“What is good porn? Confesional and secular film-club federations facing sex on screens”

This study aims to analyze the reception of porn-erotic cinema by activists from film-club federations. In full boom in the 1970s and favored by a more flexible censorship, the genre will spread on the screens of French cinema. Whether they are catholic or secular, federations have no other choice than to position themselves, notably through their magazines.

The political, cultural, social, aesthetic and ideological issues are numerous and sometimes contradictory: freedom of expression, aesthetics and art, emancipation of women, defense of sexual minorities… Therefore, is porn-erotic cinema really a genre like any other? What distinction can be made between eroticism and pornography? How will the federations position themselves and distinguish themselves? And finally, what is good “porn”?