeck Institute of Moving Image introduction:
Every Friday during the autumn of 1970, the New Cinema Club, then at the cutting edge of film culture in London, staged a weekly programme at the Sapphire Theatre in Wardour Street, Soho, called Acts of Love. It comprised four uncompromising underground sex films, some of them now canonical, then barely seen:
Carolee Schneemann’s FUSES
Stephen Dwoskin’s MOMENT
Jean Genet’s UN CHANT D’AMOUR
Takahiko Iimura’s AI (LOVE)
A staple of the counter-culture, Acts of Love continued, less frequently, in various locations, for the next eighteen months. It took place against a backdrop formed by the mainstreaming of filmed pornography, whose geographic centre was Soho; the emergence of various erotic film festivals which mixed adult and experimental film; and by the rise of second-wave feminism.
Acts of Love (Reconstructed), which will include additional material, is intended to reconstruct not just the formative event, but the various contexts in which it appeared.
The screening will be presented by Elena Gorfinkel (King’s College London) and Henry K. Miller (University of Reading). It is an instalment of an occasional retrospective of Stephen Dwoskin’s films mounted by the Dwoskin Project at the University of Reading. For more information, follow @DwoskinProject.
Here (and above) is Stephen Dwoskin’s ‘Moment’.
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