Artsy Porn & Sexy Larps

At the 2020 San Francisco Porn Film Festival, I watched a pretty arresting piece named Tidal, part of a French film project called Vespéral.

At seven minutes long, Tidal focuses on a nude brunette woman and the half-a-dozen pairs of hands that touch her, stroke her, caress her, and appear to bring her immense pleasure. The scene is scored with a thrumming, meditative track. Clips of waves hitting the beach, whose to-and-fro movement is often mimicked by the motion of the hands, intercut our vision of the woman – not interrupting but punctuating. It was an exquisitely poetic, and highly erotic film. Even I — once described by a classmate at grad school as “gay as fuck” — was titillated.

Tidal comments on both the medium of film and the genre of pornography. The film invites us to look at the rhythms of a body and compare it to nature, to gaze unabashedly at a body feeling pleasure for pleasure’s sake, with no overarching narrative, themes, or goals. And of course, if we touch ourselves in the ways depicted on screen while watching… well, it a porn film.

Pornography is arguably the most “body-centric” genre of cinema, the literal depiction of naked bodies the least of the reasons why. The tingles, the swelling, the wetness that one might feel when engaging fully with a porn film constitute the goal of a porn flick, not just byproducts of other cinematic elements. The porn film expects, anticipates, and — dare I say — stimulates physical self-pleasure. Porn invades your body, breaking the fourth wall in ways that would turn Deadpool’s costume green with envy.